St. Maries School District finds energy to burn in the forest

With a lumberjack for a mascot, perhaps it's no surprise that the St. Maries School District is turning to the nearby forest to cut its power bill.

Beginning next school year, the district will fire up a wood burner at Heyburn Elementary School. Puny trees and branches that would have once burned on slash piles at North Idaho logging sites will be converted into heat for more than 400 students and staff.

The program is part of the U.S. Forest Service's "Fuels for Schools," an ambitious effort to thin fire-prone forests and provide a renewable fuels source for cash-strapped rural districts.

Since 2000, the federal government has spent $7 million in the Rocky Mountain West to outfit 12 schools, a prison and the University of Montana with wood-burning boilers.

The community of St. Maries, in one of Idaho's most timber-dependent regions, is a natural fit for the program, said Virginia Beebe, a program coordinator for the St. Maries School District.

"We're right at the edge of the national forest. We have all this biomass right in our backyard, and we're not using it," she said.

The district anticipates spending less than $500,000 to install the hot-water boiler system, which should be in place by Sept. 1. A Forest Service grant will contribute $250,000 toward the project, with the school district borrowing the rest of the money.

Heyburn Elementary's main wing was built in 1928. The two-story, red-brick school annually sucks up about 20,000 gallons of heating oil — a commodity whose price has shot from 65 cents a gallon to nearly $3 a gallon over the past five years.

Beebe said the district has tried to control costs by turning on the heat just before students arrive and turning it off at the end of the school day. Teachers who work late end up shivering in their classrooms.

And, "you can see your breath in the gymnasium on Saturday mornings during basketball practice," Beebe added.

The school will keep its oil-fired boiler for spring and fall days, when Heyburn Elementary needs just a few minutes of heat in the morning. But the wood burner will carry the school through the winter months.

Costwise, there's no comparison, Beebe said. With oil heat, a million British Thermal Units of energy costs the district more than $20. The same amount of heat from biomass will cost the district $1.50 to $3.25.

Chuck Mark, ranger for the Idaho Panhandle National Forests' St. Joe Ranger District, hopes to eventually see wood burners in other government buildings in St. Maries. "The potential for this is huge," he said.

Heyburn Elementary will burn 300 to 500 tons of wood debris per year, which is the biomass equivalent of thinning 40 acres of trees, according to Mark. The 70,000-acre ranger district has many more acres of trees that need to be thinned — a legacy of nearly 100 years worth of fire suppression, he said.

Fuels for Schools sprang up after wildfires charred hundreds of thousands of acres in Idaho and Montana. But the concept of firing central heating systems with wood waste predates the big fire season of 2000.

For 21 years, the University of Idaho has heated most of its Moscow campus with debris salvaged from slash piles.

Scott Smith, UI's power plant foreman, said, "For years and years, we were considered kind of nerdy. People thought it was backward to heat with wood. ... Now, it's kind of come around."

Smith credits rising energy costs for generating new interest in the wood-burning boilers. Fueling furnaces with wood instead of natural gas saves the university about $5 million each year.

But the conversion to wood isn't always easy. Last fall, the Kellogg School District fired up a wood-burning boiler to heat several of its buildings. The system runs on wood chips, and a chip supplier was harder to find than expected, said Superintendent Sandra Pommerening.

The district found itself competing against pulp mills for the chips. Eventually, district officials contracted with landscaping firms for chips.

Small users sometimes have supply problems, despite the abundance of material available, said Dave Atkins, the Forest Service's Fuels for Schools manager in Missoula. He's working to develop clusters of biomass burners to encourage businesses to support it.

"What we're really developing here is a new energy-distribution system," he said.