EnviroFuels ethanol plant: what will be plant's energy source?

There's an ethanol plant slated to be built at Port of Tampa. Announced at least a year and a half ago, the plant would be built by EnviroFuels. While there is a lawsuit challenging the plans, in general I like the theory of burning cleaner fuel in our internal-combustion engines.

The downsides? Well, for one, read the brief article about the lawsuit, linked above. Another potential issue is that the plant is expected to consume 500,000 of water per day from Tampa Bay. Heck, we're already struggling to have enough water in Florida. Here in Tampa area, we get most local water from the Hillsborough River. The desalination plant is entering final testing (after years of problems and legal delay) ...but the projected 25-million gallons per day will be processed from Tampa Bay. Granted, the ethanol plant will only use an additional fraction of that, but this is not an endless supply of water.

Another issue - and the question to which I'm trying to find an answer - is this:
What will be the source for the energy that the ethanol plant will need? Ethanol production consumes energy before we end up with the cleaner-burning ethanol. If the plant is using energy produced from fossil fuels, that may negate some or all of the benefits.

So I went to the EnviroFuels website to research. I couldn't find the answer there, so I went to their contact page, which includes this information:

United States EnviroFuels, LLC
10027 Water Works Lane
Riverview, FL 33569
(813) 425-5478
Email : info@usenvirofuels.com

Excellent. So I sent them an email. Here's the immediate response:

Nice. Publish an email address for contact, but don't accept mail. I also tried calling, but the office was closed. That's to be expected, since this is the weekend, so I'll try on Monday. Their office hours are 8am-6pm, Monday through Friday.

The ideal would be for EnviroFuels to be truly green, and use solar and/or wind for the plant's energy needs. I hope to learn that this is the case (following the green lead of the wind-powered desalination plant in Australia!)

Solar: Tale of Two Showers

Actually, it's a tale of 3 showers, but I was too drawn to the Dickensian reference. Our solar home water heating system was installed as of 1:45pm on Monday, 23 April 2007. This is a completely passive system: no electricity or batteries at all, no gas, just the regular pressure in the water pipes, and the sun's rays beating down.

Shower 1: The next morning (yesterday) I took my normal morning shower. But it wasn't normal. It was lukewarm at best. Yikes! My hope was that the 40 gallons of water in the rooftop 'tank' (the series of copper tubes on the roof: pic) just hadn't had enough time to get fully heated.

Shower 2: Yesterday evening, after a rather strenuous workout on the Bowflex, I decided to take a 'hot' shower. As hot as I could get it anyway. Yee-ow! I had to turn the faucet quite a bit further toward the 'cold' side than I used to. The hot water was hot! Excellent.

Shower 3: This morning. This was the first morning shower after the system had enjoyed a full day of sunshine ...and a night cooling off. The water was not as hot as last night. But it was exactly how it used to be with the gas-fired water heater.

Next up? Well, to see how much (if at all) we might have to adjust our lifestyles to live with only solar water heat, this evening after getting home from work, I started a load running in the dishwasher, put a load of towels in the clothes washer, and got on the treadmill. After doing a few miles, I put my nasty sweaty gear along with a load of clothes in the washer (so this was now the 2nd load) ...and hosed off and took a dip in the pool :) ...so tomorrow morning we'll see how the water temp is after what has been a much more normal (or a bit above-average) use of hot water.

And Shirley tried holding an oven thermometer under the hot water flow and it got past 150F before she pulled the thermometer out. So far, so good :)

Solar water heat INSTALLED :)

The guys from Solar Source arrived this morning and about 3 hours later the installation was done! I had thought we'd need a day or more to heat up the 40-gallon roof-top tank. Nope. Jerry, the crew foreman, came in and we turned on a bath tap and a sink for about 2 minutes to flush some of the cold water, and at that point I had to remove my hand. I tested it a little while ago with an oven thermometer, and within a minute or two the temp was up to 130F ...I pulled the thermometer away then, 'cause the splashing water was too hot. Amazing. For safety, I plan to install anti-scald faucets in the bathrooms. Anyway ...the pic on the left (click to enlarge) shows the water heater for the house water up there on the roof ...above the panels that we already have had for heating the pool water.

The pic on the right (if you click to enlarge) is annotated to show what the garage looks like now. The 'old' gas-fired water heater - which is only 2 years old, since we bought it new with the house - is now completely disconnected. Jerry and the guys already drained it for us. Nice! I'll pop it on Craigslist in a few days.

This will be a definite experiment, seeing how much - if any - we need to adjust our lifestyle to fit with using only the sun to heat our water. I love it.

Earth Day: spent it fighting nature :)

We planted a 60' (almost 20 meters) trench of bamboo in our back yard in May of 2005 - two years ago (May '05 post, Apr '06 post). I need to post a current pic! When we planted it, Ben and I dug a trench, 18" deep by 18" wide by 60' long (about .5 meters deep and wide, and 20 meters long). We lined the trench sides with galvanized steel roof flashing, to keep the bamboo from spreading beyond the trench.

Or so we thought.

There were a couple of spots where we overlapped the roof flashing, since it wasn't long enough to circle the inside of the trench with a single piece. I overlapped the flashing about a foot in each spot, but did not seal it. DOH! This week we discovered a bamboo Prison Break! On one side (the side closest to the pool), the bamboo had found the seam and sent 4 or 5 runners through the seam and 20' (6+ meters) across our yard. Yikes! On the other side - closest to the fence - an intrepid runner had managed to get over the top of the steel and then proceed a couple of meters diagonally away from the trench. On the OUTSIDE of the fence, we discovered a couple of shoots - one of them a couple of meters tall!

Well, fortunately, it's not that hard to take care of this when one catches it early. For the runner that had hopped over the steel, I simply snipped it and pulled it up. During this time of year when the bamboo sends its runners, we'll make it a habit to check every day or two for escapees. For the runners that had found the seam, we cut the runners (back inside the trenched area and before the seam), pulled up the runners from the back yard (ok, Shirley dug them up ...down a few inches below the surface), and I dug around the seam, removed the now-severed runners, and sealed it with JB Weld ...which is, by the way, one of the true wonders of the world.

The moral for anyone planting bamboo ...DO put a barrier around the planting area if you are planting a running bamboo ...and DO seal the seams!!!

Solar water heat tomorrow!

At least we should be having the solar water heat system installed tomorrow. The last time we had it scheduled, I called and rescheduled when it was almost 4pm and no one had shown up nor called yet. I've got a couple of meetings tomorrow afternoon, so I confirmed with Solar Source on Friday that we're on the schedule for tomorrow (Monday) and stressed that it has to be a morning installation. I'll call again first thing in the morning to be sure. So hopefully, today is the last day that we'll have that gas water heater hooked up (it's the device in that far corner of the garage; the cylinder and the round tank nearer are the water softener system). You might also notice some of our skis in the pick. Yup, here we are living in Florida and we have skis on the shelves in the garage. Oh well. Someday I might use them again (and actually, Ben did take his snowboard up to Washington state last month on spring break and did some snowboarding on Mount Hood).

So hopefully tomorrow night I'll be posting pics of the solar water heat system. In preparation for what might be a day or so of lag time while the sun gets our water all nice and toasty, today we washed sheets, towels, clothes, and dishes. Just in case :)