releases: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/vermont/-heating-cities-with-renewables-
Data license: MIT · Data source: dwillis/congress-press
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| https://www.sanders.senate.gov/vermont/-heating-cities-with-renewables- | Heating Cities with Renewables | 2016-11-10 | 2016 | 2016-11 | Independent | House | VT | Bernard Sanders | S000033 | www.sanders.senate.gov | legacy | Heating Cities with Renewables Thursday, November 10, 2016 MONTPELIER, Vt. -- With a significant boost from federal stimulus funds, District Heat Montpelier is up and running, heating dozens of state, municipal and private buildings in Vermont’s capital city. Fueled by an innovative wood-chip fired boiler, the project is part of Vermont’s efforts to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable sources of energy. “It’s been a tremendous success,” Montpelier Mayor John Hollar said. “The real launch of the program started when the city received an $8 million stimulus grant in 2010. At that point, the project really began in earnest. It was constructed in 2013, operational in the fall of 2014.” When the US Department of Energy originally announced the funds, Sen. Bernie Sanders praised the project, stating “this district energy project will make Vermont more energy independent, lower greenhouse gas emissions and create local jobs.” The district heating plant is doing just that, as the project replaces approximately 300,000 gallons of oil that would have been burned each year to heat 19 state-owned buildings including the Pavilion Office Building, the Supreme Court and the State House. The project also heats Montpelier’s city hall, police and fire stations, an elementary school, municipal library, a federal building, the county courthouse and sheriff’s office, two churches and several private buildings. Montpelier’s heating plant is helping Vermont take strides toward reaching its ambitious statewide renewable energy goals. “Our department keeps track of and sets goals for energy use in Vermont, including renewable energy. One of our responsibilities is to produce the state’s Comprehensive Energy Plan,” said Asa Hopkins, who serves as the director of the Vermont Department of Public Service’s Planning and Energy Resources Division. That plan, Hopkins said, builds on the state's goal of getting 25 percent of our energy from renewable sources by 2025 to meet our heating, electricity and transportation needs. That goal increases to 40 percent renewable energy by 2035, and 90 percent by 2050. “That 2050 goal is among the most ambitious goals that any state in the nation has set,” Hopkins said. HEATING WITH RENEWABLES “When you’re thinking about how to get that renewable heat number up, one of the main things you can do is to use wood for heat. You can do wood on the individual house scale. You can get a pellet stove. You can get a pellet boiler. But where you have density -- like what you have in Montpelier with all the state office buildings, the businesses up and down State Street and Main Street -- there you can support a larger centralized biomass heating system that is that much more efficient and cleaner for everybody,” Hopkins said. “You don’t have individual buildings trying to support their own oil heat systems anymore. You have one renewable heat system that can work at scale and transform an entire downtown,” Hopkins said of systems like District Heat Montpelier. The Montpelier project was a collaborative effort between the city, which runs the distribution system to municipal buildings and private businesses in the downtown, and the state, which owns the heating plant and supplies heat to state government buildings. “This was a partnership with the state. We worked very closely. It was sometimes contentious, not easy to get there, because there were a lot of issues that we had to work out,” Hollar said. “But at the end of the day the state doubled the size of its plant … and built a state-of-the-art new system with about twice the capacity.” The unexpected drop in oil prices has changed some of the underlying cost-savings estimates, but the city is confident the wood-fired heating plant will continue to make economic sense over the long term. “The price is not as competitive with oil as many anticipated, but we knew that going into it,” Hollar said. ‘NET ZERO’ ENERGY GOAL The environmental benefits of District Heat Montpelier are undeniable. Hollar calls the environmental impact of moving away from oil “a big factor” in the decision to go forward with the biomass project. Instead of burning dirty fossil fuels, the project sustainably sources its wood chips from New England, including Vermont. “Montpelier has adopted a goal of becoming net zero -- having all of our energy supplied by renewable sources or offset by renewable sources by the year 2030. It’s a very ambitious goal,” Hollar said. “This is a very important component of that: having all of our core downtown area and all of our municipal buildings heated with renewable resources. So, this tied in very well and complements a significant priority for our city.” | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |