Energy Crops--BTUs Per Acre

Photo Wikipedia

When it comes to energy produced per area of food cropland usurped, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are the worst options available. If you want to obtain energy from the sun, your best option is to grow a crop of solar panels.

The solar farm above covers 150 acres. It nets sixty times more BTUs of energy per year than a corn crop used for ethanol and about 120 times more than a soy crop used for biodiesel. And you could still graze livestock around these panels to keep the weeds down. From a land use perspective, siting these on farmland is certainly suboptimal, but not nearly as suboptimal as converting food stock into liquid fuels.

I received an email the other day from someone who is an expert on certain market impacts of government policy:

The Connecticut General Assembly last week passed a bill requiring biodiesel to be blended with heating oil starting next year.(1)

He was perplexed by one of the provisions in this bill:

Before the mandate takes effect, the state commissioner of consumer protection, in consultation with a Distillate Advisory Board to be created under this bill, will determine whether there's enough in-state production of biodiesel to comply with the legislation.

Biofuel issues usually revolve around transportation because the portability and energy density of liquid fuels are best suited for things that move around. In this case it involves homes that use oil for heating. It makes no sense, environmentally or economically, for state governments to force citizens to purchase biofuels regardless of cost. If biodiesel cost less, consumers would already be using it. In the summer of 2008 biodiesel was selling for $6 a gallon. This is essentially a hidden tax on citizens and a form of wealth redistribution to farmers. Biofuel lobbyists have obviously gotten the ear of some politicians.

No politician would dream of increasing taxes at this point in time to fund something like this. So, instead, the cost is hidden in consumer fuel bills.

If global warming is the real concern, there is much more bang for the buck in solar or even better yet, home weatherization.

Connecticut is not known as an agricultural powerhouse, so this does not make a whole lot of sense the way it might in corn and soy growing states, where such legislation is being used by politicians to buy votes. The public is largely unaware of the futility and wastefulness of trying to displace oil by turning food into a liquid fuel.

Maria Cantwell recently introduced legislation in my home state to reinstate the dollar per gallon blending subsidy for biodiesel to placate the biodiesel refinery here. A back-room deal was struck where they would pretend to use oil grown in Washington State instead of importing the cheapest oil as the original business plan dictated (and why it is built on a port).

I recently attended a talk sponsored by the Northwest Biodiesel Board. An Eastern Washington professor, who was raised on a farm and had attempted his own biodiesel business, explained that politicians had not considered the Washington State farmer's ability to competitively grow corn and soy. The climate here favors other higher value crops like apples and cherries.

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Yet another DIY solar hot water project

I've been meaning to build a solar hot water system for some time now. I will post on my progress periodically, including details for anyone wanting to learn from my mistakes. Although I've read everything I could find on the Internet about solar hot water, I'm sure there is a lot I don't know but will soon find out.

By doing it myself I'll be able to pass on what I learn. One critique of solar is the expense. Telling people "I then paid $9,000 to have solar hot water installed" does not make for interesting reading. It irritates me that something this simple can cost as much as an economy car. I also like the idea of recycling materials when practical. The Internet, and Craigslist in particular, may save us all!

I recently got the ball rolling by picking up two glass panels that were being given away on Craigslist. They each measure 46 x 76 inches. I doubt if they are low iron (for less heat loss) and have no idea if they are tempered.

I also ordered two solar absorbers off the Internet that will fit under that glass. Building my own absorbers was clearly going to be time consuming, difficult, and expensive. I picked them up a few days ago at the trucking terminal. The crate had been smashed in on one side and I found out after unpacking them that both absorber panels had a damaged pipe and broken welds at the manifold. If you look closely you can make out the bent pipe on the left side.

Lesson number one, pay with Visa so you stand a chance of being compensated if your panels arrive with damage.

Although I'm not ready for one, I also checked Craigslist for new or like-new electric hot water heaters and found several available, some for free, some for a hundred bucks or so. I will remove the heating elements and use it to store water that was heated by passing it through copper heat exchangers in the solar panel drain down tanks with a low-powered circulation pump.

I spent a lot of time deliberating over the system design. I was very tempted to use the simplest design that provided the most energy per dollar invested using the minimum number of parts. It would run the clean water supply pump, one tank in addition to my existing hot water tank, no anti-freeze fluid, and no heat exchangers. You lose a lot of heat with heat exchangers and anti-freeze fluid.

However, because of the other engineering tradeoffs involved, I finally decided against that system. First, the above design is vulnerable to freeze damage. Because panels radiate heat up at the sky, the water in the tubes can freeze on a clear night even when the air temperature is above freezing. We have all seen this in action on our car front windows that slope back like a panel does. Several days a year you will notice that only your front window has frost on it. Decades of experience with designs that tried to prevent these panels from freezing by draining them when it gets cold with a complicated and unreliable valve system have proven that given time, they will one day freeze anyway when one of these valves fail. I tried to convince myself that I could manually drain the panels on cold nights but reality finally sunk in. Best not to deny reality just because you don't like it.

The next reason is overheat damage. This happens on hot summer days when you have all the hot water you need but the sun keeps heating the water trapped in the panels creating high temperatures and pressures. Repeatedly overheating and pressurizing your system will fatigue joints, melt rubber and plastic parts and eventually leading to failure or possibly to a hot water tank pressure relief valve opening. My panels will have to be able to handle continuous dry stagnation.

I chose a design that automatically (and in a fail-safe manner) drains the water out of the panels into holding tanks every time the pump stops running, which happens when the sun isn't shining because the pump is powered by a solar panel. If you live where the water is hard you will have to use special solar panel anti-freeze for the liquid pumped through the panels to prevent mineral scaling from building up. You can also use distilled water and be prepared to replace any that evaporates. Here in Seattle the water is very low on minerals. I suspect I can safely use tap water for a decade or two.

The pump will also stop running when the water has reached its max temperature and trips a heat sensor, which is also backed up by an overheat sensor for redundancy and safety. This solves the problem of overheating the system because there is no liquid in the panels to cause problems and because the system is open to atmospheric pressure (unpressurized).

The downsides are that I need another tank, two pumps, a heat exchanger, and about 20% more solar panel to make up for the losses associated with having to use exchangers.

Because my roof is not only two stories up, has a steep incline, and also happens to face the wrong way, I will put the panels on the ground right in my front yard, which faces south. This will make maintenance easy. I'll also have to make sure they look nice with no pipes showing.

Wish me luck and stay tuned. Feel free to chip in with advice to help me up the learning curve.