What's moisture have to with energy? Quite a bit, actually. When we tighten up or insulate a house, there's the potential of causing moisture problems that could harm your health by allowing mold to grow or affect the life of materials your house is built from. And any time you work on a house, especially when you do things that affect the exterior envelope (walls, roof, foundation), you're provided with an opportunity to fix problems that may already exist.

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Last week, I addressed some of the benefits of capturing waste heat from power plants and distributing it to buildings--a technology referred to as combined heat and power or CHP. This week we'll look at how this idea could be implemented in Brattleboro--using sustainably produced wood chips as the fuel source.

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The majority of our electricity in the United States is generated by using a heat source to boil water and produce high-pressure steam, which then spins a steam turbine hooked up to a generator. To generate this steam, our utility companies burn fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, or--as with Vermont Yankee--they rely on the heat of nuclear fission. (Only hydropower, wind, and solar electricity generation do not rely on a heat source and production of steam.)

Plastics — chemical compounds which are compressed under heat into desired shapes, and thereafter are not subject to corrosion — are increasingly in use. Some are made of coal-tar products, some of milk; and one... utilizes the Chinese soy bean. This useful plant, is, next to rice, the staff of life in the Celestial republic; like beans, peas, and other "legume" plants, it contains the proteins, or nitrogen compounds, for which we eat meat. The mechanical uses of the soy bean (which does not resemble American beans) are of more recent discovery.