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!

To Switch or Not to Switch?

It's a snowy day outside, school has just been let out, but my fiery student is not frolicking through the slush on her way home. No, she's with me and Jock Gill in the boiler room of the school discussing our energy future.

There are many reasons to switch us over to pellets, but there are many reasons to stay as we are.
Reason to switch:

• Pellets are cheaper than oil per BTU (with a Co-op contract, it's about $13/MMBTU, whereas fuel oil is $18/MMBTU). At this rate, and for the amount of BTUs our school uses, it would end up saving us money, but not tons because of the new building it would require).
  
• 10,000 gallon fuel tanks tend to leak, or float in a flood (which Montpelier may be prone to?)
• Pellet stoves don't put out the amount of SOx and NOx as fossil fuel exhaust.

Reasons not to switch:

• The current boilers are only 13 years old (or roughly half-way through their expected lifetime)
• They're running fine, not leaking, they're well kept up - no maintenance reason to replace them
• The boilers themselves are high efficiency models for the type of fuel they burn.
• If we put in a pellet furnace we'd need a new building to house it and a chimney.

Perhaps instead of focusing on the high school we're going to look at the Middle and Elementary Schools to see if they would stand to benefit more than the high school. We'll let you know how that goes!

Tony Klein says "Start a Demo Project"

Wow, what a fascinating meeting with Tony Klein (D) from East Montpelier.

The big things that came out of that meeting were:
We need to get in touch with the Clean Energy Fund to create a demo pelletizer system to prove that our idea works, which would be amazingly sweet because then there would actually be a local source of heating fuel! And then when people see that it's making a MAD profit other people will jump in! Which leads to the next thing we have to do:
Talk to the "chief number cruncher" for the state, I forget his name now, but get him to look over our plan and see if all our projections are roughly correct.
Lastly, we need to coordinate with a more extreme bill that's upcoming for a "March on Montpelier" which the high students are demanding. "They keep asking me, do you have a date yet, do you have a date yet, do you have a date yet?" So we'll just go... and make the point that
It's the young people's future, not theirs.
An incrementally increasing tax on fossil fuels would be good for the Vermont economy if that tax went into shifting our market to more locally-grown sustainable alternatives.

On a slightly separate note, today we found out that we have a date with Gaye Symington who's Vermont Speaker of the House, and when Tony Klein heard about it he said he'd try to be there as well.

He kept saying how impressed he was with this idea and at the end of the meeting he said, "you guys give me hope for the future". Sooooo yay :) It's not likely to be a bill which will pass this year, but we can get started with the demo project. In fact, that's probably going to be my new priority 1.

* rock! *

Tomorrow: meeting with Jock Gill to discuss the future of our high school's potential switch to biomass pellets!

Gosh, life is pretty exciting right now!

Tapping Into Revolutionary Teenage Energy

After the Montpelier Energy Team meeting the Duke Energy representatives kindly took us out to dinner at Main Street Bar and Grill (run by the New England Culinary Institute - where I got a local cow on a locally-baked bun, haha!). So what do you talk about with highly educated "important" people in the energy world? kids. facebook. myspace.

I told them about the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative led by a group of extremely passionate students. I told them about the meeting on Sunday and about the fire in each of them. And Jock Gill said something to the effect of

"There's something happening in the younger generation today that hasn't happened since the 60's."

This reminded me of the cartoon I saw a while ago of a teenager talking to his father saying, "You just had a war to protest. We've got to save the world!"


But in all seriousness I believe this is true ~ the kids are more motivated than other generations and they're less bound by red-tape, less disillusioned, and I find it exhilerating to be the go between for the younger people. I am the doorway between an explosion of fresh ideas and energy and the real world. It's terrifying and wonderful ~ mmm I hope it lasts! :) haha.

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 *