ELECTRIC RUBBISH

The small town of Ludlow in western England has a pioneering anaerobic digestion plant.
Run by BiogenGreenfinch the plant is intended to deal with the food-waste crisis at the same time as generating clean, renewable energy. The process works by the use of microbes that thrive in the absence of oxygen break down the organic matter, releasing methane as they do so Inside metal tanks.
these microbes are an opportunity in the struggle to deal with unwanted food.
The process starts with the waste being pulverised and then pumped through four processing tanks. These are linked to each other by pipes channeling gas, fluid and solids to their particular destinations.
Once the microbes have completed their job, in about a month or so , the organic waste comes out and farmers collect it and spread it on the land. “The methane is burned to create electricity and hot water, or it can be pumped directly into gas mains, or bottled and used as vehicle fuel.For every ton of food waste, the Ludlow plant generates 255kWh of renewable electricity, which it sells to Marks & Spencer, saving 110kg of carbon-dioxide emissions.”
In addition A government-commissioned study in 2007 identified “that if this system were extended to all households, it could provide between 0.5 and 1 per cent of Britain’s domestic electricity. Plus, this would avoid sending the waste to rot in landfill sites, where the methane can escape into the atmosphere, acting as a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.”
The difficulty is that anaerobic digestion plants are costly to build and complex to run.

The Crowd Farm

Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Years: 2007-present
Founders: James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/crowdfarm-0725.html

The Crowd Farm, as envisioned by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, is a plan to harness energy from human movement in crowded areas; such as subway platforms or sports stadiums. Primarily, it looks to turn the mechanical energy of people moving about into electrical energy. This innovative idea has gained a lot of attention and this year their proposal took first place in the Japan-based Holcim Foundation’s Sustainable Construction competition.

The system itself would work as follows: In a heavily trafficked space, a responsive sub-flooring system made up of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps would be installed. “The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into that of an electric current.”

According to Graham and Jusczyk, a single step provides enough energy to light a lightbulb for one second and 28527 steps (as could be easily found at a professional sporting event) can power a moving train for one second. The Crowd Farm is still being experimented with, but Graham and Jusczyk hope to get this new building system off the ground soon.

Transition Town Totnes

Name: Transition Town Totnes
Location: Devon, UK
Years 2006-present
totnes.transitionnetwork.org
Transition Initiatives were founded to increase public awareness of sustainable living as well as to build communities that are more resilient to the impending decline of oil and gas supplies. Transition Town Totnes (TTT) was founded by Rob Hopkins and Naresh Giangrande in 2006 and is the first community in the United Kingdom to embrace the Transition Initiative and actively try to increase its local resilience to an energy crisis.
The position of Transition Towns is that global warming and peak oil present an unavoidable challenge which should be dealt with sooner rather than later through various energy saving initiatives to increase the survival rate of our towns. Over the next two years, TTT aims to create an Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) to lay out where the town wants to be in terms of energy dependence in twenty years’ time. The main goals of the EDAP are to reduce carbon emissions as well as dependence on fossil fuels and to increase the town’s resilience to an increasingly volatile global market and community through self reliance. TTT believes that for the EDAP to work, it must be a collaborative effort between all members of the community, private and public, old and young.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete". Buckminster Fuller
TTT has started various initiatives to increase its self reliance. It has begun the Totnes Pound Project which is an internal currency to promote economic localization which benefits the local community in many ways, including supporting local trade and food producers, reducing food miles, keeping money in the community and encouraging tourism, all of which contribute to the town’s self-reliance. Other projects include: Garden Share which involves connecting people without their own gardens with growing space; Local Food Guide, which promotes local and independent producers; The Great Re-skilling, a practical program to teach people basic food production skills and other sustainable food production groups.

Blue Sky Biofuels

Location: Oakland, CA
Year: 2006-Present
Owner and President: Patrick McIntyre

http://www.blueskybio-fuels.com

Blue Sky Biofuels is a recently formed corporation, developing a biodiesel production facility located conveniently close to an urban center, turning used grease from commercial food production, restaurants, and public utility sewers into combustible fuel. In addition to serving a number of restaurants in the Bay Area, Blue Sky Biofuels also partners with the University of California at Berkeley and the McAfee Coliseum to collect grease. This grease, once converted to fuel, is used to power the trucking fleets of other Blue Sky customers.

In addition to selling this biodiesel to trucking fleets, Blue Sky is working on a campaign to introduce biodiesel to school bus fleets. Biodiesel can be integrated into normal diesel fuel at any ratio from 1 percent to 99 percent, and in addition to being more environmentally friendly, improves the air quality for students riding those buses. The US Dept of Agriculture and the US Dept of Energy have estimated that biodiesel also has a positive energy balance of 220 percent, dispelling the myth of biodiesel as net energy loser.

RUAF Foundation

Location: Global reach with projects in partner cities in Africa, Asia, and South America. A network of regional resource centers, with the overarching global center housed in the Netherlands.
Year: 1996-Present

http://www.ruaf.org

The mission of the RUAF Foundation is “to contribute to urban poverty reduction, employment generation and food security and to stimulate participatory city governance and improved urban environmental management, by creating enabling conditions for empowerment of male and female urban and peri-urban farmers, capacity development of local authorities and other stakeholders and by facilitating the integration of urban agriculture in gender-sensitive policies and action programmes of local governments, civic society organisations and private enterprises with active involvement of the urban farmers, livestock keepers and other relevant stakeholders”

The format of the Foundation is a global resource center, and seven regional centers, monitoring and providing resources to urban farming initiatives in 18 partner cities, in East and West Africa, South America, China, and the Indian Subcontinent. The Foundation is funded primarily by the EU, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Canadian International Development Research Centre. The Foundation’s main programs “Cities Farming for the Future” and “From Seed to Table” seek to develop urban agriculture socially, economically, and sustainably through education, information sharing, and publications like Urban Agriculture Magazine.

Cow Power (Anaerobic Digesters)

Location: Vermont

Years: 2008-present

Organization: Central Vermont Public Service

http://www.cvps.com/cowpower/

WorldChanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, p.64

One cow can produce over 30 gallons of manure a day. Instead of letting cow manure run into waterways and seep into the ground, the Central Vermont Public Service (CVPS) has created a Cow Power Program, which turns cow manure into energy. An anaerobic digester is installed on a farm and, over a period of about twenty days, breaks down some of the collected poop’s solids into acids, which feed bacteria, which in turn digest the manure and produce biogas. The gas is then pushed through a pipe into a modified natural gas engine, and electricity generated by burning the gas is fed into the CVPS system. One cow’s waste can produce enough electricity to power two 100-watt light bulbs 24 hours a day. The digester also produces a low-odor slurry that makes a fertilizer that is safer than raw manure. Participating dairy farmers get an additional source of income.

Cow Power farms are located all across Vermont. There are currently six farms online and producing electricity in Bakersfield, Bridport, Richford, Sheldon, St. Albans and Newport. All the farms have well over 500 cows, and produce or are expected to produce between 0.78 and 3.5 million killowatt-hours of electricity a year.

Algae Farming

Years: 1978-present

WorldChanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, p.111

http://www.bionomicfuel.com/algaculture-and-benefits-of-algae-farming/

http://www.globalwarmingisreal.com/blog/2009/01/21/algae-farming-in-the-face-of-the-oil-price-situation/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/business/energy-environment/29biofuel.html

http://infranetlab.org/blog/2009/02/farming-fuels/

Algae have the ability to consume CO2 and turn it into biodiesel. A single acre of algae ponds can produce 15,000 gallons of biodiesel. GreenFuel has a full-scale algae fuel plant underway. Algae farming can offer many benefits, and one of these is that microalgae grow significantly faster than land crops used to make biodiesel. One acre of algae will produce between 5,000 and 20,000 gallons of oil that can be turned into biodiesel. The US Energy Department is reviving a massive project it abandoned in 1996 to produce algae gasoline on a large scale. The DoE abandoned the project because of the low oil price at the time, but it has recently teamed up with National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Chevron. Some insiders say that it will take ten years before commercially viable products will hit the market. Others say this is going to materialize in as little as two years from now. The reason for this massive difference in prediction time is due to the political climate. In one year’s time that landscape will be a lot clearer.

Algae, just like any other plant life, use carbon dioxide and release oxygen. This means that large-scale algae farming would not only create a biofuel that is environmentally friendly, but also, while the algae is growing, it would be cleaning the air by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing fresh oxygen.

Algae also contain nutrients that can provide a fertilizer that is environmentally friendly and rich in phosphorous and nitrogen. These nutrients can be extracted from the algae and make farming land crops much cleaner and less harmful to the earth.

Dow Chemmicals and Algenol Biofuels are building a demonstration plant that will use algae to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol. Or, the oxygen produced by the algae would be used to burn coal cleanly. The carbon dioxide exhaust released by the coal burning would be reused to feed algae.

Algenol grows algae in bioreactors, which are troughs covered with flexible plastic and filled with saltwater. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide, to encourage growth of the algae. The company has 40 bioreactors in Florida, and as part of the demonstration project plans 3,100 of them on a 24-acre site at Dow’s Freeport, Tex., site. Algenol and its partners are planning a demonstration plant that could produce 100,000 gallons a year.

PetroSun Biofuel’s 1,100 acre algae farms in Harlingen, Texas

Biofuel Plant

Name: Biofuel Plant

Location: Chacabuco, Argentina

Years: 2005-present

Founded by: Edmundo Defferrari

In 2005, 28-year-old entrepreneur Edmundo Defferrari built a $152,000 prototype of a biodiesel plant about 145 miles west of Buenos Aires. In order to build this prototype plant, Defferrari received funding from an Argentine seed company called Don Mario. This plant takes 12 tons of soybeans and converts it into 360 gallons of biodiesel in just one day. It also produces more than 10 tons of animal feed in a single day. Defferrari wants this idea to catch on throughout the world and imagines that 3-4 farmers could pool their money to build such a plant and turn a portion of their harvest into a profitable source of renewable energy. The biodiesel costs only about half as much as regular diesel, about 95 cents a gallon. The process is also automated, only requiring a human to load the soybeans and turn the machine on and off. This absence of human labor also contributes to the lower price of this biodiesel. Defferrari has also achieved a sustainable circle of use, because his customers who buy the biodiesel are the same people who grow the soybean feedstock that supplies the factory.

http://www.grist.org/article/hearn/

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/08/01/8382246/index.htm

Desertec Industrial Initiative

Name: Desertec Industrial Initiative

Location: Northern Africa, but intended to supply power to Europe

Year: Breaks ground in 2011-2012

Funded by: Consortium of large German companies

On July 13, 2009, a group of 12 different large German companies announced that they had formed a consortium called the Desertec Industrial Initiative. They signed a Memorandum of Understanding and established their objective as analyzing and developing the technical, economic, political, social, and framework for carbon-free power generation in the deserts of northern Africa. The consortium includes such large companies as Siemens, RWE, Deutsche Bank, and Abengoa Solar. Together, this consortium will fund the construction of a huge solar power plant in northern Africa. This project, nicknamed Desertec, is one of the biggest private projects involving renewable energy and is supposed to break ground within the next two years. Though it will take 10 years initially before the plant will actually be able to provide power, this plant supposedly will be able to eventually supply 15% of Europe’s power via the collected solar power which powers steam turbines. The plant also hopes to provide a substantial portion of the producing country’s power as well.

I think it is great to see companies forming together to take these steps on a larger scale. This consortium is clearly concerned about the current state of power supply, and hopes to eventually lead the entire world to a system of sustainable power.

http://www.desertec.org/

http://www.rechargenews.com/energy/solar/article180526.ece