Charter Street coal plant embarks on its transition to cleaner fuels

It's not easy going green.

Just ask John Harrod Jr., who is helping guide the $250 million green makeover of UW-Madison's Charter Street Heating Plant.

The coal-burning plant will be converted so that it burns natural gas and cleaner, farm-grown fuels such as switchgrass. The changeover won praise from the plant's many critics, including the Sierra Club, which sued the university for violating the Clean Air Act. Gone will be the giant, dust-generating pile of coal that has become a symbol of the plant and its grimy history.
But Harrod, director of the UW-Madison Physical Plant, said getting rid of that coal pile and moving to cleaner biofuels has brought its own set of problems to solve — accommodating longer and more frequent trains, for example, or expanding the plant's footprint in its already squeezed urban setting, or figuring out new air standards for burning biofuels when even environmental regulators aren't quite sure what those final standards will be.

Those issues and others will be up for discussion Wednesday when UW-Madison hosts a hearing on the final version of the environmental impact statement for the project. The hearing is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. in Room 1106 of the Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Ave.

"I would have to say there would have been easier ways to do this," said Al Fish, head of facilities and planning management for UW-Madison. "It's been an adventure." (More....)