At School District 5’s school board meeting on 8 April, the trustees of School District 5 were briefed, in what I thought was a rather elliptical manner, on the biomass boiler problems at Glacier High School. The bottom line is that the installed equipment is not tough enough to handle the hogged wood that the district wants to burn. In a one-page handout (PDF), facilities manager Chuck Cassidy presented the board with three options:
Cassidy’s recommended course of action? “Have a small team analyze all the pertinent data recommend the next step in the next 30 days.”
My understanding is that repairs are necessary even for the first two options, so the logical solution is replacing the equipment with something stronger. I expect that’s the option the board will choose. And I suspect that the small team analysis recommendation is mostly a CYA tactic. What needs to be done is pretty clear. Who will pay for it is not, and there was a lot of pussyfooting around that issue.
Cassidy, trustee Tony Dawson (a good man), and mechanical engineer Steve Smith, representing CTA Architects and Engineers, all stressed that even with the problems experienced this year, burning wood instead of natural gas has saved the school money. You’ll get no argument from me on that. Hogged wood with a 40 percent moisture content currently sells for approximately $35 per ton, or $3.50 per million BTUs. Natural gas costs $11–12 per million BTUs (see the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s page on natural gas). Burning wood definitely saves money — but burning wood instead of natural gas does not mean the school uses less energy.
I’ll have more to say on the larger energy issues involved in another posting.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the officials and trustees of School District 5 have responded promptly and helpfully to my requests for information and explanations. That’s not always the case with government agencies, let alone those that are trying to deal with a situation that has a public relations downside.