Teton Power charges up

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

By Sam Petri

It’s 4 p.m. and Michael Miller is in front of the Village Café sorting empty PBR cans from the trash into the recycling bin. The two bins sit right next to each other, yet the après ski crowd has missed the blue bin, tossing their Blue Ribbon cans into the wrong receptacle.

Miller doesn’t appear miffed or meritorious, just doing his duty. He doesn’t frequent Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (JHMR) – most days he opts to kite-ski – but today he used a voucher to get on the lift to show off his idea for incorporating solar energy into the resort’s renewable energy plan.

Miller runs Teton Power, an upstart renewable energy company in Jackson Hole. His plan is to install photovoltaic (PV) panels on the upper mountain ski patrol huts, generating enough solar energy to send some back into the grid and decreasing the approximately 9 million kilowatt hours JHMR consumes per year.

Skiing around the mountain, he pointed out prime locations for PV panels at the patrol huts at the top of the Thunder and Sublette chairs and off the side of the restrooms near the Bear Flats Snack Shack, among other locations.

“Some of the benefits for the resort are intangible,” Miller said. “People will choose to come here if they know Jackson Hole is green.”

It’s an idea the resort understands. By June 1, 2007, JHMR will purchase 100 percent renewable energy credits from Renewable Choice Energy, the same Boulder, Colo., company that Vail Resorts began buying renewable energy credits from back in August.

“We see the need, especially in this valley,” said Walt Foley, JHMR’s environmental coordinator. “Teton Power is a local start up. We thought we’d look into Miller’s business and see what he has to offer.”

Although no official partnership has formed yet, JHMR is interested in Teton Power.

“We’re in line with Michael to get some smaller projects in the works that will certainly help the environment,” said Foley.

Teton Power specializes in PV panel and wind turbine installations and offers consultations to make homes and businesses energy efficient, too.

Miller hopes to sell oil field supply company EnerCrest its first wind turbine for its new headquarters in Big Piney, Wyo.

EnerCrest services oil field companies in the Rocky Mountains by providing them with heavy equipment, station and pipeline construction, ready mix, aggregate, roustabout, and environmental solutions.

“Increased drilling in the Pinedale anticline and the Jonah Field will lead to three days of noticeable air quality issues here and in Teton National Park,” Miller said. “You’ll actually be able to see the haze.”

Many of the drilling rigs just south of Jackson use diesel-fuel electric generators to power the buildings surrounding their off-grid drilling sites.

Miller has a solution of his own: “If each oil rig puts up a 20 kilowatt wind turbine and takes out that same consumption of diesel fuel, well, that’s a good thing, no matter how you look at it.”

On his laptop, Miller has pictures showing black smoke coming from the drilling rigs. “Smoke belch after smoke belch,” he points out. “A lot of that we could help. For the most part, we have a phenomenal wind resource in Wyoming.

“Maybe they need solar or biofuel,” he continued. “I’m doing my best to be up to speed on what the possibilities are and to provide those options to people.”

Teton Power is gaining a foothold with solar and wind power installations, but it all started with Miller’s interest in biofuel, and those ideas still pervade the company today.

Biofuels – the most popular of which is ethanol – are created from sugars found in biomass, or plants.

For example, sugarcane biomass contains monomeric sugars, which are easy to ferment and then distill to create ethanol; however the value of sugarcane as a food has made this process unpopular.

Right now, the most popular way to create ethanol is to use corn – a source of starch – by using a chemical process that breaks down glucose molecules in corn and isolate the simple sugars that are then fermented and distilled.

But Miller is skeptical of these first two processes because they both start with agricultural commodities.

“It’s not possible to feed this nation’s fuel thirst with ethanol derived from sugars and starches,” he said. “You have to go out and create those sugars from cellulosic biomass.”

Teton Power is focusing on two forms of biomass: cellulose and hemicellulose. Cellulose and hemicellulose, essentially fiber, are the most prevalent forms of biomass on Earth.

They are found in softwoods and hardwoods as well as grasses. But they are also the hardest to turn into a fuel.

Transforming cellulose and hemicellulose into fuel means isolating the sugars found in the biomass. Instead of using fermentation and distillation to make ethanol, the sugars are converted directly into simple hydrocarbon fuels (alkanes) via complex catalytic reactions.

This produces a more efficient biofuel, about double that of ethanol.

This is relatively new science and has not been utilized on a large scale, but is one possible solution to the problem of fossil fuels, as it is carbon neutral and a renewable resource.

Unlike using corn, which must be farmed on a specific plot of land to produce fuel, cellulose and hemicellulose can be found almost everywhere, especially in the forest.

Miller looks at future forest stewardship that would collect cellulosic biomass to use as a feedstock for biofuel refineries.

“A lot of my work in the last few months has been looking at the fuel we have in the form of diseased and dying trees,” said Miller. 

“You can take those dead trees out of the forest before they burn – before all that carbon gets burned into the atmosphere, before waterways get hammered, before the soil gets eroded – and turn it into a transportation fuel, or a sugar that can be taken into any number of directions for energy.

You can go to hydrogen, ethanol or biodiesel – the science is there.”

Miller would like to harvest dead and dying trees for energy, re-planting new trees as he goes, replace culverts with bridges, and take out old roads.

In other words, manage the forest in the name of green energy.

There are few biorefineries that are past the pilot plant stage, due to the cost of cutting edge technology, but as the Earth continues to heat up, the concept is gaining momentum and biorefineries will begin to be commonplace

“It comes down to accountability – we all consume,” said Miller.

“This is our one planet and for me it came down to: ‘What am I going to do about it?’”

Learn more at http://www.tetonpower.com.
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Teton Power charges up | Planet JH News Article: General Environment

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