Beacons lights green power fire

FORRESTFIELD-based Beacons Consulting International has revealed details of its $250 million plan to use logging waste to provide energy in Western Australia.

It has two proposed ‘green’ biomass projects that together will create three power stations, integrated with waste water treatment plants and linked to desalination plants each worth up to $83 million.

Beacons has established two companies, Perth BioEnergy Holdings Pty Ltd and Great Southern BioEnergy Holdings Pty Ltd to build, operate and maintain the projects that it wants to online by 2006.

It is using the companies to raise funds and drum up interest and support for the plants.

Beacons plans to establish a timber residue fuelled power station near the Gnangara pine plantations and close to Wesbeam’s new laminated veneer lumber operation. It has reserved land in Land Corp’s Neerabup industrial estate.

The other power station would be located near bluegum plantations in the Downs Road West Timber Precinct industrial estate near Albany.

Beacons Consulting International chairman and CEO Cliff Jones said the company had been working on these biomass solutions for more than two and a half years in cooperation with the WA Government and some of its agencies.

“There is a strategy that we’ve taken to government and there is sympathy towards the projects,” he said.

He said the projects had drawn support from several banks and a number of shareholders had taken an interest in the two companies behind the projects.

Mr Jones refused to comment on the identities of the interested parties or the shareholders, individual stakes in the projects or what proportion of the required funds had been committed to date.

Biomass technology generates energy by using residues left over from the production of materials such as pulp, paper, timber, plywood, cotton, wheat straw and forest plantations.

The supply of the biomass energy tends to be more consistent than other renewable energy forms such as wind power.

However, a spokesman for WA Energy Minister Eric Ripper said Beacons would most likely be bidding for Renewable Energy Credits from Western Power and the tender process was fiercely competitive.

The spokesman said new rules introduced in June allowed renewable energy generators more favourable terms for balancing energy supply and demand through the State’s power grid.

Department of Industry and Resources project manager Clive Thomson said it was not anticipated that there would be problems in securing environmental approvals for the Beacons projects.

He said the proposed area in the Great Southern would need to be rezoned from rural to industrial prior to further planning and approvals stages could go ahead.

Greens MLC Robin Chapple said biomass projects, such as those proposed by Beacons, represented an economically viable and environmentally sound alternative to coal or gas power stations.

However, he said renewable energy projects often experienced difficulty in getting off the ground due to arrangements in selling excess power produced back in to the grid.

“Western Power has not been a good conduit for renewables in the past,” Mr Chapple told WA Business News.

“Western Power has been acting in an anti-competitive manner because it saw renewable energy as a competitor.”