Florida,
Regarding my question about the wood burning heat:
Where do you find a reference to this information that you provided as to amount of wood burned, etc.? Is that in that linked piece?
How can they claim zero carbon emissions while burning wood?
(I am having many problems posting anything on this forum. I don’t know whether it is my computer or the forum software, but it is nearly impossible to get anything to work. Why is the privacy policy code active sometimes and not other times. Now, when it is active, I fill it out, but there is no way to enter it.)
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You've got me. Now I can't find it either! But I agree, buring wood makes a joke of zero carbon emissions but then the entire project does. But as usual that's not the whole story either. They don't actually use the power directly from the windmill but sell all of it to the utility as generated. Then they do just like you and I and use grid power to run their house. The utility may be burning coal to generate the power they actually use in which case all they've done is move their carbon emissions to some where else. The more I read about this "net-zero" stuff the sicker i get.
As I mentioned in other posts, I am interested in superinsulated houses. And a lot of the superinsulated measures are incorporated into the net zero houses. Actually a net zero house almost has to be a superinsulated house. I say "almost" because a net zero house does not need to be superinsulated, or even insulated at all if it creates enough site-produced energy to run it. And with enough money to pay the bill, a net-zero house can produce as much energy as it desires.
In reading about the early superinsulated houses, there was a common claim that they did not need a furnace. That seems like a really big deal. But many examples of these early superinsulated also mentioned using a small wood stove and not using it much. I think there is something fishy about a wood stove in a house that does not need a furnace. Was the claim of not needing a furnace only intended to mean that the house did not need a central heating system?
I'm not sure why a wood stove is seen to be more 'green' than other forms of heat. Certainly thousands of unregulated wood stoves produce far more carbon emissions than one power plant. I suppose the point was thta you could save the cost of the central system.
Apparently with "net-zero" you could burn fires in your yard every day, heat rocks, then carry the rocks into the house to provide the heat you need and still be considered "Net-Zero."
Many regard the burning of wood and other organic fuels to be "carbon neutral" since the process of growing the fuel (which occurs within a few years of even months of burning it) absorbs CO2. This as opposed to burning "fossil" fuel which has been sequestered for a few hundred million years.
I found the part about wood heat. it's in the second paragraph of the second link
"Monitoring data from January 2008 to January 2009 has confirmed that the home’s on-site 10-kW Bergey wind turbine produced 17 kWh more energy than the occupants consumed. While Pill and Maraham used 6,269 kWh of energy (6,094 kWh of electricity and the equivalent of 175 kWh of firewood), the wind turbine produced 6,286 kWh."
175 Kwh's is equal to 600,000 BTU's. A cord of oak has about 26 million BTU's so calculating from that it looks like they only burned about 3 cubic feet of firewood.
So if wood burning is carbon neutral, why not just use one of those big outdoor wood stoves instead of windmill, generator, switch gear, and heat pump? I'll bet the straight wood burning approach would be cheaper when you consider all costs of both approaches.
Burning wood is carbon neutral: If you just left that tree to live, grow up, and die... then decay back into the landscape, it would release all the carbon it had stored for growth. If you short circuit it and use the hydrocarbons to heat your house, instead of feed bacteria, you are just giving back what would have been given back anyway... just a couple hundred years earlier. The only additional carbon released is from the fuels used to manage the resource.
Using fossil based fuels for heat, on the other hand, releases carbon that had been sequestered over millions of years. Except for the case of lightning ignited coal seam fires, this carbon would have been OUT of the natural cycle altogether.
Great news. Wood will solve all our energy problems pretty quickly and placate the "Green" movement. We'll just switch the power plants from coal to wood and Voila!, no more carbon emissions. I think in Germany in WWII they even had cars and trucks that ran on wood. So long hybrids, hello Franklin stoves in every car!
Not enough trees to solve the entire energy needs of the country. Back when wood was used more widely for heat, there were far fewer trees than there are now.
I know you're being funny ;)
Wood is good for something like heating a superinsulated house, but not so good for running a large industrial power generating system or running the transportation infrastructure. This is of course ignoring the particulate polution aspects of burning wood in dense urban environments. The reason for that is that wood isn't energy dense as fossil fuels. Those fossil fuels like coal and oil have been percolating and compressing much larger volumes of biomass into a small and energy dense form.
Actually, wood-fired power plants have been proposed, fed from tree farms. The economics are not totally absurd. The main problem is that where the power's needed there's not a lot of free land on which to grow the trees.
Yes I was! Sarcastic too! LOL! Burning wood is nice, I love a wood fire and one of my brothers heated his house with wood for years back when money was tight. There really is a power plant, I believe it's in Montana, that is mainly powered by ground up railroad ties but obviously that won't work in NYC. I believe in Denver fireplaces are banned and/or regulated because of air pollution problems. It would be too ironic for words to think that in spite of not being able to see your neighbors house due to smog anyone would still consider wood to be 'carbon neutral."
Outdoor Wood Boilers
Yes, wood burning does strike me as being inconsistent with net-zero. That would mean than anybody living in a cabin with only wood heat would be net-zero without any fancy hightech wind / solar production. The cabin could even be uninsulated. The way I see it, there is a point where energy efficiency crosses over from engineering into fashion.
There has been a growing popularity of those big outdoor wood burning furnaces. There is also a growing controversy about them because they often make a lot of smoke. They are causing disputes between neighbors, and there are calls for banning them. I would think that they would symbolize something abhorent to the green movement. I wonder what the net-zero movement would think about one of those big boxy outdoor wood boilers.
Carbon dioxide is not the only pollutant that can be produced during energy conversion processes. A socially responsible individual will seek to minimize all pollutants, though weighting the relative amounts of each to judge the "badness" of a particular process depends a lot on location. Eg, carbon dioxide has global significance, sulfur compounds have regional significance, while simple soot/ash is mostly a relatively local issue.
As a result, a wood-burning system in, say, the middle of Nebraska has significantly less impact on the environment and personal health than the same system in downtown Atlanta. There is no "one size fits all" formula. And, of course, for commercial/industrial applications soot/ash is the most easily controlled of your major pollutants, so (aside from the supply issues) it's more practical to use wood for power generation in the city than it is to use wood for residental heat.
definitely carbon neutral
" If you short circuit it and use the hydrocarbons to heat your house, instead of feed bacteria, you are just giving back what would have been given back anyway... just a couple hundred years earlier. The only additional carbon released is from the fuels used to manage the resource"
But not twohundred years unless you are in the desert dry air. It takes only about 12-15 years todisappear into the soil here
I was thinking about the natureal lifespan of a tree being in the neighborhood of 200 years, versus one in a "Managed tree farm" that would have alot shorter lifespan, but many more growing in the same area.
I am still kind of surprised that the net zero philosophy would find a wood stove to be acceptable.