August 19, 2013 archive

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High technology green energy like you never imagined it before

Even small children understand this entertaining “high tech” video quite easily but Obama and Bill McKibben cannot:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/q…

For the record, I assume but do not know that the new green plastics not made from fossil fuels would be converted just as easily – and recycled, if desired.

It takes somewhat more ingenuity and effort to convert pig farts to tomatoes but that is a story for another time:

Are Hydroponic Tomatoes Fertilized With Pig Stench Organic?

Almost certainly no.

    Pig city

   Another livestock emissions research farm, but this time dedicated to recycling the metabolic waste of pigs, is being built in Denmark.

   Gottlan Paludan, the lead architect in the construction of the “City of Pigs”, says the purpose is “to analyse the synergies of large-scale livestock raising and the production of tomatoes, in order to take advantage, in a reciprocal way, of the waste that each process produces.”

   The site of the pig farm, on the Jutland Peninsula, allows the filtration and absorption of CO2, ammonia and other gases. The manure will be reused to generate biogas, which in turn will produce electricity. The manure will also be recycled to remove water and produce natural fertilisers.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?id…

Efforts to go fully commercial were in progress last I checked but the pigs were getting company from less smelly livestock.  Air filters are used to collect the ammonia from gaseous emissions.

Best,  Terry  

Cartnoon

On This Day In History August 19

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

August 19 is the 231st day of the year (232nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 134 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1909, the first race is held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, now the home of the world’s most famous motor racing competition, the Indianapolis 500.

The rectangular two-and-a-half-mile track linked four turns, each exactly 440 yards from start to finish, by two long and two short straight sections. In that first five-mile race on August 19, 1909, 12,000 spectators watched Austrian engineer Louis Schwitzer win with an average speed of 57.4 miles per hour. The track’s surface of crushed rock and tar proved a disaster, breaking up in a number of places and causing the deaths of two drivers, two mechanics and two spectators.

The surface was soon replaced with 3.2 million paving bricks, laid in a bed of sand and fixed with mortar. Dubbed “The Brickyard,” the speedway reopened in December 1909. In 1911, low attendance led the track’s owners to make a crucial decision: Instead of shorter races, they resolved to focus on a single, longer event each year, for a much larger prize. That May 30 marked the debut of the Indy 500–a grueling 500-mile race that was an immediate hit with audiences and drew press attention from all over the country. Driver Ray Haroun won the purse of $14,250, with an average speed of 74.59 mph and a total time of 6 hours and 42 minutes.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning


An Edge in the Rainbow

Liar’s Poker Update on Green or Not So Green Germany

So which is true?

Ever since Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a phase-out of nuclear energy over the next decade and pledged to generate as much as 80% of the country’s electricity from renewables by 2050, big question marks have been hanging over the future of coal and gas-fired plants in Germany.

Merkel, seeking a third term in general elections on September 22, is a staunch supporter of this hugely popular policy move.

But the turnaround is depriving utilities, including market leaders RWE and E.ON, of massive profits from their atomic plants and turning their gas and coal-fired stations into loss-makers as they are sidelined by rival renewable sources of energy.

http://www.industryweek.com/en…

I don’t expect there are copious tears shed for the utilities with their decaying dirty power around here and surely not in this corner.

But what of this from a now decaying, unloved posting:

The German Association of Energy Consumers estimates that up to 800,000 Germans have had their power cut off because they couldn’t pay the country’s rising electricity bills…

For many weeks in December and January, Germany’s 1.1 million solar power systems generated almost no electricity. During much of those overcast winter months, solar panels more or less stopped generating electricity. To prevent blackouts, grid operators had to import nuclear energy from France and the Czech Republic and power up an old oil-fired power plant in Austria.

https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

Without being on the ground with access to all the available data, it is impossible to ascertain the truth of matters.  My bias is that both are true.  A mobile blind man might feel two different aspects of the elephant but still would not know much about the beast.

What we do know is that intermittent power is – umm – intermittent and must be supplemented by baseload power.  Baseload renewable power is far cheaper and more available than all other energy sources.

Ancient inhabitants of North America some 12,000 years ago are known to have cooked with geothermal energy and millenia later, the ancient Romans used the same source of heat for their baths.  Of course fire was discovered much earlier and perhaps utilized by ancestors of humans. Biomass is a new word for the most ancient of all technologies.  There was then no need to freeze in the dark when the distant sun was neglecting earth.

So why do we concentrate on poisonous and haphazard sources of supply of energy?

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. – Albert Einstein

Albert forgot human greed but no one knows everything.

Best,  Terry

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