Representatives from a Brooklyn-based company will be at a public forum next week to explain their plan to put a “waste-to-energy” plant near Ansonia’s transfer station and sewage treatment facility on North Division Street.
A informational meeting on the proposal is scheduled for Wednesday (Jan. 23) at 6 p.m. in Aldermanic Chambers at City Hall at 253 Main St.
Greenpoint Energy Partners hopes to fund the construction of an “organic recycling and anaerobic digestion facility” in Ansonia. The plant would use microorganisms to break down food waste into methane gas.
That gas would then be used to fuel turbines to produce electricity. That electricity could be used, potentially, to power every municipal building in Ansonia. Excess energy may be sent, at a lower cost, to local non-profits, Mayor James Della Volpe said in 2011.
The plant would connect to the United Illuminating power grid, said Dennis Schain, a spokesman from the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
The initiative was born from the city’s Energy Improvement District Board, a group formed in 2007 — the first in Connecticut — that looks to save Ansonia money on energy costs and attract “green” industry to the city.
The Greenpoint plan has been percolating for a few years.
In June 2011 city Aldermen voted to sign a letter of intent with the company, Greenpoint Energy Partners, allowing the firm to pursue investors for it. A few months later the city agreed to lease the land for the project to the company.
Minutes from the June 2011 Aldermen meeting are posted at the end of this article.
The property in question — a 2‑acre, triangular plot beyond the city’s Department of Public Works complex and waste water treatment plant — is next to the far north end of the city’s Riverwalk.
Greenpoint’s plan needs approvals from both the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission and the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The company has yet to file applications for site plan review or any permits.
The Jan. 23 meeting will introduce the plan and provide answers to questions from the public.
‘There’s No Chemicals, There’s No Burning’
During a brief phone interview Jan. 14, a Greenpoint Energy company official said the plan would benefit the city and the environment.
“It’s a fairly green process,” said Chris Timbrell, a partner at Greenpointl. “There’s no chemicals, there’s no burning.”
Timbrell and Tom Brayman are the principals at Greenpoint. Timbrell said the young company’s focus is to look for emerging opportunities like the plant in Ansonia, then find private funding and grants to build them. Both men have backgrounds working in the energy field, Timbrell said.
The company is also working to cover a massive Brooklyn television and film studio with solar panels.
Timbrell was previously the head of the structured leasing group for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, a position he held for seven years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is also the co-owner of Cafe Grumpy, a chain of coffee bars in New York City, according to the New York Times.
Timbrell said the proposed facility in Ansonia would process up to 45,000 tons of food waste per year. It would decompose, with the help of microorganisms, in a large, air-tight vessel. About 18,000 tons per year of residual waste from the process — called “digestate” — would be sold as a component in organic compost.
Timbrell said that if the building is open 10 hours per day, it would mean about one extra truck coming or going from the site every hour.
Click here to read a brief description from the company’s website.
In addition to saving the city money on electricity, Timbrell said the project would bring needed investment and jobs to Ansonia.
“If it’s approved and we receive all the permits, it would be about a $30 million project,” Timbrell said. “Long-term it would employ directly at the plant eight staff.”
The facility would be the first of its kind in the northeast United States, Timbrell said. If all goes according to plan, he said construction could start in the middle of this year and the plant could open in mid-2014.
The digesters are more popular in Europe, Timbrell said, because countries there don’t have nearly the amount of land-fill space that exists in the U.S.
Sounds Great, But Will It Stink?
Schain, spokesman for the state’s DEEP, said the company would need permits from the state to discharge water — after they treat and clean it — that would be byproduct of the digestion process.
He said such plants also typically give off some “air emissions” too, but the DEEP has standards to prevent the facility from stinking up the neighborhood.
“There’s rules and requirements on odors,” Schain said. “You can’t undertake activities that send odors wafting to neighboring properties.”
Timbrell said that Greenpoint would do its best to minimize any odors by having trucks unload inside a building.
Schain said DEEP is generally in favor of projects such as the one proposed, and will make sure the company does what it’s required to.
“We’re in discussions with them, just so they understand what would be required from here and what the process is,” he said. “But generally speaking, we’re supportive of the use of this kind of technology because of the benefits to generate energy and better deal with management of solid waste.”
State lawmakers are, too. In 2011, they passed a law that requires large-scale commercial generators of food waste to recycle it once the infrastructure to do so is in place.
Click here to see a map produced by DEEP in 2011 showing all of the state’s large-scale generators of food waste. Not surprisingly, many are clustered around the Bridgeport-New Haven corridor.
Information Session
Next week’s meeting is part of the state’s “environmental justice” program, whereby companies who want to build certain types of facilities in low-income communities must seek more public input than if they were proposing such projects someplace more affluent.
Because Ansonia is considered by the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development to be a “distressed municipality” — the 11th-most distressed community in the state — Greenpoint must have a “meaningful public participation plan” approved by officials from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection before applying for other permits.
Click here to read the notice of the meeting from the city’s website.
The agenda for the Jan. 23 meeting calls for a general introduction of the project, its layout and purpose, as well as safety features and benefits. There will also be a question and answer session.
Readers skeptical of the plan posted to the Valley Indy’s Facebook page last week already raising questions about the proposal, accusing it of being a trash-burning facility that will result in unpleasant odors.
No Sludge?
One important revision since the plant was first proposed in 2011: it will not process “sewer sludge,” just food waste from large commercial users — grocery stores, food manufacturers and distributors and the like.
“We are planning on converting the digestate into organic compost and to be able to do so in Connecticut, it is important that the food waste stream is not contaminated by any sewer sludge,” Timbrell said. “Once we introduce sewer sludge into the process, then the digestate cannot be used or converted into compost in Connecticut.”
Stephen Blume was the president of the Board of Aldermen when the city first reached a deal with Greenpoint. He lauded it as a way for the city to lower the costs of paying for its sludge to be carted off.
Blume was defeated in a bid for re-election in 2011. He said Jan. 16 that he has kept up on the project through his involvement on the city’s Water Pollution Control Authority and Energy Improvement District Board.
Blume said that the project is still a good one, but he’s disappointed it won’t incorporate the sludge. Processing sludge would have saved Ansonia even more money, Blume said.
“There still is sewage, and I still don’t want to pay for it,” Blume said.
He said he reached out to company officials, who have told him their engineers will work with the city to see if the plant can help cut sewage costs another way: capturing the heat given off during the composting process to dry the sludge so it would be cheaper to process and transport.
“The byproduct of all of this is a tremendous amount of heat,” Blume said. “The heat that comes off of these turbines is tremendous. I want the heat.”
He said that even without the sludge component, the project is still a worthwhile one for the city.
“I would like to see this come to fruition,” Blume said. “It will produce good electricity, it’s another business for city, it will provides jobs, and it makes us green.”
Mayor Della Volpe said the project is in its early stages and that he was withholding judgement until he hears specific plan details.
“Obviously we’d like to have jobs and increase our tax base,” Della Volpe said. “But we’ve got to make sure it’s the right project.”
Asked how he thinks the proposal will be received, Timbrell said he’s not sure.
“We don’t know,” he said. “All we can do is present the opportunity, and hopefully the people of Ansonia will continue to embrace it. The technology is very green, and it is all about local investment, local jobs, local recycling and local energy.”
Meeting minutes from a 2011 Aldermen meeting are posted below, followed by minutes from a December 2011 meeting of the Energy Improvement District Board where former state lawmaker Gary Hale talks extensively about the Greenpoint proposal.
