The Lindsborg Blog

Remember; we should view bio fuels as the back-up for wind and solar energy, not as the primary source.

2010-11-30T10:19:00.000-08:00

Keep in mind, as you read the older post below, that biofuels, particularly cellulosic ethanol and butanol are best used as the back-up, rather than the primary source of electrical energy for small communities. This is especially true in sunny areas and windy areas where an abundance of those ever-renewable resources is available. The less we depend on actual feed grains for fuel, the less deleterious influence it has on grain prices.

This plan is essentially a 5-legged structure; 1. Wind as primary power, 2. Solar as Peak Power, 3. Biofuel and 4. Grid as backup, and 5. Biomass gasification to fuel the biofuel production process and if there is a surplus, supplemental electricity generators.

As for Solar and Wind Power as primary sources, there is no longer any question these unlimited and infinitely renewable energy resources will prove to be the two pillars of our eventual national and personal energy independence.

Wind has inherent doldrum issues, while solar collection is limited to daylight hours. The best use of these is to produce a marketable surplus during peak periods, with systems all designed to produce sufficient energy under AVERAGE conditions. With the help of state and federal regulation, small communities should get the benefit of selling their surplus to the grid, and receiving it back during those rare times when the local loop is not producing enough energy for it's own needs.

Whatever trade-off this might require, it is really a win-win-win situation. Even the utility companies benefit, from the opportunity to sell energy produced at no real expense, just whatever price they can negotiate with those communities. And the communities get the benefit of a market for their surplus energy AND a 5th layer of back-up, represented by the "the grid" that they normally are feeding their surplus into.

The idea is, if enough communities nationwide adopt this form of community energy production, they can literally replace, with their growing surplus, a lot of future coal plants, especially in places like Kansas. The benefits this kind of program would offer to small-town USA are incalculable. When they realize they can lower their rates for their own residents, and local taxes in the process, they will all be ready to start building their own local loop systems.

The Local Loop, as far as Kansas and most of the midwest goes, is a three-part process, with Wind Energy as the primary source, Solar Energy as the peak source, and Biofuels as the back-up source.

Here's a map of Kansas, showing the high-wind areas.

These numbers have been revised recently, there's much more wind power available than they previously have disclosed to the public.

Here's an excerpt taken from a recent Wichita Eagle article about wind power.

"Kansas is now No. 2 for wind potential, according to data released Friday by the Department of Energy.

The new study vaulted Kansas and Texas — the new No. 1 — past former wind-potential leader North Dakota, which fell all the way to No. 6 on the new list.

Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota round out the new top five.

The numbers show that Kansas has the potential to generate 3.6 million gigawatt hours of electricity from wind — roughly equivalent to 10 times the power consumed by the state of California in a year.

Kansas' wind potential was upgraded from earlier estimates of 1 million gigawatt hours."

There is no longer any doubt Kansas communities can harvest this natural resource, as I describe in the Local Loop process below. And that is why it is the primary resource on this list.

But let's not forget the abundant sunshine available in Kansas, too.

THE FIGURES ABOVE INDICATE THE AVERAGE (OVER THE COURSE OF THE YEAR) AMOUNT OF INSOLATION (FULL SUN HOURS) FOR THESE ZONES.

In this plan, solar does it's best work right at the same time it is most required. By using Solar energy as the peak-energy booster supplement, air conditioning and heating peak demands are completely offset.

Using deep-cycle batteries, even night-time heating can be accomplished with stored solar power, via low-wattage floor-heating systems.

Even those batteries are unnecessary when the third leg of the energy loop is added.

By locally producing biofuels for use in generators that serve as the low-wind, night-time back-up system home heating is available at any hour. And when the wind blows at night, the back-up systems and battery storage would remain available, but unused, so biofuels would not be required as a primary or peak source, only as the backup system.

The excess fuel resulting from an extended windy spell and/or bright sunlight periods could potentially be sold to the open market, after first providing greener transportation fuel to schools, city and county vehicles.

As I state later in the blog, this loop gets it's fourth leg from local waste, turning sewage and sweepings and biomass into methane gas to heat the biofuel refining process. By creating this energy with local resources, the loop is closed and self-perpetuating, and that loop opens only on occasion, to re-purchase power back from the grid whenever the local loop is short.

Multiply this plan by the number of communities under 10,000 in Kansas, and across the country, and the total energy production potential is simply astounding.

The Lindsborg Blog! Biowatts galore! If we choose to spend millions on ANYTHING it should be alternative fuel, solar panels and wind generators!!

2007-08-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

The Alternative-Energy Email Newsletter
issue #2
Introducing;
The New-American Biowatt Primer
by John E. Patterson
(JEP)
1-620-307-0334

The farm belt and biofuels; Keep it local!!!

As the farm belt develops its fledgling biofuel industry into an energy giant, local towns and municipalities should consider taking "first advantage" of this new bounty.By producing their own electricity with town-sized generators, fueled with locally produced ethanol and bio-diesel, community utility companies can channel utility fees back into the local economy, in numerous ways that are lost when we get our power from a corporate grid. Not only do the area farmers get the benefit of a new market for their crops, the local townspeople get high-tech engineering and production jobs at the ethanol plant, the bio-diesel plant, and the electrical plant. And they spend their wages in town.

And they all get cheaper energy prices. Most rural communities in the Mid-West could produce a substantial supply of fuel well beyond local needs, and clusters of these communities could form into energy co-ops, creating a hundred county-sized OPEC's and establishing a very competitive market.As fuel-plant co-op members, local farmers, city services, and school systems could get discount fuel for their ethanol and/or biodiesel powered vehicles and equipment.

This is not exactly a new idea.

Renewable fuels as the energy source for generators is something of a "retrotech" retrofit.

In decades past, every small community typically had their own power generating plant. Those of us who grew up in the 40's and 50's remember those local power stations. Only in the last 50 years have mega-plants, super-dams and nuclear facilities extended "the grid" to its current monstrous proportions.

And lets consider homeland security.

Not only would it make local economic sense to diversify and disperse our energy production, it would be a much more secure form of energy. The monster grids of today are, inherently, vulnerable to man-made and natural disasters. While an untimely disaster, tornado or terrorist, could take out one of the big grids, it would be nearly impossible for nature or mischief to disable a thousand local systems, spread out across the nation.

The U.S. farm belt has an historic opportunity to take advantage of the promise of bio-fuels, especially if they keep it in the local loop. It would behoove state and federal governments to facilitate this transition, with loans and outright subsidies, and the local utility bills would pay off that loan, instead of subsidizing corporate investors who have no stake in our local economy.

After a decade paying off the state and federal loans, the community would own and manage its own power grid. And most important, the ingenuity of a thousand American engineers would eventually develop the most efficient system, as models for the future.

Think about it: The farm belt could be a veritable laboratory for biofuel research, churning out the kilowatts while advancing the technology towards its most efficient form. It would give new opportunities to every facet of our local and state economies. The engineering and the ag departments in some of our favorite Moo-U's would become conjoined in a new field.

Surely MidWestern Academia would find a way to make a new major course of study out of that union.

Don't let biofuels become another tool of big business and factory farming.

Keep it local!

JEP

After you study the simple chart above, (click the image for full-size version) follow the links below to get more info about each stage of the multi-stage process.

1. Large Scale Biomass conversion (this is a very comprehensive technical journal, in PDF form, so be patient, this loads up slowly, but is well worth the wait! If you are in a hurry, click the next link for now.)

1A. Small Scale Biogas production

Go to the website links provided, and you will better understand these imminently important alternatives, and why I am proposing they should be viewed as a single resource.

With the increase in funding that new legislation promises to provide for research and development of alternative energy sources, this is an appropriate time to evaluate the existing alternatives, and consider a localized community-sized model that would expedite the development and the transition time.

Alternative energy ideas are popping up everywhere. Even in the face of industrial-strength suppression to prevent competition to the fossil-fuel monopolies, All-American ingenuity has been churning out ideas in response to the laws of supply and demand that the oil industry ignores. Therefore, there is already a willing public, a receptive market and a multiple-choice list of alternatives, that can ALL be developed to accommodate this 21st Century energy revolution.

I have created a "local loop" flow chart, intended to provide both a simple visual guide and an information link. The diagram outlines what I believe represents the best potential future for alternative energy, with the emphasis on a local loop, it gives you direct Internet links to the latest information about each of the separate layers in this multi-layered system.
But always keep in mind, it is not any one of these products, but the UNION of all these alternatives that forms one idea, a unified construct that addresses a big percentage of our energy needs.

These innovations, along with some meaningful revisions in our power usage cycles, bring us ever closer to total energy independence. Unfortunately, while we have some good reference resources for these fuels, there are few websites or plans that put them all together into the "team concept" of energy independence.

No single alternative energy source will stand alone to replace foreign oil and coal, and other traditional, environmentally-hazardous energy sources. But the answer will be found in the application of multiple, compatible, and complimentary alternatives, in a gear-up system that generates LOCAL community and agricultural electricity needs.

I don't get into detail about wind energy here, that will be a later post. But in some geographic areas, wind energy can play an even more significant role than biofuels in the 21st Century energy story.

Central Kansas is surely one of those areas blessed with a great deal of wind that can be harvested at no cost other than purchasing, erecting and maintaining the machines that generate the electricity. No future fuel costs, just free wind, and an abundance of it.

Seems like something of a no-brainer, any community considering a long term expense project like the one currently approved, might reconsider its priorities. The purchase of a wind energy system and/or a local biofuel plant would be very progressive, saving ratepayers and taxpayers money, not digressive, costing the taxpayers and ratepayers money.

I don't imagine everyone who reads this will learn something new, but there are many people who still have, at best, a superficial knowledge of the energy alternative story, and they talk a lot about making changes without much real action.

And all the while, "biowatts" are just waiting to be harvested from our renewable resources. Our first issue covers liquid biofuels, but also introduces the local-waste loop, harvesting waste gas to heat the alternative fuel productions, instead of draining existing electric energy from "the grid." The idea here is to wean communities off of the grid, bringing their own generators online using fuel produced from local crops and biomass.

These links and diagrams are intended to help increase alternative-energy fluency and to help illustrate how these resources can become immediately functional. This is not just more talk or speculation or experimentation. Although in essence, this will all be a very grand experiment, one that immediately produces "biowatts" from purely local resources, and gets more efficient as it develops.

What I propose is that somewhere in the process of allocating all this new research money for these alternatives, we need to put together, in every state, one town-sized model of what I have proposed here. It would prove to be the most efficient way to decentralize our on-grid use of power, and create REAL American jobs and energy independence, on a very local basis.

Each of the plants described would bring more than one high-tech job to the community, those wages and the cost of the raw materials for energy production (paid directly to local farmers) come from the utility bills of the community.

You will see three liquid-fuel alternatives on my chart . One is biobutanol, another ethanol, and the third is biodiesel. Any one of these three fuels could be a stand-alone power product, but by developing all three together, time would eventually determine the most efficient alternative and competition would drive new inventiveness.

This "plan" would create a model for other communities to emulate, once the most efficient form was established. And while it is certainly not complete, it is the only "plan" I have seen as yet that represents a "do-able" alternative that could be up and running in less than a year, as long as the resources are available.

So, basically, by sending this email to all our council people, (which I have done) what I am to lobbying for is a CITY PLAN that would actively seek state and federal grants, loans and subsidies for the construction of a multi-fuel facility similar to what I have diagrammed, and bringing that plant into the production loop, generating electricity for the local grid. Let me repeat;

... if we can spend millions on sprucing up the city buildings, we can spend it to build cheap energy generating systems!

Then LOWER RATES AND TAXES, INSTEAD OF RAISE THEM!

Excuse me for shouting. You can send a direct response to this posting to THIS EMAIL ADDRESS or just click on the comments and as long as there's no swearing or accusations in your comment, the administrators will put it online.

John Patterson

Lindsborg resident

SOLAR ENERGY MAPS

From; http://www.oasismontana.com/systems.html

also see; http://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html#collector

http://www.solardyne.com/solpvpanarra.html

The following maps detail the availability of wind, solar AND BIOMASS energy here in Kansas. As you can see, all these resources are abundant enough to be a stand-alone system, here in central Kansas in particular. And keep in mind all these charts are very conservative, the wind in Kansas is probably even stronger than this map projects, according to many other models, and the local row-crop production has skyrocketed in recent years, so there is a much larger supply of bio-diesel and bio-ethanol grains than shown on these maps.

Also keep in mind, there is a "cause and effect" factor in Kansas with solar energy, because the hotter and sunnier it gets here, the more utility usage rises, particularly to provide air conditioning. Therefore, any solar array would produce it's maximum energy at the same time demand is also peaking, thus rendering solar energy as the ideal "peak" provider, with wind and bio-diesel energy as the primary providers. Add to these a diesel-powered and an ethanol-powered generator, fueled with bio-diesel from our own local soybean, corn and sunflower crops, these generators would act to fill the gaps created by low-wind and low-light days. Look closely at these maps and you will see that Kansas is one of the few states with resources available IN EVERY CATEGORY. This is one reason we represent a great natural laboratory, because we can experiment with all three forms of energy production, without reaching outside the local loop for any resources. And in the marriage of these various alternatives in a triple-redundancy, we might actually find our way to energy independence.

WIND ENERGY MAP
From

http://www.agroplastics.com/kswind/body_intro.html
"Over the past 20 years, the assessment of wind energy resources in the United States was accomplished primarily using existing meteorological data obtained from the National Weather Service stations, primarily airports across the United States. A Department of Energy report done by the Pacific Northwest Laboratory summarized the results of analyses of data collected from over 3000 sites, report included wind resource maps listing average wind speeds categorized by class, from Class 1 (very little wind) to Class VII (extremely strong wind). In terms of wind power, any area having a wind classification of Class 3 or higher is potentially suitable for energy production. . The The map on the left shows the various areas of the state and their approximate wind classes based on the airport data sets. However, many wind experts in the state believe that the results of this study were low and that the state of Kansas actually has Class V and higher wind sites. "

INSOLATION ZONE MAP

How Many Sun Hours a Day Do You Get? Zone 1 6 hours Zone 2 5.5 hours Zone 3 5 hours Zone 4 4.5 hours Zone 5 4.2 hours Zone 6 3.5 hours

The figures above indicate the average (over the course of the year) amount of insolation (full sun hours) for these zones. These figures are based on the yearly average; consequently, systems based on these figures will provide more power in summer and less in winter. Winter figures for daily solar gain may be from 25% to 50% LESS than these average figures.