New Hampshire Public Radio’s The Exchange program, hosted by Laura Knoy, devoted a program to the topic: Figuring Out Bio-Fuel.

The 4 minute section on Grass Energy starts 42:28 into the show, which you can download or listen to from their site.

Here is some additional material on Grass Energy that adds to the material in the 4 minute interview.

Grass Energy is a tested and proven technology. In Canada, grass pellets have already been used experimentally for home heating. Burning grass for energy has been a well-accepted technology in Europe for decades.

As I was able to say on the air, we have years of experience with growing grass and pelletizing it – especially as an animal feed. The missing link in the Grass Energy chain has been a ready supply of commercially produced stoves, designed to burn high ash fuels such as grass, for the retail market. The missing link is about to fall into place.

The very good news is that we expect at least three major stove manufactures to announce new high ash capable stoves at the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Expo in Salt Lake City, March 9 – 11.

Latter this year, we are also expecting the availability of stoker grate options for out door furnaces. Now these units will also be able to use clean burning Grass Energy – no more problems with smoke blowing into neighbors’ living rooms.

These new stoves and grates are multi-fuel solutions that will give the user the ability to select the fuel of their choice based on factors such as: availability, price, and convenience. Given recent experiences with pellet fuel pricing and availability, these multi-fuel stoves will give consumers much needed confidence that reasonably priced fuel will always be available for their heating needs.

The introduction this year of these new and highly efficient stoves means that the 2006 – 2007 heating season will be the first heating season in which Grass Energy makes a significant contribution in the United States.

Research by Prof Jerry Cherney of Cornell university has shown that grass, a superb collector of solar energy, can be made into Grass Energy Pellets that have 90+% of the energy content of a premium, low ash, wood pellet. Unlike wood pellets, which are dependent upon a static to shrinking supply of sawdust as their feed-stock, Grass Energy has a tremendous untapped reserve of annually renewable feed-stock resources. For example, there are over 39 million acres are in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). We are paying farmers not to farm these acres. Why not turn them into Grass Energy producing acres that earn the farmers an income and at the same time reduce the burden on the tax payers by elimination the CRP subsidy as fully as possible?

Given the abundant and under utilized supply of raw materials, the challenge this year will be to fill the Grass Energy supply chain, not to keep it filled.

As we move further into the new energy frontier, here is a list of 6 key developments we can expect:

1] We will shift from a few, inefficient, centralized power plants to millions of small, 90% efficient, decentralized mirco-CHP internet appliances;

2] The electrical grid changes from power supply to back battery;

3] Our economy will change from fossil fuels to renewable biofuels such as Grass Energy;

4] Citizens will change from passive consumers of power to active producers, sellers and buyers of power produced in their basements;

5] We will stop exporting energy dollars and will keep our energy dollars in America to build and strengthen our local communities and economies;

6] A few jobs created in a few states building centralized plants will become many jobs, in all states, building, installing, servicing, fueling 50 million micro-CHP units [50% of US residential housing stock]

For more information on Grass Energy, the 41 page Grass Energy working paper is available here.

In February 2006, Roger Samson gave an excellent one hour over-view of Grass Energy, Switchgrass Energy Revolution, at the Frontier Centre in Manitoba, Canada.

The Grass Energy Collaborative
Grass is Greener