Jahnke’s Thoughts

I live in San Francisco, but work in Palo Alto. Until I learn how to fly, I’m stuck with commuting by either car or train. The train costs me less, allows me to enjoy the commute more, and is way more environmentally conscious. Unfortunately, I don’t have one of those jobs where I can telecommute – for the most part, I have to physically be in the office five days a week. I manage two people, and have a lot of meetings every week. Being in the office for face time is important. I’m also the type of person that is way more productive in my office than I am at home. I was like that in university during my student days too. When it was time to buckle down and get stuff done, you’d always fine me at the library.

I leave Noe Valley around 6:55 most weekdays to ensure I can find a parking spot and catch the 7:19 baby bullet express. When I arrived at the 22^nd and Pennsylvania Caltrain station this morning, I saw three workmen taking measurements and spray painting the sidewalk and dirt with lines. I used my powers of deduction to figure out they were getting ready to put up a fence. It also helped that there were little, pink, plastic flags every three feet where they were spray painting that said ‘fence’ on them.

It’s amazing how quickly work gets done when there is a private company commissioning said work, as opposed to the city. Granted, I’m making a pretty big assumption here, but this is what it looked like at the beginning of the day …

And then their progress when I returned to San Fran. Pretty impressive, if you ask me. In January of this year, I noticed that something was being constructed at the top of the paved hill on the southwest corner of the train station that me and other Caltrain folks walk down to get to the platform. A few months later, a sign was put up on this storage tank that read Dogpatch Biofuels. I’m assuming they are the ones putting up the fence. I’m actually kind of glad to see someone taking more ownership over this little patch of the city. It’s really gross seeing how many people dump their garbage there. Piles of it. I’ve seen car parts, broken appliances, clothing, industrial waste, florescent lamps – you name it – it gets dumped there. Maybe this fence will stop some of that.

So today, after work, I decided to pop in to Dogpatch Biofuels to learn a little bit. I’m kind of interested in renewal energy in general, and I think after I finish my MBA, I’d like to start a new career in the industry. The woman I spoke with was named Michelle, I assume she’s the owner. She told me that they’re selling about 300 gallons/day, which I figured is about 20 cars worth. It took them about one year to get a permit from the city, and they’ve been operating since January.

They get their biodiesel from a third party wholesaler, and then sell it retail at this location. The city, through the public utilities commission, collects grease throughout the city, and sells it to these third parties, who then clean, process, and refine the gnarly grease into usable biodiesel. She told me the city collects it from restaurants through the waste water division, which makes sense. If you’ve ever poured bacon grease down your sink (which I have a million times, because I love bacon and cook it quite often), you probably know it can clog your train fairly easily, not to mention make a mess of your sink. Imagine if every restaurant in the city was just dumping grease down their drains (as I imagine they have been for years), how nasty of a mess it would make in the sewers.

So once this biodiesel has been properly refined, you can use it in any regular diesel engine. There are a few things to be cautious of. One is that it starts to get pretty thick and unusable around 0 degrees Celsius. I’m from Canada, so that means most of the country for most of the year wouldn’t really be able to use this pure form of biodiesel. Michelle mentioned you can mix it with about 20% regular diesel fuel to address this issue. She also mentioned the refined biodiesel is a natural corrosive, so you have to be aware of that and change your fuel filter about three times as often as you normally would with conventional diesel fuel.

Finally, and I found this pretty disturbing, diesel engines made since 2006 don’t work so hot with biodiesel. I guess the EPA changed their diesel engine regulations around 2006/2007, and engine manufacturers conformed with these new regulations at the last minute and as inexpensively as possible. I guess that’s why I see so many old VW’s and Mercedes driving around with biodiesel stickers on their bumpers. I wonder if the car industry is in cahoots with the fuel industry to try and nip biodiesel in the bud? She told me about this site save biodiesel that has more details.

I recently wrote a guest blog post for Involver about what I do for a living – fundraising. The gist of this post is essentially that fundraisers need to tell a compelling story to be effective, mail/phone appeals are too costly and do not do a very good job at this, and that a combination of video and email is where fundraising professionals should be focusing their time and effort in order to inspire and educate donors. The Stanford Young Alumni and student campaigns I manage are going to be testing out some of the things we learned from previous campaigns over the next couple of months, and I’m very excited to see the results.

The blog is now official, stay tuned for more.