Posts
Friday, August 29, 2008
PickensPlan
View my page on PickensPlan
So I've joined PickensPlan...
What does the PickenPlan mean to Northern Kentucky?
We have very little in the way of local Wind Power, but, if coal continues it's recent rise in price it may become economical to import Wind power to the area. In a battle between remote Wind and remote coal, Wind wins. Either way our high 90% local reliance on coal is drawing to a close. Even though we are not an ideal place for solar it may become cost competitive with remote Wind. It will even make the spare energy from Biochar attractive.
On the natural gas part of the plan. We have local understanding of it. We had gaslight streets before electric was common. Many of us still use it to heat our homes. The fact that we burn it on the inside of our houses venting the exhaust to the open air outside demonstrates how clean it is. It's not as clean as solar or wind but it beats coal, wood, and gasoline hands down for clean.
"Since I have natural gas in the house would I be filling up at home?" If you really want to, yes. But the cost of installation of the pump may not be worth it. However even though to my knowledge we have not one natural gas filling station in the area they can be set up quickly since the gas pipes run just about everywhere in the area.
Now this means that we have a new competitor for the natural gas that heats our home and water. Until the last couple of years using natural gas for home and water heating has been the cheap way. A combination of the world using more of it and a many new natural gas plants increased the price. If our energy hungry cars start eating the supply I would assume that we will not return to a time where natural gas is cheaper than electric. Also considering that electric is being squeezed by coal prices and pollution policies it looks like many more of us will be looking into passive solar heating.
This will make local biochar more valuable as the syngas produced in it's creation is being used by the local utility and may function in natural gas vehicles as well.
Either way the time when these decisions will need to be addressed will be within the next few years.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The Rest of the Biochar Story:
Charles Mann ("1491")in the Sept. National Geographic has a wonderful soils article which places Terra Preta / Biochar soils center stage.
I think Biochar has climbed the pinnacle, NGM gets more than fifty million readers monthly!
We need to encourage more coverage now, to ride Mann's coattails to public critical mass.
Please put this (soil) bug in your colleague's ears. These issues need to gain traction among all the various disciplines who have an iron in this fire.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text
It's what Mann hasn't covered that I thought should interest any writer as a follow up article.
The Biochar provisions by Sen.Ken Salazar in the 07 farm bill,
Dr, James Hansen's Global warming solutions paper and letter to the G-8 conference last month, and coming article in Science,
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf
The new university programs & field studies, in temperate soils
Glomalin's role in soil tilth & Terra Preta,
The International Biochar Initiative Conference Sept 8 in New Castle;
http://www.biochar-international.org/ibi2008conference/aboutibi2008conference.html
Given the current "Crisis" atmosphere concerning energy, soil sustainability, food vs. Biofuels, and Climate Change what other subject addresses them all?
Add a comment to this article:
Post a Comment