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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."
Mmmm.... Danish....
The CB App. What's your 20?
"Carbon Neutral" I imagine is what they meant (no, I haven't RTFA).
They grow the straw, then burn it, then grow it again, etc. So the carbon that's released from burning gets fixed again when the next crop comes up.
Does the island import energy or not? This "Energy Density" has the feel of weasel words...
To put the amount of pollution into perspective, here's the particulate matter emissions from different types of home heating.
The uncertified wood stove puts out several *pounds* of fine particulate matter each day of winter operation. Even the proportionally clean pellet stove dwarfs the emissions from oil and gas heating.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
At least you can make more straw.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
But in many areas, PM 2.5 isn't a big issue. Definitely not in a windy area like this island. So long as the stacks are tall enough, air quality doesn't go down commensurately. It's only in places that form inversion layers, or places that are just otherwise calm that have PM 2.5 issues. Compared to other sources, though, the Straw is much better because a) I'm guessing it doesn't take as much energy to get there and b) is carbon neutral.
Or, that's my understanding of PM 2.5, anyhow. Fairbanks, AK has PM 2.5 issues due to its inversion layer and large number of wood stoves. So I've learnt what I've learnt from the happenings, here.
Even if that's what they mean:
1) Other pollutants are very relevant as well, esp. in terms of human and wildlife health.
2) Other pollutants have a profound effect on climate as well. For example, carbon black has been shown to be a significant cause of global warming.
3) I'd *imagine* that straw has a pretty good ratio of fossil fuels in -> energy out, but there still is going to be some input.
4) Land use changes can have a profound impact on global climate, and using land for growing crops for heating (capturing only a small fraction of the light that hits the land as energy) means a *lot* of land. It also means consuming land for farming that would otherwise be wildlife habitat. And there's the whole water issue. And the runoff issue. And so forth.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
"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.
A pellet stove still emits two orders of magnitude more PM than an oil or gas stove; see the above graphic.
Wood is dirty, dirty, dirty. And no, wood gas is not "smoke". Smoke is particulate matter. Wood gas is a toxic mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Why? If they're that determined to be self-sufficient, they can use horses instead of tractors on their farms. No need of fossil fuel at all if that's the way they go.
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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.
Samsø is in fact carbon negative. The island produces more renewable energy than it consumes. That's a good way of summing it up and I'm surprised neither the slashdot summary not the NYT article point this out. It's easily more interesting than them burning straw.
But what I really came here to say is, they produce fantastic potatoes on Samsø. As far as I'm concerned, they could power their Hummers with liquified kittens if it keeps the (Samsø potato) spice flowing.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
1. Wood pollution problems can happen anywhere, even at low population densities, and even without an inversion. Wood stoves pump out two to three orders of magnitude more particulate matter than oil and gas furnaces.
2. Inversions can happen anywhere -- for example, from warm fronts. They're more common in some areas, certainly (central Alaska being one of them), but everywhere gets them.
3. Very little energy is wasted in natural gas extraction and transportation compared to the energy in the fuel. The straw almost certainly takes a larger percent to grow, harvest, and transport.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Yes, why don't we all go back to a middle age existence. We can enjoy their wonderful quality of life and have a planet carrying capacity a fraction of what we have now.
Why do people pine for this mythical "good old days" before all that pesky modern technology? Between starvation, plagues, and endless manual labor, pre-industrial life sucked.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink".
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"
These metrics are a way to put a barrier up for the alternative energy business. Of course it is possible to generate all energy locally. The 1 dollar per watt myth does not count for coal fired power plants. If you win a race are you going to let an expert tell you your steps per second where under par?
the thing that should stand out the most is the part mentioning how someone uses cow milk to heat his house.
http://www.energiakademiet.dk/default_uk.asp
I'm pretty sure that's not the story I was posting to..
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't, and not just because if we did, I'd be dead. If you'll read my post (and the one I'm replying to) you'll see that the OP was assuming that the straw couldn't be produced, harvested and transported without the use of fossil fuel, and I was pointing out that his assumption just isn't true.
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except the natural gas is being depleted when used, the straw converts energy from the sun. gas is also carbon trapped millions of years ago, the carbon you burn from straw was absorbed that summer.
so yea it is the same in a superficial and meaningless sort of way.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
yes, horses and subsidies from the mainland, that's the secret for self-sufficiency on an island.
...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
The natural gas doesn't consume vast amounts of habitat per person, lead to massive dead zones near estuaries, or drain rivers of their water, either.
Switching from natural gas home heating to biomass is like trying to reduce your lighting bills by burning candles. Natural gas is an abundant, low-carbon fuel that has literally several orders of magnitude less air quality degradation than biomass. If you want to tackle global warming, it's coal that you need to fight, not natural gas.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
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!"
Straw is an agricultural waste-product which will either be fed to animals, burned or left to decompose (also creating CO2) - it also has a very short carbon cycle unlke burning fossil fuels
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The natural gas doesn't consume vast amounts of habitat per person, lead to massive dead zones near estuaries, or drain rivers of their water, either.
Obviously, you have never been to that island. There are no rivers, and DK usually gets enough rainfall that no artificial watering is necessary. And take a look at the landscape. There will be plenty of surplus straw from a place like this. And transport? You could almost throw the bales of straw to the furnace. Besides, I presume the straw is burned at biggish plants, which (of course) have particle filters, leaving your concerns about those moot.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Gas-phase combustion is more efficient too, because you can use combined cycle combustion*. Gasification probably reduces that efficiency to moot anyway.
*You burn it in a turbine, getting energy out of it like a jet engine, and then you remove heat from the hot exhaust by raising steam, like a traditional power plant.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
"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
Parse error. Receiving "generous amounts" of aid != self-sufficient. If the rest of Denmark attempts to follow them, who is going to generously give to Denmark?
And has an independent party verified that Samsa is actually carbon neutral or just faking it? Remember that in the brave, new world of carbon cap and trades, carbon fraud is going to be (if it isn't already, considering certain would-be, for profit, carbon sinks) a popular activity.
... but it's 'Samsø.' And 'Søren Hermansen.'
You do realize they're doing this for heating and electricity, right? Not much middle-aged about that...
Not to mention that with a few more wind turbines or solar panels you could switch from horses to electric tractors or something like that :)
They were burning the straw as waste already so the change is that they use the heat to do something useful.
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.
Planet carrying capacity ? You do realise that without fossil fuels, we are already way past the planets carrying capacity already. What with plastics, fertilizer, fuels for agricultural machinery and fuel for refrigeration and transport, we could not support as many people as we currently do. There is a growing trend in the UK to use vast plastic sheets over fields to bring on the crops faster. These sheets are not re-used. Baling machines use plastic to encase straw instead of natural twine. This plastic is not re-used. Chicken sheds use vast amounts of heat and light because it is all done inside huge sheds. The food processors and manufacturers have massive factories burning untold amounts of power to create products with subtle differences to their competitors, looking for any way to use every last scrap of material. This is efficient for them monetarily as they already have the materials, but the overall mechanical efficiency is pants.
I'd like to see the alternative proposals for providing all this stuff *without* dropping the planets carrying capacity.
yes, it's called the sun, you might have noticed it.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Samsø is in fact carbon negative.
Even if their entire domestic energy usage is slightly carbon negative, that's only 20% of a person's energy footprint. The other 80% goes into manufacturing goods, transportation, commerce, communications, etc. That carbon footprint accrues simply because the people of Samsø are Danish citizens and participating in the Danish economy.
So, it's unlikely that they are "carbon negative". Furthermore, they probably compensate for some of the inconveniences by externalizing energy usage--saving energy on their island by consuming more energy remotely on the mainland. Overall, they may have reduced their actual carbon footprint 10-15% relative to the mainland, but it's unlikely that it is more than that.
Danish children? I had university lecturers try to get me to say that in Copenhagen.
I lived there for a year and still can't get that right... Strøget, is another pretty difficult one for such a short word.
To make matters worse even the five English vowels have different pronunciations in Danish, and the distinction between E and I is very subtle, and can be hard for an English speaker to reproduce. In general Danish pronunciations can be quite hard for an English speaker. When I was living there I found it far easier to read and write Danish than to speak it. It did not help that essentially every adult under the age of about 50 is fluent in English, so when I tried to practice speaking Danish they tended to just switch to English.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
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?
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*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.
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.
You might be right usually it's the 'A's that are hard to pronounce.. But I would like to know how hard it is to show how to pronounce ö.
For what it's worth taking on a dare to pronounce Danish sentences even as longtime linguist isn't that smart. Even though it's very unfair I've heard people here in Stockholm referring to danish not as a language but a throat disease, in a loving Scandinavian brotherhood kind of way (or a arrogant big brother kind of way you choose.)
The parent is right on.
Energy density is not a bad measurement, but a minimum energy density for the world should be at about the energy density of the United States, for instance. Anyone know what that is?
Energy density has a better meaning. Consider that simply emperically, increased energy density in physical phenomena reveals new phenomena and generates new industrial processes. So we should reject solar power as a dead-end. Straw burning is simply insane. I hear there are about 100 promising novel approaches to fusion, that could all be tested out for a total of one or two hundred million dollars. Why has it not happened?
People are still dying from starvation and plague
People are still dying from working 18 hours a day providing you with sneakers, computers, TV's, toys ....
fixed that for ya ...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
the thing that should stand out the most is the part mentioning how someone uses cow milk to heat his house.
That is funny, but if you've ever been around a dairy farm, it makes a lot of sense.
When you milk a couple hundred cows twice daily, each giving about 3 gallons, the resulting 1200 gallons per day of blood-warm milk contains quite a lot of heat. Not only that, if the milk is intended for human consumption, it has to be heated further in the pasteurization process, raising it to about 170 degrees F -- and then it is often chilled, especially if it's going to sit in the tank for more than a day or two before being picked up.
I worked a little on my uncle's dairy farm as a kid, and I remember the big stainless steel holding tank being almost hot to the touch, and that was when he was producing grade B milk which didn't have to be pasteurized. Over the course of the day the chillers would gradually get the temperature down into the 50s (IIRC), but the next milking would heat it right back up.
There's a huge amount of waste heat that could very easily be exploited for heating.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Hello, drinkpoo, I work for a major Open Source project and I already deal with my fair share of bugs reported by our users. The Slashcode devs can now kindly get up off their lazy arses and deal with theirs.
Meantime, please kindly go fuck yourself.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Modern coal, wood and straw burning plants are all quite clean. If you see a polluting one, it is either from the 70's or before, or build with technology from that era. I guess countries with lax environmental laws will still allow such polluting power plants to be build, but Denmark's environmental laws are not lax.
The bottom line is if it generates less energy over its lifetime than is required to mine the metals, refine them, cut them into parts, assemble it, transport, erect and maintain it, then the windmill is actually not a source of energy, but an energy sink.
Experiments like the Danish island in TFA are interesting exercises, but there is much more fundamental work to be done. Like ascertaining the true EROEI of wind power.
Personally, if windpower IS positive EROEI, I would cheerfully cover much of the urban landscape with the damn things - people complain about how ugly they are, but acres of hideous shopping malls, towers designed in brutalist architecture aesthetics, and decades of craptasitc cartoon suburban ranches don't seem to raise much ire... It's a big challenge, and it needs to be met NOW.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"energy self-sufficient". That means they produce all the energy they need by themselves. You are ranting about X not being Y, when X never claimed it was anything else but X. Go to a car-manufacturer and complain about how their prototypes are way too expensive.
It's too bad it's not a bug. Slashdot is working as designed. We don't need those characters.
Closed-minded, arrogant and incorrect, good work!
I end up typing £ (£) and € (€) here regularly. I see broken/missing characters regularly, typically copy and pasted curly quotes, long dashes and currency symbols.
Slashcode supports unicode, for proof see Solidot (Chinese Slashdot).
Bricks take a tremendous amount of energy to produce and transport.
Esp "sturdy" ones.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Point out the flaw. I'm glad to point out yours.
1st quote & comments: Taken out of context. Funding was 1x time only for testing & startup. Also, the prototype for any project like this is going to be a big initial cost, likely more than what a local government can handle; the idea is that after a workable model is developed, that has a low to maybe even negative carbon footprint, ie more energy produced for less CO emissions, and as more investment is made into and research done on these alternate power sources, as more cost effective methods are found, implementation & upgrade costs will drop. That's called market development, genius.
2nd quote & comments: Pure batshit fucking insane cockamamey nonsense. How do you suggest they "just dig for" it? Strip mining? In a country that has reclaimed a good portion of it's land from the ocean, and faces an ongoing struggle against natural erosion to keep the land they currently have? With a (est 1/1/2009) pop density of 331.2/sq mi? Yeah, great plan. Besides that, the whole point is to get away from coal which is a notoriously polluting fuel.
If you have anything other than more hot air, ludicrous proposals, and childish sneering to contribute, I'd love to hear it. Until then, STFU.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
I don't know about UK farmers, but the plastic twine used on hay bales on our farm never gets thrown away. I miss the wire, though, it was much more versatile. all the old bits are starting to rust away. (They switched to plastic about 20 years ago).
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Between starvation, plagues, and endless manual labor, pre-industrial life sucked.
So if the points between starvation, plagues, and endless manual labor sucked, does that mean that starvation, plagues, and endless manual labor were the high points?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
1. There are only 4000 people on this island.
2. The island has an area 114 km2.
3. Thus it gives us a population density of 35 people per km2.
4. Even if people were distributed evenly across earth's land area, it could support slightly more than 5 billion people in this matter. Of course a lot of earth's area is not habitable, and people are not distributed evenly.
Other problems:
"However, its heating plants, burning wheat and rye straw grown by its farmers, cover only about 75 percent of the island’s heating needs, continuing its reliance on imported oil and gas."
"The islanders, she said, have all the necessary home appliances, like washers and dryers, refrigerators and stoves. Yet, she added, "Electricity is expensive, so they buy the basic models.""
If the energy density is 2 watts per square meter, they need 228MW. I highly doubt this figure, because the entire Pomeranian voivodeship in Poland (over 2 million people) uses 600MW during winter evening peak hours.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Very succinct, much better than most of your other posts, AC.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Here on the farm, (going back to the ghetto Monday, snif...) I have a very efficient air-injected woodstove, lots of stray wood and the Old Man planted a bunch of Giant Bamboo. Harvested by hand, I think it'd be carbon neutral. We do have AQMD restrictions, but mostly when it's warm. We're above the inversion; Sunny up here when it's pea-soup down below.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
"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."
As an eyewitness to the "Rodney King Uprising" IMO humans can be counted on to choose both. What I'm counting on is to survive the upheaval, and make better use of the resulting lower population density. YMMV, of course.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
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.
That's only if nuclear power is taken out of the choices available.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
So if the points between starvation, plagues, and endless manual labor sucked, does that mean that starvation, plagues, and endless manual labor were the high points?
Yes.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Care to elaborate how did you come to that conclusion? How do you compare the work done by a medieval serf with the work done by a typical worker today without comparing their respective quality of life levels?
The quality of life enjoyed by someone in the middle ages, serf or squire it doesn't matter, was way below that of a homeless person today. We see people calling it a "pandemic" when a few thousand people die of flu, how can you compare that to an epidemy that killed one third of all people in Europe, because they all lived in a filthy rat-infested environment and didn't have water to take a bath to get rid of the fleas?
Then give yours to someone who needs it, that will make both of you happier.
Only if you compare an acre in England with an acre in the Mexican desert.
There are not just 5 english vowel sounds though.
http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/newstart.html
Oddly enough I remember my english teacher talking about 25 vowel sounds. I wonder how people come up with those numbers.
Since english is my second language I have to say that the way Americans pronounce the letters 'c' and 'z' if they spell them out, really is difficult for me to understand and reproduce. I just can't hear the difference. So while english has been easy on me some aspects are more demanding.
Je me souviens.
First off, even if they do have particle filters, then it's at best the equivalent of a coal power plant which also has filters. Secondly, saying it has enough rainfall that they don't need to water yet there's no sort of runoff is pretty much contradictory; if it's raining that much, there's going to be need for surplus water to flow away. Third, "surplus straw" is ridiculous. For one, straw left on the fields helps prevent erosion. For another, straw is livestock feed and bedding. If they weren't making use of it before, then they were just being wasteful; that's hardly an excuse for them to choose a bad use for it.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Will someone please give me "generous amounts of aid" so I can become "self-sufficient" too?
Yep. Synfuels are more expensive (the cost largely depending on the feedstock). But as oil becomes harder to get, we're not going to have a choice but to rely on them more until we can switch off oil as a transportation fuel.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
More food was produced per acre before the green revolution.
Because artificial fertilizers came before the green revolution which among other things attempted successfully to produce plant varieties that can use fertilizers more efficiently? Or did you just make that up?
Anyway, I would like to remind you that a citation is needed.
Otherwise I will have to conclude that you are full of shit.
Je me souviens.
Let's do some math. At 4,000 people, that's around 8mw of peak demand assuming 2kw per househould.
So one guy plinked down 1.2M to buy one windmill. The best windmill gets you I think 3Mw, and even then, only if it is windy. By contrast, for about a million bucks, I could pick up a diesel generator station that delivers the 8MW and have power for everyone, whenever they need it.
This is my sig.
You're bitching about the post-Industrial era on an Internet message board?
Hilarious.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
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Green Technologies Feed @ Feed Distiller
As one who has just tasted my first fresh-harvested potatoes, I'd say you don't know what you're talking about. I have always enjoyed potatoes, but this year we grew a few (two square rods) and the flavor was transcendent. I would suggest that every bit of spare ground be sown so the people can share in this experience. Stored and dried and shipped &c. is truly not the same at all. I am so sorry that I didn't learn this fifty years ago. What a wasted life.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I shouldn't speak for the OP, but if I read his post correctly, he wasn't talking about "plastic twine" - he was talking about encasing the entire bale of straw in a giant plastic bag. I have seen this infrequently in Ontario, and wondered why so much extra packaging was used. I vaguely recall my farming friends telling me that the if the straw wasn't allowed to dry out, it would rot.
What was once true, is no longer so
OK, 2005 statistics, and clearly incomplete (hardly any African countries represented) but: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mor_lac_of_foo-mortality-lack-of-food Shows a total of 298 starvation deaths for 2005. Boy, I'm really upset about that. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070327044448AAMio1U Suggests there are 1-2K deaths from plague each year. Now, in the US, there are approximately 10,000 deaths each year attributed to falls. Don't see you getting all worked up over ladders and stairs, there, bunky.
What was once true, is no longer so
MooThermal Heat Pump?
First off, even if they do have particle filters, then it's at best the equivalent of a coal power plant which also has filters.
Yep, if you are looking solely at particle emissions. Of course, it doesn't have the e.g. quicksilver emissions coal does, nor the CO2.
Secondly, saying it has enough rainfall that they don't need to water yet there's no sort of runoff is pretty much contradictory; if it's raining that much, there's going to be need for surplus water to flow away.
I was talking about rivers. Of course there is runoff, that is pretty much unavoidable. However, with good crop rotation and fertilizing strategy, the runoff can be reduced to a level where it is not a problem. As you know, even a completely unused area is going to have runoff, but the sea can absorb some runoff without any ill effects.
Third, "surplus straw" is ridiculous. For one, straw left on the fields helps prevent erosion.
Erosion?! Many problems we have in Denmark, but except for a very few places erosion isn't one of them. We are a flat country.
For another, straw is livestock feed and bedding. If they weren't making use of it before, then they were just being wasteful; that's hardly an excuse for them to choose a bad use for it.
Modern farming produces much more straw than can be used for feed or bedding. Which is why, as you say, it is usually plowed down as fertilizer. (I won't comment on further on that contradiction ;) )
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
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.
I guess you don't live anywhere near an orchard?
Every year your average orchard generates TONS of wood material in the form of prunings. See, they have to prune the fruit and nut trees every year in order to optimize their growth for fruit/nut production. Currently, they use big tractors to pile the "waste" wood prunings into huge piles, often 30 feet high or more, and then burn them - flames that reach 100 feet or more into the sky, and take weeks to burn out.
Having grown across the street from Almond orchards, I can assure you, this is commonplace. Can you imagine just how many miles we could get out of a single pile, if we were to effectively harness this fuel source?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
dead zones are a result of fertilizer usage, not simply the use of a field to grow something.
and particulate matter is a concern, primarily of respiration. it can be solved by using good appliances, which could be required by law if these things were ever used in any density that really mattered.
you keep pointing at coal but it's not even close to the same. the problem with coal is not mostly particulates, it's things like mercury. wood is simply mostly inert particulate last I knew. they are not even remotely the same, and neither are the impacts of production of the fuel.
They at least had the virtue of being interesting....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
They leave it in the field after cutting to keep it from spontaneously combusting, if it's baled too soon. If it gets wet after it's baled it'll mildew. Bagging sounds excessive, but may be necessary in that environment to keep it from prematurely composting. Just my Wild-Ass-Guess. I was referring to the plastic twine, of course, which does not degrade gracefully.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I believe wood gas and water gas are distinct, although, as you say, used as a synthetic municipal fuel for a long time. The difference (as I understand it; not a chemist) is that adding steam is necessary with coal, which is mostly carbon, whereas wood can be gasified efficiently without water, as it contains plenty of bound hydrogen, some bound oxygen, and significant moisture.
Water gas, syngas, and wood gas imply different ranges of CO:H2 ratios, corresponding to the content of the feedstock. Also, as you mentioned, you end up with significant pyrolysis products like methane in your typical wood gas, depending on how it's done. (Usually, that's what you want, if you're burning it directly, like in an ICE. Natural gas, which is mainly methane, has much higher energy density than syngas, and pyrolysis is more efficient, thermodynamically, than gasification.)
And also as you mentioned, synthesis of liquid fuel via Fischer-Tropsch becomes economical at a certain price point.
the thing that should stand out the most is the part mentioning how someone uses cow milk to heat his house.
That is funny, but if you've ever been around a dairy farm, it makes a lot of sense. ...
There's a huge amount of waste heat that could very easily be exploited for heating.
To me, that just goes to highlight the vast amount of low-grade heat that is available, effectively for free, and the absurdity of burning virgin fuel to produce low-grade heat suitable for house heating.
Warm air is a waste product of almost every process in the home (to say nothing of industry, or the warm air available free from a very crude solar-thermal collector), yet we choose to consume fuel to produce special warm air to heat our homes. Insanity.