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."

Comments

Even a Bad Solution that Really Works Now

[Greyfox]

Is worth more than the shiny solution you're promised 2 years down the road. Most of the time, the shiny solution fails. Yeah that bunch of excel macros or bash scripts someone put together with duct tape and spit may not be pretty, but it gives you the answers you need NOW. And it doesn't matter how good the existing solution is, at some point some jackass will come in, barely look at it and think he can do better if he designed it from scratch. And that jackass will inevitably fail and quit or be fired and the next person will come in and look at the pile of crap he produced and think it would be better if he designed it from scratch. And three years down the line and 3 times the original estimated cost they will have nothing to show for their efforts and everyone will still be using the original system that worked.

So given this conundrum, how is it possible to engineer a system from scratch? Obviously it can be done, but it seems it's more by luck than any particular skill of the people involved. Truth be told the best solutions always seem to start small and grow into what they need.

One thing is always certain though, when those guys come in with the promises of the shiny system 2 years down the road... someone's going to make an awful lot of money one way or the other.