Eprida: Biofuel Production for Montpelier?

Today after the Service Learning Committee meeting I talked for a while with Gwen Hallsmith, the Montpelier City Planning Director about my ideas around local biofuel production. She said two things:

1. One reason to not love biofuel is that the biggest issue with biofuel is water and food. Apparently it takes an enormous amount of water to create biofuel and clean freshwater is a bigger issue for humanity than transportation. The question comes down to, "Who gets the food and water, the people or the cars?"

2. Even so, she liked my idea, and she recommended a pyrolysis-type biofuel producer called Eprida. It sounds pretty much too good to be true (which, we all know, probably means it is), but it's worth investigating. As far as I understand it pyrolysis is a kind of slow burn, letting (in this case) organic material decompose in the absence of oxygen, which leaves some kind of fuel, and a byproduct: char, something like charcoal. Only this stuff enhances carbon sequestration and can be used like a fertilizer. I know - too good to be true, saves gasoline burning AND takes CO2 out of the air. They have short flash video explaining the process, but somehow I feel like that's being generous. I came away from it feeling like I'd just watched a Dharma Initiative video on LOST. It may be legit, but not being a chemist, I'll need to do some further research.

Anyway it was encouraging to hear positive feedback from her about this idea. We'll see how far we get with it.

I think Gwen may be the archetype Eco-Maven.

Lawn-Based Biofuel

So I talked with my kids today about this idea of farm-scale supply and demand, then expanded to publicly available biofuels, and one of the kids said that someone around here is already doing that - already sells biofuel. I've got to find out for myself if that's true (other teachers were doubtful).

But.

Here's a small modification to that system. What if, once the distilling operation was functioning, people could bring their lawn clippings from their yards to this place and drop them off in return for a discount on fuel? Sweet, eh?

All the environmentalists in my life who don't like biofuels don't like it because it's not going to be a large-scale remedy/replacement for gasoline. It would take crops grown over an area the size of Kansas someone said. But grass is the #1 crop grown in America. What if we just ... used it? People could switch to Switch Grass (hehe), or they could just stick with conventional grass (which does have some cellulosic stored chemical energy). We could probably have enough, eh? We'll have to run that calculation with the students.

It could also be extra revenue for restaurants if they could sell their grease to a biofuel-producing station.

It's evolving.

Environmental Healing Tipping Points

Hal Colston recommended I read Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell, so I borrowed it from the library and read it over our break. It changed the way I think about behavior.

So I've been applying what I learned to affecting the kind of large scale change that needs to happen in order for our planet to heal. If everyone in America unplugged their appliances when they weren't using them, we'd save energy, but it would do about as much good as a band-aid on a broken arm. What is enough? Well, here's my list of things that need overhauling (not in order of importance):

1) heating fuel
2) electricity
3) transportation fuel
4) China's gotta find some better options or have higher standards (and the theory is that if America leads, China will follow)
5) Rainforests need to not be chopped down, and allowed to regrow in desolated areas.
6) human population stabilization
7) greener everyday products: matching product useful lifetime with material lifetime

Ok. That's a daunting list. Un-realistic by most people's standards (but that's why we believe in God, right? To do the impossible?)



After thinking about this list in the context of Tipping Points, something occurred to me: most everyday people don't have any choice in these things. When regular people buy a house, the type of fuel is determined by the architect, not them. When regular people buy a car they pick out a manufacturer, model, and color (I suppose some people get more involved), but since biofuels are not a mainstream option, that decision has been made for them.

So how do you affect change for home heating and transportation fuels? It's not by educating regular people, though it probably wouldn't hurt, but they're not the people to talk to. The people to start the biofuel epidemic are architects and auto manufacturers.

Yesterday my friend from NY and her husband, who's an architect, came to visit, and he assured me that green building courses are now the norm for architects, which is certainly encouraging, so hopefully that field is already shifting.

But biofuel for cars? The Catch 22 of no-supply-no-demand for biofuels is the stumbling block that we need to overcome. But how? Here's a hypothesis.

Instead of going to car-manufacturers, go to the other half of the system: fuel producers, aka farmers. The idea is

• help farmers switch their equipment to biodiesel and
  
• help them setup biodiesel production on their farm from crops they can grow.

Nobody in Montpelier will buy a flex-fuel car until they know they can fill up around here. So start micro supply-and-demand systems going on farms, and then the structures are there to expand the supply as demand increases. But you need the farmers need that mechanism to get the whole thing jump started.

If we could advertise in Montpelier that some farmer had "locally grown fuel", people would go nuts!

A lot of farm equipment is already built to run on biodiesel, so I need to do some further research on how many farmers around here are biodiesel-equipped, and secondly how many of them are producing their own biodiesel.

We might also need to have some kind of incentives program to get people around here to buy flex-fuel or biodiesel-capable cars, but that's not too hard to imagine.

Montpelier just won a $100,000 grant to make the city more sustainable, so I think I'll be writing a grant to support farmer seminars, biodiesel production equipment, biodiesel farm equipment perhaps even? We'll see.

Check out Chrysler's Flex Fuel vehicles: Chysler

Feeling Hopeful ~ Happy New Year Everyone!

Church and Sustainability?

I'm afraid the simpler design for a bicycle generator is going to have to wait a bit because I've got something on my mind.

It seems to me that the church (yes, I admit I am a Christian and a physics geek simultaneously) is in the business of bringing life to the places which are dead and need healing. That's the essence of the Resurrection, no? Taking things which are broken, and mending them. Healing wounded things. Reconciling broken relationships. Healing is divine. All healing. "Self-healing" is a property of living things, and so I think that's one regard in which God is in us.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because church usually addresses certain kinds of broken relationships: God-humanity, human-human, human-his/her body. This is evident in the types of prayer requests that come up during a prayer meeting. "Pray for Billy Wood's surgery" (human-his body). "Pray for Susie's salvation" (God-humanity). "Pray for Judy's relationship with her boss" (human-human).

But you never hear prayers like "Pray for the reduction of invasive species in our area". Or "Pray for global climate change". At least in the churches I've been to, you just don't hear that. It's not normal. But what better to pray about? Somethings which we pray about it's easy to picture the solution, but global climate change seems inevitable and huge - something that only God could control, so it would be a perfect thing to take to God. He specializes in the impossible! :)

Just now... something has occurred to me. I was going to list here the ministries that churches normally support, which address different kinds of brokenness, but I'm realizing that there really aren't that many. I've heard of some churches doing racial reconciliation, and churches supporting homeless shelters, or crisis pregnancy centers, or doing jail ministries, collecting money for needy families, or even "deliverance ministries". But when I list ministries of the church, I think of "youth ministry" or "new moms". These are not so much ministries as they are clubs. Curious.

In any case, it seems to me that there's space to have some kind of an environmental reconciliation ministry through the church.

I'm not sure what that looks like, but I think it should happen. Suggestions welcome.
(Also, I have to blame Hal Colston of the Good News Garage for this idea).

Here are the things which St. Andrew's (my church) has either done or is planning right now.

1. Give away sample sizes of eco-friendly laundry detergent to college students to advertise our church, and hopefully start them on good soap-buying habits.

2. We're going to have a church service series on environmental stewardship where we invite Seventh Generation to come talk about their products and how we can be kinder to the earth. yay!


3. We don't print bulletins, so we can save paper. Nor do we have our own building so we save on the consumption that comes along with a new building.

4. We serve organic fair trade coffee as refreshments.

5. mmmm... we don't have a 5, but I feel like this stuff isn't enough. These are little things - "lead by example" type things, but we definitely need to be doing more. We've just got to invent it. (oh the future is exciting!)

Student-Built Bicycle Generators

Today I stopped at the high school to meet up a with a former student who wanted to borrow our bicycle generator. Her college in Canada (I forget which one now) is having a green fair, and she and he compatriots are hoping to rehabilitate our delapitated machine.

Two summers ago we built 5 bicycle generators with a group of summer school students using Subaru alternators and deep cycle batteries... and some wires and stuff (heh heh). All 5 worked by the end of the 2-week session (which seems amazing to me now), and since it was the first time anyone in the group (myself and my co-teacher included) had ever done something like this we made a lot of mistakes that would certainly affect the way we would build them in the future.

In any case, this is what we did:
We took Subaru alternators (cause we could get them for free, and Subaru is like the official car of Vermont, so they're pretty abundant), and we made sure there was a good electrical connection between the outside of the metal alternator and the metal bicycle frame (grounding), likewise with the negative side of the battery (use a high-gauge well-insulated wire).

The Large Bolt on the alternator carries the majority of the current, so you need a pretty hefty, well-insulated wire connected to the positive side of the battery, but that's not going to be enough to produce electricity once the alternator's turning.

The reason is because the alternator has no permanent magnet. It's an electro-magnet, which means that it needs just a little bit of juice to start production (lighter-gauge wire should be fine). Thus the idiot light. When you flick the switch to "on", the battery sends a little bit of current through the bulb, which provides resistance and tells us that there's electricity flowing through there. And when the bulb is lit, that means the electromagnet is juiced and its ready to produce electricity on its own.

The alternator is built to cease using electricity from the battery once it's going, so after a few turns the idiot light should go off indicating that it's sufficiently powering itself as it turns. When you stop, however, the light should come back on.

Be sure to turn the switch to "off" when you're done, so you don't drain the battery.

Advantages:

• This system would be great for long-term power use - if you were actually trying to fill a battery with human-generated power.
• It was super cheap - each bike was built for less than $100!
• All the parts are readily available at an auto-parts store.
  

Disadvantages:

• The way we built them ... (heh heh) they were almost impossible to move. Those deep cycle batteries were freaking heavy.
• We ended up attaching a tiny inverter to our battery (with the cigarette-lighter end cut off) so that we could actually plug in some devices for our parent/community exhibition. But what we didn't anticipate was that those inverters were the type of device that is "always on", and as long as it was plugged in they were sucking energy from battery :( thus killing them.
• They did not demonstrate the correlation between the wattage of a device and how hard you would have to pedal to power it. Because of the electro-magnet, you couldn't get around needing a battery. So as an educational tool to demonstrate power it wasn't so good. As a tool to teach circuitry, it was great.

The bicycle generator I lent to the college student was of a different (simpler) design, which I'll notate tomorrow probably.

Organic Housing

Sabin's Pasture has been a controversial piece of property in Montpelier, VT for a few years now. It's one of the last undeveloped parcels of land within the city limits, everybody's got some plans for it.

A couple weeks ago, an civil engineering class from Norwich University gave a presentation of their work in which students created a development plan for Sabin's Pasture. Most had a compact loop of houses and a larger winding system of hiking trails. They took into account a huge amount of factors like, wetlands, solar exposure, bedrock depth, existing paths, and even the "essence" of the place (e.g. enclosed forest - introspective, bare hill top - connectedness to the rest of Vermont, etc.). In general I thought they did a fantastic job. There was one assumption though which I didn't jive with. They assumed that the houses which already exist in Montpelier would be the model for the houses which will be built in the future. I mean, it sounds fair enough, but I suspect we'll have fewer resources to play with.

We will need to be more energy efficient in our designs, and our resources will have to be more local than the vinyl siding-type housing we're accustomed to.

If I could :) (hehehehe) I'd build a house like this on Sabin's Pasture:












This house was built buy a guy in Wales mainly out of material found on their property or from the rubbish. I know what you're to say: It's a Hobbit Hole. And to that I say, what's wrong with a Hobbit Hole? Here's why it makes sense:












1) Below-ground housing with straw bale insulation is wicked heat efficient.
2) Built from local abundant materials makes it cheaper.
3) No nasty synthetic chemicals to worry about.

The builder-owners were kind enough to supply a sketch of their plans. I love it. I would love to build something like this eventually :)


And in case you're interested here are some other visions of earth-bermed housing:
Bag End 2
Nettleton

Theo Jansen's Walking Creatures

And now for a little fun...

Theo Jansen is one of my favorite artists because his art is both elegant and complicated, and I'm very into science-based or mathematical art. Theo Jansen makes walking beasts out of pipes, springs, and whatnot - just beautiful to watch.

I appreciate that his art requires a high degree of technical difficulty and a deep understanding of physics. Each Beest starts out as a computer generated model, which goes through many iterations until it is optimized for walking (or at least that's how I understand his process), and then the computer model gets transfered to reality, where it walks on the beaches of Holland. Here are a couple of videos of Theo Jansen and his work:



Here's another walking animal which can carry heavy loads:



And Finally a 3D Simulation of how the previous animal works: