patrick.net

artistsoul says

He evidently saved on fertilizer for his garden vegetables, if you know what I mean.

Ah! We forgot "self-sustaining" ;)

wouldn't make sense. people this year aren't making more than last year.

besides pension system is about to crash, unemployment might run out.... if people have less money prices can't go up.

artistsoul says

Personally, I can’t get the story out of my head where Kaczynski bragged he managed to live out there in MT on about $500 per year.

BAH! I bet i could like in New York City for $250 a year. Just need a cardboard box and a nearby soup kitchen and I'm all set. Cheap living it's all it cracked up to be if your quality of life sucks. With no electricity or plumbing, I'm sure there were plenty of nights he suffered having to use the facilities or lack there of outside in -20 degree weather. One drunken night be all it take to pass out outside and freeze to death.

Zlxr says

If these units use things like fruit peels, old lettuce, leftover drinks, half eaten food etc. The question for me is how much garbage does it take to generate enough to cook a meal AND what kind of a meal that might be.

Look again at the little calculation I did above based on the energy content ("calories") of food. This calculation gives you a rough idea and an upper bound (also known as "guaranteed-not-to-exceed" number) of how how much energy you can get out of the sewage of a family of four. It is not much, but perhaps enough to cook their daily meal. It is not enough for their daily drive in a car. Maybe not even enough for all four to take a hot shower.

If you want to increase the quantity of energy produced, you have to either add/waste more food (*) or have some other source of food waste. When I say (*) I'm not ADVOCATING wasting food to use as an energy source. I'm just mentioning it to illustrate the physical principle. It is not effective, neither energy-wise nor money-wise to buy food and use it as feedstock for a biogas or biofuel reactor. Think corn ethanol and you get the idea. That sort of biofuel prodcution is better done in a factory than at home, if at all.

Oh, and the 33.6 MegaJoule (MJ) energy content in the food of the family of four is also enough to bring about 80 L(liter) or 22gals of water from 0C (freezing temperature) to 100C (boiling temperature), ******IF-IF-IF******* the energy conversion process was 100% efficient, which it will not be by a long shot. You get the idea. Calculation: 33.6e6/4.2/1000/100 = 80.

You probably know all of the above already. Forgive me if I'm belaboring he point too much.

Summary:

Biogas reactors are a decent source of cooking gas, but not much more, unless you are a farmer or otherwise have large quantities of relatively high-energy food waste/sewage available in one form or another.

justme says

Biogas reactors are a decent source of cooking gas, but not much more, unless you are a farmer or otherwise have large quantities of relatively high-energy food waste/sewage available in one form or another.

Sounds like a load of crap. Perhaps we should combine a cheese subsidy with a weight-lifting machines in the bathroom hooked up to a generator. Add some methane-recovery equipment and we'll be self sustaining in no time.

"yea gravity" --- Patrick, add that to the list for T-shirt sayings!

The problem with replacing gas is that gas has roughly 30,000 calories per gallon. Here is a site doing some "rough" numbers, http://www.rough-equivalents.com/2008/04/how-many-big-macs-in-a-gallon-of-gas/

To get 1 gallon of gas, we would need roughly 52 "wasted" big macs. Creating enough gas to cook is fine and dandy, but it's definitely time and energy consuming. Someone has to sit there and work this machine, probably load it up, clean it every week, unload the used materials, etc. Farms have started using it because they have a huge input source, eg left overs + waste. They get enough to run their farms, which helps them out. But it's fairly large scale as well, not for a single owner.

We just need a *huge* amount of energy/power every day. Playing around with enough to solve our "cooking" needs just isn't worth it, we're talking about such a minor amount for the average family. Good for 3rd world countries for sure, but they already do a lot of this. They have the time, and require so little fuel that it's doable.

We use masses of electricity per day, natural gas, and then petrol for our cars. Putting up solar panels will reduce our home power needs, but replacing the natural gas usage and petrol is where it gets tricky! From all of the electric cars I've seen, it appears that 500watts / mile seems to be about average. A single solar panel running all day long probably produces 1000watts. If you were to drive 20 miles in a day, you would require 10,000 watts of power, on top of your house hold needs. If you drive further and/or can't handle a small car, you're going to consume a lot more!

Not to anyone in particular:

I highly recommend reading the aforementioned reference on extracting energy from human and animal manure:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2240/can-animal-including-human-manure-be-used-as-fuel

That article is not about biogas per se, but it is written by a scientist who has worked in the field (so to speak) and contains lots of useful numbers that give good perspective.

pkennedy says

We just need a *huge* amount of energy/power every day. Playing around with enough to solve our “cooking” needs just isn’t worth it, we’re talking about such a minor amount for the average family. Good for 3rd world countries for sure, but they already do a lot of this. They have the time, and require so little fuel that it’s doable.

I'm much in agreement what pkennedy says above.

I don't want to discourage people from doing the right thing, but if you do biogas composting all year long and then (say) reward yourself with a plane trip to Hawaii you have wasted 20x more energy on those two 5-hour plane trips than what you extracted from the composting all year long.

Perspective and scale is of the essence.

Personally, I hope micro wind power + solar power + solar water heating will come together.

The other big thing is live power usage monitoring, and more robust information on how much power everything is using. People simply don't have any understanding of how much power is wasted. Simply having a quick feedback loop I think will help a lot of people understand what kind of power they're using.

It's like losing weight. Once you realize how long it takes to burn off 200 calories, you quickly realize that not eating those 200 calories is the best way thing you can do, not trying to eat and then counter the eating with exercise. Biogas is interesting, but simply not using that power in the first place is what we need to learn to do.

It was Ted Kennedy who complained about windmills because he was concerned about the view. Last time I checked, Ted was a flaming liberal, when he was alive. Other famous liberals complain about windmills either blocking their view or harming birds.

EightBall says

Add some methane-recovery equipment and we’ll be self sustaining in no time.

I know I would be.

If the market is crashing, how come this house gained $18,200 in wholesale value in less than a year?

Could be a lot of things, and I would interpolate a trend beased upon a single home sale.

"The world gives us all we need. unless what we need is really greed."
DMC

Micro windmills are different. http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/new-micro-turbines-can-produce-electricity-from-slightest-of-breezes/ This is a pretty useless version, but the idea is small sitting on roofs. Not huge fan blades. Most large scale windmill farms are away from people anyways, the biggest draw back is that they aren't often near power lines making it expensive to get the power to the grid.

Wind has a decent amount of power potential, with fairly known patterns which makes it a good mix to blend in.

For the comments on nuclear power, most nuclear power plants now a days are fairly clean burning, outside of the US ones. They don't produce a lot of waste, and the waste becomes relatively inactive after a few hundred years (still a long time!) but better than 100,000 years! The ideas is to put the waste in a place where seismic activity isn't going to disturb it. It also won't be just jugs of crap, it will be sealed in massively secure drums encased in cement. Nuclear has just gotten a bad rep. It's fairly clean and far safer than most power generation. We have enough nuclear power to power the world for 600 years, which is enough time to easily find an alternative. It's one of the few methods available today that could replace oil.

...so I went to Wells Fargo, printed out my cashier’s checks...

How does this work? You print up some cashiers checks of various amounts and destroy the ones you don't use? So for example you have 150k in the bank, do you get the bank to print up a 100k, 125k and a 150k check and only use the one you need and destroy the others? If you don't win at all just destroy all the checks? Or do you need to cancel the unused checks? Or do you need the full 375k in the bank to cover all the checks even if you only use one of them or none?

You could also look at it as "very few people are interested in cash only deals in this area" or "everyone else in the crowd saw it as a poor opportunity after 100K."

It may turn out that they're the smart ones.

8 people at that price (130K) seems... incredibly low, actually.

CrazyMan says

... “everyone else in the crowd saw it as a poor opportunity after 100K.”
It may turn out that they’re the smart ones.
8 people at that price (130K) seems… incredibly low, actually.

And well, it's in Antioch. I am sure 'the market is done crashing' is pretty accurate there. Now over on the west side of the bay ...

Still, an interesting anecdote, thanks for posting.

I read a week ago that there was extremely high volume in gold $1450 December 15th call options, which now makes a lot of sense given current prices. I should have bought some - they were only $0.33 each at the time.

Boots on the ground report is always welcome IMO.

Collecting trash, driving around with a team. Then sorting and preparing, then getting some gas from it, then collecting that gas, then using that gas.
I can almost guarantee, that within the next decade, most of the large composting facilities will be experimenting with biogas generation; the infrastructure is already there. BTW, EBMUD buys, yes buys, food waste from SF. Also, you can run the trucks on this stuff as Waste Management has shown. Capital costs are high for these types of projects, but as green house gas reductions move to the fore, it starts making even more sense to reuse carbon based energy sources, instead of releasing carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years.
Some of the more interesting designs for combined feedlot, ethanol, biodiesel combination plants use an anaerobic digester for on site energy generation.

It is to be expected. The Dems did lose the House, and will probably lose the Senate in 2012.

We really can't afford any of the Bush tax cuts to continue, obviously, so down the road we'll either have to raise taxes (not going to happen with Republicans running the show) or cut services (what everybody who matters really wants to do).

Hello Brazil.

The stupid thing is 100% of the Bush tax cuts went into higher home values and rents. They were a complete f@@@-up, just one thing of many that the previous administration f---ed up.

I think the real issue is this site is full of Liberals that thinks progressiveness is mandating a marriage of Government and Corporations, and they expect the middle class to Foot the Bill.
The Neo Liberals invest in the Very monster industries they used to protect the American people from. Now they want to shovel the middle class into the Capitalist furnaces to fuel profits.

There hasn't been one damn piece of sensible legislation by one Goddamn Liberal in Washington since Tip Oneil. Nothing that limits corporate abuses, monopolies, manipulation of commodities, to the end of fixing prices. You Libs could give a Rats ass about the American people, and aspire to fix the right financial positions for your political utopia, of unspoiled profit, in the sectors and verticals your party can wield.

I am for one clicking my heels on this news. Sorry fellas I'm all for progressiveness but not on the receiving end of the Invoice. Capitol ism is supposed to foot the bill, they pay the fees, and taxes that sustain the services the Government sees needed. The Government runs these organizations from the top to the bottom so EVERYONE involved is accountable if not from this administration then the next. Not a bunch of thieves that can be protected by Corporate laws.

pkennedy says

The other big thing is live power usage monitoring, and more robust information on how much power everything is using. People simply don’t have any understanding of how much power is wasted.

Agreed. My take is that people think with their wallets and not with their brains when it comes to energy. If it doesn't hurt in their wallet, they do not notice it. We need people to KNOW how much power they waste.

Every car, bus, airplane, house and office-building should should display the power usage per passenger/inhabitant in real time. I think people would be shocked (or I hope they would) when they see numbers like 100kW in their cars and 140MW in an airplane (maybe 500KW/passenger on a 3/4 full 747-400).

I did a quick web search on the power consumption of a cruising 747 airplane and it is 140MW, enough to power ~107,000 houses for the duration of the flight!

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2010/03/the_energy_burned_by_coasttocoast_747_flight_could_1.html

Consider the fact that the typical U.S. home consumes about 1.3 kilowatts of power. Even as it is flying overhead that 747 jet is consuming as much power as 100,000 homes.

EBGuy says

I can almost guarantee, that within the next decade, most of the large composting facilities will be experimenting with biogas generation; the infrastructure is already there.

Yes, but the food waste needs be separated out by every household. Or maybe we should all eat in SF restaurants :). Just don't drive to get there :).

Non-food household waste is not very good for composting and the common use of "garbage disposals" sends most food waste into the sewer rather than to garbage collection.

For the rest of the world that does not use this contraption, a "garbage disposal" is an electromechanical shredder that shreds food waste that you dump in the kitchen sink, and then passes it into the sewer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_disposal

Well...he was in the woods. Hello lots of kindling and wood for fires. But, yeah, who the hell would want to live like that? Or live in such isolation?

Even still what a shame that someone so otherwise intelligent suffered from mental illness. If he only could have channeled all that intellect for good. The brain is so amazingly complex.

artistsoul says

Even still what a shame that someone so otherwise intelligent suffered from mental illness.

I'm not an expert, but I've heard tell that many mentally ill people have superior intellects.

Too bad there is not a true cure out there for mental illness. So many in the medical field recognize how legitimate mental illness is. We as a society accept that things fail in the body...yet in the mind, if things are failing, it is chalked up to a "personality" failure / socialization failure.

Imagine the number of neurons connecting in the brain...how many pathways for things to go wrong...how hormones and biochemistry can affect us. I do know, without doubt, that modern medicine doesn't yet have a cure. We can ease it. We can manage it. I would argue we don't manage it that well.

I really don't know if high intellect is conclusively linked. I personally think it doesn't discriminate in that way. Crazy is pervasive. But...on any given day that I feel mentally ill (which happens...we all question ourselves...unless we are total egomaniacs), I will pacify myself by adopting the theory that I must be brilliant. :)

As the California Gurl said, boots on the ground reports are invaluable. If the small investor is getting pushed aside, I'm nervous.

That wasn't hogwash. It's a valid perspective.

My only quibble is about rents.

I think we're simply going to get massacred this decade. APOCALPYSEF--- might be a novelty account but damn if we're not heading straight into the Soylent Green future.

If the Dems cave on the $80B/yr tax cut for millionaires (and the $50B/yr cut on estate taxes), this country is going down, bigtime, and you can date the inflection point to Dec 6, 2010.

The Republicans held 88 seats in the House and a piddly 16 in the Senate in 1936. This go around the anti-labor party is much much stronger. 40 years of rightwing propaganda and the culture wars are paying dividends now, literally. Palin, Huckabee, and perhaps Romney have got 25M+ fundies eager to pull the lever for them in 2012.

The rollback of the welfare state will in fact affect the wage level and housing affordability. We've got a $1B/month deficit on the state level. That's 125,000 jobs on the line, perhaps 300,000 due to the velocity of money.

We may see wage inflation come. We SHOULD see wage inflation come. But the system is out of balance and getting worse AFAICT.

the common use of “garbage disposals” sends most food waste into the sewer rather than to garbage collection.
Where, if you live in the East Bay, it ends up at the EBMUD sewage treatment plant, and then gets sent to the anaerobic digesters to be turned into methane.
Also, with regards to separating out green waste. We downsized our "landfill" garbage can (and almost halved the bill) when we went to weekly pickup of the green bins. The economic incentives are there to encourage sorting.

What’s the moral of this story? There probably isn’t one, but the details are interesting. For all those people yelling at me “THE MARKET IS CRASHING” you need to put yourself in my shoes. If the market is crashing, how come this house gained $18,200 in wholesale value in less than a year? How come the courthouse steps are crowded now when they used to be empty? How long will it be before all the other bidders realize the prices have moved up and start throwing in their bids too?

Moral of the story is prices went back to long term trends. The same home is no longer half a million, and its done 'crashing". Zig zaging 10K either way is nothing more than volitility.
Yes, there is demand at or near 100K per your observation but certainly less demand at 140K.
What you observed will continue to happen in other parts of the Bay Area.

http://www.housingbubblebust.com/OFHEO/Major/NorCal.html

It’s the Palo Alto bidders I just don’t understand. They will never be able to rent those out for a profit. Not even close.

Hype and Irrational Exhuberance is the norm in PA.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_16771940?source%253Dmost_viewed.20F88DA3D7D369F5BB70F372987EAE1F.html&nclick_check=1

Silicon Valley blog site Valleywag broke the news that Zuckerberg's 2,350-square-foot, four-bedroom home at 2073 Princeton St. had been listed on Craigslist. Its owner, a fellow by the name of Stanley Wu, who declined our request for an interview, was asking $7,850 a month for the single-family house Zuckerberg had shared with girlfriend Priscilla Chan before flying the coop.

EBGuy says

Where, if you live in the East Bay, it ends up at the EBMUD sewage treatment plant, and then gets sent to the anaerobic digesters to be turned into methane.

Yup, but quite a bit of the potential energy in the food waste gets diluted when the waste is mixed with ( large amounts of) sewer water. Then it has to be refined or dehydrated into a more optimal mixture, which reduces the energy efficiency of the whole process.

This is the difference between "dry waste" and "wet waste", as described in the article I linked above.

Would be interesting to see an accounting of how well the EBMUD system works, maybe I can find something on the web?

Actually, EBguy

from what I can tell the EBMUD biogas plant does not use sewage as feedstock, but rather food scrap collection from commercial establishments (restaurants), according to the link you posted earlier. There is a reason for this, and the reason is that the energy density of sewage is just too low.

So it may indeed be too optimistic to expect biogas from the thin gruel that is household sewage.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/compost-or-biogas/Content?oid=1369332

The moral of the story: You must still manually keep food waste separate from sewage and general waste to make it usable.

E-man says

The indicators I’m looking at telling to buy SNY yesterday.

Did I miss a thread about Sanofi?

shrekgrinch says

Obama caving into the Reps isn’t what is going to lead to more deficits, as all deficits by definition are caused by excessive spending not insufficient revenues.

Whose definition is that?

Thank you TechGromit for your words of sanity. Unfortunately, nobody is listening.

WoooHooo, I'm getting a whole 2% tax "cut" in 2011, now I can go buy a bunch of poisonous Chinese crap for Christmas!!!!!

I just love how every aspect of this "deal" increases our debt:

1) rich tax break -> increase debt
2) 2% SS cut -> increase debt
3) extend unemployment -> increase debt
4) retain 15% rate for capital gains -> increase debt
5) estate tax starts at $5M and is only 35% -> increase debt

If anyone in government tries to tell you they are doing anything about reducing the debt, you know they are lying.

shrekgrinch says

Obama caving into the Reps isn’t what is going to lead to more deficits, as all deficits by definition are caused by excessive spending not insufficient revenues.

Sorry, but that is just wrong and faulty logic. Deficits are created when the spending and revenue are out of balance. You can spend as long as you have enough revenue to match that spending.

By your definition and logic, I could say that all revenues are created by a lack of spending.