With the LIHEAP pilot project up and "running" I have recently been turning my attention towards production, which is an entirely different beast it seems.
The in-state pellet production plants I have heard of are scattered, but for kicks let's list them here:
The Burlington Free Press recently reported on a new start up in North Troy, VT. It would site on 10 acres of land.
There's Rick Barstow of Adamant, VT who plans to sell grass pellets this fall.
Roy Petraw has a small-scale pelletizer (though i've misspelled his name).
Andy Boutin may be going into this business
And the Rutland-owned Bixby folks may produce pellets this season.
All that is to say, there's just a handful of entrepreneurs at this point. Ideally, pellet manufacture plants would be a farmer/logger-owned co-op to ensure that they get a fair price for their product. But where do you start? No one's really got a sellable grass pellet at this point, so where do we start?
Well, there's one player I left out which is a family from Addison County. If I can find enough investors he'll issue bonds (or something like that), so that he can purchase the necessary equipment and begin production. Within a few years the bonds will have expired and the investors will have made a better-than-bank interest, and the family will be free to take on other partner-owners who would also have material to be pelletized. So basically we'll move from single-supplier to multiple supplier, from wood-pellet to mixed pellet, and from investor-owned to farmer/logger-owned, which all seems yummy to me.
Of course... it all sounds so simple right now... :)
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I have an interest in prmoting local wood pellet production. As I see it, this should eventually be done at the town scale here in Vermont, as we shouldn't be trucking raw materials and finished pellets very far - using up fossil fuels. Please keep me posted if you hear of any further news on pellet plant start-ups.
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