COMMENT: For those who have septic tanks because they do not have a connection to a sewer system, know about 'digesters' because it's an additive you have to add to keep septic tanks from becoming topped-off in a short time. I remember my dad doing that for our rural Pennsylvania childhood home of the '50s.
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Move over solar and wind power, there's another renewable energy source: poop. Thanks to rapidly advancing “digester” technologies, it's possible to extract and refine natural gas from the methane in human and animal waste, generating power rather than polluting greenhouse gases. Special correspondent Dan Boyce of Inside Energy and Rocky Mountain PBS reports.
DAN BOYCE (NewsHour): Jon Slutsky has been milking cows since the early 1980s, his professional life rising and falling with what his livestock excrete, and not just from their udders.
JON SLUTSKY, Co-Owner, La Luna Dairy: It's like a buffet for the manure connoisseur.
DAN BOYCE: Manure, the dirty dark side of working with these adorable Holsteins, is the enormous logistical challenge of dealing with waste. Slutsky considers himself an environmentally conscious guy, so he worries about all the methane produced as that manure breaks down.
JON SLUTSKY: Then the whole methane thing and greenhouse gases, all of that is more important to many in our industry.
DAN BOYCE: If only he lived about 50 miles southeast. This is Heartland Biogas, a new facility bring in truckload after truckload of manure from nearby dairies. All of the buildings and pools here add up to what's called a digester.
BOB YOST, A1 Organics: You can think of the digester the same as your own guts, if you can.
DAN BOYCE: So, this is where all the cow poop goes?
BOB YOST: This is — the cow poop ends up right here.
DAN BOYCE: Bob Yost is showing me around Heartland. What's brought in gets liquefied, cooked up and mixed together, speeding up the production of methane. And, here, they actually want methane. With a little more refining, that methane becomes chemically identical to the natural gas drilled from underground.
The gas produced here goes straight into a pipeline on site, just like any other natural gas.
SUMMARY: Wind can be a bountiful resource in Tehachapi, California, but not necessarily at the right time. There turbines generate the most energy at night, when the wind blows hardest, and the demand is the lowest. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports on the wider push for electricity storage solutions that may enable renewables to have a greater impact on the grid.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): A hundred miles north of Los Angeles, in Tehachapi, California, the wind can be a bountiful resource, but, unfortunately, not at the right time. It blows hardest at night, spooling up these wind turbines to their peak output, when the demand for electricity is at it lowest.
DOUG KIM, Southern California Edison: So, matching the output of wind to when customers really need it, that’s certainly one of the things that we’re looking at with this system that you see here, because you can store energy.
MILES O’BRIEN: Doug Kim is the director of advanced technology for Southern California Edison. The utility built this eight megawatt lithium-ion battery facility, designed to store electricity generated by the turbines.
DOUG KIM: We can certainly use this for an example, when the wind blows during the nighttime, capture that energy during the nighttime and then use it during the daytime, when the demand is high.
MILES O’BRIEN: The batteries, stacked in racks here, are equivalent to about 2,000 electric cars. It is the start of Edison’s effort to meet a state-mandated requirement to add 580 megawatts of energy storage into the grid by 2020.
It’s part of a big push to invent ways to practically store huge amounts of electricity, so that renewables so can become a more than fringe players on the grid.
DONALD SADOWAY, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: If we don’t treat the intermittency of renewables, they’re — they’re not really a solution.
MILES O’BRIEN: Electrochemist Donald Sadoway is a professor at MIT. He says lithium-ion batteries are not the answer; they pose a serious fire risk, and, as any laptop and cell phone user knows, their performance degrades fast as a speeding Tesla. In short, they are way too expensive and impractical for widespread usage on the grid.
But what are the alternatives?
DONALD SADOWAY:The issue is that we don’t have a battery technology that can meet the rigorous performance requirements of the grid, namely, super low-cost and super long service lifetime.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): ..... A Japanese town aims for a comeback two years after the earthquake, the tsunami, and the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima reactor.
Our story comes from special correspondent Emily Taguchi, a graduate of the School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, one of our reporting partners.
EMILY TAGUCHI: It's been two years since the meltdowns at the Daiichi nuclear power plant. The city of Minamisoma is celebrating the Nomaoi festival, showcasing their heritage as horsemen and warriors.
About a third of the city is still uninhabitable. But, on this day, residents who fled the city return, standing shoulder to shoulder with former neighbors to honor their history.
MAYOR KATSUNOBU SAKURAI, Minamisoma, Japan: I'm Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai of Minamisoma. This year's Nomaoi festival, in the hopes of recovery for our residents affected by the nuclear crisis, is being held per the custom.
EMILY TAGUCHI: At 20 miles north of the Daiichi plant, Minamisoma was cut off from the rest of the world two years ago by radioactive plumes. Not even aid trucks would come near. Mayor Sakurai uploaded a plea for help (Japanese with English captions) on YouTube.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
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