Would an organization such as Clearwater Woodlot Association be interested in providing wood heat to local public buildings and neighborhoods?
What about attracting investors to build a wood-powered co-generation plant that creates electricity plus heat for greenhouses and distributed heating?
Those were a couple of alternatives that Clearwater councilor Bert Walker brought back from a recent 10-day workshop on district heating in Austria he attended.
“I think it was worthwhile,” he said.
Farmer cooperatives seemed to own the majority of district heating systems they looked at, said Walker.
A typical system might heat one or more larger public buildings or apartment blocks, plus nearby individual residences.
Selling wood for heating provides the five to 20 farmers involved in each cooperative with income they might not otherwise have.
Others heating systems were owned by both farmers and residents, while still others were owned by municipal governments.
The heating systems ranged in size from containerized units that would heat just one or two buildings to larger systems good for entire neighborhoods.
Most were in villages, though a few were in cities. A city might have 30 or 40 district-heating units, he said.
Nearly all forestland in Austria is privately owned. The farmers typically log a portion of their land each year. Bigger logs go for making furniture and dimension lumber. Middle-sized ones are used to make strand-board.
Tops and smaller logs are piled for 10 – 20 months and allowed to dry naturally for fuel.
Most of the wood comes from deciduous trees and so needs to have its moisture content reduced, Walker explained.
A contractor with a portable chipper visits the farms, chips the wood, and hauls it to the district heating plant.
The maximum economical distance is about 100 km.
At the plant the chips are put into a big covered area to protect them from rain and snow.
A hopper at the plant needs to be fed daily or even weekly, but after that the process is pretty well automatic.
Computers monitor everything and the farmer-owner can see what is happening from home.
“It’s really quite sophisticated for a rural thing,” said the local councilor.
Possible difficulties in applying the technology locally would include Clearwater’s being so spread out. Weyerhaeuser subdivision might be one location where it would work, he felt.
Another difficulty is that few local buildings are set up for hot water heating. Retrofitting could make the proposition uneconomical.
On larger scale than the district heating units were the combined heat power (CHP) co-generation plants, which use waste wood to create both electricity and heat.
Clearwater might be a good location for such a plant, Walker felt, because it has a limited electrical supply, an abundance of nearby wood, and available land for a plant. He suggested Camp Two as a possible site.
“Is there a private investor willing to look at it?” he asked.
Challenges would include finding investors, getting a connection to sell power to BC Hydro, and figuring out what to do with the waste heat, especially in the summer time.
Greenhouses might be one alternative, he suggested.
District heating might be another. Walker noted that, because the power generation more or less pays for the facility, heat loss from piping hot water for longer distances is not so economically critical with a CHP operation.
Austria was stimulated to encourage using wood as fuel during the 1980s when Russia cut off natural gas supplies.
With the technology developed there the payback time has typically been seven to 15 years, Walker reported.
B.C. Green Initiative provides funding that could be used to assess whether such an approach could be used here.
“I really hope we can make something out of it. The best thing we could do would be to diversify our economy,” said Walker.
