| 1. A start-up program for the use of renewable energy. A lot of people out here would be happy to use locally produced energy or make their own, but they can't afford the investment of getting started.
A perfect example would be the use of small wind turbines. Many rural property owners out here have enough room to put up a small wind turbine, say a 60-foot elevation and 3 kW nameplate capacity. That would cut the electrical bill in half for most people, and could eliminate it entirely for low use or particularly efficient homes. But most people also can't invest the roughly $4000 it would cost to set up a system like that, even though it would pay for itself in five to seven years.
This would be a good time to point out that you could equip every rural home in Wyoming County like this for the amount of money that we spend in Iraq every four hours.
By providing a start-up investment for those who want it, it provides an immediate short term benefit in the form of lowering people's bills. In the long term, it produces more money than it costs, making it a good investment. And it reduces the environmental impact of generating electricity, eliminating things like mercury in the environment from coal plants. And if the turbines are locally manufactured (which they can be) then it puts life back into our local economy in the form of decent paying manufacturing jobs.
2. Making biofuels make sense. The most famous form of biofuel is ethanol of course, but around here we should be talking just as much about biodiesel. Biodiesel is is essentially identical to regular diesel fuel or home heating oil, except that instead of being refined from petroleum, biodiesel is produced from things like vegetable or animal oil, the same used oil that comes out of deep fryers in restaurants. Biodiesel can be relatively easy to make even in small quantities, making it ideal for decentralized production in rural areas. This not just creates fuel, but it solves a real world waste management problem, of what to do with used cooking oil that would otherwise be unhealthy for the environment. Moreover, beyond the world of used cooking oil and other wastes, the raw material for biodiesel can be easily grown in places that aren't fit for other farming--common algae from dug ponds and swamps produces large amounts of biodiesel when processed.
An added benefit is that biodiesel is entirely biodegradable, so spills simply can be washed away instead of requiring complicated cleanup, and it's less hazardous to people than is normal diesel fuel and heating oil.
Even more promising for our area is biogas. This is basically just combustible gas produced from any biological source. For instance, the end product of all those tens of thousands of cows out here. A simple system called an "anaerobic digester," which is basically a high tech composter, can take cow manure (and almost any other biological waste) and convert it into relatively clean-burning gas that can be used to generate electricity or heat a building.
And not only can the left-over byproduct, called "digestate," still be used to fertilize the fields for growing next year's feed, it's also more sanitary and less smelly after it's been used to produce gas.
Is this really a big enough benefit to bother with, though? Hell yes. I can't point out the benefits any better than Popular Mechanics, who had an article in their February 2009 issue talking about a cow farm in Pennsylvania which had set up just such a system. One large scale enough to handle the output from their 600 cows, with a little help from the combination of federal grants and money from a carbon offset company for the CO2 the farm would be saving from converting biogas into green electricity though a generator. Via Popular Mechanics:
Last year the system produced 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to power the farm and several nearby homes, as well as their heat and hot water-saving about $60,000. "It's covering everything, and there's still some left over," Saylor says. "We had 100,000 kwh last year that we didn't use." The local utility paid him 2.3 cents per kwh to put the excess into the grid. The digester also produces more gas than Saylor can use, so with another grant, he plans to install a second 130-kw generator this winter. All of that electricity will go into the grid-and when utility rate caps start to come off this year, it'll be worth even more.
On a 600 cow farm, that translates to each cow producing about 2000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to light up the average home for two months. Wyoming County has about 47,000 cows, which translates to 94 million kilowatt-hours annually... enough to supply the electrical demands of half the homes in the county. And once a farm's AD system and generator are in place, that's effectively free energy--all it takes is cow manure and some fine tuning to keep it running, and the digestate is an even more ideal fertilizer for the next year's feedstock crops than the raw manure. Nothing is lost.
3. Efficiency can mean "more and better." Usually when you talk about "efficiency" people assume that you mean cutting back on things, or doing things not quite as well. Just one example: we probably all know by now how much energy you can save by going from regular old fashioned lightbulbs to fluorescent ones, but you can save even more with LED bulbs. Something that's useful to all those farmers out there who have four foot fluorescent lights in their barns, when LED bulbs can give them less than half the electrical use in the same fixtures, while being nearly unbreakable.
Or the fact that electric and series-hybrid cars, which are finally starting to get on the road in significant numbers, can deliver not just massively improved fuel efficiency but also sportscar like performance out of even normal vehicles.
Increasing efficiency doesn't mean always mean turning down the thermostat or using fewer lights at night; it was the constant tweaking of efficiency and improving on existing designs to get more bang for your buck.
4. New technologies. There's a whole world of stuff out there waiting to be explored, sciences and approaches that that most people don't know exist yet. Like the work of Dr. Robert Bussard, a man who up until his death in late 2007 was a preeminent nuclear physicist for some 60 years, and in the last 15 years of his life developed the Polywell fusion plasma reactor under contract with the US government. Bussard famously said that when the full scale model was built, it would work, and when it worked, it would begin to displace all other forms of energy production.
Or wave energy, using networks of buoys spread out on the ocean to capture the power present in the constant churning of the sea--or, possibly, a Great Lake or two.
Not all of these, or even most of them, will be useful to our area, but in general, the lesson to be learned about new and green energy is that learning to develop our natural resources and use them better doesn't just not cost us anything, it can improve our economy, save us money, and leave more of the world behind for our children. |
