This commentary is by Kelly Klein, founder and CEO of Groennfell Meadery and Havoc Mead, a certified B Corp in St. Albans. She represents the small business community on the Vermont Climate Council.
As a small business owner and a member of the Vermont Climate Council, I have been excited to watch the development of the Clean Heat Standard as a critical part of Vermont’s Climate Action Plan.
With over a third of our state’s greenhouse gas emissions coming from fossil fuel heating, moving away from these fuels presents an opportunity to dramatically reduce emissions while also helping Vermonters switch to more cost-effective and less price-volatile energy sources. Paired with a weatherization initiative, this will result in a big reduction in heating costs, especially for low- and moderate-income Vermonters, who often rely on the most expensive and price-volatile fuels such as propane and heating oil.
The Clean Heat Standard bill (H.715) is poised to pass the House and move on to the Senate, and I sincerely hope that we see it signed by the governor before the end of this legislative session.
At Groennfell Meadery, we have worked to improve the efficiency of our heating and cooling as well as our other energy inputs. While brewing mead is much less energy-intensive than brewing beer (our mead is never boiled), we do need large quantities of hot water for both brewing and cleaning.
We were able to install a solar array on our roof and switch to high-efficiency heat pumps for a lot of the heating and cooling of our working spaces, and we use a heat-pump water heater for things like washing hands and dishes. But for brewing, we need high volumes of hot water delivered quickly, and for that we rely on high-efficiency on-demand water heaters that are powered by natural gas. We also have a radiant floor in our brewhouse, and that too runs on natural gas.
With a goal of reducing our reliance on natural gas, we have designed an innovative system where we almost never need to turn on our radiant floor. The metabolic activity of yeast during the fermentation process produces a lot of heat — so much that we need to cool our tanks during active fermentation so the yeast doesn’t overheat and kill itself.
Most breweries install their chillers outside so all that heat escapes and doesn’t make the space unbearable in the summer months. But we didn’t like the idea of all that warmth just going out into the air during the cold winter months, so we installed our chiller on our loading dock.
During the summer, we open a set of overhead doors so there is airflow around the chilling unit that can take the heat away. An overhead fan connected to a duct also helps evacuate the heat, and sliding doors close off the dock to keep the rest of the building cool.
During the winter, we close our overhead doors, open our sliding doors, and switch a damper so that, instead of blowing that heat outside, the overhead fan blows it right into the brewery, heating the space with the “waste” heat from our fermentation.
I’d love to say that we did this solely because we want to save the planet, but the biggest reason is because of the cost savings. We were able to so significantly reduce our reliance on natural gas that we have been able to justify a full switch to renewable natural gas.
The Clean Heat Standard will help other businesses with cool, innovative solutions like this. One of the things that really excites me about this bill is that it will make it easier and more affordable for landlords to make the switch to cleaner heat and to improve weatherization, which will translate to savings for tenants who cover the costs of heating.
I am also excited about the development of this standard because it will benefit our employees. Many of our employees rent, a few own their own homes, and all of them stand to benefit from improved weatherization and more efficient heating in their living spaces. The Clean Heat Standard will require fuel dealers to offer cleaner alternatives to traditional fossil fuels or pay for other initiatives that reduce fuel use, such as weatherization.
Vermonters will see savings, and that benefits not only our small businesses, but our whole Vermont economy.
One of the things we have wrestled with in our company is the fact that we still rely on some form of natural gas to heat our water. The unavoidable truth is that using fire to heat water is so much faster than any other method, but anytime we’re burning something, we’re emitting carbon dioxide. So we have looked for ways to be as efficient as possible, but the thing that gives me a lot of comfort about the Clean Heat Standard is that “clean” will be determined by a lifecycle emissions analysis of the fuel source.
I’m aware that not all renewable energy sources are created equal, so this provision in the bill (H.715) makes me much more confident that, when I choose renewable natural gas or any other biofuel, it’s being sustainably sourced and upstream emissions are being taken into consideration.
There’s one other aspect of this bill that I think is important to note, and that is that by moving away from fossil fuels, we can be more resilient as a state. Biofuels and other renewable fuel sources (such as wood chips and pellets) can be produced right here in Vermont. If we don’t need to rely on importing oil from other countries, we are much more resilient in a crisis — whether it be related to violence abroad or trade disruptions caused by severe weather or global pandemics.
We will also be keeping more of our money in the Vermont economy, rather than sending a significant portion of our hard-earned wages out of the state to pad the pockets of those who are extracting the Earth’s limited supply of fossil fuels, polluting our planet, and passing the costs — both financial and environmental — on to Vermonters.