One of the more unexpected themes to emerge at the MIT Energy 2.0 conference this weekend is the extraordinary mileage to be gained out of rethinking what might seem to be some of the most banal and non-techy stuff on the energy map.
Corn and wood, for instance. No, not robots fashioned of these materials or a new form of nuclear fusion that uses dried out husks and leaves to spark the deuterium-tritium cycle. I mean just plain old corn and wood.
John Pendray (left ) is a graduate student in MIT's Technology and Policy program who has studied the economics of burning corn rather than expending the energy to convert it to ethanol... so that the ethanol will ultimately get internally combusted. Corn-powered homes, in other words, might not be as crazy an idea as it may at first sound.
"The fuel itself is less expensive than (home heating) oil," he said. "But it is more expensive to buy a corn or (wood)-pellet burning furnace."
The kind of corn Pendray has examined could not be mistaken as scrapings from the Thanksgiving table. Rather, it's a dried field corn that otherwise might be sent to an ethanol plant. In 2005, for instance, generating the same unit of heat energy (one gigajoule) cost $13.76 for oil but only $6 for corn. If corn is particularly pricy one year, many corn-burning furnaces also burn wood-pellets (made from sawdust and other scraps from the lumber industry). One gigajoule of heat generated from pellets cost $8 in 2005.
The big kicker is the initial investment: An oil furnace might set you back $2000-$2500, while a corn/pellet furnace runs in the $3500-$4000 range.
"The only way it's going to lose you money in the long run," Pendray said, "is if oil prices go down."
The net carbon-dioxide emissions make this home heating option particularly attractive from an environmental perspective, too, said Pendray: The corn/pellet stove emits 75% less CO2 than its equivalent oil-fueled furnace. (On the other hand, he added, converting that corn to ethanol ends up producing about as much CO2 as the gasoline it would replace.)
Said Jon Strimling, of pelletsales.com (right), "We've been waiting for somebody in institutions of higher learning to recognize the value of (corn/pellet heating) -- and start explaining to the public and getting public policy behind it. It's the only unsubsidized form of energy in the country. And it's actually low-hanging fruit."
