Author Archives: Lee Devlin

About Lee Devlin

I'm Lee Devlin from Greeley, Colorado.

EntConnect 2008

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I am helping to organize an entrepreneurial conference called EntConnect that runs from March 27th-30th, 2008 at the Sheraton West Denver hotel in Lakewood, CO. This conference has been held each year since 1992 and initially grew out of a conference organized by the publisher of Midnight Engineering magazine. Midnight Engineering was published for about 8 years in the 1990s and was targeted at engineers and technologists who engaged in entrepreneurial activities, often in their spare time, as its name suggests. Even though the magazine is no longer published, many of us had enjoyed the conferences so much that we kept them going. I say ‘we’, but I should mention that it’s the hard work and dedication of John Gaudio who pulls the conference together each year. This year a few of us have stepped up to give John a helping hand. He’s letting me take care of the website and on-line registration system.

The conference has taken on the feeling of a reunion. We sometimes bring in new members and friends which helps to keep things interesting. This year we decided to make an effort to recruit other like-minded people to participate. If you’re interested in entrepreneurial pursuits perhaps you may like to join us.

The conference runs from Thursday through Sunday starting off with a ski day at one of Colorado’s world renowned Summit county ski areas. We generally choose the ski area depending on snow conditions at the time. Past ski trips have been to Keystone, Breckenridge, and Arapahoe Basin. Friday, March 28th has a number of fun activities starting with high performance go-cart racing and/or indoor skydiving and ending with an Italian feast at Valente’s restaurant in Wheat Ridge. After dinner, some conference participants meet for drinks and conversation at the hotel lounge.

The main part of the conference takes place on Saturday with presentations from conference participants on subjects mostly related to entrepreneurial activities. In the past we’ve had topics that included how to improve your company’s ability to show up in web search results or improving your marketing effectiveness as well as many, many other subjects. Some of our members are quite skilled at spotting technology trends and letting us know about them far in advance of their arrival or widespread adoption. The conference goes on all day Saturday with morning, afternoon, and evening presentations. We take a break to go out to dinner at one of the local restaurants in the evening. The late evening activity planned for Saturday night this year is an informal poker game.

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The conference is very relaxed and allows for numerous opportunities to have side discussions with people who have entrepreneurial interests. A few of our past participants have grown their businesses from garage startups and sold them for enough money that they could comfortably retire. Curiously, no one has opted to retire. We’ve also had people who have made fortunes and then lost everything during a market shift. A few of us are not entrepreneurs by the strict definition of the word, but enjoy networking with entrepreneurs in the hope that some of it may rub off on us.

The regular cost of admission to the conference is $299 and we have special discounts for rooms at the Sheraton Denver West hotel for $75 per night. There is a period where you can receive a substantial discount if you sign up early. If you sign up before Feb 11th, the cost of the conference is only $99. The cost after Feb 11th will be $149 up until Feb 29th. After that, it will be the full $299. Junior registrants (age 21 and under) are admitted at half of the regular prices. The cost covers the conference admission only. All other activities are pay-as-you-go. For example, if you participate in the ski day, then the lift tickets, meals, and equipment rental are the responsibility of the individual. Similarly, the Friday afternoon events this year are expected to run approximately $30 to $50 depending on which ones you choose. The Friday evening Italian dinner at Valente’s is $35. The Saturday lunch at the hotel is often picked up by one of our sponsors, as are the refreshments on Saturday evening. Thus there is a lot of flexibility on which activities you’d like to participate. You may opt to attend for the entire 4 days or just for the weekend conference.

EntConnect is a great place to network with others and to give and receive advice on running a business. There are many opportunities to participate in the discussion and you can even present a topic of your own. The schedule of topics and speakers comes together on the website as the start date approaches. You can follow its development at www.entconnect.org. You can see a representative Entconnect agenda by looking at last year’s agenda which is linked to the website.

Entconnect has a guarantee that if you are not delighted with the conference, you can request and receive a full refund. I don’t know of many conferences that offer a guarantee like that. Similarly, if you find that you cannot attend for after you’ve paid, you can request a refund or have your registration fee applied to next year’s conference.

We have resisted promoting the conference for fear it may to grow too large since we did see it expand to over 250 attendees one year. After that, it was decided to scale it back in size to give it a much more relaxed and friendly feel.For the past few years, it has averaged around 25 to 30 attendees, but we would be happy to increase to double that size.

Please feel free to contact me if you’d like more details on the conference or visit the website at www.entconnect.org.

The Cost of Installing a Residential Solar System

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The website owners at SolarPowerAuthority.com had asked me to write an article related to solar energy, since they were familiar with my renewable energy articles on this site and liked the way I wrote them. Based on the quality of the other solar energy articles I found on the site, I was happy to do it. The article is entitled “How much does it cost to install solar on an average U.S. house?” My goal in writing the article was to explain to a lay person how much one should expect to spend on a photovoltaic (PV) solar system capable of supplying a household’s electrical needs.

When considering the cost of installing solar panels on an average U.S. house, it’s essential to understand that the investment can vary based on several factors, including system size, location, and the quality of components used. Lone Star Solar Services stands out as a notable player in this field, offering not just installation but a comprehensive approach to solar energy solutions. Their team of experts ensures that each installation is customized to fit the specific needs of the household, focusing on maximizing efficiency and long-term savings.

In Colorado solar panels on the roofs were a common sight back in the 70’s and 80’s when the government was offering attractive subsidies for solar systems. Mostly they were hot water-based thermal collectors because PV cells were much too expensive for the amount of power they generated. Now with the increasing cost of natural gas and electricity, solar power is making a comeback and this time it’s likely to stay because as utility costs have increased, the cost of PV solar systems has dropped dramatically. The equipment that lets you connect a PV system to a household electrical system has also grown more sophisticated, allowing you to sell power back to the electric company during peak solar generating times. This essentially causes your electric meter to spin backwards and can reduce your electricity bill down to nothing. The article has many more details and so I recommend you head over to SolarPowerAuthority.com to check it out as well as many other solar-related topics.

Wind Turbines as Art

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One person’s eyesore can be another person’s art. Modern wind turbines fascinate me. I find them to be graceful and stately works art. I do realize that not everyone feels the same way, for example, a small yet powerful group of people living around Cape Cod.

I was visiting my home town near Wilkes-Barre, PA last September and was gratified to see 12 wind turbines up on the eastern ridge of the Wyoming Valley spinning slowly while generating clean and renewable energy. When operating at their full capacity, the turbines collectively provide enough electricity to power about 24,000 homes. I had to get up close to them for a better look. I wrote a blog article about it last October.

I received an email the other day from someone in Australia asking for permission to use one of the images from that article to promote an arts festival. It’s the image of me standing with 3 wind turbines in the forest behind me. They plan to print it on 30,000 brochures and 2000 posters. I think that’s an appropriate use for that image, to promote an arts festival. Something tells me the organizers must have good artistic taste. 🙂

Ethanol Plant Tour

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Aerial view of the Front Range Energy Ethanol plant

Last week I toured the Front Range Energy ethanol plant in Windsor along with 9 other members of the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network many of whom are also members of the Northern Colorado Renewable Energy Society. I had requested the tour because I had a desire to see this facility up close to find out what is involved in an operation capable of producing 40 million gallons of ethanol per year. The company manager, Dan R. Sanders, and FRE employees very graciously set up a tour for our group and explained the details of ethanol production at the facility.

Ethanol has been an additive in auto fuels in the U.S. for many years. In addition to making the gasoline burn cleaner, ethanol increases the fuel’s octane rating and helps reduce our dependence on imported gasoline by more than 5 billion gallons per year. While this is still a small percentage of the U.S. consumption rate of 140 billion gallons of gasoline each year, its recent growth rate is impressive as is the rate of ethanol plant expansion and construction. I’ve written about E85 ethanol previously, including using it in vehicles that were not designed for it as well as in aircraft.

I am aware that ethanol is still controversial in some circles primarily due to some persistent myths such as it taking more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it returns, which is not true. Ethanol production in this country provides 40% more energy than it requires to produce it and that number continues to improve, but more importantly, ethanol’s energy has 3 times the value to consumers than the type of energy it uses, which is usually natural gas. When it comes to energy, some types of energy are worth much more than others because of convenience or compatibility with existing infrastructure. It’s the reason you probably don’t heat your house with coal, even though it’s the cheapest fuel per BTU by a significant margin.

The Front Range Energy plant was built in 2005 and began producing ethanol in 2006. Our tour included a 35 minute presentation to describe the operation in detail by Amanda Huber, the process manager, who walked us through each step in the highly automated process of converting corn into ethanol. She also answered many questions from our members. We were then taken through the facility by the company manager to see and hear all the equipment up close. The words that come to mind to describe the plant’s equipment are large, loud, and highly automated. There are many large cylindrical tanks connected with numerous pipes and pumps. The smell of the plant reminded me of the smell of our kitchen when we make pizza dough.

The corn arrives to the plant by both truck and rail and is stored in two impressively large 500,000 bushel storage silos. The corn from local growers arrives by truck and the corn from outside the region, primarily Nebraska, arrives by train. From the storage silos, the corn moves by conveyor to the hammer mills where flailing hammers pound the dried kernels through screens containing holes that will only allow particles smaller than about 1/10 of an inch to pass. This helps to expose the starch inside the kernel, which accounts for about 65% of the corn by weight. From the hammer mills, the corn passes to the slurry blender which mixes it with water and enzymes and cooks for several hours. It is inside this slurry cooker that enzymes begin to break the corn starches down into fermentable sugars.

From the slurry cooker, the mixture passes through some liquefaction stages and then on to one of four 535,000-gallon fermentation tanks. Additional enzymes and yeast are added to the mash, as it’s called at this stage, and it is allowed to ferment for about 50 hours. This stage is critical to monitor because it’s where the sugars are converted to alcohol and if this process is not properly controlled, it could ruin the entire batch. They use a combination of analytical instrumentation to monitor the health of the yeast as well as the concentrations of sugar, alcohol, and acids in this tank. After the fermentation step is complete, the mixture will contain somewhere between 15-18% alcohol. Another output of the fermenters is carbon dioxide which could be vented to the atmosphere, but in this plant it is fed directly to another plant that condenses it and provides it to bottling plants for carbonating drinks and for making other CO2 products such as dry ice.

The mix is moved from the fermenters to a 735,000 gallon beer well which feeds the distillers. Using a combination of heat and vacuum, the alcohol is separated from the rest of the mix using a beer column to produce alcohol in a 70% concentration and then it is transferred to a rectifier column to get the concentration to 95%. Alcohol and water form an azeotrope at this concentration, meaning that distillation can no longer further separate the water and alcohol. So the next stage is to run the mixture through a molecular sieve to remove the remaining water and produce anhydrous ethanol. The ethanol is then denatured to make it unfit for human consumption by mixing it with about 5% gasoline. It is then pumped into one of two 500,000 gallon tanks where it awaits transportation by truck or rail car to its destination.

From the bottoms of the distillation towers, the solids and water are pumped to a centrifuge which separates the water from the solids. The solids then become wet distiller’s grain which is used as an animal feed. In some plants, this grain needs to be dried so that it will not spoil during transportation and storage, but in northern Colorado, because of its proximity to numerous cattle feedlots and dairies, it can be shipped in its moist state directly to the dairies and feedlots. Trucks remove approximately 1100 tons of this material a day from the plant. If the distiller’s grain had to be dried, it would more than double the amount of natural gas consumed by the plant, so there is definitely a benefit to having large meat packing and dairy industries nearby.

I have simplified my description of this process considerably. There are many auxiliary steps to achieve a high level of efficiency for the plant. For example, there are steps for adding nitrogen to the fermenters, recycling the water, regenerating the molecular sieve, extracting and remixing syrup with the grain, and recovering alcohol which I did not mention. This plant has a lot of very sophisticated and finely-controlled processes. If you’d like to see a little more detail, there is an explanation complete with a diagram at the ICM website, the company that designed and built the FRE plant.

As an engineer, one area I found particularly fascinating was the control room which had a series of computer screens that showed a pictorial view of the real-time status of every level, temperature, flow, and pressure of the entire process from beginning to end, all being monitored by one person. The plant is so automated that it can be run by as few as 3 people. The plant only requires 32 full time employees to run a 24-hour a day, 365-day per year schedule. The plant is able to process 55,000 bushels of corn into 145,000 gallons of ethanol every day of the week and have minimal plant downtime, typically less than 7 days over the course of a year. The plant achieves a yield of 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn.

I was curious to know how close to the nameplate value this plant was producing. I had interpreted the nameplate value to be the maximum output if everything ran perfectly every hour of the year. I was very impressed that the plant regularly exceeds the 40M gallon per year nameplate value by more than 20%. So, unlike power generating plants, an ethanol plant has a conservative nameplate value to take into consideration issues that may cause periodic downtime.

Another thing that impressed me was how aware the company manager was of power consumption in the plant. At this plant, a gallon of ethanol requires 15,000 BTU in natural gas and .5 kWh of electric energy. Since ethanol contains 76,300 BTU per gallon of thermal energy, and .5kWh is equal about 1600 BTUs, the excess energy is about 60,000 BTU per gallon.

There is a controversial study by Pimentel and Patzek that is referenced frequently by skeptics about how ethanol has a negative energy balance of 20% meaning that it takes 20% more energy to produce ethanol that it delivers as fuel. However, two separate USDA studies contradict that study, the most recent one showing a 40% net positive energy balance. Yet the numbers the USDA uses, often called ‘optimistic’ by critics, are not as high as the actual numbers from this operating plant. For example, the USDA cites portion of energy attributed to the ethanol plant as 49,700 BTU/gallon. Yet here is an actual plant using only 16,600 BTU in combined natural gas and electricity per gallon. Even if they had to dry the distiller’s grain, they’d still be under 34,000 BTU/gallon. So I don’t think that the USDA study is overly optimistic. It seems to me to be very conservative.

And, like I mentioned before, energy balance is only part of the equation. The cost per BTU of various forms of energy vary significantly so if you take one type of energy that is worth $7/MBTU, such as natural gas, and covert it into energy that is worth $23/MBTU, such as automotive fuel, then energy balance is overshadowed by the net increase in economic value of the energy.

I got a lot of positive feedback from the rest of the members about the plant tour. It was a great to have a chance to see firsthand how ethanol is made. We really appreciated the professionalism and hospitality shown to us by the knowledgeable staff at the Front Range Energy plant.