Green Energy Development 6 comments

27 Mar 2008 @ 11:26, by Richard Carlson The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful. ---Wendell Berry The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one third of the world's resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people's lands. That's what's going on. ---Winona LaDuke What we are calling for is a revolution in public education. When the hearts and minds of our children are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with the experience in the garden, sustainability will become the lens through which they see the world. ---Alice Waters The quotations can be found in the April/May 2008 issue of Mother Earth News, and at the website www.americanswhotellthetruth.org . Perhaps your idea of food production in the future resembles the illustrating photo (which I found here [link] ) and you may be right. Many people are preparing for a post-petroleum world by forming small self-sustaining communities of like-minded individuals. Fortified by stocks of food in individual cellars and possibly an arsenal of collective weapons, they await the apocalypse. I understand Tom Cruise is building an underground shelter. With that kind of worry, on Tuesday I entered Ohio University's Walter Hall Rotunda (not the most environmentally sound structure, we discovered) for something called the Green Energy Development Summit. The forum was sponsored by US Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, OU's Consortium for Energy, Economics and the Environment (CE3), and the Pew Environment Group (which is one of the Pew Charitable Trusts). That's a pretty formidable team for a small college town in one of the most destitute parts of Appalachia. Was rescue coming at last? Apparently the idea for the summit was cooked up by Tom Bullock, a representative for Pew in Ohio, and Scott Miller, who directs the energy and environment programs for CE3. They both contacted Senator Brown's office to get at least his name connected and some representatives here, remembering perhaps he visited Athens during his campaign for office to bless the solar array then opening on the roof of Athens Middle School. The senator himself came to Athens yesterday for a review of the conference and to meet with university and business leaders. I sat next to a representative of Governor Strickland. So there we were: a lot of suits and a bunch of blue jeans. A half dozen of the people in neckties turned out to be presenters, each alloted about 20 minutes to tell us of business initiatives in which they were involved. Now I had 2 problems with this already. First of course is my prejudice that it's free market capitalists that have messed us up to the point where chunks of Antarctica the size of an average country are falling off and dissolving. Second is my ignorance, both about business marketing and the engineering that invents the products. That means I'm not such a great candidate to be telling you about this...but I'll try my best. What I want to accomplish is at least to get something on the Internet about what we learned that day, and hopefully attract some reaction from people who do know what they're talking about. The first to present were managers of Bellisio Foods whose main plant is in nearby Jackson, Ohio. Bellisio is the third-largest producer of frozen food entrees in the United States, turning out something like 2 million packages a day. [link] That's a lot of food and, as Ryan Wright informed us, eventually tons of organic waste. Bellisio used to pay truckers to come and haul it away someplace. To cook the food the company has 9 huge boilers full of water and heated with natural gas. So somebody got the idea of turning all that good compost into biogas and heating the boilers with that. As a result Bellisio became more environment friendly, saved $650,000 a year hauling costs, and estimates another $900,000 savings this year by waste conversion into biogas. And you ain't heard nothing yet. The next colorful character to step up was Ben Schafer, an engineer himself and President of American Hydrogen. What Mr. Schafer's company does involves a process developed by research at OU, and then licensed to him. It reduces the amount of electricity needed to split hydrogen from nitrogen in the ammonia molecule, bringing cost of producing hydrogen to less than $2.00 a kilogram. A kilogram of hydrogen is equivalent in its energy content to one gallon of gasoline. No pollution. His assembly line is being set up in neighboring Meigs County, and will create a hundred jobs. [link] But the biggest jaw-dropper of all was the next gentleman, complete with Capetown accent. Neill Lane is President and CEO of Sunpower, with headquarters right here on Mill Street. Sunpower has emerged over the past 30 years as the world's leading developer of free-piston engines, including something called the Stirling engine. [link] For those of us who thought solar just means a little flickering of electricity but hardly anything that could power---say---space exploration or something, these people have news for us! Here's where my lack of afternoons tinkering in gas-powered motors brings this article shuddering to a halt...but I can direct you to Wikipedia's page on the Stirling engine. [link] And I invite you to click around Sunpower's site for some really amazing applications. Sunpower had a little humming machine going in a corner of the rotunda, which I guess was an air conditioner that had us all occasionally shivering in that place. After a break, we spent the next 2 and a half hours in small sessions discussing barriers to and opportunities for more green energy development. I have to tell you that in each of the 3 sessions, public education K-12 was mentioned again and again. The Dean of Energy and Transportation Technologies at Hocking College told us students coming to them from high school are miserably prepared in math and science. Hocking's new Energy Institute was visited by Barack Obama just before the Ohio primary. I suggested preparation for the testing required by No Child Left Behind fills up all teaching time in science and math---and from what I hear is not only impractical but not directed to student needs. It was an intense day and I'm glad to say my wife, who advocated we go to it, brought our 16-year-old daughter with us. As usual, she was the youngest person there. What was important for us all was the feeling of hope with which we left the building. Profitable innovation is underway that is helpful to our world...but most people don't know enough about it. That's going to change. An overview of CE3 is here~~~ [link] and this PDF was our agenda~~~ [link] Scott assured us all the materials we developed will show up shortly online. He also plans to develop a forum on these topics in which anyone can become involved. I'll try to keep you updated. The Pew Trust Tom represents is here~~~ [link]

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Category: Entrepreneurs, Money Making 

28 Mar 2008 @ 08:48 by jazzolog : Jim Phillips Reports
I knew the Athens News Senior Writer was in the audience, and I had hoped his article would be online by the time I wrote yesterday. It's up now though. Since he was taking notes, there are details that I missed~~~

Business leaders say ‘green’ approach doable, profitable
By Jim Phillips
Athens NEWS Senior Writer
March 27, 2008

What if Ohio-based companies could cut greenhouse emissions, wean America off imported oil – and kick-start the state’s economy in the process? A no-brainer, right?

This happy scenario is achievable, three business leaders told an audience at Ohio University Tuesday, and the key is alternative energy.

“I’m going to talk about a very real business opportunity for Ohio,” said Neill Lane, president and CEO of the Athens-based Sunpower, Inc., a company that makes free-piston engines. “Things are not changing slowly – they’re changing enormously quickly.”

Lane was one of three presenters at the Green Energy Summit, sponsored jointly by OU’s Consortium for Energy, Economics and the Environment (CE3), the Pew Environment Group, and the office of U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.

The event brought government and business leaders together to discuss ways to promote “green” and sustainable businesses in the region.

Lane noted that Sunpower, founded by local engineer William Beale, has been toiling away in relative obscurity for years, making Stirling engines that, when heated externally, produce electricity.

Though using reflector dishes to heat banks of Stirling engines with solar power can provide large amounts of clean electricity, he said, little attention was paid to the process until recently. But suddenly, with both global temperatures and oil prices shooting up, interest in Stirling technology is rising as well, he said.

“The world is different now from what it was three months ago, based on my phone ringing,” he observed.

Lane stressed that the technology – including many inventions to which Sunpower holds exclusive patent – already exists to move toward large-scale electric generation. One model is already being tested in Europe, where Stirling-based combined-heat-and-power (CHP) units completely power individual homes.

“It’s a power station on your wall,” Lane explained, adding that Sunpower has partnerships with four European companies that together account for over a third of the European Union’s heating-equipment market.

With concentrated solar technology, Lane said, the promise may be even greater. One 100-mile-square field of dish collectors and Stirling engines in a sunny state like New Mexico, he said, could meet the entire U.S. energy demand.

The best part of the story for Ohio, he added, is that the state is positioned to midwife a huge, new, clean industry that can provide both knowledge-based and manufacturing jobs. Lane estimated the industry has the potential to be worth over $28 billion by 2025.

“This is ours to lose,” he said. “This is Ohio’s to lose, and the USA’s to lose.”


BEN SCHAEFFER IS president of American Hydrogen Corporation, a company that recently opened in southeast Ohio to commercialize technology created at OU to generate hydrogen fuel by electrolyzing ammonia. The firm has an office in Athens and is opening a plant in Meigs County.

Where older methods created hydrogen at a cost of around $10 a kilogram, Schaeffer said, his company’s process brings the cost to 30 cents a kilo.

Schaeffer argued passionately that cleaner alternatives to oil must be found, and fast. He cited the “Hubbert’s peak” of oil production, named for a geophysicist who shocked the world in 1949 by predicting that the fossil fuel era wouldn’t last long.

Hubbert said that with unrestrained extraction of a natural resource in a given area, a graph of production levels will be a bell curve, peaking when the resource is about half exhausted. The world is near or past that peak now, Schaeffer warned. And as oil supplies peter out, the risk of global conflict over what’s left goes up.

Last year, he noted, China bought 55 percent of the world’s spot market in oil – up from about 3 percent five years earlier. Globally, he said, “$1.8 million an hour is what we spend on oil.” For the United States, whose domestic oil production has long since peaked, this means lots of purchases from the Middle East and elsewhere.
“I’d like to not be dependent on people who are organized slightly differently from what we are,” he noted wryly.

Citing the well-worn metaphor of the frog slowly boiled alive as the temperature under his pan of water is gradually raised, Schaeffer offered an alternative to the “boiled” frog – the “bold” frog that sees the long-term trend and acts to change it.

“I’ve always been curious why the frog didn’t turn the heat down,” he joked.

Schaeffer said American Hydrogen is committed to being a waste-free, completely sustainable business. The ammonia for its electrolysis is widely available as industrial waste, he said. And while the Meigs County plant will be on the utility power grid at first, he promised, as soon as possible it will generate its own power with fuel cells.

“We’re going to be eating our own dog food,” he said. “Our plant is going to run on the electricity we produce.”


AN OFFICIAL FROM a large food-processing plant in Jackson, Ohio, provided an example of how an existing, old-school industrial business can take huge steps toward cutting pollution and increasing energy efficiency.

Ryan Wright, utility/sustainability manager for the Bellisio Foods plant in Jackson, described how the 63-acre plant, which runs 20 production lines to create frozen entrees, has begun using its food waste to generate methane gas for energy.

The wastes are fed into a large treatment tank where they are “digested” by bio-organisms to create methane, which is then used to fire boilers.

The project cost $4.65 million, but has allowed the company to save on natural gas use, and the costs of trucking food wastes to a landfill, Wright reported. He estimated that it also cuts down on carbon dioxide production by over 43,000 tons annually.

“It’s great project; we’re proud of it,” Wright said. In addition to the cost savings, he added, “it’s the right thing to do.”

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