Welcome to the Business Journal Archives
Search for articles below, or continue to the all new BusinessJournalDaily.com now.
Search
Youngstown Thermal: It's Cool to Burn Wood Waste
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- The price of energy is key to redeveloping downtown Youngstown and the central heating and cooling system in place should advance its rebirth, Carl Avers says.
Avers, chairman and CEO of Youngstown Thermal LLC, which furnishes the heating and cool air to 75 buildings in the downtown, points to the experiences of other U.S. cities, large and small, that have rebounded because they could provide energy inexpensively.
Among them are Akron, Nashville, Tenn., Jamestown, N.Y., St. Paul, Minn., and Seattle.
“Youngstown Thermal saves [its customers] $5 million per year in fuel-only expenses,” Avers says, by using “green energy” instead of natural gas and his goal is to double his company’s business in five years and serve 100 buildings.
“We can make that $10 million [in annual savings] by employing wood and cogeneration,” he states. Cogeneration, also known as CHP, is the simultaneous production of heat and electricity.
Wood waste is a renewable fuel and Youngstown Thermal has a highly efficient process to extract the most energy from it.
Where 65% of the energy generated by the standard power plant is lost to “waste” heat, Youngstown Thermal has only 20% “waste” heat, 71% of its energy going to heating and/or cooling via its district energy system that includes six miles of underground pipe, and 9% to electricity.
Among the buildings served are Huntington Bank, Chase Bank, Home Savings and Loan Co., the Oh Wow! Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science, DeYor Center, 20 Federal Place, Ohio One and the Valley campus of Eastern Gateway Community College.
With Youngstown Thermal, its customers don’t need their own boilers, chiller units or cooling towers.
Youngtown Thermal provides the heating needs of the major buildings on the campus of Youngstown State University, says Bill Haas, its associate director of engineering, but the university has its own cooling system.
The Youngstown Thermal underground pipe system extends only a couple hundred feet into the southern border of YSU, Haas says. The university also has its own underground system.
YSU turned to Youngstown Thermal because “We lost staff and our equipment got old,” Haas says. “They’ve been our partner 15, 20 years. Our infrastructure is based on steam heat.”
Youngstown Thermal provides 100% of the heat Home Savings uses in its headquarters building but only 75% of the chilled-water cooling, says Steve Puhalla, Home Savings building and services manager.
The bank once had its own chilled-water plant but “mothballed” it, Puhalla says. As the bank grew in the 1980s, it had no space to install new boilers and Youngstown Thermal “gave us a competitive rate,” he recalls.
The bank installed “an elaborate computer control system,” Puhalla says, to regulate its consumption of heat and cool air that has “lowered our costs and saved on our demand from Ohio Edison.”
Since Youngstown Thermal acquired its plant at 205 North Ave. in 1979, it “has saved the Central Business District approximately $140 million in energy [expense],” Avers estimates.
“The St. Paul system is a model for Youngstown,” Avers says, in its use of wood waste as a fuel in the plants that heat and cool that city. “Seattle is wood-fired now.”
In 1980, the mayor of St. Paul installed a new $200 million district heating and cooling system to spur economic development in the Minnesota capital. That city continues to save $7 million a year by burning “a couple hundred thousand tons of wood waste fuel,” Avers says.
“In St. Paul,” he continues, “you will see a European-style heating-and-cooling system that’s an example for the rest of America.”
Not only is wood waste more economical than natural gas, petroleum and coal, the CEO points out, it’s more environmentally friendly. Burning wood waste, which accounts for somewhere between 2% and 5% of the energy needs of the United States, has the advantage of “being kind to the environment and the lowest-cost [fuel],” Avers says.
Jamestown, N.Y., removed its wood-waste based central heating and cooling system in the 1980s only to see the price of natural gas spike. “So they built a brand-new system in the 1990s,” Avers notes.
Visit the Youngstown Thermal plant and you’ll see mounds of wood waste outside next to a smaller hill of coal. (Coal doubled in price when China began importing coal from this country, Avers notes, and China has begun gasifying coal so it burns cleaner.)
Some of the waste remains just as it arrived from trucks Ohio Edison workmen drove there. They collected it by the removing the branches that grow between power lines. The other trimmings, in a mound about 100 feet distant, have been pulverized to the consistency of sawdust.
Within two years, the chairman of Youngstown Thermal sees the wood waste produced locally sent instead to Warren, Pa., where it will be converted to oil, brought back here and burned in the furnaces of the plant on North Avenue.
“The U.S. EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] believes wood waste is neutral or better than any other fuel,” Avers says. “When you put it into a landfill, it generates methane or carbon dioxide. So when you burn it, you’re better off.”
Compared to natural gas, which Avers calls “a premium fuel” despite the quantities extracted from the Marcellus and Utica shale plays, the price of waste wood/coal remained basically flat between 1975 and 2003 – just under a dollar to generate one million Btu to $2 – while gas skyrocketed from $1.50 per million Btu to $8.33.
Today the price of wood waste/coal is about $3.50 per million Btu compared to $9 per million Btu for gas.
When Youngstown Thermal bought the plant on North Avenue from Ohio Edison, the stacks “billowed black smoke,” Avers recalls.
Today, because of the flue-gas recirculation system Youngstown Thermal installed (under an agreement with the EPA), only the stacks are black. The smoke the furnaces produce is captured – you won’t see any emissions coming from the tall stacks – brought back within the system and reburned.
Avers says of himself, “I’m economist first and an engineer second,” meaning he analyzes problems to determine the engineering solution that offers the lowest price.
He earned his baccalaureate in mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Mich., and completed “mini-MBA” work offered San Diego Gas & Electric utility executives at Stanford University.
Asked why he studied engineering, Avers responds, “I like equipment, I guess.” He pauses. “I was influenced by a high school teacher who saw I liked creative solutions.”
In working for other utilities or as the owner of heating and cooling companies, Avers’ focus has been developing and installing the most energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and lowest-cost systems that produce electricity, heating and cooling.
At San Diego, where he worked 11 years, Avers worked directly for its chairman.
“We formed Applied Energy Inc., which I headed up and formed a network of power plants across San Diego that used very modern concepts,” he says. This included building a cogeneration power plant to serve the Navy and Marine Corps bases there.
“We achieved energy efficiency based on economies of scale. We saved them [the U.S. government] so much money,” he says matter-of-factly. “The cogeneration plant was three times as energy- efficient as the single-purpose power plants they replaced.”
His work was noticed inside the industry and from there “I was recruited to go to Nashville, Tenn., where Mayor Bev Briley was working to reverse” that city’s decaying downtown.
“Retail had moved out. Buildings were boarded up and he wanted to halt the migration. … He formed a metro government,” Avers says. “He rebuilt the downtown and his chief economic-development tool was [lower-cost] energy.” Briley’s premise was, “Cheap energy and cheap buildings would bring migration to a halt” and draw those who had left back,” Avers says.
Avers took the lessons he learned in Nashville to heart and thinks they apply to Youngstown.
“Today, Nashville is a vibrant city,” Avers says. “It just completed [building] a convention center.” The metropolitan government it established brought closer cooperation between the city and surrounding suburbs and municipalities. He implies that Youngstown and its suburbs could learn from that history, saying only that “more cooperation” would benefit this region.
Pictured: Carl Avers, CEO of Youngstown Thermal LLC, says wood waste is more economical than natural gas, petroleum and coal.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to our twice-monthly print edition and to our free daily email headlines.