Brown on Green

Colorado State University turns green into gold

By Jerry Brown
BrownOnGreen.Net

Colorado State University’s colors are green and gold.

Officially, the colors recognize the school’s agricultural heritage as a land-grant university.

But CSU has become very green when it comes to producing and saving clean energy. And it’s doing it in ways that save the school a lot of money, turning green into gold.

I was part of a group from the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce that recently toured two very different sites on CSU’s Foothills Campus in Fort Collins where CSU is producing energy that saves the school money and helps the environment.

Our first stop was a biomass boiler that burns wood chips from trees killed by pine beetles and wildfires into heat used by buildings on the campus. It’s a joint demonstration project by CSU and the Colorado Forest Service to develop a market for the timber from trees killed by the beetles and wildfires.

In its second year, the demonstration project is proving very successful, says Carol Dollard, an energy engineer for CSU’s Facilities Department.

The boiler burns about 245 tons of wood chips per year, a tiny fraction of what’s available. But it’s one creative example of how to tackle the problem of getting rid of all those dead trees.

A factsheet on the project says the heating plant saves CSU about $10,000 a year in fuel costs. The figure actually is higher than that, Dollard says, because the heating plant is operating more efficiently than it was when the factsheet was prepared.

Our other stop was a 30-acre, 5.3 megawatt solar power system. It produces about one-third of the electricity used on the Foothills Campus and will save the university an estimated $6 million over its lifetime.

It’s one of the largest solar systems on a university campus in the United States.

The solar system was built in two phases, covering 15 acres each. Phase 1, completed in 2009, uses movable photovoltaic panels that track the sun. Phase 2 was completed last year and uses photovoltaic panels fixed into place.

The system was funded through a public-private partnership of CSU, Xcel Energy and Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV). FRV owns and operates the system. CSU purchases the power under a contract that guarantees the price it will pay for the for the next 20 years.

 

Beetle Juice: Turning Dead Trees Into Heat and Electricity

By Jerry Brown
BrownonGreen.net

If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.  And if it hands you five million acres of dead trees ravaged by pine beetles?  Make beetle juice.

That’s what CEO Phil Kastelic of Colorado Forest and Energy, calls the electricity and thermal energy he says could be made from the huge number of trees in Colorado killed by pine beetles.

As Kastelic sees it, the solution couldn’t be simpler.

He proposes using mass producible BioMax gasifiers manufactured by Community Power Company of Littleton, Colorado, to turn wood chips from beetle-killed trees into heat and electricity in small Colorado communities next to areas heavily impacted by the beetle damage.

Each BioMax is about the size of a semi-tractor trailer and can turn 2.5 tons of wood chips per day -- about the size of a pickup-truck load -- into enough heat and electricity to power a high school, recreation center or wastewater treatment plant.

“It doesn’t consume any water, there’s no smoke and there’s no smell,” Kastelic said in describing the process at a recent seminar on converting biomass into biofuels sponsored by the Colorado Cleantech Industry Association.  “The only residue is ash, pristine carbon that can be used as a soil enhancer.”

Kastelic believes he has a winning idea for several reasons:

• There’s plenty of fuel available.  For example, there’s a 10,000-ton pile of chips from beetle-killed trees between Frisco and Breckenridge.  Locals call it Peak 12.  There’s another 70,000 tons of beetle-kill wood chips at the Summit County dump, officially known as the Summit Resource Allocation Park.  And there are logs and standing dead trees throughout the Colorado mountains.    The U.S. Forest Service is working on landscape architecture studies that will verify how much biomass is available as a result of the beetle infestation, Kastelic says.

• No one’s come up with a good plan for dealing with all this dead timber, which emits huge amounts of CO2 and methane.  Kastelic says no one will build a large gasification plant in the mountains without a guaranteed source for feedstock for the next 10 to 20 years – a commitment Kastelic believes they won’t be able to get even though there’s an abundance of fuel available.  The BioMax units make more sense for small communities, he says, because of their size and portability.

• The proposal is carbon neutral and much more energy efficient than delivering power to mountain communities from centralized power plants hundreds of miles away.  “It just doesn’t make sense to assume for some communities that all of their power should come from a centralized power plant,” Kastelic says.

Kastelic says he’s “working with three or four communities” who are interested in his idea if he can get the capital to scale the technology for commercial deployment.  He hopes to have that funding this year.

“Putting a BioMax unit in a community to provide heat and electricity for a school or recreation center means we would pay local property taxes on the unit, buy feedstock from the community and employee people from the community,” he says.  “Over time, we will save them money.”