by Jbs120308f — December 8, 2008—The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently lit its new, smoke-free Renewable Fuels Heating Plant. The $3.3 million project is the laboratory’s latest step toward operating as a net-zero energy facility. The RFHP will heat NREL’s South Table Mountain Campus laboratory buildings by burning wood chips that include construction waste and trees lost to the region’s mountain pine beetle epidemic.
Operating smoke-free and odor-free, the plant will reportedly offset about 4.8 million pounds of carbon dioxide each year and as much as 75 percent of the 50,000 million Btus of natural gas used annually to heat the STM campus. The wood chips for the boiler cost $29 per ton or $2.42 per million BTUs—about one-quarter of the cost of natural gas.
The new heat plant is financed under an innovative Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC) with Ameresco Federal Solutions, an energy services company, in compliance with DOE’s Transformational Energy Action Management (TEAM) Initiative. An ESPC is an alternative financing tool that allows federal operations to accomplish energy-related improvements without making capital investments from Congressional appropriations, explains NREL.
Under the terms of the heat plant’s ESPC, Ameresco will bear the project’s costs and purchases, provide the fuel, and guarantee the plant’s operation. NREL will repay the company from annual cost savings of wood over natural gas—projected in the first year to be more than $400,000. Ameresco also will perform verification analyses to ensure the plant is achieving the guaranteed energy savings.
The DOE’s TEAM initiative seeks to dramatically transform DOE’s energy, environmental and transportation management by a variety of measures, including acquiring up to 7.5 percent of all energy from renewable sources and attaining at least a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold standard certification on all new buildings.
For more information about NREL’s sustainability initiatives, visit the Web site.
