Engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory have taken a major step in launching a "net-zero energy" facility: They lit a road flare and began burning wood chips. No kidding.It's a tad more complicated than that, of course, but that is how the lab says it fired up its new, smoke-free Renewable Fuels Heating Plant. The $3.3 million RFHP will heat NREL's South Table Mountain Campus laboratory buildings, which will include a 218,000 square-foot Research Support Facilities (RSF), expected to be completed in the summer of 2010. The massive office building will carry LEED Platinum certification and house a 2,500-square-foot data center.

The new heating plant also will warm a 130,000-square-foot Energy Systems Integration Facility, which will house a variety of research that aims to overcome technical barriers to adding new renewable energy generation systems to the electrical grid. The ESIF, which is expected to open in 2012, will house a 15,000-square-foot high-performance computing (HPC) data center

Operating smoke-free and odor-free, the heating plant will offset about 4.8 million pounds of carbon dioxide each year and as much as 75% of the 50,000 million Btus of natural gas used annually to heat the South Table Mountain campus, says the NREL. Instead, the RFHP will burn woody biomass, including wood chips from trees lost to the region's mountain pine beetle epidemic and waste wood.

And those disappearing emissions? How is NREL able to pull that off? It explains: