Oil Company gets Stimulus Fund for Replacing Oil Boilers with Wood Pellets Boilers
OkoFEN delivers boilers for big Massachusetts Federal Funding Project
With help from $3.2 million in federal stimulus funding, high-efficiency wood-pellet boilers will be installed at Greenfield Community College, the Greenfield Fire Station, Stoneleigh-Burnham School and five other locations in Massachusetts, giving the Sandri Companies a foothold to enter the wood-pellet distribution business.
The award to the 80-year-old Greenfield business, whose name has long been synonymous with oil heat, will also help it become a full-scale distributor of bulk and bagged wood pellets for customers, including residential ones.
“This is very exciting,” said Tim Van Epps, company president, who added that Sandri will also install a wood-pellet boiler at Linden Hill School in Northfield. “We will leverage our 80 years of experience in the energy and fuel business to guarantee a seamless translation of our expertise into the successful distribution and service of renewable energy products and conservation services.”
In selecting Sandri, Massachusetts energy officials were convinced the company had the wherewithal and infrastructure “to make a go of it’’ and bring wood pellet technology to a wider audience, said Dwayne Breger, who runs the renewable energy division at the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources.
For homeowners, Sandri is using the stimulus funds to develop a pilot project that will offer 250 energy audits, weatherize 75 homes, and install 25 pellet boiler systems — plus $5,000 in rebates toward the purchase of ultra-low-emission pellet boilers. “They are far more efficient than anything we would replace,’’ said Laurence “Jake’’ Goodyear, vice president of Sandri’s newly formed renewable energy division.
Sandri already installed a 25-ton pellet silo and a pellet boiler to fire the hot water it uses to wash its 60 fuel delivery trucks
OkoFEN entered the US market in summer 2009 with the intention of bringing fully automatic and convenient European pellet heating technology to North America.
The well proven systems (over 30 000 installations in Europe) are produced under license in the US and marketed by Maine Energy Systems under the AutoPellet name. Due to its strong efforts in the US OkoFEN is the first European producer of high-efficiency pellet boilers offering fully certified and ASME stamped boilers in North America. Several systems have already been installed last winter and about 80 installers throughout New England have been trained to the OkoFEN technology at several one and a half day training sessions in Maine.
"This project could be a good start for pellet heating in Massachusets. The technicians at Sandri are very well trained and, most of all, motivated to make the conversion to wood pellets." says Herbert Ortner, founder and CEO of OkoFEN, who held most of the training sessions in Maine.
Typical OkoFEN pellet boiler installation in New Hampshire, 191,000 BTU/hr (56 kW) system
See the article about the Federal Funding Project in the Boston Globe >>more
More information about the ÖkoFEN products >>more
More information about Maine Energy Systems >>more
More information about Sandri >>more
