Biomass for Home Heating in Vermont

The most exciting part of the Governor's Institute of Vermont (GIV) Winter Weekend was the movement to act on an idea.

Last year a junior at Mt. Abe Union HS went to the VT State Legislature to talk about the potential for biomass fuels as a renewable home-heating option. The legislator who invited them said, "We like your ideas, come back next year with more people". So that Junior (now a Senior) came to the GIV Weekend, and told kids about her work on biomass for home heating systems.

A less-than-ideal-though-likely scenario for Vermonters:
Let's say the price of oil skyrockets to the point of basically being... well, unaffordable. What do we do? Most of us have wood-stoves, so being the independent problem-solvers that we are, we start going out to cut down trees. But do we have enough trees to sustainably harvest to heat everyone's homes? No. Our initial estimates were that we could harvest 1 ton of biomass per acre per year of wood. This is not enough. (I have not done this calculation myself, though I would really like to). Even so - we end up with wide-spread deforestation, which leads to a lack of tourism - Vermont's biggest industry.

A better solution for Vermonters:
What if we could heat our homes with something renewable that didn't shoot our forests? Turns out high-density perenials like switch grass, Jerusalem artichoke, and Japanese knotweed grow at very high densities every year. This means we could harvest 15-20 tons per acre per year sustanably. That's huge! And hopefully enough (again - I need to do this calculation).

These crops could then be turned into pellets to be burned in a pellet stove, but there's not a lot of pellet stoves in Vermont, so there's not much demand for pellets, so no one makes pellets, so no one has a pellet stove - here again is our chicken-egg catch 22. So the idea would be that the state of Vermont could help home owners buy pellet stoves, thus creating a market for pellets, and then we could have a centralized pellet station, to which farmers and land owners could bring their crops for pelletization.

Local. Renewable. Home Heating Fuel.

This would keep more money in the state of Vermont thus creating a multi-million dollar stimulus to the Vermont economy.

So that's what we're proposing. It's beautiful. I'm getting my students involved. We're going to the statehouse :)