[Vwdiesel] Sqirrely Gensets ??? LOL----WOW.

[Harmon Seaver]

   You are forgetting that netmetering is only with renewable fuels -- most
people are doing it with solar, wind, or hydro. If you want to do it with a
cogen setup, you have to fuel it with a renewable fuel, i.e., biodiesel (or SVO
- straight vegetable oil), ethanol, or woodgas. A few states allow you to use
natural gas if it is also a cogen setup, that is, you are utilizing the heat as
well as producing electric power.
   So -- my fuel costs are zero. I can get all the SVO I want for free, likewise
woodchips to make woodgas. Even better, I can, if I want to expand and build a
bigger unit, say run a few 200kwe gensets or even get into gas turbines -- and I
do hope to do this if I can get the capital together -- start gasifying sewage
sludge to run the engines on. I not only can get all I want, in a nice, dry form
ready to gasify, but the city here, for example, will not only deliver it, but
pay me to take it as well.
   Of course, if I produce over 20kwe, then I no longer get the retail rate,
only the wholsale rate, but since the fuel is free -- or even better, getting
paid a good bit to take the fuel, it still works out quite well. Right now, tree
trimmers have to pay to take their chips to the landfill. As do restaurants
their SVO. And citys are paying farmers to allow them to spread their sewage
sludge on the land, but that's not going to be allowed much longer, so there's
no end in sight for the fuel supply.
   Or, for that matter, I could just buy a few hundred acres of marginal
farmland and plant it all to switchgrass or reed canary grass. Plant it once,
you never plow or plant again, or fertilze, just harvest and gasify and produce
power. Cattails is an even better source of biomass for gasification and
ethanol. With cattails I can even get paid to harvest them from state land
(cattails are considered an invasive species and they're spending a lot of money
trying to control them).
    The economics of it look great, and will be improving rapidly as fossil fuel
costs continue to climb.


On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 09:42:35AM -0500, Nate Wall wrote:
> I'd love to see a cost per KW-H for generating electricity w/ a genset run w/ a VW diesel. I mean total cost, to include the
> generator, fuel, oil, maintenance, etc. All I know is that I took the specs from a couple portable generators and got a rough estimate
> based on the fuel usage at max output. It was much more expensive than line power. I do not think you could even come close to the
> power plant's efficiencies of scale.
>
> --Nate
>
> Harmon Seaver wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 11:50:15AM -0800, Roger Brown wrote:
> > > Harmon Seaver wrote:
> > > >
> > > >    Yes, of course, you're right and all these other people are wrong. Perhaps
> > > > you'd can post some evidence (other than your own say so) that these don't
> > > > work? And maybe you should call up the big windgenerator companies right away
> > > > and tell them to stop building their brushless induction generators -- because
> > > > they will never work.  8-)
> > >
> > > That will work as long as you have the induction motor hooked to the grid to supply the excitation current and then overdrive it
> > > beyond its synchronous RPM.  For a 1720 RPM motor, synch would be 1800 and you would need to turn it around 1880 RPM for full
> > > output.
> >
> >     Right, which is the only interest I have in doing it, to sell power to the
> > utility. With the netmetering law in WI, I can get paid at retail rate for up to
> > 20KWE and at 24/7 that works out to all my heat and electric free and about $15K
> > a year in my pocket. Minus the cost of rebuilding one or two vw rabbit engines a
> > year, that is. 8-)
> >
> > >  You don't have much control over the alternator output either, aside from the
> > speed.  You need to change the rotor if
> > > you want to generate power stand alone in order to make it self-exciting.
> >
> >    No, you just add some capaciters if you want a stand alone unit. And in my
> > case, I'd have that circuit with the caps standing by ready to be switched to if
> > the grid went down so my house would stay lit.
> >    Gee, is this just deja vu, or did we not just go thru this whole same
> > discussion about a month ago?
> >
> > --
> > Harmon Seaver
> > CyberShamanix
> > http://www.cybershamanix.com
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > vwdiesel mailing list
> > vwdiesel at vwfans.com
> > http://www.audifans.com/mailman/listinfo/vwdiesel

--
Harmon Seaver
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com