Aiding the Switch to Biomass for Multiple Demographics

One of the comments we received from Rob Ide of the Clean Energy Development Fund is that our proposal would be stronger if we could address in it how to reach multiple economic demographics. Our proposed tax on fossil fuel would help aid low income folks make the switch, but then how do you encourage more wealthy people to switch? Up until today our ideas have been basically educate them. If they know they'll make their money back in 5 years or less, who wouldn't do it?

But another possible answer today came from my dad. Tax credits for those who switch to pellet stoves from fuel oil burners. That way those with the capital will want to switch. I hope the Governor will like this solution.

Coupling tax breaks for those who switch voluntarily with a tax on fossil heating fuels to aid the low-income switch (those without the up front capital) makes our proposal tasty to both parties.

Sweeeeeet.

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!

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 *

Sneak Preview: Biomass Wiki

Things have been wicked busy getting stuff rolling with the biomass for home heating legislation. Oh gosh, where to begin!?

Two teachers are trying to organize hundreds of kids throughout Vermont, and help them collaborate on PowerPoint presentations across schools which they will eventually present to the legislature. How do you do that?

The answer, my friends, is a wiki. This wiki .

What's a wiki? (I've been hearing this question a LOT lately). It's a website that multiple people can edit, which makes it perfect for project collaboration and joint-authored documents.

We haven't officially announced this site to the students, because we want the teacher-end of it to be settled, which we're hoping to have done by Tuesday. Even so, the bones of it are done, and it's just really exciting. :) hehehehe. It's encouraging that this may actually happen, that it might manifest as more than just talk.

Biomass for Home Heating in Vermont

The most exciting part of the Governor's Institute of Vermont (GIV) Winter Weekend was the movement to act on an idea.

Last year a junior at Mt. Abe Union HS went to the VT State Legislature to talk about the potential for biomass fuels as a renewable home-heating option. The legislator who invited them said, "We like your ideas, come back next year with more people". So that Junior (now a Senior) came to the GIV Weekend, and told kids about her work on biomass for home heating systems.

A less-than-ideal-though-likely scenario for Vermonters:
Let's say the price of oil skyrockets to the point of basically being... well, unaffordable. What do we do? Most of us have wood-stoves, so being the independent problem-solvers that we are, we start going out to cut down trees. But do we have enough trees to sustainably harvest to heat everyone's homes? No. Our initial estimates were that we could harvest 1 ton of biomass per acre per year of wood. This is not enough. (I have not done this calculation myself, though I would really like to). Even so - we end up with wide-spread deforestation, which leads to a lack of tourism - Vermont's biggest industry.

A better solution for Vermonters:
What if we could heat our homes with something renewable that didn't shoot our forests? Turns out high-density perenials like switch grass, Jerusalem artichoke, and Japanese knotweed grow at very high densities every year. This means we could harvest 15-20 tons per acre per year sustanably. That's huge! And hopefully enough (again - I need to do this calculation).

These crops could then be turned into pellets to be burned in a pellet stove, but there's not a lot of pellet stoves in Vermont, so there's not much demand for pellets, so no one makes pellets, so no one has a pellet stove - here again is our chicken-egg catch 22. So the idea would be that the state of Vermont could help home owners buy pellet stoves, thus creating a market for pellets, and then we could have a centralized pellet station, to which farmers and land owners could bring their crops for pelletization.

Local. Renewable. Home Heating Fuel.

This would keep more money in the state of Vermont thus creating a multi-million dollar stimulus to the Vermont economy.

So that's what we're proposing. It's beautiful. I'm getting my students involved. We're going to the statehouse :)

A Series of Conversations

An update on the biofuel plans:

Talking with a Farmer:
I had a conversation with my buddy Lindsay who's a farmer in Addison County about the idea of farmers producing their own biofuel on site, which then could then sell to the general public, who could also bring lawn clippings by and so get a discount on fuel. She thought the part about on site fuel generation for farmers would be awesome, and selling it to the public would be awesome, but the part about having people deliver organic matter to be then turned in to fuel was more difficult.

She said that would require additional labor to sort through that matter to make sure that it was adequate (I'm not sure what all that would entail yet... at the very least it would mean that it's not littered with non-organic matter).

We also talked about diesel farm equipment and how to make biofuels work for those devices. And it comes down to either you make biofuel and tweak it to function exactly like diesel (not change necessary for the equipment) OR you make the biofuel as is and tweak the machine so that it will work with the fuel you've produced.


Talking with a Social Leader:
Since I'm a teacher, and I have these ideas about biofuels and I'd like to write this grant, how the heck will I fit it in? When will I have time to do anything? Probably just during the summer. So my Social Leader friend said she could talk with me further about how to be a part of something like this without having a lot of time to work with. (yay hope!)



Talking with an Eco-Maven Physics Teacher:
Tom Tailer, the physics teacher at Mount Abraham Union High School suggested that biofuels are not necessarily the solution for transportation. In general the world will get more local and less global once fuel becomes more expensive, and the focus ought to be more on human needs rather than getting around. Which leaves biofuels as a good option for heating fuel.

Fair enough. Maybe we won't use it for getting around, but maybe we could use it instead of heating oil? I don't know how difficult such a retro-fit might be (moving from heating fuel to biodiesel), but I imagine it's just a matter of changing the burner.

Bottom line, I think it's still worth the investment, because it will be useful one way or another.

Environmental Healing Tipping Points

Hal Colston recommended I read Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell, so I borrowed it from the library and read it over our break. It changed the way I think about behavior.

So I've been applying what I learned to affecting the kind of large scale change that needs to happen in order for our planet to heal. If everyone in America unplugged their appliances when they weren't using them, we'd save energy, but it would do about as much good as a band-aid on a broken arm. What is enough? Well, here's my list of things that need overhauling (not in order of importance):

1) heating fuel
2) electricity
3) transportation fuel
4) China's gotta find some better options or have higher standards (and the theory is that if America leads, China will follow)
5) Rainforests need to not be chopped down, and allowed to regrow in desolated areas.
6) human population stabilization
7) greener everyday products: matching product useful lifetime with material lifetime

Ok. That's a daunting list. Un-realistic by most people's standards (but that's why we believe in God, right? To do the impossible?)



After thinking about this list in the context of Tipping Points, something occurred to me: most everyday people don't have any choice in these things. When regular people buy a house, the type of fuel is determined by the architect, not them. When regular people buy a car they pick out a manufacturer, model, and color (I suppose some people get more involved), but since biofuels are not a mainstream option, that decision has been made for them.

So how do you affect change for home heating and transportation fuels? It's not by educating regular people, though it probably wouldn't hurt, but they're not the people to talk to. The people to start the biofuel epidemic are architects and auto manufacturers.

Yesterday my friend from NY and her husband, who's an architect, came to visit, and he assured me that green building courses are now the norm for architects, which is certainly encouraging, so hopefully that field is already shifting.

But biofuel for cars? The Catch 22 of no-supply-no-demand for biofuels is the stumbling block that we need to overcome. But how? Here's a hypothesis.

Instead of going to car-manufacturers, go to the other half of the system: fuel producers, aka farmers. The idea is

• help farmers switch their equipment to biodiesel and
  
• help them setup biodiesel production on their farm from crops they can grow.

Nobody in Montpelier will buy a flex-fuel car until they know they can fill up around here. So start micro supply-and-demand systems going on farms, and then the structures are there to expand the supply as demand increases. But you need the farmers need that mechanism to get the whole thing jump started.

If we could advertise in Montpelier that some farmer had "locally grown fuel", people would go nuts!

A lot of farm equipment is already built to run on biodiesel, so I need to do some further research on how many farmers around here are biodiesel-equipped, and secondly how many of them are producing their own biodiesel.

We might also need to have some kind of incentives program to get people around here to buy flex-fuel or biodiesel-capable cars, but that's not too hard to imagine.

Montpelier just won a $100,000 grant to make the city more sustainable, so I think I'll be writing a grant to support farmer seminars, biodiesel production equipment, biodiesel farm equipment perhaps even? We'll see.

Check out Chrysler's Flex Fuel vehicles: Chysler

Feeling Hopeful ~ Happy New Year Everyone!