"It takes a village to heat & power your home or workplace"…Walter Derzko
In the future, one possible energy scenario is that various sources of smart distributed power (the conventional grid plus local rooftop solar, wind, heat pumps, microbial fuel cells or micro fuel cells- all managed and integrated by a central home or industrial energy management system such as one produced by Encelium or PSD Technology [....mention the Smart Economy Blog if you contact them] ) will be strung together to make your home or workplace, independent from the traditional centrally-generated electrical power grid.
UPDATE : Distributed RoofTop Power in Toronto see Sun shines on solar industry
One other such example of distributed energy sources in your village [...read community] might be barnyard power
Microgy, a subsidiary of Portsmouth, N.H.-based Environmental Power Corp. has discovered that manure and other waste products from livestock- pigs, cows and sheep is a largely untapped source of energy in the United States.
The company builds industrial-sized "digesters" that, through heat and microbes, reduce mountains of waste into gas or electricity that can be reused on the farm or sold on the open market.
Microgy's Huckabay Ridge facility--under construction at a major composting center near Stephenville, Texas, at a cost of up to $11.5 million--will house eight 916,000-gallon digesters, which together are capable of processing the manure of 10,000 cows. The plant will start shipping natural gas (methane) to a customer in the third quarter and, when fully operational, will churn out an estimated 1 billion cubic feet of biogas a year for $4.6 million in revenue.
Thermophilic and mesophilic digesters produce biogas, which is made of two-thirds methane (natural gas) and one-third carbon dioxide. Biogas can be used on the farm to run equipment that ordinarily consumes propane or can power an electricity generator. It can also be shipped through commercial gas pipelines, but that would require an additional expense because the carbon dioxide would need to be burned off first. Burning manure for fuel has been a part of human society since the days of stone knives and bear skins. But today, rising prices for oil and natural gas are prompting investors to seek out alternative fuels and new ways to draw on existing energy sources.
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