You've given us a new acronym: NBDR (as in "...Non-Biodiesel Related discussion...").
We owe you thanks, IMHO

quote:

Originally posted by Graydon Blair:
Diesel Pickups....
That pickup in the back ground is a sweet Isuzu (well, ok, besides the rust). I could only hope that it's got a diesel under it's hood...

WOw, I can't believe you can recognize it from such a bad photo.

Geek!

Mark

another one by Lyle from here:
http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000291.html:


September 23, 2005
Swept Away

I can’t possibly cover this week in-depth. It’s Energy Independence Days in the Triangle, and it makes Earth Week look like a walk in the park.

It’s as if we are white-water rafting, with no guide, on a wild river. Wednesday was “Refueling America,” yet another remarkable conference at the McKimmon Center in Raleigh.

My hat is off to Tobin, of our local Clean Cities Chapter, and to Anne of the Solar Center, and to everyone else who had a hand in it. They brought in Paul Roberts, of End of Oil fame.

He was remarkable. Just as we were heading into a luncheon to hear his talk, we encountered Sally and Tim, the makers of What a Way to Go. They are doing their cross country tour, collecting different voices on film, and they did their thing with Paul Roberts right before he took the stage.

Paul Roberts effortlessly captivated us all for an hour (no notes—no Power Point—just raw charisma), and took questions for awhile after that. He was amazing. Coat and tie, styled hair, sort of “button-down” looking, and able to deliver punch after punch without upsetting anyone with partisan rhetoric.

In the past readers of this blog have suggested that I “take it down a notch” in the name of reaching more people. Watching Paul Roberts made me want to dull my tongue some.

Yet spending another day at another conference stirred up frustration within me. I was talking to one seasoned veteran of the conference circuit who expression frustration at our constant desire to gather round and talk about the energy issues facing our state.

Aspects of the day made me want to swear off conferences forever. Just go home and build a biodiesel plant. Bring up a generator. Do a combined heat and power project. Put a solar system on my house. Anything but sitting there listening to all of us describing the same old sorry picture.

If I am sick of the usual suspects, I need to realize that I am dangerously close to becoming one of them. On the other side of the Triangle, Jared Diamond apparently delivered a spectacular talk that wove in some local environmental issues.

That night our raft crashed over the rocks and landed in Chapel Hill at a talk by Hunter Lovins. She flew in from Kabul, taking forty hours on various planes, and while slightly late, she was magnificent. “I understand North Carolina is in a drought,” she said. “Get used to it.”

She had a slide show with her presentation. Some of her slides were out of focus, and she tossed around a bunch of MBA-speak, but she was powerful, and remarkable just the same.

Thursday we hosted “Farm and Industry Tour” at Industrial. 70 people passed through on two big tour groups. This was arranged by our local agricultural agents, who also fed us lunch with a sidebar on our “beef check off” dollars at work.

We don’t normally tour industrial. I felt like Willy Wonka. The agricultural folks had distributed a bunch of golden tickets.

Friday was the first day of the Sustainability Fair at the college, and Rachel started the day by filling up a tour bus from Horton Transit with biodiesel. Apparently the bus traveled to the old Triangle School where there is an indoor-outdoor constructed wetland that treats the building’s waste. And then I think they pushed on to John Delafield’s Hybrid House. Then out to our refinery, and back to the Land Lab and the Sustainable Agriculture program at the college.

I missed it completely. Rachel and I went to a meeting of the North Carolina Biomass Council that was more like a conference. Switchgrass to ethanol, rapeseed for biodiesel. We can get more yield if we add sulfur—but not enough to poison the soil—and no worry about sulfur content in the oil. It all comes out in the crush.

Maybe I should consider getting a room at the McKimmon Center. It could be like a YMCA for energy conference junkies.

The week ended with soccer night at the plant. I remarked to Evan that my week had been swept away. We started enumerating possible blog topics, and almost passed over one of the best stories of the week:

We run a 500 gallon tank at Carrboro Public Works. Coop members get a key, each key is associated with a meter and a credit card. People fill up, we keep the tank full, everything was happy.

Until we ran out of keys.

Evan runs the Carrboro tank. At one point we thought, this is simple, simply collect back the keys from those who are not using them, and distribute them to those who will use them more.

Which rewards consumption.

It reminds me of the proposed NC legislation a couple of years ago where someone proposed tax credits kicking in “after a certain number of gallons had been used.”

Evan never pulled the trigger on the “Key Revocation Plan.” Instead he designed a “Key Sharing Plan,” in which members would fill up together.

Let’s see, that sounds even less convenient than we are now. Another way to build community. Perfect.

I was impressed and ambivalent about the Key Sharing Plan.

Until some guy called the control room from Carrboro Public Works on his way to Ohio.

He called me. I called Evan. Evan had me call one of his “Key Share” members. She was fine with it. The only problem was that it was “Car Free Day” in Carrboro, so if she was to fill him up, she would have to ride her bike. That worked.

I called the weary traveler. She rode down and filled him up. One more tank of biodiesel shipped into the world, and “The Key Sharing” plan appears to be a success.

Perhaps next we will add a “Skill Testing Question” to anyone trying to buy biodiesel. Or perhaps we will outfit Key Sharing Members with squeegees such that windshields can be cleaned?

Tomorrow we have Sustainability Fair at CCCC’s Pittsboro Campus. I believe Clean Tech will be there. I believe we are tabling there. And then Sunday it is just the usual: tours amidst the fuel making and the cob building and the farming—no change.


Posted by Lyle at September 23, 2005 10:32 PM

Cult of Grease and Heavy Machinery Part II

Hooray, I just jumped ship at the Machine Shop. Or, at least, I'm in the final throes of moving out.

I'm moving down the street to another sculpture studio, where non-artistically-inclined me and the equally artistically-challenged boyfriend are going to share a nice, warm, indoor fabrication space for our 'wanna-be engineer' projects.

After the really crappy facilities at the Machine Shop, the idea of being someplace where I can leave tools out without fear of them getting rained on seems like an unimaginable luxury- especially relevant with the coming of the rains next month. The thought of welding indoors, without standing in big wet puddles while gazillions of amps of real, live, renewably generated power flow through my workpiece is really pleasant. I'm moving up in the tinker world. Maybe I'll even make something pretty this year with my newfound metalworking skills.

Actually, there's kind of a nerd exodus going on at the Machine Shop. All the smart kids have left in droves in the last few months. Kind of a 'rats fleeing a sinking ship' sort of feeling.

There was a phenomenon I wasn't writing about in the past year- we've been dealing with an increasingly abusive and dysfunctional landlord/shop manager guy (the artist known in this blog as The Investor).

A lot of us geeks have been sort of chased off by The Investor. There's been a lot of opportunity to argue- we have an in-house email list which is sort of his personal soapbox. This encourages people (particularly The Investor) to yell at each other way too much. Traffic on that list is immense, and the signal-to-noise ratio is appallingly low. We're all supposed to be on the list because it's where logistics discussions happen- whether the power is out and who lost the forklift key and whether some crackhead whose set up camp outside in the alley needs to be chased off.

For all my participation on biodiesel discussion forums, I happen to detest 'armchair politics' and other theoretical blabber, and I'm not a member of the Burning Man communities that most of them belong to, nor am I interested in 'art' in any shape or form, so it's been sheer torture having some of the chat garbage flooding my inbox for two years. Unfortunately the Investor has refused to allow us to have a non-chat list for just the shop essentials (ie where we'd discuss whether the power is on and what crap needs to be moved where). I'll be sooo happy to unsubscribe in about three weeks.

The new space uses it's email list to discuss the bills and tenants' comings and goings, rather than the goings-on, real or imagined.

The problems at the Machine Shop were manyfold- our warehouse is just way too small for the number of artists (hence the repeated 'welding in the rain' problem). We lack an all-important 'Thou Shalt Store No Crap' clause, which leads to packrat behavior. Packrat behavior times 25 packrats is kind of a problem. No one is really in a position to ***** about the Crap Storage Problem because we're all almost equally guilty. I say 'almost all' because The Investor is far more deeply 'over the top' about his packrat tendencies than any of us- guy is occupying about 6 times the amount of public space as any of us do, piled with rusting useless junk that he hasn't touched in a few years.

Most projects in 'shared space' at the Shop begin with an hour or two of running the forklift to move other people's crap (at times, mostly The Investor's crap) out of the way. This phenomenon is another reason I"m such a fan of welding in the alley, that one with the big puddles in the wintertime- it's usually empty. If you want space you're cleared to remain clear, you have to stick around and vigilantly bark at people who try to Pile Crap onto it. That's been referred to as 'pissing your territory', and it's sometimes a really dysfunctional dog-eat-dog world in there when it comes to space use. The Exodus of the Nerds was some sort of response to this level of functionality, I think.

It's been said by former residents that the Shop is not a place for people who want to just come in a few times a month and make art- it only functions if you're a constant presence, a full-timer. And the constant self-inflicted electrical issues are an even bigger problem. They're moving towards fixing those, slowly, but in the meantime, it's like living for years in an ongoing generator-fueled electrical renovation with 'electrical curiosities' that give little reward and cause a lot of hassle.

A couple of years ago I was a full-timer at the shop. The last few months I've been up in the Foothills, still paying rent at the Shop, and of course it's been quite frustrating to come down expecting to do some work and find that some incredibly vast Burning Man project has taken up ALL of the public space, five months before Burning Man. And that's the best-case scenario- at least we supposedly exist for the purpose of doing Art, which is a much more noble purpose than Storing Crap, which is what actually happens in the public space most of the time.

At one point this winter, after pissing everybody off with some longwinded list arguments about Burning Man and Art, and signing our collective names, without permission, to a petition about an issue that not everyone agreed with, the Investor abruptly tried to back out of managing the joint (he doesnt' own the real estate, just manages the art space). He offered it to us on some conditions- that we become a nonprofit entity and collectively manage it together, rather than one or two interested parties taking on his former role as a manager.

We had a big meeting without him, discussed the liabilities and benefits, and found almost nothing beneficial about the arrangement. The place is just far too small, and we'd still retain him and his 6 spaces full of crap. I think after that meeting all the core group of Most Involved Nerds all lost heart and started finding other spaces to join. A few people, people who'd been there since the very beginning and had worked closely with the man, left with a bang- various flavors of nasty, angry Exit Speech. I'm avoiding it pretty well so far which is quite unlike me- I dont' think their 'what I hate about The Investor' speeches have done anything to change the guy, and he already knows everything I think of him- I dont' mince words and mine came in person, not via email. Too bad, it's a nice setup in some ways. Next stop, Xian Studios...

Concrete Community College
from http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=51

Oddly enough, as I'm about to leave my stint at the world's most unique offgrid Machine Shop, I've finally enrolled in machinist school. I"m attending what I think of as "Concrete Community College". The architect who designed the school campus must have thought he was building a shrine to the god called 'one part Portland Cement, three parts sand'.

While I was a tenant at the Shop, I was too ill to get involved in the actual Machine Shop club at our shop, and I've been a bit afraid to learn safety practices from people who learned them third-hand from someone who was at one point an actual working machinist. Whatever energy I've had the past couple of years has been going to learning to weld, and to my silly dedication to those damn tanks at the biodiesel project.

At this point though machine technology seems like a good set of skills to pick up, considering I think of myself primarily as an 'inventor' and often have access to mills or other machine tools. Mills and other machine tools fall into that category of 'crap' that's so huge that it's sometimes sold off quite cheaply by hobbyists in cities like this one. The Machine Shop has outfitted itself primarily due to it's willingness to take on Big Crap that others smartly get rid of due to the constraints of rental space in the city.

Concrete Community College machine technology program is kicking my butt- it's something like 16 contact hours a week, evenings. I have no spare time now. I also stupidly enrolled in the welding class and three others. I havent' really been in college before, and I"m having a blast remembering elementary school arithmatic. No, really, it's been fun. I felt a little silly in my 'math for the trades' math lab on the first day- I used to be quite a geek as a kid, and my math skills have atrophied 110% due to disuse.

So here I am in remedial math. It was extremely funny realizing I'd forgotten how to divide by fractions- I just pull out a calculator for those arithmatic problems that aren't in the "16ths" of my carpentry profession. Then I looked over at the kid across the lab, and he was literally counting on his fingers with a confused look on his face. And he was actually college age so 'disuse' wasn't his excuse. Damn!


by the way, for those wondering what the age spread is that I'm talking about between me and college age people, I"m 33.

Mark

Remedial Cutting Torch, or, "Dial-Toning"
from http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=51

I'm actually learning a lot about how badly people 'don't learn' and it's been a great immersion course in teaching styles- things I never noticed when I was there in high school or trade school in my early 20's, before I"d tried teaching people myself.

The welding class is particularly funny- I"ve been in a couple of different schools for auto mechanic classes before, and thought I had a good idea of what to expect here in a trades program. But no, I've finally found something that attracts stupid kids even more than working on cars does. Daytime community college auto mechanic classes are usually full of unruly 18-year-old boys who aren't interested in academics (diesel school's a bit better since it attracts people who know what they want to learn- they tend to be older, already work as mechanics, and tend to be focused). But even for the 18-year-olds, auto mechanics is something that they're likely to have done before, and it takes a certain amount of thinking. Welding doesn't.

So Concrete Community College is full of these kids who just CAN'T FOLLOW DIRECTIONS worth a damn. I started over a week late because of the East Coast trip at the end of August, so I"m still in catch-up mode in my classes. With me in 'catch-up mode' in my welding class are some of the young kids who started on time but just don't get it. The other day we had 'remedial cutting torch' demo- all the kids who had flunked the cutting torch written safety test after practicing it in August, were getting the whole load of info all over again.

We had a long line of kids (sorry, 'guys'- they were all doofy guys- not 'kids', which implies that the girls were flunking Cutting Torch along with the guys), standing around the cutting torch table. Each person, um, I mean guy, would get to the front of the line and pick up the torch. And I'd watch from the end of the line as a great big dial tone would go off in his head. Nothing there. If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and dial again. And this stagefright comes right after watching the teacher lecture and demonstrate it (for the second or third time). So each guy would go up to the front of the Remedial Cutting Torch line, do everythign wrong, get it all corrected a few times, do it wrong, get it corrected again. Then the guy in line behind him would go up to the front of the line, pick up the torch and stare at it like it was somethign alien he'd never seen before. And proceed to do it wrong. Many times. Then the next guy would get up and pick up the torch wrong and not know what any of the controls did, again. again.


Mark

Girl Mark,
A couple of things come to mind after reading your last two postings.
First, machine shops.
I now have gravitated to being a machinist in a metals lab. At my age it is probably going to be my last job. But it is very odd to me. When I was a lad of about 15 years old I used to go across the street and spend hours watching a guy who built the most wonderfull model steam engines on a small lathe in a little 8 x 6 shed in his garden. He often tried to get me to go into a machinist apprenticeship, saying that if I got started at the place where he worked (he was a turner) I would soon be making my own lathe 'on the side' when things were quiet. And here I am, at the other end of my working life, making bits for my lathe when things go quiet.
The other thing I noticed was your comments on people who can't learn. We have a guy at work that is forever breaking the blades on the band saw. He just can't get his head around it. Even when I set the saw up after putting a new blade onto it you can be sure that within half an hour you will hear the bang and the cuss as another one goes. Today it came to a head and he was banned from using the machine. He was probably as relieved as we were.
regards
dva

additional,
I'm off to Santorini in a few hours for my holiday. See you all in two week.
dva

Coming Home/ Energy Nerds

http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=52

I love my new home. I didnt post a good story yet about the whole drama of me and a 'home'- in a nutshell, I was floating without a house for a full year, because of going out to work at the Foothills job after getting back from the Appleseed tour, and boy was I ready to move back in somewhere at the end of the job- it was damn painful to be disabled and couch surfing at the same time, or to be disabled and camping on a couch in a back room at the jobsite.

Right now I"m taking out my years' worth of housing transience frustrations on creating my 'dream kitchen', making hellacious food whenever I feel like it, and enjoying being able to pass out on my extra-thick down comforter whenever the hell I feel like it. Laalalalalalaaaaa!!!! (is that the opposite of 'waaah?' I hear?)

I live in a two-building 'green renovation' in a seedy part of Oakland sandwiched between the highway and the BART tracks. The house is awesome. The neighborhood is interesting.

We had a shootout outside my windows last night. And a few days ago there was a little earthquake in the middle of the night, a big loud 'BANG' as the earth shifted and released and woke us from sound sleep, and my roommate's first thought was 'oh no, another car hit the house!'.

The downstairs corner is severely armored with structural steel after a car plowed through a wall a few years ago as the driver lost control escaping police. I think people are scared about moving in here, but the area is actually really neighborly, most of the people on our immediate several blocks are nice quiet families who've been here forever and are very attached to their neighborhood and history here (and I can see why). The roomate who owns our house has managed to do a good job of managing the 'white freaks move into a nonwhite neighborhood' thing, and is friends with everybody (ie he didn't evict the tenants who lived downstairs when he bought it, and I think that earned him a good amount of respect from longtime residents concerned about gentrification).

The prostitutes, and whomever sparked the shooting the other night generally tend to be further down the street in both directions (so are the other biodieselers and others who are offgrid in various ways, for that matter- there's a fair amount of fuel being brewed in this end of the ghetto).

I guess my worst problem with the neighborhood is that there's a gigantic white-painted church outside my windows and the glare off the church walls makes my room painfully bright in the morning. Things could be worse!

And we're installing solar PV and hot water shortly. We're going offgrid, shopping for our first battery bank. I've wanted to do this for, oh, 12 years or something.

There's already a solar hot air system here, lots of creative skylights for daylighting some darker spots of the house, and a bit of PV here and there for various things. I already have a few unbreakable PV panels and some other gear, and also want to put them to use doing a second, portable system that would also power my 'take your bedroom off the grid' enclave before the main system is complete. I hope to put it to work running the printers that print the Biodiesel Homebrew Guide. I also hope to haul the personal mini-system along in my future dream teaching tour vehicle. The dream vehicle is going to have to be a brand new Sprinter that I'll have to afford somehow, no use looking for anything else in an older truck since, since Dodge finally imported the exact vehicle I'd been wanting for years, I guess I"ll have to figure out how to buy one. I'm hoping that tour will happen again next summer, so that's the deadline for me to come up with my $30K for it. That's all a lot of 'hopes'. Luckily they're starting to come into being.

I got a good start on the house PV stuff- out at the SEE energy fair in NC, I picked up what one vendor was calling the 'pile of inverters' - a lot deal of 5 used Trace SW series inverters, some good, some with problems. These are the same SW 5548's that we have on the Machine Shop generator-fired system. At the Machine Shop we've already committed electronic 'crimes against nature' on these exact units- in the process of making them do what they're not designed for (that's a whole nother blog story someday). One of the 5548's I bought puts out 130V instead of 120V, which isnt' too difficult to deal with, and that's what's going on the house system.

At SEE fair time I think I only had enough savings to equal the cost of the pile of inverters (they weren't very much) and had just left one of my jobs, so I was chewing my nails trying to figure out whether it was a good idea to blow my miniscule life savings on 900 pounds of copper laying on the floor on the wrong side of the country. I decided to go for it, and as I was flying back from SEE, the hurricane pounded the Southeast and gas prices went up, which suddenly increased demand for my biodiesel consultation/book sales services, which made the life savings come right back, thankfully. No, you cant' buy one of my inverters.


Energy nerds are such a funny thing. I'd been working towards this process of going offgrid in the city for such a long time. I got bit by the solar bug while living in NYC at an urban homestead in the mid 90's, and did all my research and reading without anyone else around who did anything with the stuff. A few years later it was such an epiphany moment when I went out to an Earth First Rendezvous in Colorado, and Ed from Solar Energy International was in the parking lot with his solar RV and a gigantic collection of solar cookers and other gadgets. I spent a lot of the gathering sitting at his feet with a huge gang of solar energy nerd kids- it felt so strange and wonderful to have peers my own age in this pursuit for the first time. This reminds me of what I see people go through who've been working on biodiesel in their own backyard and researching it and becoming obsessed, and who finally get to be at a biodiesel event and cant' stop talking about 'Biodiesel And What It Means To Me', because for once there are OTHERS who might understand the obsession.


At the Oakland eco-house we've got one or two people who are smitten with the solar geekiness. I came home a few weeks ago and my roommate was spending Saturday night with few beers watching the Home Power Guerilla Solar DVD by himself. I love this place. Another roommate is organizing the Solar Home Tour (which we're on). This morning, I came out of my room in my lingerie trying to stumble a straight line towards the nearest caffeine, and a couple of voices in the house office said 'hey Mark- come over here and take a look at these specifications and see if you can make sense of them'. So of course I did even though I couldn't really talk yet, I HAD to come and look at 'specifications'. You know you're an energy nerd when 'specifications' are more exciting than your caffeine even though you aren't awake enough to talk yet....

It turns out there are a few other urban offgrid enclaves doing equally silly stuff with electrons as the Machine Shop. There's another artist studio right on the Berkeley/Emeryville border that's got a large offgrid system. The guys with the questions about the 'specifications' are stuck in a situation with the utility similar to what the Machine Shop has gone through- they've been denied service and are going it offgrid instead. They've got a biodiesel processor in a container and have been fueling a Detroit Diesel- fired genny with homebrew. It's a rough, rough way to generate significant amounts of power, though- dont' try this at home, kids, we're quite happy to have the 'biodiesel taco truck' turn up and fuel the Machine Shop by accident rather than making our own when a fuel-hog such as a genny needs to depend on us cranking out large amounts of fuel...


Mark

quote:

Originally posted by girl mark:

quote:

Originally posted by Graydon Blair:
Diesel Pickups....
That pickup in the back ground is a sweet Isuzu (well, ok, besides the rust). I could only hope that it's got a diesel under it's hood...

WOw, I can't believe you can recognize it from such a bad photo.

Geek!

Mark

Yeah, I'm definately a Diesel Geek. That's an understatement. I can probably tell you make, model, & year of any diesel driving toward me down the freeway from about 100 yards away.
-Graydon
The Diesel Geek
:-)

From Lyle's blog:

http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000296.html


September 26, 2005
Control Room

Every Monday at 9:00 we meet in the tiny conference room at Industrial and attempt to get clear on our marching orders for the week.

Today was no exception. On the facilities front Matt was stuck on the plant wall biofilter that is going into Building One. On the distribution front the tanker needs some new electrical cables. The challenge now is how to keep delivering fuel and get the tanker serviced at the same time.

On the communications front we decided to get two new tool boxes, complete with tank and pump tools, and to color code them so that everyone would know where they go.

The control room is a nasty little place. Our windows afford views of metal walls. There is no daylight, and without an electrical assist the air would never move.

After our meeting, the day came on fast. Anyone with the heart to sit in the control room for any length of time will be awash with ringing phones. Sometimes, when I am the only one there, I arrange the phones in a semi-circle around me. The orange one always rings first. Then the black one. It has a “hold” button on it and is Leif’s preference. Then I prop up my cell. Then my new cell. Sometimes I throw Rachel’s cell into the mix.

Once the phones are arranged, it’s simply a matter of four on one telephone karate.

“I would be happy to help you open your coop in Jakarta, but I have another line ringing…”

“Leif? He’s not here right now. Can I help you or get a message? He was going to send you samples? It probably would be best if you spoke with him. Any chance I can get your number, since I have another line ringing?”

“You’re selling helicopter fuel filter linings that we might be interested in? That could be. Can I get you to email me?”

“You are trying to do your homework for the biofuels class, but your photocopy is missing every other page? No, Rachel is not here right now.”

“Someone said we were running out of oil? Was that Evan by any chance? It really could have been anyone here. No, that’s a cell phone I need to get.”

When a realtor rolled in at 4:30 this afternoon, I was relieved to leave the control room for a walk in the sprinkling rain. Bruce had fired up the waste oil burner that we intend to use to heat our pump and tank shop, and our fuel inventory. Leif had locked in on another tanker load of fuel for our distribution channel. David and Anjuli (the interns) were working on a processor design-build and painting tools and toolboxes in appropriate colors.

Evan rolled in after a couple of “adventure free” deliveries. And all was right in the world.

Mark had passed through with a potential investor, and Dean stopped by for a long discussion of the B20 market in the area. What’s nuts is we have just lost a couple of B20 stations, (because their grant money ran out) even though folks can deliver B20 on par with petroleum nowadays.

The loss of B20 stations has put pressure on fleets that are dependent on a B20 supply to meet their EPACT credits, which makes our phones ring off the hook for O80. We have always blazed a B100 trail, and have never had an interest in B20, and yet after a day on the phone with EPACT fleet managers, it is hard not to open a B20 front.

I ran off to dinner with Tami and the boys to Cary in order to escape it all. We needed a break from the pressures of the control room, and from life in Chatham County.

And it was there that we saw George Bush on a barroom TV asking people to eliminate discretionary travel.
Posted by Lyle at September 26, 2005 09:28 PM

Lyle's blog:

October 04, 2005
Pimentel Tonight

posted here:
http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000303.html


Today I left Chatham for a session on backyard plant design at Chapel Hill High School. There is a motivated group of seniors there that are going to get some biodiesel happening. And from there I headed to Duke for a lecture by Dr. Pimentel.

He’s a famous agriculturalist from Cornell who has been busy putting down ethanol for twenty five years. He likes to maintain that both ethanol and biodiesel have a negative energy balance and that neither are worthy of our consideration.

The lecture series was jointly sponsored by Duke and UNC, and it has some heavyweight speakers on the line card. Unfortunately, Pimentel was not one of them. He was a bizarre inclusion for a series on alternative energy.

He was a rambling old man. The slides in his power point presentation were not consistent or powerful. He traveled through different energy measurements, sometimes metric, sometimes American, sometimes BTUs, sometimes kilocalories. And he provided a strange mixed up message that was virtually incomprehensible.

On the one hand he faulted over population for the earth’s demise, and he struck me as someone with a genuine interest in conservation. On the other hand, he offers nothing but coal as a fall back position for dwindling energy reserves.

“Burn it while we still can,” was a common refrain. Forget biodiesel. Make liquid fuels from coal. Shrug.

He offered a forty five minute lackidasical trip through a hundred numbers and measurements, none of which are supported by any other energy balance research. His numbers are at odds with Argonne National Laboratories, the National Renewable Energy Lab, the USDA, and the DOE.

He seemed alone on a whacko fringe, like someone who might enjoy an evening with the cold fusion folks, or perhaps the handful of global warming skeptics.

The question and answer was brutal. I was pleased to see many of our coop members in the crowd, and indeed some of them threw the hardest punches. One of our guys, from NC State, pointed out that he was using four times as much lime for a crop of soybeans as the industry standard, and that if he corrected his erroneous numbers his energy balance would move from a deficit to neutral. Pimentel waved both of his hands at once—as if to say—“Forget it—next question.”

He complained mightily about our massive subsidies for ethanol, which he repeatedly broadcast at 3 billion dollars a year. That’s about how many gallons of ethanol were burned in this country in 2004. So I asked him about that.

“If we gave ethanol a 3 billion dollar subsidy, and we burned 3 billion gallons, that’s about a dollar per gallon handout to the fuel. What do you think is the subsidy per gallon for petroleum?”

He obfuscated and ducked the question entirely. Instead of speculating on how many dollars of subsidy go into every dollar of petroleum, he spun petroleum subsidy into more subsidy for ethanol.

Very disappointing.

Dr. Shabazi from NC A+T caught his attention when he pointed out from the floor that he could replace his nitrogen inputs (which typically come from natural gas) with animal waste which is in abundance in North Carolina.

Pimentel displayed a genuine affection for agriculture, remarking, “I’m an agriculturalist, I wish this worked out.” He also called for 10.00 per gallon fuel in order to force a conservation era.

If anyone carried the evening it was Tobin Freid from Triangle Clean Cities. As moderator of the evening, she tried repeatedly to call him on his “all or nothing” approach.

“We could grow enough crops to produce enough diesel, but it would take every inch of the United States, ” was his refrain.

Tobin also cited some numbers in his research that were twenty years old. He ducked her onslaught. I was impressed by her perseverance and preparation for this event.

The sad thing was that Dr. Pimentel was no match for the audience. His data is out of date. His facts are completely disputed. And all he could do when people quoted discrepancies from the floor was wave them off as “pshaw.” His logic was not precise. His presence was underwhelming.

Rachel and I had been invited to dinner with the series organizers and with Pimentel, but we ducked out in favor of a massive biodiesel discussion downtown, and we did have Anjuli to return home.

Piedmont Biofuels broke bread with the folks from Bull City Biodiesel, including Rebeka, the solar installer who has a foot in both camps, and Stephen, the master cobb builder who is leading the Tami Tank effort at the Coop.

All in all it was a wonderful evening, despite the underwhelming nature of Dr. Pimentel.

another Lyle blog entry:

October 05, 2005
Price Intersection
http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000304.html


It’s finally happened. Diesel at the pump in Pittsboro is higher than our biodiesel by nine or ten cents. For years we have been dreading the intersection of price between the two fuels. And here we are.


Piedmont Biofuels has been at odds with the Renewables Establishment on the price issue for quite some time. We’ve been happily doing our thing at 3.50 a gallon for years. We’ve ignored calls for lower prices. We’ve seen checks written to petroleum distributors in an effort to “buy down” the price of biodiesel.

When we saw distributors jump into the game with claims of “We are going to get the price down,” we shrugged, and stayed at 3.50.

We have focused on the B100 community, and we have done our level best to service and develop this community. Three years ago that community looked like a whacko fringe. Today it is exploding. We have gone from looking like nutcases to resembling brilliant visionaries.

Sadly, those many efforts to get the price down are distant memories. Gas stations which once carried B20 dropped it when their subsidy ran out. The “low cost” distributors have vanished.

Today at the General Store, I excused myself from the usual biodiesel table to make a rare appearance at the “developer’s table.” We know who they are. They know us. They are surveyors and realtors and Republicans whose idea of good civic stewardship is to ensure the continual increase and liquidity of real estate such that everyone in the game can prosper.

We have spent the last few years as hippie weirdos with fuel that was twice the price of the “market rate.”

Both camps congregate at the General Store Café. There is a mutual truce in honor of decent food. I know most of them personally, and they know me. I’ve traveled through their developmental world and arrived at a different view of good stewardship. They tolerate me. I humor them.

Imagine my glee to interrupt a table full of scheming developers to announce that we had fuel for sale on the edge of town for ten cents less than market. I just wanted them to know. One “Captain of Industry” to my pals. Sort of a Rotary Club type thing.

They view me as a long-haired tree-hugging left-wing freak with an earring. I suspect they are homophobic non-environmental right winged pukes. But I couldn’t pass on my civic duty of letting them know they could buy cheap fuel from us.

Fortunately prolific comment spammers forced me to shut down comments on this blog. If Girl Mark were around she would no doubt rage about incorrect stereotypes and about how unfair I am being. But forget that.

The truth of the matter is that we have been at 3.50 a gallon from the get go. We set our price based on our knowledge of other B100 markets. We are students of California B100 history. We have sat humbly and listened to the Colorado experience. And the truth of the matter is that everyone, from our renewables establishment to the Republican guard has dismissed our ideas of price.

“Your price will come down,” said one sage warrior of the renewable fuel wars.

Maybe not. Perhaps 3.50 a gallon was the market rate. Perhaps we were right.

Surely petroleum will fall tomorrow. I kind of liked it better when we were the underdog. But for now we are inundated with calls which are not the usual type. Loggers. Home builders. Government agencies without grant money offsets. For now we are well stocked with biodiesel.

One of the best things about this position is that we are able to backstop the B100 community with fuel. Now it’s cheap fuel. For all of those coop members who have been paying through the nose—to the astonishment of all around—we are pleased to deliver fuel for less than market rates. Until today, the value proposition of Piedmont Biofuels was predicated on things other than the wallet. Today, happily, we invite members to fill up and save money.

I haven’t formulated a philosophy of cheap fuel. Everything I have worked on to date has been based on being the high cost fuel provider. Once, in a speech in Asheville, I suggested that biofuels would be good for your wallet, but that was mere speculation at the time.

Petroleum will probably fall tomorrow. Surely this is a one day intersection in price. Perhaps we can simply note it as a glorious day, and get back to work at providing clean renewable fuels.


Posted by Lyle at October 5, 2005 10:20 PM

PV Checklist
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=53

The 'take my bedroom off the grid' photovoltaics project at my house is shaping up a bit. I went over to my ex-house in San Rafael to retrieve my two PV panels, and ended up borrowing Jeff's large panel and a cheapo inverter since he can't install them there. So I have something like this :

two Uni-Solar amorphous panels that I don't know the wattage of yet- something like 35 watts each I'm guessing

Jeff's 120 watt full-size PV panel

Trace C-40 charge controller

Jeff's cheapo WalMart 700 Watt portable inverter (I'll probably buy a 2000 watt portable instead)

For the 'full-size' system I've got some Xantrex 5548's and a 2512 (the 12Volt will probably go to Tom for the portable 'hot tub on a trailer' project we're working on). My roommate has another C-40 and we've got our eyes on various battery banks available to us. I ended up with various interesting odds-and-ends from buying the 'pile of inverters' - like a DC disconnect and various cables and breakers.

We're not planning a grid-tied system for either of the house systems.

here's my short-term to-do list for the 'take your bedroom off the grid' system:

a. borrow Wattsun or Watts-up meter from Tom's job and do a complete survey of my bedroom electrical usage. I print the Biodiesel Homebrew Guide with a bank of laser printers and have NO IDEA how much power that consumes. one advantage of printing the book myself is that I get to use recycled paper, etc, and the idea of using green energy to do it also is an appealing selling point!

b. figure out needs to meet some of this usage. I"ll probably buy a few more PVs and go with cheapo golf cart batteries for the battery bank. Right now I have no idea what my usage actually is and what my sizing for this will be.

c. figure out where the battery box is going- my bedroom is PACKED but the downstairs currently has exposed ceiling joists due to renovation. Theres actually a tiny PV/battery/inverter system down there already in Dan's shop, and I'll probably site my battery bank there. I"m assuming that 'bedroom off the grid' is going to take 2 or 4 RV batteries or 4 golf cart ones. I've seen some nice systems that people have built for portability, and will probably try and make a battery box on wheels with some of the other components mounted on it. In the future the idea is to take the power system on the road for powering biodiesel demonstrations (or even RV camping...)

d. I've already started on the power reduction. Right now all my phantom loads are on power strips mounted within easy reach so I can turn them off, but that makes a spiderweb of cords all around my room. Few of the appliances/electronics are 'on' at the same time, but I like to leave them plugged in as long as I can turn the power-sucking transformers off with a power strip. I just picked up a couple of other power strips and plan on mounting one or some sort of master switch near the bedroom door so I can turn 'all' phantom loads off when I"m gone, and figure out how to group the rest of them by similarity onto their own power strips. This means the laptop chargers and the printers are on one strip since they're used simultaneously, and the stereo and cell phone charger (used in the evening) are on another strip of their own. I"m actually unsure if printers are a phantom load or not- doestn' seem like anything gets hot when they're not in use, but if there's a transformer it might be buried deep in the guts of the system.

Our house was on the Oakland solar home tour last weekend. I realized that one feature of my room is what's 'not' in there:

I had to get a new computer recently but didn't even consider a cheap desktop machine because of the power consumption issues. I"m doing everything with two laptops even though a desktop machine would've been an easier choice. I'm about to put in a second wireless access point (because the home's wireless doesn't reach to my room very well) and I'm really hoping that I can unplug it when I"m not using it.
My printers are energy-star rated. I unplug the stereo and dont' run one with a digital clock. My alarm clock isnt' a plug-in AC model, it's a battery- powered (rechargable of course) gizmo. I've got an alkaline battery charge as well as the fancier NiMH one, and any 'regular' disposable alkaline batteries that come my way get reused at least twice. The lights are compact fluorescents. I use an electric toothbrush but it's not left on it's charger all the time as seems customary. Any other chargers are unplugged except when in use.

e. heat: I've got great afternoon light in my slightly southwest windows. I plan on sewing up window quilts for keeping the warmth in at night. UNfortunately this fall I"m in school till 9 pm, so I"m not there to run them when they need to be shut. I'm hoping that if I eventually build a big enough power system, that it'd would be energy-efficient to run a small motor on a timer or on a light-sensor each evening to close the window quilt after the warming sun passes. This is just a theory, I assume that it would save energy over my just waiting to close the window quilt when I get home and turning on a heater, but dont' know. DOn't have a good idea how much power the quilt operator motor would take, versus how many BTU's I'm actually retaining from afternoon sunlight. At the moment it gets quite warm in there if I have the curtains open at the right time of day, but of course it's really warm right now in the Bay Area.

f. lights- does it make sense to do 12V lighting? If I set up a 12V circuit in the system there could be a few places where it could be more efficient. Tom wants to do some creative LED lighting in his van for RV camping, and I'm hoping to hitch onto that project to build some custom low-volt lighting for my room. I've had 'electronics projects' on my 'fun things to do with the boyfriend' list for a while, and been waiting for something fun to come up that would be a good excuse to learn more about basic electronics. The window quilt operator and lighting is going to be one start to that project. Yes, I am a nerd- that IS my idea of a good time and luckily I can sometimes turn that into a social occasion.

g. circuits: because we've got a renovation going on downstairs and the joists are going to be exposed for a while, I've got plenty of time to run custom wiring in my room. I think I"ll be installing a series of switched outlets with the switches by the door, so that phantom loads are easier to remove.

h. I hope to do the bigger house system after learning a few lessons from the smaller one.

i. we've got various solar hot water projects on the back burner here as well (which might solve the room heating problem if we should decide to do a radiant heating system), and since it involves plumbing and I've studied it/done it quite a bit, it's somethign I"ve got a lot more of a grasp on that PV/electrical energy control, but that's a different to-do list.

Mark

Have you heard of the Jevon's Paradox? It's an economic principle but I heard it applied to energy thusly...
We do all we can to save energy, and in the meantime we save money perhaps, then we spend that money and it gets used to consume more energy so all we did there was save money, not the environment.
It's sort of like the arguement that solar PV panels take more energy to produce than you save with them. I have no opinion on it at all, but I am curious about whether there's truth to any of it...
Our grand vision for our truck includes a solar hot water collector on the roof and radiant floor heat using a diesel fired coolant heater (which we will also use to pre-heat our SVO, winter heat our biodiesel, etc). I am obsessed with plumbing parts now. I thread them together in my dreams, I bore the hell out of most people I talk to about these things though...

quote:

Originally posted by raven23:

It's sort of like the arguement that solar PV panels take more energy to produce than you save with them. I have no opinion on it at all, but I am curious about whether there's truth to any of it...
\

I'm in a hand brace and can't type right now (I swam into a wall at high speed, of all things) so I can't give this the treatise it deserves, but this needs to be mentioned- that 'argument' is absolutely untrue and has been debunked a million times- do some Google for more info.

Mark

From here:
"The solar panel market is now increasing so quickly that there could soon be a lack of usable silicon. Traditionally solar panel silicon is made from waste products from the electronic industry’s silicon. Alternative processes to make solar panel silicon which produces the correct purity with low energy usage, thereby reducing production costs, are under development. The current energy payback time for crystalline solar panels is 2-5 years, and for amorphous silicon solar cells 1-3 years. The goal is to reduce the amount of energy used in production to only a tenth of today’s consumption."

Now back to our regular Blogging....

and their lifespan is somethign like 25-50 years, the warranties are conservative at 20ish years, but many of the older units from many decades ago are still functioning.

Mark

Mark,
I am looking for some great sites similar to this one for my solar power "education". Any recomendations?

I wish I knew- I did all my reading pre-internet, and I'm now trying to remember what I forgot. I'm sure there are tons of good solar forums/discussions out there and I need to get on them.

One good start is probably the Home POwer CD's- it's a series of the entire run of Home POwer magazine on pdf. If you're tight for money get just the newer ones as the technology has changed a lot in the last few years and tehy've also been running a LOT of homebrew/DIY articles in the last few years that werent' the case as much in the late 90's.
If you find some forums let me know!

Mark