Landmark Vt. Farm Tries Grass Pellet Heat

[jpak]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/tech/2006/feb/03/020308495.html

SHELBURNE, Vt. (AP) - It cost Shelburne Farms about $1,000 a year to mow grass that doesn't end up as hay for the animals and simply goes to waste. Now staff at the historic farm have come up with a use for it: turn it to pellets and burn them to heat the massive main barn.

A boiler room is a strange place for a party, but the only things missing Friday were cocktails and canapes as staff from the farm, a historic landmark and environmental education center, joined representatives of the Grass Energy Collaborative and others to watch grass pellets get loaded into the barn's furnace.

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The advantages, said Marshall Webb, special projects coordinator at Shelburne Farms, include projections that grass pellets will cost about half what wood pellets do. The grass is dried by the sun, rather than with energy-intensive processes used for wood pellets, he added. Perhaps most important, the grass pellets can come right from the farm, Webb said.

Robert Bender, president of South Burlington-based Chiptec Wood Energy Systems, said pellets can be used well as fuel for combined heat and power systems that provide space heating as well as that needed to run a small electrical turbine.

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[robbibaba]

1. Thank you for posting this...

It's nice to read some good news now and again.

[cali]

2. Here' s another really neat

project out of Vermont. It's called the living machine, and it's a rest stop on the highway.

http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/mayjun00/vermont.htm

[jpak]

4. Hay yields in New England average ~2 tons per acre per year

If a "typical" NE household burns 2-4 tons of of wood pellets per year, then a 1-2 acre hayfield could supply the heating needs of a single rural NE home.

not bad...

[Porcupine]

5. Bamboo in Alabama averaged 28!! tons per acre.

YIELD OF WOOD. Yields of five species of bamboo harvested for wood (suitable for pulp) reported in Table 3 are for all canes on an area. Age of bamboo varied from 15 to 20 years, with average yield of 17-54 tons per acre. (emphasis mine) Phyllostachys rubromarginata has been the most productive species tested at Auburn. It has smaller canes than the timber bamboo, but has many more canes per acre; thus, total production is much larger.

http://www.ag.auburn.edu/hort/landscape/bamboo.html">Found here

Oh, and it will happily clean all the nasties out of your sewage while yeilding the fiber.

[Joe Fields]

3. Hemp has so far proven to be the best form of cellulose energy

But you would never get shrub to consider it.