It is vital that UNC meet its goal of becoming coal-free by 2020. This is a tall order. No doubt, concerned community members, students and faculty will be hankering for concrete benchmarks by which to measure progress at each step along the way.
And in efforts to retain public faith and maintain good communication, Energy Services should do its utmost to lay out and meet such milestones.
However, it is entirely premature to deduce from the three-month delay of wood pellet testing that Energy Services is not committed to reaching its goal before the decade is out. A number of complex logistical considerations were involved in this decision, and it is a sound one.
Carolina Wood Pellets, the University’s would-be supplier of biofuel, is a new company within a nascent industry. Ray DuBose, director of Energy Services, said that as various organizations make a concerted effort to become carbon-neutral (and UNC is on the vanguard of this effort), the industry evolves to meet this demand.
It is a logical argument, and one that will hopefully prove true. Naturally, however, there are a few kinks that have to be worked out along the way.
According to DuBose, the cause of the delay was a simple question of how to get the fuel where it needed to be. Chapel Hill can’t handle the tractor-trailer capacity needed to transport UNC’s 500-ton shipment, and Carolina Wood Pellets wasn’t able to ship by rail until recently, when colder weather had already set in.
And the colder the weather is, the smaller the margin for error in an a relatively untested method of obtaining energy for heat.
We hope naysayers will consider these complicating factors before accusing Energy Services of defaulting on a promise into which it has in fact put an enormous amount of time, thought, and, well, energy.
