BTEC is asking for your help to identify biomass energy installations that serve cooling, process heat and district heating needs.
One of the biggest challenges that our industry faces is that wood energy is not considered a mainstream thermal resource in the engineering, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and building performance standard community. BTEC has been trying to address that need by building relationships with ASHRAE, AHRI, US Green Building Council and US Department of Energy Better Buildings Alliance.
In fact, while many in the engineering community have never been trained or exposed to wood as a viable thermal resource for space heating, even fewer recognize the application to serve cooling, process heat and district heating needs.
BTEC needs your help! As your trade association, we plan to develop a number of case studies to demonstrate successful applications in these markets and are asking for our membership to help identify sites that we may write up as case studies and/or examples. Whether the fuel source is wood chips, pellets, forest products residuals or even cord wood, we intend to use these case studies to penetrate the thermal market beyond the forest products industry and into other commercial and institutional applications. In addition, we hope to help develop markets outside the northern tier states particularly in the South with cooling applications.
The case studies would be developed into talks for use in industry meetings, posted on the BTEC website, and shared extensively in social media. Your help in identifying potential installations for write ups would be of great assistance. In addition, BTEC seeks to secure additional funding to produce a video on the cooling, process heat and district heating applications for wider audience distribution and impact.
Please contact David Bancroft at dbancroft@biomassthermal.org or 202-596-3974, ext. 304.