“as the world charts a challenging future with dwindling supplies of fossil fuels”. Sorry not in the foreseeable future. with new technologies and findings such as shale oil and gas, not even mentioning coal, there is a couple of hundred years supply at current use.

“What will your lifestyle be like, on your income, when the cost of heating your home and driving your car doubles, triples, quadruples” Sorry again not much oil is used for heating worldwide, coal and natural gas are the big ones and there is lots of both. Sure the cost of transportation could go up, but production of oil is the issue, not supply.

Solar and wind, well solar does not make much sense in the north and not any use for bulk power. The sun don’t always shine. Wind also not much use for bulk power, the wind don’t always blow. Both of these are expensive and intermittent power. Has not been working out very well for England, Denmark, Germany, Spain, well you get the idea. Oh forgot to mention the 500,000 thousands birds or more destroyed in the US alone ever year that the greenies seem to ignore. Remember the uproar and fines the oil sands got over the death of a couple of dozen birds.

This announcement sounds more like grant fishing, nothing new here.

Did you know China are building coal and nuclear generating plants as fast as they can get them up. In France 80% of their electricity is from nuclear. So do we want to cover thousands of square miles in bird mincers?

Perhaps you should concentrate on churning out some grads with actual tangible skills instead of focusing on your play projects. In this community, UNBC is a bit of a running joke. I think you should spend some more time building quality academic credentials before you try becoming a world leader in energy innovation. Or, if you can’t accomplish that with the staff you have (a possibility) then by all means leverage grant money to reduce your carbon footprint and pass those savings on to the students. If they can’t get a good education, they might as well get a cheap one, because currently it’s way over priced.

They should take the **hot air** being spewed from the mouths of these gentlemen, and use it to heat the University.

Nothing more dreary than to see two old birds sitting on a fence discussing how far they can fly on a windy day.

In this part of the Country with a little bit of intelligence and some elbow grease we could heat everything with cheap electricity. In addition we could power vehicles with batteries, that could be charged with this electricity.

Seems we have no problem in producing power to generate all sorts of business in the USA but we cant come up with some power solutions for Canadian towns that are off the grid. One solution would be to put them on the grid.

In the Fifties Prince George and the surrounding areas electricity was produced by diesel generators. We sold them to a city in Kansas when we got the power from the Bennet dam.

What this Country needs is more thinkers and doers, and less well paid dreamers.

Don’t forget that is well paid hotair.

A gentleman making $200,000 dollars a year asking hypothetical questions? That’s the job for me!

Also all this study about burning wood, sorry, bio energy, well why not study the wood burning plant that is in Williams Lake generating electricity from wood chips. It has been established for fifteen years or more. Or how about studying the steam generation and production of electricity at our local pulp mills. Those in various have been in operation for over 40 years now. Must be something to learn there. I must be missing something. Why spend millions building heating plants at UNBC when they already have a heating system?

I understand where Mr. Iwama et. al. are coming from, and I guess that this kind of pie in the sky dreaming may be what eventually leads to bigger and better things, perhaps even advancing the cause of renewable energy. The trouble is, adding another carbon burning steam generator up at UNBC is not likely to earn kudos for “greenest Uni.” Look at the whole picture; how is the wood waste generated, is it ready made, just pop it in the toaster and out comes energy? Of course not, it is in a form that requires harvesting, processing and transport, all of which use vast quantities of non renewable resources. Hmm, seems to somewhat cancel out, imho.
Makes more sense to move toward running most things with electricity. B.C. already has plenty of hydro generated power, the damage to the land from reservoirs is already done, let’s expand on it. Why not export less electricity, and use it in B.C. on projects that will benefit B.C. taxpayers, as Palopu said, run power lines to remote communities, if Kemess could do it for their mine (390 km. power line from Kennedy to Kemess) it can be done for other areas too. Other than environmental damage (reservoirs-already done, more or less irreversible in the short run) electricity offers the cleanest, most reliable source of renewable power, this can be made to work, we have the technology.
metalman.

“In this community, UNBC is a bit of a running joke”

That speaks loudly for what this community understands. It is those people who think that way that makes this community a running joke to those on the outside looking in.

I agree with the hydro generated electticity scenario big time!

However, that being said, it looks to me that it will take some study to convince the rest of the people in the world whether methods of using biomass as an energy contributor are valid or not when it comes to energy effectiveness.

That “conversation” needs to be had in an academic setting.

That being said, I am a bit concerned that the way the topic is being communicated to the general public is that the outcome is already known.

To me, it is still very much at the level of a hypothesis that has to be proven or disproven.
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“Iwama says in Northern BC there are some communities with diesel tanks running their energy systems and there are many other isolated areas in the world doing the same thing”

I think there are more than just “some” communities like that.

Alterna was going to be going after those communities and replace those tanks with biomass driven energy systems.

To me, the story to be explored here is why has that not happened?

1. The technology is not quite there yet? 2. The technology is there but it is too expensive a proposition?
3. The communities do not have secure access to biomass?
4. No one will take the investment chance to apply the technology?
5. or some other reason?

http://genomicscience.energy.gov/centers/#page=news

That link is to a USA approach to the topic. 2007 …

3 research centres with access to many scientists working from a number of universities aaround the country. Also working at the genome level.

Anyone remember ethanol from wood? Kinsley had a plant all set to go for PG … that was then, this is now. I see nothing. Why? Again, technology not there yet? Not economic yet? What is the real story with biomass? To date, we are basically doing what the poorest villages in the workd are doing, picking the wood scraps up from the ground or other waste, and burning it. Sure, it looks great from an industrial point of view, but essentially that is all we are doing in a mechanized fashion.

http://www1.aston.ac.uk/ebri

A European version of the same thing ….

Green University, built up a hill with no green access. So the bottom line is, how much is being trendy going to cost me?

Powerlines, cables and required infrastructure is expensive that is why remote areas are not connected to the grid. Kemess makes, made money and with depreciation write downs could build the powerline and still make money. Building a very long powerline to a small remote community does make any economic sense.

That line to Kemess cost them economically big time, as there was a serious error in its design. The conductor was undersized resulting in serious line losses.