More schools look to tree debris to heat rooms – Forest Service program uses thinned slash in boilers

The tiny Council, Idaho School District used to pour thousands of dollars into outmoded oil and electric heaters. Nearby, the Forest Service burned brush piles on the mountainsides to keep the brush from fueling forest fires in dry summers.

Looking for some savings, Council Superintendent Murray Dalgleish developed Idaho’s first public school biomass heating system — a project that’s expected to save Council $1 million on fuel over the next 15 years.

“We’re surrounded by the Payette National Forest,” said Dalgleish. “We’re the Saudi Arabia of wood.”
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Biomass is plant or animal waste that can be burned as fuel. Modern biomass furnaces burn it at very high temperatures, reducing pollution to levels acceptable under federal air quality standards.

“We’re at a fraction of what our oil boiler used to stink up the air with,” Dalgleish said.

In some other heavily forested states — such as Vermont, which heats many public buildings with wood — biomass has long been used for fuel. But it hasn’t taken off until recently in the West, where power has been relatively cheap.

“It wasn’t part of the culture out here,” said David Naccarato of Siemens Building Technologies, which installed the Council boiler. “People burned wood in their stoves, but they did not tend on an institutional level to look at wood as a fuel.”

‘Fuel for Schools’ http://www.fuelsforschools.org/ program

Dalgleish started looking for oil alternatives in 2002. Some months it cost Council $10,000 — about a third of its buildings and maintenance budget — to provide heat for its 300 students and their teachers.

So he turned to Fuel for Schools, a U.S. Forest Service program that promotes the use of biomass at schools in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, and Utah. The program gave Council a $386,000 grant toward a new $2.8 million heating system. The rest of the money came from a $1.2 million bond and from projected savings on fuel.

By Anne Wallace Allen

Full Story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9924889/