Off Hiatus

Wow, take on a few side projects, get out of town for a vacation, and pretty soon it’s been almost two months since my last post.
I’ll try to update the site a bit more regularly now, especially since alternative energy seems to be in the spotlight more than ever these days.
Here’s an item I thought was especially… tasty.
Remember the Tyson Foods plan to convert the byproducts of its meat-packing operations into biofuel? Well, think for a minute about what those “byproducts” actually are.
OK, don’t think too hard, because it’s not a pretty mental image. Yes, we’re talking about slop and slime and fat and guts. Blech.
Turns out that there’s already a company testing the production of biofuel from animal byproducts, Renewable Energy Solutions, of Carthage, Mo., which went live in May 2004, which turns turkey waste from several nearby packing plants into fuel.
Unfortunately, the plant has its own unpleasant byproduct, a serious smell problem, and some local residents are raising a stink about the stink.
The governor ordered the plant shut down in December 2005, but it reopened three months later, after the company invested about $3 million in industrial grade odor eaters.
But that doesn’t seem to have done the trick, and one local resident has filed a lawsuit against RES.
I have to admit, the meatpacking plant/biofuel plant combination seems great on paper, but sometimes real-world complications don’t show up on paper.
While this is an example of NIMBY politics with which I can sympathize, there are plenty of other examples of alt-energy projects that have been stalled for other reasons that I think are just lame.
But we’ll cover Cape Wind another day.