The bankruptcy filing by the company that owns an idle Jonesboro biomass plant and received millions in state subsidies, while not paying logging contractors, has some hoping that the development could lead to a restarting of the plant. Stored Solar, which also owns a plant in West Enfield and others in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont, says in court filings that it owes $17.8 million to creditors, which include logging companies in Maine. Several of the loggers had previously sued the company in an effort to get paid. The bankruptcy court is currently considering a sale of the company's assets, with the bankruptcy filing being for the two Maine plants, four in New Hampshire and one in Massachusetts.
      According to court filings, among the company's creditors in eastern Maine are Worcester Holdings of Columbia Falls, which is owed $888,071, and H.C. Haynes Inc. of Winn, which is owed $674,304. Worcester Holdings was the last company still selling wood chips to the Jonesboro plant. Worcester Holdings also has proposed the $1 billion Flagpole of Freedom Park in Columbia Falls and has balked at a request by the town for Worcester to place $150,000 in escrow to cover the town's costs related to the project. Some have wondered whether the Worcesters' hesitancy to upfront the escrow money is related to its being owed nearly $900,000 by Stored Solar. However, Mike Worcester, co-founder of the Flagpole of Freedom Park, says, "Flagpole of Freedom and Stored Solar are two different projects, and neither has a direct or indirect impact on the other. We are optimistic that Worcester Holdings will be made whole in the Stored Solar bankruptcy filing, and we do anticipate working with that organization under new ownership in the future."
      Along with the 375 Stored Solar creditors who don't have secured claims, secured creditors, which are prioritized for repayment, are Hartree Partners LP, based in New York, which is owed $8.9 million, Coastal Enterprises Inc. and the U.S. Small Business Administration.
      When asked about the bankruptcy filing, co-owner William Harrington commented, "I really can't help you." The company is a subsidiary of Capergy US, which Harrington and his wife Fahim Samaha also own.
     

Loggers hope for reboot
      The Jonesboro plant has not operated for about the past four years, according to Dana Doran, executive director of the Professional Logging Contractors of Maine. While the plant used to buy from dozens of logging contractors, Doran says, "Most contractors stopped delivering because they weren't being paid."
      One of those contractors is George Moon of TJ Timber Products in Hancock, who says he used to haul a great deal of wood chips, or biomass, to the Jonesboro plant years ago. "I gave up on it," he says, since Stored Solar wasn't paying him. He decided not to sue the company, as he says, "It was a waste of time. They weren't going to pay no matter what. They didn't want to pay their bills."
      At one point his company was owed $80,000, which Stored Solar paid over the course of a year. While he wanted Stored Solar to pay when the chips were delivered, Moon says they wouldn't do that.
      According to Moon, about a dozen "good-sized" logging contractors used to deliver chips to the Jonesboro plant, which would be receiving perhaps 40 30-ton loads of chips, or 1,200 tons, a day.
      "They were just a bunch of con artists," says Moon. "I felt they took advantage of us. They promised to pay us, and after we delivered they didn't pay us." He says two contractors from Georgia and South Carolina who provided biomass to Stored Solar power plants in New Hampshire recently contacted him to find out how he had finally gotten paid by Stored Solar.
      Logging contractors like to sell about a third of their wood as high-grade saw logs, a third for pulp and another third for biomass, which is otherwise left behind on the ground. The nearest company now purchasing biomass is the Sappi paper mill in Skowhegan.
      "I wouldn't mind seeing someone open it up and run it," says Moon of the Jonesboro plant. "Why have idle power plants when there's an energy crisis now?" Noting that the biomass plants used to be paid 3 or 4 cents per kilowatt when they were making money around 2015, he says they should be able to make money now, noting that he's paying 16 to 17 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity. "There's money to be made in the energy business," he says. "I'd like to see someone run it and put our industry back, and produce our own energy rather than buying it from someone else."
     

State assisted biomass industry
      The Stored Solar plants in New England receive payments for maintaining the plants as renewable-energy electricity producing resources, payments for the electricity generated and renewable energy credits.
      In 2016, Stored Solar, which is headquartered in West Enfield, was one of two firms in Maine that qualified to receive $13.4 million in state funding to assist the biomass industry. The funds were approved to help bolster an industry that had suffered severely from the closure of many paper mills and biomass generating plants.
      That was the year that Stored Solar purchased the Jonesboro and West Enfield plants from Covanta Energy Corporation. At the time hopes were high that it would infuse much needed demand in the state's logging and biomass industries, particularly in Washington County. In the Jonesboro plant's heyday it used about 250,000 green tons of biomass, supplied by about 12 vendors. At full capacity of 85 95% it operated around the clock, seven days a week, and supplied 23 to 24 megawatts of electricity and employed about 21 people.
      Before they were purchased by Covanta in 2008, the Jonesboro plant and its sister plant in West Enfield were co owned by Ridgewood Maine LLC and Indeck Energy Services Inc. The Jonesboro plant began commercial operation in 1987 but was shut down from 1995 to 2001 because of conditions in the electric power market. The plant was built to accept forest related biomass such as wood chips, bark, tree limbs and tops and mill residue.