Jan's Comments

What I need to know is how does this scale down?

In a low energy future, successful technologies will depend on low-embedded energy and broad application by generalists.

EcoReality Co-op has lots of land and lots of water and some engineering expertise. How can we get started with biofuel from algae? Or is this technology strictly controlled by big money and highly trained specialists?

Too many people are worried about how things scale up. As fossil fuel goes away, the successful partial replacements will be those with low complexity and low embedded energy, according to H.T. Odum, David Holmgren, et. al.

"No response to emails and no return phone calls from Mr. Linden."

Hmmm... "Mr. Linden." His address wouldn't be something like "Linden@SecondLife.com" would it?

(For those who don't know, Second Life is an on-line imaginary world that is being taken quite seriously -- I believe Sweden has opened an Embassy there -- and all the staff and administrators there have the same last name: Linden.)

What about nanohydro? I can get 5kW from a small stream on our property, with no permits, because the stream is "below regulatory concern," according to the folks I talked to, and also because there is an existing dam and pond.

I'd love to sell 5kW to BC Hydro all winter at, say, 10 cents a kWh, then buy it back in the summer at 7.

Nice article, but also depressing. Slapping solar panels on suburban roofs is like swatting at a mosquito while staring down a hungry lion. "A nearby four-lane drones in the background." Where will these people get their commuting fuel from in a few years? What will their ostensibly "green" houses be worth when the suburbs become "energy slums?"

We need a change of life-style, folks -- not a green facade of solar panels on the roofs of a life-style that is going down.

http://www.EscapeFromSuburbia.com

In a world where many are homeless, it's disgusting to claim that anyone's "second home" is a green one.

The greenest way would be to NOT build the second home at all, and save the "6,000 acres of woodland" that was destroyed so that people with too much could have even more.

Can't you burn glycerin?

You need very high temperatures in order to avoid creating acrolein, which is a poisonous pollutant.

Unfortunately, this is part of the Liberal Party's plan to sell off the infrastructure of BC. It's already divested the ferries and the railroad, electricity is "in process" with deals like this one. Health care is next... They've also switched to fixed election cycles, which are much more friendly to corporate take-over than the messy habit of "no contest" elections at any time. Look what fixed election cycles has done for the US, where a total of nearly $50 million has been raised by the two Democratic front-runners alone! I want my renewable energy small and decentralized. This is just a big-business boondoggle, and yet another government hand out to its corporate welfare clients.

In a world where many are already starving, we should not be burning food for transportation.

In a country that uses twice as much energy per unit of production than Europe and Japan, we should focus on efficiency before burning food for transportation.

In communities that should be focusing on re-localization in preparation for the coming energy decline, we should not be trading one 6,000-mile supply line for another.

Biodiesel from waste oil is great; any other feedstock must be carefully evaluated for its true impact.

What nobody seems to get is that there is no "silver bullet."

As fossil fuel declines, humanity will necessarily be using less energy. There isn't enough unused ground to pave with solar cells. There isn't enough wind. And if you assume our current needs continue, we'd have to almost completely supplant food production with fuel production.

We really need to figure out how to have good lives with less energy. Europeans live better (according to US stats) on less than half the energy of North Americans -- let's go further!

I've converted my 3000 kVA UPS (APC SmatUPS) to run from an external 48VDC source, for which I am using inexpensive deep-cycle flooded cell lead acid batteries that I can "top off" with PV panels during extended power outages.

But of course, it's still converting that to 120VAC, 60Hz power, which every device is then converting back to DC. It would be great to have a standard DC voltage to directly power such devices. Picking such a standard will be difficult -- 12VDC is too low; it requires huge cables to carry the necessary current. Anything above 70VDC will be subject to national building codes for AC power -- probably inappropriate. Some multiple of 12VDC would simplify interfacing to currently available alternative energy sources, most of which are based on the ubiquitous lead-acid battery.

That's the nice thing about standards -- there's so many to choose from! :-)

Studies are necessarily limited in scope. This study compares ethanol from conventionally farmed corn with biodiesel from conventionally farmed soybeans. Please just take that at face value!
It would be great to see similar studies on biodiesel from algae or ethanol from switchgrass, but those technologies are not nearly so mature or vogue. The US Congress is poised to release lots of money into biofuels, so studies like this are good to influence farm state legislators.

The important thing from this study is that neither fuel is a "silver bullet." They should be used to reduce pollution in high-impact areas, such as bus fleets or marine environments.

But we don't want to trade dependence on Exxon/Mobile with dependence on Archer-Daniels-Midland! The future will require energy sources that are decentralized and locally appropriate. This *will* happen. Wouldn't it be great if we all worked toward that, rather than against it?

Tony, the efficiency of capturing or storing sunlight is just one rather small bit of the pie. A more relevant thing to consider is embedded energy efficiency -- how much energy you have to put in for how much you get out.

Solar cells are great, don't get me wrong! But they are tremendously expensive to produce, in terms of energy. Some skeptics (I'm not one) even claim that they can take more energy to produce than they themselves produce over their design lifetime.

What biologists call "basic productivity" -- the rate at which sunlight produces biomass -- is not a particularly efficient process. But it happens almost for free, when it comes to energy invested in the infrastructure -- vegetable plants grow themselves, whereas silicon wafer plants require vast quantities of energy to build and operate!

(continued -- can't live in a 1000 character budget... :-)

No single alternative to fossil fuel is going to save us. It's going to take a combination of fuels that are distributed, locally appropriate, and democratically chosen and controlled, combined with increased efficiency and vastly reduced use.

I'm not willing to sit on a footstool with only one leg, so why discard the "algae" leg before it's had a chance to prove itself? Base all your hopes on solar cells (or wind, or biomass, or ocean waves, or geothermal, or, or, or...) and you end up in the same predicament we have now -- addicted to a single, easily disrupted power source.

Interesting discussion! Commidification has its place, and $/w is important, but consider another advantage of smaller panels: tracking.

In the north, there isn't a lot of sun in the winter, and it's not as easy to capture from a static mount, which loses at least half the available insolation!

I'd think higher efficiency, and thus, lower wind load and weight per watt would be a significant advantage to anyone building a tracking system.

So another way of looking at it for those needing tracking systems might be $/(p/m) -- price per power-mass density.

The used cooking oil waste stream will never supply more than a few percent of today's transportation needs.

We need to "power down" before we can hope to supplant more than a few percent of petroleum use.

That's not to say that I would discourage responsible biofuel use -- I brew it myself! But there are a lot of crazy schemes going on that simply don't make sense, like clear-cutting New Guinea for oil-palm plantations, or the current corn-ethanol madness in the US. When you look at the energy pay-back and the environmental damage of such schemes, it doesn't make sense.

Remember, there are FOUR "r"s -- in priority order: REFUSE, reduce, reuse, recycle. We must reduce our energy use by about 90% in order to have a hope of a sustainable, steady-state (NOT growth-based) civilization.