Yes, you would have another 5 minutes of one-burner cook time per day per person contributing.
The point here is that this is a very low-grade source of energy. By the time you’ve not-bought enough fossil fuels to pay for the carbon imprint of the home appliance, the home appliance is starting to wear out.
Biogas is a meaningful energy source for a farmer that doesn’t mind pitching in a lot of manure. With 50 pigs and a chicken coop contributing, you could heat the home, run the stove, even keep a well-insulated barn above freezing in most climates.
But even that would be some work and some fiddly maintenance and for the money saved, you’re not making much per hour. As they say, the real problem with fossil fuels is that they’re cheap and effective.
Even better, it is intentional. That means that the punishment goes from a fine and a few points on your license (but still allowed to drive) to the one for dangerous driving, which is an immediate driving ban for up to two years, a fine and a possible prison sentence of up to two years. When the ban finishes then the offender has to redo their driving test if they want to drive again, except it will be about twice as long as the standard test.
British cops will be more than happy to pull them over and arrest them. No wonder no one rolls coal in the UK.
Sadly, with American cops, not so much. I was reading about instances where the truck blasted exhaust directly at car drivers and bicyclists so they couldn’t see (i.e. potentially could crash). Cops said they hadn’t done anything wrong. (Which is obviously not true on multiple levels, but also obviously they didn’t want to deal with the situation.)
There are 2 separate bacteria that operate in these. One, which produces more methane and less CO2, peaks at about 125f. The lowest level of output (above about 70 F, under which it drops off rapidly) is actually around 104 F. It would still be pretty significant there, so too hot isn’t really a problem.
Likewise, the City of Los Angeles, where Cory lives, has the world’s largest set of anaerobic digesters, which provide methane to a cogeneration plant that produces about 80% of the power — electricity and process steam — to run the Hyperion Wastewater Treatment plant.
If you’re an Angeleno, running your organic kitchen waste down the garbage disposal provides much-needed nutrients for the anaerobic digesters, which not only makes the digesters run more efficiently, but increases the methane output to the cogeneration plant. (LA BuSan actually encourages this. They could use more methane.)
OTOH, if you throw your organic kitchen scraps into the landfill-bound trash (the black can), the methane of decomposition will be captured at the landfill and burned in microturbines that feed power into the electrical grid.
Either way, LA has you covered on the kitchen scraps → biogas front.
I mean really, do whatever floats your boat - but don’t kid yourself about how ‘green’ you’re being.
LA, like many places (incl. Calgary, as mentioned), already knows about the value of biogas.
Yep! Sustainable, distributed, carbon neutral methane is the best path forward for US energy development. Little digesters like this won’t do much more than run a stove, but they are great for aquainting people with the idea, and at the farm or village scale it’s a simple, robust technology.
Around here (I’ve been coal rolled too many times to count, most recently last week) there’s a switch on the dash to cut out a couple of sensors, so the engine electronics can’t tell how much fuel is being called for or used, which puts the engine into a failsafe mode where it dumps the maximum amount of fuel that could possibly be required into the cylinders, and if you hit the pedal to open up the air it belches huge clouds of smoke. I’ve read some how to guides and none of them use a separate smoke generator.
Ahhhh, The Good Life - now that was a damn funny show back in the day. Britain’s answer to Green Acres. But having just watched the series start (again) it does not travel well after almost 50 years. Spawned a great ethic though.
I had the “pleasure” of working on this system as it was being installed.
Funny story, I stopped in to use the men’s room, and a guy looks at me and says “are you new here?”. I sheepishly responded yes, because who doesn’t enjoy a random conversation with a stranger in a men’s room. He said “little hint, around here we wash our hands before using the restroom”.
I always thought this was a sort of convoluted shitpost/urban/legend thing, circulated amongst the meme/troll-culture world that preceded the chan/gamergate/alt-right movements.
There are other benefits to farms to using these kinds of things. Animal waste is a big problem to manage, for a start, and slurry pits occupy a similar footprint to these digesters whilst not providing additional benefits (indeed, being a source of considerable danger). These digesters reduce the surrounding miasma of a piggery from ‘unbearable for several miles in every direction’ to ‘barely noticeable’. The effluent being a good fertiliser is also useful. Spreading manure, or rotting manure down in the open before spreading, produces greenhouse gases.
While the gas initially produced is low-grade, there is technology allowing purification of the gas to industrial grade whilst only consuming about 5% of the embodied energy of the gas produced, so it can then be sold into gas networks.
Basically, micro production doesn’t seem very worthwhile, but it scales well and
