In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.
Wander through the dense forests in the world of biomass energy, where technology, engineering and economics intertwine, and it doesn’t take long to discover one Vermonter’s name stands out, like a century pine towering far above the canopy of growth below.
That would be Tim Maker of Calais, all of about 5-8, slender and about as low-key as it gets, despite his giant reputation. But when it comes to the engineering, economics and construction of large-scale heating systems for our most prolific renewable energy resource – that would be wood – Maker is a state and national pioneer, a guy whose knowledge and renown has been growing for nearly three decades.
He’s authored the nationally recognized bible on biomass heating installations, founded and run the highly regarded Biomass Energy Resource Center, consulted all over the U.S. and traveled from Europe to Canada and Scandinavia to research biomass energy plants. His fingerprints are all over the map in a state that now has four Vermont colleges, at least 45 schools and numerous businesses that have converted to biomass to save fuel costs. (According to a 2011 biomass report from a Montana non-profit, Vermont leads the nation with 60 biomass-heated facilities, far more than any state in the nation.)
It was Maker who 18 years ago planted the seed for a ground-breaking effort now finally reaching completion in the state capital to build a biomass heating plant – so-called “district heating” – that would serve both state and municipal buildings and downtown businesses. He has been intimately involved with the landmark project in several capacities ever since.
Such townwide and village systems are old-hat in Europe, which is far ahead of the U.S., he notes, with many communities there heated by plants that use renewables (which can cut heating costs by up to 75 percent over conventional fuels.)
“We (the U.S.) haven’t figured out how to do this stuff yet,” says Maker, but he sees Vermont making progress. He notes that last fall Vermont formed a partnership with a province in Austria where nearly half of all the heating demand is met with renewable resources, compared to one estimate of about 4 percent in the Green Mountains.
“Biomass is this really important piece of the puzzle that just doesn’t get support,” he says.
It’s a puzzling issue he has spent his life wrestling with. In classic Vermont fashion, you’d never know all this unless someone else tipped you off or you prodded him, more than a bit, about his occupation and resume. You’d be far more likely to learn about his outdoor pursuits, such as hiking and biking, or about the house he built himself in the mid-1980s, putting on a beautiful salvaged slate roof, or the four-and-a-half years he spent in Nepal in the Peace Corps working to develop the country’s science education.
His career path in engineering schematics and the ins and outs of burning woodchips and pellets draws deeply from childhood roots in Vermont and the subtle suffusion throughout his life of a personal appreciation of wood heat, as well as its logic in a state that values self-reliance and has a heavily forested landscape.
“I’ve always heated with a wood stove,” explains Maker, who practices what he preaches.
It took a while for that simple lifestyle choice to eventually meld with his degree in engineering physics at Cornell to form his career path. His father was an engineer, and he fought against following in his footsteps for a long time. “I felt he was trying to push me down a particular path I really didn’t want to go down,” says Maker.
His father worked in Springfield, where Maker was born, but moved the family (he has two brothers) to the suburbs of Detroit when Tim was 10. After college, Maker joined the Peace Corps and went to Nepal instead of getting an engineering job. “It really was, in one sense, a rebellion. My father had set me on this track, and I was going to get off,” says Maker with a laugh.
When he came back from Nepal he had only one thing on his mind, which was to return to Vermont after being uprooted and going to Detroit.
“I really was unhappy there. I hated it, I couldn’t understand why my parents left Vermont,” he says.
He landed in the Upper Valley in 1972 in the back-to-the land days, with a ponytail and mustache, working at a book bindery, at a restaurant and at other jobs in the height of the hippie days. He met his wife Becky, a nurse, at the book bindery and they later went off to hike the Appalachian Trail, lasting two months before getting “sick of” going through the woods in solitude. Those were the days when it wasn’t unusual to hitchhike from southern Virginia back to Vermont, which they did.
After another Peace Corps stint in Nepal joined by his wife, Maker returned and landed the job that sealed his career: He began working around Woodstock doing energy audits of people’s homes, part of a statewide team in a ground-breaking conservation effort run under the University of Vermont’s Extension Service.
“It was kind of like the Peace Corps again,” he says – young, well-educated kids with science backgrounds trying to make an impact.
The four years he spent there early in his career made him realize the breadth and value of wood as a key renewable resource.
“You could see the role that firewood played in people’s lives, and translate that out to the role it played in the state’s economy,” he says. But heating with wood, he also realized, depended on a “totally disorganized” and “anarchic” economic system operated on a small and inefficient scale.
When the program was defunded in 1985, he bought land in Calais and struck out on his own, starting up a business called Energy Efficiency Associates in Montpelier. He soon got a very important client, the Vermont Public Service Department, and equally important, a ground-floor experience in building biomass heating in his hometown. That came when he volunteered for a three-person team tasked with exploring an alternative to the electric heat bills that were eating up the Calais Elementary School’s budget.
In 1986, Calais became the second school in the state to convert to biomass heating, an energy system which back then was equal parts pipe dream and radical idea. The Calais school heating plant is still working today.
And so is he, at 67, as CEO of his company, Community Biomass Systems. He is still spreading the woodchip gospel, though he stresses, “This forward movement from virtually nothing in the 1980s to where we are today has been the result of a lot of people’s efforts.”
He is currently overseeing Goddard College’s woodchip plant construction in Plainfield and an proposed innovative biomass plant to provide heating, cooling and electricity in Flushing Meadows at the former World’s Fair site in Queens, where the U.S. Tennis Open is played.
Woodchips in New York City, you ask? Turns out the parks department there chips about 7,500 tons of waste wood annually from its parks. If built, it will mark another advance in the use, and acceptance, of wood energy.
“My faith, if you could call it that, in wood heat has never been shaken,” he says.
