Welcome to R² Controls

April 2008 News release

R2Controls prepares practical energy comparison and analysis. This compendium of technical data has been collected and organized to allow a clear visual understanding of where we all stand with our energy options here in Massachusetts, but also most anywhere else on the planet. This started as casual engineering discussions during lunch. Before long we were collecting data and making spreadsheets. This effort took a little work and then a MathCad worksheet was prepared to carefully document all of the assumptions and conversion factors in a rigorous manner for further lunchtime discussions with other engineers. After numerous adjustments and additions, we have published it to the web.

The idea is to show all the options side by side to get the big picture. The summary results are presented graphically, but the technical details are fully exposed, so all the assumptions can be challenged or adjusted to get a more accurate comparison.

Do you want to see how CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) happens? If you refrigerated your car tailpipe and separated out the water you would get this surprisingly large pile of “Dry Ice” or CO2 in solid form.

	burns to:
5 gallons of Gasolins		97 pounds of CO2
How can this be? That is considerably more weight than the Gasoline in the can. Strange, but true.

We decided to compare energy by BTU’s, actually we compare various useful forms of energy all on the same basis.

1 million BTU’s

Sure we could have used Calories, Erg’s, or Joules, but thought that a million BTU’s would be convenient. So how much is that?

8.7 gallons of GASOLINE

130 lbs of Red Oak firewood.

Energy comes in a lot of flavors, and we did not capture all of them, but we did capture some of the most common and potentially useful. Some kinds of energy cost more than others. Some energy creates more CO2 than others, so take a look and press the energy button below:

Send mail to rys@R2Controls.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: 5 Jan 2017