Green Mountain College Biomass Plant
According to the Green Mountain College's official history In Loco Parentis, students living in the school’s original academy building in 1837 were warmed by wood-burning stoves. Each student was responsible for toting wood up the stairs to his room in the evening, and each was encouraged to keep a pail of water in on hand in the event of a fire.
Nearly two centuries later, campus buildings will again be heated with wood, but this time using a decidedly different technology. Construction is now underway on a combined heat and power biomass plant that will burn woodchips, providing 80% of the school’s heat and generating 20% of its electricity. When the plant goes online later this winter, the College will have taken a major step toward its goal of climate neutrality, while injecting capital and jobs to the Rutland County economy.
“Green Mountain College is an important economic engine to Rutland County, employing 200 people,” said college president Paul Fonteyn. "Operation of the plant will result in three new permanent jobs.” In addition, construction of the plant involved 100 temporary jobs at the Poultney site.
Currently Green Mountain College uses number six fuel oil to heat two-dozen campus buildings, a process that releases high amounts of sulfur and other pollutants into the atmosphere. This fossil fuel will largely be replaced by an estimated 4397 tons of locally harvested woodchips. The chips are fed into the boiler and heated at a very high temperature with low oxygen, until the fuel smolders and emits gas. On the back side of boiler, oxygen is added and the gas ignites—the resulting steam is circulated through the existing infrastructure for heat and hot water. The steam also activates a turbine which will produce 400,000 kWh of electricity.
GMC will keep an oil burner as a backup heating source, but overall the college expects to reduce its use of fuel oil from 230,000 gallons to 40,700 gallons per year. The college estimates that the plant’s $5.7 million price tag will pay for itself over eighteen years through savings on fuel costs.
President Fonteyn envisions the new biomass plant as an open educational laboratory for GMC students, local schools, and for the general public. Visitors will learn how local, renewable resources can provide solutions to energy and environmental challenges. “Green Mountain College is a national leader in finding ways to live sustainably,” said President Fonteyn. “We feel a strong obligation to share what we’ve learned with outside audiences.”
Student activism was a key ingredient in convincing the administration to make the move to biomass at the Poultney college, which attracts about 750 undergraduate and 100 graduate students from 33 states and over 20 countries. Green Mountain formally adopted its environmental mission in 1995—all students, regardless of major, take the College’s 39-credit core called the Environmental Liberal Arts. Former president Jack Brennan became the first college president in Vermont to sign the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). Participation in the Presidents Climate Commitment carried with it a concrete challenge which the College took seriously—reaching climate neutrality.
In 2005, students in a freshman honors seminar studying the phenomenon of peak oil wrote a proposal to study the feasibility of a biomass plant at Green Mountain. Their proposal was accepted by the Student Campus Greening Fund, a student-run program designed to put into action initiatives that increase awareness and decrease the school’s ecological impact. (Every GMC student contributes to the fund through a $30 allocation from the college activities fee. Students design projects and submit proposals, and awards are based on a student vote.)
When President Paul Fonteyn assumed his duties as president in July 2008, the biomass proposal was on his desk and he made it one of his first priorities. The Campus Sustainability Committee chaired by Professor Steve Letendre, a renewable energy economics expert, completed an inventory for future emissions reductions, laying the groundwork for Green Mountain’s Climate Action Plan. It was clear that the biomass plant would not only be a cleaner, cheaper solution to for heat and power, but a giant step to a larger goal: complete climate neutrality. President Fonteyn announced in his April Inauguration address: “I can state, with confidence, that the college will be carbon neutral by 2011. Our research indicates that we will be one of the first two colleges in the country to achieve this goal.”
“The whole campus community sees this as a big step in ‘walking the talk’ as far as our own energy consumption is concerned,” said the college’s sustainability coordinator Amber Garrard. “We also see the biomass as a great educational resource for schools in the area. Since we plan on buying wood chips from local producers within a 50-mile radius, this initiative will provide economic opportunities for the local sustainable woodchip market.”
