ReVenture plan close to landing N.C. legislative deal

With a flurry of 11th-hour negotiations, N.C. lawmakers appear poised to act before adjourning today on special legislation to spur development of Forsite Development’s ReVenture Energy Park.

The legislation also should make it much more likely that Duke Energy Carolinas will contract to buy the power from the proposed 50-megawatt biomass power plant at the park’s heart.

Tom McKittrick, Forsite’s chief executive, said Wednesday afternoon there was enough support for the bill to be approved by the House and for the Senate to concur as early as Thursday. “It’s just down to logistics and timing,” he said of the bill’s prospects.

He had been at the legislature that morning, when the House Energy and Energy Efficiency Committee unanimously sent the bill to the House floor for approval Thursday. Plans were to courier the bill to the Senate that afternoon so it could immediately vote its approval. That could happen Thursday afternoon (after press time) or early Friday, observers said.

The bill would offer any utility that buys the power from the ReVenture plant triple renewable-energy credits for electricity produced from its first 20 megawatts of capacity. The state is already requiring utilities to produce up to 12.5 percent of the energy they sell from renewable sources by 2021. The triple credits reduce how much a utility will have to spend to meet that requirement.

More to the point for Duke, those credits could be used to meet N.C. requirements for it to produce power from chicken waste.

Duke recently said it wouldn’t participate in joint efforts among most N.C. utilities to comply with that requirement. Duke said it thought it could meet that standard more effectively on its own. But negotiations with potential chicken-waste power producers have proved difficult.

Duke spokesman Jason Walls says the company is in early-stage negotiations with McKittrick and Forsite to buy power from the biomass plant. But Duke has not taken a position on the legislation.

ReVenture is a 667-acre development Forsite has proposed northwest of Charlotte, along the Mecklenburg-Gastonia county line. Long-term plans call for a 4-megawatt solar plant on the site, a wastewater treatment plant and other sustainable development.

Read the full story in the Charlotte Business Journal.