Fibrowatt officials said last week they are still looking forward to opening their alternative energy plant in Surry County, but it could be another three years before the facility is operating.

The company, which generates renewable energy from poultry litter and other bio-waste, has chosen a site offered by Surry County near Elkin to build a new biomass-fueled power plant. Two other Fibrowatt plants are planned for Montgomery and Sampson counties.

The Surry plant will offer poultry growers an alternative for the management of poultry litter in western North Carolina, according to company officials, though protesters have in recent months attacked the plans as environmentally unsound.

Fibrowatt representatives say the power plant will not only use “green technology,” but it will be using a renewable resource.

Terry Walmsley, vice president of environmental and public affairs for Fibrowatt, said the process, although a slow one, is moving forward. He said the firm is working on securing power purchase agreements with utility providers across the state.

Those agreements, he said, have to be signed by every company in North Carolina which provides electricity.

“They have to purchase a certain amount of renewable energy that derives from poultry litter,” Walmsley said. “That could be down to the co-op level, major utilities and municipal utilities. Each and every one of them will ultimately have an obligation to purchase power from our plants.”

Walmsley said he is hopeful that the agreement process will go smoothly.

“With the emphasis that has been placed on poultry litter, as well as swine and solar in the state, it does give us quite an upside on it. It’s taken a little bit of time for utilities and the co-ops — all of the different energy providers to meet this particular commitment. But right now they are negotiating internally on how they are going to manage their individual requirement for that,” said Walmsley.

He expects those negotiations to end fairly soon.

“We are waiting for them to figure out how they are going to meet this commitment to purchase our energy. Beyond that, once we have signed power purchase agreements, then we will be proceeding with some of the more formal activities such as permitting,” he said.

It’s an open-ended time line, Walmsley said. He expects the purchase agreements and permitting to take at least a year.

He said once the permits are in place, then the company can move forward with the construction of the facility, which is expected to take at least two years.

“One can probably envision the actual production of electricity to start taking place about three years from now,” he said.

In his investigation of the permitting process in North Carolina, he thinks the company will have no trouble in meeting the requirements. The company has one other United States plant already operating in Benson, Minn.

“The permitting process has been around for quite some time, so I think the regulators, DENR (N.C. Department of Natural Resources) as well as ourselves are pretty aware of what it takes to meet the requirements. There is a very rigid permitting processes we will have to go through, but as long as we can demonstrate and prove that we can properly meet all of those rules, we will get a permit. Not that the process is straight-forward, it will take some time. But there is every expectation based on the experience that we had in Minnesota that we will be able to meet those requirements.”

Walmsley said the company has cleared some major hurdles in order to move forward in North Carolina, but it continues to strive toward opening plants and creating jobs.

“Every time a question comes up through the North Carolina Utility Commission process, where they are trying to iron out all of the details, it seems to continue to look very favorable in our direction,” he said. “We are very pleased on how that is going,”

Contact Mondee Tilley at mtilley@mtairynews.com or at 719-1930.