When the Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. in Orrington is running at capacity, it can provide electricity for 25,000 homes, according to plant manager Henry Lang.
As it prepares to be auctioned off next month, PERC has not been operating at all since May 2 but still is receiving trash from Orrington residents — about 4,000 tons annually — that is being stored in hopes that the highest bidder will have the capital to restart the trash-to-energy plant.
When the plant, located off River Road, also known as Route 15, was built in the late 1980s, the town negotiated a host community agreement that waived its tipping fee. Trash from other communities is going to the state-owned Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town.
On Tuesday, Lang took several potential buyers on tours of the 12-building industrial complex. Their names are not being made public.
“Some were from the scrap industry who would tear it down, some are interested in operating the plant as it has been operating and others are interested in using it along with some other process,” Lang, who has worked at PERC since 1987, said Wednesday.
The Orrington plant is one of just three in the state, he said. The other two are smaller and located in Auburn and South Portland. The Maine Energy Recovery Co., a similar waste-to-energy operation in Biddeford, was purchased by the city in 2012 and demolished.
Clockwise, from left: Henry Lang, plant manager of Penobscot Energy Recovery Company, is giving tours to potential buyers of the Orrington facility hoping that the highest bidder will restart the plant; A loader moves trash at the PERC on Wednesday; One of the boilers in the boiler house at the PERC plant in Orrington. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
In 2017, its last full year of operation, the plant burned 315,000 tons of trash annually, but in 2018 burned just 105,000 after the Municipal Review Committee, then a nonprofit group that represented the trash disposal interests of 187 Maine municipalities, aligned itself with the Hampden trash facility, now shuttered, Lang said Wednesday. The loss of contracts with those municipalities coupled with the loss of a contract with Versant to buy electricity from PERC led to its current financial problems, he said.
Prior to 2018, the plant employed 77 full-time people and another 10 part-time. Now, Lang is one of 55 full-time employees.
When the plant went online in 1988, it was a technology that grew out of the oil crisis in the 1970s during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, according to Lang. PERC also was built at a time when Mainers were demanding that alternatives to landfills for residential trash disposal be found and the Maine Waste Management Agency launched its reduce, reuse, recycle campaign, according to the Bangor Daily News archives.
“This process reduces the waste stream by about 90 percent and it extracts steam that is turned into electricity,” Lang said. “It also reduces greenhouse gasses like methane, which is produced in landfills as waste decomposes.”
The plant is in need of repairs. On Wednesday, there were puddles on the floor of the large building where trash is prepared to be incinerated. Holes in the roof caused by firefighters putting out blazes that started because lithium batteries were not recycled also allow pigeons and other creatures to gain entrance.
Orrington Town Manager Chris Backman said earlier this month that the town needs PERC’s buyer to restart the plant and not demolish it to sell for scrap. The plant, assessed by the town at about $13 million, owes more than $370,000 in taxes for 2021 and 2022. PERC has not sought an abatement for either year, the town manager said.
The town’s pitch to businesses interested in the development of the Eagle Point Business Park, located on land formerly owned by a chemical manufacturing plant along Route 15 near PERC, includes the potential for power and steam from the adjacent incinerator.
In addition to those concerns, the town also would have to pay tipping fees for waste disposal if the plant does not reopen, according to Backman.
The auction will be held at the plant at 11 a.m. on July 12. Keenan Auction Co. Inc. of Portland will handle the sale.
