The Haines Borough’s biomass project has been officially disbanded after the assembly voted Tuesday to return a $900,000 Alaska Energy Authority grant.
The grant, which the borough secured five or six years ago, was set to expire this fall. It would have partially funded a wood chip-burning biomass boiler system to heat municipal buildings, replacing the oil that currently fuels the system. At its largest scope, the biomass project would have cost $2.5 million to build and provided heat to the school, pool, library, administration building and the school’s vocational education building.
The sticking point for assembly members and borough staff at Tuesday’s meeting was the lack of money to complete the project.
“Personally, I would really have liked to see the project go ahead,” public facilities director Ed Coffland said in an interview Wednesday. The biomass project offered benefits including job creation, use of local resources and potential cost savings if the price of oil increases.
Coffland said he thinks the assembly would have approved the project if full funding had been available. However, the potential benefits didn’t change the fact that the borough lacked money to complete the project.
“We needed another million and a half,” Coffland said. “We might have been able to get by with a little less, but we haven’t found prospects for finding any more money for it.”
The assembly voted 5-1 in favor of returning the state grant, with Stephanie Scott the sole “no” vote. Several members expressed reluctance to return nearly $1 million in grant money, including Brenda Josephson who cast “a very disappointed yes.”
Renewable Energy Alaska Project STEM educator Clay Good, who has been working with the borough and Southeast Conference as “project information broker,” said he thinks Tuesday’s vote “wasn’t a fully informed decision.”
He said, based on comments made at the meeting, it sounded like there was confusion about the cost of the project and the type of biomass fuel involved.
Good said the project could have been scaled back to heat fewer buildings, reducing the start-up cost. He estimates it would have taken $400,000 beyond the Alaska Energy Authority grant to heat just the school and swimming pool.
At Tuesday’s meeting, some assembly members and staff referenced wood pellet boilers, which Good said are an outdated element of the project. The proposal, in its current form, would have used chipped waste wood, which is cheaper to produce than pellets. Good said the plan was to source the wood chips from Haines Junction until somebody set up production in Haines using residue from local forest harvests.
During past discussions, Haines conservation groups had raised concerns about the environmental harm of biomass combustion.
Good said though not ideal, using biomass technology as a heating source on a small scale, with locally sourced fuel, is preferable to burning fossil fuels.
However, he acknowledged that biomass is a bridge technology, “the lesser of two carbon options.” Ideally, biomass technology would fill in until Haines is able to replace it with carbon-free technology like solar or wind, a process that could take at least 20 years, he said.
Southeast Conference executive director Robert Venables, who has been involved with the project since his time as Haines Borough manager in the early 2000s, said he doesn’t fault the assembly for its decision.
“These are hard times and every project has an uphill battle that’s not directly related to community or economic survival,” Venables said. “At present, the biomass project doesn’t check those boxes.” He added that if the price of fuel were currently higher, it might have been a different conversation.
Venables said from his experience, every community needs two things to successfully pull off a project like the Haines’ biomass effort: a local advocate to drive the project and a long-term energy plan based on community input. He said Haines will struggle to implement any future energy projects without a unifying policy.
“The next step for Haines is to get with the community and the planning commission and really decide what the energy policy should be for the community,” Venables said.