Northern Energy options

Electric Heat:

First off I’m a big supporter of converting the North to predominantly Electric Heat. And the only good alternative to Electric Heat is Natural Gas where available, or Methanol converted from Northern Natural Gas. I am astounded by the absurd statements in the northern Energy Study on Electric Heat. Coming up with some number of $10,000 to convert homes to Electric Heat. Nice round number – where did the author get that from – out of a hat? Here are the facts. Electric Heat occurs when virtually any appliance is used in the household – including lighting, stove, oven, microwave etc. A standard electrical service is 100 amp @ 240 vac which equals 24 kw of electrical energy.

Like many in the North, I live in a trailer. My trailer has used a maximum of 12.9 litres of fuel oil per day in January of 1997. That’s 1032 kwh of heat energy per day or an average of 4.3 kw of heat energy. My service is capable of 24 kw. To maintain heat in this coldest of January’s I need only run 3 of 1.5 kw electric heaters – maybe $50 each for good quality heaters. That is easy & cheap – I certainly don’t need to spend $10,000. If I needed extra fast heat – yeah I could turn on my furnace occasionally. So the REAL TRUTH is it is simple & cheap for homeowners to replace most if not all of their heating needs with electric heat – building heat is also easy & inexpensive to upgrade to electric. Ideally all new homes in the north would be equipped with 200 amp services, and set up for Electric Heat. This would easily happen if the our power company priced Hydro Electricity at its true cost of about 5 cents per kwh, absolute maximum of 8 cents per kwh – thus encouraging people to use CLEAN, GREEN Hydro Electricity to replace, dirty, smelly, environmentally destructive, terrorist funding, Global Warming causing Fuel Oil for heat. Right now at about $1 per litre, burned in an 80% efficient furnace, Fuel Oil is about 12.5 cents per kwh for heat.

We have a situation in the North, where the power company is artificially boosting the price of Hydro-Electricity – most probably by using it for Tax Revenue – while not penalizing the High GHG emitting Fuel Oil. TO PLAY FAIR – TO PUT FUEL OIL ON AN EQUAL FOOTING WITH HYDRO-ELECTRICITY – what if the power company was given a monopoly over the distribution of all fuel – Propane, Fuel Oil, Wood Pellets in the north. Just like Electricity a monopoly supply. What if the power company bought all Oil Furnaces, Propane Furnaces and Wood Pellet Furnaces from all Business and Homeowners in the north. Additionally the power company was made responsible for all maintenance and installation of all furnaces. The cost of all of the above would be recovered with a surcharge on all the fuel the power company charges to its customers. Any Bets that the Fuel Oil cost would skyrocket to at least $2 per liter and maybe even $3 per liter. That’s 25 cents to 37.5 cents per kwh for fuel oil heat. Now doesn’t CLEAN, GREEN Hydro sound more economical than GHG polluting fuel oil.

To make matters worse, the npower company is actually talking about raising Electricity Prices for Hydro customers, in order to subsidize diesel customers, by 10 cents a kwh. THIS IS A BLATANT REVERSE CARBON TAX!!!

Cost of Hydro in the north

The power company bought fish Hydro for $10 million. That’s about $1600 per kw or equivalent of 1.6 cents a kwh with a 5%, 17 yr bond. I know for a fact that the operating and maintenance cost for fish Hydro was under 1 cent per kwh. Figure it out. Two operators – I believe they only were paid about $60,000 per year each, but say $100,000 per yr each. Maintenance personnel went there infrequently, maybe averaged 10 man-hours a week. Let’s say 20 per week. That amounts to tops $50,000 per yr. Add administration and material, tops $100,000 per year – that’s $350,000 per year. With average 6 MW x 8800 hrs that’s 53 GW-hrs or 0.7 cents per kwh. Even large Hydro plants in the South commonly don’t have any operators, nowadays with automated controls & monitoring – if a fault occurs a service person is called out to the plant. It is simpleminded to make Backup Diesel Power plants automatically come online in a Hydro shutdown. Those units are only worth $250 per kw or about ¼ cent per kwh with the 17 yr, 5% bond. Maintenance is simple-minded – a trained diesel mechanic and electrician services them and test runs them once a week is more than adequate. When nerdcom did the fish Hydro expansion – they only were paying 8 cents per kwh from the power company for power. They expected a quick return on their investment. So how on Earth can the power company claim a cost of 20.5 cents per kwh for Hydro-Electricity?!?

Just what does the government expect it’s citizens to use for their heating needs in a future where Peak Oil is almost here and Oil prices could easily reach $300 per barrel? Wind, Solar, Nuclear and Hydro all mean converting to Electric Heat. Right now the utility is upgrading it’s power service – a logical time – to ensure it is sufficient to supply all of our town with Electric Heat – if the north even had a plan of dealing with the inevitable Oil Crash.

Wood Pellets:

The impression I get is that the northern government is burying its head in the sand over its guilt about the runaway Global Warming issue. Invents silly, trivial, insignificant policies like taxing grocery bags and juice cartons AND MOST OF ALL is hiding behind the Wood Pellet Scam. You need to know a bit about Wood Pellets.

First off, they are a severely limited supply. They rely on mostly sawmill waste, otherwise they would not be economical to produce. Already in the Eastern USA and Canada there are shortages, resulting in price increases and hoarding.

The notion that they avoid GHG emissions is untrue. Any burning of the wood pellets releases large amounts of GHG emissions. The best use of the Wood Waste is to make OSB plywood and Particle Board. My Trailer is mostly made of those materials. Using the Wood waste on wood pellets will push up the price of these inexpensive building materials so trees will have to be cut to produce lumber. This removes carbon sinks from the environment. The wood in homes will trap carbon for maybe 75 years, afterwards it will likely end up in a landfill where it will decay very slowly, some of which will become humus and eventually Coal or Oil – where do you Coal and Oil came from? The Global Warming – GHG emissions problem is a make-or-break issue for the next 20 to 75 years. After that, if we are not in a state of catastrophe, Nuclear Energy will virtually certainly resolve the issue permanently. So claiming that at some point, 100 years from now that trees will grow and trap the carbon released by burning the wood pellets – is just plain deceptive and wishful thinking.
The most efficient way to use the Wood Products Waste, other than converting it into building materials, is to burn it in a Thermal Power Plant, preferably at the Wood Products plant or at a regional Power Facility. I worked once at a Wood Products plant that took all of their Wood Scraps, and burned them in a Thermal Power plant at the facility, producing power, hot water, building and process heat for the factory. When you convert wood waste to Pellets, and transport them long distances you take about a 45% energy hit right off the top. About half of that being fossil fuels. Add to that the gasoline burnt by homeowners when they transport their cumbersome Wood Pellets. Then either with a CHP power plant or a home wood pellet furnace you take an additional 20% energy loss. Makes much more sense to burn the wood waste in CHP power plants.
Wood pellet stoves release 15 times the particulate emissions of Oil Burners. These emissions are known to cause cancer, lung ailments and even deaths of children due to asthma and allergy attacks. They are definitely not environmentally friendly. At least as bad as Second Hand Smoke – probably worse. And a real stupid fact is – Thermal CHP power plants are required to have scrubbers to remove particulate and other environmental toxins – but home wood pellets are given a free ride – don’t need those pollution controls. This comparatively, and unfairly adds to the cost of the Wood Waste Thermal CHP Power Plants. And yet the CHP power plants are usually located in Rural Areas, whereas the Wood Pellet furnaces are located inside Cities where there pollutants are much more destructive to the health of citizens. The infamous Brown Smog that blankets much off South Asia has been found to be due to word burning. Because of this many progressive Cities ban wood furnaces.
The Wood / Biomass scam is becoming an attractive method of reducing GHG emissions on paper – due to a false accounting of their true carbon cycle – that in areas with Carbon Taxes they are eagerly used by Governments and Industry. So what’s to say the state government (under a lot of flak already over the extreme GHG emissions Tar Sands) might not decide to suddenly burn all of there wood waste in existing Thermal Power plants – just like Germany is doing – thus claiming a reduction in their GHG emissions. So much for the norths supply of Wood Pellets.
Encouraging Wood Burning has had dire consequences in many cities. Especially as in my town, where people are charged for Garbage disposal. End result, people have a tendency to burn all kinds of scraps in their wood furnaces, including rubber, plastic, metal & plastic coated paper, food scraps etc. Many of these substances release noxious and toxic compounds into the City Atmosphere – thus many cities ban all Wood Burning.

Nuclear Energy:

No use pretending, Small Nuclear Reactors are coming. The Fossil Fuel Interests are doing their damndest to prevent it from happening. But the reality is IT WILL HAPPEN – and there IS NO OTHER CHOICE for many regions of the World – who are not blessed with ample Hydro and NG resources that the north has. So far it is looking like the costs of the small Nuclear Reactors will be much less than any Energy Supply in the north. The northern energy review would be Naive, Shortsighted and Foolish to not take into account this option for future northern Electricity and Heat Energy supply. For a good discussion on Small Nuclear Reactors see:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.html

Methanol:

The book by the Nobel Prize Winning Chemist: Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy by Olah, Goeppert & Prakash is a must read for anyone involved in north Energy.

Some References:

http://epa.gov/otaq/presentations/sae-2002-01-2743-v2.pdf>EPA 43% Efficient Methanol Engine, with a wide Island of High Efficiency
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html - moremeth> Environmentally Friendly & Safe Methanol
http://www.refuelnet.de/content/refuelnet/pdf/CO-CO2_98.pdf> CO2 Neutral Synthesis of Methanol
http://www.refuelnet.de/content/refuelnet/pdf/IJHE1998.pdf> Comparison with H2 & Methanol with Gasoline
http://www.refuelnet.de/content/refuelnet/pdf/SOMFB_99.pdf> Synthesis of Methanol from Biomass
http://www.methanol.org/pdf/ZSWMethanolCycle.pdf> Methanol as a Green Transportation Fuel
http://www.nyserda.org/programs/pdfs/vol3sc3.pdf> Methanol in Heavy Duty Vehicles
http://epubl.ltu.se/1653-0187/2006/54/LTU-PB-EX-0654-SE.pdf> Methanol vs H2

Production Cost

http://www.eng.utah.edu/~whitty/blackliquor/colloquium2003/pdfs_handouts/3.6.Berglin-BLG_with_Motor_Fuels_Paper.pdf> Forest Products Waste production of Methanol Analysis