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Burlington, Vt., uses wood chips to fire boilers in its municipally owned power plant. But doubts are rising about such large-scale woodburning. Huge chippers that swallow entire trees are used for harvesting; since they leave no small limbs to rot and replenish the forest, the practice can amount to mining the thin topsoil. "In 50 years," says one observer, "New England could look like Lebanon." President Nick Muller of Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., has another sort of woodburning in mind. He wants to build a $1.75 million central heating plant fueled by sawdust from nearby sawmills. Sawdust is cheap, burns cleanly and has much heating power. Muller, a historian, is thankful that he studied engineering for a time since he has had to transform himself into a heating and weatherizing expert who can now discuss R-values* as succinctly as Vermont history, his specialty. In the winter of 1975-76, his 700-student women's college burned 360,000 gal. of oil to heat its 29 buildings. By last year, as the result of installing 900 storm windows at a cost of $41,000, the figure was down to 290,000 gal. Muller calculates that the college got back $20,000 of its storm-window expenditure last year, and that at 1979 oil prices it should have saved the rest by midwinter. Not all of his conservation problems are so easy to solve. A handsome arts complex, designed when oil cost less than $2 per bbl., turns out to be a stubborn and profligate fuel waster. When its radiant heating system is turned down to a reasonable consumption level, the building's pipes are in danger of freezing.
In fact, any large building erected during the late 1950s or '60s is likely to be an oil-thirsty white elephant, particularly the glass-box skyscrapers that sprouted in New York and other big cities. "Cheap oil made us very lazy," admits the illustrious Philip Johnson, 73, who with the equally illustrious Mies van der Rohe designed Manhattan's Seagram Building. Conceived by their creators as formal abstractions, such austere structures bore out the "less is more" precept in an unintended way: they used far more heating and cooling energy than the buildings they replaced. Now owners are scrambling to make skyscrapers more energy efficient with such devices as heat pumps, reflective film on windows and costly refinements of lighting systems. (At present, a late-staying worker at Manhattan's World Trade Center who does not have a lamp at his desk must switch on a quarter-acre of lights.) More important, the Federal Government's edict lowering thermostats to 65° F has left windowless inner rooms relatively tolerable, while prized corner offices, symbolic of executive success, sometimes are Siberian. An executive, whose drafty 26th-floor office commands a splendid view of northern Manhattan and a stretch of the Hudson, sat glaring at her thermometer last week. The reading was 62°, "and that doesn't allow for wind chill." She contemplates rising to greet a visitor and falling flat on her face because she has forgotten to step out of her snuggle sack.