Cost of electricity less than zero?!

Fun story on the CBC today:
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/080507/K050704AU.html

In short - it was cheaper to pay people to take power than it was to shut down generators.

This is what happens when daytime power consumption is 20-30% higher than in the middle of the night.

If only we could consume power more evenly...?

Most people immediately think - "why don't we store the power in batteries!". I suggest - do the math. The energy to be store is gargantuan!!! Basically there are only two way to store that much energy:

1. Thermal potential
2. Gravitational potential

Thermal potential is easy enough to visualize - heat something up to several times the boiling point of water and insulate it until it is need 8 hours from now in the day. Thermal solar power is one example of this. This is why thermal solar power is more attractive for base electrical demand - it can still generate power when the clouds come in.

Gravitational potential does not involve a black hole or a TARDIS - but water. Using power from base load generators at night to run pumps to lift water a few 100ft up a hill or precipice into a large (kilometers wide) reservoir. The gravitational potential of 1 million tonnes of water is far greater than $100 million in batteries. And at a fraction the cost.

Hydrogenated or non-H Veggie Oil?

I only use non-hydrogenated veggie oil when I filter or in my car. In short, hydrogenated oil is not commonly called veggie oil, but veggie shortening or veggie lard (ie. Crisco).

My pumping hot hydrogen gas under pressure and in the presence of a catalyst - veggie oil will cease being liquid at room temperature. This is what McDonald's and KFC use for cooking. This is also how margarine is made. Still think it's healthy?

So when you collect veggie oil for your car - be sure to ask that it's in fact veggie oil and not veggie shortening. Then ask again - "is it liquid at room temperature?" - some people need that last bit of clarification.

Washing waste veggie oil and why I don't do it.

I've read around that it's a good idea to wash waste veggie oil (WVO) - I wasn't convinced.

I know one must wash biodiesel to get methanol, glycerin and Sodium-hydroxide by products out. But to wash straight-up WVO?

There are two common ways to wash BioDiesel (which some people recommend for WVO as well):

1. Mist washing
2. Bubble washing

Both methods can cause emulsification of the water and oil (aka. salad dressing) so heating the water and oil is important to inhibit this behaviour. 50C will do fine if you're gentle - higher temperatures will be needed if you really agitate the two fluids.

I tried to wash 10L of my 10 micron filtered oil (my car fuel) with 10L of tap water in a small 30L glass aquarium. I bought an aquarium air pump, a 30cm wand bubbler (to make a bubble curtain), and a 150W aquarium heater. I hooked it all up, poured it all in and let it all go for 48 hours.



Result? No much changed in the colour or clarity of the oil. There isn't an other way to know if the quality improved without getting scientific testing equipment. The water got smokey - but that might just be oil suspended in the water. Plus I'd have to spend more time and mess dewatering now.

As it stands, I will not add any washing stage to my filtering operation until I can see more evidence.

How to hookup a generator to a home

I got lots of traffic on my YouTube videos on Earth Day - lots of comments and emails too.

The most popular question was "How do you hook that up to a home?" Well, here's a diagram showing how.



Notice that I didn't mention anything about feeding back to the grid. Doing that is can make you some small money, but it's expensive to setup. In place of the DPDT (double pole double throw) switch you have a synchronizer to maintain freqency and phase alignment between your generator and the grid. Usually involves converting from AC to DC then back to AC at a loss of power and money from your pocket.

Message to Mark Rodriguez

Tried to email you Mark, but Yahoo said you didn't exist.

---

Hello,
my question is probably the same as everyone else's. What are you getting on your miles per gallon? The way i understand it is that you start your car on regular desiel gas and then you swith to veg. after it heats up. And then before you turn off your car you switch back to desiel gas right. So i guess i was wondering how much you have been saving now compared to before? Also I was wondering if you can give me ball park figures for before and after. As before you used veg and how much the cost is before and after using the vegetable oil to.

I only ask because im very interested in jumping on the band wagon. I believe right now i spend 190 dollars a month on gas. So thats not that bad, but it would be better if I only had to pay a 3rd of that.

well thank you for your time, and hopefully you can write me back...

Mark

---

Mark,

The miles-per-gallon (or litres-per-100km as we do in Canada) is identical as far as I can tell. I don't measure out fuel to the same precision as the diesel pumps of course. But I get roughly the same distance from the same volume of fuel.

How much you save depends on how much you use the veggie oil. And indirectly - how careful you are to only switch over to Veggie once the engine is up to temp - saving on repairs.

I've gone through about 700L (roughly 14,000 km) of veggie fuel so far. But I only fill up 2-4 times per month. If you're spending $190/mo on diesel (which is 20-30% cheaper in the US vs Canada by the way) then you're going to pay off the conversion very quickly.

The most expensive part is installing the kit. Filtering and collecting and dewatering is dirt cheap. My setup cost $100 plus filter bags ($3 each). My GreaseCar kit cost $1500 at the time and I paid another $1500 to have it installed. You may find better prices these days.

Cheers,

BioDiesel for non-hobbiests

My dad sent me think link today. Groovy. Expensive, but groovy. Don't know how good it is, but the description seems to suggest they know what they're doing. Acid/base pH balancing, 3 stage water wash, 110V @ 15A power suggests a drying stage.

If you're a boating marina selling fuel or farmer that wants to go with green fuel without modifying your vehicle - this looks like the fastest route. At $9,000 USD you better be prepared to make about 10000L of BioDiesel before this thing breaks even.

Note: you can use BioDiesel in an oil furnace too, so 10,000L may not take too long for some of you.

Tracking Power Generation in Ontario

An excellent site showing the electrical generation in Ontario is www.ieso.ca

They provide a metric dung load of information on:

1. %-age generation by type (hydro, nuclear, gas, coal, etc)


2. Maps showing where all the generating plants are (pdf, page 14)


3. %-age consuption by consumer group (home, business, industrial)


4. Seasonal peak consuptions and average demand by city


5. Historical top-20 peak daysGenerator availability plant-by-plant, day-by-day (2008-04-01)

And the awesomest demonstration of why the internet was invented: Live graphs of today's projected and actual electrical consuption!!!

Interesting things one can gleam from the website:

1. Ontario burns a lot of coal - 20.6% of total installed capacity - but plans exist to decommishon all coal by 2009
2. Ontario has been exporting more power than it brings in over the past two years - but there is still tight dependance on US for even distribution
3. There is a lot of nuclear that never turns off
4. Winter peak electrical demand is 90% of summer peak demand

All in all, very educational

Vids of my GreaseCar

Video 1: Under the hood


Video 2: In the cabin, on the dashboard


Video 3: In the trunk, the tank itself


Bonus Video: Changing veggie fuel filter

My daddy's car is greener than yours!

Ahh. Children are so competitive. But so are green-o nut jobs. And I guess I'm one of them.

Someone on one of my YouTube videos commented a better use of my the 1,000 Watts over 12 hours to dewater my veggie oil would have been to charge an electric car. A very cutting and popular view. But utterly wrong.

In my attempt to fill the blogosphere with cluons, I will tear his statement down with objective analysis and not rude language.

To his defense - he's kinda right. Electric cars would be the best way to go. Centralized energy generation (generating plants) and unified energy distribution (the electrical grid). But to say that 12 kilowatt-hours to charge a car is better use than 200 litres of veggie oil shows how the poster was talking out of their butt. But that assumes a lot about the efficient generation, distribution and storage of said energy. Hint: lead acid is very heavy and isn't the answer.

Some things to know about the SI (Systeme Internationale) units:

• 1 Watt is the instantaneous energy required to push 1 Ampare of current through 1 Ohm of impedance (resistance x inductance).
  
• 1 Joule is the quantity of energy required to run 1 Watt for 1 second
  
• 1 kilowatt-hour is the energy to push 1,000 Watts for 1 hour.
• For 1000 Watts for 12 hours (or 43,200 seconds) that would total 43.2 megajoules
  

Now. Look at these sources:

• http://www.green-trust.org/2005/09/uk-based-veggie-fueled-co-gen-chp.html
  
• http://www.southwestbiodiesel.co.uk/oil.html
  
• http://vegburner.co.uk/oils.htm
  
• and many others on google

You can see that 1 litre of veggie oil has about 35 kilojoules per litre. So my 205L barrel (rounded down to 200L to account for the fact I don't fill it to the top) has about 7.0 gigajoules of energy (7,000 megajoules).



That means I'm spending one 160^th the energy in the fuel to refine it. I find that perfectly acceptable.

Yeah yeah, I didn't account for the energy it took to make the heating element, or the barrel, or the containers, or the filter bags. But he didn't account for the energy it took to manufacture the transmission lines, lead acid batteries, electric motors, etc.

More photos of Mark's Generator

Here are some pictures of the recent videos of Mark's Generator.


Picture 1:
- 12HP 2cyl engine, 8KW 220V AC alternator ESA approved
- currently unused water tower for cooling


Picture 2:
- Flexible Aluminum exhaust pipe
- 2 piston exhaust joined in a Y-joint
- Copper fuel line is wrapped around exhaust for pre-heating (better burn, better flow)


Picture 3:
- 3 fuel tanks (Veg-1, Diesel, Veg-2)
- Flexible Aluminum exhaust pipe
- Copper fuel line is wrapped around exhaust for pre-heating (better burn, better flow)
- Exhaust going out the fron door for now.

Mark's Lister in operation

Here are two videos of Mark's generator in operation.

Added since last post:
1. exhaust pipes vent to outside (flex pipe on left)
2. glow plugs added for easier starting (battery powered - right)
3. 3 40L fuel jugs hung from cieling
4. 3-to-1 fuel valve to select fuel (diesel or veggie)

Still to-do:
1. cooling system
2. muffler
3. sound-proof the shed
4. install electrical cables to his house

With any luck, he'll have a generator working for this spring's thaw-and-melt-and-flood-your-basement season.


Video 1: Single cylinder firing.


Video 2: Both cylinders firing.

Dumb people and the environment

My biggest beef with the environmental craze that's going on right now is how mis-information and dis-information is everywhere. There are so many people out there who haven't thought things through and spout out a load of crap as fact.

The "green revolution" is a perfect example of Quantum Bogodynamics where Bogons and Cluons are interacting - and in my opinion the Bogons out number the Cluons 10:1 right now.

Example 1 - "Tap Water is unsafe, dontchaknow?"
I have a co-worker who started a conversation taking the position that city run tap water is unsafe because the recently published report on pharmaceutical chemicals discovered in tap water of several US cities. Being married to a hydro-geologist (aka. water geologist, aka. ground water scientist) I am privy to her complete confidence in city run water treatment.

Aforementioned co-worker was of the opinion - nay - the conviction that his well water is "pure" because he "got one of those expensive lab tests done" and everything passed.

Thing is - the city of Ottawa performs over 125,000 tests per year on over 350 different parameters while his well is tested, what, once per year? Check the report yourself.

And don't even get me started on bottled water vs. tap water (hint - they're the same thing).

Example 2 - "Compact fluorescent lamps are not better for the environment"
Same co-worker. His argument was:

1. CFL's don't produce as much heat, increases the heating bill
2. CFL's have mercury in them and are hazardous - "think of the children"
3. Hazardous material waste disposal requires going to a landfill - burning fossil fuel
4. Hazardous material waste days at the landfill are busy - everyone's cars are idling - burning fossil fuel
5. When he went to the HazMat day, the line up took "so long" that he just left is HazMat at the side of the road and left
6. The city should collect hazardous waste are the road side so he doesn't have to make the trip.

My responses:

1. Every dollar spend heating our house using electrical resistance would cost you $0.40 (approx) in natural gas.
2. The CFLs last for 5 years. Incandescents last for 1. Mercury and other heavy metals are recycled because they are valuable.
3. Hazardous material water disposal is a once every 5 year occurrence for most households (sometimes never, thanks to hardware store drop-offs). Don't complain about something you do once every 5 years with proper storage - "go when you have enough to make it worth the trip"
4. See response #3. If you only go once every 5 years, suck it up.
5. His fifth point revokes is right to talk to me
6. The city should also pay someone to wipe the poo from my bum so I don't have to do it. But that would not be cost effective. The same argument applies to his point.

Round 2.

Him:

1. I like soft incandescent light.
2. I have a chandelier that don't take standard type-2 bulb sizes - do I have to buy a new chandelier?

Me:

1. CFLs exist with softer, diffused light so solve this problem. We don't live in an autocratic society - shelve your bleeding hart.
2. CFLs exist on all the same socket sizes as conventional incandescents.

End result:

He still thinks "the man" is out to get him. I still think he others like him will eventually out-breed people like me.

Jets and BioFuel

So, Virgin Atlantic flew a short flight on biofuel. What remarkable about this is Sir Branson pointed out that Algae based biofuels are targeted to produce their Jet Fuel.

Stroke of common sense, brilliant.

Plant-oil is People! Er, petro-oil...

CBC is carrying something today few people know about: that plastic doesn't need to come from crude (aka. petroleum oil) oil. Orignally plastics were made from Soy bean.

Infact, just about any plant oil can be be used as raw matirial for creating plastics. If only there was a plant that could be grown in sufficant quantity to make a significant dent in the plastics industry...

Delay to our furnace

Installation of our geoexchange furnace has been delayed untill the spring.

We had hoped to get it in for Christmas, but the 150cm of snow we got really but a wrench in the plans. Add to that the Ontario ground water Regulation 903 (aka. the Walkerton regulation) you get more delays as the company investigates better ways to grout the bore hole. And to top it off, the company is going though a change of ownership (for the better in my opinion).

But all is not lost. We'll get our furnace in the spring when the ground is soft, and the snow is gone. Less of a point getting it now when the coldest parts of winter are done.

A MP3 podcast audio feature from CBC's Quirks and Quarks on the technology of our new furnace.

M's Generator is getting closer

So M's generator is getting closer to being operational.

Todo:

1. install cooling system (205L steel barrel filled with water/coolant, convection cooling)
2. install veggie fuel lines (currently only using diesel)
3. install exhaust system!

Today we got woodnstuff's man John to come over with the new fly-wheel and between 3 of us we took turns cranking the sucker. With the help of break cleaner from CdnTire (ether is so last century) we got a few successful power strokes. The -10C overnight temperatures made the engine quite cold. M will need to install some glow plugs for winter starting.

The problem with biofuel

The problem is the people who make biofuel are chemical companies and not agricultural companies.


Fundamentally, a company will focus its efforts on the things it does best. Why would a chemical company making fuel ever want to grow the crops used to make the fuel? It makes about as much sense as a bank getting into the business of real estate.



So why is this a problem? Because as a chemical producer, you care only about price and availability.

Result - biofuels are mass produced using human food crops. Why would BiofuelCompany grow its own crops when they can get soy or canola cheap prices? The return on investment isn't there for BiofuelCompany.

So now - as I'm sure you know - we're in a state where biofuels are trendy (ignoring ethenol, rightfully so) and food prices are going up because there are two markets buying the product.

Solution - grow crops specifically designed for fuel. What would this crop look like?

No intellectual property concerns
Anyone can grow it without fear of litigation. After all, more competition means more product. It's very very hard to conceive of supply outstripping demand for any cheap energy source.

Inexpensive to grow
The raw materials needed to grow the crop have to be cheap. Little to no pesticides is a bonus. Less work the better.

High fuel content
The crop needs to produce very high amounts of fuel per acre.

What would my solution be? Algae. Algae will grow in just about any body water (ask anyone who owns a chlorinated pool). All it needs is CO2, some nitrogen, 25C temperatures and lots of sunlight. You don't even need to displace prime food crops to grow it. Deserts have lots of sunlight, a water-tight greenhouses will conserve almost all the water.

As for fuel content? Corn - 145kg of oil per hectare. Soybean - 375kg/ha. Canola (rapeseed) - 1,000 kg/ha. Algae - 6,894kg/ha (theoretical 39,916kg/ha).

Staggering? Not if you answer these questions:

• What produced 99% of the oxygen present in our atmosphere during the primordial years of our planet?
• What is the base of the food chain for most of the world's ecosystems?
  
• Algae has been harvesting power from the sun for billions of years, humans have been at it (photovoltaic/solarcell technology) for 40 years. Who would you expect is better at it?
• Why is photosynthesis almost 100% efficient while photovoltaic research has only gotten 42.8% with super-expensive Gallium-Arsenide triple-junction semiconductor crystals?
  

The oil from algae can be used to produce plastics (1950's plastics were made from soy bean oil until the farmers couldn't keep up with demand and Tupperware started using slag from oil refinement).

The oil from algae can be blended (say, 50%) with home heating fuel which doesn't need the same level of refinement as transportation. Or better yet, displace large amounts of petroleum oil used in electrical generation.

Addi tonal energy can be spent to convert the oil into BioDiesel for transportation.

Hurry up and wait

The geothermal contractor we've made arrangements with has had a rough December with all the snow.

Drilling though snow isn't the problem. Operating a drill rig with exposed machine parts in blowing snow - that's the problem. With luck, I'll have a firm date soon on when the drill can start.

A neighbour emailed me today explaining a new local temple is having construction difficulties because bedrock is so close to the surface. That's great news. Hydraulic conductivity of fractured sandstone (the geological formation our house is most likely on) is very high.

Split rock == good water flow. Good water flow == good heat transfer. Good heat transfer + geothermal furnace == excellent heating.

Justifying the cost of a MADNESS

$25,000 is a lot of money for a furnace. If you won $25k, you'd be dancing. If you misplaced $25k you'd be depressed.

In spite of my tone in this blog, my wife and I took this decision seriously and here's how we came to it.

1. Assume we're replacing our furnace and air conditioner

That's $7,000 of assumed cost right there. Our furnace was mid-efficiency (by today's standards low-efficiency) natural gas. Our air conditioner is a piece of junk and we've never used it. With a baby on the way, it's a good plan to have one for emergencies. And resale of a home is quite difficult with no summer cooling.

2. Assume we'll get rebates

• $3,500 from the Ontario Provincial Government,
• $3,500 from the Canadian Federal Government, and
• $800 from the Ontario Power Authority

Total: $8,000

3. Assume we save $1,500 per year

• No natural gas bill (no delivery charges, debt reduction, or cost per cubic meter).
• Increase in hydro usage will only occur in low electricity demand months (electricity demand is always highest in the summer months as cooling systems operate)

Items 1 to 3 puts our pay-back period at about 5-7 years.

4. Assume there are no environmentally friendly investment mechanisms that make money

We wanted to save some of our money in "ethical" or "green" investments. My (and a few other) financial planners basically told us "don't bother".

The problem it seems is "green funds" are managed by people whose primary motives are not to make you money but to invest in green technology and historical performance (as short as it has been) is poor. Like losing money poor.

And companies who qualify as "green" are often run by people whose primary motives are not to increase shareholder value but to be the best green company they can be. Not a bad thing, just not money making for investors.

So, we decided if we're going to invest, we'll do it on our terms. Our veggie fueled car, our heat pump, super insulating the house, etc.

This blog doesn't just chronicle our "greeny" whims. These are our green investments and we treat each decision as such.

The Grease Car Mod

The GreaseCar modification to my car doesn't change anything with the engine - it's a 2nd fuel tank that's heated from the waste heat of the engine (coolant).

The GreaseCar website has an excellent flash animation explaining everything.

Here's what the modification looked like once I got it back from Young Street Garage.

1) Under the hood.
The red hoses contain coolant to heat up the fuel filter assembly on the right. At the bottom, you see the two solenoids to switch diesel/veggie/diesel-backflush. You can see the VW engine cover is still there, I eventually remove it.



2) The dashboard.
An aluminium plate holding the fuel gauge and 3-way illuminated rocker switch is attached quite snugly to the bottom of the standard centre dash. Below, the ash tray is removed (we don't smoke) and the GreaseCar temperature gauge is installed.



3) In the trunk.
The spare wheel is removed, and we now carry cans of RideFlat wheel sealant in our emergency kit. I've tried to insulate the tank with foil bubble wrap. Fiberglass would just get nasty and loses its insulating properties if compressed. Notice how we don't lose any trunk space with the modification. I suggest using a end of a roll of masking tape to protect the fuel-level leads from weight of trunk items (hidden by a block of white foam in the picture below).





Upgrades

I found the heat of the oil to suffer in the winter. So after reading InfoPop a lot, two upgrades that should solve my problems of winter vegoil fuel heating were discovered.

1) Brazed Plate Heat Exchanger


Click to animate.

Brazed plates have more surface area than flat plates, so they can transfer heat from the coolant to the vegoil fuel better. This is the "heavy lifter" for vegoil temp. The thermal energy transferred is much greater than the GreaseCar thermal filter assembly or the PlantDrive VegTherm. But it is limited by how hot the coolant is.



The engine cover doesn't fit anymore with all the extra hoses. I didn't like it anyways.

2) PlantDrive.ca's VegTherm Mega

30cm long, 32Amp at 12V of electrical resistance heating. This sucker burns skin on contact. After the oil is heated in the trunk tank, after it's insulated in the hose-in-hose line under the car, after it's warmed up a bit by the GreaseCar thermal filter assembly, after it's raised to the same temp as the coolant by the BPHE - the VegThermMega does it's thing.



I also stopped using foil bubble wrap for insulation and moved to copper pipe foamies - they insulate way better.

As you can see, things are getting very tight. But it's still manageable, even for me.

Yesterday, my BFHE was showing temperatures of 50C (it was likely warmer, temperature sensor heat loss to ambient air temp) I turned on the VegTherm and the oil temp out the other side was 68C.

Time will tell how it does in -30C.