A Meeting of the Pellet Minds: BERC, VSHI, Pellergy, and BCC

Yesterday was thoroughly exciting for a number of reasons, but I'll have to chop the reasons up into different posts I think. Let's start with the most exhilarating part.

After school I met with Jock Gill (of Biomass Commodities Corporation, who also arranged the meeting), Chris Recchia (Executive Director of Biomass Energy Resource Center aka BERC), and Andy Boutin (General Manager of Pellergy), along with my spitfire student to talk about up-and-coming pellet technologies. Also, Jock just wanted us all to meet each other cause we all cared about the same things: locally produced, locally consumed pellets.

Turns out BERC wants to get into pellet technologies. Previously if they had been, say, working with a school that was too small for to make a wood chip burner financially viable, they would refer them to another organization to look into pellets, which are much easier to scale down (and up, I might mention). But they've come around and decided that pellets should be included in the "solid fuels systems" which they support. This was very interesting for my student and I as we thought about our own school district's heating needs, and so we decided to meet up to discuss that possibility at length at a later date!

That wasn't the best part of the meeting though, that came when Andy Boutin took us to his house on East State Street to show us his working pellet-burning furnace. In case that doesn't make you take a step back, let me explain:

Right now the only thing you can commercially buy in the US for a residential-sized application to burn pellets is a pellet stove. It's like a woodstove that just heats up the air, which we then hope circulates adequately around the house. Companies in Northern Europe have developed a technology where you can just take the oil burner on your furnace and replace it with a pellet burner.

This guy, Andy Boutin, has taken the Swedish model and basically got permission to adapted it to run on our US 110Volts, 60Hz (rather than the European 230V, 50Hz). He lives in an ancient house that used to be coal-heated, so it had a whole room in the basement devoted to coal storage, which was obviously empty. He lined it, stored 7tons of pellets in it, ran a pipe from roughly the bottom of the room up, through the wall and over to a vacuum, which sucked up pellets and dropped them in a hopper that was about a cubic yard, then there was an auger which delivered pellets to a pellet burner (where the oil burner used to be).

It was SO cool. He told us all about the safety features, and how he had called the fire marshall, and the furnace manufacturer and all these other parties to make sure that his house was still insurable. But bottom line, his model works.

Next phase: he just started manufacturing five more prototypes in Maine, which will be sent to a third party testing facility to test for safety, and then he hopes to be installing them in people's homes by the end of the summer.

The system would cost roughly $4,000, with a payback period of 2-3 years. And he's planning to mass manufacture them in Maine (some folks at this meeting were hoping to get him to open a manufacturing facility in Lyndon, VT).

I would post pictures, but they're slightly confidential at this point (sorry). Even so I'm completely stoked about this!!! Andy is really stoked to work with VSHI, and I'm really stoked to have them visit Andy's house!! Gah!