French Island Generating Plant

Location: LaCrosse, Wisconsin, on the Mississippi and Black rivers.

Plant Description: French Island is a facility that reuses wood and municipal solid waste to generate electricity. The plant’s two generating units burn wood waste, railroad ties and processed municipal solid waste. The municipal solid waste is processed into refuse-derived fuel (RDF) – a fluffy, burnable fuel produced on-site at a facility built specifically for that purpose.

Power Production Capability (in-service dates): Total 28 Mw: Unit 1 - 143 Mw (1940); Unit 2 - 14 Mw (1948). The French Island site also includes two combustion turbines that burn low-sulfur #2 fuel oil from a 5 million gallon storage tank located on site. Each unit has the capability of 72 MW (summer) and 100 MW (winter).

Fuel Sources: Waste wood, railroad ties and RDF. Although French Island uses alternate fuels, it produces electricity the same as conventional plants – a source of heat turns water to steam, which drives a turbine-generator.

Plant History: French Island proves that a combination of ingenuity and technical advances can offer innovative solutions for today’s waste disposal problem. Built in the 1940s as a coal-fired generating facility, French Island’s two units were converted in 1972 to burn oil, a cleaner fuel. However, within two years after the conversion, the oil embargo caused oil prices to soar, and the units were fired less frequently because they had become very expensive to operate.

By the early 1980s, the company identified a new low-cost fuel in waste wood, and converted Unit 2 to a fluidized bed boiler to burn it. In addition to reducing operating costs, burning wood helped solve a waste disposal problem by using sawdust and wood chips that otherwise would have been buried in a landfill. For similar reasons, the company in 1987 built a facility adjacent to the generating plant to process municipal solid waste into RDF. The necessary fuel handling modifications were made to the plant and Unit 1 also was converted to a fluidized bed boiler, making both units capable of burning a blend of waste wood and RDF. The conversion helped extend the life of the plant and maintain reasonable electric rates for customers, while resolving a solid waste disposal problem for La Crosse County.

Interesting Features: The fluidized bed boiler installed at French Island was the first in the United States to be used for commercial power production. The special boiler gets its name because it contains a bed of sand that behaves like a boiling pot when air is injected into it. As the RDF or waste wood fuel is fed into the boiler, it mixes with the sand and remains suspended in the air – being constantly scraped to reveal fresh combustion surfaces. Unlike conventional boilers, the fuel used in a fluidized bed boiler does not have to be uniform in size and moisture content to burn thoroughly.

Waste wood is hauled to the plant in trucks and dumped into a receiving hopper. It then is conveyed through equipment that crushes and grinds wood in to small pieces. The fuel is placed in a storage bin until needed in the boiler.

French Island’s resource recovery facility has the capacity to process more than 100,000 tons of municipal solid waste each year. Garbage trucks dump solid waste on the tipping floor. Front-end loader operators then inspect trash and push it on the floor to a feed conveyor. The RDF processing facility removes recyclable materials and non-combustible items from the waste, then chops and shreds it into a uniformly sized fluffy product that is burned with waste wood.

Since 1987, French Island has utilized more than 600,000 tons of RDF and over 1 million tons of waste wood and railroad ties.

Environmental Highlights: Waste wood, railroad ties and RDF contain low levels of sulfur, so sulfur dioxide emissions are minimal. A duct scrubbing system installed in 2002 uses dry lime injection to help further decrease emissions of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen chloride. Over-fire air changes made in 2001 and 2002 improved the combustion process inside the fluidized boiler and help control emissions. Pulse jet baghouses efficiently collect particulate matter, including mercury and dioxin and metals such as lead and cadmium, in order to minimize their release into the air. In 2002, a urea-injection system was installed on both boilers to help reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides. 

Community Involvement: French Island employs 30 people full time.

Contact Information:

• Plant Information and Tour Requests — 1-800-895-4999
• Media Inquiries — 715-839-2565