EESI Supports the Wood Stove Decathlon

EESI has joined in support of the Wood Stove Decathlon, sponsored by the Alliance for Green Heat. This wood stove design competition seeks to advance the state-of-the-art, promoting design innovation, emissions reduction, energy efficiency, affordability, and consumer friendliness. Increasing the use of cleaner, more efficient, and more affordable wood stoves can be a win-win for helping households struggling with high winter heating bills, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, and advancing local energy and economic security.

In 2013, the Alliance for Green Heat, Popular Mechanics , and several other businesses and organizations are sponsoring the Wood Stove Decathlon . The competition will culminate in an event this November on the Mall in Washington, DC, at which competing stove designs will be judged for innovation, emissions, efficiency, affordability, and consumer friendliness. Prizes will be awarded.

Households across rural America depend disproportionately on the most expensive and climate-polluting sources of energy for space heating – heating oil, electricity and propane. They often pay a higher portion of their generally lower incomes for heating than urban households served by the fossil natural gas grid, and these sources of heat also release more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than fossil natural gas or renewable energy sources.

According to data from the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Short-Term Energy Outlook January 2013 :

• In the Northeast and Midwest regions, about 6.3 million households depend on heating oil for space heating, about 8.1 million on electricity, and about 2.9 million on propane.
• The average household using heating oil consumed about 560 gallons in 2011-12 and spent about $2,089 for the heating season. The average household using propane consumed 706 gallons in the Northeast and 699 gallons in the Midwest and spent $2,386 and $1,538, respectively. The average household using electric heat consumed 8,083 kilowatt hours (kwh) in the Northeast and 9,327 kwh in the Midwest, spending $1,248 and $1,030, respectively. By comparison, households on the natural gas grid spent $835 for the heating season on average in the Northeast and $619 in the Midwest.

Based upon this data, and applying GHG emissions factors for these fuel types, we compute that GHG emissions associated with the use of heating oil in the Northeast and Midwest totaled about 40 million U.S. tons of CO2 in the 2011-12 heating season. GHG emissions associated with propane use were about 13 million tons. GHG emissions from electric heat depend on the proportions of coal and natural gas that are used to generate power. If the national average fuel mix for electric power production is applied, GHG emissions from electric heating in these regions were about 44 million tons.

The EIA also reports that about 1.2 million households in the Northeast and Midwest rely on renewable wood as their primary source of heat. In addition, many more households use renewable wood as a secondary source of heat.

Wood heat constitutes the largest source of residential renewable energy in use in the U.S. today, and, because it is relatively cheap and locally available, it is the most affordable source of renewable energy for many low and middle income households. Per unit of energy, locally-sourced wood heat is generally less expensive than imported heating oil, propane or electric heat. Yet most wood stoves and boilers used across rural America today (about 75%) are old, relatively inefficient and polluting – consuming more wood than is necessary and harming local air quality. To help turn this around, we at EESI seek to develop policies at the state and federal level that would encourage replacing oil, propane, and electric heating systems and old wood burning stoves and boilers in rural areas with high-efficiency, low-emission, advanced biomass stoves, boilers, and furnaces that use locally-sourced, sustainably-produced, renewable wood and other biomass fuels.

Advanced wood combustion systems are up to 90 percent energy efficient (based on lower heating value (LHV)), a significant improvement over older wood burning systems, and they emit far less air pollution than older wood stoves and boilers. With improved fuel efficiency, less biomass fuel is needed for space heating per household. Sustainably-produced biomass is 100 percent renewable, and thus, using it instead of heating oil, propane and coal-fired electric heat can significantly reduce GHG emissions. Costs and emissions can be reduced even further when combined with home weatherization.

In addition, locally-sourced, renewable biomass improves energy security for households and communities when it displaces heating oil and propane, the price of which can be quite volatile due to global supply and demand trends and world events. Finally, locally-sourced wood heat can recycle energy dollars within communities (rather than exporting energy dollars to import fossil energy) and so can stimulate local economic development and job creation.

Stay tuned for more information as the year progresses.