The Haines Borough’s plan to install wood-fired boilers in its public facilities took two big steps forward recently, conceptually and financially.

The borough last week received its final siting evaluation report from CTA Architects Engineers, which makes a case for installing two woodchip boilers on the borough’s Fifth Avenue property to heat the school, pool and potentially the vocational education building.

The plan represents a shift in the borough’s approach to biomass heating, which was previously focused on wood pellets.

Borough biomass consultant Darsie Culbeck said a 20-by-30-foot building would sit on the Fifth Avenue right-of-way, between the Aspen Hotel and the AT&T building. It would house two of the three boilers the borough recently purchased from the U.S. Coast Guard in Sitka, which are currently being stored at Mosquito Lake School.

“In theory, the chips would come in shipping containers, plug into the building, and an auger system would take the chips out of the container and feed them into the boiler,” Culbeck said.

In addition to receiving the final siting report, the borough also got some good news on the project’s funding front in the form of a $250,000 design grant from the U.S. Forest Service. That’s in addition to the $1.2 million in grant money the project received in 2014 from the Alaska Energy Authority’s Renewable Energy Fund.

Culbeck called the $250,000 “a big deal” because of the level of competition involved. “We were competing on a national level for that money and Haines got the most money in the state,” he said.

Nationally, more than 77 applications were received with 42 grants awarded. The Hydaburg School District also received funding.

Interim manager Brad Ryan said the project was initially planned to use wood pellets. Wood chips, he said, can be locally sourced from the Haines State Forest, and don’t require additional processing into pellet form.

Culbeck recently submitted a grant application to the USDA’s Rural Development Fund for $112,000 to buy a commercial-grade chipper and wood splitter. With that equipment in hand, the borough could put out a request for proposals and have a private party manufacture chips, he said.

“The borough doesn’t want to be in the business of supplying biomass,” Culbeck said.

The project plan has also moved away from the district heating plan, which would have centralized the three boilers in one location and piped out heat to public facilities around town.

  “We talked about central heating, but they went away from that,” Ryan said. “Basically, the length of the hot water transmission lines was going to eat up too much energy. It makes more sense to site boilers throughout the town as opposed to one central location.”

Ryan said Culbeck will present on the project to the school board on June 7 and at the Planning Commission on June 9. A public workshop also is tentatively scheduled for later in the month, after which time the administration will gather public comment and present the final plan to the assembly.

Culbeck stressed that this project has been a decade in the making, moving from establishment of the Peak Oil Task Force to development of the Energy Sustainability Commission to the commissioning of numerous wood energy and weatherization studies.

“This is like a long goal that people have been moving toward. This is just another piece of that,” Culbeck said.

Culbeck said he hopes the two boilers will be fueling the school, pool and voc tech building by next summer. The remaining grant money will be used for looking into how the third boiler could best be used to fuel other public buildings.

Oil boilers will remain in all of the facilities, in case the low price of oil makes the burning of diesel more economical or problems sideline the biomass boilers.

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