Wood Pellets

Wood Pellets - A Good Choice for Heating

Many building owners use fossil heating fuels, such as oil or propane, for space heating. These fuels are often expensive and unstable in pricing, and are threatening the global climate and sustainability of communities.  Proven alternatives to fossil heating fuels exist and are already in use across North America: Biomass fuels are a local, renewable resource for providing reliable heat.

Wood pellets are a common type of biomass. Biomass is any biological material that can be used as fuel—including grass, corn, wood, and biogas as well as other forestry and agricultural residues. 

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Wood Pellets

One biomass fuel that has gained national attention with rising fossil fuel prices is wood pellets.  Wood pellets are compressed by-products from the forest products industry, of-ten woodchips and sawdust.  They are a locally available and a cost-effective heating fuel with several advantages over other types of biomass. 

Wood pellets are a condensed uniformly sized form of biomass energy, making them easier to store and use than many other biomass fuels.  Pellet heating technology is also quite simple, minimizing operation and maintenance requirements.  These heating systems can be easy to plan for and install and can save a building owner thousands of dollars in energy costs over time while providing significant local economic and environmental benefits.

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Advantages in Heating with Biomass

Using biomass fuels helps mitigate such environmental issues as acid rain and global climate change.  Perhaps the greatest advantage of biomass fuels, however, is that they cost on average 25-50 percent less than fossil heating fuels and are more stable in pricing.  It is unlikely that any future carbon or energy taxes will increase the cost of biomass fuels and are more likely to raise the cost of heating with fossil fuels.  The technology is becoming well established in the North American market and the choice to heat with biomass fuels can be as simple as choosing a traditional fossil fuel heating system.         

In addition, wood pellets:

• are convenient and easy to use, and can be bulk stored in less space than other bio-mass fuels
• have a high energy contentbiomass fuels
• are a clean-burning renewable fuel source
• are produced from such waste materials as forestry residues and sawdust
• are price stable compared to fossil fuelsWood pellets are a compared to fossil fuels.

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Who should consider Wood Pellet Heating?

There are currently 800,000 homes in the U.S using wood pellet stoves for furnaces for heating, according to the Pellet Fuels Institute.  The Wood pellets Bourne's has chosen to distribute are manufactured locally and are available for residential use in 40-pound bags.     

Increasingly, heating with wood pellets is becoming common on larger scales—in municipal or federal buildings, educational facilities, housing complexes, offic buildings, and other  businesses.  While the majority of installations of this size are in Europe, a growing number are in North America, including New England.  The greater heating requirements of these larger buildings differ from those of residential settings, thus requiring different technology (boilers rather than stoves) and fuel supply infrastructure (bulk wood pellet supply rather than bags).

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Wood Pellet Fuel Characteristics

Wood pellets are a manufactured biomass fuel.  They are made from wood waste materials that are condensed into pellets under heat and pressure. Natural plant lignin holds the pellets together without glues or additives.  Wood pellets are of diameter), making them as easy to store and use as traditional fossil heating fuels.  Wood pellets also take up much less space in storage than other biomass fuels be-six percent moisture content-tent (typically between 4-6 percent moisture by weight).

While wood pellets are typically differentiated between soft and hardwood sources, there are three grades based on the amount of ash produced when they are burned:

• Premium (ash content less than one percent)
• Standard (ash content between one-two percent)
• Industrial (ash content three percent or greater)

Premium and standard grade pellets are suitable for any wood pellet boiler with automatic ash removal, including most institutional- or commercial-scale applica-tions. Industrial grade pellets, or those with ash content greater than three percent, should be avoided due to the high volume of ash produced. 

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Availability

For the residential market, Bourne's Energy sells wood pellets in 40-pound bags with delivery and placement  available.  Small commercial or institutional-scale applications of the type being discussed here, however, require bulk delivery and storage.  There is a charge for delivery, the price typically including a per-load fee scaled to the distance of the delivery.

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*information source is Massachusetts Division of Energy Resources.