6. Journal of a DG Practitioner:

How I spent my summer trying to create a DG project

Background to the project

The following contains the journal entries of Wesley Thomas, a graduate environmental engineering student at Virginia Tech.   Under the NSF grant that allowed members of the Consortium on Energy Restructuring to pursue its distributed generation (DG) work, Wes pursued a practical ("real world") project of designing a DG system that employed methane produced from a local landfill in Montgomery County, Virginia.   The more specific goal of the project is listed under Wes's first journal entry.   The outcome of the project--with the successes and frustrations--are listed at the end of these entries.   Wes worked closely with Dr. Steven Cox, a Virginia Tech professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Dr. Richard Hirsh, director of the Consortium on Energy Restructuring, during the summer of 2007.