Concord Monitor
Summary
To make financial sense when burning wood for a large housing development, I have recently learned, you need to do something that sounds kind of crazy: Use it to cool yourself.
“That’s the key. … District heating with wood is not a new thing, it’s use of heat energy to power air conditioning in the summertime that makes it work,” said Charles Niebling, an energy and forestry consultant who has been around the state’s timber industry for a long time.
I was picking Niebling’s brain about two upcoming developments: New London Place, a quarter-million-square-foot senior living complex that should open in New London in 2025, and Ridgeline Community in Conway, where ground was broken in March. They hold promise for using biomass energy in large developments without destroying the environment or investors’ savings, something that forest-filled New Hampshire would like to see more of.
Both will have centralized systems that burn wood chips for a multitude of buildings – 44 one-bedroom cottages and a 106-unit assisted living facility in Ridgeline’s case, and 12 cottages plus a facility with 96 apartments and 60 assisted-living units in New London Place.
This kind of district system is old hat but these will be the first in the state to have “combined heat and power” or CHP systems, right on sight. That’s compared to biomass boilers providing only heat, as was done by the former Concord Steam, or only electricity, as is done by the state’s wood-burning power plants. Both of those systems have struggled financially, with Concord Steam shutting in 2017 after 79 years and the power plants struggling to stay open without government support.
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#News#DistrictHeating#Biomass