This commentary is by April Weeks, a resident of Marlboro. She says she is “politically independent and represent no lobby or special interest but that of scratch-ankle dirt-poor homesteaders, most of whom probably don’t want me speaking for them anyway, as we are by and large a contrarian and independent bunch.”
The Clean Heat Standard, and the discussion thereof which has been rumbling here, seems to have left out an obvious, simple, local solution: wood stoves.
In fact, the recent commentary by Paula Kane seems adamantly opposed to what meager support the standard does offer for burning wood. When our addiction to fossil fuels leads us into global instability and war, I find the refusal to consider our simplest option available baffling.
While both natural gas and hydrogen may be relatively clean at point of use, the actual impact of any fuel must include its entire life cycle. We create hydrogen “fuel” by using energy to split water, usually drinking water. Like electricity, its impact depends on what energy source you use to make it.
As for the “cleanliness” of natural gas, we also need to chalk up the environmental impact of the present war in Ukraine, which has everything to do with gas pipelines, and which may spread. If we nuke the planet over gas supplies, is that “clean” energy?
I understand that the Clean Heat Standard supports “advanced wood heat.” What concerns me is the lack of regard for plain, ordinary, no bells or whistles, uncomplicated wood heat. “Advanced,” in my experience, is a word meaning “too many moving parts.”
Wood pellets are fine in their place, but they require a lot of processing: material must be ground, sifted and extruded. Then you need lots of giant plastic bags or augur trucks to move it around. So, while it makes sense to pelletize existing wood waste from other uses, when it comes to being able to account for the heating needs of the whole state — or for my own heating needs directly from the place where I live — it is hard to beat a full woodpile.
My stove works no matter how cold it is. It works when the power goes out. It doubles as a cooking appliance. It doesn’t require any multistate or multinational supply chains, and we don’t have to fight wars over it. Since I put in my own work, it doesn’t cost money.
If I weren’t cutting firewood directly for myself, I could buy it from my neighbor with his backyard wood processor, who in turn supports our local loggers, who in their turn could do with more support than the multinational timber market tends to offer them. And yet the Legislature seems to not regard this solution at all.
Of course we should not “cut down those forests” for heat. Vermont has 4,591,281 wooded acres. If we harvested these at the rule-of-thumb sustainable rate of one-third cord per acre per year, every single person in Vermont could have 2.2 cords to put toward their own heating, for so long as our forests continue to grow. With well-insulated, efficient housing, that’s easily enough to solve our entire problem of thermal comfort without buying anything at all from Putin, or Maduro, or bin Salman, or even tying ourselves in knots trying to invent a grid that can handle the irregular surge production of wind and solar. (Though we will obviously have to solve the grid challenge as well, somehow.)
I understand that perhaps we don’t want to have every last acre in Vermont under active logging management, and I understand we are already burning quite a lot in biomass plants. But even if we used half that much cordwood, counting our wood stoves as a backup and supplement, they would neatly solve the problem of heat pumps losing efficiency in brutal weather. I couldn’t imagine relying on any central heating source here without a simple box stove as backup.
A few years back, our power went out for six days straight following a bad storm. I got bored of sitting in the dark, but I was as warm as ever the whole time. My stove made the difference between that event being an annoyance or an emergency.
Yes, burning wood creates particulates. But not only are there good newer stoves with secondary combustion, there are masonry stoves with simple designs, such as batch-box rocket stoves inside vertical bell heat exchangers, or some of the plans sold by Walker Stoves in Montana, which achieve excellent combustion efficiencies and heat retention while not being too complex to build or to clean.
Why does the Clean Heat Standard not enthusiastically embrace encouraging Vermonters to solve our heating needs in the simplest, most local, least processed way available? Why does everything need to be “advanced” (so gosh-darn complicated)? The Legislature should include credits to install efficient but simple wood stoves, including masonry stoves, not restrict the standard’s approved solutions to those requiring heavily processed inputs only.
Get your wood in, people. Do it now. Get a start on next year’s while you’re at it. A 6-inch chimney brush with extension poles is a cheap tool, or else you can borrow your neighbor’s and pay in cookies. Insulate everything, obviously.
But when it comes to “resilience,” I revel in the simplicity of a good, dry stack.
