This Is Not A Plan

This is hope, which everyone seems to agree, is not a plan. So what is hope?

Well, that depends on whether Your Hope is just hoping something happens, or hoping what you are doing will work. Which, again, neither plans, but they do part ways, fundamentally. There’s a difference, one from the other, in tone and tenor.

Research into building a quantum computer, for example. Not much of a plan; hopeful, maybe. Breakthroughs in encryption excites the NSA some people. But I think it is the off-shoot consequences of trying to hit balls into this cup from 90 yards out, day after month after year, that will be the real dividends of this kind of research. Of this kind of hope.

In its way, the same goes for hydrogen storage and electricity storage from wind, sun and wave. In these cases, we’re not hitting around the mark so much as increasing the volume of balls being chipped at the hole.

So, Bill Gates doesn’t care for efficiency, or cap-and-trade, for that matter. Fine. It’s a questionable signal to send, but fine. In a $ green culture, the billionaires get listened to the most. Sigh. You might as well have listened to Warhol about painting. That wasn’t was he was ever talking about – but I’ll save that for another time.

But Gates’ views are no more or less likely to be compromised by conflicted interests than anyone else’s. Just something to keep in mind. Especially of late, when hope is such an easy target for relentless pummeling. Go ahead, take that away and replace it with the best of the best laid plans ever devised.

What would we have?

‘Eco-Bling’

This might be overstating things.

LONDON—Installing wind turbines and solar panels in people’s homes is “eco-bling” that will not help meet Britain’s targets on cutting carbon emissions, engineers warned Wednesday.

In a new report by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), Professor Doug King said it was better to adapt buildings to make them more energy efficient than try to offset energy use with “on-site renewable energy generation.”

The leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative party, David Cameron, is among those who have installed wind turbines, fixing one onto the roof of his home in the plush west London district of Notting Hill.

“Eco-bling is a term I coined to describe unnecessary renewable energy visibly attached to the outside of poorly designed buildings,” King told the Daily Mail newspaper ahead of the report’s publication.

If we want to talk about little or nothing, there are a lot of places to start – and not all of them small bore. Energy efficiency, gas tax hiking, rail infrastructure. But individuals buying the means to capture wind energy for use on inefficient buildings… eh, I have trouble getting worked up about that. And here’s why.

I was working construction a few years ago… okay, up until about ten years ago. But anyway, I worked on an historic renovation project that took years, literally; we learned a lot, used some interesting materials, had a good time and eventually completed the house – all very reminiscent of my writing at the time. Near the end of the project, there were installed some PV-cell solar panels on the roof, three or four massive panels that were enough to power a small freezer in which you could, I think, fit an already-frozen pizza. And maybe some popsicles.

It was silly, in its way, and not unlike some those gigantic satellite dishes scattered and rusting in yards across America. We/they just didn’t have the technology right yet. And now, we/they know much more about satellite TV technology and we have tiny dishes that fit under your cornice and pick up 582 channels. Those albatrosses were the precursors to something better, more effective, cheaper and more useful.

(Unlike the highly pretentious display windmills at issue, the big PV panels I mentioned were on the back of the house. No one could have seen them from the street; they were an honest attempt at renewable energy.) There will always be a penalty for ostentatious displays of hipness, youth, technical prowess and especially green-ness. Let that penalty be money and let it flow downhill to fund research for the Direct TVs of wind power. Then we can laugh about those rusting windmills in the backyards of houses and how those hippies yuppies protested too much anyway.

All Hail Our Coming Microbial Overlords

Geobacter metallireducens. Originally found in anaerobic soil and aquatic sediment (also known as mud) about twenty years ago – though I’m sure it had been there all along – this bacterial species had some initially intriguing capabilities that have only become sexier and sexier as the terrestrial courtship progressed.

[The] Findings open the door to improved microbial fuel cell architecture and should lead to “new applications that extend well beyond extracting electricity from mud,” Lovley says. In the new experiments, the UMass Amherst researchers adapted the microbe’s environment, which pushed it to adapt more efficient electric current transfer methods.

“In very short order we increased the power output by eight-fold, as a conservative estimate,” says Lovley. “With this, we’ve broken through the plateau in power production that’s been holding us back in recent years.” Now, planning can move forward to design microbial fuel cells that convert waste water and renewable biomass to electricity, treat a single home’s waste while producing localized power (especially attractive in developing countries), power mobile electronics, vehicles and implanted medical devices, and drive bioremediation of contaminated environments.

Now, the speciesists will contend that we must preserve the purity of homo sapiens and must not interact with this lowly organism, even at the cost of denying ourselves new energy sources. Will this bio-bigotry prevail? Can we put aside antiquated social conventions to expand our thirst for power? Or will a distaste for mixing with certain organisms lead us to a glorious, low energy future?

Winding Us UP

How much does this have to do with the misdirection plays of the fossil fuel industry? In a way, it doesn’t matter. When we get down to studies involving just how much energy we need and how much we might supply with conventional renewable sources (in other words not urine-powered hydrogen engines or other exotica), we break into the clear about just what could be accomplished with prudent investment. But I guess this is exactly what puts the fossil fuel propaganda network on high alert.

Speaking of which, I did a similar piece on the potential for solar energy in this country some time last year. Complete with this short video.

Museum-ready

Years ago, when I was doing construction work and learning much about rehabbing old houses, we installed some enormous Photo Voltaic (PV) panels atop one Victorian-era manse that, if I’m not mistaken, were able to power a refrigerator of sufficient dimension for, I think, one frozen pizza. No lie. We all stood back and were like, man this is crazy. Talk about giving enlightenment a bad name – it was the hat trick – expensive, giant and ineffective.

Yesterday, an Israeli start-up unveiled PV technology at a kibbutz in Ashdod capable of harnessing 75 per cent of incoming sunlight. It looks like a modified parabolic trough but is actually a PV arrangement that uses mirrors to reduce the number of PV cells needed and has a water cooling system that increases efficiency and produces thermal energy.

The Monitor story also has a link to a video of a student project at MIT that concentrated the sun’s rays so intensely it was able to light a wooden 2 x 4 on fire.

The prospect of free energy in a region, or planet, dominated by the despotism of fossil fuel interests is quite a hopeful scenario – though it’s important to point out that we can become captives of hope just like anything else. Developing devices that track the sun, that work in shade, the abide by absolute requirements (clean, low cost, durable) we should demand of our energy technology at this point has nothing to do with hope. These are mere capabilities we should surround, master and set aside, and leave the old PV technology for museums that document the era of swell intentions and token investments in energy innovation and imagination.

An era already in the rear-view.

Feed-in Tariff

With a name like that… well it’s on the order of shrouding mammary wonders beneath a barbed-wire bikini. But I’d rather a clunky name for a program that works than another sexy title for a failure. And whoa if there are not some nourishing nipples poking through all that metal.

Why is the renewable energy market in Gainesville booming while it’s collapsing elsewhere in the country? The answer boils down to policy. In early February, the city became the first in the nation to adopt a “feed-in tariff”—a clunky and un-descriptive name for a bold incentive to foster renewable energy. Under this system, the local power company is required to buy renewable energy from independent producers, no matter how small, at rates slightly higher than the average cost of production. This means anyone with a cluster of solar cells on their roof can sell the power they produce at a profit. The costs of the program are passed on to ratepayers, who see a small rise in their electric bills (in Gainesville the annual increase is capped at 1 percent). While rate hikes are seldom popular, the community has rallied behind this policy, because unlike big power plant construction—the costs of which are also passed on to the public—everyone has the opportunity to profit, either by investing themselves or by tapping into the groundswell of economic activity the incentive creates.

Sounds a lot like making a (new) way for the Sunshine State live up to it’s name. I’ve got a friend whose family business is real estate development down in G-ville, and I haven’t heard a word from her about this. I don’t suppose they realize the opportunity this represents, but I’d like to think it won’t take long until they do.

Anyway, this is the kind of incentive that will begin the process of putting the rest of the many required tricks and non-tricks to renewable electricity into place. Emphasis mine in the above.

Home Grown Power

Somewhat counter-intuitive take on the new electrical grid that’s been bandied about as an infrastructure project within the stimulus bill(s) set to appear at State House near you.

But there are better — and cheaper — ways to get more clean power flowing to the big cities. Renewable energy resources are found all across the country; they don’t need to be harnessed from just one place. In the Northwest, the largest amount of green power comes from hydroelectricity. In the Northeast, the best source may be the wind over the ocean, because it blows harder and more consistently there than on land. Offshore wind farms have been proposed for Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. In the Southwest, solar energy can be tapped on a large scale. And in the Southeast, biomass from forests may one day be a major source of sustainable power. In each area, developing these power sources would be cheaper than piping in clean energy from thousands of miles away.

As his omniscient narrator, I’ll say this is predicated on using far less power to make any of these suggested power solutions work, as we should begin to stipulate about every single thing. The writer draws a distinction between a smart grid and high-capacity transmission lines, the former distinguishing itself as a locally-deployed system within a multi-dimensional strategy against waste and inefficiency. Which is the only way to really address waste or efficiency. Once we get into what some of these concepts – a smart grid, for instance – mean, they begin to define long-term solutions in the only way in which they can be defined as viable – on a local scale. Ideas can come from anywhere, but they have to make sense there, first. Then a next-step Mandlebrot set in reverse motion can begin – leading the way toward more grander-scale solutions as we pan out. Or, luck be your lady tonight, altering their urgency into something more manageable.

Of course, changing how we think about a big new electrical grid for the country opens up more space to think about trains, SUPER and otherwise. Which is as it should be.

The joneses, keeping up with

This is exactly what I was talking about in this week’s column. Admittedly it does involve foreign concepts like nonprofit utility boards and conscientious people, but this

The utility thinks behavior modification could be as effective in promoting conservation as trying to get customers to install new appliances is, Mr. Starnes said, and maybe more so.

is universal. Set aside ethical sympathies about the environment. Shame people into keeping up with their neighbors and they’ll take care of the imaginative/innovative part; you just put the comparative graphs on their bill. Okay, and the frowny faces, too.

In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged the residents to conserve energy to save the earth for future generations; another emphasized financial savings. But the only kind of message to have any significant effect, Dr. Cialdini said, was one that said neighbors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

“It is fundamental and primitive,” said Dr. Cialdini, who owns a stake in Positive Energy. “The mere perception of the normal behavior of those around us is very powerful.”

Green Stimulus

Jokes about the size of Obama’s package notwithstanding, discussion on once-and-future efforts to get the country going again but in a different direction are a re-run of the initial green wave. As a correspondent at Marshall’s puts it

My practice group works exclusively in the public sector. Obama’s only constituency in Congress and the nation for bold initiatives, such as Green infrastructure, will come from states (a small handful) that are ahead of the curve on green initiatives. The biggest candidate is CA, where the Governor has already signed legislation that is more aggressive than the federal government, or likely, any other state in the Union. How much congressional representatives from CA are in line with these initiatives is not clear. Other constituencies will be politicians from states with companies heavily invested in green technologies and industries, such as wind farms, solar, and solar thermal (big energy, small footprint so far). Ironically, many of the bigger companies are based overseas.
My conclusion is that the constituency is not ideological, nor is it very deep. Politicians love Green the way they love “tough on crime.” It’s a great ad, and you don’t have to do too much, other than build a few prisons in the latter case, and show pretty pictures of wind turbines in the former. Green initiatives have been seen as a potential boom catalyst. In a global economy that has driven down the price of oil, the national security imperatives that were the strongest political selling points, are lessened. Obama will need to make a case directly to the people and drag a disinterested Congress with him. Does he care enough? Time will tell.

What this financial collapse on so many levels boils down to is an open opportunity to pivot. We already know that we cannot go back to doing/living/driving/buying/building/traveling/growing/powering the way we used to. So this gargantuan effort to stimulate the economy must be informed by that reasoning. It was going to take a gigantic re-investment in public-oriented (mass transit, updated electrical grid) infrastructure all along. Now we are going to get one under the not very different pretext of saving the economy and creating jobs.

Our energy problems and the depressed economy are related, we must let them be one.