District Heating for Montpelier? Not Soon.

So much to tell you about!

Last night I went to the Montpelier Energy Team meeting where we hosted two representatives from Duke Energy who are interested in helping us start our city's District Heating project. But first a brief explanation of "District Heating".

District Heating is the idea that there is one location with a boiler or burner which provides heat for a network of buildings. Sometimes they're connected radially outward, sometimes there's more than one heat source, but everybody's connected. This is commonplace in Northern European countries. Duke Energy built and runs such an operation in St. Paul, MN.

The Vermont State Capital Building is currently heated by a woodchip burner/boiler across the street with pipes of hot water running underground. This boiler needs to be replaced pretty soon (it was installed in 1962), and they thought, "why not expand the boiler system there to heat many public buildings in Montpelier?" This makes sense, right? It's more efficient, you stop using fossil fuels, stop sending money out of the state. It's better for everyone. Buuuut it's going to cost like 10 million dollars to dig trenches to lay pipe, staff the boiler room, get the larger boiler, etc. Yuck.

My fiery student and I went to this meeting because the high school is on the list to receive heat from this central heating plant, should it ever come to pass. But by the end of the evening we both decided that it was a mess that we didn't want to get involved with: The head of the District Heating project told us privately at the end of the meeting that he would probably die before this project went into effect. He was joking, but I think we all knew he was right.


This means we're all out pursuing pellets as a heating method for the school now, and I'm very thankful for that clarity. We're hoping to get an estimate with Jock Gill on Tuesday. * whoop *