Generating electricity from wood waste

[Al_Smith]

Well there have been many alternatives over the years of ways to conserve energy with respect to residential construction .Earth sheltered houses were one .Although very practical they fell out of favor .Seems after a period of time people felt they lived in a basement of which for all intents they did .

That aside even industrial buildings are being more conservative about ways to conserve which has nothing to do with being "green" merely a buzz word ,nothing more .The real reason is dollars and cents savings .

Another savings regarding electrical usage would be more energy efficient drive systems used on large industrial applications for machine tools and the like . The large 50 to 200HP drive motors have pretty much been replaced with DC servo motors which operate considerabley more economicaly than the previous systems .In addition the lighting systems are now using much better illumination than the thousands of 8 foot flourescent lights of years ago .

All this has nothing to do with generating electrical power from wood chips though ,only a thought .The difference between a 2 million square foot factory and a sawmill is quite light years apart

[pyrocasto]

I agree Al, you save a lot more money by spending for more efficient appliances, building materials and the such, than you do buying alternative energy stuff. I have a 35k sq ft cabinet shop with a ~$22000 a year electric bill, with another $8000 yearly for NG heating(fire marshal is an idiot, wont allow wood boilers). I'm currently insulating the garage doors with cardboard as inch per inch it's almost as good as foam boards. Cheap, effective.

[SwampDonkey]

Insulation will do wonders.

My electric bill is so cheap that I'd have to live a long time to recover costs from any of the solar and wind, plus loose on replacement parts and maintenance. You gotta do the math and put down the glossy brochures. I was sitting and talking to a neighbor from my area a couple weeks ago. He moved to another town and was in to see father and a guy back east visiting us. He said he put in a $6000 windmill, a local build. But then he said it's only supplemental. He said the power company only pays about 1.5 cents a killowatt for the surplus times. He also went on to say it had already blown apart one time in the wind and he had to repair the roof from the collision. All confirmed what I knew all a long that you will encounter.  The hitting the roof might be a freak thing, but the breaking down of equipment is going to happen.

[Kansas]

Still working on it. Waiting on the KFS for the engineer advice. But I did stumble onto something. Bloom Energy, which has fuel cell technology, has a website and they talked about what can power their stand alone fuel cell units. One of the things mentioned was biogas. They were referring more to the gasses off of landfills and waste plants that cities have. Wonder if there is a chance in the world wood burning gases would power one of these units. Here is their website.

http://www.bloomenergy.com/

Most of them are powered by natural gas. But if you hit products and data sheet, it mentions biogas.

[jpgreen]

Call these guys.  They need a new project, since California burned them.

http://www.globalgreensolutionsinc.com/s/Home.asp