How wood becomes electricity.
Eight steps, from a crowded stand of forest to the outlet in your wall. Nothing in the middle is exotic: fuel, fire, steam, and a spinning generator. What matters is where the fuel comes from.
Follow it on the 3D modelForest thinning
Crews thin crowded stands in the Shasta-Trinity and Lassen National Forests and on nearby private land. Those small trees and that brush are what let wildfires run.
Decades of fire suppression left many North State forests far denser than they used to be. Thinning removes the small trees and brush in between the big ones, the “ladder fuels” that carry a ground fire up into the crowns.
Chipping
Limbs, tops, and brush with no lumber value are chipped for fuel instead of being left to dry out or burned in open piles.
Material from a thinning project has little or no value as lumber. Without a plant like ours, it is usually piled and burned in the woods, or left to dry out on the forest floor.
The haul
Trucks bring the chips down out of the mountains to our plant in Anderson, in the Sacramento Valley.
Fuel comes from projects across the region, down to our fuel yard off Industry Road in Anderson.
Fuel yard
Up to 1,250 tons of wood arrive every day, including limbs, pallets, and clean lumber that neighbors drop off through our free recycling program.
The yard blends and stores fuel so the boiler gets a steady supply. Our Wood to Energy Recycling Program accepts clean tree wood and lumber from the public at no cost.
Boiler
Controlled combustion turns the wood into high-pressure steam, capturing energy that would otherwise go up in smoke from an open burn pile.
Conveyors feed chips into the boiler, where they burn under controlled conditions. The heat boils water inside the boiler’s tube walls, making high-pressure steam.
Turbine
That steam spins a turbine generator rated at 55 megawatts.
Steam expands through the turbine and spins the generator. Then it is condensed back into water and returned to the boiler to be used again.
The grid
Our substation steps the electricity up to grid voltage and sends it out across Northern California.
Unlike solar and wind, a biomass plant can run whatever the weather and whatever the time of day.
Your home
The end of the line: enough renewable electricity for about 62,600 homes.
That power comes from material that would otherwise have been burned in the open or left to feed the next wildfire.
Inside the plant
A steam plant is a simple machine at heart. Wood is the fuel, water is the working fluid, and the generator turns motion into electricity.
By the numbers
- Generating capacity
- 55 MW
- Wood taken in
- up to 1,250 tons a day
- Homes’ worth of electricity
- about 62,600
- Oil it would take instead
- 789,238 barrels a year
- Or coal
- 237,521 tons a year
- Making power in Anderson since
- 1987