Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency takes step toward zapping garbage into energy

CEDAR RAPIDS - The Solid Waste Agency board took a step forward Tuesday toward diverting garbage collected in cities throughout Linn County from the landfill to a proposed power plant in Marion that will zap trash into a gas that turns turbines to produce electricity.

The agency's board authorized the agency's executive director, Karmin McShane, and its lawyer to negotiate a garbage-diversion agreement with a Florida firm, Plasma Power LLC, which has said it needs the agency board's commitment of a steady supply of garbage as fuel so it can secure financing to seek permits and then to build the power plant.

Most of the proposed plant's electricity will be produced by natural gas, with a portion of it produced by turning garbage into syngas with a technology called plasma arc.

Board members on Tuesday noted that the board later will need to approve the specifics of any agreement with Plasma Power, specifics which Tom Podzimek, a Cedar Rapids City Council member and board chairman, said will need to address the price paid to Plasma Power to take the garbage and the ability of the agency to alter or void a 20-year agreement should circumstances change.

Nonetheless, board member Charlie Kress of Marion, an advocate for the Plasma Power proposal, told the board on Tuesday that Plasma Power needed “some kind of guarantee of 20 years” of garbage or the board “will throw the (firm's plans) into reverse.”

Ben Rogers, a Linn County supervisor and vice chairman of the agency board, noted that the firm still faces “hurdles” of securing permits to build the plant. The firm has said it will secure its own funding for the plant, which the firm has said will cost well over $100 million.

The agency board has been talking about plasma arc technology for more than five years after proponents in Marion began pushing it as an option to expanding the agency's landfill at County Home Road and Highway 13 on Marion's border.

Plasma Power believes it can make plasma arc work with municipal garbage in a cost-effective way by placing it in a power plant that operates primarily on natural gas. Such a combination will eliminate the need to use costly turbines required of plants that burn only syngas produced by plasma arc technology, the firm has said.