School boiler fuels Wisconsin Governor's interest

"if we can get our public buildings on bio-mass, if we can ultimately get our corrections [facilities on bio-mass], we can move toward using those major public institutions in a way to really create a market."

Email this story to a friend

Description

School boiler fuels governor's interest
By: Eric Quade

The wood boiler system that brings heating and cooling to Barron High School recently caught Governor Jim Doyle's attention, and the top state official swung by the school Aug. 26 to learn more about it.

Doyle, along with Barron Area School District Administrator Monti Hallberg and DNR Secretary Matt Frank, headed a roundtable discussion last week on bio-fuels and how to promote their use. Also attending the session were members of various school districts across the state and local wood suppliers.

The governor mentioned throughout the program that the state has invested in a $250 million bio-mass fueled heating and cooling plant on the UW-Madison campus. Keeping a facility of that size 'fed' with enough wood products to burn could be a supply challenge, so Doyle solicited the crowd for input.

"We need suppliers, and we are really going to try to use this facility as a way to help develop a strong bio-mass economy in this state with suppliers able to produce aggregate bio-mass in capacities that can handle that size facility," he said. "If we can get our schools on bio-mass, if we can get our public buildings on bio-mass, if we can ultimately get our corrections [facilities on bio-mass], ... we can move toward using those major public institutions in a way to really create a market."

Since the Barron Area School District has had success with its wood boiler system even without such a robust market in place, the governor looked to local officials for insights on how the rest of Wisconsin could follow its lead.
"You are going exactly in the direction that I want this state to go," Doyle said.

District Administrator Hallberg said that it was "forefathers" who served on the school board in the 1970s and 1980s who put Barron on its present course with bio-fuels.

"They realized that the fossil fuel energy that we have isn't something that renews in 10 years or 20 years; it's thousands of years before that renews. It's a limited supply," he said. "They moved to a wood-burning boiler system, and it began in 1981-82."

The school district has had other partners climb aboard their bio-mass project over the years. Steam not only fuels the high school, but it also is piped over to the Maplecroft assisted living center and to the Barron Area Community Center. The project is poised to expand with the addition of a second wood boiler at Riverview Middle School.

Local suppliers have been an important part of the school district's wood burning operation, Hallberg said. Bell Timber and Pole of Barron provides the bulk of the school's bio-fuel. The district administrator credited three people in attendance-Chuck Nelson and Bob and Karyn Schauf-for processing that waste product into wood chips and shavings, which the boiler can efficiently burn.

Hallberg said that switching to wood-based fuel was a money saver for the school district. Almost a decade ago, the district had shut down its wood boiler for a year, and other fuel sources filled the void. After the wood boiler came back online, school officials at Barron determined that burning wood cut energy costs in half.

Another school district represented at last Wednesday's meeting was Antigo. There, officials were struggling with the upfront costs of implementing a bio-mass fuel system. Antigo schools don't have a bio-mass supplier in place, either, so they would be competing with others in the market to buy wood chips.

Hallberg introduced two former members of Barron's school board who made the district's wood boiler system a reality. Ed Johnson shared a lot of technical information about the boiler and noted that it burns an equal load running air conditioning on a hot day as it does heating on days when it's -25 degrees outside. Even though fuel cost was still an issue when the wood boiler first came to Barron, Alfred Koser said that it took awhile for the community to warm up to the changes it brought.

"There was smoke, and there was ash, and there was people that are upset and there were kids that were coming home dirty," Koser said. "But it all worked out. It really wasn't as bad as they thought, and you can see out here now that it was a good deal."

State officials, too, stressed that moving to renewable energy sources like bio-mass was in Wisconsin's best interest.

DNR Secretary Frank said that Wisconsin has been a leader in paper wood products manufacturing for more than a century. The state is still No. 1 in this area despite a lot of international competition. Due to the importance of this industry to the local economy, the state needs to ensure that there is sufficient supply to fuel both paper production and renewable energy demands.

Doyle said that supply issues must be dealt with, but the overall goals are to lower dependence on oil from foreign countries and to reap the benefits.
"We don't have coal. We don't have gas. We don't have oil," the governor said. "So every dollar we spend in buying energy that comes from those sources, is a dollar that goes outside the state of Wisconsin ... And so, to me, it's just a sort of simple logic that we have to figure out a way that we produce and build an economy around production of energy here in the state of Wisconsin ... If the rest of the companies in the oil embargo days of the '70s had had the vision of these two gentlemen (Johnson and Koser) here in Barron, and we had really made an investment as a country in renewable and domestically produced energy here in America, we'd be having a very different discussion right now. We might not well be in a war in the Middle East. We would have millions of jobs here in the United States that surround the production of energy here at home. So, we have a big challenge right now in Wisconsin-a critical challenge-about how we keep the momentum going.

"There is no turning back on this. We can't go and say, 'Well, you know, we got problems when [gas prices] got to $4, but let's rely on those Middle East companies to keep pumping petroleum in here, and let's hope for the best.' You just can't do that."

Additional Information

Web Site: http://www.zwire.com

Category: Forestry>Fuels for Schools

Region: Wisconsin

Ad Running: 9/5/2009-10/5/2011

Ad Posted: 9/5/2009 10:04:43 AM

Ad Viewed: 704 times

Create your
Buy & Sell Ad