A grand vision of freeing Randolph’s commercial, residential, and manufacturing core from the fluctuations of world oil prices was floated at two community meetings this week.

The Montpelier-based Biomass Energy Resource Center (BERC) released the results of a $50,000 study about the feasibility of building a central wood heating plant that could serve 409 houses, businesses, and industries in Randolph village.

The short answer, said BERC researcher Adam Sherman, is that the $18 million project could provide space heating roughly equivalent in price to oil heat at $2.50 a gallon. If heating oil prices begin to climb again (and BERC predicts they will), then the properties connected to the wood heating plant could reap millions in benefits, he said.

BERC Director Chris Recchia of Randolph stressed that the main benefit would be the assurance of “price stability” for heating costs, rather than being at the mercy of wild swings in the international oil market. Additionally, the BERC study said, the wood-burning boiler could provide a better market for landowners who need to cut low-grade wood to improve their forests.

“It’s like selling the weeds from your garden,” exclaimed Randolph forester John McClain.

For those who were stunned by the price tag, BERC produced a true-life tale of a similar project which has been a success in a small Italian town not much bigger than Randolph.

Stefan Clara, the CEO of an Italian company called Vision Power, described the experience of connecting a town in Italy’s province of Sudtirol to a wood-heating network. Within a few years, 90% of the town was hooked up, and the boiler had to be expanded, he said. Now, he estimated, the savings amount to about $40 million a year—partly because Europe’s oil prices are higher than those in the United States.

The nearby Austrian province of Styria (a place not unlike Vermont) now has some 400 community wood-burning plants, Clara noted.

The technology for community heating is uncomplicated, BERC’s Sherman pointed out. A similar system, though powered by oil, heats all the buildings at VTC and other state colleges, and a wood-powered boiler heats Randolph Union High School and several state buildings in Montpelier.

However, community heating has not caught on in this country as it has in Europe, which has developed modern technology to deliver the heat. Recchia said that if Randolph were to undertake the project, it would be the first application of this European technology in the U.S., and thus would be carefully watched as a model.

For that reason, he said, BERC believes that 30% of the upfront costs could be covered by various grants, and another 20% might be contributed by European firms anxious to enter the U.S. market.

Questions
Questions centered around how many customers would be necessary to make the project work. Sherman said he envisioned a phase-in with several large customers, including perhaps the hospital, manufacturing buildings, and downtown businesses hooking up first, with individual homeowners signing up once they see it’s a viable option.

The heating plant could eventually serve most of the village area on the south side of the river, including Weston and School Streets. The best place for the plant, he said, would be on South Pleasant St. Ext.

Wood requirements would be far less than needed by an electric plant, he noted. Only an average of one truckload of chips a day would be needed, he said, with perhaps six or seven during peak winter production days.

The plant would be capable of producing about 32 million BTUs per hour.

A survey of forest conditions in central Vermont shows that there is much more than enough wood to supply such a plant, according to Sherman.

The presentation was made to an invited group of businesses and officials Monday afternoon, and to an evening public session attended by about 20. The completed study will now be delivered to the Randolph Energy Committee, chaired by Frank Reed, and to the Randolph Area Community Development Corp., which helped commission it.

The idea of being the first community in the country to attain energy independence via wood heat produced considerable interest among the attendees, but no advance commitments.

“Come back when you know how much it’s going to cost me,” advised Peter Winslow, owner of Belmains and Magee Office Machines, both located in the area that might be served by the new system.