The Pull

I'm struck by the tone of my posts of late.

Lately, many of my posts have been related to my faith, and often connected to politics.  My faith is very important important to me and really informs everything I do, including my politics.  But politics are such a divisive issue leading me do to things I'm not normally prone to do, like forget about my roots in this blog.

For instance, when I merged my two blogs to create this one, I merged a blog about religion with a blog about sustainable living, but in the process, sometimes I lose track of one or the other and tend to focus to heavily on one at the expense of the other.

I was just thinking about passive houses for instance.  Why haven't I blogged about passive houses lately?  They are the future of housing and really a fantastic solution to many of our energy problems.  Why haven't I blogged about my favorite energy source, wind power, lately?  Most of my posts are rants about something conservatives or Christians, or conservative Christians are doing that I don't think meshes with what Jesus wanted them to do.

And it's hard not to, I listen to progressive talk radio on my phone, NPR or conservative talk radio in the car.  I would listen to NPR more, but they play music half the day.  I don't like to listen to music on the radio, they don't play the songs I want to listen to.  I quit listening to KLRC because they play secular Christmas music, and Air1 doesn't play around here much to my dismay.

Politics are so depressing.  I fall probably a bit left of many democrats, bordering on socialist and definitely progressive.  But to me, that's inevitably where my beliefs in Jesus lead me.  I know that's a foreign concept to some people, but especially here in the south, people just don't understand.  I live in one of the most churched areas in the country, but with few real Christians it seems.  Of course, that concept falls under my definition.  Why can't anyone understand that there's no room in the Bible for "God and Country."  It's just God!

And with so little room for blogging anyway because of school, it's hard to gather my thoughts for anything that doesn't just straight out piss me off.  It's hard to sit down and develop the material I need to type up a good post with reasoned arguments and interesting prose.  There's a list of about a dozen topics to write about in my iPhone, but most of them I can't remember what I was thinking, and the rest are six months old.  The fire kinda goes away after a while.  Some of them I think I wrote about, but I'm just not sure.

And finally, very few people really read this blog anyway.  I mean, no one sits down and reads for the reading.  No one encourages me at all.  I have eleven followers, but the vast vast majority of the hits and comments I get come from people trying to find out what the most accurate Bible translation is.  Praise God for Jehovah's Witlesses right?  No one really cares about what I really care about.

So I guess the point to this is that I want to do more environmental stuff.  I am in school to be an environmental engineer after all.  I'm very in to the idea that "God is green."  But environmental issues are kinda hard to really get fired up about especially when there's health care, corporate personhood, and most of all, you're just too tired.

Maybe my purpose is too broad.
WiredForStereo

Another Featured Renewable Energy Generation System

As you've seen on here a few times before, I like to feature little renewable energy projects that are good not only for their owners and the environment, but also help spread the message by being conspicuous. I've talked about the ones in the pics below, at Walmart in Lowell AR, and also at St. Thomas' in Springdale. Feel free to click on the pictures to get a better view.

















Here is a new system that is set up right next to the freeway in Rolla MO. It consists of a Bergey Excel S 10 kW wind turbine, about 2 kW of solar panels and a weather station. It is part of a project by the University of Science and Technology. The setup is on the front lawn of the Highway Patrol Headquarters and its purpose will be to test the performance of the system as well as keep track of all sorts of weather stuff. To the left you can see the 10 216 watt solar panels.












Here is the brains of the operation, the inverters, weather station recorder, and whatever else. It's hard to see, but there is a rainfall recording device attached near the top of that yellow post next to the propane tank in the background. I assume it's wireless.






















Here is a picture looking up at the turbine and the anemometers of which there are three. No the tower is not straight, but it doesn't really matter as long as it doesn't fall over. For a little perspective which is hard to get standing next to the thing, it is on a 36.5 meter (120 feet) tower and the blades are 6.7 meters (22 feet) in diameter.













I didn't know what this was right off.


I had either never seen one before or never noticed. I did a little research and found out that it is a pyranometer which measures solar irradiance.














Here is the whole thing. It looks really good from the freeway. If you look up Bergeys, you'll find that this one has a custom paintjob as Bergeys have a very characteristic yellow to them. There's another one with original paint along the freeway in Springfield coming back from Lambert's that is on a monopole with a solar system with it too. I believe it is next to some sort of utilities office. Both excellent examples because a Bergey Excel is a great turbine for whole home service. One of these should easily be able to provide all the electricity for an efficient home in a moderate wind area. This unit is the grid connected unit, they also make a 7.5 kW low wind speed optimized unit for battery charging.













The wind was pretty heavy, so I decided to take a quick video to show how loud the wind turbine is. The problem is, I was standing right under the thing and it was no louder than the wind. In fact, on the video, it is virtually impossible to pick out the sound of the turbine. Admittedly, my digital camera does not have the best microphone.


Special thanks to the University of Science and Technology.
WiredForStereo

ENERCON's Really Big Wind Turbine

What you see to the right is ENERCON’s new (ish) E-126 wind turbine. Its capacity is rated at 6 MW, and 20 million kilowatt hours per year, that’s enough to power about 5,000 households of four in Europe. Lets to a quick US calculation. 938 kwh per home per month, 12 months, that’s 11,256 kwh per year per house. That’s 1776 American homes on one wind turbine.

I like these.

This one, like the rest of the E’s is direct drive, like most small home power style wind turbines. That means there is no gearbox attaching the turbine blades to the generator, in fact, the generator is housed just at the widest part of the nose cone, it takes up the entire width of the nacelle to generate power more efficiently, and provide longer service life with less wear.

Also like small turbines, these have inverters instead of synchronous generators, that is to say, a separate controller that converts the wild AC generated into something the grid can use. This means the rotor can run at more optimum and varied speeds.

Again like small turbines, this one does not shut right off at a predetermined speed due to gusts or just very high wind speeds. It simply throttles down by turning the blades slightly away from the wind so as to continue to generate power though at a lower production rate. Then the instant the wind is more favorable, it starts back up again. Many smaller wind turbines do something similar except have no blade pitch control, they use a technique called something like “side furling” where the whole machine, excepting the tail, turns “sideways” to catch less wind but continue operating.

The 126 in E-126 stands for the width of the rotor blades. That’s a bit over 413 feet for those non metric humans out there. The RePower 5M is about the same size, but produces 5 MW and is more of the standard hardware configuration.

Why such huge wind turbines?

Money, why else? Big things are cheaper per unit production. If you have 3 2 MW generators, you have to have three (at least) cranes to put them up, build three foundations, have to maintain three machines, and have three times the parts to fail. If you have one, it is larger and more expensive in itself to move, but not as expensive as having to move three smaller ones.

Birds

I don’t understand how people can be so concerned about birds becoming mush with modern wind turbines, especially ones this big. It only turns at 12 rpms. That means it takes five seconds to complete one revolution. That is slow but this is much bigger and easy to see compared to the whirring blades of old. The Altamont Pass turbines gave wind turbines such a bad name because they were built in the middle of the natural habitat of rare birds, the turbines were the small fast spinning type, and they were built using lattice towers, the kind birds love to nest in. These are slowly being replaced and all of the new ones are of the slower rotating kind. In the end, it comes down to this. Stationary buildings and moving cars kill literally millions of times more birds than wind turbines. And things like the Exxon Valdez spill kill millions of everything. So let’s go with the best option.

WiredForStereo

Wind farms Now and Future in Arkansas.

I was looking at the AWEA website at the wind energy characteristics of Arkansas. It has a neat little page here that shows the current and planned wind developments.

Guess how much Arkansas has.

0.1 Megawatts. One single small wind turbine in Prairie Grove. And I know that one can't do 100,000 watts, I just think that's the smallest number they had. I think it may be capable of 20,000w in a hurricane.

Here's a pic of that one lonely wind turbine.

The real sad part is that Arkansas ranks 27th in wind resources in the nation. That means we've got more wind resources than half the states. And all we have is a single puny wind turbine. And it's not even in a class 4 area. Arkansas has two good sized class 4 areas.

So, anyone in Arkansas, or anywhere else for that matter, push for wind power.
WiredForStereo

New Coal and Natural Gas Power Plants in Arkansas and the South.

I was out to visit a new natural gas power plant in Tontitown Arkansas yesterday. Looked up some info, you can find articles here and here. The first deals with the Tontitown plant and the second deals with the larger SWEPCO network over Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

I got to see some of the plans, and you can see the substation that has already been built next to it on Google Earth here. The plant will appear in that (now enlarged) dirt area to the left of the substation. The article states that there will be two gas turbines and one combined cycle steam turbine, but on the plan, I saw a fourth unit of the same size. I believe the turbines will be GE 7FA units but I could be wrong. I am definitely sure of the 7 though. Notice the Tyson chicken farm right next to the plant.

Now I am definitely more ok with the natural gas peaking plants than I am with the coal mainline plants because of reasons listed before. And, I am much happier about a natural gas plant being a few tens of miles from my home rather than a coal one. But, that ignores the availability of wind power close enough to here to be useful. Any US wind resources map you look at will show you class 3 wind resources in two separate areas, on both sides of the River Valley. And I know there are not alot of people that live on those areas because they are mountainous (for Arkansas that is.) Additionally, there is a huge portion of Texas that contains class 3 and 4 wind, not to mention Oklahoma.

It is refreshing however to hear of more wind turbines going up in Oklahoma and Texas though. And I'll tell ya, it was very enlightening to find out how much more efficient George W. Bush's house is than Al Gore's.

WiredForStereo

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a Plan.

As promised, I have a PowerPoint presentation of the plans for my ultimate sustainable house.

Download the file here.

This presentation outlines the major aspects of my Sustainable Home Design idea. I welcome more ideas or more efficient incarnations of the plan.

If anyone wants to invest in renewable energy systems for the betterment of the planet, I am accepting donations, it's kind of in the same vein as greenhouse gas deferments that people can buy to offset the emissions caused by their carbon footprint. If you wish to give a donation, please PayPal it to wiredforstereo at yahoo dot com.

If anyone has any topics for discussion, I'd love to address them, I think I'll do BioDiesel next.

WiredForStereo