Green Heat News
A monthly news service for everyone
interested in renewable wood & pellet heating
December 2021
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Featured Stories
Residential pellet heating is booming in Europe, with double digit growth since 2005. Italy leads with per capita stove installation; Belgium leads with per capita boiler installs. And France just overtook Germany in volume of residential pellet consumption. The media ignores this success story and only focuses on the more carbon intensive pellet to electricity industry. This blog has excerpts of a European pellet report with a series of charts and graphs that tells the story.
After ten years of exaggerations and misleading advertising, almost all stove and boiler manufacturers appear to be accurately informing their consumers about which models are eligible for the tax credit for wood heaters that are at least 75% efficient. There are still a few holdouts, like US Stove, which issued a certificate saying that models as low as 64% efficient qualified for the credit.
Please consider a donation to the Alliance for Green Heat! We are an independent non-profit that relies on donations and grants. We are passionate advocates for cleaner and more efficient wood and pellet heaters and are on the front lines interacting with environmental groups, policy makers and the media. You donation helps us keep our doors open.
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The Infrastructure bill pass by Congress and signed into law by President Biden contains numerous programs with far more funding to support institutional and industrial biomass heating. BTEC breaks down the programs and amounts.
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“A fuel from earlier times, so niche an industry that no one appears to even try to track pricing on a national level.” Wrong, wrong and almost wrong. Firewood is a modern fuel, like coal, oil, wind and sunlight used by more than 10% of households, which is more than the percent of homes with solar panels or electric cars. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains the Consumer Price Index, which tracks firewood together with propane and kerosene.
This 1981 article advising consumers how to buy firewood could have been written today. While other countries bring more transparency to moisture content and other issues, the United States seems content to stick to the original weights and measurement topics.
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Lazy reporting and insensitive environmental activist are hurting the movements for middle income homes to use domestic heating pellets to reduce fossil heating fuel in homes across America. Like most stories about wood pellets, this NPR affiliate makes sweeping statements, without distinguishing between using biomass for high efficiency heat, or low efficiency electricity, a distinction that is essential for carbon calculations.
"Insulation is amazing stuff. We didn't really believe at first, that we could heat our house with just a wood stove [in Canada]," he said. He originally thought he'd need a pellet boiler and in-floor heating to make it livable. Apart from the occasional barbecue, we don't have any fossil fuels on site here."
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"Wood to make heat will be less resource-sucking and less polluting than using solar electric panels to make electricity that then makes heat. With increased gas recycling in wood stove design and community forests for locally grown fuel, a place like Vermont could produce all the heat it needs."
The debate about the carbon and PM emissions of wood and pellet heating is often misrepresented by clean energy advocates who use point of source data when it’s convenient. Advocates for heat pumps say they are 2 or 3 times more efficient than boilers and furnaces, forgetting that the electricity they use was made at around 30% efficiency. Similarly, this graphic shows electricity emits no PM at all. Some areas now have very high amounts of renewable on their grid but most of America has very little.
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In a three-part series, Treesource explores the potential roles of forests and wood products in addressing the global climate crisis. Part 1 discusses how we can use more wood, a renewable, biodegradable carbon sink, while also storing more carbon in forests across the U.S. and the world.
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Sometimes pellet stoves break down and the repair may be much easier than you think. Or not. This Facebook page, run by AGH Advisory Board member Scott Williamson, provides free troubleshooting and repair advice for any brand and any model pellet stove.
The Stove Repair Relief Fund helps families impacted by COVID-19. Air quality agencies, change-out programs and low-income winterization programs can link to this fund to help their clients and residents. It provides up to a 50% reduction in the price of pellet stove parts for orders up to $500. Dozens of families can now keep their pellet stoves running safely.
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Best of November Facebook |
O'Hurley's General Store in Shepardstown, WV, one of the last continuously operating general stores that still keeps their wood stove running. As our Facebook readers noted, this is an unprofessional and potentially dangerous install, with such a long single-wall horizontal pipe. This used to be more common, helping transfer more heat to the room as it produces plenty of creosote.
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State News
Maryland: The Maryland Energy Administration produced a flyer for stove retailers to distribute and to reach more consumers with the details of their stove rebate program. The goal of the program is to help middle and lower income families offset the cost of replacing fossil fuel heat with renewable heat. Nearly 90% of the grants go for the pellet stove rebate of $700, which is $200 more than than the wood stove rebate. Permits to install the stove are required.
Montana: Last week, a massive, but surprisingly quiet machine was working in the woods in the Crystal-Cedar area grinding up a huge slash pile into wood chips.
New York: This article reviews firewood rules in New York State, including: (1) Untreated firewood may not be imported into NY from any other state or country.
Washington: Most states require firewood sellers to provide a written receipt with their phone and address, the amount of wood delivered and often a few other details. But this says Washington requires providing a receipt that includes a picture? Anyone heard of that? Requiring disclosure of approximate moisture content makes sense to me.
Utah: To qualify for 75 - 95% of change out costs to a non-wood heater, you have to be a major wood burner. AGH has long supported focusing on households that use wood as a primary heat source but believe pellet stoves should always be an option over gas.
West Virginia: With the increase in fuel prices, people are looking for alternative ways to heat their homes this winter. Now, companies can’t cut firewood quick enough to keep up with demand.
International News
Australia: Wood and pellet stoves were the fifth most popular energy efficiency measure in this Australian rebate program.
China: On a crisp Saturday morning last month, men in the black jackets favored by local Chinese officials were going door to door. They were checking to make sure villagers in Tangshan’s Fengrun district—one of China’s smoggiest spots —had quit burning coal for heat.
Czech Republic: A household would pay up to CZK 80,000 a year for electricity, compared to around 25,000 for wood and 60,000 for gas.“ I wouldn’t recommend heating with coal, because of the approaching ban on boilers,” Mr Stupavský added. As of September 1, coal-fired boilers with manual feeding manufactured before the year 2000 will be decommissioned.
Finland: Finland has come out against the EU’s draft “Taxonomy Climate Delegated Act” saying the proposed classification of biomass under the EU’s green finance rules goes against the country’s national interest.
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Follow us on Instagram @for.greenheat for wood and pellet stove information, interior design inspiration, and easily digestible wood stove news and education! |
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Verona, Italy, February 23-26, 2022
World trade show of pellet heating systems.
Wels, Austria, March 6-7, 2022
Deadline for paper/speaker submissions is October 12, 2021.
Atlanta, Georgia, March 2-5, 2022
Annual North America industry heart trade show.
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Misleading Advertisement of the Month |
Every year produces a crop of sleazy advertisements that pose as expert reviews of wood and pellet stoves. Forbes acknowledges they "earn a commission from partner links," which many “reviews” do not disclose. This review featured four Drolet models and one Pleasant Hearth, and it'd gave very high reviews for Drolet's efficiency, providing false and misleading efficiency information. We assumed Forbe's "partner" was Drolet. But Marc-Anoine Cantin, CEO of SBI, which makes Drolet stoves, assured us they had no contact with Forbe's but are pleased to get some free advertising. We then asked Forbe's who their partner was, and to our surprise, we got a quick and professional reply from Alice Luu. She wanted to know "how our business partner might impact what your plans are with our ranking." We asked again who the partner was, and after that, she did not reply again. Much of the educational content was quite good and they reported on emissions accurately. Forbes provides a methodology to their scoring, saying they “analysed third party data on 17 different major companies.”
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Please support our work on Giving Tuesday! |
Thank you to everyone who donated to AGH during 2020! Your support makes a huge difference and is very appreciated. The Alliance for Green Heat is an independent non-profit organization working to promote cleaner and more efficient biomass heating. Please consider making a generous contribution. The Alliance is a tax exempt 501 (c)(3) organization.
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