Alternative Energy Dead Ends

I’ve been interested in alternative energy for decades. Some experiments worked out really well: solar electric, batch solar hot water, waste veggie oil powered vehicles, cold well water refrigeration -a lot of stuff. 

There are some notable alternative energy projects I didn’t do for various reasons. The big one was wind energy. Plenty of places have good locations for wind power. My location isn’t one of them. It’s not the price of the wind generator so much as the price of the tower. When in the mountains fairly tall towers are needed to get above turbulence that can rip your windmill apart. There was a guy in town who had one on too short a tower. Periodically the darn thing would throw blades like giant spears of death. He’s lucky no one got killed. 

Micro hydro needs a good water flow with a sufficient gradient. That wasn’t going to happen with the trickle that comes from my well overflow. 

At one point I got way too deep into the design of methane digesters. There are farms that use animal waste to generate methane to run generators and stoves. It was the same energy source used in the movie “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” The only problem is that you need a lot of farm animals to make a go of it -and you are shoveling lots of animal poop. Most farms have discovered they get better use from their animal wastes by composting everything to reduce fertilizer inputs. 

Anybody familiar with wood burning cars? During WWII a lot of gasoline vehicles were converted to run on wood chips. The wood was turned into gas with a big complicated mess of pipes and valves. There are people building wood gasifacation systems to this day. It’s more of a novelty that truly practical, unless you have special circumstances. I was tempted to build one, but it wouldn’t make financial sense to do so. There are some cool YouTube videos out there. 

As much as I loved to tinker with alternative energy I had some serious restrictions. It either would have to have a very good chance of working and saving money or be put together on the cheap from salvaged junk. Oh yeah, my lovely wife said I couldn’t burn the house down either. That was seriously tested when I built a heater to burn waste veggie oil. Let’s just say I had some fuel flow issues. 

After setting off smoke detectors on three floors and sending a plum of black smoke high into the air, my lovely wife put an end to the experiments. Too bad. It was just getting interesting.

-Sixbears