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A company that generates electricity by burning poultry litter plans to build a $150 million plant that will employ 100 workers in Montgomery County.

Fibrowatt, a Pennsylvania company, said Tuesday it will build the plant on 140 acres near Biscoe, off Interstate 73/74, about 50 miles south of Greensboro.

Fibrowatt will be the largest industrial project in Montgomery County history, said Judy Stevens, executive director of the Montgomery County Economic Development Corp.

“It couldn’t come at a better time for us,” said Stevens, who began talks with Fibrowatt in late 2005.

Stevens said she’s grateful because Montgomery, a county with about 27,000 residents, has an unemployment rate of more than 10 percent.

She said the jobs will pay an average of $18 an hour.

Biscoe and Montgomery have pledged $4.8 million in incentives for the plant.

The company built its first U.S. plant in Minnesota. The plants burn poultry litter, which is manure from chickens or turkeys along with the bedding, usually wood shavings.

Fibrowatt found out about Montgomery County more than three years ago when a local poultry grower met Fibrowatt officials at a meeting in Delaware, Stevens said, where they told him they were interested in building three plants in North Carolina.

After talks began, researchers at N.C. State mapped the parts of North Carolina with the heaviest concentration of poultry farms.

Montgomery, Stanley and Moore counties had the highest concentration in central North Carolina, Stevens said.

The Montgomery plant will generate 55 megawatts, which is enough to power 44,000 houses continuously, said Kasia Wieronski, the company’s public relations manager.

The company sells the power to larger companies, such as Duke Energy, through long-term contracts.

The Minnesota plant, similar to the one planned for Montgomery County, consumes 500,000 tons of poultry litter annually.

Fibrowatt is also planning to build similar plants in Surry and Sampson counties, all of which are designed to take advantage of heavy poultry farming in surrounding areas.

Community groups have fought both those plants, saying they cause heavy truck traffic, reduce the amount of poultry litter that farmers can use for fertilizer, and emit pollutants such as arsenic from their smokestacks, according to published reports.

Stevens said the plant will be heavily regulated through the environmental permitting process; it removes only 30 to 40 percent of the available litter from the fertilizer market; and the Minnesota plant has no odor from the truck traffic because trucks are sealed and hosed off.

Wieronski said the process is a clean alternative for generating power, however, and poultry farmers are especially eager to sell their byproducts to power companies.

“It’s great for the economy,” she said. “We are being sought out not just by North Carolina but throughout the U.S. by farmers. It’s the farmers who really want us. We provide a service first and foremost to the poultry industry — we’re a litter management service.”

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com