From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency 183
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."
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
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There are not just 5 english vowel sounds though.
http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/newstart.html [washington.edu]
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 mor
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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
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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.)
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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.
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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 [solidot.org] (Chinese Slashdot).
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".
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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.
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Isn't that what you call a catalytic converter?
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"Put a tiger in your tank" - for rather small values of "tiger".
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
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Re:Spuds! (Score:2)
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.
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.
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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
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MooThermal Heat Pump?
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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. . . and this "Sucker" you refer to is also known as "Congress?"
Two definitions of 'sucker' I know of as far as Washington, D.C. goes:
1) Anyone voting Republican who isn't rich
2) Anyone voting Democrat expecting actual liberal change.
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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
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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.
I also read the story and I also found that the power plant producing "more heat than light" to be amusing and appropriate for the District as well.
Where I went to college there was a coal fired power plant on campus. It's primary purpose was to produce the heating and cooling for the buildings on the main campus. It had the capability to produce electricity but the generators where mostly kept at low power since it was cheaper to buy electricity from the city than produce it themselves. Best I could tel
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From the article:
If the coal:sulfur ratio by weight is 1:17,108, it will release exactly one ton of sulfur. This will be as sulfur dioxide (SO2), which weighs 64.07 g/mol, half of which is from sulfur (32.065 g/mol). In other words, one ton of sulfur becomes two tons of sulfur dioxide.
From what I could find (ufl.edu [ufl.edu]), coal usually contains more than 1 percent of sulfur by weight.
That me
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I also read that article, i thought it strange that Eva Malecki wouldn't talk about the plan because of security concerns. If the plant only provided heat/cooling i don't think either of those systems would be considered critical. Perhaps it actually DOES power something? Just not anything that is on the books. Built in 1910? When was that bunker under union square built? around that same time?
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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)
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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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So what was the prototype? I just see an uneconomic mess of well-developed technologies. Subsidizing an expensive alternative isn't the same as a "prototype". It can be, I admit that. But I don't see the novelty here. Another qualm I have is whether this program is sustainable. 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.
Your point about the soil is worth considering, but it is not necessarily a telling one. The question is whether they are removing enough biomass to disturb some kind of equilibrium or generate some kind of physical disturbance. It leads to another important issue which you don't raise: scalability.
My wife is a scientist who worked on the planning stages of the Boston Harbor cleanup. The basic design the engineers came up with was this: a large scale conventional primary and secondary treatment plant, d
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Your point about the soil is worth considering, but it is not necessarily a telling one. The question is whether they are removing enough biomass to disturb some kind of equilibrium or generate some kind of physical disturbance. It leads to another important issue which you don't raise: scalability.
I mostly ignored this issue (though needing subsidies is a related issue). You definitely bring up an important point there. Not everyone has a lot of biomass to burn.
As far as the subsidy is concerned -- that's neither here nor there. Nothing gets done in this world without money being spent. Even saving money, if you exclude simply not doing something. You don't need to commission engineers and scientists to answer the question, "Can we make this Island energy self-sufficient if they stop heating their homes, using electricity or internal combustion vehicles." You *do* have to spend money to answer a question like, "How much of this straw can we burn before the soil dries up and blows away."
It's certainly not my money that they spent. But I think it's quite cavalier how most of the people in the story were about the money that they used. And that's another point here that I think is worth emphasizing. Money spent making a small island carbon neutral (or if you consider heating, almost carbon neutral) probably could have been spen
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Let me spell it out for you, since the simple concept seems to escape you. The island wanted to see if they could change their Infrastructure, basically the way all'uhv that tharr 'lectrissty stuff was gettin' made, ah-hyuck! So they went an' asked the gonverme- govmer- gomerv- tha guys in charge, an' whatnot, fer sum money ta try outa' whole buncha new ideers. When they dun found one what warks an' all, they went an' bilt it! Ah-hyuck! Now that they dun figger'd out whatta'do an' whatall that don't make all that stinky smoke, thar gonna start bildin' it all over So thar it is! Gawrsh... Now I'm off to down a bottle of Ibuprofen. Could someone else please field the next potential Darwin Award nominee that starts spouting off rhetoric and trying to cloud the issue? Talking down to that level physically pains me.
Oh my. A slashdot native being uppity! Quick! Get the camera! Honey, let me put Junior on his shoulders first. That should be a great shot!
More seriously, if you have a problem with something I wrote, maybe you could bring it up rather than just being an entertaining idiot. There are four problems you've ignored: 1) they took a lot of somebody else's money to build this infrastructure. That's one strike against the claim of self-sufficiency. 2) It doesn't scale to most people. Denmark isn't exactly a lan
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Let me distill what others in this thread have been trying to make clear:
The capital required to set the system up in the first place is completely irrelevant to whether the infrastructure is self-sufficient on an ongoing operation basis, which is how any claim of "self sufficiency" is generally understood.
The reasonable counterargument would be that any interest paid on the init
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The capital required to set the system up in the first place is completely irrelevant to whether the infrastructure is self-sufficient on an ongoing operation basis, which is how any claim of "self sufficiency" is generally understood.
No. That's not how self-sufficient is generally understood. But you make my point in the next paragraph.
The reasonable counterargument would be that any interest paid on the initial outlay should be counted against "self-sufficient" status, and such a counterargument is one I'm willing to accept -- if you have the numbers to sustain the argument that the cost of funds outweighs the ongoing expenses avoided. Are you prepared to make that argument?
I never saw any indication that this actually saved money. If it actually does, then we can consider whether it saves more than the interest cost of the capital outlay.
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Quoting from the Wikipedia article: Self-sufficiency refers to the state of not requiring any outside aid, support, or interaction, for survival; it is therefore a type of p
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This refers to an immediate state, independent of how that state was achieved.
The same could be said of dropping someone naked in the Artic tundra. They're self-sufficient till they freeze to death (and hence no longer survive).
If the energy needs of the island are able to be met without sending the island's funds outside on an ongoing basis, there is no question that money is saved from the perspective of the economy of the island as a whole
I don't think it's a good idea to take this plan only from the point of view of the island. The thing that bothers me here is that there's absolutely no mention of cost in most of these stories. The best I've found is an estimate of 11,000 euro [milkproduction.com] per person which allegedly includes some amount of local investment. The link mentions a farmer, Jørgen Tranberg
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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.
What is still unknown... (Score:2)
The bottom line is if it generates less energy over its lifetime than is required to mine the metals, refi
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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,
Bricks (Score:2)
Bricks take a tremendous amount of energy to produce and transport.
Esp "sturdy" ones.
More problems (Score:2)
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 h
One gearbox to bankrupt them all. (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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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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).
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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
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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?
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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.
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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 ...
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[citation needed] (Score:2)
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 kil
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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.
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You're bitching about the post-Industrial era on an Internet message board?
Hilarious.
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Very succinct, much better than most of your other posts, AC.
Re:Nonpolluting straw burning? (Score:5, Insightful)
yes, horses and subsidies from the mainland, that's the secret for self-sufficiency on an island.
the straw exists anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
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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
Having lived on a farm I can tell you that any thing that can be fed to animals is not "waste". Animals raised for meat, milk, hide, etc. take a lot of feed. Most of that feed is quite expensive since it is also used for human food, like corn and soybeans. Farmers and ranchers will fight over that "waste" if it is a suitable substitute for the more expensive alternatives.
After decades of taking the straw off of fields to be used for feed and bedding for cattle local farmers have realized that erosion is
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Straw is not edible.
Hay is edible.
Straw is what you sit on at the county fair and people spread over mud.
"Straw is an agricultural by-product, the dry stalk of a cereal plant, after the grain or seed has been removed. Straw makes up about half of the yield of cereal crops such as barley, oats, rice, rye and wheat. In times gone by, it was regarded as a useful by-product of the harvest, but with the advent of the combine harvester, straw has become more burdensome to agriculture"
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 mak
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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 Denm
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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"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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.