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Windmills for electricity
There are many factors that don't usually get factored into the calculations of what something costs.
The advocates (highly paid professional talking heads usually) of choices like coal or gas fired steam plants, or nuclear power, will often quote the fact that the "per KW" cost of a windmill is higher than 'their' method.
The big thing they don't like to talk about though is the cost of getting the power to the consumers. The cost to construct a transmission corridor is astronomical these days.
To complicate things further, in this day & age the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality is very prevalent.
All this together means that IF nukes or other generating plants are built, they must be located a long way from the consumers, and a VERY spendy transmission line built to get the power to those who need it.
With wind power the concept is to locate the rather innocuous wind mills near the demand and avoid the costs of transportation.
Wind power also offers a level scalability that is not possible with a nuke or most other options.
I'm not sure where the 20 year life expectancy comes from for a wind turbine, there was a show on the History Channel the other day on high performance lubricants, in it they were talking about windmills. The information they offered, and that I've read & heard elsewhere, was that with proper maintenance these things have a nearly infinite life span.
Best of luck.
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Windmills for electricity
Joel, if you read other sites the big picture becomes clearer.
It's been proven by actual hard cost surveys of existing electricity generating facilities that it cost about the same amount of money per Kw of capacity to put a nuke or a windmill online and making power.
The big difference is in size and scalability.
You can't economically make anything but a BIG nuke, and the ongoing costs are far higher with a nuke than a windmill, there's no waste to deal with, and when it needs VERY little staffing, whether it's making electricity or not, try that with a nuke.
It doesn't matter who builds them, runs them, or gets the financing for them, the bottom line is the nation needs more electricity at a lower cost, in both dollars and environmental damage, wind does that.
Best of luck.
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Windmills for electricity
We looked at doing pellets too, there's some new (cheaper) small scale equipment out there to turn sawdust into pellets.
Problem is still labour, on a small scale the labour costs make the pellets more expensive to produce than you can buy them from the 'big boys' for.
There's a guy near me here who has a novel slant on things though, he made a set of forms himself that produce blocks of compressed sawdust about the size of a bar of soap. He burns these blocks in a wood-burning furnace. Still, if you factor in his time to produce the equipment, and the blocks themselves, he's probably really only reducing his cost of disposing of the sawdust itself.
A good multi-fuel stove will burn wood chips or sawdust directly, so why bother even trying to make pellets for your own use?
Best of luck.
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Windmills for electricity
Kenneth, that's precisely how most 'modern' burners work, though in fact very few of them have a blower, they use the heat of the air rising up the chimney to create enough vacuum to make a real draft and then direct it straight into the base of the fire.
Jim, just get a good multi-fuel stove, like the Sedore, and just burn the wood as chips. My neighbour cuts a tree down in the morning, chips it, and burns it that night, no problem.
Likewise, any decent multi-fuel stove will burn corn, even the cobs!!
Best of luck.
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Windmills for electricity
Hettric, for loose material there is a hopper that is set down into the fire box, but the key to the Seodre stove is that the fire burns horizontally (to a point), not vertically.
The draft is arranged in such a way as to make the fire burn cross-wise, and the smoke to go to the back and up, this means the material directly above the fire, in a V-shaped hopper, is exposed to the heat and drying air flow of the fire for a period just before it hits the fire itself. This dries the material so fast that you can put damp sawdust or green wood directly into the fire.
Depending on how much sawdust you have to deal with, you may want to consider making either fire starters, or fuel blocks from the sawdust.
For fire starters all you need is a package of small paper cups and some paraffin wax. Saturate the sawdust in the paraffin in an old pot, wring it out pretty good wearing a rubber glove and pack it into the paper cups. To start a fire you put one cup in the pile of wood and light it like a candle.
For fuel blocks you do the same thing, but make the blocks bigger, a hardwood mould the size of a brick works well, and use far less paraffin, just barely enough to stick it together, use a small jack in a press or a couple of good clamps to hold it till it hardens.
Best of luck.
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