Five Iowans bicycled through the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark on a four-week tour of alternative energy operations this summer. They found many ideas that would fit Iowa. A few of these energy ideas are already in operation or being tested in the state, but they are part of daily life in northern Europe. These are ideas that mean money for farmers and their communities and efficient energy and a clean environment for the state.  Read the diary.

Spinning Energy From Straw

At Sakskobing, Denmark, area farmers are making money on straw that is burned for electricity. There, a new district heating-electric plant burns straw and gets nearly three times the energy potential of a standard U.S. power plant. While standard power plants convert only about 33 percent of their fuel into electricity, with the rest of the potential energy becoming waste heat, the Sakskobing plant uses about 90 percent. The heat produced at the plant heats the homes of 12,500 residential and business customers in two Danish towns. Nearly 60 percent of the potential energy in the fuel goes for heat and 33 percent becomes electricity. District heating is common in northern Europe and is one of the reasons countries there are more energy efficient than the United States.

By burning the wheat and grass straw, the plant doesn't add new carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide produced when the straw is burned recycles back into the crops that produce the straw. Global warming is reduced because the power plant uses renewable fuel. The waste ash and slag from the plant are transported back to the same farms that produced the straw and used as a soil amendment. This is a truly closed-cycle power system. Energy policy in this country is integrated with agricultural policy and consequently farmers make money while the atmosphere receives less greenhouse gas.

The pictures of the plant include the building where big square straw bales are unloaded, the conveyor belt that takes it to the burner, the room holding the turbine generator, the control room, and the accumulator (a large hot water storage tank).

Taking Waste out of Waste

Aalborg, Denmark, is an example of what are called "sustainable cities." There are many in Denmark, but Aalborg goes a step beyond others to turn waste into methane gas that is used to produce electricity and heat for home and businesses. In Iowa, we have big debates over what to do with livestock waste. In Aalborg, it helps both to create energy and add nutrients to the land, with fewer bad side effects for the environment.

Aalborg's tool is a municipal methane digester, located eight miles from town in an old gravel pit. Municipal food waste from restaurants and some households go into the mix, as does a large amount of industrial waste (fish processing and slaughterhouse waste) and manure from farms. All of the material arrives by truck. At the plant, it is converted to methane gas, which then is sent by pipeline to a nearby village where it is used as fuel for an electric plant that also provides hot-water heat. The same trucks that arrive at the plant with hog and cattle manure are reloaded with digested material. The waste from the plant is stored on farms before being applied to farmland as a fertilizer and soil amendment.

The pictures show the industrial and municipal waste trucks that dump their loads into a device that removes plastic and other residue. The gloved hand shows the material before it is converted into methane gas by bacteria. The large half-dome structure stores the methane during the part of the year when demands for heat are low.

Making Energy Out of Thin Air

Use of wind power already is growing in Iowa. Europeans are showing just how much more we could do. A good example: the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which gets 18 percent of its total electricity from wind power. In February of this year, wind produced fully half of Schleswig-Holstein electricity needs and on one day, Feb. 26, wind power supplied all of the electricity used by the entire state. Iowa, by contrast, gets less than 3 percent of its electricity from the wind, despite tremendous potential particularly in the northern part of our state.

The difference is more than one of electric production. More markedly different are energy policies of the states. The Germans demand more use of renewable energy. Schleswig-Holstein plans to boost wind power to 50 percent of its wind-power production by 2010; Iowa has no plans, despite attempts by a bipartisan task force in 2001 to nudge the state toward setting a renewable energy goal. All over Europe, in both rural and urban areas, government policy is setting a course for increased use of renewable sources of energy, which benefits both the environment and the economy. In Germany, wind power not only makes the country less dependent on imported fuels, but wind-machine manufacturing and installation have created many jobs and displaced shipbuilding as the country's second largest consumer of steel.

Wind turbines were everywhere the bike riders traveled. Most often there were two to five turbines at any site. Denmark and Germany do not have the large multi-turbine wind farms of the Midwest. European wind turbines are often owned by local landowners or cooperatives.