Vermont Biomass Article

[peakbagger]

An interesting article about Vermont's Energy plan, they are advocating wood pellet heating over cordwood heating.

Vermont Doubles Down on Wood Burning, with Consequences for Climate and Health - Inside Climate News

This story was co-published with The Weather Channel as part of Collateral, a series on climate, data and science. BRISTOL, Vermont — Wood smoke rising from a stovepipe is as about as common a sight in Vermont as roadside signs advertising maple syrup for sale. Vermonters have been heating...

insideclimatenews.org

For those who like to skip over articles make sure you read it to the end for this classic quote

During Hanson's first week on the job, she found herself touting the virtues of advanced wood heating systems to an older Vermonter. "Well, Emma," he replied, "I have 100 acres of trees on my property, but I don't have a single pellet tree."

Some background on Vermont's biomass history. Vermont made it very attractive for schools and government buildings to switch to wood. Plenty of entrepreneurs hopped into the market selling systems and many schools were converted to wood chip heating. The problem was that most schools and government buildings are down in deep river valleys surrounded by moutains where most of the towns are. The valleys get temperature inversions on occasion and in general the air tends to get stagnant down low. Most of the boilesr installed do not have thermal storage so they run all the time regardless of heating demand. That leads to part load operation and associated high emissions. Most of the boilers installed did not have emissions control equipment installed, although at some point late in the game the state started requiring some particulate control. The net result is the local air emissions around these schools actually got worse. Burlington has the McNeil wood fired power plant right near downtown. it does have 25 year old emissions technology but since its baseload power it runs hot and relatively clean.

 

[begreen]

LOL. I like the comment.

The Seattle Steam plant was converted to wood chip burning several years ago and seems to have made the transition successfully. A lot of the cost was in emissions control. It too runs hot and is not providing power (that I know of) so it can be run optimally.

That's a very good point about temperature inversion issues. We have similar issues in winters, on both a local and also a larger scale between to high mountain ranges with large urban centers feeding into the stagnant air. If wood is going to be the fuel it needs to be burned as cleanly as possible. I'm not sure if they still run the steam plant during unhealthy air stagnation days or not.

 

[peakbagger]

I think I know the company that did the conversion in Seattle but never got into the details with them. There are only a few companies who really know how to burn chips well and several others who aren't as good at it that keep the good ones trying to straighten out the not so good installs. I used to do "tune ups" on the big wood chip boilers. They are a big Rubiks cube, change one thing one way and three other things move in opposite directions.

The McNeil station in Burlington did a large scale trial on a wood chip gasifier to make "clean gas' eventually to run an engine on it. They ran out of funding but there is firm out of BC that has built some plants. They are expensive and only make sense if someone is subsidizing the extra cost like the government.

Most of the wood chip heating systems in the VT schools were designed for high quality sawmill grade wood chips or ground up trunks of trees, most of the supply is whole tree, full of leaves and twigs and the chip quality is far lower. The schools janitors spent a lot of time dealing with plugs in the fuel feed system when running whole tree. A large wood buyer in the region went into the supply business where they specialize in supplying the schools the "Cadillac" chips at a premium. The VT capital complex in Montpelier is heating with wood chips and they also produce some electric power. A small portion of the downtown is also heated by the system.

The last wood chip power only plant proposed in VT got shot down by the neighbors, VT is definitely a Nimby state when it comes to power plants, they much prefer buying if from Hydro Quebec.

 

[begreen]

TMonter said he worked on it.

 

[Brian26]

I think New England needs to focus more on heat pumps and renewable power. More wind power should be installed. Think of every cold front like todays with gusty NW winds and how much power could be generated. Almost all severe cold high pressure systems bring strong NW winds at the same time heating demand skyrockets. Perfect timing if your running a heat pump.

New England also needs to bring in more Hydro Quebec power. Take a look on google maps how big those facilities are way up North. There is an insane amount of untapped hydroelectric soruces up there. Friend in Montreal says electric resistance heat is common and dirt cheap. I remember hearing electricity is like .05-.07 a kwh there.

 

[semipro]

he replied, "I have 100 acres of trees on my property, but I don't have a single pellet tree."

I get this. I sure wish there was a way to take the brush, cord wood, and chips that I have in abundance on my property and burn them efficiently without having to ship them elsewhere for conversion to pellets and then back to my property for burning. In my dreams I imagine a device that ingests wood in any form for conversion to heat.