Legislators consider summer boilers, fuel conversion to stabilize steam for Randolph campus lab

Sharon Scott, chief financial and operating officer for the Vermont State Colleges System, told the Corrections & Institutions Committee on Feb. 27 that the Randolph campus heating plant has been providing steam to the state Environmental and Agricultural Laboratory (the Vail Lab) under a temporary arrangement that is stressing the college’s boilers and producing inconsistent pressures for laboratory work.

That temporary arrangement began after the Vail Lab project and its planned standalone biomass plant were delayed. "Each year we go through a process to identify exactly how much steam the Vail Building is using proportional to the total amount of steam that's being produced out of our plant," Scott said. She added that in the most recently completed fiscal year the Vail Building accounted for 17.2% of all steam produced at the plant.

The committee heard that the current pattern — running boilers in summer to supply Vail and short-cycling them for the campus — reduces equipment life and does not reliably deliver the higher pressure (50 PSI) the lab’s autoclaves and certain equipment require. Scott said the original short-term agreement did not set a required pounds-per-square-inch and was intended to end once the Vail biomass plant was complete.

Scott and Buildings & General Services (BGS) staff described a near-term proposal from BGS to install "summer boilers" at the Randolph site and to convert the campus’s existing boilers from No. 4 fuel oil to No. 2. Scott said that switching to No. 2 would make the system easier to operate and, while still a fossil fuel, would be cleaner and cheaper to run than No. 4. She said BGS paid about $235,000 last year as its share of Vail’s steam (the 17.2% share) and that replacing the Randolph heating plant with a full No. 2 system had a rough order-of-magnitude cost estimate of about $10 million, versus about $16 million for a more energy-efficient biomass or alternative-fuel solution.

Officials said the capital bill currently contains a mix of money they could use: roughly $1.8 million carried from prior planning and about $3.5 million in the governor’s recommended funds for a combined $5.3 million. Scott and BGS staff said the $1.8 million would fund design work and that additional bids or estimates would be needed to determine whether the combined $5.3 million would cover summer boilers plus conversion work.

Committee members and BGS staff sketched a near-term schedule on the record: BGS could prepare a revised request for proposals within about two weeks, with bids potentially back by mid-April. If appropriately sized, off-the-shelf summer boilers could be installed ahead of the next summer season; burner replacement for conversion from No. 4 to No. 2 fuel might follow on a later schedule because of lead times.

Committee discussion emphasized the trade-offs: a standalone biomass plant had been planned and permitted under Act 250 during earlier project phases, and an earlier study had estimated a roughly 10-year payback for biomass under conditions at that time; but the standalone option had been removed from the final project in favor of connecting to the college heating plant. Several legislators noted that the Randolph work has ancillary benefits for the campus but primarily benefits the Vail Lab’s mission.

The committee asked BGS and the Vermont State Colleges to return with refined cost estimates, a clearer count of required summer boilers (staff said they suspected at least two), and a recommended phasing plan that would prioritize restoring reliable 50 PSI service to the lab while limiting additional short-term risk to the college boilers.

Next steps recorded on the hearing record included BGS preparing an updated bid package for a summer-boiler solution, design work funded by the existing planning appropriation, and return of hard estimates and a recommended cash-flow/phasing plan to the committee in follow-up reports.

Sources: Testimony by Sharon Scott, Vermont State Colleges System; remarks from Buildings & General Services staff and Corrections & Institutions Committee members during the Feb. 27 hearing.