Jennifer Bogo, Science Editor at Popular Mechanics, published Poop Power: U.S. Farms Save Big Turning Manure to Kilowatts (October 8, 2008; web only):

If I’d driven up Kingwood Road here two years ago, there’s a very good chance that I would have smelled Hillcrest Saylor Dairy Farm long before I reached its gravel driveway. But as I open my car door on Monday not 100 yards from the would-be offenders—approximately 600 Holsteins—the only odor that drifted my way was that of the freshly compacted corn silage that feeds the cows. Harnessing bacteria to generate energy from waste is not a new concept: According to the National Renewable Energy Lab, the first digestion plant was built at a leper colony in Bombay, India, in 1859. But for all practical purposes, the first farm-based digesters in the United States were introduced during the 1970s. Since then, farmers have relied on three basic designs. After visiting several and seeing them in action, Saylor decided to combine the most desirable features of each design into his own, based on the needs of his farm.

{NB: , the capture of methane from sewage systems seems to date to the work of the Scottish engineer John Duncan Watson in the 1920’s.]

To introduce me to the biodigestion process, Saylor suggests that I start at the beginning-with the ladies of the hour. As we walk through the milking parlor, 40 cows released from their paddocks amble to the barn. A sudden gush of murky water flows past their hooves, flushing waste toward metal grates where it enters a gravity system that leads to the digester.

I was standing on the digester before I realized what it was: a 70-ft.-dia. concrete tank, 16 ft. deep, capped by a lid and covered with sawdust so that it appears to be solid ground. The digester’s influent tank, on the other hand, is inside an adjacent building and hard to mistake: The stench of concentrated cow poo makes it tough to breathe, let alone formulate astute journalistic questions. Even so, I ask Saylor what the old system was like. “It ran straight to the pond,” he said, referring to a body of water just past his shoulder. “You’d see a two-ft crust floating down there that you could pretty much walk across. The odor was unbelievable!”

That made me newly grateful for the present tank, where the manure-and the occasional truckload of peels from the local potato chip factory-is mixed in a thick slurry of water then disappears on a 16-day journey inside the digester. Anaerobic bacteria break down organic matter as the slurry makes its way around a dividing wall and produces a biogas that is about 65 percent methane. The gas fills the foot of airspace underneath the lid, and then is piped to a 40-ft.-dia. rubberized bubble for temporary storage. Gas from the bubble drives a natural gas CAT engine, which in turn runs a 130-kw generator.

“I’ve been to some digesters where they had a solid top, but no storage for gas, so with any fluctuation in the digester you either have to back off the generator, and you’re not making electricity, or you’re making too much gas and wasting it,” Saylor says. “The bubble buffers me for a couple days. I can just run the generator at 100 percent all the time.”

Last year the system produced 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to power the farm and several nearby homes, and to provide their heat and hot water-a savings of about $60,000. “It’s covering everything and there’s still some left over,” Saylor says. “We had 100,000 kilowatt-hours last year that we didn’t use.” There was also leftover biogas. Saylor built his system to be modular, so with another grant from the state of Pennsylvania he plans to install a second 130-kw generator this winter-all of the electricity from that generator will go into the grid.

The project is paying dividends in other ways, too. Waste heat from the engine heats both milking parlors and water for the farm, as well as water that runs through pipes inside the biodigester to maintain the temperature. Other byproducts include a liquid fertilizer that’s less acidic than straight manure and a soft bedding material that harbors less toxic bacteria than the previous bedding, sawdust.

For an example of the risks associated with handling, See 38 Die in Methane Blast at a Coal Mine in Siberia, The New York Times, May 25 2007; David Barstow and Robin Stern, California Leads Prosecution Of Employers in Job Deaths,December 23, 2003.

MindMapping.org tracks free, paid, online and desktop, mindmapping and information visualization tools (that, just about any visual representation other than GIS – geographic information systems). (SeeVisualComplexity for great examples of information visualization). Here’s their directory of available software, which I found extraordinarily easy to use.

We haven’t yet had a chance to test any of these, but we’ll certainly start at MindMapping.

Sahana is an open-source disaster manament tool  – we’re hoping to get a copy on our servers for people to play with in short order. The link will be – sahana.popularlogistics.com (nb: we don’t even have a placeholder up yet).

In the meantime, however TalkSahana is a blog, heavy on user contributions – and just reading posts one can the attention to detail, complexity and difficulty of the database design problem they’ve undertaken.

I’d been trying to get rid of an accumulation of paper – but this page I suppose I’ll have to hold onto in the case the Times’ general counsel comes calling. In my copy of Thursday, July 17, 2008’s Section A, is an article called “”Protesting Parents and Police Clash in China.” Here are the lead grafs:

BEIJING – Hundreds of parents protesting shoddy school construction that they said led to the deaths of their children in the May earthquake were harassed by riot police officers on Tuesday and criticized by local government officials, the parents said Wednesday.

Local officials were also trying to buy the silence of the parents by offering them about $8,800 if they signed a contract agreeing not to raise the school construction issue again, several parents said.

The confrontation between the parents and the police officers erupted on Tuesday morning as 200 parents protested outside government offices in Mianzhu, a city in the earthquake-ravaged Sichuan Province, said Liu Guangyuan, a protester who lost a son when a school collapsed.

Insofar as I can tell, they’re identical to the first three paragraphs of Edward Wong’s on-line piece, Grieving Chinese Parents Protest School Collapse

, also dated July 17th. Following is the balance of the story. Again, it’s identical insofar as I can tell.  The emphasis – red/bold – is added. What seems to have happened here is that parents whose children were killed held a demonstration; then some were arrested, and are perhaps being held incommunicado.

The Times – of which I am generally a big fan – starts with a headline that’s less than stellar – “parents and police clash” – “police arrest grieving parents” – which takes out the implication that both sets of parties are somehow equals in this contest – and then waters it down further with “Grieving Chinese Parents Protest School Collapse” in the on-line edition. Grieving parents – but no police. Contrast this with Wong’s piece of June 4, Chinese Stifle Grieving Parents’ Protest of Shoddy School Construction, in which the headline doesn’t subtract the relevant facts. Here’s the rest of Mr. Wong’s July 17th piece:

It was the latest in a series of protests held by grieving parents, many of whom lost their only child in the earthquake. With an eye to the approach of the Olympic Games in Beijing next month, however, the Chinese authorities have ordered the police to crack down on the rallies. Chinese news organizations have also been told by the central government not to report on the schools, and all journalists have been barred from approaching the collapse sites.

The parents in Mianzhu on Tuesday were demanding that the government offer a full report on why Dongqi Middle School collapsed, killing at least 200 of the school’s 900 students.

The Chinese government has reported that a total of 7,000 classrooms collapsed during the May 12 earthquake, and by some estimates 10,000 of the nearly 70,000 confirmed deaths were of schoolchildren.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, many local governments promised to investigate the school collapses, but parents across Sichuan Province complained that they had yet to receive any reports.

The parents of the Dongqi schoolchildren gathered at 10 a.m. and demanded to meet the mayor, but no officials came out for any serious discussion, said Mr. Liu, a carpenter.

Instead, an official, saying that the parents were violating public security laws, “ordered us to leave within two minutes,” Mr. Liu said. “Then the riot police started pushing and dragging. Some of the outraged parents got into physical confrontations with the police. I saw eight or nine parents carried away to patrol cars parked on the side.”

Mr. Liu said he had heard that the parents were taken to a police station, but it was unclear exactly what happened to them.

A person answering the telephone at the Mianzhu government offices on Wednesday said officials were in a meeting and could not talk to reporters.

Mr. Liu said that the parents of Dongqi students were offended by the offer of money from the Sichuan provincial government if they agreed to drop the issue. The amount “is far from enough to appease the grief,” he said.

Mr. Liu said the parents of children who attended Dongqi Middle School would petition their case at higher levels of government.

Dongqi Middle School was built in 1975 and renovated in 1981, Mr. Liu said. “When my son entered the school in 2006, they promised to build new buildings,” he added. “This was written in the enrollment welcome letter. But they didn’t keep their word, and then the earthquake happened.”

Zhang Longfu, whose daughter died in another Mianzhu school that collapsed, said parents at that school had also been offered $8,800 plus a pension upon retirement in their 60s if they signed a contract acknowledging that their children died in the schools because of the earthquake and agreeing not to disturb reconstruction efforts.

“Parents are generally concerned about the contract and are not willing to sign it because they’re afraid that by signing it, they’ll be admitting that their children’s deaths are not related to the shoddy school building,” said Mr. Zhang, whose daughter died in the collapse of Fuxin No. 2 Primary School.

Mr. Zhang said some leaders of the parents group met on Tuesday with the vice mayor of Mianzhu, who he said acknowledged that the schools were poorly built and had some hidden safety problems but insisted that the earthquake was ultimately responsible for the collapses.

Hundreds of parents also held a rally on Tuesday in Shifang to protest government attempts to give them compensation in return for silence, according to a report from Radio Free Asia, a nonprofit news agency that receives financing from the United States government. The report said that the local government was offering to hand out $14,600 to each household in which a child had died in a school collapse.

According to Edward Wong

of the Times

,

Chinese police oppose parents of children killed in earthquake

The Energy Blog reports that a private vendor is working with Con Edison to make the grid more secure. We’re intrigued – but concerned that the grid will remain heavily centralized – and not in a position to accept many small, decentralized production nodes – e.g., the solar panel that you’re thinking about putting on your roof.

American Superconductor Corporation (AMSC) (NASDAQ: AMSC

) and Consolidated Edison, Inc. (Con Ed) (NYSE: ED) have teamed with the Department of Homeland Security on a project to protect New York’s power grid with surge suppressing superconductor cable technology.

Work has started on what is expected to be a $39.3 million project for Con Ed to develop and deploy new high temperature superconductor (HTS) power grid technology in Con Ed’s network in New York City. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is expected to invest up to $25 million in the development of this technology to enable “Secure Super Grids” in the United States. Secure Super Grids utilize customized HTS wires, HTS power cables and ancillary controls to deliver more power through the grid while also being able to suppress power surges that can disrupt service.

Concurrently AMSC introduced

a new surge-suppressing, high-capacity superconductor power grid technology – a system-level solution that increases the capacity of power grids while also being able to rapidly suppress power surges. This technology is expected to significantly enhance the capacity, security and efficiency of electric power infrastructures in urban and metropolitan areas around the world, enabling “Secure Super Grids.”

Read more at The Fraser Domain’s Energy Blog.

Doug Myers of the Abilene Online Reporter News reports that the Texas Public Utility Commission has approved a massive windpower array (and the necessary transmission lines) which is expected “to handle enough wind-generated electricity to power more than 4 million homes.” From Winds of change: More jobs, lower rates for Big Country, state

The Texas Public Utility Commission’s action opens the door for construction of a far-reaching web of transmission lines that, when completed at a cost of nearly $5 billion over four or five years, would be able to handle enough wind-generated electricity to power more than 4 million homes. The electricity will go to some of the state’s most populous areas, including Dallas, San Antonio and Houston.

Paying for the PUC plan would add roughly $4 per month to residential customer bills after construction is completed.

Passage of the plan is “a real big deal,” said Sweetwater Mayor Greg Wortham, who also heads the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium. “It’s good for Abilene, good for Sweetwater, good for the region.”

Good, in fact, for the entire state of Texas, Wortham said.

“This will bring billions more dollars of investment to Texas in the form of wind equipment, construction, local revenues and jobs,” said Susan Williams Sloan, spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based American Wind Energy Association.

“It will certainly help out wind energy farm developers, and I think we’ll be pleasantly surprised with the amount of wind turbines this will support,” said Rep. Joe Heflin, D-Crosbyton.

“Hang on. The winds of change are coming to West Texas, and you’re in for a boon,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office.

“We think it’s going to reduce cost, reduce pollution and create jobs,” Smith said. “It’s going to be particularly beneficial for the West Texas region of the state.”

While construction costs will be passed along to customers, Smith said ultimately they will be better off because of the wind-energy plan. Smith said his nonprofit, Ralph Nader-founded group determined, based on rising fuel costs, that the wind-generated power would save consumers about $8 a month in electric costs.

Smith’s group also concluded thousands of wind industry-related jobs will result, tens of millions of dollars will be generated in local taxes, and landowners will receive lucrative royalties as a result of the transmission lines running through their properties. He said the gains would primarily be enjoyed in West Texas, although some of the manufacturing jobs would be in East Texas and El Paso.

“What’s happened in West Texas is there are these little, tiny transmission lines equivalent to two-lane country roads that aren’t set up to move megawatts on a superhighway to our cities,” Smith said.

Wind energy from West Texas flows through a substation in Graham that is ill-equipped to be a power hub for cities such as Houston and Dallas, Wortham said. Energy congestion at the Graham substation is causing the wind farms to have to take turns temporarily shutting down to curtail output.

“It gives the green light to wind developers who had wondered if they could plug in and if they could get their power to market,” Smith said. “What the wind turbine companies have told us, ‘If you build the lines, we’ll come.'”

The PUC action also sends the message to wind industry manufacturers that Texas “wants to become a world-class leader in wind development,” he said.

According to the Associated Press, electricity is out for thousands in Omaha, Nebraska, and restoration of power is expected to take at least a week. Link via nola.com

blog at the Washington Post: “In This Case, Rumsfeld was right”: (I’m quoting at length because Arkin writes better, and I’m not sure how much to pare away without distorting a nuanced point)

If there were a musical about the Pentagon today, the opening number and reprise would be “If Rumsfeld Was for It, We’re Against It.”

Witness the portrayal of the reversal of a “controversial” plan by the former secretary of Defense, first reported in the New York Times last week, to use special operations forces as the lead element in the war against terror.

There is a lot wrong with the way the United States has been “fighting” the war against terror in the past seven years, and there is much wrong with the special operations aesthetic. But any push to reduce their role and turn over counter-terrorism to the conventional military instead is wrong in every way.

I have often criticized special operations for being too secretive and for a lack of basic accountability; for pursuing a “direct action” (read: head-hunting) approach to counter-terrorism that is circular and never-ending; and finally for believing their own P.R. about how great they are. But the “quiet warriors,” as they often call themselves, are just the right element of the military to contribute to counter-terrorism efforts.

If there’s going to be a “war” against terrorism, it needs to be quiet and stress the non-military. This means a small military footprint and fewer bases and a fully coordinated “interagency” and international effort. For all this, the Army and Marines are just too much of a blunt instrument. Haven’t we learned that blundering out there, as we are blundering in Iraq, just confirms our desire for subjugation and empire in the minds of far too many in the Islamic world?

First the news: As reported in the Times, Special Operations Command, which under presidential directive has been given authority to conduct independent counter-terrorism missions, is supposedly backing off of this unilateral role and focusing on working with regional commanders to conduct joint operations. Adm. Eric T. Olson, the new special operations commander, says that he will continue to play the role as counter-terrorism coordinator around the world, a “shift” that the Times suggests means the old Rumsfeld way is dead and that special operations command will not conduct unilateral operations.

In some ways the news is unremarkable.It is simply impractical for special operations forces to do their own thing without coordinating fully with the regional commands and the CIA and the conventional forces, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, where 90 percent of the effort is expended. In fact in Iraq the coordination has become so intimate that a two-star special operations forces general has been deployed there to coordinate at the highest level of the military command, a level of collaboration that has proven more useful and productive.

– snip –

So are special operations forces being spanked getting some comeuppance? I don’t think so. For all the changes, the super-secret “Delta Force” and commando and intelligence teams of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite of the elite, are going to continue to conduct unilateral operations and go where the conventional military — even the conventional Special Forces — can’t. Of course, to be effective, they have to coordinate with the regional commanders, the CIA and State Department, FBI, etc. Duh.

– snip-

That doesn’t necessarily mean it should be the Pentagon’s job, and it certainly doesn’t mean that Rumsfeld was able to implement a sensible plan through all of his megalomania. But a shift of the conventional military to a global counter-insurgency focus? If this is the plan, both our counter-terrorism efforts and our military needs will be weakened.

William Arkin’s Early Warning blog at the Washington Post is morphing into a weekly column and discussion group. That’s probably good for Arkin – and Arkin’s work once a week is still a lot better than no Arkin at all.