Fantastic , great , brilliant etc etc Green gas from AD is the way to go.

So your thoughts with regard to Stroud having an incinerator instead of investing in a local AD unit or better still just allowing someone to build one without their investment in return for a gate fee per tonne at about half the landfill tax level.

I am really looking forward to tricorn house to be developed, that is one building that was born ugly!!!

Cheers

Alex

Bugs will give us free power while cleaning our sewage:

You might think a constant supply of fresh air would be essential for a sewage treatment plant, but some bacteria cannot stand the stuff. These bugs could be the key to cleaning waste water so efficiently that the process could generate power rather than consume it.

In conventional sewage plants, micro-organisms digest solid waste in “activated sludge”. They convert the organic matter into methane but leave liquid waste containing ammonium and phosphates, which must be removed before the water can be poured into rivers.

Existing treatment plants use a lot of energy to get rid of the ammonium. The process uses bacteria that convert ammonium into nitrate, and the bugs that do this need oxygen, which must be constantly supplied to the treatment tanks by electric pumps. The nitrate is then converted into nitrogen gas by still more bugs, known as denitrifying bacteria. These require methanol, which must also be added to the mix.

This process consumes an average of 44 watt-hours per day for each person who adds waste to the sewage system. This can add up to megawatts in a big city.

Cut out the middle bug:

But now Gijs Kuenen at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues are developing a technique that cuts out the energy-consuming processes. The key is a recently discovered type of bacteria that can munch ammonia without oxygen. So-called anammox bacteria short-cut the nitrogen cycle by converting ammonium directly into nitrogen gas.

One by-product of this process is methane, which Kuenen proposes to harvest and use as fuel. The team calculates that, far from consuming energy, the process could generate 24 watt-hours per person per day. “This is about trying to make waste water treatment plants completely sustainable, in the sense that they could even produce energy, which is not the case in present treatment facilities,” says Kuenen.

This month the team will begin building a pilot plant to demonstrate the technology at the Dokhaven waste water treatment plant in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, working with from Radboud University Nijmegen and water purification firm Paques, based in the Dutch town of Balk.

Michael Wagner, a microbiologist at the University of Vienna in Austria, points out that anammox bacteria were discovered only 20 years ago and hold great promise for a new generation of sustainable waste water treatment plants. “The anammox story shows how fundamental discoveries by microbiologists can revolutionise waste water treatment,” he says.

You’re right, burning gas gives off CO2.

The gas you’re using currently is a source of CO2 that’s been locked up for a few billion years, so it’s a net addition to the atmosphere, in that respect, when it’s burnt.

The gas we’re going to make will come from food that’s been grown (and thrown) much more recently – in the growing process it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, part of which at least gets released when we burn it. You could consider it more or less carbon neutral in so far as the carbon absorbed to grow the food is re released on burning the gas. Broadly speaking.

Plus of course the CO2 in the food would be released in any event by the process of decomposition.

I agree with you that making as much renewable electricity as we can is the right thing to do – but we do have waste sources that can be turned into green gas which we can use instead of fossil gas – and I think we should use these also.

And if you buy gas now (which it sounds like you do), it’s fossil gas, you can only be improving things by switching to green gas – even if it’s only a stop gap until you switch your gas supply off and run only on electricity (which I think many of us will have to, or choose to, do in the future).

Hope that helps.

Cheers.

We did build one windmill in 2009, the one powering B&Q.

When we build at an unfavourable exchange rate we basically build a project which is financially weaker than it would or should have been – and that’s locked in for probably 15 years (it’s debt period) – that does hamper our ability to build more windmills later.

There’s a balance for us to strike – we can’t stop building until the exchange rate recovers, but we can’t just build as we did before (the rate crashed) – in some cases our projects just cant be built at this x rate though.

We’ll build some this year, but not as many as we’d like.

Cheers.

It’s actually a far more complex job that you might imagine once you get down to the detail – and it takes several months to have run through the majority of processes for the first time.

Like billing for example, until 3 months down the road you can’t know if your billing system actually will produce good bills on time and accurately.

A good experience for our customers is more important to us than speed or size. We’re busy making things excellent before we allow too many people to sign up.

And things are excellent, we’re very pleased with progress.

I’ve no concern that this is bad for us, it’s quite the opposite I think.

Cheers.

My first thoughts were about the overall efficiency. It’s the key to any attempt to store energy.

I’ve not looked at the paper but I see Nick has and says (further down) that the efficiency is not too bad – which is a surprise.

There’s a lot of work going on right now on grid scale energy storage – it’s part of the answer going fwds IMO.

Another part of the answer is something I like to think of as Intelligent Demand – something quite the opposite to our current energy on demand model.

A combo of storage and smart demand could go a long way.

Cheers.

BG wise – Reckon you just got lucky and got someone who didn’t have a scripted answer for that.

Cheers.

First green gas on the grid will be announced very soon – and it won’t be BG wot did it…..:)

Cheers.

Thanks for the heads up on Bristol Council,. We hope to build our first project here in Stroud with our council, Brissol is close enough though – virtually our backyard. We’ll keep an eye on it.

WRT time span – We’re rolling our gas tariff out ‘gently’ while we make sure things work like we want them to. We’re past the early test phase though and any Ecotricity customer can now add gas to their electricity supply – over 2,000 Ecotricity customers have already signed up as of last week.

Within another few weeks we should have gas fully integrated into our web site and processes and available to everybody – customers and non customers alike.

Things should get interesting then.

There’s nothing to stop you joining us now if you want.

Cheers.

Digressing a bit, if you built the turbines at the unfavourable exchange rate then they would cost you more… and then ecotricity’s WhichGreen figure would go up wouldn’t it? But then that would be counterproductive on reducing the UK’s GHG emissions.

I look forward to hearing about more turbines going up, but maybe it is wiser to wait until favourable finance and exchange rate conditions come…

Regards
Jeff

What happened in 2009 (and no surprises here I think) was the combination of the global recession and credit crunch which made the job of building windmills (a job already difficult enough) that much harder. Banks simply stopped lending as they appeared to run out of money, the pound crashed in value against the euro (we buy our windmills in euros) and things generally ground to a halt.

We were chuffed to still came top of the WhichGreen league – for the 6th year running and although £78 per customer was small for us it was still untouchable..

As for the guarantee to match every pound our customers spend – that wasn’t a commitment – it was an observation from our performance these last five years, it’s what we’ve been achieving. It’s no longer a true observation and we’re amending what we say to reflect that – we do intend to get back there though, soon as poss.

Cheers

http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/

So what’s going on here, do we not actually vote for who we actually want?! .. Anyway I thought it was encouraging. Maybe it will also help people realise that the Green party isn’t just about being green.

(PS. Worth noting, the opinions in this post are mine and are nothing to do with Ecotricity!)

A much better idea is to use (wind) electric powered heat pumps to heat buildings instead of natural gas, it also gives you a lot of potential storage for example if you knew you where going to have a windy week and then a still weekend you could use the heat pump to heat your house/hot water tank a few degrees warmer than normal and then you wouldn’t need heating for a couple of days when it was still.

There is a microbe that will convert CO2 to CH4 when electricity is introduced to it! Very strange http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16902-bug-eats-electricity-farts-biogas.html

It claims an 80% efficiency which is pretty good for energy storage.

Have you hit a snag in the plans ?

I think the concept has something. A possibly symbiotic technology would be the formation of raw silicon from sand using concentrated solar power in high irradiance areas such as deserts. Silicon can be transported more or less like coal. Silicon can then be used to generate hydrogen which can then be used in the methanation processs or directly in fuel cells etc.

I would like to draw your attention to two really interesting concepts:

1.) Renewable Power Methane:

The basic concept of “renewable power methane” is based on the mutual linking of the power grid with the natural gas grid.
Renewable power (e.g. surplus wind power) is converted via electrolysis into hydrogen.Hydrogen is combined with CO2 and converted into methane in a thermochemical synthesis (methanation). In this way, renewable electrical energy is stored as chemical energy in existing storage capacities (natural gas grid), which is an advantage vs. hydrogen.

The concept of Renewable Power Methane is described in detail in the dissertation of Dr. Michael Sterner”Bioenergy and renewable power methane in integrated 100% renewable energy systems”. I recommend it strongly. It can be downloaded here:

http://www.uni-kassel.de/upress/publi/abstract.php?978-3-89958-798-2

http://www.upress.uni-kassel.de/online/frei/978-3-89958-798-2.volltext.frei.pdf

The company SolarFuel is in the process to make it commercially available (unfortunately the homepage is only in german):

http://www.solar-fuel.com

2.) “ZuhauseKraftwerke” (home power plants):

many small gas-fired electricity-led CHP-units, dispatched as one big virtual power plant; cooperation of german green electricity supplier Lichtblick and VW; more details here:

http://www.volkswagenag.com/vwag/vwcorp/info_center/en/news/2009/09/volkswagen_energy_partnership.html

I really would like to know what you think about these two concepts (which could work really well together, I think). Isn´t it maybe something for ecotricity?

Best regards from north germany

Ole

Keep up the good work.

“If you suspend a cow in the air with buckets of grain, then it’s a bad guy,” Harttung explains. “But if you put it where it belongs — on grass — that cow becomes not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative.”

Read more: http://bit.ly/bQKPso

Cheers
Jenny

We put this to our facts and figures bod, and he says:

“Hands in the air Paul, you’ve spotted our deliberate mistake.

Basically, the slurry produced over a year by six cows is enough to generate sufficient biogas to meet the heat needs of an average household, around 20,500kWh. We arrived at this figure using an assortment of Defra cow slurry facts and biogas generation figures. Somewhere along the way this morphed into the same 6 cows now producing enough gas to not only heat the house but also to generate the electricity to light it.

This was one of a number of stats that we came up with in the early days of this project to help illustrate the benefits of biogas. As we don’t support the idea of biogas generation from commercial cow slurry this fact really is a bit redundant, interesting but redundant, so we’ve gone back and removed it from the site to avoid any further confusion.

Thanks for pointing it out to us.”

Hope that clarifies things? Thanks again for your comment..

Paul

From a methane point of view I understand that 95% (or so) of the methane emissions of slurry occur during storage on farms, as opposed to spreading on the land – when it’s out in the air it doesn’t make methane it’s only when air is excluded that that happens. I thought that was interesting to know.

Could we and if so should we utilise farm slurry is how I see your question.

First ‘could we’ – It takes a great deal of waste to feed an AD plant big enough to make enough gas to be worth scrubbing up and grid injecting. For example the scheme we’re working up for Stroud would take all the food waste in the whole of Gloucestershire and more.

The amount of slurry on a farm, even a large farm is not going to be sufficient I think, for an AD plant with gas injection (as a rule). Add to that the fact that many or most farms are quite remote from the gas grid. It looks unlikely.

Farms can harness their BS and other stuff and (mini) AD it for use of the gas on the farm though – that’s a neat and pretty economic way to go.

Coming to the ‘should we’ – I get what you’re saying, maybe we have the opportunity at ecotricity to tackle a problem, even though we oppose the roots of the problem should we not intervene? I think not. The problem is agri farming, it’s an offence against nature even before you factor in climate change – it’s bad practice and it has to stop. it will stop in time of that I’m sure.

Even if we could use slurry for our green gas (which doesn’t look so likely) – we wouldn’t. Farming could and should clean it’s own act up – first thing would be to stop storing the stuff anaerobically – that might be an easy enough step to take and would deal with the methane problem, without vegan intervention……:).

Cheers.

Maybe in the folder named ‘BIG FAT SHAREHOLDERS ONLY’