The market for high-performance wood-fired boiler systems is growing, especially in the Northeast. This makes sense: It gets cold here and trees are plentiful. There’s also a significant rural population that often doesn’t have access to natural gas pipelines. Fuel choices are often narrowed to fuel oil, propane and electricity.
With the dollars per MMBtu price of heat delivered from pellets and cordwood currently well below that for heat supplied by these fuels, the financial incentive to use wood for heating is being “stoked.” Other, more altruistic motivations come from wood being a carbon-neutral fuel, the desire to keep dollars spent on heating fuel in local economies and viewpoints that correlate fuel choice with national security.