Algae Biodiesel Steals the Show

Will bee offers a very cool post today on his blog RideLust, Solazyme’s Algae-Derived BioDiesel Passes Defense Department’s Cold Weather Testing.

I particularly enjoyed the lede…

In a recent news release from Solazyme and as reported at this years Worldwide Energy and Trade Show yesterday, their algae-derived biodiesel has passed its Department of Defense cold weather testing. To demonstrate the performance and readiness of their product an unmodified Ford F-450 diesel was driven to the conference fueled by Solazyme’s biodiesel by former Director of the CIA, James Woolsey.

Hahaha!!! Man, I’d have paid real money to see that! There is a real future here, and some folks have been putting in some serious R&D to make it happen. Go on over to RideLust and read the whole thing, it’s definitely worthy!

Home Grown Revolution

Here is a wonderfully entertaining and inspirational video about “urban homesteading” and modern Victory Gardens, brought to us by Peter Seller’s cultural arts class at UCLA using clips from Treehugger TV’s Path to Freedom. Sit back, relax, and enjoy!

Paint-On and Print-Out Solar Cells

Great news this week on ScienceDaily, picked up by Nanotechnology News and other outlets that researchers from Swansea University have developed a paint coating for steel buildings that will generate electricity even in low light situations.

Note that this isn’t solar panels on the roof, but the enameled coating on the siding itself. Meaning that metal buildings - including garages, barns, equipment sheds, airport hangars, outlying megachurches and community buildings could all be generating electricity (some from the infrared spectrum current solar cells cannot capture) while they’re just sitting there enclosing space. Put a few regular panels on the roof too and it could be generating more than it uses on a regular basis.

But when I went looking at just how innovative this development is in the overall scheme of things keeping affordable alternative energy options safely insulated from regular people who might just put them to work, I found that the idea isn’t all that new, and isn’t anywhere close to being marketed to consumers of things like metal buildings (commercial or residential). Why do you suppose that is, given the sheer amount of money being funneled into research and development, as well as into actual production?

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Hemp: Our Original Industrial Crop

Back when the country was new, its beloved “father” and gentleman farmer George Washington advised…

“Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.” [1794]

It was the #1 cash crop in the 13 new states just as it is the #1 cash crop in 50 states today. As a fast-growing “weed” that requires no pesticides or herbicides and very little fertilizers or irrigation, the close-packed stands of 8-9 foot tall plants provided more biomass per acre than any other crop ever discovered, bred or engineered. Its fiber content is 2 to 3 times as great as cotton per acre, and is both softer and stronger than cotton. Hemp paper lasts hundreds of years and can be recycled more often than tree pulp papers.

Hemp’s high cellulose content is a fine base for plastics - composites made with hemp are now used by Mercedes Benz to produce auto bodies and dashboards. Hempseed oil is both more nutritious and more economical than soybean, peanut, sunflower or canola oil. It burns brighter than any other plant oil, and can be used to produce non-toxic diesel fuel, paint, varnish, detergent, ink, home heating oil and lubricating oil. It is as easily converted into ethanol as corn, but can be grown in a much wider range of climates and conditions.

News organizations warn that we are facing a worldwide food shortage in part brought about by the diversion of staple food crops to ethanol and biodiesel fuel production, worsened by reliance on unsustainable agricultural practices and chemical pollution of once-rich “breadbasket” farmland. Our reliance on foreign oil has caused 2 wars in this first decade of the 21st century and killed more than a million people with violence. America alone has sacrificed more than 3,000 soldiers and left some 30,000 returning veterans with life-crippling injuries. Pollution from fossil fuel burning contributes to another few hundred thousand premature deaths worldwide every year. Global warming, if unchecked, will eventually kill tens or hundreds of millions more.

The answers we seek for the future may require a re-examination of our past. Perhaps George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were right. What might be accomplished if we did NOT spend 4 billion dollars a year trying to prevent farmers from growing industrial hemp?

Links:

Fossil Fuel Cuts Would Reduce Early Deaths, Illness, Study Says
1997: Canada Repeals Hemp Prohibition
Energy Farming in America
Hemphasis: Hemp as a Fuel/Energy Source
Vermont House Approves Hemp Bill
Hemp-based biodiesel, NOT ethanol

25 Alternative Energy Strategies - 5

In this, the last five items in the list of 25 strategies, a look at community efforts to become self-sufficient is in order. While an energy self-sufficient homestead can exist in any rural environment, the more neighbors (no matter how spread out) who catch the bug, the more resources are available to be developed for the good of all. It’s the natural ‘next step’ in extending the idea of energy self-sufficiency toward the broader society.

The real “trick” in items 21-25 are the collective will to work together and agree upon sustainable agricultural, building, energy production and distribution practices.

Part 5: Collective Strategies for Communities

When FDR was elected President in 1932 - in the midst of the Great Depression - he addressed the awful situation by means of the “New Deal.” Tucked away in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 which established the huge public works programs, was the Subsistence Homestead Communities project. The plan was to relocate some of the idled workers from over-populated industrial areas into planned subsistence communities they would build for themselves with government money.

Read about the Cumberland Homesteads project for yourself, it gives a rough idea of the rewards community development can reap, even if the whole thing is privately financed by the motivated homesteaders themselves (as it must be today). Sure, there are many grants available for rural community development (such as state agri-tourism initiatives) when there is someone skilled in applying, from all sorts of government agencies federal and state. And some resources available from corporate largesse these days as well.

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25 Alternative Energy Strategies - 4

For homestead and/or community independence

We’ve looked a bit at on-site electrical generation, transportation fuels and building technologies. In this installment we’ll look at some ways of putting things together into overall strategies for homestead independence.


Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems

In a previous post a short video was offered about as small, 1Kw hybrid energy system using solar and wind offered by a company in Canada. Whether you’re planning to go off-grid with storage batteries or negotiate a price for your excess production with the local utility (and get a “backwards meter”), the same thing is true of energy supplies as is true of general homestead success - diversify. So Here are five hybrid systems, some good links and some cool ideas for planning your alternatives…

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25 Alternative Energy Strategies - 2

For homestead and/or community independence

In the first installment of this series we looked at 5 technologies for generating electricity - solar panels, other solar (thermal for heat differential mechanical energy or steam generation), micro-hydro power and wind. This post is about alternatives for basic transportation, motorized equipment around the homestead and in rural cooperative communities.

As the series is about all the alternatives, these transportation-related alternatives are numbered 6-10 out of the 25.

Part 2: Transportation & Motorized Equipment

In 1893 Rudolph Diesel published “The Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Engine” and was eventually granted an American patent on his invention. His first models operated at about 26% efficiency, which more than doubled the efficiency of steam engines. By 1897 he’d achieved an engine that ran at 75% efficiency. Diesel demonstrated his engine at the Exhibition faire in France in 1898, and the fuel that powered it was peanut oil. It was Diesel’s vision that the engine could be used by small business owners and farmers and run on vegetable oil rather than then-expensive petroleum.

Then petroleum became so cheap that the entire transportation and farming equipment industries went with that fossil fuel instead. Now petroleum is once again becoming very expensive, and the air pollution problem from the burning of fossil fuels has become increasingly dire.

Most transportation - and some electrical generation - still uses the diesel engine. That’s some cars and light trucks, most all heavy trucks, city buses, heavy farm equipment (tractors, combines), railroad engines and ocean shipping. The gasoline engine, which uses a more refined petroleum based fuel, accounts for most of the private cars and trucks. What are the best present and upcoming alternative fuels?

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25 Alternative Energy Strategies

For homestead and/or community independence

This series will provide an overview of the most promising energy systems and strategies for homestead or rural community independence. Most of these are available right now, some can be put together by the handy homeowner or community action group, and some will be available in the near future. Combined with common-sense conservation practices these can contribute a great deal to the independence of individual homesteads and rural communities willing to work together.

These technologies and ideas will be divided into particular technologies and presented together - 1. Electrical production; 2. Transportation alternatives - vehicles, fuels and power to operate the kind of equipment necessary to a rural lifestyle (trucks, farm and garden equipment, remote generators, etc.); 3. Building technologies and direct alternatives for heating/cooling and their applications; 4. Hybrid systems that can even out production and tie together for constancy of supply; 5. Collective strategies for small, cooperative communities striving for self-sufficiency and willing to invest together for alternatives that benefit all.

Part 1: Electrical Generation

We use electricity to light our homes and outbuildings, refrigerate our food, wash and dry our clothes, prepare our food, provide our in-home entertainment (music, television, computers), and sometimes to heat or supplement our heat during the winter. The “average” electricity use per home in the US (this is something we can personally adjust downward by conservation and appliance/heat alternatives) is ~900 Kilowatt hours per month. Get that down to ~700 for your home/homestead, and we’re talking less than 8,500 KwH per year.

What are the best alternative sources for that much on-site electrical generation?

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Working Hybrid Wind-Solar System

Here’s a short video demonstration of a hybrid home electrical generation system developed by SEMA Technology that we’ll be exploring in more depth later. While it does depend on a storage system (battery), it would only take one of these to power my homestead. I’d still have to weigh longevity of its capacity and cost of replacement before I’d change my mind about going with the backwards meter. Which might cost me less over time and avoids the necessity to either turn off the solar cells or send the wind energy to a heat sink as waste.

Next week I’m planning a series looking at the best and most affordable technologies out there right now, and what’s on line for the future.

Energy Project: Solar Panels for Free?

In my 3-part series on energy independence (parts 1, 2 and 3) I talked about both solar and water as readily exploitable sources of ‘free’ energy here on my NC homestead where wind isn’t an option. With a water powered ram jet I can solve my water pumping problems and get gravity feed to the house to boot, and there are also possibilities for making electricity directly with a water turbine if we care to go that far into re-engineering the creek.

As with my plans for solar panels on the homestead roof, any electricity we can generate will most likely be returned to the grid via one of those “backwards meters” big energy companies (like ours) are required to provide if you do generate power on your property. That way they have to purchase all the excess energy you produce. The purchase price is of course always less than the retail price you pay for the energy you are using, so the best you can hope for is a seriously diminished electricity bill - use less energy than you sell, you might even come out ahead every month!

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