HFCS Hears More About Wood Pellet Heating

by Alex Brooks
The Hoosick Falls School Board met in a workshop session on September 26 with David Dungate of Bioenergy Project Partners, a company proposing to put in a heating system at the Central School fueled by wood pellets.
[private]Dungate’s company is in the business of providing “turnkey biomass boiler installations with guaranteed performance.” They have secured funding from NYSERDA for three demonstration projects, and are offering to do one of them at the Hoosick Falls School building. The NYSERDA funding means it will pay for the equipment, which will cost $200,000 to $250,000. The host facility (the school) pays for the installation, which will probably cost around $250,000. But Dungate’s company will finance that cost, and the payments are eligible for school building aid.
Dungate said NYSERDA is interested in encouraging the development of wood pellet technology because New York State imports 1.6 billion gallons of heating oil each year at a cost of about 6 billion dollars, and 75% of that money leaves the State. New York State already has a large forestry industry, which is cutting a lot of trees for forest management purposes which it does not use. This resource is just going to waste when it is not being gathered and processed as heating fuel.
Dungate said the pellet heating equipment will be sized to provide 90% of the heating load, and the existing oil boilers will be kept in place as supplementary heaters and backups. He said if you size the pellet heating system to handle the very coldest days, it has to be much larger, which is more expensive and less efficient. It works better with an oil boiler backup.
Pellet heat costs about half as much as oil heat. The project overall is shooting for an annual cost of 80% of what it has been, with no up front investment by the School District. The savings will be larger after the installation is paid for, expected to be ten years. The savings would also be greater if the price of oil went up faster than the price of wood pellet fuel. Dungate said that historically the price of wood pellet fuel has been very stable.
The project will involve installing a silo to store the pellets when they are delivered. Dungate said this would be about 12 feet in diameter and about 25 feet high.
The Board continued to be very interested in the project, but they asked Dungate to give them a detailed proposal which specifies exactly what his company will do and what the costs and performance guarantees will be. He agreed to put together such a proposal for the Board’s consideration. The plan appears to be for the Board to make a decision on whether or not to go forward with this project at their regular meeting on October 17.
New Board Member
At this same workshop meeting, the Board appointed by a unanimous vote Bridget Foster to the seat from which Don Skott resigned at the last regular Board meeting. This appointment is until June 30 of 2014. The seat will be up for election next May. Foster is a former member of the Hoosick Falls School Board so she is already trained and experienced in the duties of a School Board member.
School Board President Greg Laurin said he is very pleased that Foster has agreed to serve on the Board.[/private]