CADMUS, an energy consultant hired by the Vermont Department of Public Service, performed a survey of 77 ASHPs at 65 sites in Vermont.

https://publicservice.vermont.gov/sites/dps/files/documents/2017%20Evaluation%20of%20Cold%20Climate%20Heat%20Pumps%20in%20Vermont.pdf

CADMUS and VT-DPS concluded, on average, an owner…

The Vermont Comprehensive Energy Plan, CEP, has a goal to install about 35,000 air source heat pumps, ASHPs, by 2025, and projects:

About 63% of building space heating* and domestic hot water, DHW, from renewable electricity (wind, solar, hydro, biomass, etc.)

About 34% of building space heating and DHW, from wood burning (cordwood/pellet) and bio liquids.

About 3% of building space heating and DHW, from fossil fuels burning.

 …

Ground source heat pump systems, GSHPs, are becoming the preferred way to electrically heat and cool a house, an apartment building, or a university campus, or a medical center, etc. This is especially the case in northern European countries, such as The Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden. See Appendix.

The big plus for nearby people (and flora and fauna, and forests), due to not burning trees and fossil fuels, will be no…

This article explains in detail how the efficiencies of wood stoves are calculated using the higher heating value or lower heating value of the fuel. In case of condensing wood stoves, the higher heating value must be used.

The US uses higher heating value, HHV, as the basis for calculating efficiency, Europe uses lower heating value, LHV.

This leads to European stoves having calculated efficiencies greater than US stoves, which deceives lay people in the US,…

Dartmouth College was planning to replace the existing oil-fired central steam heating plant with a tree-burning hot water heating plant.

Dartmouth College held several public meetings during which there were numerous objections from nearby residents regarding the up to 16 eighteen-wheelers per day delivering wood chips, and regarding the harmful air pollution of the plant.

Dartmouth College present and former environmental professors also were opposed to the wood-burning…

No, Congress will not extend the PTC

PROTECTING BOILERS AGAINST FLUE GAS CONDENSATION

https://www.achrnews.com/articles/135513-protecting-boilers-against-flue-gas-condensation 

NON-CONDENSING BOILERS USING PROPANE OR NATURAL GAS

If the thermostats in the buildings connected to a boiler are set so the buildings can use the entire hot water output of a…

THE CASE AGAINST INTENSIVE FOREST MANAGEMENT IN MAINE http://www.forestecologynetwork.org/BANDY22.htm

by LeRoy Bandy, PhD and Barbara Bandy, M.S.

For references and more information, consult the Bandy's bibliography on clearcutting.

The forestland of Maine is sometimes referred to as the Northern…

By JOHN P. GREGG, Valley News Staff Writer, Tuesday, September 24, 2019

HANOVER — Dartmouth College is reconsidering whether to rely on a proposed biomass plant to heat its campus after prominent alumni environmentalists said burning wood chips contributes to global warming.

“At this point, biomass is still on the table, but we are going through a process to kind of confirm if that makes sense,” Josh Keniston, the Dartmouth’s vice president for institutional…

Vermont has the 4th highest percentage of forest coverage, after Maine, New Hampshire and Virginia. According to the USFS, based on 2015 satellite data, Vermont had about 4,511,000 acres of forest, of which 4,288,000 acres were classified as timberland.

Only about 3,050,000 acres of the timberland acres were considered “accessible, ecologically appropriate for logging” by BERC, a pro-logging industry consultant. However, that does not mean all of the 3,050,000 acres…

Dartmouth’s planned biomass plant would only make things worse

https://www.vnews.com/Column-Burning-Forests-for-Heat-at-Dartmouth-27594239

GEORGE M. WOODWELL, WILLIAM SCHLESINGER and JOHN D. STERMAN

We are three Dartmouth College alumni who have led major scientific programs and research institutions dealing in part with forests as cause…

A nearby farm in Hartford, Vermont has 200 acres of open fields, plus 700 acres of woodland. During a recent logging operation, the trunks of the high quality healthy trees were set aside and cut to 8.5, 10.5 and 12.5 ft lengths, for transport to lumber mills, and the less valuable material, such as tops of trees and branches, misshapen trees, standing dead trees, sickly trees, etc., were gathered and piled up for chipping.

The less valuable material is fed into very large…

The New England high voltage grid provides electricity throughout New England. There are several hundred electricity-generating plants directly connected to the grid via substations. In 2018, the total output of these plants was 103,702 GWh, about 84% of the total supply to the NE grid. The rest of the supply was 21,409 GWh via 3 connections to nearby grids. See URL.…

Regarding wind and solar, cost shifting is rarely mentioned, identified or quantified. Those costs, as c/kWh, could be quantified, but it is politically expedient, using various, often far-fetched reasons, to charge them to:

- Directly to ratepayers, via electric rate schedules, and/or added taxes, fees and surcharges on electric bills

- Directly to taxpayers, such as carbon taxes, user fees and surcharges.

- Directly to federal and state budgets and…

The existing Dartmouth campus central cogeneration plant required about 3.5 million gallon of No. 6 fuel oil in 2018. The plant had a minimum heating load of 4 MW (13.65 million Btu/h) in summer and a maximum of 32 MW (109.2 million Btu/h) in winter. See page 11 of URL

The Dartmouth campus required about 50000 MWh of electricity in 2018, of which about 80% was purchased and the existing co-gen plant generated about 20%.

 …

The Norwegians have about 60 years of experience building and servicing oil/gas rigs and laying undersea electric cables, gas lines and oil lines all over the world.

They have invested billions of dollars in specialized deep-water, Norwegian harbors and facilities for assembly of oil/gas rigs and invested in specialized sea-going heavy lifters, and specialized sea-going tugboats to tow the oil/gas rigs from Norwegian building sites to oil/gas production sites. The heavy…

As more EVs will be used in the future, a problem will arise what to do with the old batteries. Some folks say they can be reused for grid-scale storage to provide electricity, such as during multi-day wind and solar lulls, which in New England occur at random anytime of the year.

The old EV batteries would come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They would have to be arranged in buildings and kept at about 70F for best performance. Older batteries have more in and out…