Upcoming Report on Best Practices for Stove Incentive Programs

The Alliance for Green Heat was awarded a grant by the University of Maryland Extension (UME) to analyze the Maryland wood and pellet stove rebate program and other state incentive programs and write a paper on “best practices” for stove incentive programs.  The paper would be presented at a conference, published as a UME fact sheet, presented on a UME webinar and posted on the websites for UME and the Alliance.  Key states we will look at include Maryland, Maine, New York, Oregon, Washington and Massachusetts.  The Alliance has worked previously with the University of Maryland Extension and produced a set of wood heating fact sheets.

Background: In the last two years, several states have initiated wood and pellet stove incentive programs and almost all of them have had to make adjustments after establishing requirements that did not work well.  While this is a normal part of the learning curve of establishing a program for any appliance or technology, the lessons learned are important for other programs. It is also partly because innovative stove incentive programs that try to focus on cleanest or most efficient stoves are new and there are not many examples to draw from.  Most states craft their own program and take elements from other states.  More states are now in the process of creating a program and could use a roadmap that lays out what worked well and what didn’t. 

Project Description

a.     We will contact existing programs to see if they have any data that they can release for us to analyze.  At a minimum, we will do a full analysis of data that Maryland can share.  In other states, we will at least ask for high level information and collect as much as possible from the internet.

b.     We will review public policy goals of each program, whether its primarily renewable energy production, smoke reduction, helping to provide affordable heat for rural residents or a combination of the three.  This will also involve interviews with the managers of those programs.

c.      We will review the standards and requirements of each program in terms of requiring professional installation and outside air, limiting eligibility of stoves by emissions and efficiency, limiting eligibility by location or income of home, etc. 

d.     We will try to establish average costs for the installation and/or removal of each wood stove, and match that with the benefits.

Why the Alliance?

This project taps into a core expertise of the Alliance for Green Heat.  We have relationships with the managers of numerous incentive programs and have provided advice and feedback to many of them. This report will also be partly an updated to a major report on stove incentives we did 3 years ago that was funded by US Forest Service’s Wood Education and Research Center. 

The budget for the project is $7,500 and the University of Maryland Extension Service grant covers a third of that. 

Wood Heat Symposium Challenges Policy Makers to Address Wood Heat’s Potential

This last Tuesday, Washington DC witnessed a rare event; a group of policy makers, industry officials and environmental organizations gathered to discuss the renewable energy contributions of everyday Americans using wood to heat their homes. The basics of this technology has been around for hundreds of years, but its modern form has yet to earn the same respect and attention flashier renewable energies such as wind or solar power receive. Wood heat provides 80% of residential renewable energy in America, solar PV 15% and geothermal only 5%, but wood heat has consistently been neglected by state and federal policy makers. On Tuesday, the Alliance for Green Heat’s Symposium, “Scaling up Residential Biomass Heating” helped to raise the profile of residential wood heat in Washington.

This symposium explored the opportunities for policy makers to maximize the potential of residential wood heat to reduce fossil fuel use in a tight fiscal climate, while minimizing its drawbacks. The eleven expert speakers covered the policy landscape, sustainability and emissions issues, state and federal case studies and results of a newly released study on wood heat incentives. The discussion was divided into two panels, the first, “Wood Heat in America: The People’s Renewable,” was a bright look at the scale and potential of wood heat in America, with Dave Atkins from the Forest Service outlining the ecological benefits of firewood harvest, John Ackerly of the Alliance for Green Heat presenting on how wood heat will continue to outplace solar, Jack Goldman of the Hearth Industry discussing how technological innovations are cleaning up wood smoke and Jon Strimling of American Biomass discussing how the country can further scale up wood heat. This panel was introduced by Edmund Gee of the USDA, and moderated by Lily Donge of the socially responsible investment group, Calvert Asset Management.

The second panel outlined various policy and incentive options for residential wood heat. The Alliance for Green Heat’s Tatiana Butler both moderated and discussed their newly released 130 page policy toolkit on Transforming Wood Heat in America. Scott Nichols of Tarm USA began the discussion by comparing the US’s progress on promoting wood heat as a valuable energy solution with the great advancements Europe has made. Steve Nadel from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy discussed how incentives can act to drive the market towards the most efficient appliances. Finally Chris Rice from the Maryland Energy Administration gave a real life example of how Maryland has tried to integrate wood heat into their renewable energy policies. Ed Cesa concluded the symposium with a discussion of the valuable educational work the Wood Education and Resource Center performs and finances.

Stakeholders who attended included representatives from the Forest Service, EPA, state energy offices, the EIA, environmental groups, non-profits, the Congressional Research Service and many wood heat related businesses. There was concern expressed over how we would know when the nation would hit the point of unsustainable harvest. While that point is far in the future, attendees felt it was important to consider when growing the use of woody biomass while other uses of it may grow quickly as well. Other discussion centered on how low-income families would be affected by tightening emission standards and the difficulties invasive species such as the Emerald Ash Bore, pose to the firewood industry.

The Alliance for Green Heat wishes to express its thanks to everyone who participated and contributed to a valuable and ongoing discussion, and especially to the Wood Education and Resource Center, and the Forest Service headquarters. For copies of the power point presentations, click here.

Salt Lake AGH Workshop

The Alliance for Green Heat (AGH) ran a round-table discussion/workshop on incentive programs at the 2011 HPBA Expo. The Alliance presented on the different types of incentive programs, the possible rational and goals behind many incentive programs and an example of the legislative process in Maryland. There were twenty-five people total in attendance and participants ranged from appliance manufacturers, retailers, fuel producers and suppliers to EPA officials and non-profits. The appliance industries represented included outdoor wood boilers, pellet stoves, masonry stoves, catalytic and non-cat wood stoves. While this group was only a small percentage of the industry, many of the participants represented large companies and/or had great depth of policy experience. The discussion provided excellent feedback for AGH’s incentive project and helped focus some of the key issues that need to be investigated.

Efficiency: The EPA will require reporting of actual efficiency numbers in the NSPS and there was a debate about whether there should be a minimum efficiency threshold required by EPA. A Task Force member spoke out strongly against focusing on how high efficiency numbers could go because in wood stoves, extremely high efficiency numbers means lots of problems with draft, condensation and creosote formation – issues that go to heart of safety and effective functioning of the stove. A lively debate ensued about whether wood stove owners care about efficiency and whether we should. Most participants seemed to think some focus on efficiency was important, but not as a way to incentivize the best stoves.

Change-outs (and rental units): A task force member emphasized that the public dollar is best spent on change-out programs, particularly focusing on low-income households. He praised the Idaho tax deduction program for requiring an older stove to be recycled for the deduction. He also suggested that incentive programs should focus on renters more often as they are a huge source of residential wood stove home heating (often using an un-certified stove due to financial constraints).

LIHEAP Benefits: A task force member explained that wood stoves for home heat actually help low-income families stay off of government assistance programs such as LIHEAP, which allows the LIHEAP dollars to stretch further.

Lower Emission Limits for Incentive Programs: One of the liveliest discussions was around the pending Maryland biomass stove incentive bill that sets emissions standard for wood stoves at 3g/hr and pellet stoves at 1.5 g/hr. Participants cited the new Rick Kurkeet study showing the margin of error for EPA studies could range from 2.5g/h - 6.5g/hr, so putting the requirements lower than the EPA standard is arbitrary and will not necessarily incentivize cleaner stoves. A counter point is that stricter standards are inherent in virtually all incentive programs and often form the core rationale for them, and that popularizing the idea that wood stove emission tests are unreliable may be counterproductive with incentive program managers.

Wood vs. Pellets

Wood stoves should always be an option for people in incentive programs. The fact is people won’t want the expense and trouble of pellet stoves and will instead prefer to stick to their old and possibly dirty stoves rather than use the incentive to buy a pellet stove. However, pellets, not cordwood, are likely to be the future of biomass heat in this country. Many people are too lazy to stick with cordwood. Ideally in the future pellet heat will be as easy as oil. Wood stoves equal operator error, and no matter how clean they are regulated to be, people will always be able to burn them dirty. Are there other creative ways that incentive programs can address this?

Replacement on sale of Home

The Oregon law requiring old stoves to be replaced upon sale of property is a great law and bundles the cost of replacing an old stove into the purchase price of the home. This should be a federal program. The NSPS cannot accomplish this, and Congress unlikely to do it, so it may be left to states. Some in Washington State are considering it. Oregon achieved it by having local jurisdictions do it first, creating an incentive for consistency state-wide.

Replacement Parts

Since old stoves in the market are the main source of our air quality issues, perhaps regulations could focus on eliminating the market for parts for non-compliant stoves, so when old stoves break, they are forced out of use. Europe places a ‘born on’ date on all of their wood stoves, this makes it easy to phase out/in stoves when they are outdated or too polluting. France had an excellent change-out program.

Other Points

· 25c was not that effective since people used it to replace broken things they were already planning on replacing and did not spur people to buy energy efficiency things they weren’t already considering. There were few water heater change-outs, for example.

· Some incentive programs, like that in Montana, had a hard time giving away new stoves since people only wanted to keep their old stove. “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

· One way to sell incentive programs in the future to consumers might be to highlight savings in time and money, rather than health and abstract efficiency concepts.