AlterNRG, Dufferin County's preferred vendor for EcoEnergy Park's (DEEP) thermal treatment plant, is evaluating the use of switchgrass and sorghum as feedstock at its Cajun II electrical generation plant in Louisiana.

And it announced Wednesday that it had purchased all shares of Clean Energy Developments Corp. at a total cost of about $18.4 million.

Alter NRG owns Westinghouse Plasma Technology, a process that has been proven at a U.S.- based pilot project as a thermal system to convert waste to energy, and it has a memorandum of understanding for creation of the DEEP facility.

The acquisition by the Calgary-based arm of Alter NRG of Clean Energy announced this week expands its green energy operations into the geothermal field, enabling it to "use heat from the ground to provide an environmentally friendly means for heating and air conditioning using renewable geothermal energy.

"Geoexchange systems have lower energy consumption compared to conventional equipment, and adoption of this technology has experienced rapid market growth worldwide in recent years," it says in the announcement.

The shares of the Calgary corporation are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, whereas the U.S. arm's shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

In Louisiana, the company is seeding 20 acres of improved varieties of switchgrass and high-biomass sorghum for the tests. The grass is intended to replace coal.

"Biomass from locally grown energy grasses has the potential to be an important part of NRG's multi-pronged approach to reduce our carbon intensi- ty and can also be a source of economic development in rural communities," said David Crane, NRG's President and Chief Executive Officer.

"In addition to nuclear, wind and solar, energy from biomass has the potential to help support an energy future that addresses global climate change in an environmentally and economically sustainable manner."

Describing the rationale of biomass, the company explains more or less that surface vegetation stores the carbon from a single year of growth; the root system stores several years, but coal stores millennia of carbon.