We have had several questions and comments about this story, asking how the reopening of the plant will affect local LMUD customers in the event of an outage. In the past, during outages, LMUD would rely on Honey Lake Power for backup. The phyical connections for this are still in place, but according to LMUD the prior agreement was between HLP, LMUD and PG&E. A new agreement is being worked on which takes into account HLP’s new contract with San Diego Gas & Electric. At this time, according to the utility no agreement is in place with HLP. -Jeremy
Greenleaf Power, the Sacramento based owner and operator of the Honey Lake Power facility in Wendel, announced Tuesday that the power generating plant has reopened after four months of inactivity.
“Greenleaf Power is proud to announce that Honey Lake Power re-started operations last week,” said Hugh Smith, president of the company.
According to the company the Honey Lake Power Plant closed in October due to the expiration of a prior agreement.
In a brief press release Matt Ross, of Ross and Associates, explained that in September, Governor Brown signed Senate Bill 859 which requires all investor-owned utilities and large publicly-owned utilities to procure biomass power generated with wood from high hazard fire zones throughout the state. This requirement affected the Honey Lake Power plant.
“In the fall,” said Ross, “Greenleaf Power and San Diego Gas & Electric began negotiations for a long-term power agreement. The two sides reached a five-year agreement in November and after having received approval from the California Public Utilities Commission, the contract became effective February 1st.”
“With this new agreement in place, the plant will be scheduled to operate full-time throughout the duration of the new contract, except during maintenance outages” said Smith. “the agreement also ensures our staff and fuel suppliers that jobs will be available for the foreseeable future.”
Greenleaf Power acquires, develops, owns and operates power projects that utilize residual biomass as fuel, and currently owns and operates more than 150 megawatts of biomass generating assets in North America.
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