More on this when I get back from Portland but the talk will be about local revenue production through energy generation and keeping those dollars in the community. Decentralized power will be a big factor in the discussion as well.

Join me at noon, Saturday if you can ( I believe there will be some shade ).

Moonshine distillers may not find this device has anything special going but it could enable everyone to produce their own fuel and have local farmers growing sugar beets and high school kids gathering clean wood waste in their pickups.

Read more about this here. When we can power this device with renewable energy like the V-LIM then we are really moving forward.

(hat tip/Pat)

In an email today to fellow commissioners Whitty and Stufflebean as well as local media, Bob Main makes the following suggestions –

Some thoughts on the Chromite Mining issue.

1. 75 jobs will be a boost to the local economy.

2. The ancillary economic impact of related sales will help our local economy.

3. The exploration agreement should be separate and distinct from the actual lease of the property for mining purposes.

4. Coos County should be due diligent and perform their own exploration to determine the extent and content of the minerals / metals that the citizens of Coos County own.

5. The lease by Coos County should only be for specific minerals i.e. chromite, garnet. All other minerals / metals should be a separate contract.

6. Coos County should enlist the help of an attorney that specializes in mineral leases.

7. Royalties, etc. should be thoroughly researched, thereby, providing the citizens of Coos County the best return for their minerals / metals.

8. The mechanism for payment of the royalties should be thoroughly researched.

9. 1.34 million tons of unrefined chromite ore per year may contain 1 ppm (parts per million) of platinum would mean approximately 40,000 troy ounces of platinum per year. Platinum is currently at about $1,050 per ounce x 40,000 ounces = $ 42,000,000 per year for the citizens of Coos County. Gold is currently around $900 per ounce.

10.What happens to the lease if ORC goes out of business? Should the lease terminate and not be

absorbed by another company.

11.$450,000 road improvement in the URS report. Who should bear the burden of this cost?

We need to be very cautious and perform due diligence before entering into an contractual arrangement!

Bob Main

February 13, 2009

Bob is absolutely right the County needs to do its own due diligence before signing any deals (or letting go any more County employees) with ORC or any other company seeking to do business with County resources.

Developing new technology is often like working your way through a minefield, belly down, creeping inch-by-inch, poking tentatively at every possible dent or protuberance and hoping you aren’t blown up in the process. Each forward inch extracts pints of sweat yet when you raise your head to get your bearings you find there is still a long way to go and multiple paths to choose from.
Even now, as the V-LIM turbine has solved one problem after another, where to get 8 conductor slip rings, NASA grade bearings, 50 amp 4 contact rectifiers, 45 mega Gauss magnets, what insulator to use, how to minimize cogging and resistance, the biggest hurdle lies ahead. Breaking through traditional mindsets and established paradigms that trap our society within a centralized power model is not going to be easy.
Language in the Draft EIS report prepared for FERC regarding the proposed LNG terminal illustrates the ‘stuck in the box’ thinking that has helped lead America into its current energy crisis. The report, ironically, cites all the inherent problems of centralized power production, be it renewable or LNG, namely transmission congestion as a barrier to renewable energy.
The report further cites, correctly I might add, that tying intermittent energy sources into the grid at the higher voltage transmission line levels is highly problematic. Load matching and maintaining a consistent 60 Hz output is a costly and time consuming job, the failure of which can cause massive blackouts like the one in the Northeast in 2003.
The Draft EIS report concludes that lack of transmission capacity and difficulties in load matching at the transmission level negates renewable energy as a viable alternative to LNG in meeting projected loads in the years to come. Not once does the report discuss the merits of de-centralized power production.
Widely and successfully practiced in Europe, the concept of producing power at the point of consumption instead of in remote rural outlands is hardly untried technology. The failure of the report to acknowledge advances in small wind technology, solar and geothermal power production, micro-grids and combined heat and power, not seeing the forest for the trees, puts millions of acres of private property at risk of seizure by eminent domain.
Imagine how frustrating it is for my small venture to know that I may close deals with European contacts before I finalize domestic projects, simply because the foreign mindset is open to decentralized alternatives. America must think out of the box if small business has any chance of providing long term, living, family wage jobs in Coos County.
Please allow me to take this opportunity to introduce and thank those people who participated, at my request, in the duel with Amanda Davidson. I want to especially thank my good friend, Ed Pool, who is a little under the weather right now and wrote in support of ending combat operations in Afghanistan. Ed served in the United States Navy as a radar technician and patrolled the Saigon River in 1965 and 1966. He then went on to spend 35 years with the Federal Aviation Administration. Please join me in wishing Ed a speedy recovery.
Dr Robert Fischer handled the oil-drilling topic. Bob is a Marine Corp veteran and went on to earn his PHD from Michigan State University. He taught at California State University, Fresno in the Social Sciences department for 30 years.
Pat Reid took on the ethanol topic. Pat earned his Bachelor of Science Degree in Applied Physics from Pacific Lutheran University where he also played all four years for the university’s baseball team. He served 8.5 years in the US Army with 7 of those years as a helicopter pilot including 2.5 as an instructor pilot. Pat made a direct transfer to the USCG 3.5 years ago and is currently flying as an aircraft commander out of North Bend.
Pat lives right here in Coquille with his “beautiful wife” of nearly 11 years and two children, ages seven and three.
Thank you all so much for contributing to the community.

Recognizing the importance of addressing the climate change crisis and reducing dependence upon foreign oil and gas, the US Department of Energy (USDOE) has launched an aggressive program aiming to meet 20% of America’s energy needs via wind by 2030. In conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the USDOE produced a study assessing the economic and environmental costs and benefits of achieving this goal.
The study can be read in its entirety at 20percentwind.org and concludes more than 500,000 jobs would be supported with an increase of 100,000 jobs in supporting industries and 200,000 more jobs through economic expansion at the local level. Other economic gains are expected annual property tax increases of $1.5B by 2030 and electric price stability.
Deploying wind energy and displacing fossil fuel powered plants will result in 825 million metric tons less carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2030. Power generation presently accounts for 40% of CO2 emissions in the US. Wind energy, unlike fossil fuel or nuclear generated power does not require water so water consumption will drop also.
The study focuses entirely on centralized wind energy or large wind farms despite growing and successful implementation of distributed renewable energy systems in Europe. Nevertheless, the study reveals that successful deployment of an additional 304GW of wind power to meet the 20% goal is dependent upon massive investment in the transmission grid infrastructure. Consequently, 19,000 miles of new 765-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines, for an estimated price tag of US $60 billion are being proposed to Congress by high powered energy players like T Boone Pickens.
Other challenges to the centralized model include the need to develop larger electric load balancing areas, in tandem with better regional planning to implement generation diversity. According to the study, the US must increase annual wind power installation by 16GW by 2018, within ten years. Obtaining permits from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other affected agencies in order to build out the transmission infrastructure to support this growth can take up to ten years. This is one reason the European Distributed Energy Partnership (EUDEEP) formed to implement wide scale distributed energy production to avoid many of these barriers and costs.
Significantly, the study acknowledges that a “business-as-usual” approach will not meet these goals. A major national commitment to clean energy, CO2 reductions and independence from foreign resources is required at a grass roots level. From a grass roots level it will also be possible to demonstrate that wide scale distributed energy systems can work in the US not just Europe and elsewhere. Happily, there are several people working on making the South Coast of Oregon a model of energy independence that the rest of the nation can build upon.
Please permit me a little divergence from topic here but I hope that in the inevitable debates to ensue during an election year we can focus on issues and not stoop to exposing verbal gaffes and sartorial faux pas. If you want to criticize Obama, criticize him, a constitutional lawyer, for eviscerating the 4th Amendment with his recent vote on the FISA bill. Or criticize him for his hawkish view on Iran or his votes for emergency defense spending more than five years after the ‘emergency’, not because he said fifty seven states instead of fifty on the campaign trail.
Criticize McCain for not defending the 4th Amendment and not voting on the FISA bill, for voting against an increase in GI benefits and for voting to continuing emergency defense spending five years after the ‘emergency’. Don’t criticize him because he thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a common border, (a really wide border called Iran). The future of this country is worthy of better debate and time is too short to waste on anything less than serious issues.

This past week heralded a stunning example of the dangers of designing an economic policy dependent upon outside resources. Just three days after Governor Kulongoski inaugurated the new $20M airport terminal and delivered a $624,000 check to build an air traffic control tower, Horizon Air announced they will cut service to Coos County.

One of only two carriers servicing the area and flying only to Portland, Horizon cited growing fuel costs and concerns about future demand in the area in its decision to vacate Southwest Oregon Regional Airport. Horizon’s abrupt and unexpected exit also illustrates the consequences of tying publicly owned infrastructure to privatized essential service. In the end, it is not the needs of the public but the bottom line, the profit margin for company shareholders that dictates our quality of life here on the Southern Oregon coast.

Experts predict $7 per gallon gasoline by 2010 and that fuel costs will exceed food costs in the typical family budget. By that time, if the remaining carrier pulls out of SORA it will not matter because no one will be able to afford a ticket anyway. Of course, according to Gov Kulongoski’s speech last week, the airport terminal was more about bringing people in than travel or air freight which brings me back to our dependence upon outside resources.

As I have written before, exports create jobs and imports eliminate them. Continued strategy of enticing imports, “if we build it, they will come”, whether its foreign liquefied natural gas, container ships loaded with Asian products and produce or jet setting tourists and golfers is not going to promote a sustainable, full employment and independent local economy.

As resource competition increases along with future energy demands transportation, like air and rail, will not be the only essential services cut to rural America including Coos County. Electrical generating authorities are warning that load demands may not be met by 2011 and just as Horizon cut service to small communities while maintaining more profitable urban routes, unregulated investor owned utilities will make similar cost saving decisions in delivering rural power.

To grow an independent economy with full employment we must keep as many of our dollars local as possible. As oil prices rise our spending habits are being altered for us, forcing us to make choices we would never have considered two years ago and rolling blackouts will force our hand as well. Instead of reacting to outside conditions beyond our control we should begin by making proactive decisions on our own terms now.

There are abundant, underutilized renewable resources at our disposal. First and foremost we should buy local food grown and raised by area farmers and ranchers. Encourage grocery stores to stock and offer local produce or buy at the farmers’ markets. Forego ornamental shrubbery and plant fruit and nut trees and encourage gleaning and community harvesting. The fewer miles food has to travel to get to your table the better it is for the local economy.

Wind is a plentiful local resource and community owned wind projects have been proven to be more beneficial to communities than corporately owned projects. Producing energy locally provides more long term jobs and increases the tax base which allows dollars to be reinvested in the area to fund health care, education, transportation and maintain infrastructure, all on our own terms.

Coos County has been operating below production capacity for some time because of insufficient demand for local goods and services in favor of imported goods and services. An almost 8% unemployment rate is a consequence of government investment in imports over infrastructure, unrestrained free trade and local spending habits. Exporting our dollars through the purchase of foreign fuel, electricity, food and even fines for petty traffic violations leaves less money to increase competitive local production and create jobs.

To enact these types of changes requires community involvement and progressive leadership. Attend city council and county commission meetings. Read the budgets, ask questions, assess whether that tax dollar investment will rebuild our economy. Consider running for elective office, we have four Coquille city council positions up for election this November. Get involved because what we also learned from the embarrassing Horizon Air departure is that you cannot leave matters of significant public interest in the hands of just a few.

Events are planned all over the globe – here – here – here to name but a few

For curmudgeons read here and here