The P2P Power Economy
Author: Jock Gill
For too many decades the idea of the citizen as a one dimensional consumer has been growing. See Adam Curtis’ BBC series “The Century of the Self“. Today, it is the dominant view. The citizen consumes products, services, and “ideas” promoted by the few and sent […]

Author: Jock Gill

The picture above, thanks to David M. Harrison, Dept. of Physics. Univ. of Toronto, is one way to look at the concept of punctuated equilibrium or the bifurcation process that is part of Chaos.
I once wrote a simple BASIC program that creates this image of a system bifurcating and then moving into chaos. […]

Author: Jock Gill
As we consider our options for our Energy Future, what sorts of criteria might we use to evaluate the various paths under consideration?
Do we want an Energy future that meets these six simple tests:
1] Design goal: a system that is at least 85% efficient end to end;
2] A robust and resilient network with […]

Biofiber pellets are green coal: Stored solar energy, a useable form of recent sunlight. Coal is just ancient sunlight. This makes me think of steam as in engines. This leads to green coal powering steam engines for combined heat and power, perhaps even Micro-CHP.
A “2-cylinder, 3 horsepower steam […]

The promoters of poisonous black seeds from jatropha [and here and here] “weed” have, so far, yet to imagine, see, the cooking fuel before their very eyes: double pressed oil seed cake [the residual fibers after the oil has been extracted]. When run through the oil press a second or third time, the […]

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, […]

My friend Peter Jones sent along a pointer to the work at Princeton on “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies.” See also the Carbon Mitigation Initiative site.
I think this is an interesting idea, but it is badly flawed for several reasons.
1] Nuclear power is a very bad […]

Today’s Sunday NY Times lead editorial reports on The Democrats Lag on Warming, but does not ask why.
I suggest that editorial misses the key meta issue: We need to build our new, post 20th century nation on new models. Rebuilding the old 20th century US would be a large mistake. It is what […]

Tom Friedman has a long essay in the April 15th issue of the NY Times Magazine:
The Power of Green
One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way […]

Let’s do the math on the corn ethanol hoax.

For every unit of energy I put into making grass biofuel pellets, I get 14 out = 14:1 net energy.

With corn ethanol the net energy is just 1.67:1

14/1.67 = 8.383 better return on the investment made in grass pellets.

Now consider how the two fuels will be used.

Pellets will be burned at 80% efficiency. Lets say 70%.

Ethanol will be burned in an internal combustion engine at just 30% efficiency.

.7/.3 = 2.333

So the systems advantage of grass pelllets over ethanol is: 8.383 X 2.333 = 19.56X

Solid biofuel in the form of grass pellets, gives us 19X more return on our investments, 19X more energy independence. And 19X more national security than corn ethanol.

So why is it that all of the subsidies etc go the the biofuel with 1/19 the benefit?

Isn’t it amazing, the out right stupidity of corn ethanol? It is just a mechanism to transfer and redistribute wealth to ADM and Cargill. It just another example of corporate looting of the public treasury. It also depends utterly on fertilizers made from fossil fuels. Not to mention the virgin water degraded by the corn ethanol process: gallons of water degraded for each gallon of corn ethanol made.

Can we say that there is a pathological condition in this market and its supporting politics?

Your thoughts?