Bio Products Opportunity

I’m not the king of spreadsheets.  Normally I leave “the numbers” to Barb and to my brother Mark.

They run the financials (with help from Jill and Amanda), and I merely take my cue from them.

But recently we have been working on a “book.”  That’s cheesy business parlance for a business plan.  People in the financial community like to say things like, “get me your book and I’ll consider it.”  Translation:  “Send me your business plan and I will think about investing money in your ideas.”

For the past few months Mark and I (with help from John and Barb and Rachel and David and Ben and Amanda and everyone else we can tap) have been working on writing a grand plan for Piedmont Biofuels expansion into the world.

I do the words.  Mark does the numbers.  It’s been a big chore, and it is coming together.  Once it is released into the world it will answer a whole bunch of questions—like “How do I invest in this?” and “What does the future of Piedmont hold?”

The “book” is damn near done.

But Mark has not been feeling well.  He had a blood clot, followed by what we thought were allergies followed by what was mis-diagnosed as pneumonia.  It’s been irritating for me.  Maddening for him.

When my nephew David passed through town, he chopped wood, played guitar with the boys, and ran the spreadsheets like ringing a bell.  22 year olds have a digital literacy that I lack.

So the business plan has been progressing sans Mark.  And I have learned to drive the spreadsheets myself.  The initial response to our idea has been well received by the investment community.  Apparently food, water and renewable energy still have a pulse in what remains of the investment world.

And what is being talked about is a whole bunch of money.  There is a very real chance that millions of dollars are about to be dropped on our heads so that we can execute the plan.

This very bad day began like any other.  I dropped the boys on their bikes at Doug’s auto garage and drove to the plant.  I fired up a kettle of water to make a pot of coffee and opened my notebook at the bar in the kitchen.

I got a panic email from John in New York about how all the spreadsheets in the preliminary “book” were broken.  I went in and fixed them on my own.  Leif came by to drop his lunch in the fridge, and I merely grunted rather than offering my usual effusive “Good Morning.”

At which point Mark pulled in on his way to the hospital.  I jumped in to be his sidekick.

Over the years Mark and I have gone on hundreds of adventures together.  From cross country road trips to cross county sculpture installs.  Jumping in together is what we do.

And when we arrived at UNC Hospital, it was merely that.  I park the car, and fetch the medical records—he goes for this test and another while I read a book—we flap aimlessly in the waiting room and all is well.

Until we learn cancer is involved.

At which point my blood pressure rises and I feel like I am plugged into an electrical socket.  Reading comes hard.  Concentration is wandering.  Small talk is hard to find.

Mark is tough as nails and has a brave face.  He is also making jokes about the things we could do to increase some of the tension in the waiting room.

I’m his loyal sidekick (as I have been all my life), so I laugh along and shrug off the cancer thing.

His girlfriend Beth pulls in.  She’s terrific.  Mark lights up when she’s around.

And together the three of us pull through a long “medical establishment” day.  Mark is the one getting poked and prodded and having to stand for twenty minutes with his arms above his head.  All I have to do is read, and sleep, and survive the boredom of the hospital waiting room.

By the end of the day Beth is in charge and my responsibilities have been reduced to getting Mark’s Mercedes back to his house.

Which gives me some time for quiet reflection.  Which causes me to lose it.

I would rather have Mark than 10 million dollars.

When I pulled into the plant I tapped Leif for a ride to drop off Mark’s car.  Leif has had a nightmare day.  He’s running the plant, and the bio-refinery, with new help, and no help, and struggling to stay above water.  When he hears about Mark he slams the dash and curses loudly.

When I return to the plant I get the cell call from Rachel. She is in St. Louis at a meeting of the National Biodiesel Board.  She has been loaded up with enough scarcity to crush a mule, and has had a very bad day, but when she hears about  Mark she merely starts to cry.

One of the unwritten rules about Energy Blog is that we only write about the good stuff.  It’s our media, and we censor.  If you want bad news, try another outlet.

And when it comes to Mark it is not bad news.

He’s young.  And strong.  And feisty.  And still laughing.  And he will send this cancer packing such that he can join us in full force again.

And to do that he needs us.  He doesn’t need us to see him “out.”  He needs us to see him “through.”  Just as hundreds of people  turned their goodwill toward Kaitlin after her accident, it is time to do the same for Mark.

After all, having him on the couch instead of “on project” is really annoying.  We are not the same without him engaged in our lives…

Original post by Lyle

Halloween has always been a high point at Piedmont Biofuels.  This year the Coop held its annual party at the Plant.

And it was a blast.  It was smaller than usual.  Carolina Farm Stewardship held their annual meeting in South Carolina and that gutted us of the farm crowd.  Some headed to pumpkin carving on the Bynum Bridge.  Others hunkered down in Chatham Forest, where the world goes to trick or treat.  Lots to do.

Bob recently pointed out that as the “bubble” expands there are ever increasing opportunities to socialize.  Pressure on the social calendar.

Saturday night Tami and I snuck away to Chapel Hill to take in Project Symphony.  That is a truly remarkable project put together by Ari Pickers.  We remember him as a young lad, playing classical piano during breaks of the B-Sides at the General Store Café.  He’s since gone on to form Lost in the Trees and to the Berkeley School of Music, and to put on a remarkable symphony project that raised a bunch of money for Chatham Together.

Chatham Together is a mentoring program for troubled kids.  I did it once, but my kid went on to do time-rather than create symphonies.  Pesky weapons charges.

I bumped into Pam Smith at the show.  She recently staged a fashion show at Fearrington Barn, and regrettably, it was such a spectacular piece of entertainment that I had to concede that her event was superior to Pecha Kucha at the Plant.  At Project Symphony I suggested that Ari had topped her, and that her fashion show needed to take a back seat.  She rejected that claim–suggesting that they were not comparable events.  She’s competitive.

Saturday night the boys stayed home with Uncle Glen and David to play pinochle by the woodstove.  We went on to a Halloween party at Abeyance.

Sunday Tami led a tour of the plant for the board of the Chatham Arts Council.  They held their meeting at the plant today.  Russell was leading a tour at the same time-and kicking out a batch of fuel.

I did a book signing down at Unity Books, as part of the First Sunday event put on by the Pittsboro Merchant’s Association.. And we took in Moya’s performance at the Pittsboro Bach Society.  Moya is the grease collector.  And she plays bassoon.  She showed up at the Halloween party as “the grease goddess.”

The Pittsboro Bach Society performed a new arrangement entitled “Death March of the Investment Bankers,” inspired by the news of the world.

Other than that the weekend was populated by pecan, acorn and hickory harvesting, firewood splitting and stacking, and our annual horseradish harvest.  It was a sweet weekend indeed.

These days we are in an “Indian Summer.”  Jack Frost has visited.  We have moved the bananas indoors to dodge his blow.  But we are warm again.

Wars tend to tone down when it is cold.  Even nowadays, the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan are curtailed in winter.  And the same was true in colonial America, where Indian attacks on settlements “took the winters off.”  We no longer suffer from Indian attacks.  But we sure do love our Indian Summers.

It’s a good time to be in Pittsboro…

Original post by Lyle

Today I am off to NC State to participate in a symposium entitled The Energy Situation, Public Deliberation and Social Innovation.

Here is what I am going to say:

Six years ago, when I was a student at Central Carolina Community College in Pittsboro, there was a popular phrase being bandied about Washington D.C.-and that was “Regime Change.”

I latched on to the term and when we published a flyer for a renewable energy course I was to teach, we called for “Energy Regime Change.”

It felt radical.  The price of a barrel of oil was about 30.00, and the United States was sounding the drums of war in Iraq.

A small group of us had stumbled into making biodiesel out of waste vegetable oil.  By now you all know what biodiesel is.  It’s that cleaner burning renewable fuel that is made from fat and can run in any unmodified diesel engine.

At the time we were collecting used cooking oil from various dumpsters in the Triangle, bringing it home to my back yard, and attempting to spin it into fuel.  At the time it did seem a little Rumplestiltskinesque-but we were pulling it off-by hook and by crook.

It was one thing for me to meet the fuel needs of my tractor.  It was another matter to fill up Rachel’s Dodge.  And Leif’s Dasher.  And Tami’s Jetta.  And so on.  We formed Piedmont Biofuels as a Coop where members could participate in meeting their own fuel needs.

And we talked about it.  We wrote blog entries and speeches and books and we pushed our stories out to the world.  David Korten tells us that when we change the stories, we change the culture.

And we are happily guilty of that.  We  became the largest biodiesel Coop in America.  With around 600 members, it is a position Piedmont Biofuels holds to this day.

We found ourselves in the energy business-shipping valuable BTUs around to members who needed them.  And when you are moving BTUs around you become conscious of all of your energy inputs.

So you deploy solar panels.  And you enact conservation. You daylight your facilities. And you study gravity.  And you become keenly aware of coal fired electricity.  And before long you are immersed in topics that have nothing to do with making biodiesel.

If you are not careful, you become a renewable energy guru.

I once attended a talk by the head of Larry’s Beans.  That’s a fair trade, organic, shade grown, bird safe coffee roasting operation in Raleigh.  The gist of his talk was about how their addiction to sustainability overtook their interest in the coffee business.

At Piedmont Biofuels we have been converting fossil BTUs into renewable BTUs for six years.  And the process has caused us to spawn two sustainable farms, a non-profit, a statewide curriculum, a consulting business, an education business, a design-build business, and a research and development arm.

Long after they stopped looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we were opening our Industrial biodiesel operation which currently kicks out about a million gallons of biodiesel a year.  By then we had changed our mantra from ‘Energy Regime Change” over to “Hometown Security.”

Since we are in the energy business it would be logical to measure us by our energy balance-that is-how many fossil BTUs we consume versus how many renewable BTUs we generate.

Academic researchers say that biodiesel made from virgin soybean oil has an energy balance of 1:3.2.  That is, 3.2 renewable BTUs are generated from every fossil BTU consumed.  When studying virgin soy we need to account for the sins of pesticides and herbicides and electricity for crushing etcetera.

A graduate student study of our Coop operation yielded a 1:7 result.  Because we run around on one hundred percent biodiesel in our collection efforts, and the Coop begins at the dumpster.  That is-most of the energy is charged to the French fry, and we begin after it has been fried.

I don’t have a number on our industrial operations but I suspect it would be somewhere in between the two.  Since we run on locally generated chicken fat, we will likely clobber virgin soy, but we are unlikely to perform better than our Coop brethren.  This fall we hope to enlist N.C. State’s help on getting an energy balance for our industrial operation.

While it is utterly critical for us to focus on the carbon footprint and energy balance of our fuel, it is equally interesting to take a look at lunch.

We have a good-sized kitchen at our biodiesel plant.  And we have a tradition we call “Local Food Friday,” in which volunteer teams of people prepare food for everyone on project.

That means that around 12:00 on any given Friday, you will find farmers, and educators, and fuel making interns, and fuel makers, and accountants, and farm interns, and researchers, and guests converging for a sit down meal that generally accommodates 30-40 folks.

And if you are not around for Local Food Friday, you might very well find yourself at Oilseed Potluck on Sunday nights.  Oilseed community is a cluster of residences that is populated by folks “on project.”  Once again the dinner table is filled with volunteer board members, and farmers, and educators, and biodiesel production workers, and others who have a relationship to the greater project.

Those who are not able to attend Oilseed Potluck, may very well find themselves dining at the Coop, where a community of interns, and farmers, and neighbors, and farm interns has coalesced into a social fabric of its own.

What began as making fuel has morphed into making friends, and the “making friends” part has outstripped the importance fuel production.

Nowadays the conversation is about Ultimate Frisbee (that’s Wednesday nights) or disc golf (every Saturday night at 6:00) or the new band in town, or the pecan harvest, or who fell in love with whom.

The fact that we are all employed somehow in the production of renewable BTUs is secondary.  It’s beside the point.

An energy regime change is our start point.  That is why we are here.  And while we are all working toward it, we might as well hang together.

Imagine four competitive men on the edge of a catfish pond, staring down a disc golf basket.  Each has taken their turn to “drive,” which means throwing the disc as far as they possibly can.  And each has worked themselves into a position to “putt,”” or throw their discs into the basket.

One is a grower.  He powers his farm with homemade biodiesel, and makes a living selling sustainable produce to eaters in Raleigh.  He is good at driving and putting, which makes him hard to beat at disc golf.

One is a teacher.  He has worked for years in the biodiesel industry in far away places like Hawaii and Texas, and he has chosen the path of the leather elbowed blazer. He’s moved to town in part because he thinks it would be a good place to weather a total and complete economic meltdown. He has a wide repertoire of disc golf shots and is hard to beat.

One is a new kid.  He lives for disc golf and biodiesel.  And has moved to town from Michigan to complete the Biofuels Program at Central Carolina Community College. He has become the primary fuel maker at Carolina Biofuels over in Durham.  He has come with a collection of golf discs, a large variety of shots, an unstoppable ability to putt, and he is hard to beat.

The fourth is me.  I’ve barely heard of disc golf.  But I’m the guy who created the catfish pond.  I do the entire course with a single borrowed disc and am pretty much a one trick pony when it comes to throwing styles.  I’m a founder of Piedmont Biofuels, know a whole lot about the industry, and I am not hard to beat.

If you ask this foursome whether or not they are social innovators they might reluctantly agree.  They are sustainability addicts.  Renewable fuel is one thread that ties them together-but they don’t talk about it all that much.

At the end of the day each is doing what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint, and to help others do the same.  Each is there to win a round of disc golf.  Or at least to experience the thrill of a few beautiful shots.

No one on our project has any delusions about replacing the energy density of fossil fuels with biofuels.  We cannot replace what we take from within the earth’s crust with that which we can scrounge from the earth’s surface.  And with that in mind we all realize that what we are doing is merely demonstrative.

We are drawn as much to the shared meals as we are to the BTUs.

And speaking of meals, did you notice I used “scrounge” when describing our feedstocks for biodiesel?  The reason I chose that word is that is connotes waste, and I think that when it comes to biodiesel it is best to stay in the waste stream for our feedstocks.

Biodiesel doesn’t normally win when it bids for feedstocks against those in the food supply, and I would argue that we don’t want to win that one.  When we first started making biodiesel it was considered “quirky.”  As the notion grew in popularity to became known as “good,” and when our big brother, ethanol, figured out how to out-compete food supplies, we found ourselves labeled by the United Nations and others as “evil.”

In times of caloric surplus, turning food into fuel looks like a good idea.  In times when the world’s caloric consumption is evenly matched with its caloric output, biofuels look like a rotten idea indeed.

I’ve been good.  I’ve been evil.  Good is better.

We started out using waste vegetable oil.  We moved to virgin soybean oil.  We switched to waste chicken fat, and back to waste vegetable oil, and back to chicken fat again.  I’ll settle for calling our efforts “mostly good.”

Our industry cannot always make the same claim.  We must not flatten the rainforest to grow oil palm all in a row to put it on supertankers to ship the oil to America to spin it into fuel in Seattle’s harbor, ship it to Raleigh by the rail car only to wait until RDU airport has burned enough of it to the  point we give them an award fro being “green.”

Stop the madness.

And the same can be said when we sell our fuel to Europe.  We kill ourselves to make sustainable biodiesel out of local feedstocks.  We innovate to reduce our water consumption, we crack our co-products to reduce waste, we try and we try and we try.

But at some point, we need to rip the “sustainable fuel” sticker off the product.  And we can argue about where that might be.  It could be the state line.  Or the Georgia harbor.  Or the fuel terminal in Rotterdam.  All we know for sure is the guy in Oslo  filling up on fuel made in Pittsboro cannot call himself “green.”

Madness, it seems, can go both ways.

For us sustainability is simple.  It entails putting a little more into the pot than we take out of the pot.  And once you wed yourself to that idea, you rapidly realize that sustainability can only be achieved by a dramatic reduction in consumption.  The path to a sustainable energy future lies in conservation.

Finally, the important thing to realize is that our primary relationship to energy is mediated by its price, and the price we assign energy has very little to do with markets, and everything to do with society’s values.

Let’s say a gallon of diesel fuel is  3.50 at the pump in Raleigh today.  Not included in that price is the price of the health care associated with its use.  If the user were required to pay for the asthma and respiratory problems associated with the product’s use-add a buck.  In America we have decided that we will not pay for our health care at the pump.  We’ll pay that through our health plan at the office.

Not included in that 3.50 product is the price of war.  We get to pay for that every April 15th when we send our taxes to Uncle Sam.  Even in “peace time” the United States maintains a vast military infrastructure in the countries of the Persian gulf.  But we don’t pay for that “security” at the pump.  Add another buck.

Not included in that 3.50 product is the price of climate change.  As we watch our property insurance premiums climb, we are inclined to gripe about the high price of fuel.  Were we to tie the cost of climate change to the use of the product, add another buck.

The energy industry has done such a wonderful job of externalizing its true costs, and society has done such a marvelous job of absorbing those costs elsewhere, that the average consumer is oblivious.  They just hope the next administration can get fuel prices down.

I notice Steve Kalland is on the dance card today.  Renewable energy is a small pond, and I’ve had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Steve before.  He’s my hero.  I can’t wait to hear what he has to say-but I am confident there is something he will not say.

He will not say that the Utilities Commission of North Carolina is so wedded to cheap electricity and  so dependent on successful externalities that it needs to be burned to the ground.  He will not say that the state could afford to give every North Carolinian with a solar orientation free solar panels to generate as much electricity, for less money than the cost of a new nuclear plant.

The price of energy is a societal decision.  Where it comes from and how we harness it is dictated by its price.  In cultures where energy prices have been allowed to rise, renewable energy rapidly takes up its rightful role.  In North Carolina, where industry comes to live out  its last few last years before moving to the developing world to die, cheap energy is at the heart of our thinking.

We need to change that story.  And when we do, we can change the culture.

Original post by Lyle

Last night we converted the warehouse in Building One into a theatre and staged a speaking event.  It was unbelievable.

Pecha Kucha is Japanese for “The sound of conversation,” and it is a rigid speaking format that limits each participant to twenty seconds per PowerPoint slide, times twenty slides.

The idea came from Gary Phillips, who sits on the board of the Abundance Foundation.  According to him it is a “worldwide movement,” that is sweeping the planet, filling theaters in big cities, and bringing swarms of audiences into seats.

Maybe.  It’s either that or a thing no one can pronounce.

With the full support of her board, Tami embarked on getting sanctioned as a Pecha Kucha site-to make Pittsboro one of their legendary cities.

I was suspicious.  I’m both a consumer and a producer of public speaking.  For me PowerPoint is the death of public speaking.  People the world over seem to think that because they can manipulate fades and transitions with a poorly written piece of Microsoft bloatware they are now public speakers.  Generally pictures fill the screen, with words, and the “speaker” reads the slide aloud.  I hate PowerPoint.

But I am a fan of Tami.  And Abundance. And so I railed kicking and screaming into Pecha Kucha.

They have a lot of rules.  It’s their brand.  And they want it protected.  You can’t use it to make money.  Or to advertise.  They prefer an “unconventional” location.  And from what I have heard they are slow to respond-perhaps because they really are a worldwide phenomena.

I think the idea hails from the world of architecture.  We have held a couple of charettes.  That’s when a bunch of designers and architects and thinkers get together to ideate.

They tend to be long, drawn out affairs.  We hosted one before tackling the Plant.

Pecha Kucha is the charette meets bonsai.  Or the epic poem meets haiku.  It’s tight.  And disciplined.  The slide moves whether the speaker is done or not.  And at the end of 6.6 minutes, it’s over-whether the speaker is done or not.

Tami embraced this unforgiving form and decided to put on a performance.  Lots of people signed up to speak.  Some were interested in modifying the format.  Those she rejected.  She stuck to the rules.

Eastern Carolina Organics was exceedingly helpful in clearing the warehouse in Building One.  They moved pallets around and got forklifts out of the way so that Tami and her volunteers could string Christmas lights, build a projection screen, and line up folding chairs.

Gabriel and I built a “bananatorium” in the extra room of the warehouse.  We moved a handful of full sized banana trees in to escape the cold, and I hung a hammock.  Anyone looking for me after lunch these days should check the bananatorium-where I will be reading or dozing off.

When show time arrived the place was packed.  Ten speakers.  Two computer projectors-one for slides on the screen-and another broadcasting a clock on the roll up door-and a makeshift bar rigged up by ECO’s cooler.

And off we went.

Last night Pecha Kucha competed against Cathy Holt Yoga, Tuesday Night Fuel Making, Vinyl Night at City Tap and a Democratic Party soiree at Fearrington.  And yet we were busting at the seams.

People interested in ideas.

People wanting to listen to others present their ideas.

People willing to forgo their usual Tuesday night schedules, and drive to the edge of town, to a warehouse beside the biodiesel plant, for Pecha Kucha.

Tami gets a point.

It was wild.  I noticed Lesley Landis, the Mayor’s wife, taking a break from peak campaign season to drink in some Pecha Kucha. She is the architect of “Wake Up Wednesdays,” which is another public speaking venue in our town.

Today the email box spilled over with joy, and congratulations from the big Pecha Kucha night.  My presentation, which should have rocked the project, was mediocre in this lineup of speakers.

Next time I am going to use an actual slide projector and forget this PowerPoint nonsense.

Chatham County’s Poet Laureate, Geoffrey Neal participated.

As did Jerry Stifleman, founder of The Change.

It was remarkable.  Sami Grover, who writes for Treehugger, among others, kept strict time.

I noticed Pam Smith and Katherine Ladd in the audience.  Pam has a fashion show coming up.  And Katherine has Studio Tour right around the corner.  I remember thinking that if they are coming to Pecha Kucha, Tami must be on to something.

Last time I saw Pam at the plant was when I hired some aerial fire dancers for Tami’s 40th birthday.  They were suspended above the audience by an overhead crane in a four-storey building above a concrete floor.  And yet last night Pam said, “You don’t need aerial dancers-this was better.”

And she was right.

Pure passion.  Audience members clearing their nights to take a chance on an unlikely show.  Speakers risking their self-images to push their ideas out.  All inside an intensely rule-based formula that few people understand or can pronounce.

My hat is off to Trace, who took a crack at the franchisement of anarchism.

It was a powerful night.  To use a metaphor from Bob, who went to bed early and missed the entire affair, Pecha Kucha was the “ball over the fence.”

And one night later I’m still living on its afterglow…

Original post by Lyle

For as long as we have been in biodiesel we have had demand from folks who want to run generators on our fuel.

And we have largely passed on generator projects.  There are a number of reasons.  The first is the crummy energy conversion.  Why take a precious fuel and waste it in an engine that is only 30% efficient to make electrons?

If you want to make electrons from renewable energy, use the sun.  Or the wind.  Or the water.  Biodiesel is a rotten choice.

A lot of generator opportunities are for “backup” generation.  At the hospital when the grid fails-for instance.  And as such they don’t burn a lot of fuel, which means the biodiesel would sit around for an inordinately long time-which is another waste of perfectly good fuel.

David has run up to Floydfest under the auspices of helping them power their music festival on biodiesel-but we all know he is merely sneaking away to dig the music.

And we have a 10kW generator on Clean Tech.  That’s the mobile biodiesel processor that the Coop drags around for demonstrations and workshops and such.  For years we have fired it up on biodiesel, piped the waste heat into the process, used the electrons to powers pumps on board.  It is very interesting from a combined heat and power perspective, and it makes a wonderful demonstration tool, but at the end of the day the generator is way more power than we need.

Until last weekend.

Last weekend Clean Tech was parked at the Shakori Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance out in Silk Hope.  It’s sort of the highlight of our year in these parts.  This year we set up Camp Piedmont-which was separate from Camp Estill-which was apart from Clean Tech, which is simply eye-popping.

Far be it from me to start preaching “division,” but the separation this year worked wonderfully.  Children in one place.  Party enthusiasts in another.  And sustainability folks in a place of their own.

It was so much better than years past, when we would walk up to the Piedmont booth, and find everything from young lovers to beer bottles to biodiesel processors scattered about.

We were finally doing Shakori right.  When the lights went out at the festival.

Someone hit a power pole, or the line was undersized-or something.  The grid quit.

Suddenly 7,000 music and dance fans were shrouded in darkness.

Someone from Shakori spots the generator on Clean Tech.  They call Matt.  Matt is “off project” and not answering.  He is at Shakori-but he is off partying, or loving, or dancing, or grooving to the music, and he is not on sustainable energy.

They call me.

Forget it.  I don’t go to Shakori for the sustainable energy.

I go there for the poetry on Saturday night.  I go there for church on Sunday mornings.  Last weekend I had my first communion at Shakori.  After 46 years of being unable to participate in the holy sacraments because I am not “confirmed” in the church, the Reverend Gary Phillips changed the rules so that “All are welcome.”

I wept.

Chatham’s Poet Laureate, Geoffrey Neal, and I read one of his pieces to the assembled crowd.

When the lights go out on a Saturday night at Shakori, it is not Piedmont’s department. We don’t answer our phones.

But Shakori is an empowered place.  With a lot of highly skilled people.  With no word from Matt, they found a volunteer electrician, ripped into the Clean Tech generator in the dark, wired it up to the Dance Tent and the Cabaret Tent, and just when they were ready to let it fly, Matt randomly came by to throw the switch.

Two venues lit up on biodiesel from an idle generator on an educational trailer.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops were just tuning up when the lights went out.  Clean Tech let them deliver their show to the awaiting crowd.  And the dance tent returned to above normal-since the rest of the festival was dark.

It was a remarkable night.  I traveled the grounds in the middle of the night.  After even the drummers had crashed.  There was Clean Tech.  Humming away.  Keeping the lights on.

I occurred to me that it was probably the first time in that generator’s life that it was actually happy.  Generators like to run at maximum output-and we never even come close operating the little biodiesel plant on the trailer.

We bought that unit with a grant from the State Energy Office.  It was at a military surplus store outside of Asheboro, and it was wound for some weird forest service current.  They rebuilt it for us, and it had a nice tour of duty for our first Clean Tech Trailer.

It was nice to see it come to the rescue.  And nice to see it still kicking.  And it was nice to think it was finally maxed out…

Original post by Lyle

Today is Tami’s birthday.

She runs the Abundance Foundation–which is focused on local food, renewable energy, and community development. This year she was invited to speak at the NC Center for Non-Profits annual conference.

She hates speaking gigs.  So as her gift this year, I’m taking her shift.  Here is what I will say:
Let me get this straight.  The rules for giving go something like this:

I’m a businessperson.  So I am supposed to go out and make as much money as conceivably possible.  When I am successful, I will be ungodly rich, and when I am ungodly rich, I will be able to “give back.”

When I do that, I give back to you-the non-profit sector so that I can get a tax break.

I wasn’t invited here today to comment on the system.  The fact that it is greedy, silly, irresponsible and not working is irrelevant.

The rules are this:  You have a mission; you starve, scrape, scramble and kill yourselves to achieve that mission.  To pull it off you woo donors, you beg, you plead, and you struggle to convince the world of the merits of your mission.

Some want to save all the poor housecats; others want to fight HIV AIDS.  One wants to teach inner city youth to play polo, and the next wants to feed hungry children.  One is going to beat cancer, the other is going to stop men from beating women, and the next is going to create a sanctuary where old donkeys can go to die.

And through this process we use yardsticks.

We need to make sure we can measure how effective you are before we can help fund your cause.

One of the ways we do that is by studying your financial position.  If you spend too much money being you, we cut you off.  When the Chair of the United Way runs around in a stretch limousine, we don’t feel good about giving them our hard earned money and put our money instead, on that non-profit which boasts about its low overhead.

This way donors can ensure that those workers in the non-profit world never get ahead.  Best to keep you poor, like those charges you are trying to help.

Another way to measure you is by whether or not you are accomplishing your mission.  If you are supposed to be developing curriculum for under funded public schools, and are instead hosting huge galas at with ballet, you can be perceived to be off topic which can also cause your funding sources to look away-or find a non-profit that is perceived to be closer to achieving its goals.

A third way we measure you is by effectiveness.  Did you get the project completed before the grant expired?  If you did, you might be considered a good steward of donated money.  If you didn’t, you could be labeled ineffective and see your donors turn to other projects.

And today there is a new yardstick in town.  That being “Sustainability.”  As donors familiarize themselves with little things like peak oil and resource wars and climate change they are starting to filter your efforts through a new lens.

Are your efforts sustainable?

The Abundance Foundation, where my wife Tami works, has a mission focused on local food, renewable energy, and community development.  A recent donation came in from the Northeast which came with a simple letter which said:  “Don’t put us on mailing lists, switch to recycled paper if you haven’t done so already-and if not-here’s how you can change.

This message came with the cheque.

So we have these yardsticks by which we measure you.  Recall the only yardstick we have for our donors is that they have a lot of money.  How they came by it is generally not of interest.

But what happens when your solicitations meet with sustainability?  I have been a long time supporter of an organization in Pittsboro, where I now have a friend responsible for fundraising.  I work at Piedmont Biofuels, where we make fuel.  As such we have come to see fuel as a precious resource that needs to be conserved at all costs.  We are sustainability junkies, and fuel lies at the heart of our thinking.

So in comes the letter asking for cash.  Same as it ever was.  Except this time they have a new idea.  They are going to get a bunch of motorcyclists together to go ride around to raise money.

I donated.  And in my letter I said, “please do not put my/our name anywhere close to a foolish event like this.  Haven’t you heard of climate change?  Conservation anyone?  Wouldn’t we be much better served if you had everyone who is going waste fuel on this event simply stay home for the day, and mail you a cheque for the amount of cash they are going to burn?

Please.”

You might find that snarky, or impolite, but I was offended by a non-profit that I have been supporting for 18 years predicating a fundraiser on wasteful practices.

And so your heart is dropping.  Another yardstick by which to measure you.

If you invite your base to your annual conference, and you serve far away food on disposable plates with plastic silverware, you are going to turn off the sustainability crowd.

If you leave the door open in the middle of winter because your crummy offices overheat, you are going to fail to measure up.

Which leaves the non-profit sector in exactly the same boat as the rest of today’s society.  That is, questioning whether or not you can even afford to go “green.”

Some of us would say you can’t afford not to.  Your base is headed in that direction, and you want to go with them.

Let me rattle off a quick list of things you can do right now:

Get your facilities audited for energy use.  Donors love to fund energy audits.  When you get your results back, take action.  It might mean changing your ballasts, or your light bulbs, or insulating or learning to use the pro-grammable thermostat, which is already on the wall.  Figure out your energy use and integrate your relationship to energy into your messaging.  Let your donors know you are addressing it.  Let them know that you know that it’s important.

I once visited an agency where the lights were turned off in the rooms they were not using.  It was part of their culture.  I was impressed and we have been working together for the past five years.

The path to sustainability lies in conservation.  Start conserving.

Offset your electrical consumption with NC Green Power.  That’s easy.  Before your cry, “But we are a poor non-profit-why would we give to another non-profit?” realize that if we don’t all start shifting to renewable energy now we are putting the future of the species at risk.

That sounds like a tall order.  Who can explain or even comprehend complex issues like climate change?  Not I.  But I can understand how to chase my consumption down.  I can look at my waste streams and work on mitigating them.  I work on the scale of me-since that is something I can understand.  You can work on the scale of you-and by making changes in your behaviors; you will attract the attention of those who you depend on for funding.

Look at your fleet.  If you are driving around in an SUV because sometimes you need to tote an easel to the coast-shed it.  Get the most fuel-efficient vehicle you can afford, and stop driving.

Batch your meetings.  Take the bus.  Donors will be impressed.  The world is headed this way.  You want to go with it.  Don’t find yourself left behind with your spot on mission, your low overheads, your brilliant effectiveness, and your individual serving of bottled water.

There’s a new yardstick in town.  It might not be fair.  But it’s here, and you want to make sure your organization measures up.

Original post by Lyle

It’s working.  Three systems working in harmony.  Today we had our first recovered methanol come off the line.

We conceived of the bio-refinery project a year ago.  Engineering, permitting, capital formation, everything went into play.  We designed it.  We built it.  And today we turned it on.

It’s rather like building a chemical plant inside an operating chemical plant.  Much more challenging in some ways.  He had hoped to turn this on in June, but the used condenser we bought would not hold pressure.  Tuesday and Bruce have laid down 3000 welds on this plant, and none of them leak.  But inside our used condenser, one tube would not hold.  We plugged it.  Another one went south.  Plugged it.  And another one went.

Our condenser vendor came to our aid.  He had warranted that the thing worked.  He brought us another one.  Same thing.  Holding pressure is not new to us.  That system is something we know, and should come easily.

So we ripped the whole thing out and sent it off to Charlotte to be re-plumbed.  Which meant we waited.  There went June and July.  When it came back the bell on the end of the unit would not hold pressure.  A custom gasket and some metal sculpting by the fabrication crew solved the problem.

Pressure:  check.

Then we fired up our Ag Solutions boiler.  We are not boiler folks.  We plumbed it in wrong.  Cut out the pipe.  Did it over.  Brought on Joe, our new fabrication guy with boiler experience.  He did some re-design.  And added an expansion tank.

And the damn thing kicks out before hitting temperature.  On again off again.  We fired it on Number 2 diesel.  I could watch the black smoke from the chimney from my desk window.  We could smell the petroleum everywhere.  Most of us have been away from petroleum so long we are hyper sensitive to its smells.

Still.  It was the best looking air pollution I had ever seen.  It meant we were about to take the bio-refinery out for a spin.

Switched to biodiesel.  Beautiful cleanup.  Smoke is invisible.  The only way you know the boiler is running is when you detect a shimmer of heat agains the wires in the background.

But the boiler continually cut out.  It turns out there is an electric eye which monitors flame color.  It’s not ready for bio.  And it turns out that by yanking the thing apart and spray painting the inside of the tube white (from black as it ships from the factory), it is problem solved.  Boiler started building temperature and holding it.

An intriguing aside on the boiler front is some work Greg performed on our wash water.  For years we have known that some biodiesel ships off to compost with our wash water.  Greg played around with it in the lab.  Designed and implemented a large scale system which allows us to “recover” that biodiesel.  The biodiesel that comes out of our wash water is off-spec.  It can’t be sold for onroad use.  And sending it back through the wash-dry system is perceived to be too risky.

So we burn our recovered biodiesel in our newy working boiler.  Rather than paying to haul it away and paying to have it tipped, it is the energy source for the bio-refinery. Cuts costs.  Employs waste.

Heat:  check.

The system that worked right out of the box was vacuum.  This was our first such install.

And around noon yesterday, with heat, vacuum, and pressure working in three part harmony, we saw the glorious first drips of methanol coming off the line.

Nice.

Adding this plant to our process is going to vastly improve the carbon footprint of our  fuel.  It will allow us to recover methanol and reuse it.  It will allow us to break out free fatty acids which we will sell to the boiler fuel market.  And it will give us a purer crude glycerin which has a myriad of uses.

It will reduce our operating costs.  Less methanol to buy, less tipping fees at the compost.  There is a chance that by stripping the methanol out of the fuel phase before sending it to wash-dry we will be able to reduce wash-dry time and free up tankage.  Time and tankage might enable another shift.  Another shift would mean more biodiesel.

And more importantly it reduces the wastefulness of our operation.

We are jazzed.  It’s been a big year.  Another plant turned on.

Monday is our bio-refinery opening.  It looks like I am not going to need my “Almost Open” sign that we used on the last one.  Come join us if you are in the neighborhood…

Original post by Lyle

A couple weeks ago Tami and I went to a meeting with Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry and a bunch of sustainable agriculture folks.

Wes Jackson has an appointment for 20 minutes with Obama, and he wanted broad based guidance and advice from as many folks as he could find.  Wendell Berry is his friend and confidant.

It was a strange meeting.  There was nothing I could tell this group about sustainable agriculture.  The room was full of people from Chatham County and Pittsboro.  And I am not sure there is anything I can offer Wes Jackson in the way of energy.

He gets it.  Wendell Berry gets it. He’s a god.  We are in good hands.  They don’t need me.

I did watch Michael Tiemann light up Wendell Berry from across the table.  That was a treat.  Michael is a Chatham resident who often has the best idea in town.  He has lit me up before too.

But despite the fact that this crowd does not need me, they have asked for a Farm Bill for the next fifty years.  They are building a coalition of like-minded people and this is what I was assigned.  So I’m going to comply.

I’ve never written legislation.  I’ve read some.  I’ve proposed some.  I’ve cut and pasted some.  But this is new to me.  If I had to write a farm bill for the next fifty years, it would look like this:

Firstly:  Stop funding monocultures.  We know they are dangerous.  We know they put our food supply at risk.  The new farm bill will put its money on diversity.

Secondly:  Start funding nutrition.  Not just for humans, but for butterflies and wasps and worms.  We have created a nutrition less landscape through our plant selections, and we have had an adverse impact on everything from berries to birds.

Thirdly:  Reward whole foods.  Our food system has degraded to the point that it is more advantageous to break foods into their component parts than it is to eat them whole.  We take the Vitamin E out of vegetable oil because it is valuable for face creams.  Nature has put Vitamin E in vegetable oil to provide oxidative stability.  When we take it out we create an inferior oil-which wears out faster.  The new farm bill will reward that which is whole, and turn a blind eye on that which is “processed.”

Fourthly:  Imitate nature.  Fund those projects and systems that will regenerate, and pass on those that are purely extractive.  Soil can be a renewable resource.  If we treat it right.  The next farm bill should value soil over production.  Value soil, and we can sustain production.

Fifthly:  Value renewable energy.  Our planet has all the energy it needs.  It comes from the sun, which creates winds and tides and waves.  In the new farm bill we need to simply value the sun and the soil.  All outlays, grants, subsidies and disbursements from the new farm bill will be targeted at those activities that collect energy from the sun or revive the soil.

Finally:  Stop rewarding greed.  Greed kills.  Let’s stop putting our money on genetically modified organisms, agribusiness handouts, and those projects which value large scale over all else.

And that’s it.  The order is not important.  When this is sent to committee, Item 5 can become Item 1.  A farm bill is not about family farms.  Or agribusiness.  It’s not about top-down or grassroots.  It should simply be about how we might sustain life on this garden planet.

Easy.  I should write more laws…

Original post by Lyle

ECO Blend LLC is pleased to announce the opening of its new production facility in Pittsboro, NC.  ECO Blend is a manufacturer of ECO friendly, all natural pest control products, which uses soy methyl esters as a main ingredient.

ECO Blend’s manufacturing plant was designed and built by Piedmont Biofuels, is located inside Piedmont’s biodiesel plant, and will be operated by Piedmont on a contract basis.

Allen Jones, president of ECO Blend said, “We’ve been manufacturing retail products for years out of our Clayton facility under the name HOMS Bite Blocker. Our new Pittsboro location will target large volume agricultural and commercial customers.”

Piedmont Biofuels is a manufacturer of methyl esters, and will provide feedstock to the ECO Blend plant.

Leif Forer, Piedmont’s head of engineering, said “Moving big liquids around is what we do well.  We work on precise chemical reactions.  ECO Blend’s process is more about precision blending.”

The products of both companies are registered for use with the Environmental Protection Agency, and ECO Blend holds patents and intellectual property rights for its products.

“On the ground floor our fuel makers are careful to avoid emulsions,” said Lyle Estill, president of Piedmont Biofuels.  “Up on the mezzanine, the ECO Blend guys will be busy turning our product into valuable emulsions.”

“You hear about how bio-products will be entering the market all the time.  It’s been fascinating to watch this one come to life,” said Estill.

Jones used to procure his soy derived biodiesel from Cincinnati.  But the prevalence of biodiesel is not the only reason he has invested in a new Pittsboro operation.

“Our product is all natural, non-toxic and biodegradable,” Jones said.  “The large number of organic farms and sustainable farming operations in Chatham County are an ideal target market.”

Pittsboro Mayor Randy Voller, who also sits on the board of  Chatham County’s Economic Development Corporation,  was delighted by the news of ECO Blend’s opening.

“Industry tends to cluster,” said Voller.  “First it’s biodiesel, which attracts this new bio-product firm, which will attract other companies in the biomass business.”

Voller continued, “We have a growing population interested in sustainability and sustainable products in our town.”

ECO Blend has been working on this plant for the past two years.  Capital formation, engineering, regulatory approval and staffing are now in place, and production has begun.

More information on ECO Blend can be found at www.ecoblend.us.  Information on Piedmont Biofuels can be found at www.biofuels.coop.

Original post by Lyle

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I never really got to know Marc that well.  He spent a semester with us, and went back to his world, and we are grateful for both his time on project, and for this:
In this blog entry, which is likely my first and last, I share my feelings about the “Piedmont experience”.

It should be stated that I have not read other Interns blog entries submitted to the Piedmont site.

I entered the scene with an engineering background trained with an industrial approach to problem solving.  Visiting the site prior to accepting a position was crucial.  Had I followed suit with more than half the accepted interns by not visiting, I very well may have left in my first week also.

Piedmont is a company made up by its character not its infrastructure.  If you stop in expecting aesthetics don’t expect much.  If you stop in looking for devotion expect to be painting by the end of the day.

Meeting with Dave Thornton and Matt Rudolf for an interview presented me with the state of mind in which a person of the Piedmont bubble operates.  I feel that the Piedmont bubble is made up of experienced individuals, all of whom are good at what they do.

I can relate to their personal quests through life, but not to the ways in which they go about accomplishing their tasks.  Where we all differ is in our skill sets, goal setting, consideration for other people, and consideration for personal items loaned to the project in order for it to function.  When one arrives at Piedmont there is a new state of mind to which one must adapt.  It can be a struggle at first, but once you become accustomed you can see some of the light at the end of the tunnel–envisioned by others on project.

However everyone envisions something different and therefore that is why you will only see bits and pieces.  3 months at Piedmont required humbleness and patience, while building more of it.  The awesome personalities of Piedmont employees compares to the protein necessary to rebuild muscles after a workout in project management. Reaching a state of exhaustion is not hard to accomplish.

To prevent exhaustion one must become their own manager and decide what their priorities are.  If not, the project becomes the manager.  This happens when other employees simply ask favors that will help complete a priority on their list, but in fact draws you from your own priorities.  A fellow intern passed on a bit of advice about going slow at the beginning so that you can go fast in the end.

It turns out that Joanna was right.  If a person plans to work at Piedmont they are in for an experience.  We learned the ins and outs of biodiesel production, the operations of local currency, different ways of cooking and living, the importance of teamwork necessary to accomplish big tasks, the importance of local farming, and finally the behind the scenes economics of the biodiesel industry.

The Piedmont “point of view” is that everyone needs to be on the same page and have shared skills.  I would suggest a biodiesel boot camp for interns in order to cover the essentials.  Unfortunately, when an organization grows every person must specialize. Piedmont is at that turning point and is experiencing growing pains.  If you are a person interested in biodiesel, entrepreneurship, farming, or community living the Piedmont internship is a great opportunity to learn about all of them.

My cooperative education program required a summer of hands on learning.  Not only did I get hands on, I got covered in it.       Marc

Original post by Lyle

Today I went to a meeting of  the new Co-Housing project.  It is in it early stages, so ideas are still being batted around.

Biomimicry was one of the ideas floated by Simon.  It would have us imitate nature.  The concept began with Janine M. Benyus’ book of the same name, and the idea has since gone on to form its own institutes and consulting firms, and has indeed become a school of thought.

It’s one that I love.

Our meeting ran out of time before we could plunge to the depths of what Simon was driving at (I suspect he was headed for things like waste water etc.), but biomimicry is something I think about from time to time.

Our project imitates nature.  In nature things divide.  Species don’t tend to merge.  They tend to emerge as new.

Bill Gates once introduced the world to the idea of “convergence,” in which all of our technology would arrive at a single desktop.  But Mr. Gates had it wrong.  In nature, things don’t converge.  They divide.

That’s why we use our notebooks to do our banking, our Ipods for music, our Game Boxes for games, our cell phones for telephony, etc.

Cars don’t become trucks.  I miss the El Camino as much as the next guy, but “convergence” is the opposite of nature and subsequently does not happen with products.

“Division,” on the other hand, is not always a good thing-despite the fact that it is what nature does.

Since we imitate nature we are in a constant state of “dividing” at Piedmont Biofuels.  Design Build wants to stand alone, unfettered by problems in production.  R+D wants to “go it alone,” without the baggage of the whole.  The Coop persistently wants to get distance from Industrial.  And so on.

Division is what we do.  We imitate nature, after all.

And with division comes rationale.  And the rationale is usually not pretty.

State government blames the federal government.  Canada blames the United States.  White people blame black people.  Branch offices blame head office.  And away we go.  Division is in our nature, and since we are of nature, it suits us well.

Where the break down occurs is when we lose track of the interconnectedness of all things.  That’s another concept found in nature.  And when “division” is viewed form the perspective of the “interconnectedness of all things,” it becomes a different matter all together.

At our recent “State of the Bubble” meeting we touched on some of this.  We did it in the absence of biomimicry, but the song remains the same.

Species divide in an attempt to find their ecological niches.  And subsequently we divide in an effort to find our business or career niches.  But species division is dependent on the whole.

One of the best theatrical versions of evolution I have seen came from Paper Hand Puppet Intervention’s latest performance, I Am an Insect.  It is a wonderful show that is much more backyard observation than Kafkaesque reflection.

And in it they have the bug that evolves to look like a leaf.

Spectacular.  Divide and look like a leaf.  That way the bird that would love to dine on you passes right by.  It’s a great strategy, as long as the tree you are eating can support your population.  If you are successful, and enough leaf-looking bugs come into the world and devour the tree upon which you depend, the strategy will cave.

In order for it to work, you really need the bird that figured out how to eat you in the first place.

Bird eats the bugs that eat the tree that allow life for both in the first place.  Biomimicry.

Our latest, best example of biomimicry comes from our R+D group (for which we have Simon to thank).  In our case government is the tree.  Government  generates sustenance, which feeds an engineering firm, which picks Piedmont to do the work.

We are not alone in the world.  We are not the world.  We are merely imitating nature with a small company that is seeking our ecological niche in the world.  And all we know for now is that we are stronger as one entity, despite our natural desire to divide.

A year ago I received a late night call that my daughter Kaitlin had been crushed in a terrible car crash.

At the time I had a fellowship to go write on the edge of a mountain in California.  Instead I spent my time in the intensive care unit of Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, watching Kaitlin cling to life.

Cross Country running played a large role in the story.  Kaitlin is a runner, and at the time of her accident she was one her way to one of the famed Ames High Spaghetti Dinners that the Girls Cross Country team has before every meet.

In the hospital she was surrounded by fellow runners, and her coaches, and the parents of fellow runners.  Her journey back to life was surely aided by the cross country runner within.

And by the power of prayer.  The energy and positive thoughts sent by others was palpable in that hospital room.  And for that I will be eternally grateful.

Yesterday was the first Cross Country meet of the year for Ames High, and I found myself canceling appointments, slipping out of commitments, and flying back to Iowa to watch her race.  The promises made in the darkness of ICU had a strange pull on me.

I’ve never been to a cross country race.  There is a lot of walking involved for the spectators.  It’s a little like watching golf–with the addition of mad screaming by parents and fans as the runners emerge from the woods, or struggle past a spectator’s point on the course.

Kaitlin was unimpressed by her time.  She has shin splints from the roughly forty miles she runs each week in training.  Watching her run, at the manicured course of Iowa State, was a miraculous thing to behold.  Her accident is merely the stuff of lore.

I showed up.  And hung out with her mother, Megan, who graciously instructed me on how to watch a race.  When it was over Kaitlin and I headed downtown for dinner, scored some ice cream, and called it a night.

I am currently in the skies over Illinois.  Hoping I make it home before Hannah comes ashore.  Wishing the top on my convertible would go back “up.”

And reflecting on the race that Kaitlin has run…

Original post by Lyle