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Powering Restaurants WIth Deep Fried Fuel
Mike writes "Here's a brilliant idea for biofuels: rather than filtering used fry oil for use in vehicles, why not simplify matters and use it to heat and power the restaurant itself? The VegaWatt turns used vegetable oil into clean heat and energy for restaurants, eliminating the dirty and costly mess of oil disposal while producing 10-25% of the electricity needed to run a small restaurant. It also produces fuel free of chemicals or fossil fuels, unlike standard biodiesel."
Soylent heat is people (leftovers)!
McDonalds Energy,
Solving home heating crisis by providing clean deep fryer vegetable oil!
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
This is it. I love this kind of idea and packaging/sale. It's clean, it seems to work, and companies are going to be attracted to that (esp. the $800/month energy savings...) The idea really isn't new, but they've cleaned it up, and that's really what counts these days.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
If everybody started using used vegetable oil for an energy source, wouldn't the cost of used vegetable oil go way up? Meaning it would be more cost effective to sell the oil and buy the electricity rather than use the oil to generate my own electricity. Trust me, if dead cats were to become a viable energy source, then even the market value of a dead cat would skyrocket. (What?!? There's currently no market for trading dead cat futures?!?)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"It also produces fuel free of chemicals..." As a somewhat tired internet meme would say; "O rly?"
FFS people, virtually everything is made of "chemicals" and that isn't a problem. Sure, there are loads of quite nasty chemicals that will play hell with your chemistry and are to be avoided; but the notion that there are chemical free fuels is beyond asinine.
I for one welcome smog warnings that are accompanied by the delicate scent of fries.
On the other hand, you'll have to burn more of it to drag your fat ass to the McDonald's in the only megavan that it will fit in.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Plastic surgery clinics could do that too. It would be better than just leaving their lipid waste in big plastic bags in bio hazard dumpsters, where anyone can just jump the fence and steal it.
You can't take the sky from me...
It's CO2 that was pulled out of the atmosphere when the vegetables it came from were grown, so in that respect it's carbon-neutral. The CO2 emitted by farming equipment, fertilizer production, and so forth would have happened anyway.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
When was that carbon last in the atmosphere? If the answer is "within the past two years" then it doesn't make things worse.
If the answer is "fifty-seven million years ago" then there may be a problem.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Not only is this a dupe, like so many others on /., but it's a dupe of an article considered so stupid, it was put on idle: http://idle.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=3713481
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/599471.html
It was a really distressing story to see that someone who went out of his way to avoid using oil for powering his car got fined for essentially evading fuel taxes by buying vegetable oil from costo
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Here in the Netherlands it is forbidden to use vegetable oil or left-over frying oil as fuel for cars, even if the cars are perfectly able to run on it and pollute less then running on normal diesel. The reason: Taxes. They get no chance to skim off 'some' money so you can't use it.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?