Husker6.5
135' diagonal 16:9HD, 25KW sound!
Well, I have one farmer friend up by Neligh, NE who runs his whole farm - farmhouse, machine shed, two barns - off of the solar array between his farmhouse and machine shed, with a bank of storage batteries and a voltage inverter in the machine shed. He usually is able to sell his excess electrical capacity back to Nebraska Public Power District each month. He heats the 130 year old (in gorgeously maintained/restored/remodeled condition) farmhouse with an external wood furnace supplied with big chunks of firewood from the shelter belts around the perimeter of the farm. He has a diesel tank on the farm to fuel his old John Deere tractor and his combine and his pickup. He also charges his Chevy Volt off his array, it's used for the 7 mile trip to Neligh or 42 miles to Norfolk, NE to shop, etc. Or to run the 175 miles down here to Lincoln. That three days of -20+ to -30+ cold snap we went through last February? He came through without a glitch, never lost power or heat! Oh, yeah, there's a HUGE wind farm array just north of Neligh, stretching for about 15 miles, with one of the windmills about ¾ of a mile west of his farmhouse, no failures of those, either! In fact, all the windfarms in Nebraska actually produced an excess of electrical production during the cold snap. Unlike Texass', ours are winterized and designed to run year round, regardless of weather conditions. BTW, my friend's farm was also the site of the Willie Nelson and Neil Young Harvest the Hope concert back in September 2014.
Have another farmer friend who lives over by Wisner, NE who has a fairly large (40,000 head) confined hog operation and has designed his hog sheds to supply a methane generator from the hog waste that then collects all the methane gas and compresses it and into storage tanks. He has a 100# propane tank in the bed of his K3500 Dually Crewcab Duramax Silverado that he fills with compressed liquified Methane and uses a Bully Dog Propane injection kit to Methane fog his Duramax. When he's Methane fogging and running just enough diesel to fire the mixture, he gets 72mpg on the highway on the dino/hog mixture. He also has tanks out on his center pivots, all 14 Sections worth (that's 8,960 acres), to fuel the 454 Chevy motors that pump the water to power his center pivots to irrigate the feed corn to feed the hogs with during the year. He also uses the methane produced by the hog operation to power the four 30KW generators that provide lighting, air circulation and heating (methane converted propane furnaces) to the barns. The initial investment to build the methane generator system and compressor system paid back in 5 years and it drastically reduced his overhead costs for fuel and electricity. He's still hooked up to NPPD's grid for emergency and high demand back up, and does put a tank or two of diesel in his pickup every couple of months, but is pretty much energy independent.
