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GREEN ENERGY
Green Energy is derived from any former
living plant substance which is used for heat, electricity or
transportation. It specifically excludes fossil fuels.
Our Green Energy project is divided
into two parts. The first part will use bakery waste, wood and
cardboard which are a part of our everyday municipal solid waste
(MSW). Why would we want to do that? Because they are so plentiful
here and when we discard them, they clog our landfills. The second
part will actually grow trees which are then converted into a different
type of fuel through a proces called
gasification. In the first part, wood and cardboard can be used
directly to make heat. They are burned in a special furnace which
burns the smoke twice getting as much heat from the fuel as possible.
The bakery waste - breads, cookies, pies and cakes - can be converted
into alcohol fuel and used in a variety of ways. We will use this
fuel to provide heat, electricity and carbon dioxide in our greenhouses.
Making alcohol fuel from bakery waste also generates a by-product
called Distillers Dried Grains and Solubles or DDGS. This is mostly
the protein which is contained in the bakery products and is a good
feed for many types of livestock. We will pelletize it and use it
to feed our fish. To do this, well pick up bakery waste from stores
before it is discarded. You have to remember that this is waste
and the stores don’t want it lying around for long, so you
have to be very dilligent in being there every day.
We bring it back to the project site
and remove the wrappings, which are compressed and sold as scrap.
The bread is ground up into small particles, cooked, enzymes are
added to convert the starches into simpler sugars, fermented and
distilled. We will capture the carbon dioxide made during this process
and fertilize the air in our greenhouses with it. Plants love extra
carbon dioxide in the air.
So you can see that nothing is wasted, even the water used during
the whole process is recycled and the ash from burning the wood
and cardboard will be added to compost (it is rich in Boron, an
element which is normally lacking in northeastern soils). A permit
is required from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to produce
this type of fuel. If you don’t have an abundance of bakery
waste available, you can still generate fuel in a different way.
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Planting
Date: June 3rd
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August
One Year Later
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With even a little land, you can grow some fast growing trees called
poplar to generate energy. It doesn’t have to be great growing
land, even marginal land will do. From initial planting to harvest
takes about 5 years, but once they are established, you can cut
them every few years and they will grow right back from the stump.
Acreage devoted to growing trees for energy is called an energy
plantation.
The trees are chipped (the chips are called feedstock) and put through
a gasifier (a device which heats the chips in a chamber with no
air, so they won’t burn but rather give off a gas). This gas
is called Synthesis Gas and has about half the energy of natural
gas. The carbon dioxide released from burning Synthesis Gas is used
by the next generation of trees to grow more wood. So the process
repeats itself, and is termed carbon-cycle neutral because it puts
no more carbon dioxide into the cycle than it takes out. Synthesis
gas can be burned in a microturbine to generate electricity, or
injected into the air intake of a diesel engine to reduce diesel
fuel consumption while generating electricity. Or, it can power
a fuel cell. This project will provide fuel, electricity, carbon
dioxide and fish feed for our aquaponics project.
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