THE WOODPECERS ARE AT IT AGAIN
The name of the game is making wood work.
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In the scramble to find domestically available energy
resources, the old standby—wood—has received a
heck of a lot of attention lately. Unfortunately, the
rampant and injudicious use of this combustible hangs like
a double-edged sword above the head of humankind: Burned
directly, especially on a large scale, wood could be a
serious source of air pollution ... and its widespread
unchecked consumption could have an impact on the
environment in more direct ways as well. (After all, it
takes a good many years to produce a single hardwood tree.)
Still, "woodburning" doesn't have to be a dirty word. In
fact, the people at Wood Power Energy Corporation—in
concert with the nursery firm of Miles W. Fry &
Son—are taking some pretty impressive steps to
demonstrate that cellulose combustion, when managed
properly, can be both a practical and an economical
alternative for "power hungry" Americans.
The Fry nursery folks, who are part of the "WoodPEC" group,
are no strangers to long-time MOTHER-readers. (See "Hybrid
Poplars", issue 64, page 42 ... and "Homemade Motor Fuel
... From Firewood", No. 68, page 172. Back issue ordering
information appears on page 148.) But the wood-powered,
on-site energy system recently demonstrated by the WoodPEC
organization takes the group's experiments in wood
gasification one step further... and actually provides a
sizable portion of the nursery's everyday energy
requirements!
Greenhouses, you see, are costly to maintain ...
particularly throughout the winter months. So the
Pennsylvania-based group decided to modify its hothouse's
existing oil-fired water-heating system to burn
wood gas, by way of an automatically stoked,
1-1/2-million-BTU gasifier. Its 49-horsepower boiler easily
supplies two 5,000-square-foot greenhouses (it's been
designed to handle four such units), and a secondary heat
recovery system insures that any normally wasted thermal
energy gets recycled rather than dumped.