In late 2001, Fuels for Schools was started in the Northern and Intermountain regions of the USDA’s Forest Service. The previous summer, fires ravaged much of the Bitterroot Valley of Montana and Idaho, says Dave Atkins, the Fuels for Schools program manager for the Forest Service’s Northern and Intermountain regions. Following the fires, Congress passed the National Fire Plan, which was aimed at reducing wood that could possibly fuel fires and fire suppression. It included funds to help with small-diameter wood utilization, which is not as valuable to the wood industry, is fuel for fire and costly to dispose of. A community group saw Vermont as an example, and applied for funds from the Forest Service for the first school demonstration project in Darby, Mont. From there, a regional program was developed.
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There are now systems operating in Montana, Nevada, Idaho and North Dakota. Wyoming and Utah are working to identify their demonstration communities. Within these states, 16 projects have been installed or are in the design phase.
Atkins says the localized systems fill an important niche. “The advantage is you’re closer to your source of material, so you keep transportation costs down,” he says. “If you are consuming heat and energy on site in your local area, you don’t need a lot of transmission lines for moving the energy product to the end user.”
There are also challenges to localized systems, as discovered by Nick Salmon, who has served as senior project manager of several projects through the architectural and engineering firm CTA Architects Engineers. “One of the challenges of these projects is they all have their unique challenges,” he says. “As much as we’ve tried to standardize them, we always encounter something different, whether that’s bidding or integration of the boiler or working with vendors.”
A recent challenge has been dealing with fuel quality. “As the program has become more focused on diverting fuel that would otherwise be burned in a slash pile and getting that material in a school campus, we’re encountering more debris,” Salmon says. “It takes more time to screen that debris out.”
Wood consistency is a new problem for boiler vendors. “I would say, in the big picture, the biggest challenge is that the majority of vendors work directly for the wood products industry,” Salmon says. “They’re designing for a mill or wood processing plant of some kind. So they have certain ways used to solve a certain problem and a certain way of handling it, because that’s their livelihood. The end users are typically not used to working with solid fuel and the vendors aren’t used to designing systems for those types of facilities.”
In Doshi’s experience in Vermont, many of the vendors are comfortable working with solid fuel, but not necessarily accustomed to working with wood. He says there are about 10 active boiler vendors, and two or three that dominate the market with up to 70 percent of the market share. “Others are new and trying to increase their market share,” he says. Most of the vendors also manufacture boilers for solid fuel, such as coal.
Designing wood boilers for schools requires unique considerations compared with other boiler systems. Salmon explains that most boilers are designed to meet peak load, but that peak load happens very infrequently—less than 15 minutes every five years. With conventional gas boilers, this usually isn’t a problem, as they operate efficiently at a small fraction of their capacity. “Wood boilers function well at high fire, and less so at lower fire,” Salmon says. “In general, we design wood boilers for less than peak load, to work productively for much of the year.”
Salmon says they are always learning something new, such as the importance of involving the state’s environmental permitting agency, even though most projects are so small they don’t require an air quality permit. “They do an analysis of future emissions and quantify whether the system will require a permit, and they also determine the optimal stack height,” he says.
Both Salmon and Atkins emphasized the savings—both time and money—in implementing a biomass system in new construction. “The cost of the system is a good one-third less than a retrofit,” Atkins says. “There is no cost to integrate the plumbing and connections, and it’s part of a bigger project, so the building permits and design fees are spread over a bigger project.” This savings was demonstrated this spring at a new high school in Kalispell, Mont.
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