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

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.

The points I’m most excited about:

• Reducing gasoline consumption through improved vehicle efficiency, gasoline alternatives (like ethanol), and reductions in commuting and congestion.
• More research into hybrid vehicles, especially plug-in hybrids.
• Increasing the supply of renewable fuels.

The points that make me cringe:

• More nuclear energy.  First, it’s not a renewable resource, and second, it creates toxic byproducts that last for hundreds of years.  People are starting to talk about nuclear as green energy and that makes me crazy.  It is so NOT green.
• More domestic oil production, especially in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge.  Aside from my feeling that we should protect the few wild places we have left, I don’t like a policy of bleeding our country dry of oil first.  If anything, we should preserve what oil we have while we develop renewables further to take the place of foreign oil imports.

Some people think that any State of the Union address is nothing but lip service regardless of who delivered it.  I don’t agree with that.  I have to say that I am very impressed with the majority of the stated goals set out in the new energy policy from the Bush White House, but it’s much easier to talk about doing things than it is to actually do them.  We will see if this administration puts its money where its mouth is.

Check out the full policy here.

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. In combustion, ethanol has less energy per gallon than gasoline, so running on ethanol has to have less power or worse mileage, or both. The Taurus didn’t seem to run any different, and it didn’t seem to have less power. So the lower energy content must show itself mostly in the mileage. It did. For that tank, I got 13.4 mpg. Hmmmm. Now, I don’t keep track of mileage too carefully, but I think this car usually gets something like 21 mpg.

In order to do a real cost comparison between the fuels, you have to account for both the price difference and the mileage difference. I made a little table in Excel to show the cost per mile in order to compare the two fuels. CPG is cost per gallon, MPG is miles per gallon, and CPM is cost per mile. Here it is:
CPG MPG CPM
gas $2.20 21.0 $0.10
E85 $2.68 13.4 $0.20

Remember, this is a snapshot of prices and an estimate of MPG on gasoline, but it would cost about twice as much to always run my car on E85. I would be willing to pay a little extra to run E85, but not twice as much. I’m sure the economics work out better for someone buying E85 in the midwest. But I’ll be doing some research into ethanol production and economics. With many cars out there that are ready to run on E85, it seems like the government could be subsidizing this industry (or more generously, if they already are) until it can be profitable on its own. Wasn’t it just a month ago that Bush was imploring the people to help reduce our dependency on foreign oil? FFV owners aren’t going to buy E85 unless they can afford it.

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

The newspaper INtake published an article last week that seems almost too good to be true. Not only is it about trying to make a small Indiana town produce almost all it’s own fuel, but they make it sound like it might not be that hard, and maybe it would even be profitable.

Check it out here:

http://www.intakeweekly.com/articles/5/024302-8225-154.html

I certainly hope that this experiment works out, because it could be a model for communities all over farming areas. Incredible.