May 20, 2008 5:19 am US/Mountain
Ritter Shovels Symbolic Last Coal At School Boiler
OAK CREEK, Colo. (CBS4) ―
Gov. Bill Ritter made a special trip to a remote part of Colorado just outside of Steamboat Springs Monday to celebrate a school district transitioning from antiquated, coal-fired boilers to a modern, green system for heating.
The Soroco Middle and High Schools were receiving heat from those furnaces, which were installed in 1971 but were a 1950's design. They burned coal to produce heat for the schools, and often, on bad days, the soot in the air would be so bad it would coat parts of the school with a film and make visibility poor. Some students said it was even hard to breathe on those days.
The Governor's Energy Office is donating the equipment to set up a woody biomass heating system to heat the middle school that would use pellets from trees killed by pine beetles for fuel.
A silo will stand outside the high school and feed the new heating system, saving the school about $15,000 in energy costs each year.
The governor's office also helped the South Routt School District hire the McKinstry company as a private contractor, and it's donating the labor to install the system.
The Colorado Department of Local Affairs is providing $625,000 and the Colorado Department of Education is providing $1.5 million toward the overall "green" project which will cost $4.1 million. The project also includes energy efficient projects within the schools, such as switching out old lighting, and a geo-exchange heating system that will be used for the high school and elementary school.
"South Routt will be the first school district to use woody biomass pellets for heating," said Ritter. "This will support Colorado's new pellet industry and our efforts to create healthier forests and handle the beetle kill. Those pellets will be made in nearby Kremmling [Confluence Energy's new plant], further developing our New Energy Economy and increasing the number of jobs in rural communities."
By switching to a biomass system, 977 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions will be taken out of the air each year. The school district is one of the last in the state to use coal for heating. The community is a historic coal mining community, and one of the largest coal mines in the United States is just down the road — so it was only natural that it used this method of heating.
The new heating systems will be online by the fall semester.
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