Slashdot Mirror
From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency
chrnb writes "Last year, the Danish island of Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island's sparse sunshine. By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. 'We just met it,' said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders."
Does the island import energy or not? This "Energy Density" has the feel of weasel words...
At least you can make more straw.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
"Nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces"? Given that wood-burning has a pollution profile as bad as coal burning (the exact amount of different pollutants in each case varying depending on pollution controls), I seriously doubt straw burning is all that clean.
You don't have to interpret this as "straw-burning furnaces, which by nature of burning straw, are clean...". What you could just as easily interpret is "straw-burning furances, which have been modified to burn cleanly..".
Wood can burn horribly, generating thick black plumes of carcinogenic smoke, for example, when it's too wet. However, under controlled environments, wood can burn *very* cleanly. Take a look at a pellet stove - basically a wood burning stove, with the wood pellets providing a much more optimal burning profile that produces dramatically fewer pollutants.
On the flip side, you can purposefully create smoke, and use it as fuel in an internal combustion engine. This is called "wood gassification" and it's being used right now to drive a truck across the country. The Mother Earth News (magazine) built one more than 25 years ago back when the memory of the 70's oil embargo was still fresh and painful.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Another name for it is "water gas" and it was originally used in homes before natural gas became common. Sources of Carbon are heated with water to very high temperatures ~1000C and react to form CO,CO2,H2,CH4... The CO and hydrocarbons in the gas can be removed and further reacted with water to produce a mix of CO2 and H2. Or the mixture can be reacted in the presence of an Ni/Al catalyst to form hydrocarbons and water. New Zealand produces approximately 1/3 of its petrol in this fashion. The advantage to synthesizing "water gas" or "syn gas" as it is often called is that you can convert many Carbon sources to liquid or gaseous fuel and can strip out the more toxic chemicals normally found in coal and other Carbon sources. As conventional sources of petrol become less available, this process may account for a significant quantity of the liquid and gaseous fuel consumed in the world.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Indeed indeed. Too few people realize that you can *make* hydrocarbons, from almost any source of carbon. Just burn it with insufficient oxygen for full combustion, and you have your (pick a name): "wood gas", "town gas", "water gas", "coal gas", etc. The challenges are when you want to use biomass for that source of carbon. You can just mine or pump up fossil carbon sources. Growing fuel crops takes a ton of land (habitat), water, leads to runoff, and all sorts of other problems.
But, if we end up in that situation, we may not have a choice. Humans are not going to choose a stone-age existence. If it comes down to either doing actions with major adverse environmental consequences or tossing society in the gutter, humans can be counted on to choose the former every time.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
...is Capitol Hill's very own coal-fired power plant,. Sucker is still belching tons of pollutants without producing a watt of electricity, thank you very much Senators Byrd & McConnell. And take a look at all the other coal-fired plants in the US. Awesome. Obviously, doing nothing is a bad idea. Even if what the Danes have pulled off isn't truly 100% clean & pollution free, could it possibly be as bad as what we have now?
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
There's a critical difference.The straw enterprise is C02-neutral on an annualized basis. The carbon in the straw was C02 a year ago. And now it's C02 again, big deal.
There are hazardous substances associated with most every form of energy generation. There's U, Th, K40 and other radionuclides in a coal smokestack. The emissions from a coal plant would get a nuclear plant shut down instantly. There would be mass evacuations if enough radiation leaked from a nuclear plant to be comparable to the everyday background in Denver. And don't even get me started on the DHMO hazards associated with hydroelectric power. That stuff kills thousands in the US every year.
--
olderphart
"disjointed ramblings since - Get off my lawn!"
If a small island with little sunshine can become independent and carbon negative what's stopping the rest of us? I hear lots of arguments why it can't be done but like the health industry the real problem is far too many people are making money off the current system. Wind only works well with large towers in certain locations but everyone has sunlight, okay except Seattle. Europe has had grass pellet burners for years and wood pellets are getting popular in this country. There's nothing wrong with burning wood or grasses if you replant and you are in areas where it won't affect air quality. Coal plants hardly improve air quality and between the two I find wood smoke pleasant and coal acrid. We should already get a 1/3 of our power from renewable sources so it proves we aren't really trying. Large wind towers and solar cells can be installed faster than power plants can be built. There's plenty of non lumber quality wood for pellet stoves and the ones that can run on corn pellets make far better use of the corn than ethanol. Other than grinding and pressing them into pellets corn requires no processing. I love hearing about places like the island it just shows how far we have to go.
My apologies to Scandinavians who confuse orthography with phonology, but you're wrong. Easy enough to make this sort of mistake, since the written representations of your languages are almost completely phonetic, whereas written English is anything but -- please refer to photi for a rather extreme example. :)
I'm a native English speaker with a fair command of German and Spanish, and I can get by in Swedish (have been living in Stockholm for 2+ years now). Having been born in the Southeast US, grown up in the US Midwest, worked for a British publisher, and lived for many years in Australia, I also have rather more than a passing familiarity with several major different English dialects. Linguistics and phonology are lifelong interests of mine, backed by some university-level studies as well.
One thing that a lot of non-natives (such as you, apparently) fail to realise is this:
(a) English has only 5 letters representing vowels*.
(b) This has absolutely nothing to do with the number of English vowel sounds, of which there are about 20. Wikipedia lists only 13, which might be true of US "NBC Handbook" English, but this is definitely well short of the mark when you account for British, Canadian, US Southern, Australian, etc.
Just because we lack a Ø (Danish, Norwegian) or Ö (Swedish, German) character does not mean that we don't have or can't pronounce the sound. The "ou" in could or should comes quite close. If I show a Swede the letter sequence KÖD and ask him to say it aloud, my English ear will inform me that he's just said the word "should". (Not "could"; the high vowel makes the "k" soft.)
Native English speakers also have absolutely no trouble with Æ / Ä ("a" in bad, as pronounced by 90% of Americans) or Å (the "ore" in more as pronounced by many Brits and most Aussies), once they are shown what sounds these signs are intended to represent.
...
And it is annoying as fuck to have a Scandinavian keyboard and yet be forced by this site (alone amongst all those that I visit) to use the HTML entity references for Ä, Å, Æ, Ö, etc. Can we get with the 1990s and adopt Unicode sometime before the end of the decade, please?
-----
*I do not include Y, and you shouldn't, either, when talking about English vowels, because most English speakers do not consider it a vowel -- it's used 90% of the time to represent the semivowel that other Germanic languages spell with J. Depending on where you go to school, you might be taught that it's "sometimes" a vowel, or that it's simply a consonant that gets pronounced like a short "I" when it sometimes accidentally gets stuck in between other consonants, for lack of having any "real" sound of its own. It is almost never pronounced as Scandinavian Y or German Ü because that vowel sound is seldom if ever used by the majority of English-speakers, regardless of country/region.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.