BUCKSPORT, Maine — AIM Development USA will lay off at least 20 more workers at its power plant within the next two weeks, leaving just 13 employees or so to run the facility, according to Bucksport Economic Development Director Dave Milan.
“I’m not going to say it was unexpected,” Milan said Friday. “We’ve kind of known from Day One that the first thing they had to do was to find out how they were going to be able to operate the power plant without having a paper mill.”
Formerly, 60 people had been employed at the power plant, located at the site of the former paper mill. AIM Development, a subsidiary of Canadian metal recycling firm American Iron & Metal, acquired the infrastructure after Verso decided to shut the facility down and to lay off about 500 mill employees at the end of 2014. Verso spokesman Bill Cohen said last December that AIM intended to continue operating the power generation assets and sell power onto the grid.
According to Milan, the plant has been put on standby status because the cost of fuel to run it is too expensive right now. One of the mill’s boilers runs on natural gas and the other runs on biomass. The boilers create steam, which powers the turbine generators. Formerly, steam from the paper mill ran the power plant.
“Basically, it’s the cost of fuel versus what they can sell power for,” he said. “If biomass or the price of natural gas goes down, it makes the operation of this facility more lucrative. What they’re doing is simply operating it when it’s profitable — and not operating it when it isn’t. It’s market-driven.”
Jeff McGlin, a Cleveland-based AIM Development vice president, said Friday that because the company has not received any legitimate offers for the paper mill as a whole, the Bucksport facility will continue to transition from a papermaking mill to a “standalone merchant energy generation facility.”
He said that because demand for electricity is low right now and the price of biomass is high, the plant will reduce its operations the week of April 20.
The New England electricity market is cyclical, McGlin said.
“The overall capacities of the plant are the same. Nothing has changed,” he said.
According to McGlin, there is “definitely” a chance that AIM will hire more people in the future, as market conditions warrant.
The layoffs do mean more uncertainty for Bucksport, a community that has been grappling for months with the loss of the paper mill, its major economic driver. AIM officials have submitted a demolition permit request for the mill to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, which returned it earlier this month citing “certain deficiencies.”
While AIM officials have not said what the company will do with the 250-acre riverfront site once it is demolished. Previously they suggested it was likely they would try to redevelop it, as they are doing with another former Verso mill in in Sartell, Minnesota.
Milan said that when the paper mill was operating at full capacity, employees came from long distances to work there. But most of the power plant employees live locally.
“Those impacts probably will be more felt than anything else,” he said of the job losses.
However, Milan said that most people in Bucksport have “accepted the fate of the mill.”
“They’re looking forward to starting with a clean canvas,” he said. “If [AIM] is going to demolish it, they’d like to see it demoed quickly, so that redevelopment of the property can happen as soon as possible.”