LEWISTON — Water treatment in the Twin Cities should get a bit more efficient Monday when two new methane-burning generators go online at the Lewiston-Auburn Water Pollution Control Authority water treatment plant.
“One part of it, the part that takes on solids, has been working for about two months now — and they’ve been working quite well,” Superintendent Mac Richardson said. “We haven’t had the electrical generators up completely, but we strongly believe they should be up on a regular basis Friday morning.”
The authority has scheduled a ribbon-cutting celebration at 10:30 a.m. Sept. 9 at 535 Lisbon St.
“We have run them, but we’re looking forward Monday to being able to say ‘Yeah, they’ve been running great for the past couple of days,” Richardson said.
It’s part of a two-year project designed to make the water treatment plant more efficient.
The new $14 million anaerobic system digests solids and sludge in the sewage and wastewater to create burnable methane. The methane, in turn, will power electric generators.
Currently, solid waste is composted, used to fertilize farms and sent to landfills.
The new facility will process the solids from 11 million gallons of wastewater daily. It should cut the amount of solids that need to be composted in half while producing methane.
“They’ve been doing a great job for the last few weeks generating the gas,” Richardson said. “We’ve used it to run our boilers, but most of it, we’ve had a flare running to burn it off, until the generators come online.”
That gas will fire two generators that are expected to produce more than three million kilowatt hours of electricity per year, enough to save the authority about $15,000 to $20,000 per month.
“As of the first part of this year, we’ve paid $25,000 to $30,000 per month in electrical bills for an average 318,000 kilowatt hours per month,” Richardson said. “These units should generate a little more than three million kilowatt hours per year. So that should help our bottom line quite a bit.”
The Twin Cities plant is the first of its kind at a publicly-owned wastewater treatment plant in the state.
The project was financed with a 1 percent loan from a state revolving loan fund as well as a $330,000 Efficiency Maine grant.
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