New company taking over Packer’s role in Naperville green depot project

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The "Green Fuel Depot" that was unveiled on Monday November 21, 2011, at the Springbrook Waste Facility in Naperville IL. | Terence Guider-Shaw~For Sun-Times Media

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Updated: March 11, 2012 8:05AM

Planners of Naperville’s Green Fuels Depot are keeping the light on.

Packer Engineering, lead local partner in the city’s innovative earth-friendly prototype power plant, closed its doors in late January. However, a phoenix has risen from the ashes, in the form of a newly-established company based in Bolingbrook that is taking the reins on the project.

“The responsibility for finishing that project will reside with Tger Technologies,” said Al Wilks, formerly senior director of research and development at Packer and now chief technical officer and vice president of the newly incorporated company, which is scheduled to move to Naperville this summer.

Other partners in the project include the city, Argonne National Laboratory and College of DuPage.

Wilks said an 11-person team will be working to move the depot forward as a demonstration of an emerging technology that can convert shredded landscape waste into fuels and power for electrical generation.

“It’s people who used to work for Packer, and it’s the very same people who did the Green Fuels Depot,” Wilks said.

With the team roster essentially unchanged, Naperville City Council member Bob Fieseler isn’t worried about the nameplate change.

“If the Department of Energy is content that the reorganized entity is able to carry on with the project, I think that is the seal of approval,” said Fieseler, an ardent proponent of the project since work began on it more than three years ago.

The depot has run into minor complications before, including a delay in regulatory approval that made its community unveiling in November an unexpectedly low-key event. But while it is without precedent, Fieseler has plenty of faith in the facility’s viability from a technical perspective.

“This is a new technology that’s going to have some stages in which problems are encountered and need to be solved,” Fieseler said. “It’s the solving of those problems that leads to new innovation.”

One such opportunity came up recently. Wilks said the depot, located on the 135-acre site of the city’s wastewater treatment plant on Plainfield-Naperville Road, was found to have an equipment malfunction that has caused a five-month holdup for its launch into full demonstration mode.

“The depot was constructed, unfortunately, with a set of defective heaters,” he said. “We could not know they were defective until they were hooked up to the Naperville grid.”

The team contacted the manufacturer, who sent out a representative to look them over.

“He agreed that they were off spec,” Wilks said.

Part of the problem was that the federal funding initially anticipated for the depot wound up considerably lower as the project moved along.

“We got it done with less money,” Wilks said. “One of the prices on that was we couldn’t check every piece as it came in. That came back and bit us.”

They problem should be fixed by the end of June, he said.

“That just cost us a couple of months. No big deal.”

Funding for the depot going forward is less a sure thing. With the federal grant money all used up, Wilks said it’s now up to the city whether, when and at what level the remainder of the project will be funded.

“So far we haven’t put any hard dollars in,” Fieseler said. “That was one of the conditions that we had going in, that we were willing to put in in-kind donations.”

The city provided a site for the depot and took care of site preparation and putting in the utilities, and could do more of that if needed, he said.

“If we’re talking about hard dollars, I think that would go to the normal budget scrutiny that we apply to any spending of taxpayer dollars (and) frankly I think the appetite on the part of the council to put hard dollars in this at this point would be fairly low,” he said.

There may be a cart-and-horse piece to that aspect of the depot. The facility can process only a fraction of the landscape waste generated by the city, but it can be reproduced at a much larger scale to accommodate more green matter. Fieseler said if it can be demonstrated that the technology works to divert a significant amount of material from the faraway sites where it is now taken for processing, it could be worthwhile to pursue a larger depot more aggressively.

“If it made sense that there was a net positive return, I could see the city possibly putting up some money in order to get a return in as short a time frame as possible,” he said, adding that otherwise it’s unlikely. “You would have to present a very strong case.”