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A Powerful Opportunity For Managing Your Electricity Costs

For organizations looking for new ways to manage their electricity costs, DEMAND RESPONSE can make perfect sense.  Demand Response is increasingly being recognized as an effective way to reduce the cost of power and the need to build additional electricity generation capacity. 

What is DEMAND RESPONSE?

DEMAND RESPONSE programs compensate participating industrial and commercial businesses for reducing their energy demand at specific times of power system need.  During such times wholesale market prices for electricity may be high, the power system is experiencing large peaks in demand, or there is a greater risk to the reliability of the electricity grid.

DEMAND RESPONSE can be incorporated into your business’ energy cost-management strategy in several different ways by reducing your equipment electricity use, generating your own power or shifting production to an off-peak period.

You can participate in Ontario’s DEMAND RESPONSE program in two different ways, depending on your facility’s electricity demand: 

DEMAND RESPONSE DR3

This contractual initiative offers higher incentive rates to large businesses in return for your firm commitment to take part in activation notices.

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peaksaver PLUS^TM For Small Business

If your business has central air conditioning and an annual electricity demand of less than 50kW, you’re invited to participate in this load management initiative.

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Depending on which initiative you choose and where you are located in the province, you may also have the option to participate through your local electric utility or through a Demand Response Provider. Demand Response Providers are organizations that manage the demand response capacity of a number of facilities as an aggregated group.

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Biochar Is a Valuable Soil Amendment

Biochar is a solid material obtained from the carbonisation of biomass. Biochar may be added to soils with the intention to improve soil functions and to reduce emissions from biomass that would otherwise naturally degrade to greenhouse gases. Biochar also has appreciable carbon sequestration value. These properties are measurable and verifiable in a characterisation scheme, or in a carbon emission offset protocol.

This 2,000 year-old practice converts agricultural waste into a soil enhancer that can hold carbon, boost food security, and increase soil biodiversity, and discourage deforestation. The process creates a fine-grained, highly porous charcoal that helps soils retain nutrients and water.

Biochar is found in soils around the world as a result of vegetation fires and historic soil management practices. Intensive study of biochar-rich dark earths in the Amazon (terra preta), has led to a wider appreciation of biochar’s unique properties as a soil enhancer.

Biochar can be an important tool to increase food security and cropland diversity in areas with severely depleted soils, scarce organic resources, and inadequate water and chemical fertilizer supplies.

Biochar also improves water quality and quantity by increasing soil retention of nutrients and agrochemicals for plant and crop utilization. More nutrients stay in the soil instead of leaching into groundwater and causing pollution.

Biochar is a Powerfully Simple Tool to Combat Climate Change

The carbon in biochar resists degradation and can hold carbon in soils for hundreds to thousands of years. Biochar is produced through pyrolysis or gasification — processes that heat biomass in the absence (or under reduction) of oxygen.

In addition to creating a soil enhancer, sustainable biochar practices can produce oil and gas byproducts that can be used as fuel, providing clean, renewable energy. When the biochar is buried in the ground as a soil enhancer, the system can become "carbon negative."

Biochar and bioenergy co-production can help combat global climate change by displacing fossil fuel use and by sequestering carbon in stable soil carbon pools. It may also reduce emissions of nitrous oxide.

We can use this simple, yet powerful, technology to store 2.2 gigatons of carbon annually by 2050. It’s one of the few technologies that is relatively inexpensive, widely applicable, and quickly scalable. We really can’t afford not to pursue it.

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Introduction to Triple Green Energy

Biochar- a valued by-product from our TGE Series of BioHeat systems

Biochar

Along with bags of potting soil, mulch, and compost, you soon may see bags of biochar for sale at your local nursery.
To explain what biochar is, we need to return to the Amazon basin circa 450 a.d. Indigenous people didn’t practice slash-and-burn farming as they do now. They practiced slash-and-char agriculture, roasting wood and leafy greens in “smothered” fires, in which lower temperatures and oxygen levels resulted in the production of charcoal instead of ash. The charcoal was buried in fields where crops were grown.
But then, with the arrival of Europeans and their diseases, the Amazon civilizations, some with cities of more than 100,000 people, collapsed. Slash-and-char agriculture was forgotten, as were the fields of buried charcoal. But they weren’t gone. In the 20th century, huge expanses of black soil were rediscovered, although at first no one knew what they were. Then, in the 1990s, scientists determined that these soils were manmade. They were dubbed terra preta (“dark earth” in Portuguese). And they were extensive. Some estimates put the total acreage covered by the charcoal-enriched soil at twice the size of Great Britain.
Most amazingly, the soils extended up to 6 feet deep in many places. Scientists have theorized that terra preta soils are self-propagating and have grown in depth since they were first made. The charcoal, acting a lot like humus, had been colonized by myriad microbes, fungi, earthworms, and other creatures; these soil organisms produced carbon-based molecules that stuck to the charcoal, gradually increasing the soil’s carbon content. Carbon in decomposing plants, which would otherwise escape into the air as greenhouse gases, was sequestered by the biologically active charcoal in the soil. Scientists theorize that the charcoal was originally laid down in thin layers and that earthworms chewed through the layers and mixed them deeply into the soil.
That is just the beginning of the benefits of this strange soil. It appears that the carbon will be sequestered for a thousand—possibly thousands—of years, unable to contribute to global warming in the form of greenhouse gases. Green charcoal, or biochar made from agricultural residues or renewable biomass, appears to hold the most promise as a carbon sink. Every ton of this biochar in the soil is capable of capturing and holding at least 3 tons of carbon.
Biochar also stimulates mycorrhizal fungi—those fungal symbionts that live on plant roots, scour surrounding soil for hard-to-find phosphorus, and deliver it back to their host plants. According to scientists studying the soils, microbial growth of all kinds is substantially improved. And so is the soil’s ability to hold nutrients until plants need them, then dole them out at the optimum rate for plant health. Crops have been shown to grow 45 percent greater biomass on unfertilized terra preta soil versus poor soil fertilized with chemical fertilizers.
Research on biochar is under way at universities around the world, and agribusiness is beginning to show interest. While biochar could be manufactured by cutting down forests and fields, a more sensible approach would be to utilize the billions of tons of organic waste that now goes into landfills—a perfect raw material for biochar

Biochar - The new green is black.

It appears our Bioheat system is proving to be even greener. Biochar is one of the valuable by-products produced by our Bioheat system. The more research I do the clearer it becomes that our system and biochar play a critical role in addressing the global problem of climate change. Bioheat along with biochar not only reduced our carbon footprint but offer many other benefits. Do yourself a favour and educate yourself by reading the following link; http://biochar-international.org/biochar/