by Alex Brooks
At the January 19 School Board meeting, Hoosick Falls Central School District Superintendent Ken Facin said the wood pellet boiler that was installed in the summer of 2014 with great hopes of reducing and stabilizing the District’s heating costs will be removed in April, and all of the District’s financial commitments to pay for it will be reversed.[private]
The District has no cash invested in the pellet boiler system. The agreement with Bioenergy Project Partners, the firm that designed and installed it, was a power performance agreement, which was to pay the cost of installation through fuel savings. Negotiations are continuing, but the District expects to be released from commitments it made to the project because the system never worked as promised.
The District first became interested in the project in the fall of 2013 when Bioenergy Project Partners (BPP) offered the project along with a big grant from NYSERDA that would make it possible to get the system installed without any upfront cost to the District. After much deliberation and research, the District signed on in the spring of 2014 and the system was installed in the summer of 2014. The system was not ready for the winter of 2014-15 because there were said to be engineering bugs in the system that needed to be corrected. It was said to be fixed by September of 2015, but once again it did not work properly, and in June of 2016 the District filed suit against BPP, NYSERDA, the architects and engineers, and the State Education Department.
Facin said, “the system never functioned correctly. There were issues with capacity, design, and installation. We never relied on pellet heating to heat this building. The system was oversold and under-delivered.” [/private]