When the BioMass Hits the Wind Turbine: How we got ourselves into this mess, and how we are going to get out of it

By Jay Warmke

Ask yourself:

Do you feel that this generation, and the generations to come face a future of only limited resources – and even less hope?

Is this the last generation that will have access to millions of years of stored energy in the form of fossil fuels?

Do you feel like the corporations and politicians are lying about ho

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Rock Station LLC
• Release date: Jan 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9780979161124

Jay Warmke

Jay Warmke is the author of a number of textbooks on renewable energy, including Assembling a Solar Generator, When the Biomass Hits the Wind Turbine, Understanding Photovoltaics, Designing & Installing Solar PV Systems, and more. He has received several awards including Educator of the Year (ETA), Volunteer of the Year, and Pioneer of the Year from Green Energy Ohio. Jay also has served as Vice President: Green Energy Ohio, Chair Person: ETA's Renewable Energy Committee and board member: Electronic Technician's Association (ETA) . He also teaches renewable energy at Zane State College, University of Dayton, and conducts various workshops on sustainable construction and renewable energy at throughout the midwest. He co-owns Blue Rock Station, with his wife Annie Warmke,the premier sustainable living center in Ohio which draws thousands of visitors from around the world.

Book preview

When the BioMass Hits the Wind Turbine

How we got ourselves into this mess, and how we are going to get out of it

by Jay Warmke

Published by BRS Media

ISBN-13: 978-0-9791611-2-4

Text © 2012 Jay & Annie Warmke

Layout and Design by BRS Media

E-Book format 2019

A special thanks to:

Annie Warmke - Editor

Dawn Pettit & Shannon Cox - Proofreaders

Cover Design Assistance from Persa Zula & Ryan Evans

and to Jim Gravelle and the board of Green Energy Ohio,

where a rambling discussion led to the title of this book.

Blue Rock Station

1190 Virginia Ridge Road

Philo, Ohio 43771 USA

Telephone: [phone], Email: [e-mail]

www.bluerockstation.com

For all those people too foolish to know that it cannot be done. They are the hope and the future in a world desperate for change.

Chapter Zero

Introduction

I don't remember a time when the world wasn't about to end.

It seems my entire life has been one global catastrophe after another. Both NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and I were born the same month – created to counter the Red Menace - a threat to the American way of life. NASA did their part; they beat those commies to the moon. I think I mostly didn't live up to my end of the bargain. I spent my childhood bewildered.

The 1950's were, after all, a very strange place to live. With Sputnik beeping overhead and Levitt building towns for white people across New Jersey, we ducked and covered under our desks while Dinah Shore sang "See the USA in your Chevrolet." And of course, the world didn't end (I think I would have noticed). The only strange foreigners that invaded were the Beatles. And all they wanted was to hold my hand.

And suddenly there were over three billion people on the planet.

My family moved to a suburban home in St. Paul, Minnesota. One cold November morning, I sat under the ironing board while my mother did the laundry (in our brand new washer and dryer). She watched television on our second TV set (yes, we were a two-set family). The old black-and-white had been moved to the basement after my dad rushed out to buy one of the first color television sets. I always loved that opening scene in Bonanza when the map burst into orange flames. And Disney was in living color.

But on this day, I was confused. My mom began to cry as the old guy on TV took off his glasses and wiped his eyes – saying something about a president getting shot in Texas. I had seen Bonanza. Heck, everyone in Texas got shot at one time or another. Dallas and Washington and New York had once been far off places. Now they were in our laundry room.

We moved to a bigger house - in Ohio - out in a new sub-division. My brothers and sister and I rode the school bus an hour each morning and another hour each evening, then rushed to the living room to watch Mr. Cartoon on one of the three channels (Channel 10 was always a bit fuzzy) that were available during most daylight hours on our new, bigger television. Antennas sprouted from every rooftop, aimed like the faithful towards the Mecca of Televisionland. Our new religion.

After the dinner dishes were loaded into our new automatic dish washer, my parents watched that same old guy with the glasses on television talk about what was happening far away – and they seemed surprised when a black preacher was shot in Memphis. My dad said the world was full of hate. My mom said it was going to Hell in a hand basket. I don't remember if she cried when that president's brother got killed. Seems by now everyone on television was either in trouble or dead. Except, of course, for Mr. Cartoon.

But even though people seemed to be getting themselves killed all over the place, adults were worried that there were way too many people on the planet. Everything was getting more and more crowded. The planet was about to collapse under the weight of all those starving people in Africa.

So my dad bought a second car, and my mom kept the big station wagon. It had a seat in the far back that saw the world in reverse. It was great on those long family vacations when we piled the whole crew into the wagon, with all our gear on top, and headed out to Yellowstone, or to visit grandma in Colorado. We tried to see how many different state license plates we could spot. People were from everywhere.

My older brothers started wearing turtle neck sweaters and had peace medallions on chains around their necks. My dad grew sideburns and let his hair get just a little bit shaggy. The riots at the university were far away (at least 5 or 6 miles). My mom bought a new refrigerator.

The year my oldest brother turned 18, we watched them draw numbers on television. His number was high, so he probably didn't have to go away. My brother Jim (who was 15) confidently announced he would just move to Canada. My dad didn’t argue. He bought a new, sportier car.

As Vietnam played in the background, we bought a huge, side-by-side refrigerator and freezer. My dad put the old one in the basement. It was to hold his beer. We also bought a freezer for the garage and filled it with a steer from the country fair, which somehow managed to get itself cut up into little white packages and didn't look much like a cow at all. We begged to go to the new McDonald's whenever my mom announced that it was steak and potatoes (again!) for dinner.

In 1974, my parents got divorced and I got my driver's license. I don't recall which was more important to me at the time, but I suspect whatever was going on between them couldn't hold a candle to that 1967 Volkswagon bus that sat in our driveway. My mom ditched the station wagon (figuratively, not literally) and bought a Chevy Vega. After all, gas prices were through the roof. In the last year alone they had shot up from 29 cents a gallon to over 50 cents a gallon. Who could afford these prices?

Well, apparently my dad could. He bought a big white Cadillac El Dorado. It was, he assured me, simply a matter of supply and demand (he was, after all, an economics professor). Heck, he admitted, he would even be willing to even pay a dollar a gallon if the government would simply allow the market to do what markets do. Those lines at the pump were just the result of the government putting its nose where it didn't belong. Maybe he morphed from being a Eugene McCarthy Democrat to being a Ronald Reagan Republican while in line trying to fill his tank, but at least he waited until we didn't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.

And of course he did pay a dollar a gallon. Then two. There were now four billion people on the planet.

Meanwhile, some Iranian students took hostages, Three Mile Island melted down, and President Jimmy Carter put on a sweater and scolded us for being self-absorbed energy hogs. We would soon be out of oil, the world economy was going to collapse – and it was all our fault. I moved into an apartment and went to college. I signed up for HBO.

Then Ronald Reagan announced it was "Dawn in America," removed the solar panels from the White House, and I graduated from Ohio University with a degree in journalism. I wondered if the world would last until I was 40. It seemed unlikely and a long way off. Nuclear weapons hung over our heads like the Sword of Damocles (see, I really did go to college).

Oh yeah, I also met my wife. But neither of us knew that just yet.

Eventually we figured it out, and with degrees in hand, we got married and moved to Florida, leaving the recession and Ohio behind. There were now five billion people on the planet.

We headed towards the land of real estate opportunities and sand fleas (although maybe not in that order). We were off to make our fortunes. We got jobs, bought a house and, in 1984, I bought a brand new Macintosh computer. A 128k processor – nearly unlimited power! A second 400k floppy drive. George Orwell was wrong. These new toys were great.

And each new toy was better than the last. I bought my first new car. We bought a bigger house, then another, then an even bigger house. I drove an hour each way to work because, after all, who wanted to live over there when you could live over here? Then it became a 90-minute drive. I didn't actually move again... but then neither did the traffic. There were now six billion people. The world’s population had more than doubled since I was born.

The orange groves became gated communities. For years I drove past the Boot Ranch, a thousand acres of scrub and cattle. A huge concrete cowboy boot stood proudly in the pasture. Then one morning, the cows were gone – replaced with a thousand acres of Wal*Mart and driveways. But the boot remained. A proud symbol of the new suburban dream. Everything was named after something that used to be there.

Then, out of the blue, it happened. Sometime around the collapse of the dreaded Soviet Union , my lovely wife Annie announced, I don't want to be a Capitalist anymore. (I don't think one had anything to do with the other).

This had been a recurring theme since we decided to become landlords. I had heard it before. In fact, I had heard it pretty much every time we had to fix a toilet or replace an air conditioning unit. But at the time of this particular outburst, we were cleaning up about seven dump truck loads of garbage left by tenants who had pretty much trashed the house and then moved out without paying their rent. The walls, which had been painted just six months before, needed to be painted again.

I didn't know it at the time, but we were about to dismantle the American Dream. Because this time (to my surprise), I answered: "Neither do I."

We decided to get rid of everything we could live without. Like all good Americans, our house was packed with loads and loads of stuff. We rummaged through closets and cupboards and gathered it together, then sold it to enthusiastic neighbors who rushed to our front yard. Two weeks later we decided we still had way too much stuff – and did it all again.

We then got rid of our houses, even the one we lived in. We rented an old Cracker-style home in a small village. For several years we managed to live what I liked to call a zero-sum life. If a shirt came into the house, a shirt had to leave. Buy a new pillow, get rid of a pillow. After all, as the young guy running for president told us: It's the Economy, Stupid!

But then I got promoted and for some reason, they started paying me more money. A new baby came into our home and the zero-sum life became a fading memory. Business and the Internet were booming. Folks in the Middle East were fighting each other (as folks in the Middle East seem to do) and gasoline was cheap. We bought another big house in the country. We got rid of our VW diesel Rabbit and bought (it pains me to admit this because it was my idea) an SUV. I stuck a bumper sticker on it that read, Live Simply so others can Simply Live. But we didn't.

We also bought some land in Ohio. Forty acres where someday we would build a cabin and grow old and gray, napping on the front porch like in some Norman Rockwell painting. But then Annie heard this very strange guy on the radio talking about building homes out of old automobile tires and other bits of assorted garbage – and those old worries returned.

It had lasted until I was 40 (which had arrived much quicker than expected) but this old world was showing her age. We decided that a house made out of tires might not be such a bad idea at that.

And with that decision, the wool sweater we had wrapped around our lives began once again to unravel. It pulled apart all together when, one sunny crisp morning, while waiting for a ski lift to take us to the top of a mountain in Spain, Annie turned to me and said…

You know, there was a pause, you have to quit your job. I must have looked both resigned and bewildered. Because it's sucking out your soul, she added.

So twelve years later, I find myself sitting in a house made of tires – warmed by a wood stove, drinking a cup of coffee, wondering how we humans managed to get to this moment in time. I have read dozens and dozens of books on energy, sustainable living, emerging technologies – and I still wonder. It always seems to me that an important point has been missed.

I now share this planet with seven billion people.

This world is complex, contradictory, silly and bizarre. As I wrote this line, I suddenly began to feel a very low rumble in the earth. It felt like someone had parked an idling semi-truck just outside the door. So I stood, went outside, and looked out across the valley. Apparently someone had landed a jet engine just over the next ridge (not really – don't panic).

What had happened, is that a natural gas pipeline 50 miles away had exploded for no apparent reason, sending flames and barns two hundred feet into the air. It seems this sort of thing happens a lot. You just never hear about it unless it happens to be your barn that gets transported to Oz.

I went back to work, and discovered an e-mail that offered to sell me a report on the amazing investment opportunities that will soon be available in the (and I am not making this part up) Booming Natural Gas Market. No wonder I spent my childhood constantly bewildered. The world is, and always has been, completely and totally insane.

So let's take a look at that insanity. Let's explore where we are, and where we will be going. But first, let's take a look at just how we got into our current mess.

Blame it on Prometheus

The story of energy is the story of people. Seven billion people – living their lives. Each day they make a million decisions, tug at a thousand private worries, and mostly just try to get through the day. Yet, it is this soup of individual thoughts and actions that create what we think of as history.

In the lifetime of my parents, more than half the stored energy resources of the planet have been used up. Millions of years of fossil fuels – an incredible wealth – a vast inheritance... gone. We didn't do this on purpose. We weren't bad or evil. We just made a lot of decisions that seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It is not inherently evil to buy an electric dish washer.

Since dropping out of so called civilized society and moving into the hills of Appalachia to live in a house made of trash, we have been blessed with a lot of visitors (literally thousands). They come here for many reasons. Some are just interested in a carnival sideshow kind of way:Gosh, you guys are like the Amish, except you got computers and stuff. But most are genuinely searching for something. They just don’t know what it is. There is something wrong out there – and they are seeking.

I am often surprised at how hopeless the young people who visit us seem to feel. They have come to believe that there are no more fortunes out there waiting to be discovered. Their inheritance has been spent, the new frontiers are now wastelands. They believe that the people in charge do not care, because they have been bought and paid for by the very corporations that have destroyed hope.

And, I must admit, for the most part, they do have a point.

It is remarkable the number of people that simply cannot grasp the concept that if you have a fixed amount of anything – and use some of it – then you have a little bit less of it to use later. And if that something cannot be replaced, but you keep using it, you will eventually run out.

I had an uncle who could never be trusted with an ATM card. He just couldn't get it in his head that taking cash from the machine was actually removing money from his bank account. To him the machine was a limitless supply of free money. To be charitable, let's simply say that his attitude towards banks and money was not sustainable. As a result, my aunt paid all the bills (and gave him an allowance).

The same is true with energy resources. Whether you believe that the available fossil fuels were formed through millions of years of geologic shenanigans, or you think that they were stashed on this planet some 6,425 years ago by a tricky little supreme being with an odd sense of humor, the fact is that whomever is responsible, simply isn't making any more of the stuff (at least not as fast as we are using it up).

Yet we keep sticking our card into that old fossil-fuel ATM machine and can't quite grasp that the stuff we are using is coming out of our account. And that account seems to be emptying out pretty darn fast.

When I was twenty, I worried that the world was about to end. I thought it would blow up in one big atomic frenzy. Seems today's worry is of a longer, probably more painful, slow descent into deprivation. No wonder folks don't want to check their fossil fuel bank balance.

But actually – much to my surprise and the major focus of this book – the future looks pretty hopeful. It is an exciting time to be alive (which, of course, is always dangerous). We do still have, however, one major energy problem. The price of fossil fuels is way too cheap!

But don't worry. As my dad would have said, the marketplace will take care of that problem.

Had Mark Twain lived today, he might have said: There are lies, damn lies, and … governmental studies regarding the current and future state of fossil fuel reserves based on extraction methodologies and global consumption rates. Or maybe not.

The books and articles I have read seem to fall into two camps. Looking at the same bits of data, one group tells us that we (meaning those of us who live in Western developed nations) are wasteful greedy bastards who have destroyed this planet, cut down the rainforests, used up all the oil (but won't admit it), caused global warming (but won't admit it), and that it is too late to save the planet but that we should stop what we are doing anyway or we (meaning you) will go to Hell. Don't ever invite these people to a dinner party.

In the other camp are the people who used to work for oil and gas companies (or have been hired by them to write a book). They look at the data and … well, it's difficult to describe exactly what they do with it. The logic is often pretty creative.

For example, let's say we drill a hole in the ground and out comes oil. Someone says, Gee, there must be a billion billion gajillion gallons of oil down there. So we announce that we have just discovered a billion billion gajillion gallons of oil and the media reports it and we can all sleep easily at night, knowing our SUV will never be out of fuel.

Each year we pump a billion gallons out, but there just seems to be more of the stuff down there. And besides, if you take away a little from a lot, you still have a lot (I learned that in high school math). So no real need to change the numbers. Sort of like the guard at the museum telling people that the fossil on display is 600 million and 4 years old. He knows that's true because it was 600 million years old when he started working at the museum four years ago. No point, really, in trying to be exact.

Each year (strange as this may seem) the reserves of a billion billion gajillion never seems to change, therefore the oil will last forever and the Cleveland Browns will win the Super Bowl (hard to know which is more improbable).

You have just (sadly) had a graduate-level course in how world energy reserves are projected, stated and analyzed. And upon such foundations rest the fortunes of civilizations. No wonder the young folks are worried.

Another thing that bugs me when I read these articles and books is how they are way too filled with numbers and footnotes. I know why people do that. They are trying to convince you that this stuff is real and that they are not making it up.

It sounds very authoritative if you say: "In 1950, U.S. coal production was 560 million short tons (MMst). In 2003, U.S. coal production was 1.07 billion short tons, an average annual increase in coal production of 1.2 percent per year (see Table 1)." Authoritative, certainly, but my brain just shuts down.

I, on the other hand, might be tempted to simply say "We produce almost twice as much coal today as we did in 1950." Maybe not so exact, but I think the point is clear.

I mention this because I am not going to include footnotes or a lot of references in this book. I think they just get in the way. Either you believe me or you don't. Those little numbers and references to other people who probably just made this stuff up anyway aren't going to convince you one way or the other. After all, 74% of all statistics are pure fiction anyway.

Another thing I have found to be deceptive when I study energy, is that people who write about it like to focus on only one thing at a time. They will talk about coal. Then they will talk about natural gas, then they will tell you all about oil... and so on and so forth. The problem with life, however, is that everything happens all at once. It is messy. And one thing affects the other. People forget that just because you are focusing your attention on this thing over here, stuff doesn't stop happening on those things over there.

So I am going to take you on a walk through our energy past and into what I believe will be our energy future. And we are going to mix it all together.

At its core, the history of energy is a story of hope. People hoping the landlord won’t catch them cutting down his trees. Hoping to harpoon that great whale. Hoping to hit a gusher and be portrayed by James Dean in a blockbuster Hollywood movie.

Sure, if you want to get picky about it, the search for energy sources has largely been responsible for most of the wars of the last century, and has probably caused irreparable damage to our planet's ecosystems, but those were consequences, not goals.

Most of the great thinkers who have moved this quest along over the years have, for the most part, just wanted to get rich. Or perhaps they simply thought that what they were working on was super cool. It is hope that moves us forward.

It is easy to become overwhelmed and fearful when you study the data. Looking at the numbers you will soon find that, in a very, very short span of history, we have taken the millions of years of stored energy that exists on this planet and used it up. We have built economies and nations that depend on this energy for their very existence. And unless you simply want to stick your fingers in your ears and shout I can't hear you... I'm not listening... yada yada yada, you will come to realize that this way of life is coming to an end. And that can be scary. The biomass really is about to hit the wind turbine (to put it delicately).

But that is only half the story. We are only looking over here while things (once again) are happening over there (notice how technical this all is?).

Everything is about to change. Everything is about to be different. Our way of life is coming to an end.

That song from REM runs through my mind... It's the end of the world as we know it... and I feel fine...

As we are about to see, it really is the end of the world as we know it. All the hoping and wishing and denying will not change that one little bit. It will happen. It has to happen. And as the world comes to an end, a whole new world will take its place, with a vast array of new and exciting opportunities.

Just remember: The world as we know it has ended many times before.

Yesterday

Chapter One

1491

World Population: 425 million

Primary energy sources: Charcoal, Waterwheel, Windmill

Born: Henry VIII of England

Avg. World GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per Person (1990 dollars): $138.00

Big News: Closest comet ever recorded flies by Earth. First British blast furnace built. The Jews are expelled from Spain and the Spanish Inquisition begins. And, oh yeah, Columbus was getting ready to take a trip.

The history of human development rests largely on men trying to get out of work. We seem to be in a never ending search for someone else or something else to do all the heavy lifting.

Throughout our early history, during breaks between hunting and gathering and avoiding being eaten, humans managed to convince animals to do much of the work for him (plow the fields, turn the stone wheels to grind bits of grain into flour, etc.).

But animals had to be cared for and fed, and there was only so much they could do. So over time, extremely clever (and probably quite lazy) fellows figured out how to harness the power contained in wind, wood and water. And upon these three W's, civilizations were founded.

Wood and Charcoal

Whether it arrived as a flash of lightning, or Prometheus smuggled it to humans in a hollow stalk of fennel, early man found fire intensely useful. And the fuel of choice to feed this fire was, of course, wood.

Wood was, after all, literally just lying around on the ground. It could be used it to make shelters, sharpen it into pointy sticks for hunting, and when burned, it gave off heat and light. It was useful to cook food, to keep animals away, and to help stay warm on those cold Paleolithic evenings.

But wood is heavy and hard to lug around, so eventually someone figured out that one could make charcoal by burning the wood for a long period of time at very low heat. The moisture and fibers burn off, leaving the bit of carbon where all the potential energy is stored.

The remaining charcoal retains much of the energy content of wood and can burn quite hot. It is also much lighter and easier to transport.

There is evidence that it was in widespread use up to 7,000 years ago. It is clear that, as civilizations formed, the fuel of choice was charcoal.

When there were just a few hunter/gatherers mucking about the planet, the woodlands could easily provide more than enough fuel for everyone's needs. But by the late 15th century there were over 400 million people on the planet, crowding into ever larger cities (after all, the population of London had grown to over 50,000). The world was about to experience its first energy crisis.

So, What Were They Doing With All This Energy?

A number of industries had grown up in medieval Europe, most quite dependent upon the charcoal industry. Perhaps the foremost of these were the iron works.

For thousands of years people had understood that iron ore (which makes up about 5% of the earth's crust) could be heated and smashed and formed into useful bits of jewelry and even the occasional tool or sword. What they hadn't realized, however, is that if these rocks are heated to very high temperatures, the ore actually melts and it can be poured into molds to make whatever is desired.

In 1491, in a wooded area just south of London known as the Weald, some clever iron workers constructed an oven of sorts. Within this tall chimney-like structure, they found the heat of the fire could be intensified by blasting air through alternative layers of iron ore, charcoal and flux (crushed seashells or limestone).

Using a waterwheel that pumped a bellows, the first blast furnace was constructed and an industry was born. The Weald had long been the center of the nation's iron works, dating back to Roman times. It prospered because of an abundance of trees and streams, and iron ore deposits that lay close to the surface. But with the advent of the blast furnace, the once small industry grew dramatically.

In blast furnaces, the iron ore could be melted to a liquid. The liquid then flowed down troughs made of sand, from one large stream of hot metal to a series of smaller troughs.

These little streams filled molds shaped to create whatever was needed at the time. The whole thing reminded the farmers-turned-iron-workers of a mother sow feeding her piglets, and the cast iron produced became known as pig iron.

The product that drove this industry, more often than not, was cannonballs and bullets. The European war machine demanded lots and lots of iron. The cannonballs carved from stone were just so 13th century. Modern warfare demanded modern weapons.

By 1549 there were 53 ironwork forges operating in the Weald area. By 1574 the number had jumped to 110. And each forge needed vast quantities of charcoal. And charcoal needed wood. It was estimated that each forge required about 1,500 wagon loads of wood per year to operate. A lot of trees were being chopped down to feed this machine.

But other industries needed wood as well. England was a naval power, and that navy was made of wood. The tall ships of the day required tall trees to build the masts and form the planks. Lots and lots of trees.

In addition to the many merchant vessels that sailed the seas from England, King Henry VII began an effort in 1509 to increase the size of the Royal Navy. The fleet grew from five ships to thirty in just five years. By his death in 1547, Henry VII had increased the size of the navy to 58 ships.

And not only had the size of the fleet increased, but so too did the size of the ships. The Scots built the Great Michael, for example, first launched in 1511. It weighed over 1,000 tons, was 240 feet long, and was manned by 1,000 seamen as well as 120 gunners.

In response, Henry built an even larger ship (the Great Harry, although officially named Henry Grace à Dieu ). The Spanish and the French built even larger fleets – and the arms race was on. These ships needed wood (to build each ship consumed as many as 2000 100-year-old oak trees) and their cannons and cannonballs needed charcoal.

And then, of course, there was beer. During an age when water was generally unfit to drink, beer was the beverage of choice in northern and western Europe. And folks drank huge quantities of the stuff. Around the late 1400’s, the brewing of beer moved from a home-based industry, largely managed by women in their kitchens, to a proper industry (in other words, controlled by men).

In the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands, for example, it was reported that in the year 1515 this town of 11,000 people produced over 20 million liters of beer from over 100 breweries.

In London, one brewer of beer complained that his business consumed over 20,000 wagon loads of wood each year. He worried that he would soon be out of business if more and cheaper