Wood Heat in VT Schools Residential Wood Heating Personnel: Staff

Wood is a vital energy resource in Vermont, and it’s renewable. In fact, the most recent inventory of the state’s forests showed that our forests are growing twice as much wood as is harvested annually!

Many of the state’s households burn wood as their primary fuel and wood-using industries in Vermont have long used wood for space heating and drying lumber. Vermont also has two commercial electric generating stations and several industrial sized heating plants using wood chips because of their ease of operating control, lower fuel cost, and manageability. Wood chips are used to heat twenty-five public schools around the state, two state office complexes and seven other state facilities.

Forest managers, landowners and the forest products industry have come to realize that increasing the amount of wood used for energy can help attain forest management goals, now and into the future. The expanded use of wood for energy has increased the opportunity to utilize low quality trees.

Wood also provides one of the State’s most significant current and potential sources of renewable energy. Governor James Douglas has identified the use of renewable energy, including biomass energy, as part of his strategy to ensure a reliable, affordable energy supply for Vermont in the 21st Century.

The use of wood fuel helps to reduce our dependence on imported oil, while providing an economic benefit in our rural communities and reducing the State’s greenhouse gas emissions. Because the release of CO2 from the combustion of wood is roughly equivalent to the CO2 sequestered or stored by the growing trees, it is considered “carbon neutral”, and when used to displace the use of fossil fuels, reduces the release of greenhouse gasses.

Please check out all of the Wood Energy Pages to learn more about the use of wood for heating and electric generation, and learn how you and your community can benefit from this native energy source.