NRG Energy, (NRG -0.05%) announced today that it has been hired by privately held InventivEnergy to restart a 50 MW biomass plant in Texas that shut down almost two years ago.
InventivEnergy is a clean energy consulting and asset management firm, and has selected NRG Energy subsidiary NRG Energy Services LLC to both reinitialize and ultimately operate the currently defunct plant. After coming online in August 2011 as Texas' first wood-based biomass power plant, the Aspen Power plant was shuttered around a year later due to "market economics," NRG said. That tends to be code for uncompetitive pricing and/or costs. Now, both InventivEnergy and NRG Energy believe the time is ripe for another attempt.
Source: NRG Energy, Inc.
"[O]ur projections show an attractive opportunity for the plant to resume operations and provide competitively priced clean energy to the Texas market," said John Keller, CEO & Founder of InventivEnergy, in today's press release. "We are very excited to team-up with NRG in bringing Aspen back on-line and combining its top-tier O&M [Operations and Maintenance] capabilities with InventivEnergy's proven expertise in power plant asset management, value enhancement and optimization."
While NRG Energy itself doesn't own any biomass plants, NRG Energy Services LLC has a successful history of operating, maintaining, and repairing various types of power plants.
