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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.
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.
"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.
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.
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"
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"
the thing that should stand out the most is the part mentioning how someone uses cow milk to heat his house.
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?
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
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.
"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.
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 :)
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.
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.
So you want another study on top of the large number of studies already done. Fine - I question your motives though. It seems to be a smoke screen at best. I mean you could have looked it up yourself and presented your somewhat better founded ideas here instead of spreading FUD.
Regarding the EROI you could start here:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy
and here:
"Food, Energy, and Society", David Pimentel, Marcia Pimentel, Edition 3, illustrated, CRC Press, 2008, ISBN 1420046675, 9781420046670
Interestingly the second source presents a much lower number for the EROI than the first.
After all, all power conversion systems currently in use have a higher than 1 EROI, does this come as a surprise to you? Personally I count on the people who build power conversion facilities to have an interest in a properly filled wallet and the major energy storage medium being sold in some currency.
Je me souviens.