Any feedback on district heating / chauffage à distance with pellets?

Accomodation, House and Garden
1
Our commune is planning to invest in a district heating solution next year.

The burner will run on wood pellets, exclusively sourced from CH.

We have an individual oil (mazout) burner right now and would very much like to replace it with something cleaner and sustainable.

We are ready to make the significative investment in the installation and connection to the pipe network. But I find the yearly running cost premium financially very difficult to justify. During the last 12 months, pellet prices went through the roof (doubled), and the contract proposal has a yearly running cost which is about 70% higher than the yearly running cost of the oil burner. I was trying to compare apples to apples, so the oil burner includes maintenance cost and oil price when the price of oil was almost the highest during this year.

Is there someone here who is on district heating with pellets? What is your experience with it?

Pros:

- carbon neutral heating, sourced locally

- no maintenance

- there are some subsidies for the initial investment

- we live in the old part of the village and neither heat pumps nor solar panels are allowed, currently. (Of course, legislation can change and technology changes.)

- heating oil might be outlawed in 10 - 20 years

- frees up some space in the cellar where the tanks are stored

Cons:

- chf 2’500 /year higher running cost compared to mazout (at current pellets prices)

- long term contract, 10 years

- potential further increase of pellets prices (apparently pellets are victims of their own success)

- pellets are actually not as “green” and carbon neutral as the pellets industry presents them. Yes they are better than oil, but certainly not clean.

- I am also questioning if pellets are sustainable source as their popularity is increasing. This seems a bit like greenwashing, and it will likely change.

All in all, ready to make an investment for a cleaner and more sustainable energy source, but I find the huge monthly running expense increase ridiculous. And this increase is substantial for our household budget.

The feedback from the community is appreciated.

Thanks!

2
We are in a village of about 1000 people in Vaud. We are not on the CAD; however, many of our village friends are. It runs on local wood chips (we have a large forest on the commune), but it's a complete disaster. Only works half the time. You can live without heat a day or two but when the CAD goes down people also find themselves without hot water, which is much more bothersome. We've spent most of the month of December at apéros for the village advent windows, and it's all everyone talks about. The general consensus is that too many homes hooked up to it (apparently 100 homes?) and the CAD just can't keep up. We actually have an "emergency" mobile burner in the village at the moment (who knew such a thing existed?) which makes an incredible amount of noise. Perhaps it's just us though?

I also wonder about the impact on air quality in the village. We lived in Montreal for a number of years before moving to Switzerland, and Montreal has since imposed a wood-burning ban for air quality reasons. The CAD spews out an awful lot of smoke right in the centre of the village, and I'm left wondering about the consequences on the health of the CAD neighbours (which includes the village school) and the village as a whole.

3
Are pellets really that much more ecological ?

4
@Huba, can the district heating plant can work with other fuel type in case of emergency? That would be a more important issue above money.

Indeed, Burning wood produces particulate matter (PM10 & PM2.5). However, installations like this usually have technology to reduce emissions. So, be careful when talking to neighbors. If the plant has a PM10 reduction tech, the talk about air quality won't end well.

To a certain degree, nothing's perfect. But their supply is less compromised by wars.

5

Basically not. Perhaps a bit less CO2 than oil but not that much given the amount of diesel burnt to extract and transport the wood and the rest is only neutral over a 40 to 50 year timespan which is way too long to be of benefit.

The short-term effect of wood burning is basically as bad as coal.
https://energynews.us/2019/12/02/woo…arbon-neutral/
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/10/10544…be-critics-say

For air quality wood burning is basically a disaster unless there are seriously good filters in the chimney, some of the places in Switzerland with the worst air quality (particulates) in winter are those villages with a large amount of wood heating.

6

I always found Swiss reliance on wood heading very odd. I do love our fireplace, but clearly not great from an environmental and air quality perspective.

7

You seen the amount of trees they got and the lack of oil or gas rigs ?

8
In the UK and elsewhere people have finally woken up to the fact that burning wood pellets is not environmentally friendly, nor is it carbon neutral. Also to be taken into consideration is the collecting and transport of the wood, then manufacturing and transport of the pellets.

Also to consider with a centrally distributed heating system, is that in late spring evenings when it can be very cold, and as the Mayor sits in his nice warm oil fired home, he may not find it necessary to warm up the rest of the village, leaving everyone shivering.

Having said that I think we warm homes and offices much to much in Switzerland (and Europe) and cold showers, though taking a day or two to get used to, are not a real hardship and the saving on energy and water is tremendous. Billions of people in Africa and Asia do not have that luxury and all somehow seem to survive!

9

I agree, but why invest so much in "technology" (practically wood burning) when we all need to reduce our carbon footprint. The pellets are green-washing to me and we are being brainwashed by the Swiss wood lobby t burn them. I understand that the historic center of the village can't install noisy heat pumps due to the close proximity of houses, but I am having a hard time accepting that there are no better technological solutions than wood burning.

Solar tiles (heritage style) might be part of the solution, but they are too expensive for the moment and as I understand there is a lot of red tape from the canton to install solar on historical buildings.

10

I cant get past the OP statement of burning wood pellets as “carbon neutral” - it defies logic. just becasue there is a carbon cycle in nature doesnt mean releasing carbon has no impact. thats a distortion.

Putting it in the same carbon neutral category as solar, wind, hydro - how? They overall have far fewer negative environmental impacts or emissions. And are cheaper. I simply cant fathom putting them in the same category.

So you can see the misleading logic at play, here is an extract from an article about 10% of UK energy production being from pellets from newly felled trees from US forrests, shipped across the Atlantic in ships that run on fuel oil mazut (a polluting feul) to get there:
Over the roar of the logging, Bob Abt, a forest economist at North Carolina State University (NC State) in Raleigh, explains why this trans-Atlantic trade in wood pellets is booming: a push by policymakers, industry groups, and some scientists to make burning more wood for electricity a strategy for curbing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Unlike coal or natural gas, they argue, wood is a low-carbon fuel. The carbon released when trees are cut down and burned is taken up again when new trees grow in their place, limiting its impact on climate.

The idea is attractively simple, says Abt, a member of an expert panel that is studying the concept for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “Another tree will grow here and sequester carbon again. So we’re just recycling carbon.” (emphasis added) source https://www.science.org/content/arti…ts-are-divided

or, I would say, simply deception and double speak. It defies logic. “burning more wood … for curbing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions” . The kind of scientist that says its neutral is like the kind of banker saying spend on your credit card and just make the minimum monthly repayments and in 30 years everything will be fine. A debt accumulates in both scenarios. and it might not ever get paid.

Consider this comparison:

a. leave the forest alone to store carbon and keep planting trees to increase the rate of carbon sequestration, and choose non carbon based methods of energy generation. result. No immediate emissions due to the feul used. net negative carbon emissions. Some emisions form building the tech/machinery for generation and transmission.

b. cut down a portion of a forest, ship it, burn it. immediate emissions of carbon and other pullution. even if you replant the area felled, there is a lag of decades before all the carbon is re-captured, and the remaining pollution is never ‘caught’. Optimistically you have a 30 year lag if you use the fastest growing Eucalyptus trees. Take this conceopt to giant scale and the CO2 levels and pollution, and envionmental degradation and reduction on biodiversity from this ‘carbon neutral’ strategy would be terrible.

I might have a few details wrong but this is not clean or carbon neutral energy, and is commercially inspired creativity/dishonesty. Not sound logic.

Bob Abt, cant be credible in both roles of selling the forest and being a credible source on how burning it is good for our atmopshere. Not apt!

11
If I remember well, pellets are made from the "waste" of other industries: lumber, construction, furniture, food, etc. So, trees are cut anyway for other purpose and if the materials are not pressed into pellets they would end up in compost or landfill.

12
Fully agree with you. This is exactly what I can’ reconcile - why is Switzerland still promoting pellets as “renewable” energy and why there is not more chalenge to the wood lobby from environmental groups, so the confederation and the cantons would advise against pellets for large projects. In isolated cases, they might make sense, but apparently pellets demand is thru the roof in Switzerland.

There are hardly any debate about pellets or articles against them in the Swiss press challenging the pellets burning lobby. I don’t understand why is this still under the radar in CH.

13

It used to be like you describe it. But things changed as many countries jumped on the trend because it was/is the easiest way to meet their CO2 reduction targets +EU subsidies have distorted the pellets market.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazi…olitics-477620

14
CH is neither North America nor the UK.

The amount of wood contained in a forest is pretty stable, and the CO2 with it. What you're ignoring is the fact that a tree that's not felled will die and rot, which also releases its CO2 back into the athmosphere.

15
Interesting. Felling the tree only to make pellets to export it to other country is far from optimal, and looks a lot like greenwashing.

But, if it's only a small village, local sources are enough to fuel the plant. What Urs Max said.

16
And I believe that recycled wood makes for a very small percentage (less than 1%) of the pellets. Again, it has to be collected, processed (taking out metal screws etc) and transported to a pellet manufacturer.