What type of yard should you open????

The thing where i see the most promise is in energy production. Here in Maine we're out on the forefront with environmental & recycling issues but we're entirely dependent on foreign oil. Granted ... most of our fuels are imported from our friends in Canada but if there's ever a glitch in the supply chain we're gonna be looking at gasoline, diesel, and home heating oil prices of over 8.00$ / gallon.

It would be wise to diversify. Maybe take a look around to see what we have in our own back yard that could be used to produce energy.

We've got all kinds of wood. We use fresh cut softwood tree trunks to make paper and lumber. We run the smaller trees through a chipper and the chips have all kinds of uses. Some of the mills produce OSB. The most intriguing thing though is that at least one of the paper mills is using those chips in their bio mass boilers to produce electricity. It's a closed cycle clean burning process that's pretty darned efficient.

The hitch here is that you don't want to be transporting those chips over great distances because of the fuel needed to run the trucks.

Biomass is a low grade fuel but if it's locally produced and locally converted to energy it's well worth doing.



I always wondered if it would be feasible to set up a pilot plant and start dumping electricity into the local grid.

That would mean having a yard where you buy wood products from the local producers. You could also buy hardwood waste products and convert those to wood pellets. There's a huge demand for them here in the Northeast as a home heating fuel. So much so that we're importing them from Canada by the train load.

It's not likely that energy prices are going down anytime soon. There might be a future in diversifying our fuel sources so that we're not so dependent on imported oil.