FREE PRESS • November 1, 2020
After a trial run in 2019, Penobscot Energy Recovery Company is importing about 11,000 tons of solid waste from ReGen WTE in Northern Ireland to power its Orrington waste-to-electricity plant. The PERC waste-to-electricity incinerator was built in 1988 for municipal trash from Maine towns. This year, after losing many towns to Coastal Resources of Maine in Hampden and seeing the expiration of a lucrative contract with Emera that paid above market rate, volume is down to 33-34% of capacity. The 2019 shipments from ReGen were on a smaller scale, with the material arriving in Portland in shipping containers. The current shipment, intended to work out the logistics of large-scale, bulk transportation, arrived in Searsport on November 28.