Amid a torrent of news about clean-tech projects and developments, three coal-fired power projects in the Great Plains and Mountain West seem to be bucking the trend — in part by getting on the green bandwagon.

In the first example, Minnesota-based G&T cooperative Great River Energy announced plans to develop a $300 million cellulosic biorefinery to be built on the site of its 99-MW lignite-fired Spiritwood cogeneration project, now under construction near Jamestown, N.D. The Dakota Spirit AgEnergy biorefinery would use agricultural waste to produce three products: ethanol, lignin and molasses. The C5 ethanol would be sold in wholesale markets, while the molasses would be used as a livestock feed adjunct and the lignin would be burned in the Spiritwood boiler. Great River Energy is negotiating with Inbicon of Denmark, which developed a similar biorefinery in Denmark.

In a second example, Black Hills Power Corp. began commercial operations at its $247 million WyGen III plant in northeastern Wyoming on April 1. The 110-MW plant started up 24 months early, according to company officials. It will burn Wyoming coal to provide power to customers in western South Dakota and parts of Wyoming and Montana. Black & Veatch served as project engineer.

Black Hills Power sold a 23-percent interest in the plant to the city of Gillette in mid-March for $62 million. Last April MDU Resources acquired 25 percent of the plant. Rate cases are proceeding before regulatory commissions in all three states to finance the project’s costs.

And in the third example, on March 8 the Wyoming Supreme Court upheld an air-quality permit the state’s Department of Environmental Quality issued more than three years ago for Basin Electric Power Cooperative’s 385-MW Dry Fork Station near Gillette. Environmental groups sued to stop construction on the $1.3 billion plant, challenging the validity of the state’s air permit, and also questioning whether the G&T cooperative selected the “best-available control technology” as defined by the Clean Air Act when selecting the plant’s pulverized-coal boiler design. Sargent & Lundy served as architect-engineer.

Although the Wyoming high-court ruling is a major victory for the Dry Fork project, it still faces a federal legal challenge led by the Sierra Club in U.S. District Court in Cheyenne.