Solving a heat load hardship

At best, the road to finding an efficient and economic means of heating the Plumas County Health and Human Services Center has been rocky. In 2006, the facility was rebuilt to consolidate and centralize operations, and with the new design, the existing heating solution was replaced with a ground-source geothermal system. Though appealing in theory, the system—undersized and unable to keep up with the buildings’ heat load—has been very expensive to operate. A decade later, it’s close to failing, and the building’s heating and cooling costs are significant. That will soon be changing, however, as a new solution will be in place by spring—a biomass-fueled, combined-heat-and-power system, a project that has been in the making for the past couple of years.