The ‘Bigger Picture’ Of UNBC’s Bioenergy Plant
By: Michelle Cyr-Whiting
Opinion250.com
Prince George, B.C. - The new bioenergy plant at UNBC will serve a larger purpose than to just reduce the university’s carbon footprint – the technology has very real implications for whole communities…
On a busy day, the campus can swell to 5,000 people. UNBC’s Assistant Director of Facilities, Doug Carter, points out that’s a Mackenzie or a Chetwynd. He says the ground-breaking thermal heating system will act as a model for small communities.
Carter says the university’s enhanced forestry lab has been running on wood biomass pellets for almost two years and that data has its own implications. “We probably have enough capacity in that little system to heat a community centre, school or something like that.”
“(The bioenergy plant) system is sending down to a central plant which is heating one-million square feet of buildings – and we’re talking labs, offices, and everything – and this is a template for a small city, a distributed energy system.”
