As one of thousands still without power after the Northeast’s ice storm last Thursday, I’m feeling more thankful than usual for my woodstove (it’s also great that my place of employment dodged the storm, so I can at least escape the darkness at the Orion office). I’ve got three cords of wood stacked up to keep the stove stocked and the house warm, and during bouts of hauling logs and gallons of water, I’ve been thinking about James Hansen’s recent statement about the importance of biomass for the future of the atmosphere. He said in the Independent in September that humanity needs to grow more trees and burn them for power, while capturing the CO2 produced.
I don’t know what that would look like, but I can tell you, the wood piled on the sides of the roads in my town right now could fuel such a power plant for a long while.
Environmental education in Guinea Bissau
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Pangolin Posted 2:52 pm
18 Dec 2008
Start burning that wood instead of coal and the Northeast will revert to the rock pastures that covered it one-hundred years ago. The heat you want is under your feet or hidden in a stack of straw bales. Insulation, thermal mass and ground-loop heat pumps are far better options than windfalls and thinnings.
You're going to burn them anyway but hopefully in a retort so the majority of carbon is retained as biochar to feed the soil. Feed them to a coal furnace and you'll live in a desert.
Put the Carbon Back
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Erik Hoffner Posted 12:14 am
19 Dec 2008
Got the lights back at last here at my house - 7 days was long enough. Some folks are still out, though.
Erik
The Orion Grassroots Network: supporting grassroots groups working for conservation, justice, & more
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:42 am
19 Dec 2008
What might really help is to have every building with geothermal heat exchange units, but in order to survive off the grid you would need a decent battery supply and/or some PV on the roof -- or maybe a little biomass generator.
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Erik Hoffner Posted 2:48 am
19 Dec 2008
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/27/183942/200
I would have been in the pink these last 7 days. Or at least I would have had lights and water, if not a cold fridge.
Erik
The Orion Grassroots Network: supporting grassroots groups working for conservation, justice, & more
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amazingdrx Posted 3:29 am
19 Dec 2008
Start with a few deep cycle batteries to power your essential during expensive peak hours, charge them up at night with 6 cent per kwh current.
Add in a few solar panels to feed the batteries too.
Install more panels, get a net metering power system. You can then get a small biodigestor, a couple of 55 gallon drums, and a multi-fuel 5 kw generator, that will run on natural gas or gasoline (in extreme emergencies), and hook it up to the battery backup. In New Hampshire they have been powerrless for weeks already.
How much will the plumbing bill for all those frozen pipes cost, alone? Not to mention the lost business. A smart grid with distributed storage and backup would make the grid un crashable. Each building becoming a stable cell in that whole network.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Colin Wright Posted 4:21 am
19 Dec 2008
Very easy to survive that type of cold. I have done it for years. Just did it for a new client. Cost about $ 2K.
The solution is called SUPER INSULATION of your primary living space. Take a kitchen room and do an internal build out of 12 inches of insulation. Loss of 1 foot around the wall is really not that big a deal. Ceilings are wayyy too high anyway.. Learn to live off the floor. By that I mean shelves for everything, take advantage of all the wasted space over your head. Really, make a line on the wall 6 inches above your head height and put everything you can up that high..Why heat dead air???? You can heat a space 24 x 24 with a few candles and body heat. Simple heat exhanger for outside air...very easy to do.
(Incidentally, there you will also find Nate Hagens with a few grim words to say about the drop-off on investment in natural gas drilling. Since we're running on a treadmill (more drilling each year just to keep supply constant), future supplies are in jeopardy.)
Also, while you're at the oil Drum, you could check out the great article (and comments) about the role of deforestation predating the Irish Famine, The Distant Mirror: Ireland's Great Famine by Ugo Bardi.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:15 am
19 Dec 2008
Colin, I've read about passivhaus before, it's an interesting idea. I don't know how easy it is to retrofit, in general, I think the building has to be designed from the ground up.
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Bob Wallace Posted 6:06 am
19 Dec 2008
If a house uses electricity to produce heat in any form (cook stove, space heater, water heater, etc.) just forget about it.
I run a very efficient 18 cu.ft. refer, 1-2 18 watt CFLs, a ~20 watt laptop, and a 4 watt draw radio. Twelve 6 volt "golf cart" batteries will store about 2 days of power.
Go to a site like Backwoods Solar and do an electricity audit for your lifestyle and see now many kWhs of batteries you would have to purchase to carry you through a few days of power outage.
(Deep cycle batteries are those with much thicker than usual plates. That allows them to undergo many more deep discharges before they croak. Normal car starting batteries just won't hold up to lots of deep down cycles.)
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Bob Wallace Posted 6:16 am
19 Dec 2008
Snowed in? The outside is your refer. Lots of things will keep really well in the trunk of a car parked in the shade. Or throw a space blanket over it if there's no shade. Putting it in the trunk keeps your goodies away from the critters.
I've used 5 gallon plastic boxes and dug them into the snow. Or stick them in an unheated garage. They work just fine for milk, etc.
You can even freeze containers of water overnight and stick them in your freezer to keep your frozen food for a couple of days. Or use a ice chest in a very shady place - screened porch.
No reason to go high tech and expensive just to cover occasional outages.
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Bob Wallace Posted 6:47 am
19 Dec 2008
I even used one dug into the ground underneath a large bush for one summer as my refer when I was first building and had only a very minimal PV setup.
I could keep milk for almost a week. Made shopping once a week viable....
Lots of things that we think need refrigeration really don't. I've kept eggs for months on my boat. Kept mayo without refer just fine, even in the tropics. Lots of veggies do well if just kept cool and out of the light.
Cheese - wrap it in a cloth lightly soaked in vinegar.
Keep a few small containers of stuff you really like for emergencies. Then you can open something and use it up in a couple of days.
People who live in places that can lose power should visit their shelves/pantry around Thanksgiving and ask themselves "If I get snowed in for a week or two and have no electricity what will I eat?". And then stock up on stuff that keeps well and is tasty to eat.
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amazingdrx Posted 5:22 pm
19 Dec 2008
And no refrigeration of off batteries Bob. A smart grid would store heat and cold directly in water heaters, refrigeraters, and building mass.
Batteries would be for laptop, phone, lights, just the emergency essentials. If solar did not provide enough heat, and grid power was out, the backup biogas powered generator would run for a few hours, recharging batteries and building up heat/cold in the storage. Heat from the generator would be captured to heat water and could even be used for cooking.
Jon the 55 gallon digestor would be batch fed. Before emptying, sufficient time to render the biomass harmless would pass. It can be pumped out with a sump pump and dried in a solar collector to provide organic fertilizer.
This is a home garden/chicken type biodigestion system, just one step above the heavy plastic bag in a trench design mentioned in the Costa Rica article by Ana. It would take a few barrels.
One system like this feeding a 5kw generator could back up your own home and a few neighbors, with smart grid load timing.
A farm biogas operation with 200 cows could backup maybe 50 homes. That's a failsafe grid. These systems would vastly increase gas production over just manure and garden waste by the addition of waste cellulose, like leaves and wood chips.
The cellulose to manure ratio is optimal at 30 to 1. 30 times the weight of dead leaves and wood chips to one part manure. Could the 1.24kwh per cow per day average be boosted to 8 kwh per day per cow, with the proper C/N ratio and a much more efficient generator?
kwh production could triple by switching from ICE generators to solid oxide fuel cell/turbine cogeneration. Plugin hybrid cars and trucks could also be used for grid backup, their generators hooked to biogas digestors when parked.
When will we get 20 kw biogas/gasoline multifuel cell/turbine backup generators for vehicles?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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