What is interesting to me about this "bright" from the NYT is how surprised the locals are about the money that's reinvigorating the local economy.
This is no great surprise to me, and we might have some of this money in Maine too, were we prepared to think a little harder about our energy choices. The way I learned economics (in the Pacific Northwest at that) was that one successful local enterprise would foster another and another, through the power of economic multipliers.
To be sure, I studied with Tom Power at the University of Montana, who made a point of using multiplier theory in his work in the regional economy.
But I thought most people understood the idea.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Rapture! The parity cometh
A recent article in Renewable Energy World charted the advance of solar retail price parity, the famous "crossover point."
This is the point at which it's cheaper for homeowners and other building operators to make their own power, rather than buy it from the grid.
Wind energy has been at parity for many years, when medium to large scale turbines are used on good sites to offset retail prices.
But solar has been too expensive, at least thus far.
I've been tracking solar pricing now for years, and am on record numerous times in various places drawing attention to the cross-over point. Lots of good things happen when that point is reached. In particular, the steel dagger of supply and demand gets driven deep into the heart of the dirty energy industry, and much of that industry then gets to simply go away.
Not all of it, unfortunately, because we will still need peaking and base load plants and we will still need coal and oil for industrial production. But enough of it to make me a very happy energy wonk.
There's also the small matter of potentially ending worries about climate change.
The REW article uses the current analogy of the "Rapture" to ironify their point. I thought that was funny.
But digging deeper into the comments, I found this web page here from SolarBuzz.com. Study their table. Apparently parity is already here for large scale commercial solar in sunny states.
I see the the Nanosolar business plan at work here. The new cheaper thin-film panels made by this company are available only for commercial-scale, power-plant scale, multi-megawatt operations. This seems like a self-denying ordinance on the part of the company but it will actually speed up roll-out. Only those installations that make purely commercial sense will go ahead. As a result, the company gains reputation and market clout, while minimizing client disappointment, and reducing client education costs.
That doesn't stop me wanting one for Unity College, though.
This is the point at which it's cheaper for homeowners and other building operators to make their own power, rather than buy it from the grid.
Wind energy has been at parity for many years, when medium to large scale turbines are used on good sites to offset retail prices.
But solar has been too expensive, at least thus far.
I've been tracking solar pricing now for years, and am on record numerous times in various places drawing attention to the cross-over point. Lots of good things happen when that point is reached. In particular, the steel dagger of supply and demand gets driven deep into the heart of the dirty energy industry, and much of that industry then gets to simply go away.
Not all of it, unfortunately, because we will still need peaking and base load plants and we will still need coal and oil for industrial production. But enough of it to make me a very happy energy wonk.
There's also the small matter of potentially ending worries about climate change.
The REW article uses the current analogy of the "Rapture" to ironify their point. I thought that was funny.
But digging deeper into the comments, I found this web page here from SolarBuzz.com. Study their table. Apparently parity is already here for large scale commercial solar in sunny states.
I see the the Nanosolar business plan at work here. The new cheaper thin-film panels made by this company are available only for commercial-scale, power-plant scale, multi-megawatt operations. This seems like a self-denying ordinance on the part of the company but it will actually speed up roll-out. Only those installations that make purely commercial sense will go ahead. As a result, the company gains reputation and market clout, while minimizing client disappointment, and reducing client education costs.
That doesn't stop me wanting one for Unity College, though.
Friday, May 27, 2011
General Motors turns a negative into a positive
The Gulf Oil spill that wreaked havoc on the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida coastlines began April 2010 and continued to pollute these beautiful coastline habitats months after the leak was capped. Oil booms were placed along the coastline and in the gulf in attempts to contain the oil spill. It was devastating for our nation to watch and even more devestating to those whose livliehoods had been directly affected by this monstrous disaster.
It has been a little over a year now since the oil spill. So many of us around the nation just continue about our daily lives and easily forget what is not directly affecting us at the moment. This is why, I was pleasantly surprised to see that General Motors had not forgotten the oil spill at all. In fact they made plans to recycle the oil booms which would otherwise have been sent to landfills.
Yes, I am proud of General Motors. They will be using the oil booms for the Chevy Volts air-deflecting baffles. General Motors has saved 212,000 pounds of waste from the landfill to be recycled as plastic resin.
Give General Motors a pat on the back and hope that other companies see how economically beneficial it will be to take advantage of what seems to be a negative and use it as a company positive. This is when I think of the addage, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Respect! There is no better time to start than NOW!
http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2011/05/23/general-motors-doubles-oil-spill-waste-collected-gulf-disaster
It has been a little over a year now since the oil spill. So many of us around the nation just continue about our daily lives and easily forget what is not directly affecting us at the moment. This is why, I was pleasantly surprised to see that General Motors had not forgotten the oil spill at all. In fact they made plans to recycle the oil booms which would otherwise have been sent to landfills.
Yes, I am proud of General Motors. They will be using the oil booms for the Chevy Volts air-deflecting baffles. General Motors has saved 212,000 pounds of waste from the landfill to be recycled as plastic resin.
Give General Motors a pat on the back and hope that other companies see how economically beneficial it will be to take advantage of what seems to be a negative and use it as a company positive. This is when I think of the addage, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Respect! There is no better time to start than NOW!
http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2011/05/23/general-motors-doubles-oil-spill-waste-collected-gulf-disaster
"What good is a private college unless it is serving a great national purpose?"
I was reminded of this important quote while reading my paper this morning. It's from Anthony Marx, President of Amherst.
Unity College's great national purpose is the environment. Which, in these days of super-floods and super-storms, means that climate change is front and center. There's no point having any other environmental program unless it includes and addresses climate change.
And sustainable energy and agriculture, together with adaptation, are key to climate change.
So I'm aligned and my college is aligned with a great national purpose.
It's nice to have all your ducks in a row.
Unity College's great national purpose is the environment. Which, in these days of super-floods and super-storms, means that climate change is front and center. There's no point having any other environmental program unless it includes and addresses climate change.
And sustainable energy and agriculture, together with adaptation, are key to climate change.
So I'm aligned and my college is aligned with a great national purpose.
It's nice to have all your ducks in a row.
Solar park
These things are interesting, but they're going to attain the same "must protest" status that wind farms currently have in Maine.
And the impacts are comparable, within the same order of magnitude: A very visible installation "ruins" the view. This 36 acre example provides 26,000 MWh/year, compared to about 4,000-5,000 for a GE 1.5 XLE turbine on a Maine hilltop, so this is about a five-turbine farm.
The turbine needs about a three acre footprint and between 1,000 and 2,000 foot setbacks to achieve noise standards (45 dBA minimally -- and also depending on tower height and wind shear, speed and directions), and we tend to put them in numbers of at least three, so the solar park has a smaller footprint within which residential use is hampered.
The solar system is still intermittent but delivers peaking load. Turbines these days tend to be used for base load, now we're figuring out how to use them.
They say they're planning to graze under the panels, but I'd say the grass is going to grow less because of the blocked sun.
Some grazing farm animals like a bit of shade, though. My sheep generally enjoy shade.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/picture/2011/may/26/solar-photovoltaic-france?intcmp=122
And the impacts are comparable, within the same order of magnitude: A very visible installation "ruins" the view. This 36 acre example provides 26,000 MWh/year, compared to about 4,000-5,000 for a GE 1.5 XLE turbine on a Maine hilltop, so this is about a five-turbine farm.
The turbine needs about a three acre footprint and between 1,000 and 2,000 foot setbacks to achieve noise standards (45 dBA minimally -- and also depending on tower height and wind shear, speed and directions), and we tend to put them in numbers of at least three, so the solar park has a smaller footprint within which residential use is hampered.
The solar system is still intermittent but delivers peaking load. Turbines these days tend to be used for base load, now we're figuring out how to use them.
They say they're planning to graze under the panels, but I'd say the grass is going to grow less because of the blocked sun.
Some grazing farm animals like a bit of shade, though. My sheep generally enjoy shade.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/picture/2011/may/26/solar-photovoltaic-france?intcmp=122
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Summer wind research begins
Hi. My Name is Rachel and I'm a former Unity College student now employed as a wind assessment technician on the "wind crew." I'll be posting here from time to time on matters of interest to me and the crew.
Yes, the Unity College Community Wind Assessment Program is up and running with another summer's field work.
Wind crew is not just a job. It's an opportunity to learn more about wind power and other alternative energies, becoming familiar with the pros and cons. Most of all, it's an opportunity to approach wind and other renewable energy and energy efficiency systems from a scientific point of view. All of us are here to learn.
Our job is not to advocate for wind power, but to gather, store, analyze and disseminate data that will be useful to the residents of Maine and to our leaders in the state house and town offices around the state when considering renewable energy systems.
The data will provide information for political leaders and the general public to use to identify the best possible placement for community-owned wind turbines across the state of Maine: those sites that would be most economically viable and provide the least noise and other impacts for neighbors. By doing so we also rule out literally hundreds of other sites, saving planning effort and reducing costs to the general public. We also provide advice to landowners and the general public whenever a wind energy system is not the best use of their available energy dollars. Often an energy efficiency measure will save more money and energy than can made on a given site with a wind power system. In most cases a solar power system will work better than a wind system, but a minority of sites have the wind to make lots of energy and money. In any case, the landowner needs good, solid, scientific advice.
Finally, we provide scientific data and an understanding of what Maine's wind actually does that will help Mainers understand, mitigate, or avoid the impacts of commercial scale wind farms.
Our first day of work was Monday.
"Training Day."
We began in the morning by going over safety procedures, learning how to use our special anemometry equipment. In the afternoon, we visited two sites in the area that already have wind turbines. The first site was Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association located in Unity Maine, most widely known as MOFGA. They had a Bergey 10KW wind turbine donated to them several years ago, and have since placed it on the highest point of land available to them. MOFGA facilities manager and renewable energy tinkerer Verne LeCount met us underneath his turbine and gave us a tour. We were able to check out the noise output of the turbine with our new hand-held decibel meter.
The second site we visited, Beaver Ridge wind farm, located in Freedom, Maine has three Generel Electric 1.5 MW turbines. This site has been somewhat controversial with the residents of Freedom, because the noise emitted by the turbines after they were commissioned was much greater than was represented during the planning process.
Mick explained the science of turbine noise in Maine, something to do with the "wind shear factor." Apparently, if you don't know your wind shear factor, then you can't accurately predict turbine noise. Wind shear factor is one of the metrics the wind crew measures with our equipment.
We were joined by a planning board member from a nearby town that is studying an application for a slightly larger wind farm. These wind turbines are much larger in scale than the Bergey we visited at the MOFGA site. The noise was distinctly noticeable at the Beaver Ridge site.
Here are some pictures of the wind crew at work in previous years. There'll be new pictures and video just as soon as I've figured out how to post it.
Stay tuned for more Wind assessment updates!
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Intelligent enough to adapt?
Here's an interesting phenom.
The city of Chicago is laying in place long range plans to adapt to the climate changes predicted by the national climate prediction agencies, to avoid both future emergencies and different future routine impacts.
Go figure. A city sensible enough to actually use the science they've been given. But then the excess deaths they got from heat waves in 1995 were a serious lesson in climate reality.
Notice too that the emerald ash borer is on their list of problems. This little bugger is in states to our south and north, and it's just a matter of time before someone imports a few to Maine, in a truckload of firewood or something like that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/science/earth/23adaptation.html?src=recg
The city of Chicago is laying in place long range plans to adapt to the climate changes predicted by the national climate prediction agencies, to avoid both future emergencies and different future routine impacts.
Go figure. A city sensible enough to actually use the science they've been given. But then the excess deaths they got from heat waves in 1995 were a serious lesson in climate reality.
Notice too that the emerald ash borer is on their list of problems. This little bugger is in states to our south and north, and it's just a matter of time before someone imports a few to Maine, in a truckload of firewood or something like that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/science/earth/23adaptation.html?src=recg
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Conspiracy and other strange theories
A new article in today's NYT offers a review of a study of conspiracy theorists.
I found the review interesting, although I'm not going to buy the book. I have enough conspiracists to deal with in my day-to-day. I don't need to be introduced to any additional ones.
Equally illuminating, and connected in my mind, is a Leo Hickman's blog interview in the online British Guardian about the California school board that is requiring high school science teachers to "teach the controversy" about climate science.
Finally, also in the same vein, the infamous Koch brothers are trying to buy the acquiescence of a Florida university's board of governors to the teaching of "free market, anti-regulatory" economics.
What connects all these things in my mind is that we have several cases here where different people, for different reasons, think that facts, and particularly science and social science facts, are properly subject to political outlook.
In other words, my politics trump your fact, and that's the way it should be.
This is an inherently dangerous development in western society, although it isn't a particularly new one.
There was a time, back when western science was born, that the great hope for the new endeavor was that empirical method and careful quantification might allow distance from the great political controversy of the day, which was of course which of Protestant or Roman Catholic Christianity was the "true" belief.
Scholars like Bacon, Descartes, Newton and Voltaire advocated the use of empiricism as mean to both understand the world, but also to get away from the sectional religious conflict that was then threatening to destroy European civilization. Even the new science of economics, as per Smith's Wealth of Nations, was intended in part as a contribution to the reduction of conflict.
How ironic then, in our new age, that it's an objective geological danger that threatens global civilization, while sectional conflict over economics has become so religious that its proponents have become the new Jesuits, proclaiming a counter-reformation complete with a proper Inquisition of certain key "heretic" scientists.
Of course, this too shall pass.
King Knut's legend is instructive here.
I found the review interesting, although I'm not going to buy the book. I have enough conspiracists to deal with in my day-to-day. I don't need to be introduced to any additional ones.
Equally illuminating, and connected in my mind, is a Leo Hickman's blog interview in the online British Guardian about the California school board that is requiring high school science teachers to "teach the controversy" about climate science.
Finally, also in the same vein, the infamous Koch brothers are trying to buy the acquiescence of a Florida university's board of governors to the teaching of "free market, anti-regulatory" economics.
What connects all these things in my mind is that we have several cases here where different people, for different reasons, think that facts, and particularly science and social science facts, are properly subject to political outlook.
In other words, my politics trump your fact, and that's the way it should be.
This is an inherently dangerous development in western society, although it isn't a particularly new one.
There was a time, back when western science was born, that the great hope for the new endeavor was that empirical method and careful quantification might allow distance from the great political controversy of the day, which was of course which of Protestant or Roman Catholic Christianity was the "true" belief.
Scholars like Bacon, Descartes, Newton and Voltaire advocated the use of empiricism as mean to both understand the world, but also to get away from the sectional religious conflict that was then threatening to destroy European civilization. Even the new science of economics, as per Smith's Wealth of Nations, was intended in part as a contribution to the reduction of conflict.
How ironic then, in our new age, that it's an objective geological danger that threatens global civilization, while sectional conflict over economics has become so religious that its proponents have become the new Jesuits, proclaiming a counter-reformation complete with a proper Inquisition of certain key "heretic" scientists.
Of course, this too shall pass.
King Knut's legend is instructive here.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
UK energy plan reinforced against the odds
Not many Americans properly understand the cabinet form of government practiced in the UK. Here in the US the President's cabinet is appointed directly by the president with no or few concessions given to dissenting views and minority parties. But cabinet government, in the form of a National Coalition, got the UK through many of the tough spots of the 20th century. And a cabinet that must consist of elected MPs or members of the house of Lords is much more independent than the US-style advisory cabinet.
The key point is that to keep the different, and very self-willed characters, in the cabinet, you have to give them some of what they want. National-level negotiation between otherwise warring ideas has a venue in which to take place.
The US Congress can be like this in some seasons. American voters seem to like the House, Senate and Presidency to be held by different parties, and one net result is negotiation.
In the British system, the major deals are struck in the cabinet. In the American system, deals are struck in Congress, or between the President and Congress. Occasionally a President may even reach out to the opposing side. Nixon famously did this many times, but particularly with the "alphabet soup" of environmental legislation we all must learn at American policy school.
In other seasons in the US Congress, it's my way or the highway for the leading parties.
Today's Lib-Tory Coalition in the UK apparently just underwent one of the major Cabinet battles in history, to come out in favor of a lasting climate policy. Since the next UK government after David Cameron's surprisingly successful coalition, is likely to be Labour (or a Labour-Liberal coalition), these plans will last.
This doesn't mean the battle is over for UK climate campaigners. But it does mean that the UK has committed to renewable energy and energy independence, with all that means for industrial development.
At least one immediate result may be that a 2,000 job offshore wind turbine fabrication plant is developed in Kent.
Since this is presumably the kind of plant UMaine's offshore wind project seeks for Maine, we perhaps should watch closely to see what happens next.
Other job schemes are also being touted as a result of the cabinet deal.
The key point is that to keep the different, and very self-willed characters, in the cabinet, you have to give them some of what they want. National-level negotiation between otherwise warring ideas has a venue in which to take place.
The US Congress can be like this in some seasons. American voters seem to like the House, Senate and Presidency to be held by different parties, and one net result is negotiation.
In the British system, the major deals are struck in the cabinet. In the American system, deals are struck in Congress, or between the President and Congress. Occasionally a President may even reach out to the opposing side. Nixon famously did this many times, but particularly with the "alphabet soup" of environmental legislation we all must learn at American policy school.
In other seasons in the US Congress, it's my way or the highway for the leading parties.
Today's Lib-Tory Coalition in the UK apparently just underwent one of the major Cabinet battles in history, to come out in favor of a lasting climate policy. Since the next UK government after David Cameron's surprisingly successful coalition, is likely to be Labour (or a Labour-Liberal coalition), these plans will last.
This doesn't mean the battle is over for UK climate campaigners. But it does mean that the UK has committed to renewable energy and energy independence, with all that means for industrial development.
At least one immediate result may be that a 2,000 job offshore wind turbine fabrication plant is developed in Kent.
Since this is presumably the kind of plant UMaine's offshore wind project seeks for Maine, we perhaps should watch closely to see what happens next.
Other job schemes are also being touted as a result of the cabinet deal.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Advice to a prospective home builder
I get quite a lot of letters -- five to ten a year -- asking for advice on building with local materials. I like to post them to the blog so I can save them for re-use and reconsideration later.
For those readers who don't know, Aimee and I once built a house using straw bales. At the time it was one of the first bale houses in Maine, and used a lot of recycled and reused materials to boot. It cost less than $20,000 and, after a recent rebuild, still stands and is the current home of another Unity College faculty member.
But these days I advise circumspection and forethought before using a lot of straw bale in a home, and point out that straw is not actually local, free, or even that native to this part of Maine.
My favorite local materials, after years of trail and error, are actually field stone and green hemlock lumber.
The former is widely available in very large quantities, quite handsome when properly placed, and free or nearly free.
To most Mainers, field stone is a nuisance to be gotten rid of. You can get it by the truckload for nothing or next to nothing.
While hemlock lumber is stout, resists rot, and widely available from local sources, such as Gerald Fowler's mill in Thorndike, for around 45¢/board foot, which is less than a box-store two-by-four.
I sometimes daydream that if I had nothing else to do at all, no classes to teach, no wind research to do, I would like to take about five years to build a stone house.
One stone at a time, no rush, no worries, out in the wind and sun and bugs.
The Zen of Building.
That might be my retirement project.
This latest series of letters is to a recently-hired, new Unity College faculty colleague who will arrive with his family this fall from Out West, and wants to home-build. He wanted to talk about straw, but my gut instinct, after learning the hard way, was to want to think and write about house-sites and foundations, about sun and stone and, yes, even the evil climate-killer, concrete.
It's been reorganized so the first letter is posted first:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dear XXXX
The first thing I would say is, this place is cold. Way colder than NW Montana, for instance. I don’t know of anyone who has survived a Maine winter in a yurt. I managed the first half of a Maine winter in an as-yet uninsulated house once, and it was very hard on me and my animals. (This was the bale house before I managed to finish it.)
Our straw bale house worked well enough until I married, and then we had to move. It was too far from campus for both of us, and way too off-grid for my wife. It still stands and serves after 8 years and you can see it if you like. XXXXX (another UC professor) lives there.
But I wouldn’t build another one like it. I’d use more conventional materials. If I had to do it over, I’d use post-and-beam pine and/or rough-cut hemlock studs and sheathing, cedar shingles, ordinary drywall, cellulose insulation, and normal wiring and plumbing. I might use locally made SIPs if I decided to go post-and-beam.
I’d put in a full septic, and make a super-insulated passive solar design.
It would be cheaper than straw bale, last longer in this climate, use more local material, insure more easily, be more fireproof, and have better resale value.
You see, the maine (pun intended) ecological difficulty is that we don’t grow wheat, rye or barley for straw within 100 miles of here, but we do grow and cut local pine and hemlock and cedar lumber, and do so on a small and sustainable scale, and cheaply. Hemlock rough cut lumber retails from local mills for 45 c/board foot or less. That’s cheaper than regular studs from Home Depot.
Straw has to be trucked further and is expensive.
You can even cut your own lumber off your own land and mill it, or have it milled. 20 c per board foot is the growing rate.
Before buying land for any kind of house, the first question I’d ask myself would be how far I was willing to live from work. Unity is more expensive than other places. Jackson here, fifteen miles away, is cheap. We got our three acres with almost-too-far gone farmhouse for $60K. We had to rebuild it and add a new septic, but we paid around $85K total in the end.
Then I’d investigate the planning regulations in the towns I was willing to consider building in. You can often download those from the Town Office web sites.
Then I’d go looking for land. Be sure to get sloping land that has vegetation that grows only on well drained sites. Anyplace flat around here gets wet in spring.
The best house sites have all been built on before because the old timers were more plentiful in Maine than current rural residents. They knew to build on south facing slopes wherever there was soil. Pick a gently sloping southerly-facing site away from noisy roads and neighbors with some pockets of deep fertile soil, first and foremost.
Everything else is secondary.
You may have to buy an existing fixer-upper, and rebuild it or knock it down, to get a really good site, just because the best sites we picked two hundred years ago.
But if you get the right site, sunshine and peace and quiet and good growing soil will be there when you want them.
http://ucsustainability.blogspot.com/2009/10/old-fashioned-carpentry.html
http://womerlippi.blogspot.com/2008/05/build-with-straw-bale-in-maine.html
http://womerlippi.blogspot.com/2007/12/first-post-great-farm-history.html
Aimee’s web page: scroll down to see the “new house”
http://www.unity.edu/facultypages/aphillippi/house.htm
Mick
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dear XXXX
High efficiency in walls and roof are important, but still secondary, after choosing a good site to build on.
We're at 44 degrees latitude here. The sun only climbs 23 degrees above the horizon in midwinter. When we built the bale house, we learned this lesson the hard way. Even with the best insulation, if you build in a site with poor aspect, you may not get the sun into your rooms for weeks or months. And with so little daylight in winter, that sunshine is essential for health, especially psychological health.
Since you and I began corresponding yesterday I've been noticing other people's house sites more, and I'm still struck by the difference between sites where the really old houses (150-200 years) and the relatively new ones are. In the country (not the small villages and towns where access to streets was more important), the older houses are much more often found on knolls and terraces. Houses built in the last hundred years are less likely to be so well sited. Part of this would have been simply that the best sites were used up, but once coal became widely available, it must have allowed builders to pay less attention to aspect. Oil heat, which is still what 71% of Mainers use, continued to foster the disconnect between Mainers and sunshine. But the old timers knew better, because they had to split their own wood, sometimes as much as twenty cords a year, so they wanted that sunshine.
It's sunny here in late January, February, and the first week or two of March. Cold, Canadian sunshine, but free solar energy all the same.
Drainage would have been a good reason to choose the knolls and terraces too.
The next thing I learned from the old house is, you either build a cellar/basement, or you build on an Alaska slab (insulated floating slab-footing combo), but you don't do anything in between.
Which of the two you do may depend on your site.
All cellars/basements around here at at risk of filling with water. Most actually do fill with water at least twice a year. Much of Maine is actually below the water table once or twice a year.
We live in a giant seasonal wetland -- the main reason straw bale becomes complicated.
But old-timey cellars are great for root crops and OK for a place to put heating and hot water systems. And, if you build into a slope or terrace, you can provide a level entrance to the basement, and make sure that surplus water can get out this way too. This gives you security against the day when the water level is rising and the power gets cut off at the same time.
Maine's power supply is fairly tenuous, because of nor'easters, ice storms, snow storms, wind storms, thunderstorms, and hurricane remnants. These days we even get occasional tornadoes. We usually get a power cut every couple months and being without power for three days is not unusual. Rural Mainers like to have back-up generators to run sump pumps and home-grown food freezers when the power goes out.
In the Great ice Storm of '98, before my time here, but a historical point by which many Mainers set their clocks, people were without power for up to two weeks.
If you're planning to build off-grid this cellar/power supply/groundwater inter-system nexus thingy may seem like it doesn't apply, but it actually does. Most off-gridders can't afford to own enough solar panels, or a big enough wind turbine, and the necessary batteries, to be sure of having power to run a sump pump (that may draw 500W or more/hour) when the time comes. But neither can they add enough panels to run a big fridge or freezer or both.
One option is to build on a slab and add an above-ground level root cellar later.
But by far the most convenient option, and the one the old timers choose a lot, is to build into a south facing, well-drained terrace and leave a level exit to your cellar. And now I know why they did so. My 110 year old cellar, which stores potatoes all winter perfectly, would also drain itself if the sump pump were out. Duh. And a cellar can be built with stone, which is good for the climate. And you don't need to go out to the cold to get your spuds from your remote cellar when you need them. One less pathway to shovel, one less thing to worry about when the snow flies.
(One important seasonal Maine routine is to get your dooryards and barnyards ready for winter, by which I mean you move things around to minimize plowing, provide places to put snow, and so that you are sure that anything that will be under the snow can be safely ignored until April.)
If you decide not to have a cellar, which I would recommend if for some reason you are unable to get a good site with slope and southerly aspect, then build a serious Alaska style insulated slab.
The reason for this recommendation is again based on Bale House experience, and observation of the energy efficiency results from other houses.
Lots of home builders decide not to deal with concrete or to minimize it, and we followed this thinking when we built the Bale House. I thought I could build on piers and avoid the expense and climate emissions. I also, if I fess up to myself, wanted to race ahead and get to the straw bale part. I was anxious to be green and use "natural" materials. Piers are quick and easy.
But any big air space under the house is where all the damp and cold air comes from.
If it's a well-designed cellar, you can control this in part by sealing and by putting a heating system down there to make waste heat and dry out the air a bit. This is what most people do with typical ranch house basements around here, and apart from a mild diesel smell from the oil heat system, it works well-enough, particularly by helping solve the dampness problem. The waste heat dries the underplace out a bit. Seal it up properly and you can control air infiltration. In our energy efficiency work we're learning to deal with sealing basements and improving air quality at the same time. Be sure to add a source of combustion air for the heater. A lot of folks put a wood furnace down there, which really dries the place out well, but then you don't have a root cellar any more because the temperature has increased too much.
Cellars and basements are not a perfect solution and the air quality is still bad, but it's a compromise. You can at least go down there and fix things.
But if it's just a crawl space, life sucks. You get all the problems of damp and bad air, but you can't fix them easily, and you get none of the benefits of a cellar or basement. Nowhere to keep your spuds, nowhere to put heating and other systems, and lots of damp and bad air and mold. All that -20 degree air blowing around under the house in winter.
I haven't mentioned carpenter ants yet. They're a whole other consideration.
So a slab is way better than piers. If you can't have a basement or don't want one, don't settle for a crawl space. Just forget you ever thought about putting any kind of underplace under the house. You'll be much happier if you don't. Build a slab.
But it gets really cold up here, and basic slabs that are not properly insulated get cold. Your house will need to be heated more just to warm up the cold slab a bit just because people's feet will be cold and if your feet are cold, you feel cold. You can partly solve this problem by insulated the slab and running hot water heat pipes through the slab, but by far the best thing to do is to make a floating, fully isolated, fully insulated slab with the heat pipes. If you add a footing, you can get the house a bit further away from the wet ground.
We now do insulated floating slab and footing combos for all our campus buildings, after long and painful experience with flooded basements and cold, uninsulated slabs. There are emissions, but the buildings are much nicer to live in and use.
Like I said, site comes first, then plan your house from the ground up. You can put any kind of house on any kind of foundation. But decide on the foundation for the right reasons and match it to the site. An old fashioned stone cellar sealed up with some modern product on a south-facing hill or terrace with a level exit is a good choice. If you can afford or find granite, use that -- a local product. An Alaska slab is another good choice, but uses more concrete. This adds climate emissions but we make cement here, not thirty miles away, and we make aggregate here too, so the emissions are in the lime-making, not the trucking.
You can put a bale house or a post-and-beam house on a cellar or an insulated slab, but if you put any kind of house on piers with a crawl space, you're saving up misery for later.
You ask about clay, and we have lots of it here. I often think it's another overlooked local building material. It makes good rough adobe and good rough clay plaster. Sand is the key issue to mix with the clay. Although we have lots of glacial sand pits, native Maine sand is inconsistent and coarse, and so makes for a less smooth experience in adobe-making than fine western sand does. Little rocks in the sand spoil the finish and make it hard to spread. But it's a very cheap building material, almost free. Most gravel pit owners know where they also have a bit of clay, and people truck it to your site for a few dollars a yard. It's needed for earth ponds, is why there's already a supply. Be sure to ask to see it first, to make sure it's good, clean, consistent blue or yellow clay. Many plots of land will have a clay deposit of their own.
Any outside wall covering made of clay plaster or adobe in Maine that doesn't have serious protection from soil moisture or wind driven rain is a potential problem, and the answer is to build on a tall footing and add a large overhang. It helps to add a little cement, one or two percent, as a stabilizer.
(Another good reason to consider using some concrete in your house. to get a tall footing. But granite blocks or field stone cellar walls would do as well.)
I have an experimental patch of clay wall covering on the Bale House that has been open to the weather for eight years now and is still going strong.
You won't find it easy to insure a clay-walled house. though.
A different solution for a bale house wall is to add a very lightweight wooden sheathing, and use instead a different native Maine siding -- cedar clapboards or shingles. This is what we did with most of the Bale House.
Again, what is native may surprise you, when you think about it.
Sand, stone, clay, hemlock, pine, cedar, cement, and lime are all found or made within thirty miles of Unity, Maine, and have been used for generations, and the lore of how to use them well, and poorly, is available far and wide.
Straw is only available from further away, and essentially experimental and unproven in this ecosystem.
Hope this all helps.
Mick
For those readers who don't know, Aimee and I once built a house using straw bales. At the time it was one of the first bale houses in Maine, and used a lot of recycled and reused materials to boot. It cost less than $20,000 and, after a recent rebuild, still stands and is the current home of another Unity College faculty member.
But these days I advise circumspection and forethought before using a lot of straw bale in a home, and point out that straw is not actually local, free, or even that native to this part of Maine.
My favorite local materials, after years of trail and error, are actually field stone and green hemlock lumber.
The former is widely available in very large quantities, quite handsome when properly placed, and free or nearly free.
To most Mainers, field stone is a nuisance to be gotten rid of. You can get it by the truckload for nothing or next to nothing.
While hemlock lumber is stout, resists rot, and widely available from local sources, such as Gerald Fowler's mill in Thorndike, for around 45¢/board foot, which is less than a box-store two-by-four.
I sometimes daydream that if I had nothing else to do at all, no classes to teach, no wind research to do, I would like to take about five years to build a stone house.
One stone at a time, no rush, no worries, out in the wind and sun and bugs.
The Zen of Building.
That might be my retirement project.
This latest series of letters is to a recently-hired, new Unity College faculty colleague who will arrive with his family this fall from Out West, and wants to home-build. He wanted to talk about straw, but my gut instinct, after learning the hard way, was to want to think and write about house-sites and foundations, about sun and stone and, yes, even the evil climate-killer, concrete.
It's been reorganized so the first letter is posted first:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dear XXXX
The first thing I would say is, this place is cold. Way colder than NW Montana, for instance. I don’t know of anyone who has survived a Maine winter in a yurt. I managed the first half of a Maine winter in an as-yet uninsulated house once, and it was very hard on me and my animals. (This was the bale house before I managed to finish it.)
Our straw bale house worked well enough until I married, and then we had to move. It was too far from campus for both of us, and way too off-grid for my wife. It still stands and serves after 8 years and you can see it if you like. XXXXX (another UC professor) lives there.
But I wouldn’t build another one like it. I’d use more conventional materials. If I had to do it over, I’d use post-and-beam pine and/or rough-cut hemlock studs and sheathing, cedar shingles, ordinary drywall, cellulose insulation, and normal wiring and plumbing. I might use locally made SIPs if I decided to go post-and-beam.
I’d put in a full septic, and make a super-insulated passive solar design.
It would be cheaper than straw bale, last longer in this climate, use more local material, insure more easily, be more fireproof, and have better resale value.
You see, the maine (pun intended) ecological difficulty is that we don’t grow wheat, rye or barley for straw within 100 miles of here, but we do grow and cut local pine and hemlock and cedar lumber, and do so on a small and sustainable scale, and cheaply. Hemlock rough cut lumber retails from local mills for 45 c/board foot or less. That’s cheaper than regular studs from Home Depot.
Straw has to be trucked further and is expensive.
You can even cut your own lumber off your own land and mill it, or have it milled. 20 c per board foot is the growing rate.
Before buying land for any kind of house, the first question I’d ask myself would be how far I was willing to live from work. Unity is more expensive than other places. Jackson here, fifteen miles away, is cheap. We got our three acres with almost-too-far gone farmhouse for $60K. We had to rebuild it and add a new septic, but we paid around $85K total in the end.
Then I’d investigate the planning regulations in the towns I was willing to consider building in. You can often download those from the Town Office web sites.
Then I’d go looking for land. Be sure to get sloping land that has vegetation that grows only on well drained sites. Anyplace flat around here gets wet in spring.
The best house sites have all been built on before because the old timers were more plentiful in Maine than current rural residents. They knew to build on south facing slopes wherever there was soil. Pick a gently sloping southerly-facing site away from noisy roads and neighbors with some pockets of deep fertile soil, first and foremost.
Everything else is secondary.
You may have to buy an existing fixer-upper, and rebuild it or knock it down, to get a really good site, just because the best sites we picked two hundred years ago.
But if you get the right site, sunshine and peace and quiet and good growing soil will be there when you want them.
http://ucsustainability.blogspot.com/2009/10/old-fashioned-carpentry.html
http://womerlippi.blogspot.com/2008/05/build-with-straw-bale-in-maine.html
http://womerlippi.blogspot.com/2007/12/first-post-great-farm-history.html
Aimee’s web page: scroll down to see the “new house”
http://www.unity.edu/facultypages/aphillippi/house.htm
Mick
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dear XXXX
High efficiency in walls and roof are important, but still secondary, after choosing a good site to build on.
We're at 44 degrees latitude here. The sun only climbs 23 degrees above the horizon in midwinter. When we built the bale house, we learned this lesson the hard way. Even with the best insulation, if you build in a site with poor aspect, you may not get the sun into your rooms for weeks or months. And with so little daylight in winter, that sunshine is essential for health, especially psychological health.
Since you and I began corresponding yesterday I've been noticing other people's house sites more, and I'm still struck by the difference between sites where the really old houses (150-200 years) and the relatively new ones are. In the country (not the small villages and towns where access to streets was more important), the older houses are much more often found on knolls and terraces. Houses built in the last hundred years are less likely to be so well sited. Part of this would have been simply that the best sites were used up, but once coal became widely available, it must have allowed builders to pay less attention to aspect. Oil heat, which is still what 71% of Mainers use, continued to foster the disconnect between Mainers and sunshine. But the old timers knew better, because they had to split their own wood, sometimes as much as twenty cords a year, so they wanted that sunshine.
It's sunny here in late January, February, and the first week or two of March. Cold, Canadian sunshine, but free solar energy all the same.
Drainage would have been a good reason to choose the knolls and terraces too.
The next thing I learned from the old house is, you either build a cellar/basement, or you build on an Alaska slab (insulated floating slab-footing combo), but you don't do anything in between.
Which of the two you do may depend on your site.
All cellars/basements around here at at risk of filling with water. Most actually do fill with water at least twice a year. Much of Maine is actually below the water table once or twice a year.
We live in a giant seasonal wetland -- the main reason straw bale becomes complicated.
But old-timey cellars are great for root crops and OK for a place to put heating and hot water systems. And, if you build into a slope or terrace, you can provide a level entrance to the basement, and make sure that surplus water can get out this way too. This gives you security against the day when the water level is rising and the power gets cut off at the same time.
Maine's power supply is fairly tenuous, because of nor'easters, ice storms, snow storms, wind storms, thunderstorms, and hurricane remnants. These days we even get occasional tornadoes. We usually get a power cut every couple months and being without power for three days is not unusual. Rural Mainers like to have back-up generators to run sump pumps and home-grown food freezers when the power goes out.
In the Great ice Storm of '98, before my time here, but a historical point by which many Mainers set their clocks, people were without power for up to two weeks.
If you're planning to build off-grid this cellar/power supply/groundwater inter-system nexus thingy may seem like it doesn't apply, but it actually does. Most off-gridders can't afford to own enough solar panels, or a big enough wind turbine, and the necessary batteries, to be sure of having power to run a sump pump (that may draw 500W or more/hour) when the time comes. But neither can they add enough panels to run a big fridge or freezer or both.
One option is to build on a slab and add an above-ground level root cellar later.
But by far the most convenient option, and the one the old timers choose a lot, is to build into a south facing, well-drained terrace and leave a level exit to your cellar. And now I know why they did so. My 110 year old cellar, which stores potatoes all winter perfectly, would also drain itself if the sump pump were out. Duh. And a cellar can be built with stone, which is good for the climate. And you don't need to go out to the cold to get your spuds from your remote cellar when you need them. One less pathway to shovel, one less thing to worry about when the snow flies.
(One important seasonal Maine routine is to get your dooryards and barnyards ready for winter, by which I mean you move things around to minimize plowing, provide places to put snow, and so that you are sure that anything that will be under the snow can be safely ignored until April.)
If you decide not to have a cellar, which I would recommend if for some reason you are unable to get a good site with slope and southerly aspect, then build a serious Alaska style insulated slab.
The reason for this recommendation is again based on Bale House experience, and observation of the energy efficiency results from other houses.
Lots of home builders decide not to deal with concrete or to minimize it, and we followed this thinking when we built the Bale House. I thought I could build on piers and avoid the expense and climate emissions. I also, if I fess up to myself, wanted to race ahead and get to the straw bale part. I was anxious to be green and use "natural" materials. Piers are quick and easy.
But any big air space under the house is where all the damp and cold air comes from.
If it's a well-designed cellar, you can control this in part by sealing and by putting a heating system down there to make waste heat and dry out the air a bit. This is what most people do with typical ranch house basements around here, and apart from a mild diesel smell from the oil heat system, it works well-enough, particularly by helping solve the dampness problem. The waste heat dries the underplace out a bit. Seal it up properly and you can control air infiltration. In our energy efficiency work we're learning to deal with sealing basements and improving air quality at the same time. Be sure to add a source of combustion air for the heater. A lot of folks put a wood furnace down there, which really dries the place out well, but then you don't have a root cellar any more because the temperature has increased too much.
Cellars and basements are not a perfect solution and the air quality is still bad, but it's a compromise. You can at least go down there and fix things.
But if it's just a crawl space, life sucks. You get all the problems of damp and bad air, but you can't fix them easily, and you get none of the benefits of a cellar or basement. Nowhere to keep your spuds, nowhere to put heating and other systems, and lots of damp and bad air and mold. All that -20 degree air blowing around under the house in winter.
I haven't mentioned carpenter ants yet. They're a whole other consideration.
So a slab is way better than piers. If you can't have a basement or don't want one, don't settle for a crawl space. Just forget you ever thought about putting any kind of underplace under the house. You'll be much happier if you don't. Build a slab.
But it gets really cold up here, and basic slabs that are not properly insulated get cold. Your house will need to be heated more just to warm up the cold slab a bit just because people's feet will be cold and if your feet are cold, you feel cold. You can partly solve this problem by insulated the slab and running hot water heat pipes through the slab, but by far the best thing to do is to make a floating, fully isolated, fully insulated slab with the heat pipes. If you add a footing, you can get the house a bit further away from the wet ground.
We now do insulated floating slab and footing combos for all our campus buildings, after long and painful experience with flooded basements and cold, uninsulated slabs. There are emissions, but the buildings are much nicer to live in and use.
Like I said, site comes first, then plan your house from the ground up. You can put any kind of house on any kind of foundation. But decide on the foundation for the right reasons and match it to the site. An old fashioned stone cellar sealed up with some modern product on a south-facing hill or terrace with a level exit is a good choice. If you can afford or find granite, use that -- a local product. An Alaska slab is another good choice, but uses more concrete. This adds climate emissions but we make cement here, not thirty miles away, and we make aggregate here too, so the emissions are in the lime-making, not the trucking.
You can put a bale house or a post-and-beam house on a cellar or an insulated slab, but if you put any kind of house on piers with a crawl space, you're saving up misery for later.
You ask about clay, and we have lots of it here. I often think it's another overlooked local building material. It makes good rough adobe and good rough clay plaster. Sand is the key issue to mix with the clay. Although we have lots of glacial sand pits, native Maine sand is inconsistent and coarse, and so makes for a less smooth experience in adobe-making than fine western sand does. Little rocks in the sand spoil the finish and make it hard to spread. But it's a very cheap building material, almost free. Most gravel pit owners know where they also have a bit of clay, and people truck it to your site for a few dollars a yard. It's needed for earth ponds, is why there's already a supply. Be sure to ask to see it first, to make sure it's good, clean, consistent blue or yellow clay. Many plots of land will have a clay deposit of their own.
Any outside wall covering made of clay plaster or adobe in Maine that doesn't have serious protection from soil moisture or wind driven rain is a potential problem, and the answer is to build on a tall footing and add a large overhang. It helps to add a little cement, one or two percent, as a stabilizer.
(Another good reason to consider using some concrete in your house. to get a tall footing. But granite blocks or field stone cellar walls would do as well.)
I have an experimental patch of clay wall covering on the Bale House that has been open to the weather for eight years now and is still going strong.
You won't find it easy to insure a clay-walled house. though.
A different solution for a bale house wall is to add a very lightweight wooden sheathing, and use instead a different native Maine siding -- cedar clapboards or shingles. This is what we did with most of the Bale House.
Again, what is native may surprise you, when you think about it.
Sand, stone, clay, hemlock, pine, cedar, cement, and lime are all found or made within thirty miles of Unity, Maine, and have been used for generations, and the lore of how to use them well, and poorly, is available far and wide.
Straw is only available from further away, and essentially experimental and unproven in this ecosystem.
Hope this all helps.
Mick
Rap on, Oz
This video is hilarious, but don't click play if you're offended by the F-bomb. (And don't complain to me if you click play and then decide you don't like the F-bomb afterwards.)
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Goodbye, and good riddance, to the central inverter?
I regularly report on new energy technology here, to help students keep up with this very fast-moving field, and as a way to begin to organize my own thoughts about energy sources so I can see how best to advise users and government agencies.
Most recently I posted on grid-scale battery developments, which are likely to help break down the remaining intermittency issues with renewable energy generation.
A key feature of the new dry cell, grid scale battery technology is modular design; the batteries are "plug and Play" and can be custom-organized in battery banks much as we currently do with computer servers.
I also heard the idea recently (on the Diane Rehm Show) that there would be no need to create buildings for such battery banks but instead power companies and other consumers of grid scale batteries would use trailers -- regular tractor-trailer rig-style trailers would work just fine.
Another new development, which I just found out about today, is the roll-out of modular AC inverters for solar PV. Now, instead of a central inverter coasting several thousands of dollars, a small AC inverter is attached to each panel.
I have a good few central inverter dinosaurs that I use for various demonstration and practical solar and wind projects, and I can report from experience that they are a pain. Typically big grey or white wall boxes that sit near your power distribution panel and are hard-wired, they cost thousands and often don't work. If something breaks with a solar power system, on-grid or off, 90% of the time it will be the inverter. You have to shut off all the power to switch out the inverter, using at minimum a flashlight and screwdriver, and it's a total pain and you can get electrocuted to boot, if you don't follow the proper procedure.
(Batteries are the next most unreliable component, being very sensitive to charging cycles, and have their own maintenance pitfalls and OSHA dangers, largely overcome by the dry cell technology, but that's another story.)
So getting rid of the central inverter is a great idea, especially if the new modular inverters are cheap and can be easily replaced. I haven't been able to locate data on cost, but a good price would be $50 or less, a fraction of the cost of the panel.
A solar panel with a built-in modular AC inverter might also be connected to power distribution just about anywhere. You could essentially just hang it out of a window and connect it to a wall socket, although on ordinary male-prong 110V plug would need to be made fail-safe using electronics in the inverter for this purpose.
You wouldn't want to touch the contacts on a sunny day, otherwise.
A few years ago an award-winning student-run start-up called Veranda Solar (out of Stanford U) tried to begin selling a modular panel with a mini-inverter for young 20-somethings to go green in their college dorms. I'm not sure what happened to V-Solar or their art-deco panels, but the same basic idea seems to have been used here.
This is just another interesting contribution to the renewable energy solution to climate change, and will likely make solar PV yet cheaper by reducing installation costs and training costs for installers.
What I want to know is, when and where can I buy my new panels with modular inverter at the Home Depot or online?
I have long been interested in putting a solar roof on the Womerlippi Farmhouse, but for several years now, like the good energy wonk that I am, I've prioritized reducing heat energy costs though my ongoing super-insulation project.
Essentially, I'm converting a 100 year old Maine farmhouse to a passive solar building at about $1,500 a year. I already have the oil and electric heat bills down to about $300/year, but that doesn't count the three cords of wood I make from our own woodlot. PV is in the plan, for after I get the insulation and sealing done, and after I get solar hot water fitted.
With quite a bit of this low-hanging fruit to pick, I haven't wanted to add solar PV just yet, especially when the minimum cost is several thousand dollars for a central inverter and, say, a kilowatt of panels.
But if I could buy one or two modular panels to begin, at say $500 each, and get one a year for several years, you could convince me to start the PV part of the project sooner rather than later.
And if I'm interested, others would be. I'm an energy economics curmudgeon and I only ever pay attention when the new ideas are cheaper than the old.
The new modules also present a major sales opportunity for household PV, by potentially reducing the barrier to entry that is the central inverter.
Most recently I posted on grid-scale battery developments, which are likely to help break down the remaining intermittency issues with renewable energy generation.
A key feature of the new dry cell, grid scale battery technology is modular design; the batteries are "plug and Play" and can be custom-organized in battery banks much as we currently do with computer servers.
I also heard the idea recently (on the Diane Rehm Show) that there would be no need to create buildings for such battery banks but instead power companies and other consumers of grid scale batteries would use trailers -- regular tractor-trailer rig-style trailers would work just fine.
Another new development, which I just found out about today, is the roll-out of modular AC inverters for solar PV. Now, instead of a central inverter coasting several thousands of dollars, a small AC inverter is attached to each panel.
I have a good few central inverter dinosaurs that I use for various demonstration and practical solar and wind projects, and I can report from experience that they are a pain. Typically big grey or white wall boxes that sit near your power distribution panel and are hard-wired, they cost thousands and often don't work. If something breaks with a solar power system, on-grid or off, 90% of the time it will be the inverter. You have to shut off all the power to switch out the inverter, using at minimum a flashlight and screwdriver, and it's a total pain and you can get electrocuted to boot, if you don't follow the proper procedure.
(Batteries are the next most unreliable component, being very sensitive to charging cycles, and have their own maintenance pitfalls and OSHA dangers, largely overcome by the dry cell technology, but that's another story.)
So getting rid of the central inverter is a great idea, especially if the new modular inverters are cheap and can be easily replaced. I haven't been able to locate data on cost, but a good price would be $50 or less, a fraction of the cost of the panel.
A solar panel with a built-in modular AC inverter might also be connected to power distribution just about anywhere. You could essentially just hang it out of a window and connect it to a wall socket, although on ordinary male-prong 110V plug would need to be made fail-safe using electronics in the inverter for this purpose.
You wouldn't want to touch the contacts on a sunny day, otherwise.
A few years ago an award-winning student-run start-up called Veranda Solar (out of Stanford U) tried to begin selling a modular panel with a mini-inverter for young 20-somethings to go green in their college dorms. I'm not sure what happened to V-Solar or their art-deco panels, but the same basic idea seems to have been used here.
This is just another interesting contribution to the renewable energy solution to climate change, and will likely make solar PV yet cheaper by reducing installation costs and training costs for installers.
What I want to know is, when and where can I buy my new panels with modular inverter at the Home Depot or online?
I have long been interested in putting a solar roof on the Womerlippi Farmhouse, but for several years now, like the good energy wonk that I am, I've prioritized reducing heat energy costs though my ongoing super-insulation project.
Essentially, I'm converting a 100 year old Maine farmhouse to a passive solar building at about $1,500 a year. I already have the oil and electric heat bills down to about $300/year, but that doesn't count the three cords of wood I make from our own woodlot. PV is in the plan, for after I get the insulation and sealing done, and after I get solar hot water fitted.
With quite a bit of this low-hanging fruit to pick, I haven't wanted to add solar PV just yet, especially when the minimum cost is several thousand dollars for a central inverter and, say, a kilowatt of panels.
But if I could buy one or two modular panels to begin, at say $500 each, and get one a year for several years, you could convince me to start the PV part of the project sooner rather than later.
And if I'm interested, others would be. I'm an energy economics curmudgeon and I only ever pay attention when the new ideas are cheaper than the old.
The new modules also present a major sales opportunity for household PV, by potentially reducing the barrier to entry that is the central inverter.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Reliving the 1980s
The world changes. But do we notice?
I'm always impressed by the power of negation, dissonance, and disconnection to persist in peoples' minds as the world changes around them.
In my field of renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change mitigation, I deal with this daily at the individual, community, and regional level, as Maine villages and towns struggle with the impinging reality of $4/gallon gasoline and $3.60/gallon heat oil.
I sometimes visualize myself uncomfortably as a kind of fat grumpy male midwife, as ideas that I've been conscious of for twenty, or in some cases, thirty years struggle to be born in the minds of people disconnected from what I think of as the "real" world of energy, food supply, and climate change.
The primary difference is in the "mental models" folks are using This is relatively old social science now. My former PhD committee member Willett Kempton and his graduate students first applied mental models to the social milieu of American environmental problems in the mid-1990s, to what I still think was rather profound effect.
Basically, people tend to explain complex phenomena by recourse to abstract cause and effect models (which may or may not be accurate or correct) we carry around in our heads.
If you ask an ordinary non-electrician person to explain how household electricity works, for instance, they may use the mental model of flowing water. This is actually not such a poor model to use some of the time, because household electricity is a physical flow of something: negatively charged subatomic particles called electrons. The mental model works just fine for some purposes, such as imagining electrical connections as if they were connections of pipes in a water system.
But as any physicist, professional electrician, or hapless handyman can tell you, the model fails badly when it comes to explaining what household electricity can do to the human body, if inadvertently connected to the ground through that body.
Take home message? It's not water, Einstein.
What I notice as I try to communicate with ordinary Mainers and New Englanders in general about energy supply, food security, and climate change is that many older people have a mental model of energy politics that was forged in the 1980s, and that we apply this model to today as if the world of the 1980s was still around us.
While our mental models of climate change are yet more dissonant with the reality I perceive through monitoring climate science.
The two sets of models combine to affect food supply issues.
This is all very contentious, since I have no social science basis for these assertions, and I really should know better. But I have to have a mental model too, don't I, to help me understand why people think the things they think about energy and climate change.
So we're talking about older folks here, middle aged people from say age 45 and up. The kinds of folks who contribute disproportionately to important decisions about things at a local and regional level. They run business and government offices. They teach schoolchildren and even college students.
I suppose the defining criterion might be that you had to live through the 1980s as a more or less grown-up, conscious person, paying attention to politics.
If so, you would have noticed things like the oil crisis of the late 1970s, the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear accidents, the Reagan presidency and the economic recovery that followed, and the decade of the 1990s with its relative prosperity and economic growth (which masked a terrible growth in the American class divide, and may have heralded the end of the American dream, but we'll save that discussion for another day), leading to the Internet Age.
What perfectly reasonable mental model of energy might ensue from this biography?
Well, you'd be rationally justified in deciding that the energy fear of the Carter era, specifically the short-lived energy crisis that President Carter told us was "the moral equivalent of war," was just a big fat stinky red herring.
You'd come up with a mental model of energy crises as things that somehow come and go and pass, a bit like economic recessions, perhaps. And you'd conclude that things would return to normal, eventually.
You'd just wait it out.
No need for a big panic. No need for new technology. No need to insulate that home or change those leaky windows. Get a more fuel-efficient car? Maybe for a year or two. Trade in that eight-cylinder Detroit boat that gets 16 mpg for a six or four cylinder model that maybe gets 25 mpg, until around 1992, when gas is down again, and those new SUVs again offer the familiar comfort and security that one can only get from driving at least three real American tons of solid steel down the freeway.
Back to the womb.
"Wind turbines on my mountaintops? No need for that. Nuclear power in Maine? Close down Maine Yankee forever. New powerlines? Don't need them. Solar PV or solar hot water? It'll never work. Electric cars? Believe it when I see it."
"Passive solar? Heating a house without a heating system? Not even conceivable. And if we can't even imagine it, we certainly don't need one."
So much for energy, and you can see where this leads naturally. After a while our hapless 49 year-old is living in a house that costs $5,000 a year just to heat, driving a car that he or she can't afford to fill with gas. Waiting for the price to come down. Because it will, right? It did in 1990. It will again.
(I'm picking on 49 year-olds because I am one. Don't take it personally. Just feel empathy for me turning the big 5-0 this year.)
What about climate change?
"It's just so hard to understand, isn't it? All those scientists telling us what to do with our lives. I don't trust science. The newspapers always seem to be able to find a contrarian scientist, so not all scientists believe in climate change, do they? How do you know what to believe? Fox News say it's all a conspiracy. I'm not sure I agree with that but you never know."
"And that winter was cold. Brrr."
Can't possibly be right.
And food prices?
Well, if you're still in denial about putting $80 of gas into that SUV each week, a little ethanol might seem like a good thing. If you're even paying attention to what goes into your tank at that level of detail.
It's really hard to notice hungry children in, say, India, from the forecourt of your local short stop, when the stuff gushing out of the hose looks and smells just like the stuff that's gushed out of the hose since you were 18, in 1979, and you filled the tank of your first car.
(Mine was a Mini. A real British Leyland Mini, that got 40 mpg in 1979 and that I could rebuild myself on the side of the street, not a silly marketer's simulacrum for which you can't buy parts. But that's a whole another story.)
When you've been doing the same thing for thirty years, when it looks and feels and smells pretty much the same, it's hard to notice the small differences...
...like for instance that it says 10% ethanol and uses 40% of the US corn crop and now costs $4/gallon.
...or that we just had the highest recorded flood peak of the Mississippi River in a hundred years and the most tornadoes ever recorded in one day or that 2010 was the second hottest year on record.
Like a frog in a saucepan, you may not notice the changes until it's too late.
A bit like the size of my pant's waist measurement, also now entering the 40's and in denial.
How long can we keep on doing this until we notice the changes?
I wish I knew.
I really do.
I'm always impressed by the power of negation, dissonance, and disconnection to persist in peoples' minds as the world changes around them.
In my field of renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change mitigation, I deal with this daily at the individual, community, and regional level, as Maine villages and towns struggle with the impinging reality of $4/gallon gasoline and $3.60/gallon heat oil.
I sometimes visualize myself uncomfortably as a kind of fat grumpy male midwife, as ideas that I've been conscious of for twenty, or in some cases, thirty years struggle to be born in the minds of people disconnected from what I think of as the "real" world of energy, food supply, and climate change.
The primary difference is in the "mental models" folks are using This is relatively old social science now. My former PhD committee member Willett Kempton and his graduate students first applied mental models to the social milieu of American environmental problems in the mid-1990s, to what I still think was rather profound effect.
Basically, people tend to explain complex phenomena by recourse to abstract cause and effect models (which may or may not be accurate or correct) we carry around in our heads.
If you ask an ordinary non-electrician person to explain how household electricity works, for instance, they may use the mental model of flowing water. This is actually not such a poor model to use some of the time, because household electricity is a physical flow of something: negatively charged subatomic particles called electrons. The mental model works just fine for some purposes, such as imagining electrical connections as if they were connections of pipes in a water system.
But as any physicist, professional electrician, or hapless handyman can tell you, the model fails badly when it comes to explaining what household electricity can do to the human body, if inadvertently connected to the ground through that body.
Take home message? It's not water, Einstein.
What I notice as I try to communicate with ordinary Mainers and New Englanders in general about energy supply, food security, and climate change is that many older people have a mental model of energy politics that was forged in the 1980s, and that we apply this model to today as if the world of the 1980s was still around us.
While our mental models of climate change are yet more dissonant with the reality I perceive through monitoring climate science.
The two sets of models combine to affect food supply issues.
This is all very contentious, since I have no social science basis for these assertions, and I really should know better. But I have to have a mental model too, don't I, to help me understand why people think the things they think about energy and climate change.
So we're talking about older folks here, middle aged people from say age 45 and up. The kinds of folks who contribute disproportionately to important decisions about things at a local and regional level. They run business and government offices. They teach schoolchildren and even college students.
I suppose the defining criterion might be that you had to live through the 1980s as a more or less grown-up, conscious person, paying attention to politics.
If so, you would have noticed things like the oil crisis of the late 1970s, the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear accidents, the Reagan presidency and the economic recovery that followed, and the decade of the 1990s with its relative prosperity and economic growth (which masked a terrible growth in the American class divide, and may have heralded the end of the American dream, but we'll save that discussion for another day), leading to the Internet Age.
What perfectly reasonable mental model of energy might ensue from this biography?
Well, you'd be rationally justified in deciding that the energy fear of the Carter era, specifically the short-lived energy crisis that President Carter told us was "the moral equivalent of war," was just a big fat stinky red herring.
You'd come up with a mental model of energy crises as things that somehow come and go and pass, a bit like economic recessions, perhaps. And you'd conclude that things would return to normal, eventually.
You'd just wait it out.
No need for a big panic. No need for new technology. No need to insulate that home or change those leaky windows. Get a more fuel-efficient car? Maybe for a year or two. Trade in that eight-cylinder Detroit boat that gets 16 mpg for a six or four cylinder model that maybe gets 25 mpg, until around 1992, when gas is down again, and those new SUVs again offer the familiar comfort and security that one can only get from driving at least three real American tons of solid steel down the freeway.
Back to the womb.
"Wind turbines on my mountaintops? No need for that. Nuclear power in Maine? Close down Maine Yankee forever. New powerlines? Don't need them. Solar PV or solar hot water? It'll never work. Electric cars? Believe it when I see it."
"Passive solar? Heating a house without a heating system? Not even conceivable. And if we can't even imagine it, we certainly don't need one."
So much for energy, and you can see where this leads naturally. After a while our hapless 49 year-old is living in a house that costs $5,000 a year just to heat, driving a car that he or she can't afford to fill with gas. Waiting for the price to come down. Because it will, right? It did in 1990. It will again.
(I'm picking on 49 year-olds because I am one. Don't take it personally. Just feel empathy for me turning the big 5-0 this year.)
What about climate change?
"It's just so hard to understand, isn't it? All those scientists telling us what to do with our lives. I don't trust science. The newspapers always seem to be able to find a contrarian scientist, so not all scientists believe in climate change, do they? How do you know what to believe? Fox News say it's all a conspiracy. I'm not sure I agree with that but you never know."
"And that winter was cold. Brrr."
Can't possibly be right.
And food prices?
Well, if you're still in denial about putting $80 of gas into that SUV each week, a little ethanol might seem like a good thing. If you're even paying attention to what goes into your tank at that level of detail.
It's really hard to notice hungry children in, say, India, from the forecourt of your local short stop, when the stuff gushing out of the hose looks and smells just like the stuff that's gushed out of the hose since you were 18, in 1979, and you filled the tank of your first car.
(Mine was a Mini. A real British Leyland Mini, that got 40 mpg in 1979 and that I could rebuild myself on the side of the street, not a silly marketer's simulacrum for which you can't buy parts. But that's a whole another story.)
When you've been doing the same thing for thirty years, when it looks and feels and smells pretty much the same, it's hard to notice the small differences...
...like for instance that it says 10% ethanol and uses 40% of the US corn crop and now costs $4/gallon.
...or that we just had the highest recorded flood peak of the Mississippi River in a hundred years and the most tornadoes ever recorded in one day or that 2010 was the second hottest year on record.
Like a frog in a saucepan, you may not notice the changes until it's too late.
A bit like the size of my pant's waist measurement, also now entering the 40's and in denial.
How long can we keep on doing this until we notice the changes?
I wish I knew.
I really do.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Three more
Yesterday was graduation day at Unity College.
Three more Sustainability Design and Technology graduates went out into the world.
The three are Kayla Bubar, Cody Floyd, and Jamie Nemecek.
(Kayla got done with classes at Christmas. But there's no ceremonials at December graduation, just cake and speeches in the Library.)
I was very happy to see these fledglings walk the stage and get their diplomas. They've each worked hard, and I'm confident that each will go on to make a difference in the world.
Actually, Kayla is already hired. She has a job as Sustainability Coordinator for the food service at the University of Southern Maine.
Kayla has been a mainstay of the Sustainability Office. You can scroll through the UC Sustainability Monitor blog to see her contributions there. She also interned with G.O. Logic, who will be building a version of their passive solar design house on campus this summer. Kayla, in her internship, worked on publicity and PR for the original version built in Belfast, Maine.
Actually, come to think of it, Cody is also hired. He's going to be on the wind crew with me this summer.
Cody has worked in the construction business for some time. His father is a contractor. He's considering marrying his energy background with construction somehow.
Jamie wants to go to policy school, but is taking a semester, or possibly two semesters off. She's applying for policy internships.
Jamie also won the President's Award at graduation. This is an award given to the student chosen by the President of the College for demonstrating an excellent combination of academic excellence with community service.
She certainly deserved it. Jamie has been a mainstay of our community energy work, and has served on the community energy committees in both Unity and Waterville.
Here are some good pictures of all three doing fun (and intellectually rewarding) renewable energy stuff:
First up, since she technically graduated first, here's Kayla on her way to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. And yes, that would be Wales in the British Isles, not Wales, Maine.
(That would be why it's a "centre" and not a "center".)
I thought this was a good picture because of the rather direct and frankly appraising gaze the photographer is getting from Ms. Bubar.
And here she is actually at the Centre, in the solar courtyard by the cafe, with a computer laptop open, no doubt actually assiduously studying renewable energy, with Amber (who also graduated yesterday), and Alicia (who graduated last year).
Kayla was accepted to the CAT Graduate School of the Environment MSc program, but has put off starting the program while she decides if she wants instead to go to a US graduate program. She is also accepted to Boston Architectural College.
Here's Cody helping me with some wind power research. The first picture is from our research platform at the former Charleston, Maine USAF base, now a prison. We use the plinth for one of the old DEW-line radomes to support anemometer towers. Cody helped me set up the first anemometer on this site several summers ago.
The second is from the top of an old WWII Naval observation tower at the Peaks Island anemometer site.
And last but by no means least, here is Jamie. Both photos are at the Fox Islands Wind farm on the island of Vinalhaven. We're setting up the ground level anemometers that are to be used for the NREL sound abatement study.
The first shot is Jamie with Mary. They have just completed working on a boom arm.
The second shot is Jamie and Harvard professor George Baker working with a sensor.
Finally, I thought we'd better put up this video of Jamie on the Solar Road Trip. Jamie hates the video, but I think it's great.
Here's some of the Solar Road Trip context as seen by NYT climate and energy blogger Andrew Revkin. Read the first one before the second to get the full effect:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/white-house-puts-off-solar-enthusiasts/
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/white-house-deliberative-process-on-solar-ends/
As you can easily see from the different activities, and the different placements, these three have already made a big difference in the world, before even leaving college.
We expect very confidently that they will go on to do much more.
A college's reputation rests on the quality of its students when they finally go out into the world. I think these students are a very great credit to Unity College and the experiences we've managed to provide them. We wish them all the best, and hope they come back to visit often.
Three more Sustainability Design and Technology graduates went out into the world.
The three are Kayla Bubar, Cody Floyd, and Jamie Nemecek.
(Kayla got done with classes at Christmas. But there's no ceremonials at December graduation, just cake and speeches in the Library.)
I was very happy to see these fledglings walk the stage and get their diplomas. They've each worked hard, and I'm confident that each will go on to make a difference in the world.
Actually, Kayla is already hired. She has a job as Sustainability Coordinator for the food service at the University of Southern Maine.
Kayla has been a mainstay of the Sustainability Office. You can scroll through the UC Sustainability Monitor blog to see her contributions there. She also interned with G.O. Logic, who will be building a version of their passive solar design house on campus this summer. Kayla, in her internship, worked on publicity and PR for the original version built in Belfast, Maine.
Actually, come to think of it, Cody is also hired. He's going to be on the wind crew with me this summer.
Cody has worked in the construction business for some time. His father is a contractor. He's considering marrying his energy background with construction somehow.
Jamie wants to go to policy school, but is taking a semester, or possibly two semesters off. She's applying for policy internships.
Jamie also won the President's Award at graduation. This is an award given to the student chosen by the President of the College for demonstrating an excellent combination of academic excellence with community service.
She certainly deserved it. Jamie has been a mainstay of our community energy work, and has served on the community energy committees in both Unity and Waterville.
Here are some good pictures of all three doing fun (and intellectually rewarding) renewable energy stuff:
First up, since she technically graduated first, here's Kayla on her way to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. And yes, that would be Wales in the British Isles, not Wales, Maine.
(That would be why it's a "centre" and not a "center".)
I thought this was a good picture because of the rather direct and frankly appraising gaze the photographer is getting from Ms. Bubar.
And here she is actually at the Centre, in the solar courtyard by the cafe, with a computer laptop open, no doubt actually assiduously studying renewable energy, with Amber (who also graduated yesterday), and Alicia (who graduated last year).
Kayla was accepted to the CAT Graduate School of the Environment MSc program, but has put off starting the program while she decides if she wants instead to go to a US graduate program. She is also accepted to Boston Architectural College.
Here's Cody helping me with some wind power research. The first picture is from our research platform at the former Charleston, Maine USAF base, now a prison. We use the plinth for one of the old DEW-line radomes to support anemometer towers. Cody helped me set up the first anemometer on this site several summers ago.
The second is from the top of an old WWII Naval observation tower at the Peaks Island anemometer site.
And last but by no means least, here is Jamie. Both photos are at the Fox Islands Wind farm on the island of Vinalhaven. We're setting up the ground level anemometers that are to be used for the NREL sound abatement study.
The first shot is Jamie with Mary. They have just completed working on a boom arm.
The second shot is Jamie and Harvard professor George Baker working with a sensor.
Finally, I thought we'd better put up this video of Jamie on the Solar Road Trip. Jamie hates the video, but I think it's great.
Here's some of the Solar Road Trip context as seen by NYT climate and energy blogger Andrew Revkin. Read the first one before the second to get the full effect:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/white-house-puts-off-solar-enthusiasts/
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/white-house-deliberative-process-on-solar-ends/
As you can easily see from the different activities, and the different placements, these three have already made a big difference in the world, before even leaving college.
We expect very confidently that they will go on to do much more.
A college's reputation rests on the quality of its students when they finally go out into the world. I think these students are a very great credit to Unity College and the experiences we've managed to provide them. We wish them all the best, and hope they come back to visit often.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Monbiot examines the problem
I shouldn't be surprised if this article becomes a kind of keystone to the future of the environmental movement.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/may/05/green-problem-environmentalism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/may/05/green-problem-environmentalism
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Hidden Valley Home-Building
Mitch, our outgoing (in both senses of the word) college President, asked that I highlight his friend David Moskovitz's group and their work with timber framing workshops.
I would be remiss, and get into beaucoup trouble, if I did not also mention that our community partners, Newforest Institute are also holding timber framing workshops this summer.
Timber Framing Workshop
Hidden Valley Nature Center, Jefferson
Wednesday-Saturday, April 20-23
Learn post and beam basics in a hands-on setting where participants will experience the entire process from felling the trees to the finished product. Students will:
1. Go into the woods to see the front-end of the process. What trees were cut? Why? How did our low impact equipment get the logs to a portable bandsaw mill located on-site.
2. Help mill logs into timbers.
3. Learn basic joinery while building a small shed.
Program cost is $450 ($400 for members), includes all materials, breakfast and lunch. No previous experience necessary. MOFGA scholarships available. HVNC’s rustic overnight cabins available at reduced rates. FMI: www.hvnc.org, 586-6752, or gary@hvnc.org.
Hidden Valley Nature Center, located in Jefferson, is a member based, community supported organization with 800 acres of diverse habitat, many small ponds and vernal pools, miles of trails, and a range of low-impact, sustainable forestry projects both completed and underway. It is dedicated to providing educational and recreational opportunities to the community throughout the year. All donations are tax deductible.
I would be remiss, and get into beaucoup trouble, if I did not also mention that our community partners, Newforest Institute are also holding timber framing workshops this summer.
Timber Framing Workshop
Hidden Valley Nature Center, Jefferson
Wednesday-Saturday, April 20-23
Learn post and beam basics in a hands-on setting where participants will experience the entire process from felling the trees to the finished product. Students will:
1. Go into the woods to see the front-end of the process. What trees were cut? Why? How did our low impact equipment get the logs to a portable bandsaw mill located on-site.
2. Help mill logs into timbers.
3. Learn basic joinery while building a small shed.
Program cost is $450 ($400 for members), includes all materials, breakfast and lunch. No previous experience necessary. MOFGA scholarships available. HVNC’s rustic overnight cabins available at reduced rates. FMI: www.hvnc.org, 586-6752, or gary@hvnc.org.
Hidden Valley Nature Center, located in Jefferson, is a member based, community supported organization with 800 acres of diverse habitat, many small ponds and vernal pools, miles of trails, and a range of low-impact, sustainable forestry projects both completed and underway. It is dedicated to providing educational and recreational opportunities to the community throughout the year. All donations are tax deductible.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Building Jerusalem in my head
It's been sunny off and on this week, but there's been a bit of rain too. There hasn't been any frost.
As a result, the grass is making up for lost time, and in our most fertile places has jumped up three inches in almost as few days.
I was able to put the sheep out to graze for the first time for a couple of hours on Sunday night after our chicken-fence marathon. They went to the New Paddock, where the grass was long-enough already, but less lush, mixed in with some brown thatch from the fall. This was good because they were able to adjust slowly to their new diet.
Sheep get a bit squiffy if they jump from hay to lush green grass too quickly. This is called "scours" and it isn't good for them.
Later, Friday evening after the BBC America news, we fenced the Island Paddock, and Saturday afternoon (after I got back from judging at the Maine State Science Fair) they went on to that very lush green material, with no ill effects.
Our flock of mothers and nursing lambs were grazed most evenings after work this last week, which reduced the hay consumption considerably.
For which my wallet is very grateful.
I had been trucking up to Newport every few days for a large round bale from Beem Farm, where they specialize in hay and straw. This was very nice timothy hay, which was good for our nursing mothers, but at $45 a bale, it was a bit steep for sheep.
Sheep are wasteful of hay. Our sheep, given a whole round bale to eat, will mine through rapidly (leaving a perfect nose-shaped hole in the bale), eating all the leaf and leaving the stem. The expensive buggers then bed down on the stems as if they were the softest straw, which they may as well be. After they've slept on the stems for a night, only the sharpest of hunger will cause them to go back over the now-tainted fodder.
The solution is to eke out the fodder using a hay feeder. We have one, in the barn, but it takes square bales not round, and I prefer our ewes out in the sunshine all day this time of year. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, good for drying moist dungy fleece, and a good deterrent for fly-strike. I'd rather waste hay than get infected sheep.
Actually, there is another solution, which is to chop the hay. Old timers used a device called a hay chopper to reduce the stems a little, after which cattle and sheep would eat more of the whole plant. If I could ever find or make something modern and efficient to do this job for us, I could get our hay consumption per year down about fifty percent.
So the green grass has helped a lot with costs. I also was able to convince Andrew Stoll the Unity Amishman to sell me the last of his 2010 hay, twenty square bales of green mixed pasture grasses which I picked up on Monday during my lunch hour. This fodder wasn't technically as nutritious as the Beem Farm timothy, but it could be fed a bale at a time, and it was the second cut of the season, so there was more leaf and less stem.
The combination of the switch to square bales and the addition of the evening grazing routine has cut the hay consumption down considerably. A round bale is often said to be worth ten to fifteen square bales, and indeed one Beem Farm round bale weighed more heavily on the truck springs than all twenty of the Stoll Farm square bales.
The Amish around here cut by horse power, but run their motorized balers in the barn, feeding the cut in by hand, and so you get a loose bale. But each Stoll Farm bale lasted almost a whole day, whereas the sheep ran through their last Beem Farm bale in only four days.
At $2 each for the Stoll Farm bales, and with each bale lasting longer, our hay bill has been more than cut in half.
Obviously we don't make money nor break even on the sheep business. Revenue from sales of whole live and whole butchered animals and yarn comes to less than $500/year, whereas we spend that much on hay alone, never mind the grain and shearing costs.
It probably costs us about $1,000 a year to stay in the sheep business. We can make a profit on eggs. We break even on pigs. But we lose on sheep.
But after several years of experience we've been able to work out what might work. If we had about a twenty-acre hay field, a bigger tractor, all our own haying equipment, a lambing shed, and four or five times as many animals of slightly better bloodlines, I reckon we might get good-enough prices for Corriedale ewe-lambs as breeding stock, and we could get a good carcass price for a Corriedale market lamb. We'd only get the very best prices for our meat if we put in our own mini USDA- and State-of-Maine certifiable slaughtering and packing facility, and sold our other farm products like Aimee's pesto and the yarn we get made up at the same time. We could then sell retail in small vacuum-packed packages, and get $5/pound or more at the local farmers market and in our own CSA scheme, the germ of which already exists in our pig club members.
Now we know how to keep sheep alive and thriving in this climate, we could make money out of them, I'm sure. But only if we were willing to risk something like $40,000 of capital.
Dream on, Mick! That's the path to impoverishment and bankruptcy. We're not giving up our day jobs anytime soon. I'm happy for now to write off that annual $1,000 loss against a couple tons of compost for the garden, against not having to mow lawns, which suburban chore I despise (and lawn mowers cost money and use gas which also costs money), and against the very great pleasure of seeing lambs snuggle up to their mothers on green pastures in the evening sun, as in the photo above.
For the foreseeable, if we're going to help take any particular sustainable business to the next level, it will be Unity College.
One of the hymns sung during the recent nuptial event in the UK was William Blake's Jerusalem, which particular favorite piece of music I was very sorry to miss, but then it did happen to come during my Friday morning commute.
We didn't get a day off in New England.
Bread of Heaven, however, another favorite (also known as Guide me, oh thy Great Redeemer), came during my morning cereal, much to my republican wife's* anguish since I turned up the volume.
But Jerusalem remains more germane to my mood this spring...
And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green & pleasant Land
*In the British sense of the word, someone who prefers a republican form of government, most definitely not a monarchy.
Building Jerusalem in my head
It's been sunny off and on this week, but there's been a bit of rain too. There hasn't been any frost.
As a result, the grass is making up for lost time, and in our most fertile places has jumped up three inches in almost as few days.
I was able to put the sheep out to graze for the first time for a couple of hours on Sunday night after our chicken-fence marathon. They went to the New Paddock, where the grass was long-enough already, but less lush, mixed in with some brown thatch from the fall. This was good because they were able to adjust slowly to their new diet.
Sheep get a bit squiffy if they jump from hay to lush green grass too quickly. This is called "scours" and it isn't good for them.
Later, Friday evening after the BBC America news, we fenced the Island Paddock, and Saturday afternoon (after I got back from judging at the Maine State Science Fair) they went on to that very lush green material, with no ill effects.
Our flock of mothers and nursing lambs were grazed most evenings after work this last week, which reduced the hay consumption considerably.
For which my wallet is very grateful.
I had been trucking up to Newport every few days for a large round bale from Beem Farm, where they specialize in hay and straw. This was very nice timothy hay, which was good for our nursing mothers, but at $45 a bale, it was a bit steep for sheep.
Sheep are wasteful of hay. Our sheep, given a whole round bale to eat, will mine through rapidly (leaving a perfect nose-shaped hole in the bale), eating all the leaf and leaving the stem. The expensive buggers then bed down on the stems as if they were the softest straw, which they may as well be. After they've slept on the stems for a night, only the sharpest of hunger will cause them to go back over the now-tainted fodder.
The solution is to eke out the fodder using a hay feeder. We have one, in the barn, but it takes square bales not round, and I prefer our ewes out in the sunshine all day this time of year. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, good for drying moist dungy fleece, and a good deterrent for fly-strike. I'd rather waste hay than get infected sheep.
Actually, there is another solution, which is to chop the hay. Old timers used a device called a hay chopper to reduce the stems a little, after which cattle and sheep would eat more of the whole plant. If I could ever find or make something modern and efficient to do this job for us, I could get our hay consumption per year down about fifty percent.
So the green grass has helped a lot with costs. I also was able to convince Andrew Stoll the Unity Amishman to sell me the last of his 2010 hay, twenty square bales of green mixed pasture grasses which I picked up on Monday during my lunch hour. This fodder wasn't technically as nutritious as the Beem Farm timothy, but it could be fed a bale at a time, and it was the second cut of the season, so there was more leaf and less stem.
The combination of the switch to square bales and the addition of the evening grazing routine has cut the hay consumption down considerably. A round bale is often said to be worth ten to fifteen square bales, and indeed one Beem Farm round bale weighed more heavily on the truck springs than all twenty of the Stoll Farm square bales.
The Amish around here cut by horse power, but run their motorized balers in the barn, feeding the cut in by hand, and so you get a loose bale. But each Stoll Farm bale lasted almost a whole day, whereas the sheep ran through their last Beem Farm bale in only four days.
At $2 each for the Stoll Farm bales, and with each bale lasting longer, our hay bill has been more than cut in half.
Obviously we don't make money nor break even on the sheep business. Revenue from sales of whole live and whole butchered animals and yarn comes to less than $500/year, whereas we spend that much on hay alone, never mind the grain and shearing costs.
It probably costs us about $1,000 a year to stay in the sheep business. We can make a profit on eggs. We break even on pigs. But we lose on sheep.
But after several years of experience we've been able to work out what might work. If we had about a twenty-acre hay field, a bigger tractor, all our own haying equipment, a lambing shed, and four or five times as many animals of slightly better bloodlines, I reckon we might get good-enough prices for Corriedale ewe-lambs as breeding stock, and we could get a good carcass price for a Corriedale market lamb. We'd only get the very best prices for our meat if we put in our own mini USDA- and State-of-Maine certifiable slaughtering and packing facility, and sold our other farm products like Aimee's pesto and the yarn we get made up at the same time. We could then sell retail in small vacuum-packed packages, and get $5/pound or more at the local farmers market and in our own CSA scheme, the germ of which already exists in our pig club members.
Now we know how to keep sheep alive and thriving in this climate, we could make money out of them, I'm sure. But only if we were willing to risk something like $40,000 of capital.
Dream on, Mick! That's the path to impoverishment and bankruptcy. We're not giving up our day jobs anytime soon. I'm happy for now to write off that annual $1,000 loss against a couple tons of compost for the garden, against not having to mow lawns, which suburban chore I despise (and lawn mowers cost money and use gas which also costs money), and against the very great pleasure of seeing lambs snuggle up to their mothers on green pastures in the evening sun, as in the photo above.
For the foreseeable, if we're going to help take any particular sustainable business to the next level, it will be Unity College.
One of the hymns sung during the recent nuptial event in the UK was William Blake's Jerusalem, which particular favorite piece of music I was very sorry to miss, but then it did happen to come during my Friday morning commute.
We didn't get a day off in New England.
Bread of Heaven, however, another favorite (also known as Guide me, oh thy Great Redeemer), came during my morning cereal, much to my republican wife's* anguish since I turned up the volume.
But Jerusalem remains more germane to my mood this spring...
And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green & pleasant Land
*In the British sense of the word, someone who prefers a republican form of government, most definitely not a monarchy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)