Eco Engineering Internship at Dancing Rabbit

March 22nd, 2011 by Guest Contributor

Are you looking for a clean tech summer internship? Are you an expert in cogen, biomass heaters or solar-thermal? Maybe you can help our project at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

Background

Dancing Rabbit (DR) is an ecovillage of 50 people with plans to grow to be as many as 500. The village is powered completely by solar and wind power with all spaces heated by passive solar and wood. We are beginning the design on a new community building scheduled to break ground in 2012 and we will need a source of heat for this new building.

Concurrently we are preparing to install a 35kW wind turbine and a village-wide electric grid to connect our stand-alone photovoltaic/wind systems. This new power source will provide power for future homes, electric vehicles, as well as commercial and small-scale industrial spaces. We would like to add a biomass-fueled electric generator to our portfolio of renewables so that we might provide for power when sun and wind are not sufficient.

Combining these needs, we envision a system that collects thermal energy from the sun, supplemented by a biomass fired boiler which together power electricity generation with resultant heat going to meet the common house’s heating requirements.

To find out more about the technical specifics of our project, click here:

Questions

Do you know of specific examples of solar-thermal and biomass cogeneration we should look at?

Is there new academic research, technologies, or engineering angles we should consider that we might not have heard of?

What pitfalls or mistakes should we avoid?

Any other tips or encouragement for us?

Internship

Interested in a summer internship? Excited to work on these issues? Want to experience rural ecovillage and intentional community living? Click here to find out more about the internship.

_____

Brian Toomey lives and works at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, is tech lead over at Sustanablog.org for their green tech store with Birkenstock Florida Sandals and 10k other eco products, as well as being a sustainable business consultant for outdoor equipment sellerAppoutdoors.com and eco garden fountain store fountainspirit.com.

Photo via ziggy fresh