Biomass: A sustainable, but

As farmers have abandoned fields over the last 150 years, Vermont’s landscape has dramatically shifted from a largely agricultural terrain to forests that now blanket three-quarters of the state. Forest is still converted to fuel here: Many residents burn cordwood in rural areas as a primary source of heat.

Recently, though Vermonters have begun to think about forest fuel in a new way – as “biomass,” or renewable energy from wastewood products that can be used to heat homes, college campuses and even enormous 19th and early 20th century structures that house the seat of state government in Montpelier.

Several municipalities are considering district biomass heating systems, and big electricity generation build-outs like the Beaver Wood Energy plant in Fair Haven remain on the table.

Forests are the latest fuel in a long-running debate: How much of the region’s woodlands can–or should–be harvested?

Some experts worry that Vermont is trending toward a denuded future. “There is a conventional wisdom in the region that wood is abundant and cheap,” said Bob De Geus, a forester for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. “There is a lot of indication that it is neither.”

Adam Sherman, program director for the Biomass Energy Resource Center, says biomass generation requires trade-offs, but he argues that it’s worth it.

“It was short-term thinking that got us into the current climate debt,” he said. Regionally harvested biomass fuel curbs use of oil, coal, and natural gas while promoting local autonomy, for better and worse, according to Sherman. “Having it in our backyard, being our own watchdogs, seeing the impacts of what our demand is, it’s the only way we can manage that resource sustainably.”

Montpelier’s future biomass district heating project relies on a Combined Heat and Power plant, an upgrade and expansion of existing boilers located on State Street. Woodchips are trucked in by Limlaw Pulpwood and Chipping, a West Topsham logger who specializes in the screened chips suited to biomass heating, often called “bolewood.”

Biomass power plants like Burlington’s McNeil Generating Station and Ryegate, which average around 25 percent efficiency after thermal loss from steam generation, can burn low-grade “whole-tree chips,” which BERC describes as “tops and stems from harvested logs, processed in the forest into various-sized chips that also contain bark, and sometimes forest debris.

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