HomeMy WebLinkAboutKenny Lake School Wood Boiler Project Summary 2009Kenny Lake School Installs KOB Pellet Boiler
With funding through Alaska Energy Authority’s Renewable Energy Fund, the Coper River School District
designed and constructed a pellet boiler to heat the Kenny Lake School. This system is anticipated to
displace approximately 16,600 gallons out of a total of 18,000- gallons of heating fuel using 125 tons of
pellets.
The total cost of the project was $807,972. The design was funded in Round 2 of the Renewable Energy
Fund for $159,688. Construction was funded in Round 4 for $648,284. CE2 was the design engineer and
Alaska Energy Authority managed the construction.
In 2009, the community was paying $3.07/gallon for fuel oil, down from $4.50/gallon in 2008. The
system became operation in late 2014, so the actual economics of the system will be calculated after the
system has been operational for a year.
The original shipment of pellets was trucked from Superior Pellets Fuels in North Pole, Alaska at a cost of
$345/ton. The auger feed in the pellet silo failed soon after start-up, requiring removal of
approximately 20 tons of the pellets from the silo. The failure was caused by a frozen wedge that
developed at the interface between the silo and the concrete support slab that interfered with the
auger. To access the auger, the pellets had to be removed. Because of the logistics associated with
getting equipment to remove and replace the pellets, repair took approximately 6 months to complete.
So the pellet boiler does not have many operational hours. Additionally, the significant decline in diesel
fuel prices have made the economics for this pellet boiler marginal. The school district is planning to use
fuel oil for the 2015/2016 heating season but will switch back to pellets as soon as the economics adjust.
The boiler is a KOB Pellet Boiler sold by Fink Machinery in British Columbia with a capacity of 1,500,000
Btu/hour. Fink Machinery provided a complete heat module that includes the boiler, thermal storage
tank, heat exchanger and system controls, basically a plug-n-play system, for approximately $400,000
delivered to Kenny Lake. The capacity of the insulated thermal storage tank is 880 gallons. Fink
Machinery has provided excellent support throughout the project from construction to the start-up and
commissioning. Burkhard Fink has made himself available to the school district for operational advice
and troubleshooting of the boiler (including participating in the fix of the auger). The entire project team
has been very happy with the support he has provided.