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

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

Just down the road from the storage yard, Mr. Vines’s 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 by wood waste has recently surged in East Texas, which has none of the wind-power potential of West Texas but does have plenty of pine trees. Forty-five miles away from Lufkin, in Northwestern Nacogdoches County, a larger plant with the capacity to power about 75,000 homes is being built by Southern Company, an Atlanta-based utility holding company. That plant, which will sell its power to Austin Energy, broke ground a year ago and should be operational by mid-2012.

Two other plants, near Woodville and Lindale, received crucial permits from Texas air-pollution regulators this year, though construction has not yet started. A fifth plant, near Greenville, has an application pending.