RRx

Alternative Energy Sources

Prescription

Adopt the concept of attempting to gain a space-heating/cooling energy self-sufficiency and achieve high levels of cost-effective energy conservation. Alternatives means for doing this are being attempted and others are under study. The sources include wood, water, wind, solar, geothermal, biogas, and others. The area has the potential to provide for some of these energy sources, most conspicuously solar and biomass (wood, etc.).

The ownership should seek to achieve capabilities for operation with minimum fossil fuel inputs so as to minimize any future disruption in achieving and the maintaining and improving the desired high-quality conditions of the area. Fossil energy shortages can endanger entire projects on the area. These in any way related to endangered species can be very serious and life-threatening for species.

The ownership should display a general willingness to work with people seeking special use permits for areas to produce alternative energy.

Because energy is so readily lost and the evidence in biology for long-term life is the development of diverse strategies for its capture and storage, it will be useful to seek to implement alternative forms of captive/storage and loss-reduction strategies (usually with cooperators) for the present and long-term future. Those are listed below.

Information and Diagnostics

The key energy concepts fundamental to operation and activities of the land system are:

Energy may be transformed from one form into another but it is neither created nor destroyed. You cannot do more work than the energy you have that is available for such work.

Ideas and information are said to be stored energy. Embodied energy is that required to produce a long-lasting object. The higher the energy cost, the more long lasting, and the more work an object may do, the more valuable an object in a fossil-energy-short world.

All transformation processes are entropic, that is they change in energy from a non-random to a random form. Waste of energy is inevitable. Entropy is the tendency of all systems toward randomness or maximum dispersion. Entropy is an increase in the inability to do work.

Systems that can tap the most energy sources and that can maximize the flow of energy to do the most useful work will survive and expand over or outcompete other systems.

Developed systems have an inherent tendency to grow beyond optimum size and at the expense of natural systems.

Other related concepts are:

1. Any system that does less than possible is likely to lose in competition.
2. Effective systems maximize energy returns on energy investments over the short run, diversify energy returns over the long run.
3. Successful systems store energy, but at some cost.
4. Some energy must be spent on new alternatives for the system so that it can evolve as the context changes.
5. Concentrated energy (e.g., gasoline) has a greater capacity to do work than dilute energy (e.g., sunlight). Green plants concentrate solar energy.
6. Information is energy. Ideas are a highly concentrated form of energy.
7. In managerial energetics, the emphasis must be on net, not gross energy.
8. Maximum energetic efficiency in nature is not usually desirable as the living environment for people. The mature climax ecological system (e.g., the old-growth forest) is a system most closely approaching this concept.

Alternative Forms of Captive/Storage and Loss-reduction Strategies

• Coal reserves (crushed and re-store in mine pits)
• Oil-gas storage tanks
• Hydrogen in storage tanks
• Solar collectors
• Housing (stratified central-well solar storage)
• Preservatives for wood or metal
• Fiberglass or glass for windows
• Catalysts that improve energy use efficiency
• *Superconductive induction-convertor units for pulsed power loads (* is the source listed below)
• *Five-megajoul homopolar motor-generator
• *One-megajoule homopolar motor-generator
• *One-megajoul fast condenser bank
• *Reliable, low-cost, energy-storage capacitor for laser pumping
• *Very high voltage capacitor of flow inductance applications
• *Inductive energy storage with short-circuit generators
• *High-magnetic field cryogenic coil for the Frascati tokamak transformer
• Magnetic field storage system
• Wind power collector system
• Pumps for storage reservoirs
• Water wheel and turbine
• Water condensation devices
• Flywheel
• Batteries
• Methane processor
• Recreational sculpture
• Phonograph records
• Books(See the Italicized insert above)
• Materials storage areas (as playgrounds)
• Ball bearings
• Sludge compressor
• Land in an optimal climate
• Forest (or land in local climax)
• An orchard
• Hand tools
• Needles
• Surgical and medical tools
• Farming tools
• Animal-drawn equipment
• Re-usable fasteners
• Non-breakable dishes and utensils
• Steel pipes
• Boilers
• Large liquid storage bottles
• Concrete manufacturing materials and equipment
• Great mass in high elevations (rocks-gravitation)

Biofuels Feedstock Areas

Crops are grown to produce vegetative matter that, when harvested, delivered as feedstock and may then be processed into biofuels for hundreds of human uses. these fuels are seen as one alternative in a comprehensive energy management program in future society. Fossil fuels are predicted to be fully exploited in 60 years and to bring great pressure on society to find energy alternatives, use less, conserve more, and revise life styles dependent on other energy sources.

There are many changes that occur with planting and harvesting biomass crops and these are likely for the ownershipin 50 years. The possible effects are being studied. There are questions about how long the soil fertility can be retained, about soil (structure, changes, and those of water quality and wildlife use of the crop) (e.g., perennial grasses and hardwood tree species).

Information is needed about the species associated with the crop; how abundance changes with crop age and structure; whether there are harmful effects of plantations on wildlife ... and wildlife of plantations (e.g., deer foraging).

General knowledge and preliminary studies suggest:

1. plantations (hybrid poplars) have more mammal and bird species than row crops
2. plantations have fewer bird and mammal species than local nature forests
3. breeding birds favor the crop areas; migrants do not
4. switch grass plantations are better for grassland birds than row crops
5. bird species differ between plantations and natural areas; few species "like" the plantations.

The patterns are approximately those expected, based on knowledge of community succession of natural change.

Literature Cited

*Bostick, W. H. (Eds.). 1976. Energy storage, compression, and switching. Plenum Press, N.Y.

Last revision January 17, 2000; October, 2009