I’ve been adding articles to this site from time to time and I think I ought to make a plug for the company I work for, which is working on making renewable energy available to everyone. Hey, Mark okayed it, so plugging your company must be cool! ; )

Shameless Plug for BeUtilityFree

Take the idea of energy sustainability and apply it to what are probably your largest energy uses: your home and car. That’s the approach of BeUtilityFree. Take a look at what we do at www.beutilityfree.com. (I’m the webmaster as well as a renewable energy installer, so I’d love to hear feedback on what you think of the site at brett_s AT BeUtilityFree.com.)

The grand plan is to start out by reducing the amount of energy you use through replacing your current fixtures and appliances with more efficient ones, or designing your new home with efficiency built right in. Then you can buy a much more affordable renewable energy system that will cover your modest needs.

Once you own your means of production, you start getting paid back through avoiding the ever-rising cost of fuel, selling renewable energy credits for your production, taking tax breaks and utility incentives and maybe even selling excess energy.

We sell energy-efficient appliances and lighting and renewable energy systems like solar electric, solar hot water, wind power, hydrogen cogeneration and ethanol stills. We’ll design renewable energy systems, install them or just sell the components to those who have the skills to set them up themselves.

Our special, can’t-find-them-anywhere-else items are Nickel-Iron batteries, the Superior Solar Storage Tank and our 3″ and 4″ column Ethanol Stills.

We are hoping to unveil a few exciting things in the near future. Among them are:

• A turn-key ethanol plant. Just put feedstock, water, enzymes and yeast in one end and watch the fuel pour out the other. We’re currently testing enzymes for cellulosic production so that making ethanol can be as inexpensive and sustainable as possible.
• A Purchase Power Agreement plan that lets anyone get solar energy from their rooftop without any up-front investment. We’d retain ownership of the solar system and sell you the energy at a rate lower than the utility company’s.

If we can get everyone to pump renewable energy into the grid or unplug and make their own energy sustainably, we’ll have taken a huge step toward getting this climate problem licked. And if everyone owns the source of their energy, we can all get out from under the thumb of the utility company and the US Oil War Machine and get back to making a poistive difference in the world.

Brett

Wisconsin will soon light the way to energy independence, thanks to a $125 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. UW-Madison announced plans for the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, where UW scientists will work in partnership with two other universities to develop methods of converting plants into renewable liquid fuels.

Read the full story here.

The Discovery channel is 3/4 of the way through their four part series on the car of the future, appropriately called Future Car. The most recent episode was about fuel and hit on everything from ethanol, bio-diesel, hydrogen and solar all the way to having a car powered by air.

A few of the finer details are a little off, but all in all the shows have been great. It’s really cool to see what the designers are thinking about, and what is on the way. Perhaps the most interesting thing for me in this episode on fuel is that a lot of the future is already available now. Of course they showed prototype cars that can do some amazing things, but really the near future of fueling our vehicles is not so much about bringing in new technology, as it’s about getting more people on-board with the advances that are already commercially available like ethanol, biodiesel and hybrids.

One of the great things about cable is that you get more than one chance to see a good show. If you missed any of Future Car, check out the schedule for your second chance.

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Gotta pay the bills:

The exquisite combination of exterior paint colors is used by the professional exterior designers to give a unique look to the fence gate. There is a need of fine-quality material for the establishment of driveways in the patio or garage.

Being a top soy bean producer, it is in Indiana’s economic as well as environmental interest to use soy-derived bio diesel. Indygo, Indianapolis’ mass transit company has recently introduced hybrid buses that burn fuel produced right here in Inidana.

Read about Indianapolis’ first winter Ozone Action Day here.

Read more about the new busses here.

I’ve had a flexible fuel vehicle (FFV) for a couple of years, a 2003 Ford Taurus. The FFV is one that can run on a mixture of ethanol (sometimes methanol, but not in my case) and gasoline, at any mixture ratio from 0% ethanol to 85% ethanol, which is what E85 is - 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. Ford has offered a flexible fuel vehicle for a while now, and I recently saw a Chevy SUV that had a “FlexFuel” tag. There are probably others, and it seems like the numbers are growing. The difference in these cars is that there’s some kind of gizmo under the hood that detects the ethanol/gasoline mixture, and adjusts fuel/air ratio and ignition timing accordingly. The car also must have special fuel supply lines to carry the ethanol, so don’t go putting E85 in your AMC Pacer just because you want to cut down on our dependence on foreign oil. You’ll just hurt the Pacer.

Just this week, I put my first tank of E85 in the Taurus. You’re probably wondering why it took me a couple of years to try out the E85. This isn’t the car I drive every day, but more importantly, there’s only one station in town (Albuquerque, NM) pumping E85. And it’s only open 8-5, M-F. Bummer, because here I have a car that, straight from the factory, can run mostly on renewable bio-fuel. You’d think with quite a few FlexFuel cars out there, you could buy E85 easier. Well, you can if you live closer to the corn it’s made from. I looked at the Alternative Fuels Data Center website’s map (www.eere.energy.gov/afdc), and there are many E85 stations in the midwest, but only a handful in the Southwest.

Before I had a chance to try E85, I watched the price a little, and it seems to be always 30 or 40 cents more than gasoline. Now, I can understand that it might be more expensive than gas. After all, gas must be collected, refined, and distibuted. But with ethanol, you have the extra step of growing the corn. But the part that bugs me is that E85’s price seems to follow the price of gasoline. I hope that the cost breakdown isn’t like this: $0.40 to make a gallon of ethanol, and 1 gallon of diesel to bring that gallon of ethanol to Albuquerque.

Anyway, I tried it. (more…)

Tonight I was visited by someone from the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, and it inspired me to make the following plea to our nation’s leaders:

To our Leaders at all levels,

It’s time to get serious about Renewable Energy. This country has made some good steps, but it’s time for more serious action. We need a National Renewable Energy Standard (RES) for the United States. We need it for four reasons: environmentalism, to maintain our economy, to avoid an energy shortage, and for national security.

A Renewable Energy Standard is a plan that requires utilities to gradually increase the percentage of renewable energy in the total energy that they provide. Twenty states already have their own Renewable Energy Standards, and it’s time to follow their lead. This can be done locally, statewide, or nationally. With enough leaders at all levels working on it we will be able to have an impact.

I live in Indiana, and the main thing that has been in the news in this state regarding Renewable Energy is biofuel. Since we are a corn and soybean-growing state it makes sense to promote biodiesel, and I am very happy with the progress and the attention that biodiesel has gotten so far, but there is another area that deserves greater attention in Indiana and throughout the nation: wind. (more…)

 

This month in Discover Magazine there is an article celebrating their Scientist of the Year and two nominees. The Scientist of the Year is Jay Keasling, and he is what has become known as a synthetic biologist. His immediate work is shooting for a low-cost, mass manufacturing method for producing an effective drug against malaria called artemisinin. His lab is working on reengineered yeast to produce the drug. The interesting thing that is mentioned very briefly in the article is that in the future he thinks that it won’t be too large a step to modify the process to create biofuels. You put sugar and bacteria or yeast into one end of a big vat, and you get fuel out the other end. This is a very distant technology, but it’s very exciting.

Read the articles: Scientist of the year and the two runners-up.

As excited as I am about Biodiesel and SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) as fuel for vehicles, I don’t have a diesel car and don’t see one in my near future. If you are like me there is new hope: Biobutanol.

Biobutanol is a form of alcohol that can replace gasoline. It is similar to ethanol but has more favorable characteristics as auto fuel.

• the “bio” in biobutanol refers to the fact that butanol can be made from biological sources including a wide variety of crops, which leads to all kinds of environmental, economic and societal benefits (like less dependency on foreign oil)
• butanol has a higher energy content than ethanol
• it is less corrosive than ethanol so it can be transported through existing infrastructure (trucks, pipelines, etc)
• requires little or no modification to work in your car
• can be a 1:1 replacement for gasoline (unlike ethanol that can be up to only 10% in most vehicles)
• it may even be able to be used in diesel engines

So if it’s so great why can’t you buy it right now? It seems as though the new technology to produce biobutanol efficiently is so new that it is not yet scaled up to an industrial level, and very little testing has been done on how cars will react to the fuel. The good news is that several groups are working on it, like a fairly new partnership between BP and DuPont, and it seems like a very promising fuel. You can find a whole lot more information at butanol.com

As I travel around the Midwest doing yo-yo shows, I have been seeing more and more evidence that biodiesel is entering the public consciousness. In the style of the old (like 1950s era) Burma Shave ads, I have started seeing biodiesel ads. These are in the same style as the ones that you have probably seen from the gun enthusiasts where there are four or five signs in a row on the shoulder of the highway, where each one has a part of a larger message. The soy farmers have latched on to this technique and I like it.

(more…)

A group of ten forward-thinking Madisonians have turned the former Car Care Clinic at 1894 E. Washington Ave into PrairieFire BioFuels Cooperative. If all goes well they will be selling 100% biodiesel from a real, honest-to-goodness pump on E. Washington Ave. by the end of the summer. At the moment all fuel sales are done at 100 S. Baldwin St. When winter comes there will be blends available that won’t congeal in the cold weather.

In addition to the fuel sales, you can pay PrairieFire to convert your diesel vehicle to use Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO), or they can teach you how to make your own biodiesel.

There were a couple of articles on this new co-op in Madison, but they don’t seem to be available online, so you’ll just have to check out their website: www.prairiefirebiofuels.org