Grass Energy: Fuel for a Rural Renaissance?
July 17, 2007
The biomass energy activities at the recent UVM/Governor’s Institutes engineering camp demonstrate what Jock Gill has been talking about.
On July 3, students came to Votey Hall with displays of bagged biomass pellets, posters about various “cocktails” of mixed biomass they’d tested, and homemade pellet burners. Jock was there to explain biomass potentials, lead a tour to a biomass-fueled boiler room, and visit an early Vermont experiment in commercial ethanol production.
Jock lives in Peacham, but he’s often found at conferences, forums, schools, and farms throughout the state. He’s the guy with the trim white beard, glasses, and mischievous grin – the one talking a mile a minute about his passion, grass.
Jock is the founder of Grass Energy Collaborative (GEC), the leading proponent of grass biomass energy in Vermont and the main reason it’s now on our policymakers’ radar.
Grass is hardy stuff, he explains. It’s not a row crop, and it’s a perennial, which limits nutrient run-off problems.
It can be planted and harvested with relative ease and with typical farm equipment, and it can be used as a livestock feed or an energy crop, as needed.
It’s a highly efficient solar energy collector, a time-proven living technology that turns the sun’s rays into solid stuff that’s easily converted back into energy. And using grass for energy contributes very little to global warming, because each year’s new crop reabsorbs the carbon dioxide that burning last year’s released.
———- snip
Read the whole essay is here.
By: Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information about any Green Grapevine column, contact
vec@norwich.edu.
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