Sustainability. . . In (From!) the Desert

A wing of the Rockefeller clan—founding family of the Standard Oil Dynasty that became Esso, that became Exxon, that merged with Mobil—have been agitating to have ExxonMobil focus more attention on renewable energy and a sustainable future. They also recently sponsored a resolution to split the positions of Chairman and CEO, currently held by Rex W. Tillerson who has been stubbornly resisting any move to acknowledge the possibility of a post-fossil fuel economy—that resolution is detailed by its author, Robert A.G. Monks, in the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog.

They failed. And Tillerson has reiterated his commitment to ride hydrocarbons into the rising tides of a warmer future—a fine example of American Can’t Do cantankerousness.

Damn the melting ice sheets, full speed ahead!

Meanwhile, what country has been working on one of the more radical attempts to build a sustainable, post-carbon city, from the ground up?

ABU DHABI!

One of the oil and cash soaked United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, in collaboration with MIT, has recently laid the cornerstone to Masdar City, which they expect to be “the world’s first zero-carbon, zero-waste city” housing nearly 50,000 people by 2016. See David Roberts blog post on the subject.

I think it unlikely that The Emirates are on the cusp of becoming the hub of sustainable energy research. Neighboring Dubai is famous, among other things, for building one of the world’s largest, indoor, year-round skiing facilities in the desert and for building archipelagos of artificial islands—one in the shape of a map of the world and one in the shape of a palm tree—in the Persian Gulf.

Part of the Masdar Plan appears to be just as grandiose, a demonstration of economic and technological muscle. They will do this to show that they can do it, that they can do pretty much anything they want—and not merely in the realm of the previously possible but in the realm of watch us do what no one has ever done before.

That said, this is a pretty good direction in which to focus ego and self-promotion. It’s not a bad advertisement for the benefits of well-funded autocracies either. I am in favor of environmental impact studies, of careful planning and full consultation. But imagine if we tried to build our own Masdar in the Mojave Desert.

We want and need energy; more and more of us favor sustainable energy projects; but the ethic that prevails isn’t just NIMBY—Not in My Backyard!—anymore, it’s BANANA—Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. Treehugger has covered the topic of “how much desert it would take,” basically to fulfill the electricity needs of the entire planet; I don’t think the hurdles are technical as much as they are matters of regulation and. . . imagination.

Texas (and Texans like Tillerson) remains committed to oil; at least some Arabs in the Gulf are beginning to look toward, and plan for, the future.

Good for them; sad for us.

Ironic if they ended up forming OSEC—the Organization of Solar technology Exporting Countries—and we remained beholden to foreign energy sources.

Tillerson and the other fossil fuel fool execs seem to wake every morning and “smell the crude,” an intoxicating and bewitching scent.

They would do better to look up and see the sun.

Personal Energy?

I tend to think of wasted energy in two broad categories:

1. Inefficiencies in the design and use of all of our gadgets.

2. The more personal “spent most of the afternoon running around trying to find or fix—fill-in-thing-you-couldn’t-find-or-fix-last-week. . .” In that latter category, the issue is more time, irritation, some part of the lining of my stomach, and perhaps the heat loss from those little wisps of steam that come off my head both during and after a rollicking afternoon pacing my living room while on the phone with customer service or tech support people who are busily not addressing my issue.

On the one hand, the idea that we should be recapturing energy from our own activity sounds slightly silly and slightly Tom Swift-like. How much energy could you get, how would you get it, and what’s the point? On the other hand, it’s more energy than you think, and we can get some of it back.

Light, Heat, and Motion. . .

The logical place to start, for Homo Electronicus is the welter of portable electronic devices on which many of us have come to rely: laptop, cell phone, PDA, music player, electronic games, GPS, cameras of various kinds, etc. You come home and—if you want things to work tomorrow—you plug in. And if you commit heavy usage on the road (in your car, on a plane, in your off-grid cabin in the woods) you get that sinking feeling and the cartoon wah-wah-wah-waaaaah sound as you watch the display of your favorite device blink out.

Doesn’t seem like those things would cost much energy but they get us in a couple of ways: not least, most of the charging devices we use are vampires, they are leaking small amounts of energy all the time. Adds up. Like the dripping faucet that costs you four bazillion gallons of water over the course of a year.

You can find portable solar re-charging devices to jack into and they are getting cheaper and easier to find. For the lazy environmentalist, however, they require a few too many steps—something else you have to remember to bring with you, then you have to figure out where to position the thing in the sun for a few hours.

More appealing, to me, are the pocket books, backpacks, or even clothing with built in solar cells: charge-on-the-go Geek Chic. More subtle, sophisticated (and doubtless expensive) options that concentrate on harvesting power from body heat and normal movement are being researched by NASA, among others. We are the batteries. . . here comes The Matrix.

Meanwhile back at the ranch. . .

While I’m pacing and fuming, I’d like my shoes to be generating a little power for me and I don’t see why my house can’t be giving back some energy via the floor. And when I’m in my basement, peddling off some frustration on the exercise bike, that ought to be generating electricity too, like Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green.

I understand that for a lot of people most of this sounds something between geeky or pointless. Regarding the latter matter, I would simply point to the Starbucks Equation: $4/day doesn’t feel like much for an elegant cup of coffee, but by the end of the year that adds up to almost $1500.

Have to stop concentrating on the drops and look at the bucket.

Decentralizing Power

On “Sugar Candy Mountain,” (where they use cane-based ethanol rather than corn?) I would have my own windmill on a forty-five foot tower, the southern side of which would support a large photovoltaic array: free electricity in the sunny summer and the windy winter. The system would be grid-tied—which would mean that I would continue to benefit from the “always on” power network. “Net metering” would mean that the power company would be obligated to buy whatever I produced and credit that toward my monthly electric bill. Obviously my plan is to make so much electricity that they’re writing me a monthly check.

The other thing to do with surplus electricity would be to use it to split hydrogen from water, and bank the hydrogen: 1. To fuel my Honda FCX Clarity (what idiocy to generate hydrogen using a fossil fuel like natural gas!), and; 2. To run fuel cells sufficient to give me a week or two of power if the grid failed, the sun went out, and the wind went suddenly still.

So. . . Thing is I don’t happen to have $100 grand to drop on the windmill and the array, the tank, the fuel cells, the grid tie electronics (the car!), don’t have much in the way of southern exposure, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my tower wouldn’t tickle the neighbors that abut my postage stamp sized lot (they might get pissy about my Hindenburgian-sized tank of hydrogen too—go figure).

At bare minimum, there are financial and zoning issues; the viability and reliability of these systems is a fair question, as well.

Working backwards, and taking those last two issues together: this is what’s cool about grid-tied systems and this is why we should begin working on decentralizing and reconfiguring our power networks. We think of (f)utility companies as vendors; they are. What we need instead is something more akin to a credit union that funds a never ending swap meet in which what we are bartering back and forth is energy. The credit union doesn’t own the money supply, lock, stock, and barrel. Mostly, it reallocates our money: you buy a certificate of deposit that becomes my mortgage; someone else gets bridging capital for their business. How much smaller could the Big Grid be if it were more an exchange and a backup? Dunno. A tenth? Less? It should be able to shrink as local/renewable energy sources become both more common and more reliable.

The zoning issue is as much a design question as a legal question. Retrofitting is tough (sometimes impossible), potentially ugly, and often inefficient. We need to design houses, neighborhoods, our cities, our lives, from the ground up, to integrate sustainable technologies.

As to cost. . . 1. Economies of scale should drive costs down; 2. We spend ridiculous amounts of money on “home improvement” that yields virtually no pay back at all—granite countertops may be attractive but they won’t pay your energy bills; 3. If your house is on fire, it makes no sense to say that using water to put out the fire is too expensive; you pay the cost of the water or you don’t have a house anymore.

The Metered Life

From the time I first owned a car, I’ve kept a gas book, a little notebook in which I’ve recorded gas purchases and calculated miles per gallon. Every week or every 300 miles or so, I’d get some information on how I was driving. But mostly that was a kind of gross feedback, tending to show whether I had been doing more highway driving or city driving. During the winter, some warm-up time in the morning might drag the number down; during the summer a/c usage might do it. Given that I’ve always driven fairly old cars, the mileage figure also provides an early heads up about necessary maintenance.

The car I drive now has a dashboard computer that shows MPG all the time and in several ways: Total since the car was new; total since last fill-up (or since one of two trip odometers was last reset); MPG in-the-moment. That last one is like a thermometer in constant motion and runs from zero to 150 MPG; throw the car into neutral while going down a hill and that indicator “pins” at 150—which is such a cool feeling. There are aftermarket products you can get which will do this as well.

Well, okay, so my car is a video game. So what?

It affects my driving. When I can see that, on this particular trip to work, I’m right around 69 MPG, it nudges me in the direction of seeing if I can get just over 70 MPG. When I can see, INSTANTLY, that stomping on the accelerator, made my mileage plummet from 100 MPG to 50 it gives me some incentive to ease off.

So why isn’t my house like that? If I got constant feedback about my heating, cooling, and hot water decisions, that would change my behavior, too. If my air conditioner showed a constant readout in dollars—what it cost per hour/per day/per month at current rate of usage—whenever it was on, that would have a faster effect than end-of-August electric bill sticker shock. Same for heating in the winter. Same, to some degree, with how I adjust my refrigerator or even when I use hot water, to shower, to wash dishes, to wash clothes: it would be nice if these appliances could give me advice, offer to run later when possible. There are already systems like this for large buildings.

We use the bulk of our electricity during the day; there’s a huge amount of slack capacity at night. We would save electricity and use our utilities more efficiently if we worked more on load balancing. In some places the cost of electricity varies, according to time of day, time of year or sometimes even according to current load on the system, to incentivize customers to use less during peak periods and more during off-peak periods. Don’t know if the same is true for the natural gas networks. It would make sense if it were: a more evenly distributed load would make it easier to maintain steady pressure in the system.

Should I need my appliances to give me advice? Shouldn’t I be smarter than my refrigerator? Does this amount to a kind of lazy, techno-outsourcing of my conscience? I shouldn’t; I should; and perhaps it does.

But I’m not looking at things the way they should be, I’m trying to look at things the way they are. If we can embed better signaling into our environment, that might help us change in ways we know we have to.

Running Freight at Night? Take the A Train

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been lauded by some and vilified by others for his attempt to follow London’s lead and put in place a congestion charge for cars entering midtown Manhattan during business hours, and to direct the funds thus generated to expanding mass transit options. There is another way that daytime traffic could be reduced and mass transit boosted: the MTA could use both buses and the subway system to run freight at night, shifting a significant percentage of road-clogging, air choking deliveries to off-hours, and cutting carbon emissions in the bargain.

The technical hurdles to putting such a system in place are trivial.

Freight elevators would have to be built for most subway stations, to allow efficient delivery of goods. This would have the dual advantage of making the subway system fully handicapped accessible, and the cost of that expansion would be shared by businesses which would also benefit.

The bus fleet would have to be modified. One way to do this would be to adopt a system long in use on airplanes. Going back more than forty years, “quick-change” technologies have allowed airlines to run passenger flights during the day and cargo at night: the seats are on pallets that slide out. Alternatively buses could be designed as frameworks for inter-modal cargo containers. The passenger module would be removed, allowing cleaning and maintenance to be done; the cargo container would be installed.

Because there are significant economies of scale involved in the purchase of bus fleets, these vehicles have been on the leading edge of change as more efficient technologies are rolled out: we now have electric buses, hybrid powered buses, buses that run on cleaner natural gas. Taking the older, dirtier, diesel-powered semis off the streets in favor of a new fleet of dual-use buses would be a boon to air quality.

The subways create no local air pollution. How clean they run depends on the method used to generate the requisite electricity. Ultimately we should be able to run them on pollution free sources like hydro, wind, or solar power.

Making cars pay their fair share in the city is a good start. Heavy trucks, however, create a disproportionate amount of air pollution, traffic congestion, and road damage. New York City already has in place a transportation infra-structure that could replace the majority of those trucks. It only remains for that infra-structure to be used more efficiently.

Green Nukes?

Nuking Your Insurance

Of late, the nuclear power industry has been ginning up a campaign to represent itself as a “green alternative” to hydrocarbon-based methods of electricity generation. Never mind, for the moment, the abysmal failure of the industry’s original claim, that nuclear power would produce electricity that was “too cheap to meter.” Never mind, as well, the fact that, decades on, we still have no permanent nuclear waste storage facility. Let’s look at the safety issue. And let’s look at it not from the point of view of “alarmist environmentalists” or the “poorly informed” public, but from the point of view of the industry itself, and from the point of view of those dispassionate number crunchers in the insurance industry.

We are repeatedly and strenuously assured that modern nuclear power plant design is completely safe, that we have nothing to fear from nuclear accidents.

This would be easier to accept if the industry actually believed its own rhetoric; it does not.

Exhibit A in this regard is the Price-Anderson Act first passed more than fifty years ago, in 1957.

In the fine print at the back of just about any insurance policy you hold–homeowner’s, renter’s, auto, even your contact lens insurance–there is a clause which exempts both your insurer and nuclear power plant operators from liability if your property is damaged as a result of a nuclear accident, whether at a nuclear power plant, fuel reprocessing facility or via the transportation or storage of nuclear waste. Damage resulting from nuclear war (declared or undeclared) is likewise exempt.

That’s the result of the Price-Anderson Act. The nuclear power industry, from its infancy, has never been willing to shoulder the financial risks of the accident or accidents that are “never going to happen.”

Don’t worry, though, you’re still covered: the federal government picks up the tab in the event of nuclear misadventures. And since the government gets its money from you. . . That means that you’ll just pay yourself. Simple.

The arithmetic of the Price-Anderson Act is simple, as well:

It provides an annual subsidy to the nuclear industry worth more than $3 billion—which is more than four times the annual federal expenditure on alternative energy projects and research.

It caps the total insurance coverage of the industry at just over $9 billion, while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s worst case estimate for the cost of a serious nuclear accident exceeds $300 billion.

Nothing new here. Just another industry privatizing the profits and socializing the costs, telling the public we have nothing to worry about, telling the government that the risks of their business are too great for the industry to bear.

If reactor operators really have the strength of their convictions behind them, let them lobby for the repeal of the Price-Anderson Act. Let them put up their own money in guarantee, not ours.

People Don't Like My Car!

It’s not a good sign that people don’t like my car.

People are agog over the Toyota Prius and the Prius is a respectable achievement, four doors, five passengers, room for at least some cargo. But it’s not uncommon for the car to not break 50 mpg (Consumer Reports put the real world mileage at 44 mpg).

I’m driving the car that was the first hybrid to come to the US, the Honda Insight (beat the Prius by a few months).

My r/t commute is 100 mi. door-to-door.

I get 65 mpg on a normal day; 58 mpg if I drive aggressively; 75 mpg with a little effort; and my record is 85 mpg (which involves annoying other people on the road—I’m in the right lane and I’m saving my inertia; I’m really sorry if you’re behind me; I like speed too).

This model (though not my car) has been hacked to get 100 mpg.

My car is the 2000 model year, the first to make it to the US, a year after release in Japan. And you have to figure a development cycle of how long—at least five years, maybe more. So they started working on this in 1995 or earlier. The 100 mpg car? It’s not the car of the future; it’s the car of the past!

The past and fading, because 2007 was the last model year the Insight was available. Off the market. Gone.

So why don’t people like my car?

Well, okay, people seem to like it—point at it, wave, ask questions about it. What they don’t seem to have done is buy it.

Cool car. Nice for you. I’ll take the Hummer, thanks!

The Insight is limited. No doubt. Only two seats, minimal cargo room. Will go over 85 mph but takes some time getting there (that’s what I’m told anyway, officer, I would never, of course, myself. . .) And for people who suffer road anxiety, well it ain’t big. A little bumpy on the high pressure tires, a little jiggity in the wind.

As far as I’m concerned though, it’s the perfect commuter car, the perfect second car. Most of what I need to do (in my one child, no pets family) is get to and from work, drive my wife or (not and) daughter somewhere, and do errands that involve more grocery bags than lumber. Can’t drive the carpool in this car. For that I take our BIG CAR, the two door Honda Civic.

But, but, but. . . 75MPG on a good day!! According to the government, the combined average for the US fleet in 2005 didn’t quite crack 20 mpg.

Who killed the Insight? I’m thinking we did, that Honda just couldn’t sell enough of them to make a profit (I believe they were selling them at a loss, too, which didn’t help).

Sounds like market failure to me. Can you say Carbon Tax? Betcha can. Not a fun word but something’s got to help the market along, provide some signals and incentives.

Sigh. . .