Olson Hillview Greenhouse

INOV8 is working on this project currently. The greenhouse is located in La Crosse Wisconsin. We are replacing five natural gas boilers with Viessmann Vitola boilers and INOV8 burners. Joel will be purchasing filtered vegetable oil from Coulee Region bio-fuels. His estimated yearly amount needed as fuel is projected at 31,500 gallons. By making the change to this fuel his projected return on investment is 5 years, with an estimated annual savings of $9000.00 Joel wrote this for me to publish to share his logic behind his decision.

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Wisconsin’s motto is forward for a good reason. It takes fortitude to see the goal and pursue the process without reservation to conclusion. The project that is proposed is a forward thinking mechanism to achieve the governor’s ambitious goal toward greater energy independence for the state of Wisconsin.

I have been in the greenhouse industry for twenty years now. During the hay day of bedding plant growers, we could factor in the rising cost of energy to our retail price. Ten years ago, I realized the “big box stores” were putting up retail superstores with a greenhouse attached. Adding the greenhouse instantly gave those companies instant legitimacy as garden centers. The customer will always have a problem accepting the local expert advice, experience, and product knowledge as part of the price of any product. The resulting effect is price points that local grower retailers could not compete with. This trade practice will eventually eliminate many growers and depress the local economies a bit more.

Like many growers, energy represents ten to twenty percent of our operating costs. For years, I have explored the alternative fuel saga with both interest and skepticism. Over the years, I have seen waste wood burners, pellet burners, corn stoves, to name a few, promising easy operation, reliability, and low cost fuel. Given time, all of these promises were proved unattainable.

The process of heating with oil has been available for many years with easy operation, reliability, and until a few years ago had affordable fuel costs. Using innovative technologies to burn used restaurant fryer oil is a smart use of an existing resource. Using waste restaurant oil locally is going to directly stimulate the local economies with job growth, capital investment on infrastructure, and reducing the dependence on imported fuels.

Our greenhouse is more than a hundred years old. The greenhouse like many of the era was built to grow food crops. Being in business means flexing to provide things people want. This past years food scares were the resultant errors of the industrial food complex. Again, Wisconsin shows why our motto is forward with Governor Doyle’s “EAT LOCAL WISCONSIN” program. Smaller growers like my family operation will use the heat from this renewable fuel source to produce organic tomatoes and salad greens for our local consumer. Many growers given the real time performance data and economics of using fryer oil could spur local investment and job growth in horticultural food crops returning reliability of wholesome fresh food to Wisconsin.

The utilization of this twice-used resource has broad prospects because of the historical acceptance of oil fuel technologies. Imagine the farm that grows low impact soybean crops for the local oil press. In return, from the family farms efforts they receive free heating fuel for the grain dryer, fuel for the bio-mass digester, high profit from the sale of excess oil, and bean cake having the enzymes converted from the pressing process to feed to all ruminates. The result would not be only sustainable but a positive economic catalyst.

The beginning of the organic movement was smirked at as an anarchist movement full of disillusioned “earth tones”. Today we know that FORWARD thinking farmers are glad they made the move. This restaurant waste oil technologies needs the support of a FORWARD thinking administration at the governor’s level. This move to waste oil technologies alone when fully utilized could contribute one to four percent toward Governor Doyle’s 20/20 energy independence goal. While alone waste oil fuel technologies will not solve all our energy problems, it is more importantly one of the ten good ideas it takes to solve any vexing problem.
It is time to support the innovative FORWARD thinking Wisconsin leadership has always provided the United States of America.