Recently there was an article in the Bridge about me, my teaching, and the working I'm doing with the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. So that was very encouraging. Since then I've had lots of people come up to me saying, "You've got me convinced. I've got a couple acres of land we could grow grasses on!" Ha! Most excellent.
And as long as we're talking VSHI, the last Thursday in Montpelier was the Energy Town Meeting Day with Ken Jones and the Montpelier Energy Team. We were hoping to start a pellet-purchasing coop that night (ideally 100-150 homes participating). Unfortunately, we only had six families sign up. I mean, it's a start, but more work needs to be done.
Some of my students presented their work to the community, which was ... a little comical since many of the students thought they were sharing new information, when really the audience was abnormally well-educated. This was most poigniant when a student who had built a wind turbine had a diagram of the insides of an industrial turbine in his PowerPoint presentation. Someone from the crowd asked, "I normally see fins on these turbines to make sure they face into the wind, but there's not fin on this one, how does it turn?" The student didn't know, he had merely tapped the picture to make the point that his was much simpler, but to everyone's surprise a guy in the back corner piped up, "Well, I happen to be a windmill designer, and you can see there on the back, there's a little anemometer and a sensor there, which sends information to a computer inside the turbine, which tells it how to turn." hA! Wow. This was not your typical audience.
Anyway - back to VSHI - the VSHI kids ran a session called "How can we move in the direction of locally produced pellets", which was sorely under-attended. Or at least it felt that way at first, there were only 3 people in attendance, but they were the right three people: Jeff Beyer, the Tree Warden and head of the Parks and Rec Department, and Rick Barstow an East Montpelier farmer who recently bought a small pelletizer so that he can pelletize grass from his farm. Jeff was saying, "We have hundreds of yards of woody biomass that's just getting buried right now because we don't have anything to do with it, but it's got to be worth something. We've got to use it!" And Rick was saying that he'd like to go into production very soon - by the fall he hopes. And ideally, the right blend of materials in a pellet would be mostly grass and a little bit of wood for lignan, which acts as a binder. Getting these two guys together was just fabulous. There was a lot of potential there.
Thus far VSHI has been mainly focused on Bristol and Addison County, and I think I need to start dreaming about the Montpelier community and its potential heating future.
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