I had a wonderful time at the grand opening of the Catawba County EcoComplex (http://www.catawbacountync.gov/ecocomplex/ecocomplex.asp). This facility currently uses methane from the landfill to provide power for up to 600 homes and will soon be processing 100,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel each year. It was a big celebration for a lot of groups and individuals there who were involved in this project for a long time for the large organizations Appalachian State, UNC Charlotte, Motorola Solutions, Catawba County, the GoldenLeaf Foundation, the Biofuels Center of NC, and Piedmont Biofuels to the various other smaller individuals and organizations including the architect, the contractor and even the building inspector. All of these wonderful individuals had to come together and continue work on a project that will help bring some degree of energy independence to their region and provide a vehicle for research and development and, hopefully, employment to those working at the facility and farmer supplying the facility with virgin feedstock or a lonely entrepreneur interested in waste vegetable oil collection.
After the ribbon cutting and as we were standing in line to get some barbecue from Judge's, I spoke with Chris Jude of Piedmont Biofuels, who was involved in building the reactor for the facility, about the difficulty of getting people involved in energy projects like this. I mentioned to him that it always seem that in a large scale, innovative project like this there are so many individuals who have a reason to say "No" to why a project should not get off the ground and very few seem to say "Yes." Well, in this case, it seems that everyone said "Yes" and they all had the same vision - to be innovators in a private and public endeavor for energy independence.
In addition, I'd like to say thanks to all the wonderful conversations I had with Shane Reese of the Biofuels Center of North Carolina about his organization, Rob Howard of Home Energy Solutions about the future of energy efficiency and energy auditing in North Carolina, and David Thornton, the official Campus Biodiesel Guru of Clemson University, about his research in biosystems engineering. It was a wonderful day and I'd like to add a great place for anyone to visit and catch the bug for energy independence.
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