Sachin Teng

Imagine two homeowners: One is a wealthy

investor building a vacation house near Lake Tahoe in California. The other owns a middle-class home outside Burlington, Vt. Both are interested in keeping their energy costs under control—and helping the environment while they're at it. The owner of the Tahoe ski palace installs an expensive solar-energy system to power his lights and appliances, covering his roof with photovoltaic panels. (He uses natural gas for heat.) The Vermonter invests in a clean-burning wood-pellet stove, cutting his consumption of heating oil by about 80 percent.

Our Tahoe homeowner enjoys the virtuous glow of being seen as an alternative-energy pioneer. He also enjoys something else: Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, he is entitled to a tax credit equal to 30 percent of the cost of his system, including installation. Let's say Mr. Tahoe installed a 6-kilowatt PV system at a cost of about $23,000. His federal tax credit works out to nearly $7000, and the state of California kicks in additional incentives.

Our Vermont homeowner isn't so lucky. The IRS offers only a 10 percent credit on biomass heating systems like his stove. The credit doesn't include installation costs, and the total is capped at $300. That's a grudging level of support—yet the pellet stove may be doing more than the solar array to help the environment.

The systems are tough to compare: It's electricity versus heat, and removing reliance on a distant power plant rather than an oil burner in the basement. But to get a rough idea, we can calculate the energy savings from both systems using British thermal units, or Btu. The Vermont homeowner's system saves about 575 gallons of oil yearly, which is the equivalent of 79 million Btu. The Tahoe system might produce close to 9000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year—about 30 million Btu.

Even if the energy savings were equivalent, the Vermont system arguably provides more benefits. I don't mean to discount the good things about solar power. But what is the logic behind offering incentives that are 10 or 20 times larger for a solar installation that produces less than half as much clean energy as a basic wood heat system? And the power that a solar system creates isn't automatically greener than the power it replaces. Sometimes solar panels replace electricity generated in high-emissions coal-burning plants, but electricity also comes from hydroelectric, nuclear, or relatively clean-burning natural-gas power plants.

In contrast, all residential oil-burning heaters release carbon that has been locked underground for eons, adding to the net load of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Wood isn't like that. A tree pulls carbon out of the air as it grows; when you burn it the CO 2 returns to the atmosphere, where other trees can use it in turn. The same thing would happen if the wood were left in the forest to rot. And it's not like we're short on trees. "A lot of forests in the U.S. are vastly overstocked with fuel," says Steve Marshall, assistant director of cooperative forestry at the U.S. Forest Service. Responsible thinning operations can yield plenty of environmentally friendly fuel.

Closer to home, local woodlots and landscaping operations supply much of the wood currently burned in residential stoves. That's quite a contrast with fossil fuels, which need to be extracted from the earth and then transported long distances before being used.

You can debate the physics details, but the disparity in U.S. energy laws is hard to justify. "There is a terrible double standard here," says John Ackerly, the president of the Alliance for Green Heat, a pro-wood-heating advocacy group. "Right now, most energy incentives target fairly expensive systems such as solar and geothermal rather than wood-heat technology, which might make more sense for the average American family."

Of course, for woodstoves to make a positive environmental impact, they need to be a lot cleaner. Unfortunately, most of the 10 million households using wood heat in the United States have dirty, out-of-date technology. An inefficient stove can produce as much as 40 grams of unhealthy particulate matter an hour. It doesn't have to be that way. Many modern wood and pellet stoves produce under 1 gram per hour. That's not far from what many oil burners produce. These clean-burning stoves deserve the same kind of incentives solar panels enjoy.

Popular Mechanics recently joined the Alliance for Green Heat on a project called the Wood Stove Decathlon. The contest offered cash prizes to teams for devising new stoves that combine efficiency, low emissions, and affordability. The competition attracted established stovemakers, independent inventors, and a team of student engineers from the University of Maryland, who all took their stoves to Washington, D.C., for nearly a week of testing. The top designs featured both established technologies (such as secondary-burn chambers and catalysts to promote cleaner combustion) and exciting new ideas (including tiny thermo electric generators to power fans controlling airflow).

The Decathlon helped prove that the technology is here to make biomass heating much cleaner and more efficient—and that much more progress is possible. Now we need the federal government to catch up by creating a level playing field. Shiny solar panels on million-dollar homes are nice, but clean, affordable woodstoves can do a lot more to improve our energy and carbon-emissions picture.

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