After almost six years of study, planning and lobbying, the Alpine Energy Group’s trash-to-energy plan is officially dead, the V.I. Waste Management Authority voted Wednesday.
The directors of the authority, meeting in a special session, voted to cancel the contracts between the agency and Alpine.
Earlier this month the Senate voted 13-2 to reject a proposed lease for the company for land on which it would build a St. Thomas refuse-derived-fuel plant. It was the second time the lawmakers had said no to the plans, which would have used the trash generated by the islands’ residents to generate electricity.
Waste Management Executive Director May Adams Cornwall said the agency could have continued pursuing the project, gambling that eventually they would win approval, or start over.
Wednesday the board chose to start over, canceling the contract under a provision called "termination for convenience."
Now Waste Management is going all the way back to square one, Cornwall said, reforming the citizen advisory groups that helped formulate the plan in the first place.
According to Cornwall, 17 people on St. Thomas and 17 on St. John came together from all walks of life to study the territory’s solid waste needs and potential, then developing the plan that eventually brought Alpine into the picture.
"A lot has changed since then," Cornwall said, including the rising cost of energy, the territory’s timeline for closing the Bovoni and Anguilla landfills, and the decision by Hovensa to close its St. Croix refinery. The latter will almost certainly make energy more expensive in the territory, she said, changing the calculations that will make a project economically viable.
With the clock ticking on federal mandates to close the territory’s landfills, Waste Management’s primary interest is finding some way to get rid of the waste. And Cornwall said she still leans toward recovering the energy from the waste as the best alternative.
After consulting with its citizen groups the authority will issue another request for proposals.
In the meantime, the territory is under scrutiny from the federal Environmental Protection Agency for problems at the landfills. In the absence of the Alpine plants diverting at least a portion of the waste stream into fuel, Waste Management will bail the refuse and use those bales to cover the landfill and create a slope. This gives them about three to five years to come up with a solution, Cornwall said.