The Department of Public Service has awarded almost $1 million in grants to bolster the state’s wood heat industry, the department said Monday.
The grants came from money contributed by Vermont Yankee as part of a decommissioning arrangement for the shuttered nuclear plant.
The more than $900,000 will pay to retrofit fossil fuel heat sources to burn wood pellets, in many instances, and will contribute to the construction of a pellet mill in Lunenburg and the purchase of trucks.
Housing Vermont won three of the grants this year. “We’re hedging ourselves against future increased oil costs,” said Eric Schmitt, the organization’s vice president of asset management.
The grants Housing Vermont received — totaling $125,000 — will offset the cost of replacing three oil-burning systems for low-income housing developments, Schmitt said.
Many of the grants went to low-income housing developments and to schools, said Andrew Perchlik, the director of the clean energy development fund.
Wood-burning central heating should eliminate some of the price fluctuations that housing and educational facilities encountered over recent years, Perchlik said.
He said the department is giving grants to encourage wood heating this year because the department found that was the best use of the fund’s monies, which are reserved for “environmentally sustainable” sources of power.
Wood heat, Perchlik said, reduces Vermont’s fossil fuel dependency, expands the state’s economy and benefits the environment.
The grants don’t cover the full cost of any of the projects they support, but in some cases large fractions. That seemed the most cost-effective approach, Perchlik said.
“We’re basically looking at people thinking of switching to wood, and our grant puts them over the hump,” he said.
