Loss of biomass won’t affect Holy Cross 100% goal

Closed biomass plant at Gypsum once was a major source of renewable energy for electrical cooperative. By the end it had become expensive.

by Allen Best

In April, owners of the biomass plant at Gypsum laid off employees and announced that the $45 million operation, Eagle Valley Clean Energy Biomass Plant, would be filing for bankruptcy.

Electricity from the 12-megawatt plant had been purchased by Holy Cross Energy since production began in 2013. Will loss of the electricity production from the plant slow Holy Cross in its progress toward 100% renewable energy by 2030?

No, says Jenna Weatherred, the vice president for member and community relations at Holy Cross.

“In 2013, the biomass plant was one of our first large renewable energy sources,” she said. “Over time, it has become our most expensive. Today, our other sources of renewables are less expensive; in fact, they are our cheapest source of energy. Therefore, losing the plant’s production has not had a negative impact on our path to the 100% renewable energy goal.”

She said she could not provide the precise cost of the biomass electricity because Holy Cross is involved in the litigation.

The plant as recently as 2022 provided 7% of the electricity delivered by Holy Cross to its customers in the Vail-Aspen-Battlement Mesa area. In 2023, it provided 4.8%, Bryan Hannegan, CEO of Holy Cross, told the Vail Daily in April.

Does that mean biomass-produced electricity will be gone from Colorado? Not necessarily, although the cost always matters. Xcel Energy had dangled the idea of a biomass plant at Hayden as it prepares to close its two coal-burning units there. But the cost wasn’t competitive when Xcel solicited bids during its last electric-resource planning that was initiated in 2021.

In October 2024, Xcel launched its next electric resource plan. The company projects a massive need for new generation from primarily renewable resources in coming years. The plan is called Just Transition because it is supposed to consider the ways that places where generation from fossil fuels plants are being shut down might gain tax base and jobs in other ways.

Might a biomass plant at Hayden be a possibility given Xcel’s considerations? As recently as this 2023 posting, Xcel had indicated a 19-megawatt biomass plant might still be in the cards.

Does biomass even constitute renewable energy? A Nederland resident wrote a letter printed in the Boulder Weekly in response to a Big Pivots column.

Not only isn’t incinerating trees “emissions free,” wrote Josh Schlossberg, biomass plants spew approximately as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy generated as coal. His source was a 2023 study of biomass emissions called “Emissions of wood pelletization and bioenergy use in the United States.”

This was not an endorsement of fossil fuels, he added, but rather a call for “equal (if not more) effort into curbing our ever-increasing consumption of energy – and the natural world in generation – that corporations, governments, our entire economic system and so many of us individually continue to demand.”

As for the biomass plant at Gypsum, it had been developed by a Utah-based company, Evergreen Clean Energy. The U.S. Forest Service had welcomed the plant as it delivered a market for trees and hence became a management tool. Trees could be profitably trucked from as far as 75 miles.

But, as the Colorado Sun and others have reported, the plant has had problems along the way. For example, a fire in 2014 idled the plant for a year. In 2019, the plant was sold to Greenbacker Renewable Energy.

Examining the filings in U.S. District Court in Denver, the Sun found that the bankrupt enterprise still owed $34.5 million from its 2013 loan from the Rural Utilities Service (the former Rural Electrification Administration) in the Department of Agriculture.

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