...Energy Flashes

 

By the Mother Earth News editors

January/February 1975

ROBERT LANDING RIDES THE WIND , so to speak, as he scoots around Pleasant Hill, California on a motorbike powered by windplant-generated electricity. The ham radio buff's 200-watt generator--installed atop a 40-foot-tall tower--zaps his bike with about 25 miles' worth of battery-stored power per charge.

HOW DO YOU KEEP THE WORLD'S SECOND LARGEST OIL SPILL A SECRET? Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.)--among others--would like to know. It seems that on August 9, 1974, the Shell supertanker Metula ran aground and dumped 385,000 barrels of crude oil into the Strait of Magellan. The resulting slick covered 1,000 square miles of water and 75 miles of Chilean coastline . . . yet a search by the Library of Congress has revealed almost no coverage of the incident in the U.S. press.

MANURE - MADE METHANE MAKES IT BIG! Recent issues of both The Wall Street Journal and The Chicago Tribune announced that The Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America--which supplies about 75% of the natural gas delivered to the six-county Chicago metropolitan area--has contracted a Kansas City anaerobic processing firm to deliver an estimated 640 million cubic feet of manure-made methane per year. The gas will be used to heat 3,500 homes in the Windy City area beginning sometime late in 1976. And . . . Monfort of Colorado, Inc. (the world's largest cattle feeder) is planning to utilize the 450,000 dry tons of manure its cows produce every year for the generation of 4,000,000 cubic feet of bio-gas per day. That's enough to heat 12,000 to 15,000 homes!

NORTH WIND POWER COMPANY , recently formed by two enterprising members of the American Wind Energy Association (21243 Grand River, Detroit, Michigan 48219), is now selling reconditioned 1,500- to 2,800-watt, 32-volt Jacobs wind electric plants . . . as well as newer 110-volt, 3,000-watt units rebuilt by Jacobs' own men. Don Mayer and Dave Sellers--founding partners of the new firm--are also agents for Dunlite and Winco and handle a complete line of towers, batteries and inverters. The fledgling company is currently in the process of installing a Jacobs unit on the Goddard College campus to run lights and pumps for that institution's new solar laboratory. For more information, write to the North Wind Power Company, c/o Don Mayer, Craftsbury Common, Vermont 05827.

TAKE THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF WORDS written and voiced in protest of our government's energy policies, boil them all down . . . and what do you get? Senator Gaylord Nelson's recently issued statement: "The Administration's call for increased production of oil, coal and natural gas--without a serious program for conservation of these vital fuels--is comparable to trying to fill a bath tub with the drain wide open."

PUBLIC SERVICE ELECTRIC AND GAS COMPANY of Newark, New Jersey, has begun preliminary tests on a new low-sulfur fuel derived from municipal wastes. The energy source--produced by Combustion Equipment Associates of New York--is odorless, comes in briquette form and contains 0.2% sulfur. Up to 200 tons of the fuel a day will be mixed with oil and burned at a power plant in Ridgefield, N.J. A long-term agreement between the utility and manufacturing companies is anticipated if the tests go well.

LAST MINUTE NEWS : Despite recent assurances from the White House that there will be no gasoline rationing or steeply increased gasoline tax, knowledgeable sources in Washington are now betting that one method of limiting petroleum consumption or the other is inevitable. The only question is, "When?"