Driving his mud-spattered Suburban through a wood storage yard, Danny Vines gestures out the window at piles of lopped-off logs and bushy materials.

“This is our fuel,” he says. “And it’s a waste product.”

Just down the road from the storage yard, Vines' company, Aspen Power, is building a first-of-its-kind power plant in Texas: one that will burn the woody debris to make steam, which turns generators to make electricity. The roughly $128 million plant in Lufkin is expected to begin running tests this month and should start full operations in the spring.

Interest in building power plants fueled ...

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