Posts Tagged ‘Environment’
Senergy helps NC farmers improve energy efficiency
Wednesday, July 21, 2010, 3:03 pmOur world is undoubtedly becoming more and more concerned with energy efficient processes and renewable energy sources. And although it may not always be so obvious, the government is actually helping the cause.
In 2003 the US Department of Agriculture created the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP, then known as “Section 9006”) to provide grants to farmers and rural small businesses to cover up to 25% of the total costs associated with purchasing and installing renewable energy systems and making energy efficiency improvements.
As with any government program however, there’s a tedious process to go through and paperwork to fill out before receiving the funds. One of the first steps in the process is having an independent professional engineer conduct an audit estimating the potential energy savings on the specific project that they’re applying for to receive grant money. Kurt Creamer, Ph.D., says that the “actual percentage energy savings, in some cases are quite phenomenal.”
That’s where Senergy Inc., the Apex-based company hired to conduct these energy audits, comes in. Kurt Creamer, PhD, president of Senergy, founded the company in 2003 in response to REAP while he was still enrolled in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering PhD program at North Carolina State University and working full-time at the school. Even though there was a new need for energy auditors, business remained relatively slow for a few years.
“In the early days farmers had to pay up front for the energy audits which were often times quite difficult for the farmers,” Creamer said. Business for Senergy spread solely through word-of-mouth and only those farmers that could afford to front the initial costs of an audit got on board for the first 5-6 years of the program.
But then, in 2008, the North Carolina Farm Bureau got involved. The Farm Bureau covers the costs of the audits up front so that the farmers are much more willing to go through the process of applying for the REAP grants. The program (and business for Senergy) skyrocketed. It’s “been a real boom to my business to have the Farm Bureau involved in the project,” Creamer said.
Senergy’s work
Senergy typically works with farmers in Eastern North Carolina specializing in grain farms, but has had the opportunity over the years to work with a variety of types of farms including tobacco farms, some on swine & poultry farms, and a handful of dairy farms, often times on some very nontraditional projects.
One particular project on a hog farm required comparing the energy efficiency of burning the dead hogs to composting them—composting is more energy efficient, in case you were wondering. Creamer has also worked on energy efficient organic dairy farm feed grinding systems, poultry barns, irrigation systems, and grain dryers. But he’s not just limited to working on energy efficiency projects. Kurt also works on some renewable energy projects, including one this fall where he’ll be working on a “project to look at the use of sweet potatoes in an anaerobic digester,” Creamer explained, that “could generate enough biogas from the sweet potatoes to meet the requirements of the farm.”
What’s next?
Creamer says that he would love to expand in several ways:
- Geographically: There is still plenty of opportunity to pursue this program in other parts of North Carolina and beyond
- Explore the energy needs of rural small businesses (outside of the farm base)
- Take on more renewable energy projects
- Improve his engineering methodologies
At the end of the day Creamer says he really enjoys the work he does and “it’s a really good program for the farmers, and a good program for the environment.”
Books: ‘On The Grid’ by Scott Huler
Thursday, July 1, 2010, 10:47 pm
About a month ago, I told you about the book-reading event where Scott Huler (blog, Twitter, SIT interview) read from his latest book On The Grid (amazon.com). I read the book immediately after, but never wrote a review of my own. My event review already contained some of my thoughts about the topic, but I feel I need to say more, if nothing else in order to use this blog to alert more people about it and to tell everyone “Read This Book”.
What I wrote last month,
“I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.”
…was reinforced when I read the book itself: I don’t know anything about infrastructure. But after reading the book I can say I know a little bit, understand how much I don’t know, and realize how much more I’d like to know. I bet it was fun watching me as I was reading it, exclaiming on average five times per page “This is so cool”, and “Hey, this is neat” and “Wow, I had no idea!” and (rarely) “w00t! Here’s a tidbit I actually heard of before” and “Hey, I know where this is!” (as I lived in Raleigh for eleven years, I know the area well).
A few years ago, Scott was just as ignorant about infrastructure as most of us are. But then his curiousity got better of him and he started researching. He would start at his house in Raleigh and trace all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. Sometimes there would be a crew on his street digging into the asphalt and fixing something and he would approach them and ask questions. At other times he would figure out where the headquarters are and who to ask to talk to:
Lyme disease, ecologists, and public health
Friday, June 25, 2010, 9:10 amLast week I wrote about the impacts of swine operations on our water quality. It’s one example of how land use patterns can disrupt the environment and affect public health. That subject came up again this week during a conversation with Dr. Laura Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL), a unit of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development that is housed in Research Triangle Park.
Dr. Laura Jackson of the EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL), a unit of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development that is housed in Research Triangle Park.
Dr. Jackson and her colleagues in this RTP lab—more than 100 scientists—conduct research on ecosystem services, those benefits provided by the environment over and above the psychological benefits of being out in nature. These services can have tangible and measurable economic value.
For instance, in a normally functioning ecosystem, vegetation would take up nitrogen and phosphorus from animal waste and keep those nutrients from overburdening groundwater and streams. In last week’s example, when hogs were added to an ecosystem, they knocked it out of balance by depositing more nutrients than the vegetation could handle and by removing plants that could take up the nutrients and provide erosion control. The researchers at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems were developing countermeasures to keep the water clean near hog farming operations and restore ecosystem function. Read more…
Is your barbecue causing water pollution?
Monday, June 14, 2010, 6:49 pmFarmers’ market managers tell me that consumers are becoming incredibly knowledgeable, quizzing farmers about their use of chemicals and antibiotics in order to be well informed about the food they eat. Now here’s a new question to ask farmers when you buy pork: what are you doing to protect the environment?
Here’s the background. Hog production is one of the cornerstones of North Carolina’s agricultural economy, with more than 10 million hogs produced annually in the state, or roughly one pig per person. In recent years, most of these hogs have been raised in indoor operations known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.
But consumer demand is driving a movement back to pasture-raised pork, and about 100 farmers in the state are responding to the call for hogs raised in natural conditions that many people consider more humane.
Consumers are driving the market for pasture-raised pork. Photo by Lisa M. Dellwo
Seventeen Years of Discovery in Duke Forest
Tuesday, June 1, 2010, 1:22 pm
Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide are pumped into four of the experimental rings. Photo: Will Owen
Late in 2010, an epic ecological experiment in the Triangle will begin drawing to a close when carbon dioxide stops pumping from four massive rings of towers in the Duke Forest. Since 1996, more than 250 scientists at Duke and dozens of other institutions have measured the response of this forest ecosystem to the elevated amounts of carbon dioxide expected in the Earth’s atmosphere in the future. They’ve measured tree and plant growth, photosynthesis, leaf size, soil composition, root growth, and water use in the plots bathed in elevated carbon dioxide and in three other “ambient” control plots.
The first, prototype ring was built in 1994; six more came in 1996 (three controls and three experiments). Each ring consists of 16 metal towers in a 30-meter diameter. Computer-controlled instruments in the experimental rings bathe the interior of the plot in carbon dioxide. It’s called Free-Air CO2 Enrichment, or FACE. As opposed to “chamber studies,” in which plants are studied in carefully controlled growth chambers or greenhouses, the rings are open to nature. That means that mammals and insects can circulate freely and that natural events like hurricanes, ice storms, and droughts affect the research site. Read more…
ScienceOnline2010 – interview with Emily Fisher
Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 11:34 amContinuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Emily Fisher from Oceana to answer a few questions:
ScienceOnline2010 – interview with Amy Freitag
Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 2:38 pmContinuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Amy Freitag from Southern Fried Science to answer a few questions:
ScienceOnline2010 – interview with Russ Williams
Thursday, March 11, 2010, 12:19 pmContinuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Russ Williams from North Carolina Zoological Society and the Russlings blog to answer a few questions:
ScienceOnline2010 – interview with DeLene Beeland
Wednesday, March 10, 2010, 10:08 pmContinuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked T. DeLene Beeland to answer a few questions:
