HOQUIAM, Wash. – The howling storms that knocked out power along the Washington and northern Oregon coasts also brought a windfall, you might say, to Grays Harbor Paper LP.

Cleanup since the storms hit at the start of the month has yielded a bumper crop of blown-down trees and tree limbs to burn as “hog fuel” to produce steam for generating electricity at the mill in Hoquiam, company president Bill Quigg says.

“It’s waste to some people, but it becomes energy to make paper,” Quigg says. “If it doesn’t come to us, it goes to a landfill.”

Grays Harbor Paper has had a three-megawatt generator for years, and its recently upgraded 6.5-megawatt generator uses sawdust, cleaner shavings, trim, bark and just about anything else that can burn.

A few weeks ago, working with the Grays Harbor Public Utility District, the company completed work on a 1953 Westinghouse turbine, boosting its output from 7.5 megawatts to 9 megawatts, power house manager John Pellegrini said.

In 2006, the Legislature provided the PUD with $7.5 million in grants and loans for construction of the biomass turbine, which is owned by the utility and leased to the paper company. The company is responsible for providing wood waste as fuel, and any surplus electricity goes to the PUD as “green” energy.

Quigg told the Daily World of Aberdeen the new generator was operated for about a month to make sure it was working properly but then was turned off for reasons ranging from lack of an adequate waste wood supply to questions over marketing the green power.

“It’s an immature green power market right now and people are asking why we aren’t running this generator, and the reason we’re not is because all of these people need to work these details out – plus we’re starving for wood down here,” Quigg said.

The company has only enough hog fuel to produce 6 megawatts, less than a third of its 18.5-megawatt generating capacity. Running the generators at full capacity would make the paper mill a “power island” with all the electricity it needed and plenty of surplus to sell, Quigg said.

“The hog fuel is becoming scarce and more expensive,” Quigg said. “With the lumber mills shutting down or taking downtime that’s why it’s suddenly become hard. We use so much – mountains of wood – you can’t believe it.”

That’s why he has been grateful to everyone who has brought branches, waste wood and practically anything else that can be burned to the mill in the past couple of weeks.

On Thursday, for example, storm debris was mixed with piles of shake and shingle waste as truck after truck kept arriving.

Branches were shoveled onto a huge pile before being fed into a grinder known as “Hogzilla” and reduced almost to powder. Hogzilla guzzles about 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day, Quigg said, but the company recently bought an electric grinder, and the company president is optimistic that it will be in operation by Christmas.

“That will save us money and it saves a lot of carbon emissions, too.”

Most people bringing loads of waste wood to the mill have heard about the operation through word of mouth, Quigg said.

Steve Davis, who does water damage repair work for RSI out of Aberdeen, was unloading his second trailer full of branches on Thursday.

“You know, the contractors who would typically come and chip this on site are so busy that it was going to be weeks and weeks before they could get to us,” Davis said, “so this is a great opportunity.

“While we’ve been here there have been 15 to 16 trucks full of wood – lots of homeowners, lots of small guys. This really isn’t the service we even do. We do water damage repair and things like that, but we have to get this out of our client’s driveway so we can even work.”

For Quigg, one of the most satisfying deliveries was a cut-up tree that was blown down at the Grays Harbor Country Club.

“It’s a tree I swear I hit 500 times with golf balls, and I want to make sure that one is ground up and gone, never to bother me again,” he said.