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Comments: 183 +- Hardware: From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency on Saturday October 10, @01:06AM
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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."
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All I can think is... (Score:2, Funny)
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girls and cookies!
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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
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [urbandictionary.com] 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 t
Samso? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
A Møøse once bit my sister (Score:2)
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".
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Take your fancy ISO characters back where they belong -- this is Slashdot, dang nab it, where ASCII is not just a good idea, It's the Law!
(Yes, blah blah blah ISO-8859-1 blah blah blah.)
Re:Samso? (Score:5, Funny)
they could power their Hummers with liquified kittens
Sir, I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to invest in your startup.
Parent
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Isn't that what you call a catalytic converter?
I doubt it (Score:2)
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 extern
For anyone who has bothered to read the article... (Score:4, Funny)
the thing that should stand out the most is the part mentioning how someone uses cow milk to heat his house.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 befo
First thing that comes to mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sucker is still belching tons of pollutants without producing a watt of electricity
. . . and this "Sucker" you refer to is also known as "Congress?"
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Sucker is still belching tons of pollutants without producing a watt of electricity
I read the story. It produces heat not electricity. Appropriate for Congress, and it is a valid thing for a coal burning plant to do.
Also, you mention "tons of pollutants"? Over what time frame? Are you counting carbon dioxide? I'll say already, that if you are, then you shouldn't be. The idea that everything is equally a pollutant and hence equally harmful is a particularly toxic environmental myth. Consider that a ton of "pollutant" could be a ton of carbon dioxide or a ton of botulin. The former gets
parse error at "generous amounts of aid" (Score:2, Insightful)
"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.
Re:parse error at "generous amounts of aid" (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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It apparently depends to a great degree on locals burning their hay in an heating plant rather than leaving it on the field. That might lead to soil loss in the long run.
Topsoil-based fuels are always wrongheaded if they don't do something beneficial to the soil. It would probably make more sense to just grow native grasses, because they tend to feature nitrogen and phosphorus fixers.
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Denmark obviously thought it was worth investing in this experiment to see if the things tried worked and were viable long-term. I would expect the aid given was an initial investment and not an ongoing requirement for the sustainability--sort of like venture capital.
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"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.
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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 (
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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.
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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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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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 :)
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Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:5, Insightful)
yes, horses and subsidies from the mainland, that's the secret for self-sufficiency on an island.
Parent
the straw exists anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
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They were burning the straw as waste already so the change is that they use the heat to do something useful.
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:4, Informative)
To put the amount of pollution into perspective, here's [greenedmonton.ca] 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.
Parent
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
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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 s
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:5, Informative)
so yea it is the same in a superficial and meaningless sort of way.
Parent
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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.
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [google.com]. 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
At least you can make more straw.
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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 [impactlab.com]. The Mother Earth News (magazine) built one more than 25 years ago [motherearthnews.com] back when the memory of the 70's oil embargo was still fresh and painful.
Parent
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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.
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
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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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 ba
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They exchange energy back and forth with the mainland.
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If they're on the same grid as the mainland, there's no guarantee that they'll be using "the same electricity" as the stuff they're putting in (not that that makes any sense in any case).
Self sufficiency would just involve putting in as much as they're taking out. "Energy density" is just their way of measuring that, it being quite a tricky thing to measure over a 10 year period.
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If one's goal was to make a particular patch of land self-sufficient in its energy needs, the amount of energy produced per unit area would be an important metric, would it not?
That's Odd... (Score:3, Funny)
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That comment looks like it's the slashdot equivalent of a skeleton key. It commits itself to so little that it can probably earn you puzzled but appreciative moderation on any story.
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yes, it's called the sun, you might have noticed it.
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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 [eoearth.org]
and here:
"Food, Energy, and Society", David Pimentel, Marcia Pimentel, Edition 3, illustrated, CRC Press, 2008,