The Haines Borough Planning Commission gave the go-ahead for a new biomass boiler near Takshanuk Watershed Council’s Starvin’ Marvin Garden.
Public facilities director Brad Ryan asked for approval at a July 13 meeting, before Wisewood Energy of Portland, Ore. creates conceptual designs.
Ryan said the boiler will “displace about 80,000 gallons of fuel oil,” providing heat to Haines School and pool, the borough administrative building and the public library.
About a 20-foot-tall building would house the boiler, with a feed system of containers and conveyors outside.
Ryan said he doesn’t have a cost estimate for the facility yet.
Other locations considered were the Fifth Avenue right of way south of Main Street and Thor’s Gym parking lot, but Ryan said there was little room there to expand.
Assembly liaison Heather Lende said she was worried the operation would be too industrial with trucks coming in to deliver wood in the middle of town.
Commission chair Rob Goldberg said the wastewater treatment plant was named in past discussions as a place to store chips or pellets. Ryan added the borough has a grant to buy a chipper that could be placed in that location.
Commissioner Lee Heinmiller said the Aspen Suites Hotel, Haines Brewing Company or garden greenhouses could harness some of the facility’s waste heat. Excess heat could also be used to dry wood chips.
“For me that gets complicated,” Ryan said. He said the borough could be competing with local utility companies, and the Aspen Hotel is currently heated with electric power.
Ryan said he is planning for the boiler to burn both pellets and chips.
“We want to do chip because it can be locally sourced, but we want to do both because we don’t want to be locked into one fuel source,” Ryan said.
When burning pellets, there would be 5 to 10 minutes of smoke when the machine starts, but wood chips would cause a steady visible vapor plume from the stack.
“We’ve got to be able to burn chips to source from the Haines State Forest,” said commissioner Brenda Josephson.
Goldberg said the borough should consider purchasing the 855-acre Baby Brown timber plot, the sale of which recently fell through. Astoria Forest Products of Oregon purchased the resource for $270,000.
“The borough could fuel this biomass boiler forever if we owned that timber sale,” Goldberg said.
“This would be an economic driver for the community. The price of biomass would never go up, we would own that…I think it’s really important for the future of the Haines Borough to buy this timber sale.”
The acreage may come for sale again in the fall after forester Greg Palmieri completes a forest land use plan.