Comments by noel_stanton
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Posted on April 17 at 10:47 a.m.
Mr. Hartman has done his homework and correctly attacks the failure of the American nation over the past decades to establish a national energy policy. Unfortunately, he would correct the problems with "mainframe solutions," that is, big centralized power plants analog to the old mainframe computer centers. The future is with cogeneration, small, decentralized power plants, analog to PCs in every home and office, generating electricity and warmth and cooling for buildings with superior insulation and energy-efficient equipment and lighting.
A Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the US. Dept. of Energy, is conducted biennially. The competition in October of 2007 took place on the Mall in Washington between 20 university teams, including a combined team of KU and KSU Architecture students. The task was to design a house of about 1000 sq. ft. and use a washer, dryer, other appliances and lighting as well as an electric car, to simulate an American family home in 2015, all to be charged and keep running by solar energy.
First place was won by a team from the Institute of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. Unlike all the other teams, the Germans used standard energy management software that will run on any laptop, together with high-tech insulation, phase change wall board, LED-lights and simple shading and cross-ventilation to maintain a temperature of 72-76 degrees while keeping their batteries filled at all times, as the monitors proved.
The Kansas team was number 18 of 20. The Germans attributed their success to their strategy of conserving and managing energy, while the others chose to make as much energy as possible and then blow it away on conventional power hungry appliances. That is, the Germans generated decentralized electricity with a roof covered with photovoltaic panels and hot water with solar thermal panels, while conserving consumption with software and efficient technology. Such homes with a cogeneration plant for the neighborhood is the future Mr. Hartman, not nuclear or coal-fired monsters.
The link Mr. Hartman offers to HTA Inc. and their Aquygen gas is fascinating and might be the answer to pouring American money into the bank vaults of the Mideast potentates. Another solution for a gasoline substitute, however, can be biogas, generated from agricultural and household waste. Biogas, when properly filtered and treated, can be sold into natural gas pipelines or used as vehicle fuel. There are various towns of about 2000-3000 inhabitants in Germany and Austria and several cities in Sweden with over 30,0000 population that have their own municipal utility company which makes biogas and then uses it to heat and power the whole community as well as many vehicles.
Posted on January 30 at 9 a.m.
Alfalfa
You still have a great idea!! All the negatives being posted here are not because you are a farmer, but rather because most people are limited in their vision and react with a knee jerk to new ideas.
Would it be cheaper during the start up phase to lease a slaughter line from Tyson rather than buying a building and equipment? Assuming that Tyson would lease.
Posted on January 29 at 8:38 p.m.
Continued....
Observer then posted five suggestions on Jan. 25, at 10:57 p.m.: (shortened due to space restrictions)
#2 Encourage Fanestils to expand slaughter/processing of local organic beef. http://www.emporiagazette.com/news/2006/......
In fact, there’s been so much success at Fanestil’s, the company is running out of places to put it.
“We’re pretty much out of room, out of space, out of opportunities to do more here,” said Dan Smoots, who owns the plant with his wife, Jan. “I’d like to get the ball rolling and see what we can do to get located out of this flood way.”
Some kind of expansion is going to be necessary. The company is just doing too well.
A lot of that push has come from the company’s organic meat lines, a market the company began to explore in 2005.
“With the elimination of the small country stores, it was obvious we had to look into some other areas,” Smoots said. “We were small enough that we could take on an organic line of products. For other people, it’d be too small for them, or too big. For us, it was just the right size.” and
#5 Organic local production of poultry, beef, pork. Slaughter/processing and retailing.
Reading the reactions being posted above, all the moaning, nit-picking attacks on others, the black despair and insistence that Emporia is dying and soon to be a ghost town. Open your eyes and see that the business concept sketched out by Alfalfa can work and uses the strengths of the town and the region!!! Get positive.
This is being written in Europe. European beef is pathetic but Europeans will not eat American beef because it is full of chemicals and hormones. Europeans spend millions to eat beef in Argentinean steakhouses because the meat is guaranteed to be from the pampas. I doubt it is completely chemical free but the European consumer thinks it is.
If Emporia would produce grass-fed, guaranteed non-industrial beef, there is a huge potential for over-the-counter sales, a hamburger chain and restaurant franchises all over the world featuring top product Kansas beef! Go for it instead of waiting for the City Manager or the powers that be to find some big plant that will set up for a few years and then fire everyone and move on again.
Posted on January 29 at 8:37 p.m.
Alfalfa's concept of a locally owned and supplied beef packer (8th post from the top of this thread) is WONDERFUL!!! Especially the idea of producing different brands of beef. Several others have posted related ideas.
Observer on Jan. 25, at 9:11 posted the following:
The local ranchers will need to see a greater emphasis on grazing/pasturing and a reduction in winter feeding operations.
There is a local meatpacking plant (he includes a link to Fanistelmeats), which emphasizes quality of product. Perhaps they should consider expanding into a quality beef product without the use of growth hormones. Perhaps a beef free of additives and corporate greed would be welcome in our local markets. Perhaps an expansion into natural beef production with support from the community would provide quality jobs for our people.
My post followed Observer a few minutes later on Jan. 25, at 9:13 p. m.:
Suggestion: ranchers and regional investors can establish a cooperative with the goal of producing and marketing natural meat, call it "organic beef." There is a growing market for grass-fed, chemical-free meat. Consumers will pay top dollar if they are certain of the quality and that it is authentic.
When the cooperative gets going, it might only employ 400 in Emporia but at least 1500 people in the area would have an income as suppliers. And the image of a national product "Flint Hills BBB, Bio-Beef and Buffalo" can only make the town and region more attractive.
Gallo used to have bad wines. In fact, Gallo was another name for "cheap binge, bad headache." Gallo made an effort to improve and today it sells successfully at a much higher price, even in wine producing European countries.
Emporia should make the same effort to improve the meat products it sends out to the nation. Don't mix good grass-fed meat with the low quality coming from industrial feedlots.
Tyson just gave the city and the region a stiff body blow to the gut. You have strengths; use them to get your breath back and maybe even beat Tyson at its own game.
Continued....
Posted on January 25 at 9:13 p.m.
Suggestion: ranchers and regional investors establish a cooperative with the goal of producing and marketing natural meat, call it "organic meat." There is a growing market for grass-fed, chemical-free meat. Consumers will pay top dollar if they are certain of the quality and that it is authentic.
When the cooperative gets going, it might only employ 400 in Emporia but at least 1500 people in the area would have an income as suppliers. And the image of a national product "Flint Hills BBB, Bio-Beef and Buffalo" can only make the town and region more attractive.
Gallo used to have bad wines. In fact, Gallo was another name for "cheap binge, bad headache." Gallo made an effort to improve and today it sells successfully at a much higher price, even in Europe.
Emporia should make the same effort to improve the meat products it sends out to the nation. Don't mix good grass-fed meat with the low quality coming from industrial feed lots.
Tyson just gave the city and the region a stiff body blow to the gut. You have strengths, use them to get your breath back and even beat Tyson at its own game.
Posted on January 24 at 6:24 p.m.
Muffling the train noise: a wonderful improvement for life in Emporia!!
If the new city manager is brave enough to take on BNSF, may I suggest as his next project getting Tyson to capture the stench by converting its animal wastes, manure and sewage into biogas using anaerobic fermentation.
Posted on October 26 at 5:47 a.m.
The stench from Tyson could be eliminated if the wastes were converted to bio-gas. The investment to produce bio-gas would be a win-win for the city and Tyson itself. Bio-gas can generate heat (hot water, steam, whatever), electricity and can even power vehicles. There are bio-gas plants in Europe that filter the gas to bring it up to the standard of conventional natural gas so that the communities and commercial producers (like farmers) can sell their gas into the pipelines of utilities like Kansas Gas.
A wonderful example for this is Linkoeping, Sweden (some 100 miles southwest of Stockholm). Because a food processing plant produced too many organic wastes, the city worked with scientists from Linkoeping University to begin processing the wastes into bio-gas. Later bio-mass from the local farms and forests was added to increase production so that now many buildings are heated, warm water and electricity generated and some 600 city and county vehicles powered by bio-gas.
The noise pollution from the trains could be eliminated if the grade crossings were eliminated. If I remember correctly, the Cottonwood Street crossing has already been blocked and it should be feasible to block perhaps two-thirds of the crossings. The remaining crossings could be guarded by lights and automatic barriers or converted to underpasses.
It cannot be that in order to protect perhaps 4 people in a car or 40 in a bus, bellowing, shrieking machines are allowed to bombard perhaps 40,000 people with blaring noise day and night. If loud planes were to leave the Emporia airport every hour, every night from ten pm until six am and fly low over the city toward the north, all those who argue that train noise is romantic and nostalgic would be screaming their indignation. If you have to slave long days at low wages in Emporia, you should at least have the right to sleep peacefully.
Rather than spending $70,000 for image consultants, maybe it would be wiser to retain a city planning office that has worked with communities to solve pollution and housing problems.
The importance of education (ESU, the Technical School and the Teachers Hall of Fame) is the image that Emporia enjoys with many people. It would seem logical to build on this by establishing a Science Park near the ESU campus for start-up companies concentrating on educational research and data compilation or perhaps the editorial work for publishing houses of textbooks and other literature pertaining to the field.
Posted on July 11 at 5:51 a.m.
Emporia's best, like Mr. Soden, would do well to establish another "Manufactured Gas Company."
The company would use local animal and agricultural wastes to produce bio-gas.
Why must Emporians go to a "Leavenworth in Arabia" to get energy from the sheikhs when local resources and technology can sever this dependence?
noel stanton
moerlenbach, germany
Posted on June 8 at 2:27 a.m.
Reebles indeed enjoys a proud tradition in Emporia. Perhaps the Reeble foundation would consider supporting the fund drive of the Corner House, which seems to very quietly be doing good works, too.
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Posted on June 30 at 7:33 p.m.
Why was WAW's Red Rocks not on the list?
On Chase County Courthouse a winner