Bioenergy News
Award Winning Pellet Boiler/Solar Thermal Installation
May, 2010
The Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks (The W!ld Center) recently installed a 1.7 MMBtu high-efficiency ACT Bioenergy™ wood pellet boiler at its 54,000 sq. ft. facility in Tupper Lake, NY. The NYSERDA supported project integrates the pellet boiler with a solar thermal heating system and has already won an innovation award from the New York Solar Industries Association and is expected to save the Center more than $80,000/yr in heating costs. See the attached Project Report W!ld Center Project Report. and listen to the Live Inverview that was completed by North Country Public Radio (NCPR).
Photos Of Containerized Boiler Installation
January, 2010
ACT Bioenergy™ recently installed a 500,000 Btu/h containerized wood chip boiler system at the The Cayuga Nature Center in Ithaca, NY. The boiler will heat the 10,000 square foot facility and is expected to reduce heating costs by 80% or more. Please see the attached: Photos and project description.
ACT Bioenergy™ Boiler Manufacturing Video
December, 2009
The W!ld Center (Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks) recently filmed a video of their ACT Bioenergy™ wood pellet boiler being manufactured. This video shows the boiler's pressure vessel being welded and explains the operating principles of gasification-type wood combustion in the boiler. The 1.7 MMBtu/h boiler will provide heat for the 54,000 sq. ft. museum in Tupper Lake, NY and is scheduled to be delivered in February 2010. Click here see the video.
Biomass Heating and Community Sustainable Development
October, 2009
The Hubbard Brook Research Foundation (HBRF) recently released White Paper titled: "Our Carbon, Our Communities: A community-based vision for using wood biomass in an era of climate change."
The Hubbard Brook Roundtable met in September 2009 with the goal to create a blueprint for a thriving wood fuel marketplace at the local scale in the Northern Forest Region. Local wood use for biomass heating would promote local economic development, increase the efficient use of low-quality wood, while also promoting sustainable forestry practices. This blue print is intended to serve as a template for the Northern Forest region and beyond.
The mission of HBRF is to promote the understanding and stewardship of ecosystems through scientific research, long-term monitoring, and education; and to develop new initiatives linking ecosystem science and public policy. HBRF works in partnership with the USDA Forest Service, the National Science Foundation, and many colleges, universities, and other institutions.
ACT Bioenergy Boiler for The W!ld Center
September, 2009
The W!ld Center - Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks, recently announced that it will install a 1.7 MMBtu ACT Bioenergy™ wood pellet boiler to heat its facility in Tupper Lake, NY. The W!ld Center is a (LEED™) silver certified building with more than 100,000 visitors a year will showcase the boiler and develop education materials that explain the project and the role of renewable biomass energy in reducing greenhouse emissions.
The wood pellet boiler will operate in parallel with solar hot water panels and will reduce both heating costs and greenhouse gas emissions by replacing propane heat which is currently used at the Center. More information on the project is available on the W!ld Center News Release and Biomass Boiler FAQs sections of the Wild Center Website and through a factsheet published by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) W!ld Center Factsheet NYSERDA is a financial contributor to the project. The boiler is scheduled to be installed in December 2009.
NYSERDA Research to Promote High-Efficiency Biomass Heating Technologies
September 30, 2008
Albany, NY--The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) today announced a state-funded program to support the evaluation and improvement of biomass-fired heating equipment. The program will clear a path for New York-grown fuels, create new manufacturing jobs, and improve environmental performance of biomass technologies.
Nine projects valued at more than $2.5 million will compare energy and emissions performance for wood-burning equipment, including residential and commercial wood boilers, pellet stoves, and wood stoves and emerging grass-pellet technologies. The NYSERDA-funded studies will be conducted in cooperation with New York State manufacturing companies, research organizations, universities, and government agencies. NYSERDA is investing $1.6 million in this effort, with an additional $0.9 million in co-funding from research partners. A summary of the nine projects is attached.
Robert Callender, NYSERDA Vice President for Programs said, "With the increasing use of alternative fuels, we must strive for high energy-efficiency and environmental performance. There are opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of wood-fired heating equipment and substantially reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, particulate matter, and other pollutants."
Conventional outdoor wood boilers waste more than half the energy of wood fuel and emit significant amounts of pollutants. Advanced wood-boiler units developed in Europe can achieve efficiencies greater than 80 percent and produce less than 5 percent of the particulate emissions of inefficient wood boilers typically used in the U.S. The advanced systems are commonly called staged-combustion or gasification boilers, and NYSERDA is working with two companies to manufacture these products here in New York State: Alternative Fuel Boilers of Dunkirk, New York; and Advanced Climate Technologies (ACT), of Schenectady, New York, focusing on the residential and commercial markets, respectively.
Alternative Fuel Boilers LLC, a subsidiary of Dunkirk Metal Products Inc., manufactures and sells the Econoburn™ wood boiler. William L. Raines, President and CEO of Alternative Fuel Boilers said, "The Econoburn™ wood boiler utilizes gasification technology that captures and re-combusts chimney flue gases to dramatically increase energy efficiency and significantly reduce air emissions. We look forward to working with NYSERDA to document the high-quality energy and environmental performance of our completely 'Made in the U.S.A.' boilers."
ACT's project at the Cayuga Nature Center in Ithaca, NY, will demonstrate a fully automated, 90 percent efficient wood-gasification boiler technology that is proven in Europe and adapted for the U.S. market. These systems have emissions that are significantly better than conventional wood boilers and comparable to typical oil or gas boilers. Mid-sized buildings (10-100,000 sq.ft.) represent 90 percent of the boiler market in the U.S., and are prime targets for these wood systems which can achieve rapid paybacks when replacing fossil-fuel boilers.
NYSERDA is funding three studies that between them will compare conventional commercial biomass systems and high-efficiency European-style gasification biomass boilers to oil-fired systems. The studies will evaluate energy efficiency and emissions for woody biomass in several forms: wood chips with bark, wood chips without bark, and wood pellets. These studies will be conducted by Clarkson University, the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM), and Advanced Climate Technologies. The demonstration at Clarkson University will be the first project for an innovative Energy Park being developed to study alternative energy sources on the campus.
There also is increased interest in pelletized grass for heating. NYSERDA is working with Cornell University and the State University at Canton in manufacturing grass pellets, identifying the operational requirements for pellet stoves and boilers, determining stove and boiler compatibility with grass pellets, and evaluating the emissions from these systems.
In cooperation with the U.S. EPA and Brookhaven National Laboratories, NYSERDA's program will perform a comprehensive scientific evaluation of several different advanced and conventional biomass technologies to characterize emissions and energy efficiency in specialized combustion laboratories. The technologies to be evaluated include both residential and commercial scale boilers with various fuel types under different operating conditions.
Finally, NYSERDA is supporting a study with NESCAUM to evaluate the effects of emissions from wood combustion on local air quality. Wood combustion may be more common in rural areas where there are fewer residences, but due to the high particle emissions rate of conventional wood burning technologies, wood smoke concentrations in local air can become elevated, depending on meteorological conditions and local topography. This study will use an innovative approach linking a mobile monitoring strategy with a geographical information system to characterize ambient air pollution gradients over relatively small spatial scales with varying landscape features.
First ACT Bioenergy Installation at Clarkson University
August, 2008
The first ACT Bioenergy Boiler™ in the U.S. will be installed on the campus of Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY in fall 2008 . The 500,000 BTU boiler will supply heat to the recently renovated Walker Center Sports Facility. The goal of the project, led by Dr. Phil Hopke, Director of the Center for Air Resources Engineering and Science, will be to demonstrate state-of-the-art high-efficiency wood pellet boiler technology and undertake detailed thermal efficiency measuremetns and emissions monitoring to confirm European test lab results.
Based on European lab data, the innovative ACT Bioenergy Boiler™ boiler achieves 90% thermal efficiency and emission results that are an order of magnitude lower than current large wood boilers typically used in the U.S. (based on Environmental Protection Agency data). The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) with support from Clarkson is supplying funding for the project through the competitive process won by Clarkson and ACT under the “Energy and Environmental Performance of Biomass-Fired Heating Equipment Program”.
