Today we are on the Council Ranger District of the Payette National Forest outside of
Council, Idaho.
The material that is being generated on this treatment project, much of this material is
being taken to the fuels for schools project where the local high school and elementary
school is being heated with wood chips.
We had a fifty year old elementary and a fourty five year old high school.
And the HVAC systems basically had worn out and they were very expensive to operate and
so we had to do something and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.
We're surrounded on three sides by the Payette National Forest so it made sense that we would
use wood if possible.
So I met with the Forest Service, they were on board, very supportive of it.
In the summer of 2005, we put in a boiler building.
And gutted the two buildings as far as their HVAC systems.
We went with a heat pump system.
And the heat pumps would pull out the air conditioning.
And so it was a great system for us.
Part of that, we had no fresh air in the buildings, the heating was sporatic, we had electric
heat in our secondary which was very hot in some places and cold in others.
And the elementary had an old oil boiler.
Which was inefficient and very expensive to operate.
We were spending about twenty five thousand dollars a year alone on fuel oil for that
building.
The biomass unit also allows us to have air conditioning in our school.
It allows us to start school with time in August.
The biomass plant heats our high school.
Our elementary school.
The greenhouses and also our shop.
This allows students to have a very comfortable working environment year round and we are
so fortunate.
The chip storage over here holds about twenty five tons.
This is a walking auger and it puts it on the conveyor belt into a hopper and it's fed
into the fire box.
Right now the fire box is working, and we're using about, I would say any where from one
to two ton of chip per day, it's not too cold.
We're in our eigth year of operation now.
And we've finally got it to where we want it.
We save quite a bit of money.
We eventually added greenhouses that we could heat with the biomass which we could grow
native plants.
And so it's also helped the airshed because now they are no longer burning it out in the
fields.
And that's a pretty inefficient way of dealing with it.
And so it seemed just like a very very natural thing for us to look at wood and to put in
a system like that.
You know, the cost savings have been there.
If you look back eight years, we've probably saved probably in the neighboorhood of half
a million dollars atleast.
Now we've had to pay down part of the bond with that because that was the deal with our
community that we would use our energy savings to help pay that bond down.
But it's still saved us money.
And so we just think this is just a win- win.
It's been a win for everybody.
It's a win for the Forest Service because now they can get that stuff out of the woods
without burning it.
So we think this has been a great, a great way to use our natural resources and to work
with our community.
It started as a biomass to heat our buildings, it then turned into greenhouses, it then heated
our shop.
So those things have had a real connection to our curriculum, our Ag.
program has been able to benefit by having this and having greenhouses, which they didn't
really have the opportunity to have before.
You know, I think that's the wave of the future in our part of the world.You know, I really
do.
I think that it's an opportunity for us to clean up the forest and take a lot of the
treatment out and create energy and jobs.
It's instrumental because it took the tremedous rise of heating costs out of the picture.
And then you can take that money and put it back in the classroom.
We think it's a win- win deal to be able to utilize a product that needs to be cleaned
up in a forest any way.
It creates catastrophic fuels laying on the ground.
We need to get a lot of that out and use it in the right ways.
And what better way to use it to offset costs in rural communities it's a wonderful resource,
it's a double edged deal where you're cleaning up the forest at the same time and creating
energy and jobs in rural communities.
From the Forest Service and many of the partners that have made this happen, we are truly excited
about the success of this project.
It has truly made a difference in the budget of the school, in the environment of the school,
and the stability of the community and has found a place for many, much of the waste
material that historically has just been burned on the mountain but is now going to use.