Alternative Energy Blues

It's 53 degrees F at 8:07 PM at my favorite Starbucks. I'm attempting to write full speed for one hour and then pack up and go home. My central focus is on finance and getting a paid for, easily maintained home for my parents and I. I want it to be a positive example for others as a conservation, energy and sustainability location. I want to be able to give it to relatives or friends when I'm no longer able to live there. I want it to be in excellent condition when they receive it and I want the people who receive it to be able to afford to maintain it and enjoy it. I want to have a long, healthy and prosperous life. I want to enjoy life in this house or any new house or houses with my parents, friends, relatives and any other allies. I want the house(s) to help as many people as possible as active, living houses and or energy providers for other people, and acting as positive examples for others. I want to clean up my parents' finances and my own. I want to...

So.  Put solar panels on every inch of the roof of a highly insulated, high energy efficiency house.  Install cistern to catch rainfall runoff for gardening and maintaining a xeriscaped landscape.  Carefully use recycled materials and new materials so there's a minimum of waste as a result of the construction.  Have the house planned and inspected under the scrutiny of three different independent environmental and energy non-profits for certification. Sounds like one of my pipe dreams?  Nope.  It's been done here in Houston.  Its the first triple LEEDS house in Houston, the Drummond House. According to the Code Green House website the efficiencies can be scalable down to 2000 Square feet. Just my size.  

No electricity for eleven days.  I had no work but, luckily I was still getting paid. But that didn't help the fact that there were no groceries.  I went around the city to free food places.  A few of them had MRE's, meals ready to eat from the military.  Managed to get ice too.  The water continued to work as did the old style phones.  I don't think I had a cell phone at the time.  We had electricity powered house phones which quickly stopped working.   Luckily I had a couple of old phones that didn't need batteries or our electricity to function. We had no air conditioning but that was okay because our house was so old it had been designed to allow air to flow through open doors and windows.  We have screen doors and windows fore and aft to keep out the bugs. With much less work and not as much to do at night for most people, the traffic was very quiet.  I actually enjoyed it. No AC was okay until, within about three nights t...

So.  A week to two weeks ago I stopped thinking about wood gas as a home electricity/gas solution. I can only speak about my situation and where I'm coming from.  I live in a gigantic city.  I'm not a tinkerer.  I've never considered myself good with my hands.  I can work very hard for a short period of time, then I get sick for a  long time.   I can see myself loading a generator on a daily basis, and doing quite well at it.  But all the day in day out care that's required to maintain the machinery and supplies  could lead to either the machine's breakdown or mine, very quickly. There's some direct funding possible for  a new, high efficiency,  ecologically sound house for my parents and I to live in.  There's some more indirect funding for some kind of generators that can create a surplus of power that can be used for some non-profit purpose. I'm not interested in building a fortress. I actually want to be tied into...

Yellow Rose Distillery said no.  I called back a moment later and asked about the spent distillers grain.  She said the spent grain was taken away by farmers.  She didn't know if they bought it or if was just given away.  I wanted to emphasize that I was willing to pay the entire cost of organic certification, and the cost of a batch, the event planner was not only not interested she was downright rude about not being interested.  Okay. Still, I've taken a step towards knowing who I'm not dealing with.  Let's find other sources of fuel or users for electricity.

Well,  my divorce is in progress.   I see that I'm in it thick. The distillery that might be interested in producing a certified organic whiskey was reluctantly surprised when they couldn't simply fluff me off. I initially offered to pay the price of getting certified and the extra cost of certified organic ingredients.  Certification with the Texas Department of Agriculture costs a minimum of  $2,350.00. What's the cost of certified organic ingredients?  How large is a batch run at the distillery? I know that they can run a maximum of 500 gallons in the still at once.  They don't like to do that large a batch at once so the prefer to do a maximum of 400 gallons.  However, they can step down how much whiskey or vodka they make to almost any lower amount they would like. That doesn't give me a price.  The lady with the distillery apologized but they couldn't run a batch because it would take away from current production there's also labe...

Proton Power finally called me back.  The raw numbers are $4 Million for most of a system that can deal with the fuels  primarily interested in.  Plus another  $1 to $1.5 Million for the drying system. They would generate 250 kw consuming 5 dry tons of fuel a day. They say they need to keep the moisture in the fuel down to a maximum of 45%.  They prefer bone dry fuel, especially for comparing the energy and waste yield of various fuels. I asked if we could get just the gasifiers and not the engines or other components. He said no.  They want to make sure they deliver a reliable, comprehensive, working system. They have at least two levels of removing tar from the syngas before it gets to the engine/generators.  After the fuel variety concern that was my second biggest worry. I talked to a gentleman who had worked in Indonesia.  He said that country was littered with non-working gasifiers.  I suspect that tar build up probably fouled up ...

The short and simple reasons to gasify stuff are first, to eliminate or reduce pollution and second or lastly to create energy. Some useful products can be created from pyrolysis or gasification.  Some byproducts of these processes can be disposed of with greater safety and using less landfill than with leaving the biomass or biosolids in standard treatment mode. The two different processes of dealing with biomass and biosolids are pyrolysis and gasification.  Pyrolysis is at a lower temperature range and results in tars, biochar and syngas.  Gasification is at a higher temperature range.  This latter process results in more syngas because the biochar and tar are consumed  (or cracked ) by the higher temperatures.    Both processes produce ash.  In pyrolysis the ash is mixed with biochar.  In gasification the biochar is mostly consumed.   Well, what if we really raised the temperature as high as humanly possible?  Appare...

So far, so good. A magazine led me to a possible manufacturer of gasifiers.  Can their gasifiers actually use biomass pellets for fuel?   It's looking good but I'm hoping to talk with someone with the company tomorrow. I recently learned the difference between pyrolysis and gasification.   Pyrolysis is at a lower temperature range and produces more tar and charcoal.  Gasification occurs at a higher temperature range and results in more complete consumption of tars and charcoal. Gasification results in more syngas, heat,  and ash than pyrolysis. It appears that each level of heating results in different types of products and byproducts. Adding or subtracting simple things like air, oxygen, water, steam and other things create even more variations in those products and byproducts. I'll go for whichever method will result in the least pollution of the air, water, and land. For the machines that I want to use to create electricity or transportation fuels I...