Post Carbon Sustainability Network

... formerly known at the Peak Oil Network, asked my student and I to be their main presenter at their monthly potluck. What an interesting bunch - they're mostly older and highly educated. Beth went to Harvard (she wanted to know if I was related to Thomas Watson, or James Watson whom she'd had for intro to biology at Harvard). Dave taught physics at the high school ages before me. Henry helped install over 50 solar hot water heaters in the Tunbridge Valley area. There was a crew of about 14 folks in attendance, and although I couldn't answer all of their questions, I think they appreciated it and liked hearing about our work. I mean, I think I navigated those questions well enough; they were good questions, like, "How do you transport the crop to the pelletizer, on a bailer or a large truck?" Meh, idk. But even so, those are the types of questions we'll need to have looked into by a research facility, which I'm meeting about tomorrow.

Tomorrow we've got an audience with the president of the Biomass Energy Research Corporation, Adam Sherman, as well as Jock Gill, and Andy Boutin (an inventor of a pellet boiler insert to retrofit-replace the oil burner on a conventional furnace). The goal of this meeting is to generate focusing questions that a research facility could address.

Anyway, back to the Post Carbon folks, we went like 30 minutes over, which cut into the next presentation (unfortunately) from a guy from Adamant Vermont (Rick Barstow) who bought a small pelletizer and specifically wants to pelletize grass crops. This is very exciting, and I'm sure he'll be a great resource when we get things up and running.

A woman from the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund was unable to attend (but apparently she has expressed interest in meeting with us later) because they would like to throw money at a pelletizing facility. MmmMMmmm :) yummy.


... In other news, my students energy projects are going... slowly. Today one group disassembled an electric pump to get to just the motor part (which you'd think would be easy, buuuut it's not), and in the end they had to take a hack-saw to it, but they got it. Now if only we knew which pieces were really important to put it all back together as a generator. :)
And for kicks... here's a picture of my students doing some measurements of the height of the dam at the Lane Shops (today they calculated that revenue from the dam would be approximately $100,000/year ... yea!)