Atlantic Forestry July 2022

A conceptual drawing of the district heating network proposed for New Glasgow, N.S., straddling the East River of Pictou, just north of the Trans-Canada Highway.

Wood heat for the whole town
Feasibility study to assess proposed network in New Glasgow

Pat Wiggin, executive director with the Federation of Nova Scotia Woodlot Owners, is pretty excited about the prospect of a wood-fired district heating system for the community of New Glasgow, in Pictou County. The federation is one of the partners in a year-long feasibility study that has just received $515,000 in federal funding. The lead player is TorchLight Bioresources, a consultancy that has extensive experience in this field, based in Mahone Bay, N.S. The other partners are Rathco ENG, an engineering firm based in Guelph, Ont.; ACFOR, a New Brunswick forest management company that specializes in wood heat; and the Town of New Glasgow.

According to Wiggin, Dr. Jamie Stephen, managing director of TorchLight, brings considerable expertise and credibility to the project. The two got a positive reception when they made their pitch to the New Glasgow town council. “It was a unanimous vote to try to get funding for the feasibility study, with the intention of moving forward and getting infrastructure dollars from the government to actually do it if it proves feasible,” says Wiggin.

The project would involve installing a network of underground pipes to distribute hot-water heat to more than 90 percent of the buildings in the community. This type of system – with a sophisticated wood-chip boiler at a centralized plant, and heat metering technology in individual buildings – is common in parts of Europe, under various ownership and management structures. The study will examine the relative merits of ownership by the municipality or by a community cooperative.

New Glasgow is seen as a good fit for a Nova Scotia pilot. “There’s the fact that it’s a damaged community, as a result of the mill going down,” says Wiggin, adding that the town’s high population density is also a factor. “There is a lot of commercial expansion that’s happening in New Glasgow right now, and while the roads are dug up and being built, we might as well put pipes in them.”

The proposal is focused on heating, because electricity is “a bit of a legislative nightmare,” says Wiggin, though he points out that a well-designed co-generation system could provide both. “You actually end up having a combined heat and power plant that operates in the high 90s, in terms of efficiency, whereas somewhere like Port Hawkesbury Paper is somewhere down in the high 20s, and a place like Tufts Cove in Dartmouth is probably about 33 percent energy efficient.”

The feasibility study will, however, examine the technical and economic viability of incorporating wind energy to power an industrial-scale heat pump as a secondary heat source, with any surplus electricity being sold onto the grid.

Initially the proponents reached out to the Nova Scotia government, but it became clear the province did not have much appetite for countering negative public perceptions of biomass energy. “I think it’s just a PR nightmare,” says Wiggin. “Shamefully, it’s gotten in the way of a lot of solutions that the province could have, especially for where we can put our low-grade wood fibre. We no longer have to ship it overseas, while that ship passes an oil tanker coming our way to bring our energy to us.”

The study is tied in with a social research project at Dalhousie University, aimed at better understanding public attitudes toward forestry and wood energy. “Everybody wants to decarbonize, everybody wants more stable energy markets, and we just need to be able to educate people, as best we can, to try and make this happen here,” Wiggin says. “We do have a kind of not-in-our-backyard mentality, in terms of how our energy is sourced.”

Wood supply for the district heating system would comprise low-grade fibre derived from ecological forestry treatments, and this is where the federation would have a key role. “A lot of our responsibility would be in landowner engagement and building the capacity from a member base, in terms of fuel supply. I don’t really care how the pipes go into the ground; my issue has more to do with the process by which we acquire wood chips,” Wiggin says. “We would have in-forest demonstrations on various active sites where we’re practising stand improvement on an FSC-certified woodlot.”

FSC certification is far from perfect, but it could provide “a really good baseline of practice standards,” says Wiggin. “Then we can take it one step further, with making sure that the types of trees and the amounts of trees that are being removed is up to our standard. And that’s what ACFOR has also brought in, because they have been actively feeding and supplying boilers with wood chips for a while now, and their management – what they do in the forest – is great.… It’s a lovely, delicate touch they have, even though there are nine-tonne machines stomping around in there. It’s incredible. They are fairly small-scale, but to be that vertically integrated, in terms of providing energy and jobs – heating communities and connecting communities – it’s really cool, what they’ve done.”

The proponents estimate that annual fuel demand for the heating plant would be in the range of 50,000-100,000 tonnes – which is readily available within a 100-kilometre radius, and fairly modest in comparison to the amount of fibre consumed by Northern Pulp, which exceeded one million tonnes annually.

If the project moves forward, as much as 76 percent of the capital cost could be covered by green infrastructure funding from the federal government, Wiggin says. That would leave relatively small portions to be chipped in by the province, and from another source such as a private partner or a pension fund. With today’s high energy costs and geopolitical instability, he believes there will be strong support.

“With prices the way they are right now, I can’t even imagine somebody filling an oil tank for double the price that they did last year, and trying to make ends meet, when they could just be getting a monthly heat bill, the same as an internet bill, that’s more controlled and more affordable and less volatile.” DL