New Hustle

New Flagpole column is up, which focuses on our status quo energy use and the element of efficiency that is largely missing. A lot of this deserves greater unpacking than can occur in one 850-word column, so I’ll probably revisit. For instance, efficiency itself. The term is a technical one used to signify a ratio of input divided by output, which means we might lower the inputs but keep output the same when, really, we need to find ways – today, right now – to function and thrive with lower outputs. This gets lost in efficiency discussions, mine included. But you gotta start somewhere.

This is a Test

When I was a kid, there was probably everyday – and likely precipitated by the specter of nuclear attack (which seems almost surreal now) – 30 seconds of test pattern with a C flat hum on the tv, probably between some favorite shows. You would just get accustomed to waiting it out, then the voice over would come on and say: “This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system. Had this been an actual emergency, you would have been caught practically unaware as you have have become so complacent about the test that…” Well, it didn’t say that. But it could have.

This drop in gas prices is a similar though much more poignant test of our ability to comprehend the circumstances in which we find ourselves, vis-a-vis dwindling energy reserves. I mean, I don’t know what else to call it besides stupid. Actually, I can think of a few things.

“We’re in remission right now,” said Marvin E. Odum, the vice president for exploration and production for Royal Dutch Shell in the Americas. But once the economy picks up, he said, “the energy challenge will come back with a vengeance.”

Come back? It’s gone somewhere? Sure it’s hiding behind the drop in prices that is the result of a fire sale to jetison every asset for cash, including in the commodities market and oil contracts. But it’s… HIDING. This a test of our resolve. The biggest challenge/problem we have in society – all caps implied – is what to do when the price is cheaper. When faced with this, we always do the wrong thing: destroy downtowns, eat poison, willfully trash the environment, put ourselves out of work, live in isolation… all because it costs a little less. Low, low prices. Always.

Listen up, people. This is an actual emergency. You are being defined on your ability to resist your impulses to return to your regularly scheduled programming and wait for this to pass. You must begin to change everything about the way you do everything before this looming catastrophe changes it for you – even and especially when it is supposedly cheaper not to.

I won’t go into why it would be cheaper to begin to change now. I think I’m already starting to have more in common with the sound of the hum than I’m comfortable with.

Update: Interesting addendum to the miles per gallon vs. gallons per mile debate to tack on

Steven Chu

At the presidential level, it means choosing as your nominee for energy secretary someone who knows the difference between their colorectal orifice and a hole in the ground. A Nobel-laureate instead of a lobbyist?

In a presentation at this summer’s National Clean Energy Summit convened by the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Dr. Chu described why he has moved from his background in experimental quantum physics to tackling global warming:

Consider this. There’s about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn’t seem a lot to you, that’s 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° C means that … it’s the difference between where we are today and where we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the United States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year round.

Five degrees Centigrade.

So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very different world. So if you’d want that for your kids and grandkids, we can continue what we’re doing. Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.

As a friend noted upon Obama’s election last month, it feels like rain.

via.

Now, it’s overhead

So, following up on the last post about transmission lines, I was talking with an environmental engineer about whether a new grid system as such would be overhead like we are accustomed to seeing, or buried, as other public infrastructure improvements in sewage and fiber optics have been. Without recreating the discussion I’ll try to hit some of the high notes.

A lot of this is already happening – burying supply lines – which loses much less power in transmission with some of the new technology utilized to deliver the load to absorption or reflection points. Plus, he muted the point about the high costs of installation and maintenance of underground wires with the high costs of overhead wires brought on by perfectly predicatable events like ice storms. Overtime crews, trucks in the field – these things, too, have a cost.

There is a bigger, hidden idea behind this transformer transformation, if you will, that does not change now matter how much more renewable energy we can generate and even connect from remote locations where it’s captured to more densely populated areas where it is needed. The compulsion to say/think we can replace present energy consumption levels, whether it is for electricity or for transportation, must be overwhelmed. This is where the plans and discussion stop making sense and venture into territories unknown, and, coincidentally, where we usually tune out.

We’ve got to use less of the stuff, whatever it is but definitely energy – plus, we’ve got to figure out how we can still have jobs for people to do. But before we can even get to that part, the reality of using less must be reconciled. Until it is, that’s the dark cloud following us around.

Ideas?

Now, it’s overhead

So, following up on the last post about transmission lines, I was talking with an environmental engineer about whether a new grid system as such would be overhead like we are accustomed to seeing, or buried, as other public infrastructure improvements in sewage and fiber optics have been. Without recreating the discussion I’ll try to hit some of the high notes.

A lot of this is already happening – burying supply lines – which loses much less power in transmission with some of the new technology utilized to deliver the load to absorption or reflection points. Plus, he muted the point about the high costs of installation and maintenance of underground wires with the high costs of overhead wires brought on by perfectly predicatable events like ice storms. Overtime crews, trucks in the field – these things, too, have a cost.

There is a bigger, hidden idea behind this transformer transformation, if you will, that does not change now matter how much more renewable energy we can generate and even connect from remote locations where it’s captured to more densely populated areas where it is needed. The compulsion to say/think we can replace present energy consumption levels, whether it is for electricity or for transportation, must be overwhelmed. This is where the plans and discussion stop making sense and venture into territories unknown, and, coincidentally, where we usually tune out.

We’ve got to use less of the stuff, whatever it is but definitely energy – plus, we’ve got to figure out how we can still have jobs for people to do. But before we can even get to that part, the reality of using less must be reconciled. Until it is, that’s the dark cloud following us around.

Ideas?

Local motion

On the energy front, that is. LA Times lays out the situation of subsidized commercial rooftop solar vs. private investment. Much of the action is going to be on the regulatory front.

Consumer activists object. They say Edison should be looking to cheaper sources of renewable power, such as large solar and wind farms and geothermal plants. They contend that Edison International shareholders, not utility ratepayers, should finance the company’s huge bet on photovoltaic rooftop solar, one of the most expensive forms of clean energy.

An independent advocacy group has asked the Utilities commission to reject the ratepayer-financed plan, fearing unfair advantage over private sector entrepreneurs. But isn’t it the case that if the Edison plan creates demand for materials (and the power these materials generate), more materials and their power will appear? What is the uniqueness of renewable energy production that it will not obey or at least adhere to the rules of the marketplace? While not perfectly analogous to coal-fired power production, is it really exceptional?

Again, as much of this will be decided through sober, commission-type deliberations as will have to be amended later, as we learn more about and become familiar with the nature of distributed power generation. But the pre-conceived notions (free-marketeer or egalitarian) that guide these at the beginning will mean a lot.

The soft landing

That people hope for, that is. Nice article on the ten biggest green energy myths. One favorite:

Myth 8: zero carbon homes are the best way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from buildings

Buildings are responsible for about half the world’s emissions; domestic housing is the most important single source of greenhouse gases. The UK’s insistence that all new homes are “zero carbon” by 2016 sounds like a good idea, but there are two problems. In most countries, only about 1% of the housing stock is newly built each year. Tighter building regulations have no effect on the remaining 99%. Second, making a building genuinely zero carbon is extremely expensive. The few prototype UK homes that have recently reached this standard have cost twice as much as conventional houses.

Just focusing on new homes and demanding that housebuilders meet extremely high targets is not the right way to cut emissions. Instead, we should take a lesson from Germany. A mixture of subsidies, cheap loans and exhortation is succeeding in getting hundreds of thousands of older properties eco-renovated each year to very impressive standards and at reasonable cost. German renovators are learning lessons from the PassivHaus movement, which has focused not on reducing carbon emissions to zero, but on using painstaking methods to cut emissions to 10 or 20% of conventional levels, at a manageable cost, in both renovations and new homes. The PassivHaus pioneers have focused on improving insulation, providing far better air-tightness and warming incoming air in winter, with the hotter stale air extracted from the house. Careful attention to detail in both design and building work has produced unexpectedly large cuts in total energy use. The small extra price paid by householders is easily outweighed by the savings in electricity and gas. Rather than demanding totally carbon-neutral housing, the UK should push a massive programme of eco-renovation and cost-effective techniques for new construction.

I like the term eco-renovated, and better, I like how all this information is leaking out with anecdotal evidence from so many portals. It’s almost as though the conventional wisdom doesn’t quite have enough time to gel, though that, too, maybe CW in its way.

But what Goodall writes here is solid. There are many things you can do less expensively than building a zero carbon house. Investing in new windows, insulation and especially installing a radiant barrier when you get a new roof, which you have to do eventually anyway, all make a real difference in energy efficiency. And when that nano-solar roofing material becomes available (who can install that stuff?), you’ll be ready to start supplying (some of) your own decreased total energy needs.

No need to get excited about this; it’s just practical. Another step in understanding how a society’s problem-solving abilities can change, especially when they have to.