There are a couple of points I want to reiterate. First is that I think that true wealth can only be measured in Joules, the unit of energy, and that access to energy is a key human rights issue. I also think that the current and coming energy crisis can be solved by breaking both design and technology constraints on our production and use of energy. Of these, I think that the design constraints are going to be hardest to solve.

The two most useful resources that I found were the Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air ebook, by David MacKay, a professor of physics at Cambridge, and the Energy Information Administration website. Be sure to check out the EIA’s section on renewables. David MacKay’s book is worth a careful read, simply because he has a very quantitative approach to renewable energy. In general, I think he is a lot more pessimistic than is strictly warranted. For example, he assumes at one point that the British populace at large will simply reject certain renewables outright. I think that belies a certain cynicism. The book is well researched and footnoted, however, and while it is focused on the renewable resources and needs of Great Britain, there is a lot of relevant information for us Yanks as well.

The chart that showed the energy consumption in the US by sector was put together by the Energy and Environment Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This is probably one of the most informative infographics I’ve ever seen.

I mentioned Amory Lovins and his concept of Negawatts. The book you want to read about this is called Winning the Oil Endgame. I also highly recommend his book, Natural Capitalism.

I’ll break the rest of the resources out by section.

Biomass

Robert Rapier, a well-regarded engineer and writer, often posts very careful and critical pieces about new biomass technologies on his blog, R-Squared. He is very savvy about the field and is currently working with a startup in biomass gasification. He has been very critical of new ethanol startups that have claimed to “break the mold” with some new process and has thus far been correct.

Many companies are trying hard to breed bugs to generate biofuels in larger quantities and without the need for expensive distillation or other separation steps. Two that I think are interesting are LS9 and Synthetic Genomics. Synthetic Genomics is a startup company run by J. Craig Venter, the guy who made history for being the first person to sequence the human genome. He gave a TED talk last year about his work at engineering bugs that will produce fuel, which I recommend watching. The TED conference is a very wonderful program, by the way, and we’ll be doing a TEDxAsheville conference at the end of August. Very few scientists are as polarizing and controversial as Venter is, but he is undeniably brilliant. I highly recommend both of his TED talks.

Blue Ridge Biofuels is a local producer of high-quality biodiesel. They run a waste oil collection service for the WNC area and produce their biodiesel from that waste oil. Their facility is located in the River Arts District in Asheville.

The company associated with the University of Georgia that is working on biochar is called Eprida.

Wind

The cute little vertical axis turbines I showed are made by Mariah Power.  Unbeknowst to me, Bob, our host at Green Drinks, works for Blue Sun Renewables. You can buy these wind turbines from him.

The big turbines I showed are made, in large part, by GE Wind Energy. Many of the nacelles for these large turbines are manufactured at their Greenville, SC facility. Most of my data about the large turbines came from a presentation given by a GE Wind technical manager.

Solar

CIGS (copper-indium-gallium-selenide) thin-films and nanoparticle systems are the chief technology to watch in solar photovoltaics right now. The company I mentioned at length is called Nanosolar, but there are other competitors in the market, including OptiSolar, Miasolé, and Oerlikon.  I also mentioned that several groups have broken the 40% efficiency mark on photovoltaics. The first of these was a company called Spectrolabs. Their work has been published in a peer-reviewed journal [Applied Physics Letters 90, 183516 (2007)] and there is a mainstream article about it here.

Solar thermal is a great way for the average homeowner to take advantage of solar energy. There are companies in the Asheville area that install solar thermal panels. If you have the proper siting and the space for the tank, I recommend this.

One note about solar. A lot of folks will claim that the sun provides enough energy to power our society indefinitely. Suspicious of those claims, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and found that nothing could be further from the truth. I estimate that if we were to rely solely on solar power, we would “run out” in just over 500 years. There are some calculations to back that up, along with the assumptions I made in the process, in an earlier blog post.

Geothermal

The best source for information about geothermal energy comes from two places. The first is the MIT report that I mentioned in my talk. You can find that report here.  There is also Geo-Heat Center in Oregon that publishes a lot of useful information. My numbers for cost per watt installed came from the Geo-Heat Centre Quarterly Bulletin (Klamath Falls, Oregon: Oregon Institute of Technology) 28 (3): pp. 8-19.

Hydro

A lot of you were interested in microhydropower. Western NC is a great place for microhydropower. Interested parties should check out Microhydropower.net, a web portal.

Finally, a few of the images I used in the presentation were Creative Commons licensed. I believe strongly in the Creative Commons model. Because of their license lack-of-restriction, I’d like fulfill my obligation by attributing the photos I used.

• The photo of the Hoover Dam is licensed under the CC-By-SA 3.0 license from Wikipedia user Stubbleboy
• The picture of the jatropha flowers is licensed under the GFDL.
• The picture of the terra preta earth is licensed under the GFDL.

Most of the rest of the images I used are in the public domain. A few of the images were used without permission for educational purposes.

If I promised to make a note of something here during my talk and then forgot it, please contact me via this website or leave me a comment and I’ll rectify my oversight.

Just like the beds I planted earlier with fall mustard greens and sugar snaps, I went through where the fennel, basil and tomatoes were and dug the bed. In a slacker version of John Jeavons’ recommendation, I simply went along with a spade and loosened the top 20 cm or so of soil. Jeavons would have recommended pulling that dirt out, then using a broadfork to loosen the subsoil. I didn’t have time for that, so I didn’t go to that length. Since I still have very little topsoil, most of what I loosened up was huge chunks of clay. I added about a centimeter or two of compost, most of which came from my own compost bin, and mixed that into the top layers of soil as I broke up the giant clods of clay. Once I got that done, I inoculated an envelope of fava beans and planted them in the loosened bed. I’m still of two minds about the favas. Half of me wants to till them under in the early spring to add organic matter to the soil on top of the nitrogen they will be fixing all winter and the other half wants to have fresh favas in the spring. No need to make a decision at this point, though.

My peppers are producing like mad, and I still have blossoms. M. and I harvested three gorgeous Nardello peppers on Friday, one of which we ate on the way back to the house, another wound up in a breakfast omelet and the last wound up in a veggie quesadilla along with some fresh shiitakes from my CSA share. The Cuban peppers are putting out another flush right now, which should be ready in a week or so, and my red bell peppers are a few days from being picked. Identical plants that I gave to my back door neighbor have been producing like crazy for the past two weeks, so I’m taking that as a sign that my soil is a bit tapped out right now.

When he got around to asking our names, he discovered that they didn’t match the one on the account he was supposed to terminate. We pointed out that the folks next door had just moved in and that we’d gotten a misdirected bill for them a few weeks back. We’d dutifully set it back out for the mail carrier and thought nothing more of it. It is alsoimportant to note that our own power bill, then one we’d just paid, had been for a short pay cycle.

It turns out that the folks next door had applied for a connection using our address by accident, realized it, and then re-applied with the right address. Progress Energy decided to simply cancel our account and transfer the service at our house to the guy next door. I was astounded to discover that they would do this without even the most cursory phone call to make sure that we wanted our service disconnected.

After discussing the situation with the company, we’re confident that we’ve got our side of the situation straightened out. They’ve opened a new account for us and made sure that we’d have uninterrupted service. I feel sorry for the poor guys next door. They had almost assuredly been paying their bill – the one that actually was for their address. But when I left, it looked like their power had been cut and the outstanding bill will almost certainly be applied against their credit report. Mainly though, this appears to be a total failure by Progress Energy to sanity check their billing and account processes.

Not too shabby.

I ordered my plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti, a neat company near Olympia, WA. They’ve got spawn for lots of different strains of mushrooms, but I love shiitakes and shiitakes love hardwoods. The spawn arrive in a little bag like the picture on the right. The spawn themselves are small dowels, about 1.5″ long, with a spiral groove cut into the side. You can clearly see the white mycelia from the shiitake in the groove. There is also some grain in the bag as well, which I surmise are how the dowels were inoculated.

I had ordered my spawn about a month ago, so by the time I pulled the bag out, there was plenty of mycelial growth in the bag, which you can see in the picture on the left as the white matting around the dowels. According to the instructions, this is normal and probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d used the spawn more quickly. Fortunately, no mushrooms had begun to bud, so I didn’t have to pull those off.

When I pulled all my stuff out to start the project, I hadn’t read the instructions carefully enough. I needed a 5/16″ drill bit to make the holes in the logs for the dowels. Unfortunately, my little B&D cordless drill’s largest bit was 1/4″. I already had a rubber mallet to tap the dowels into the log and I’d stopped by a fabric store a few weekends back and gotten some untreated burlap to cover the logs with to help them retain moisture. All I needed at this point was that drill bit. A quick stop by Northern Tool solved that problem, and I could get down to log selection.

It’s best to get longer, larger logs. I didn’t have anything shorter than 14″, since the arborist’s crew cut the branch wood to firewood length. I don’t think that’s a huge problem, though. What was more important is that the wood not already be inoculated with competitor fungi. This means that I selected from logs that had not been touching the ground and that didn’t show any splotchiness at the end. None of the logs showed any major saprophytic growth – no turkey tails or other polypore mushrooms like you’d expect on rotting logs. Most of them had the lichen-like surface growth in some places – this was on the tree when it was still erect. I brushed most of it off and hoped that the shiitakes would out-compete anything left.

I also didn’t know how many logs I could plug. I had 100 dowels – the smallest order I could make. I figured that would make about 5 logs, since the holes needed to be spaced fairly closely at about 4″. I drilled a few test holes into the first log and tapped the dowels in, pretty much like I the picture to the right. The mallet collapsed the mycelial growth at the end of the dowel, but slid into the hole without a problem. The spiral grooves will hopefully have protected the mycelia inside them from collapse. Elder Daughter, who had come outside to help me, was able to tap in most of the dowels, even with her cast on, which she enjoyed doing.

At this point, I could have covered the holes with a dab of hot, food-grade wax. I didn’t do that, which means that I’ll probably need to keep a more careful eye on my logs to keep them wet and to keep ants from trying to eat the mycelia. If the ants start bothering the logs – well, I have some diatomaceous earth with their names on it.

I wound up stuffing some of the extra mycelial mass from the bag into the holes in front of some of the dowels. I drilled slightly deeper holes into the log to accommodate the extra “stuff.” I don’t know if that will help speed along the inoculation or not, but I figured it might and it wouldn’t hurt. The picture on the left shows the first two logs completely pegged. Each log took between 16 and 20 plugs, which means I had enough to plug 6 logs – though the last log only got 9 plugs, which hopefully will be enough to get good colonization of the wood.

At this point, I needed to get the logs good and wet and cover them up. I set them under the garden sprinkler for a little bit, then wrapped them in the burlap. I moved the whole package to the shady side of my garden shed, and used a watering can to put about four more gallons of water over the whole thing. This soaked the burlap through so it wouldn’t wick water away from the logs. The instructions recommend that the whole thing be watered once a week, depending on how arid the climate is, and whether you used wax on the holes. I’ll check it a little more frequently, since I know I’ve got a very healthy ant colony nearby.

If all goes well, the logs will be fully colonized in somewhere between 6 and 12 months. At that point, I can encourage a fruiting by applying a lot of water and a little sunlight. This went well enough and I have enough logs left that I’m considering ordering more plugs, even though I have no idea what I’ll do if I get that many shiitakes! I have a couple of friends to whom I may give ready-to-fruit logs, assuming all goes well. And well, I do love shiitakes, so not having to pay out the nose for them will rock. The only question is whether I’ll get mushrooms this year or next.

And just in time too, since its supposed to be right at freezing tonight and tomorrow night.

At the end of the growing season last year, I seeded the plot with crimson clover as a green mulch and leaf mulched the swiss chard in hopes of having some of it survive the winter. This spring, when I started planting, I noticed that the soil seemed much healthier – black and a bit deeper, and nicely crumbly. Most excitingly, when I was digging up some of that weird 6-leaved running ground cover that had crept in from the edges, I found that I couldn’t lift a spade of soil without turning up at least one earthworm. Fantastic!