WhyCan’tThisHappenHere? by Michael Harris Burlington, Vermont. Population: 38,000. Burlington, Vermont, is home to IBM computer-parts factories, General Electric equipment plants and the University of Vermont. Burlington, Vermont, has also earned itself the dubious reputation of becoming the “ restaurant-oven capital” of the world; Burlington manufactures more restaurant ovens than any other place on the face of the earth. But what may now really put this city on the map is Burlington’s municipally owned electric utility, the Burlington Electric Department. While power costs are rising everywhere else, Burlington Electric customers have the lowest utility rates of any comparable city in the Northeast. Why? By 1982, Burlington Electric will meet one-third of the city’s demand for electricity. . .by burning wood, that’s why. “We’re at the end of long transportation corridors up here,” Burlington Electric General Manager, Robert Young, said. “Up to now, we’ve relied on out-of-state coal, Arab oil and ‘interruptable’ natural gas piped in from Canada. Fuel prices have risen 300 percent to 600 percent in some cases during the last five years. We had to do something.” A high-powered, balding businessman in a blue suitcoat and striped tie, the fast-talking, eversmiling Young is the perfect candidate for introducing “ alternative technology” to mainstream American enterprise. Doubtless, Young could have been a bulldog upperlevel corporate manager with one of the Fortune 500 firms, had not a yearning for life in his native Vermont detoured him into the general managership of this municipal utility. Young accurately describes himself as a big fish in a small pond, and he’s made the most of it. From humble beginnings as a collective effort to light the city’s streets in 1905, the Burlington Electric Department has become one of the best-equipped electricity suppliers in the nation, while consistently boasting the lowest electric rates in all of New England’s region of high-priced energy. And now, Burlington Electric is becoming the yardstick with which to measure all other utilities. Burlington Electric’s love affair with wood began in 1977. Thomas Carr, the company’s generating plant superintendent transplanted to Burlington from the Iowa cornfields, directed the rehabilitation of an aged coal-fired generator into an electricity producer fueled by wood chips from the nearby Vermont forests. Carr is a wiry, energetic guy who scampers up the lofty catwalks of the plant’s giant boilers like a speedy chimpanzee. He retooled the utility’s Number One generator to wood-burning capacity without federal grants or other technical assistance. He recycled steampipes from other boilers, and used an old firstaid kit for the control box. Carr spent only half of the $50,000 that the Burlington Electric Department allocated for the job. “ It was easy,” Carr says in his characteristic easygoing style. “ There’s nothing to it, really, no new technology required. Anyone can do it.” Yet, an executive from the nearby IBM corporate office who visited the generating plant marveled at the speed and price tag of the conversion project. “ Only $25,000,” he mused. “ Why, it would have cost us $25,000 just to determine which department would handle the job.” Carr’s retrofitted wood burner is a marvel of simplicity. The same conveyor that shuttles coal to the other three Burlington Electric boilers dumps matchbook-sized wood chips into Number One’s overhead bin, and large screw augers push the chips down four steel chutes into the firebox below. The chip disappear in a dancing wall of yellow flames, and, in the process, create enough steam to generate 10 megawatts of electricity. Initial adjustments and a bit of tinkering were required, but now, wood-fired Number One perks along day after day, generating electricity alongside its coal-burning counterparts in Burlington’s Moran Generating Station. “The way it works is not much different from burning coal,” said Pete Brosseau, whose job is monitoring the performance of the wood burner and its coal-fired companions. “We ironed out the problems long ago.” It took only a few weeks after the first wood chips slipped down Number One’s chutes for Burlington Electric engineers to discover that they were consistently generating commercial quantities of power from the makeshift wood burner at a rate of only two cents per kilowatt-hour of generated electricity—much cheaper than nuclear power and fully onethird less than the cost of burning coal, the cheapest of all fossil fuels. “The experiment exceeded our expectations, it was a complete success,” Young announced. Soon after, planning began in earnest for the development of a larger-capacity, wood-fired generator. Earlier this year, Burlington voters overwhelmingly approved the sale of revenue bonds by their power company to help fund construction of a new, 80million-dollar, 50-megawatt, woodfueled generating plant to be completed by 1982. For Burlington, located in a state where 76 percent of the land is covered by forest, the choice of wood as an alternative fuel was an obvious one. Before the closing days of the 19th century, farming and a “cut out and get out” timber harvest had stripped most of New England of its forests, leaving stunted, twisted, poor-quality trees in their wake. As a result, today’s “ second-growth forest” is filled with timber unsuitable for lumber and most other commercial uses'. Thinning and weeding of the forest stand is desperately needed to return the region’s woodland garden to productive capabilities. The Vermont Forestry Department has estimated that one-third of the trees in the state’s forests should be removed. So when Burlington Electric announced its plans to chip and bum 250,000 cords of unmarketable cull wood annually to fuel its new generating plant, state foresters enthusiastically endorsed the project. “ Weeding the dead, diseased and dying trees from the state’s forests will increase the growth of highquality timber, ” Bradford Walker, a state forestry director, observes. “Studies have indicated that sufficient quantities of waste wood are available to supply a plant of this size on a sustained yield basis. ” That is, forever. Unlike the case with nuclear power plants, where many jobs are created only for construction of the new plant, wood-fired generators will mean many new and lasting jobs for Vermonters: loggers to cut the fuel from the state’s forests, machine operators to reduce whole trees to wood chips, and truckers to haul the wood chips from the forest to a Burlington storage yard. “We’ll be spending $30,000 a day here for fuel,” Young said, “and all that money will be staying right here in Vermont, strengthening our local economy.” With the Burlington Electric Department blazing the trail, it seems likely that other localized wood-fired generators will be springing up in New England and in other forested regions of the United State. A study recently completed by the Michigan Public Service Commission, for example, concluded that the state can generate “ all of its electricity from dead and decaying wood fiber, logging residues, mill wastes, forest thinnings and surplus annual growth, with ample megawatts to spare.” The commission calculated that Michigan’s annual surplus forest growth holds the potential for generating 1,300 megawatts of electricity each year. Burning wood isn’t an appropriate energy alternative for all parts of the country, of course, but Burlington’s experience reveals the essential ingredients of reasonable regional energy planning: an open-minded, creative attitude toward the wise use of the resources at hand, freed from the demands of centralization and the narrow confines of corporate profit pictures. Decentralization of electrical generating capacity in several small plants—rather than construction of a huge, centralized reactor—makes sense economically and ecologically. “ Transmitting electricity over long distances results in a tremendous loss of power,” Young explained. “Just the fact that we have local generation here is worth a million dollars a year to our customers, whatever the fuel.” A federal task force recently estimated that enough wood could be harvested in New England by the year 2000—without environmental harm—to produce the energy equivalent of 2.3 billion barrels of oil, or the output of ten typical nuclear power plants. Recently, word reached Burlington officials that the U.S. Department of Energy had belatedly “ discovered” the project. “We’re getting a lot of people thinking inside government and other utilities,” Young said. “Lately, we’ve been inundated by phone calls every day.” As a finishing touch to their grand alternative energy design, Burlington Electric engineers have developed plans to grow vegetables and flowers. Waste heat from the new wood-fired plant will be used to warm a series of greenhouses, providing an alternative to the pink California tomatoes and pale lettuce shipped there fromacross the continent to feed Vermonters during the long, cold New England winters. The first demonstration greenhouse is scheduled for completion this year, and it is expected to produce “lots of vegatables and flowers” during a 12-month growing season. “The home-grown lettuce and tomatoes will sell well in local markets,” said Young, explaining his utility’s interest in developing an agricultural companion to its woodfired generating facility. “Besides, we don’t want to waste the BTUs.” For those of us far from the smokestacks of Burlington and the green hills of Vermont, the Burlington Electric success story offers an important lesson. Burlington Electric engineers have merely demonstrated what most of us have suspected all along: there is no magic, no exotic technology is needed to wean the nation from our overwhelming addiction to fossil and nuclear fuels. Fresh insights, unfettered ingenuity and new priorities are what’s required. But maybe that’s magic, after all. Michael Harris has written for The Nation and the Real Paper. His last article for Mother Jones was on “ Eating Oil.” Support KBOO Spring Pledge, April 21-28 11
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