Safety Problems for Biomass?

Nope. Poor planning, poor design, poor execution, greed, and human error.

I can slap together a dangerous LPG, natural gas or diesel boiler in a couple of weeks max.

With a few minutes and a couple of tools, I can turn any automobile into an explosion hazard.

Maybe it was just Karma. Mother nature hates stupid people. Even if they say they're green.

Huh................Looks like the Canadian government is just as dumb as their US counterparts when it comes to throwing money at unproven "green" schemes.

http://www.nexterra.ca/about/funding_partners.cfm

Not to leave the US out though................we still are part of the action.

http://www.nexterra.ca/industry/projects.cfm

Their slogan should be, "Maximizing Fund Raising Efforts By Wrapping Bullsh*t In A Green Wrapper".

I take it back. There is a danger...............it's called deforestation. The idiots realized, after these things were built, that there wasn't enough grass and trigs to fire them.

So let's summarize:

1) Company promises to provide heat and power generation with grass clippings and mulch.

2) US and Canadian governments give them taxpayer money.

3) After plants are built, it turns out they were wrong, so whole trees that could be used to build houses, etc. are utilized.

4) The whole trees are harvested, transported, and chipped, using conventional petroleum based fuel, (with a little taxpayer subsidized ethanol mixed in).

5) Over 100 years of technology has brought us full circle, (with government help), to burning trees for fuel.

Anyone still believe that the government can solve any problems?

Keep dreamin'

Yes, it's very interesting.........."politicans have good ideas..........they can't think of them, that's the trouble"..........to quote Max Miller (English comedian, long time gone)

It's all true. I read about this a year or two ago. A story from South Carolina.

I suppose it's to save face and not look like the idiots that they are, but they have been quietly harvesting entire trees down there to run these things................for a long time now.

My intention is to expose this stupidity whenever I can.

Every year I think my disgust with politicians can't get any worse, and every year, I'm wrong.

......or, I forgot this one.

It has been proven that over the centuries politicians have have not changed at all.

Here the the skeleton of a politician that was recently discovered at an archaeological dig believed to be dated around 300 BC

Good one!!!!

The first line of your first post said it all for me personally:-

Nope. Poor planning, poor design, poor execution, greed, and human error.

Only error was that "Human error" should have been in Bold and Underlined and then some!

Its designing out the possibility of human error that complicates things so much!!!

I remember years ago, when I used to occasionally write programs for various companies (as a side line only), the programs were easy to write, but ensuing that a user could not enter false data would increase the program size, sometimes quite a bit, slowing down operation slightly at the same time......

I had to take the opportunity to point out that this is yet another big green lie.

I'm sure these units work great on a small scale, like the one tcmtech has.

For them to have dumped millions into these large units, and now be harvesting whole trees to feed them when we have more than enough natural gas available for heating, is beyond farce.

Yep for a small scale personal use system its a cost effective and reliable heat source provided of course that you have an adequate supply of usable biomass that is nearly free to make it work.

Where I live we have an abundance of free wood from around the farm and surrounding area along with an endless supply of wood shipping pallets and crates I can get just for hauling them away. The down side is the physical volume of wood/biomass it takes to equal the equivalent BTU content of coal or natural gas.

A long winter for me can easily take the equivalent of around 1200 wood pallets of an average weight of 40 - 50 pounds apiece or roughly 25 - 30 tons! Now scale that up to the level of what average sized college or university complex would need for fuel volume and well... You are looking at an annual fuel volumes equivalent to literally trainloads of biomass.

Right. I heat my house with a wood stove. Works great, and only costs my labor.

Wood is free, and would otherwise go to the dump. I either catch tree guys when I'm driving around, and get them to happily dump the wood in my yard, or hit craigslist for free downed hardwood trees in people's yards and go get it.

Since they're cutting down live trees to feed this university boiler that exploded, they might as well bite the bullet, face the fact that they're idiots, and convert it over to natural gas.

As someone who has actually designed and built his own biomass fuel boiler, that has been in use for nearly 10 year now, I can say with reasonable certainty its not that hard but its not the same as making a normal natural gas or coal fired boiler system.

Burning anything takes knowledge of how stuff actually burns not theoretically burns and over complicating a design does not make it better.

Unless you are confused #4 supports #3. Capiche?

This is not so much a what problem as a who problem. Fuel is fuel and the safe and reliable handling of these is very well documented and, thankfully, safely executed on the whole. What happens is that when some inexperienced folk have reinvented the wheel and think it something special and unique they blunder on and produce installations that are in themselves a pile of biomass. "Green" fools mostly. (nothing wrong with green if it is based on sound engineering practices) Anything can be made to look economically attractive if the safety systems are omitted or maldesigned and boy scouts are entrusted with the implementation and operation. If you don't know then ask. It's that simple.

Our local college of MSU is trying its hand at replacing the old coal fired heat plant with a ground based heat pump system. Personally I have serious doubts about the realistic goals, practicality, and financial savings/offset, of said system.

According to the engineers who are designing it they don't expect to see much more than a 40 - 50 degree temperature drop in the soil mass the thermal wells are in. Thats fine but around here the main ground temps are only in the mid to upper 40's as is and pumping heat out of near 0 F ground to a suitable level the campuses existing hot water heat system works at which is around 180 - 200 degrees is not efficient at all.

Anyone know what the expansion rate of damp earth is when it frozen solid being I am expecting a rather permanent city block sized frost heave a few feet high to form where they placed the thermal wells.

Lastly there was no mention of how that thermal mass is going to recover its thermal energy in the short summer months so that it will have enough energy to go a second season. Air conditioning does not provide that much thermal returns around here in the summer months and my calculations estimate that a thermal solar panel system about 1/3 the size of the campus could be necessary.

Unless of course they could decide to build a coal fired heating plant to reheat the ground where the ground source heat pumps pulled all their heating energy from. That might work too.

The flame, pressure, and temperature safety controls for boilers are pretty well understood. Depending on whether you are burning oak chips, buffalo chips, potato chips, or recycled computer chips, there might be some acids involved that increase corrosion on the fire side. If these are suitably monitored, reasonable safety should still be attainable.

This is a good learning experience.

No matter how ignorant or downright stupid this overpriced, obviously poorly designed/operated system was, there will be plenty of taxpayer money available to pay someone to cut trees for it and fund the next folly.

And, you can bet that no one connected with this project will suffer any repercussions for their irresponsible actions.

Thanks for an interesting video. I have driven by there without realizing that this facility existed (or recognizing what it is).

Several communities near me (Ketchikan) are considering biomass boilers. I think they are meant more for district heating than electricity production, but this might vary.

The now defunct pulp mill here used to produce electricity from hog fuel, backing up the local utility when water was low in the hydropower lakes. Now, when water runs low, we have diesel generation with a substantial surcharge (more than double the usual hydro rate).