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The head of a wood-fired power plant seeking to supply Hawaii island with electricity for 30 years says his company has enough trees under contract for the first few years of operation, but it’s unclear where the rest will come from.

Warren Lee, president of Hu Honua Bioenergy, recently told the Public Utilities Commission that his company is attempting to negotiate leases with landowners of commercial eucalyptus forests on the Big Island to secure a long-term inventory of trees. But because Hu Honua lacks what he calls a “non-appealable” power purchase agreement with Hawaiian Electric sanctioned by the commission, landowners are reluctant to sign contracts.

Hu Honua intends to provide energy to the Big Island’s grid, operated by Hawaiian Electric, by burning eucalyptus trees cut from multiple locations on the island. Originally planted in the mid-1990s after the sugarcane industry collapsed, the trees were grown for commercial harvest.

To date, Hu Honua has secured leases with three sources of eucalyptus covering approximately 11,266 acres. Those trees would allow Hu Honua to operate for six to nine years, depending on how much energy the plant is producing, Lee said. The tree plantations are in Pahala, Paauhau and Hamakua.

If the plant gets the commission’s approval to operate, it needs about 1,137 acres of trees per year initially, according to Hu Honua documents. When it’s operating at full capacity and producing 21.5 megawatts of power, Hu Honua would need 1,871 acres annually.

Lee told the commission that he’s negotiating with a landowner on the Hamakua Coast north of Hilo to acquire an additional 5,500 acres of eucalyptus. Those trees would keep the plant running an additional five to seven years. But Lee said the landowners he’s talking to are skittish about offering him a lease because of the plant’s uncertain future.

“There a lot of interest,” Lee said, but the talks are moving very slowly.

Mickey Knox, staff attorney with the Division of Consumer Advocacy, asked Lee for the name of the landowner he’s negotiating with but the Hu Honua executive declined to say, citing confidentiality.

The fact that landowners are taking a wait-and-see approach to Hu Honua is not surprising given the many years of regulatory wrangling and court battles in which the company has been engaged.

Hu Honua has been trying to open for over a decade but its quest has been hampered by missed deadlines, disputes over a competitive bidding waiver, and calculations over greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration, among other factors.

The proposed biomass plant in Pepeekeo has numerous critics, including Marco Mangelsdorf, a solar-energy businessman based in Hilo. He’s skeptical of the company’s claims that the project will have zero effect on climate change, or be carbon neutral in other words, because it’ll plant more trees than it burns.

In Mangelsdorf’s view, burning trees or fossil fuels is archaic when clean sources of energy exist like solar, wind, hydro and geothermal.

“We absolutely can and must do better in terms of power generation on this island, if not the whole state,” Mangelsdorf said. “We’re in a planetary emergency, a planetary crisis, as far as the stuff we’re putting in the atmosphere.”

Burning trees releases more greenhouse gases into the environment than burning coal, Mangelsdorf said, citing on the matter.

Hu Honua disagrees. Modeling shows that the plant will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and be the first bioenergy project in Hawaii to commit to being carbon neutral by 2035, meaning every year the facility will be sequestering more carbon by regrowing trees than is emitted, said Jesse Smith, an attorney representing Hu Honua.

During evidentiary hearings earlier this month, the company was asked why it should be granted a 30-year, non-appealable license to operate if it doesn’t know where its tree supply is coming from over the life of the project, a situation that could potentially affect operating costs and electricity customer bills. Lawyers for the company said it’s unfair and unreasonable for the commission to expect that the plant would have written agreements in place for three decades of trees at the outset.

Regardless, the company says there’s plenty of biomass to be had. In written testimony and in remarks made by Lee, Hu Honua said it intends to get all its trees from the Big Island. But if an emergency were to arise, such as a hurricane or volcanic eruption that could wipe out trees, or if the timber supply were to run out for other reasons, the company could import trees as a last resort. The trees could come from elsewhere in the Hawaiian Islands, the continental United States or even overseas, according to company filings with the commission.

In addition to eucalyptus, Lee said the plant would seek to also burn invasive tree species, as well as wood chips and green waste diverted from local landfills. The plant’s consumption of excess wood debris would benefit the island, Lee said.

According to Hu Honua, its plant on the Big Island because it would require three decades of trees as well as reforestation. Without a forestry industry, the island’s eucalyptus plantations could be turned into housing subdivisions or razed for agricultural purposes like coffee or vegetable farming, Hu Honua filings say.

Either scenario would be less environmentally friendly than Hu Honua’s operations because most of the trees would be cleared and not replanted, lowering the amount of greenhouse gases the eucalyptus stands absorb, according to the company.

In his closing statement at the hearing, Consumer Advocate staff attorney Knox said “legitimate questions” remain about Hu Honua’s ability to assess its greenhouse gas emissions based on currently available documents.

Overall, “there are still very important areas that need further clarification and/or information so that there is a clear understanding of expectations, commitments, accountability and recourse” about the project, Knox concluded.

The commission isn’t expected to issue a decision about the plant’s future for several more weeks.