SITKA, ALASKA
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}
Brackley has done an informal analysis of heating demand in Sitka. He said the community couldn’t support a local biomass plant, even if every home and business got a pellet stove.
“If you’re in the business of harvesting wood, those volumes are so small that you wouldn’t have any economy of scale. It hardly justifies going out and buying the equipment it takes to cut wood in a lot of areas of the country. But in Alaska, if you look at the whole cost, there isn’t enough volume there to get to any economy of scale – any ability to make a profit.”
Brackley, a Ph.D. who has been a forest researcher and economist for most of his career, has calculated that it would take 14,500 tons of pellets to meet residential and commercial heating demand in Sitka – a fraction of the 130,000 ton capacity of a typical pellet plant.
But, factoring in transportation costs of pellets that would have to be brought to Sitka, Brackley says biomass is competitive with oil heat and, surprisingly, the town’s relatively inexpensive hydro-electric power.
“The cost of pellets that I personally pay, a million BTUs is costing me $25.76. If I use fuel oil at $3.25 it would be $30.19. There’s a modest reduction in cost, about 14-percent. The payback on a pellet stove, if you have to pay the retail prices here in Sitka, is about seven or eight years to replace it.”
Brackley measures the cost of heat in millions of BTUs. He said the cost of a million BTUs of electric heat in Sitka is around $34.
Brackley noted that the least expensive, widely available heating source in the state was natural gas – but only in the city of Anchorage. Customers there pay just over $11 per million BTUs.
Brackley told the chamber that he has both a pellet stove and a woodstove in his 1,500 square foot home. He’s calculated the cost for cordwood heat $2-3 per million BTUs, far below gas, fuel oil, electric, or wood pellets. But he says his calculation does not include the work and inconvenience in handling cordwood, the smoke, storage requirements, and the overall lack of supply.
Brackley said the production of wood fuel pellets currently was cost-effective primarily as a by-product of the timber industry. He said it was straightforward for existing forest product industries to expand to include pellet production, through the use of sawmill waste and logging slash – material which is now scarce in the region.
“If you look at Southeast Alaska, one of the difficult things about this is we don’t have any forest industry left. We have a couple of mills, one of which down in Ketchikan hasn’t operated for the last year, and a bunch of small mills. If you look at the residual from those mills, and the figures that we’ve got, there just isn’t the material to meet the needs of Southeast Alaska.”
Still, Brackley was not dismissive of biomass. He reminded the chamber that the Coast Guard was moving ahead with a plan to convert its Southeast facilities to biomass, even it is barged in. He anticipated that, with the rising cost of fuel oil, biomass production would eventually happen in Southeast, probably with smaller plants in the southern part of the forest. But he also pointed out that Sitka’s was one of the largest ranger districts on the forest, with over 61,000 acres of second growth timber. If biomass activity does take place in the area, Brackley told the chamber that “Most will be happening in second-growth.”
© Copyright 1970, Raven Radio Foundation Inc.
