Friday Five: January 31, 2014

Since I live in Chicago, it would be hard to put together a list of environmental articles without highlighting one that discusses the polar vortex.  This one provides a good summary of the science and the impact.  While all politics may be local, we cannot evaluate the overall impact on the climate looking at one region.  Those of us who have lived in Chicago our whole lives see this winter as a return to normal, but taken in context with what is happening in Alaska, the South, and the historic heat waves in Australia, we cannot deny the presence of climate change.
Snow's melting in Alaska and pelting the South. What's going on?
"Research hints that this type of pattern can be triggered by the recent massive loss in Arctic sea ice due to the effects of human-induced climate change. One recent study which attempted to explain this counterintuitive 'warm arctic, cold continents' phenomenon during similar patterns in the 2009-‘10 and 2010-‘11 winters called it 'a major challenge' to understand, though the pattern is 'consistent with continued loss of sea ice over the next 40 years.' Bottom line: Something weird is going on, but scientists are still trying to nail down exactly what it is."

Note that the photographers worked diligently to maintain objectiveness.  The images document reality, and do not go for shock value.  Once you read the article, follow the link to the images as they put a human face on the situation.  The team did reach out to the energy companies to get the entire image...including the jobs created...but received no cooperation.  It is too bad they did not, because the images do provide a real look at what is happening, and I would have appreciated to have everything documented.
Powerful photos go deep inside America's fracking boom
"Tapping the Marcellus has altered the landscape, a change the photographers strove to painstakingly document, from the towering rigs and miles of pipeline to life in the communities impacted by it all. Each photographer brought a unique perspective."

I am not one to overly focus on predictions, but this list has a practical take on the coming trends.  I also present it because it disagrees with me on the near future of natural gas (although we agree on the long-term view).  I like it when smart people disagree with me.
A year of cracking ice: 10 predictions for 2014
"Many of the signs have been building up in the past few years – the way the costs of solar and wind power have closed in on those for conventional power, even beginning to undercut them without subsidies in many parts of the world; the way grids have become capable of integrating much higher percentages of renewable electricity than previously possible; the way renewable energy with no marginal cost of production has disrupted the clearing prices of electricity markets; the way utilities are finally realising that this poses an existential threat to their business model; the way consumers have enthusiastically adopted new energy technologies when embodied in cool products like the Nest thermostat and the Tesla Model S; the way investors have started to become concerned about stranded fossil fuel assets. These are all tipping points – once passed, it is impossible to go back.
"

That said, I am pretty good at predictions, and in the early part of this century when everyone was pushing rooftop gardens, I fought for white reflective or solar roofs.  Looks like I picked the right side.
White roofs keep cities cooler than 'green' ones, study finds
"What's the greenest roof? A white one. White-painted roofs are three times more efficient than 'green roofs'—rooftops that are planted over with grass or other greenery—at countering global warming, a new analysis found. White and green are both are much better for the environment than traditional black-colored roofs, which heat up under the sun, drive up air conditioning bills, and make cities and towns a few degrees warmer than they would be otherwise. Cooler roofs can make a big difference: In a previous study, the same team determined that a 100-square-meter white roof offsets 10 tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide over its lifetime."

Imagine if we had focused on the electric vehicle for the last 116 years instead of the internal-combustion engine.  It would be interesting to see an analysis of the impact.
Porche's first car is 116 years old, and it's electric
"The automaker has recovered the P1, an electric car that Ferdinand Porsche built while working for a carriage maker in 1898; it was also the first car he ever built. No one will mistake it for a Tesla between its wood frame, 3HP motor and 50-mile range, but it was fast enough to win an all-electric race in 1899."

Happy Friday!

A year in green tech: The future of electric vehicles rests on the shoulders of Ultracapacitors

As we sit in the middle of auto show season, we see the changes brought about by the change in CAFE standards for vehicle fuel economy.  Manufacturers have lighter trucks, more efficient engines, and...of course...more electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.  One might wonder, after a century of knowing the technology, and over a decade of implementation on new vehicles, why we do not see more electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.  The problems rests on the limitations of current battery technology to deliver the performance we have come to expect under some of the high-output conditions:  steering, braking, and acceleration.  The solutions to this problem must come from either better batteries, or some form of supplemental electrical output that can provide the added power when needed.  Recent research has developed capacitors that can provide the latter...and never missing an opportunity to turn anything into a superhero, we know them as ultra capacitors.

For those who remember their high-school physics or electronics shop classes, a capacitor in an electrical circuit stores charge at the circuit voltage for discharge at a later time.  They perform several services in a circuit: resilience, stabilization, continuity, and their performance depends on their material makeup and the conditions surrounding them in the circuit.  This stabilization function proves particularly useful in the setting of an electric vehicle.

The limitation in electric vehicles comes from the recharge and discharge rates of the battery.  The electric power the car needs comes from a set of batteries optimally sized to provide the instantaneous power and duration of energy required.  In times of constant power draw, the batteries perform well.  When the car accelerates, performs high performance steering, or brakes quickly, the battery will experience draw or recharge faster than it expects.  When this happens, it may hit the limit of the battery, limiting performance.  To combat this, designers will sometimes install two battery systems: one for constant draw, and one for faster draw/recharge.  This adds weight and complexity to the system that limits performance.

The ultracapacitor solves this problem by providing a constant draw device into the power circuit that can provide fast discharge when required.  This prevents the battery from experiencing the sharp changes in draw/recharge that can damage the system if unchecked.  In order for these capacitors to perform optimally, they have needed relatively significant cooling systems to keep them stable.  As we demand more of them, the cost to install and maintain them has prohibited widespread adoption.  Without a change in materials, ultracapacitors cannot find widespread adoption.

Recent research into materials holds hope for increased implementation of ultracapacitor technology. Ultracapacitors made out of ceramics can reduce the size of the device while supplying the same or greater performance.  Also, the ceramics require measurably less cooling than current material choices.  This reduces the demand on the electrical system, and improves the overall performance.

I expect that within the next five years we will see a significant increase in the number of electric vehicles, and expansion of the technology into more and more high performance vehicles.  Ultracapacitors will drive that expansion.  We will see increased issues with our electric grids (a topic for another day), but once we solve that, we will see a vehicle market no longer dependent on gasoline to get us from place to place.

Flashes: January 29, 2014..."Super" Bowl

The NFL, in 267 games every year uses more energy than the annual consumption of about half the countries of the world.

Super Bowl Sunday is second only to Thanksgiving in food consumption by Americans.

Americans will consume the wings of around 625,000,000 chickens on Super Bowl Sunday alone.  Most if not all will be from CAFO like this:

Each chicken wing requires around 5 gallons of water to produce, meaning the Super Bowl consumption will have required around 3 billion gallons of water....approximately the annual water consumption of the Dominican Republic.

Enjoy the journey!

Rising natural gas prices: A benefit for efficiency or drilling?

The growth in hydraulic fracturing, especially over the last decade, has fueled a sharp shift in the availability of natural gas.  These increasing supplies have resulted in maintaining downward pressure on natural gas prices.

The Great Recession certainly created a market with depressed demand, also a factor in low prices.  But since 2008, the price of natural gas has only tracked the overall heating demand of the country, essentially decoupling it from economic parameters.

That creates a scenario whereby today's news of sharp increase in the price of February futures for natural gas to $5 could present a reason for concern.  Not only does the US economy depend on some relative stability in energy prices (and with an increase in the use of natural gas to create electricity, these markets are more coupled than ever), but the return on investment made in drilling operations depends on a minimum level of performance to keep capital flowing.  Increasing that return drives more investment, then more production, then more utilization, then more damage.

After 2010, amidst continued economic turbulence in Europe and a still sluggish US economy, this relatively high price (at least in the "new normal" following 2008) for February did not result in a trend upward because demand remained relatively low for the next two years.  With this year's predicted heating demand comparable to 2011, and prices still climbing, we could finally see an increase in non-heating market demand driving price growth.  That could lead to a return to the $10+ natural gas of mid-last decade as electricity and liquified natural gas production puts demand pressure on the market.

An increase to $10+ would certainly have a draining effect on the economy.  It would also produce increased incentive for more drilling, adding to the cycle of dependence.  Even with the increased incentive for energy efficiency, the increased investment will drive an increase in supply, and eventually reset the market at a new acceptable level.  The only way to break this cycle is to move to a culture of low demand.  During times of low commodity costs, we need to drive and incentivize investments in efficiency.  At the same time, we need to accelerate the requirement that new buildings and processes require no external source of energy.  Both of these requirements are cost positive to the economy both in the short- and long-term.  In addition, they provide a resiliency and risk aversion that commodity fuels like natural gas cannot provide.

Energy prices grab all the headlines, but in terms of economics and quality of life, a steady path of efficiency and resiliency presents the best option.  We certainly need to respond to the short-term impacts of energy use, but in the end, our best strategy should focus on taking energy as a commodity out of the equation altogether.

The power (and peril) of the marketplace

Does anyone remember "New Coke"?

Back in 1985, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company decided to change the formulation of its flagship drink, and built a marketing campaign around its new shining star.  There was only one problem...

People did not want "New Coke", they wanted Coca-Cola the same way they had been drinking it.

The backlash came swiftly and strongly.  People hoarded Coke, newspaper articles and commentaries noted the public outcry, and comics had a field day with the situation.  Not surprisingly, Coke backtracked, noting that it would still sell "Old Coke" under the brand "Coca-Cola Classic", and "New Coke" under a separate and distinctive label.  Just four years ago, Coke finally removed the "Classic" from its label and now, twenty-nine years later, we have just Coke again.

Turns out, that even the biggest corporations bow to the will of the consumer, especially when they cannot control them through marketing and advertising.  Looks like another giant multi-national might try the same path.  Monsanto, after years of trying to convince the public that its GMO products will not harm them, might have shifted strategies and will focus on traditional breeding techniques to deliver new vegetable products.  This does not necessarily mean they will abandon their GMO products, but it does show that they perceive a market trend against GMO products that will harm their bottom line.

Although many people I know consider this a desirable result, it may represent something even more scary: large corporations shifting at the will of the mob.  The most rational advocates have sought labeling and independent testing of GMO products, not necessarily an outright ban.  By shifting away, will we lose some of the potential benefits of GMO products as the industry seems to acknowledge some concern with them.  

Markets can be a great tool of democracy because they convey the will of the people.  However, in the same way that a true democracy has not survived inour  civilization, this form of mob rule has its drawbacks.  The recent uptick in measles across Europe and the US comes to mind.  An uproar about a perceived link between vaccinations and autism caused a number of parents to decline vaccinations, creating a pool of unprotected children.  The study on which the fear found footing proved erroneous, and now we have a problem that may extend beyond those who made the choice.

Consumers need to make smart, informed choices, and allow those choices to drive the actions of corporations.  That said, we should remember our tendency towards panic and put in place some common sense safeguards.  If we follow the precautionary principle in allowing new products to market, require clear information, and ongoing, independent testing, we will not need to overreact.

It's one thing to produce an odd-tasting soda.  It's quite another to stop developing food products that can feed an ever expanding world population.

Friday Five: January 24, 2014

As we ask more questions, and shine more light on the processes that enable our use of fossil fuels, the more we learn about the lives we have traded for the level of comfort that some of us enjoy.  Since we no longer need this tradeoff to survive, we need to examine our relationship with these dangerous sources of energy.

W. Va. spill latest case of coal tainting US waters
"From coal mining to the waste created when coal is burned for electricity, pollutants associated with coal have contaminated waterways, wells and lakes with far more insidious and longer-lasting contaminants than the chemical that spilled out of a tank farm on the banks of the Elk River.
Chief among them are discharges from coal-fired power plants that alone are responsible for 50 percent to 60 percent of all toxic pollution entering the nation's water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency."

Adding complexity to the issue, the current models - both state-run and corporate-run - avoid accountability.  This story is not important because it "bashes" a corporation, but because it highlights that the corporate/government battle is over who caused the problem not over how to keep this from happening to the poorest and least powerful in our societies.  The only way to accomplish that is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels for energy.
Ecuador: International support crucial in battle with Chevron
"In 2011, a court in the northeastern Ecuadorian Amazon province of Sucumbios found that Texaco, acquired by Chevron in 2001, dumped millions of gallons of crude residue and toxic waste water in the rainforest between 1964 and the early 1990s and thereby spoiled the lands and damaged the health of the local population."

Our limited ability to maintain safety when processing, distributing, and converting raw energy sources into useful form is dwarfed by our lack of understanding of the impact associated with changing the chemistry of our planet on a global scale.  Even if one doubts the specific details of forecasts and predictions, it is foolhardy to assume that even in our skepticism that we know for sure.
The maddening cloud: When forecasting the future, scientists' blind spot is above them
"'Clouds are a big lever in the climate,' Bretherton tells me. Because they’re light in color, they’re reflective, taking 10 to 20 percent of the sunlight that reaches the Earth and reflecting it back into space. 'Just a 1 or 2 percent change in cloud cover is significant in terms of warming,' Bretherton says. 'Remove all the clouds and the climate would warm big time — a lot more than doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere.'"

The ultimate hubris comes from our thinking that after almost four billion years of refining life, that our species - whose survival comes primarily from our instinct to destroy our competition - somehow has the complete knowledge to reshape the world as is best for us.  Hopefully, our evolution as a species includes survival for those who embrace a relationship with nature, and not those who believe our controlling of nature provides the optimal solution.
Preserving nature isn't about aesthetics, it's about necessity
"Our aesthetic and spiritual connection to nature and wilderness, and our desire to maintain the Holocene version of the planet, is something that sadly is no longer completely practical. Like it or not, we have already changed the planet in significant ways, and there is no simple way to go back. Furthermore, the planet will soon have 9 billion people with considerably more wealth and aspirations, dramatically increasing demands on natural resources and the planet."

However, when it comes to man-made systems, like our system of personal travel, we can make major strides in reducing impact and improving both service and efficiency.  The waste associated with single occupant ownership and driving can be eliminated with great benefit to our economy and quality of life.  I must also confess that the mention of my "everything transit card" at the end of the article might have influenced it's inclusion.
Down the road, car will take you out for a spin
"'Imagine if your phone had an app with a hundred bucks of transportation dollars on it,' Garcetti said, and you could use it to call for a driverless vehicle that works sort of like a mini-mass transit system. Or you could use it for a shared bike, or a bus, or a train."

Happy Friday!

How do we pay for a City of Lights?

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced recently that he wants to boost tourism in Chicago by making the city a new "City of Lights", a la Paris.  Without overly dwelling on the decision in Paris to tone down the lights in order to avoid wasting energy, the proposal to do so in Chicago raises two issues that I am not sure will be addressed by those charged with implementing this vision.  One of the concerns has to do with the already suspect commitment to the environment shown by the mayor's agenda.  The second concerns the double standard applied to environmental decisions relative to ones of other forms of "commerce".

The obvious concern deals with the additional energy required to power an expanded lighting of the city's architecture.  At a time when Chicago's benchmarking ordinance and new green building requirements have made building owners rethink the "light all night" philosophy, reducing energy use, environmental impact, and urban light pollution, the current administration now wants to reverse some of those gains with a new initiative to drive tourism.  On the surface, this seems remarkably hypocritical, especially when the current Sustainable Chicago 2015 plan calls for a 5% reduction in energy use...but the goal appears to be to achieve the City of Lights after 2015 after the reduction goal.  This can be addressed by requiring the cost of the project to include additional, unplanned reduction in electricity usage to offset the added usage.  Or better yet, to require new, distributed and renewable energy sources be used to power the new installations...perhaps with newly developed battery storage technology coming out of Argonne National Laboratory.  Pursuing the new lighting initiative does not necessarily mean it will be detrimental to the environment, it would just take an approach not yet shown by the administration to accomplish it.

On a more important note, we should hold initiatives like this to the same scrutiny that we apply to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other environmental projects.  Do the investment of money, energy, and environmental damage actually deliver the five million extra visitors?  Already, questions have arisen as to whether this initiative would deliver the desired increase better than additional festivals, events, and other forms of tourism development.  I hope that when the true costs of the initiative come out, that the analysis provides the guarantee that tourism will increase...at least to the point that those of us in the energy field have to justify the return on investment of efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Tourism helps the local economy.  An increased number of visitors mean more eyes on the city, and a greater chance that more help will become available to the most distressed among us.  I want tourism, and I want improved quality of life.  I just hope that those who have pushed for this have to clear the economic hurdles and guarantee the results, then they have to account for and address all the environmental concerns.  Increasing economic development for some, but not for all, is not worth it.

Flashes: January 22, 2014...Cool Car Edition

Courtesy General Motors

Cadillac ELR increases net fuel efficiency to 83 mpg from 26 mpg of ATS.  If all ATS purchasers switched to ELR, savings of 265 million gallons of gas over the lifetime of one year's worth of sales*.

Courtesy of Toyota 

Toyota fuel cell maintains net fuel efficiency of 28 mpg for Camry.  If all Camry purchasers switched to fuel cell, equivalent to saving 1,715 million gallons of gas over the lifetime of one year's worth of sales*. (In terms of emissions reduced by using hydrogen from natural gas instead of gasoline.)

Courtesy of Ford Motor Co.

Ford C-Max Energi with solar charging (through Fresnel canopy) increases net fuel efficiency to 124 mpg from 28 mpg of Fusion.  If all Fusion purchasers switched to C-Max Energi, savings of 1,660 million gallons of gas over the lifetime of one year's worth of sales*.

The new F-150 increases net fuel efficiency to 21 mpg from 18 mpg of current model.  For projected F-150 sales in 2014, savings of 1,190 million gallons of gas over the lifetime of one year's worth of sales*.

The first three are hopeful projections....the last one is reality.

*Cadillac sells about 50,000 ATS (and ATS-similar) per year, Toyota sells about 400,000 Camrys per year, Ford sells about 300,000 Fusions and 750,000 F-150 per year.  The savings takes the 200,000 mile lifetime of the vehicle, multiplied by the total sales, then computes the total gallons at the old and new MPG.

We are to blame for the rise in climate denial

Even with record low amounts of Arctic ice cover, severe droughts across parts of several countries, and increasing costs to help recover from major storms, the dialog on climate change has started to shift with a larger percentage of the country willing to deny the presence of "global warming".  A study from the end of last year by Yale University and George Mason University noted that over the past five years, the percentage of people who believe "global warming" is happening has dropped from a high of 71% to stabilize at about 63%.  Over that same timeframe, the number of people who specifically do not believe in "global warming" has risen from 10% to 23%, and the trend is upward.  Although a deliberate public misinformation campaign, sponsored by deep pockets in the fossil energy industry provides a handsome target for the blame, a not insignificant portion of it must go to us in the environmental advocacy arena who pushed the concept of "global warming" as the consequence of our two hundred year love affair with fossil fuels.

Who knows why we immediately centered on the phrasing of "global warming" to describe how we have changed our living space.  Perhaps it was the zeal of a generation that had grown up with Rachel Carson, finally having a tangible issue to rally around.  After a decade of hearing the virtues of corporations and the ills of government, maybe the excitement of having a serious issue was too much. Whatever the reason, the media caught on, the phrase stuck, and our fixation on it has temporarily doomed us.

We have learned that the changes set in motion by our intentional changing of the chemistry of our atmosphere have greater complexity than we can attribute in a sound bite.  Instead of focusing on the immediate dangers of burning fossil fuels: increased particulate, heavy metals in the atmosphere, and the damage caused by mining of resources, we grabbed onto the easy phrase.  Instead of waiting for consensus and better models, we planted the seed, and promised that without a course correction, we would see continually rising temperatures.  As many news outlets have covered, the surface temperatures over the last fifteen years specifically have seen no net increase in temperature.  That has caused confusion in the message, and a large part of a generation raised on the concept of "global warming" must now be swayed by the argument that it is not about warming, but changing.

We can also take some responsibility because of the tone we have set.  Instead of a discussion of what "we" have done and what "we" can do, the environmental movement has done a fair amount of finger-pointing.  Truth is, I still have to heat my home with natural gas; I still have to drive a car.  The options are getting better and more cost effective, but I cannot afford to go "all green, off-grid".  Yet the argument sounds like anything less than perfection will do.  This feeds into the political animosity that unnecessarily clouds the issue.  Environmental protection, until the end of last century, had always been a bipartisan issue.  Making it a political one...the culpability for which lies on both sides...created unnecessary and potentially damaging delays in action.

The fact that Americans on an almost three-to-one basis agree that we have altered our planet gives us hope.  The continued increase in the adoption of renewable energy - based on economic and not just environmental terms - shows us that even in the face of increased skepticism, that we can still make sustained change.  Insurance companies looking to mitigate loses from extreme weather, and recognizing the role of carbon pollution, provides a foundation from which we can still inspire action.  We know more now than we did twenty-five years ago.  And we cannot fixate even on climate change as an issue, because our issues go much further.  We need to address shortages in metals, the feeding of nine billion people, and the emergence of water shortages as the issue of the 21st century.

None of these issues have easy answers, or simple explanations that we can summarize in a sound bite.  We need to fight the urge to battle in that way.  We need to remain dedicated to dealing with real problems, finding sound solutions, and being honest with ourselves and the public as a whole.  Most of all, we need to discuss these issues on a platform of equal access to quality of life.  The more we talk about the wicked problems in front of us from a human perspective, the more we will find ourselves united in the desire to make life better.

A year in green tech: Electricity from solar energy

NREL

A discussion of green technology cannot ignore the clean energy solution with greatest potential:  solar photovoltaic.  The energy from the sun that hits the earth could power the planet thousands of times over, so harnessing even a portion of its power would solve most of our energy problems.  Over the centuries, we have developed many ways to use the sun's energy to our advantage: direct heating of water (solar thermal energy capture), reflection of sunlight to provide illumination, photosynthesis in plants to produce sugars for our consumption, and direct conversion of incoming solar energy into electricity.  Even wind energy comes, at its heart, from solar energy since wind derives its energy from the pressure differences in the atmosphere, which in turn develop because of the earth's rotation and the uneven heating of the planet by the sun.  Although we can discuss many of these technologies, we first must understand the most promising in terms of energy potential and possible ease of distribution: solar PV or solar photovoltaic.

The science behind photovoltaic energy sources dates back to the 19th century.  Scientists such as Max Planck and Albert Einstein contributed to a body of work that developed an understanding of how certain materials behaved differently when bombarded with light.  Light, until then considered to behave as a wave, now had discrete packets of energy (called quanta), which under the right conditions would cause electrons in certain materials to jump away from the atom structure and move freely through the material.  This understanding of light as both wave and discrete unit (sometimes called the "wave-particle duality") forms the basis for quantum physics, and for the development of technologies based on the photoelectric and photovoltaic effects.

In standard electrical circuits, we need a potential difference to drive electron motion, then a method to channel that electron movement through the circuit we choose so that we can harness the power and use it to drive some piece of equipment.  For the better part of a century and a half, that source came from rotating magnets causing oscillating current flows, with the magnet rotation coming from a shaft that spins through the high-temperature, high-pressure introduction of steam to a series of blades surrounding the shaft.  This electricity alternates direction, and therefore led to the designation as alternating current.  As useful and profitable as alternating current power has become, it no longer holds the ubiquity in our lives it once did.  For most of the first hundred and twenty-five years we have harnessed electric power, we generated AC electricity, and made use of it in devices that rotated.  Most of us that remember grammar school science remember electric circuits that rely on the electro-chemistry of batteries to drive the current flow in a circuit.  These sort of direct current (or DC) circuits do not have the ability to deliver power over long distances in the same way that AC systems do, but they do produce consistent electricity that works well especially in digital circuitry.

This understanding of what causes the potential difference that creates electricity flow, and the manner in which our electrical infrastructure has developed, helps place the development and implementation of solar photovoltaic energy systems into context.  The Department of Energy has a useful website with much information about how specific materials produce electricity.  The basic system contains a material that absorbs sunlight, and uses the energy packets to release electrons into a conductive layer.  The material with the free electrons is paired with a layer of material that draws the free electrons.  By separating these materials, we create an electric potential that drives the electrons to flow from one material to the other.  During this trip, we channel them in the manner we desire and put them to use.

On the surface, the description suggests that by now, we should have solved this relatively simple technology.  The process of transferring the energy in a packet of light energy into electrical energy has several direct and indirect hurdles.  First, we do not have large quantities of the materials that currently make up most of the solar photovoltaic panels.  This scarcity drives up the retail price of the material, and therefore the price of the cells.  Second, the photovoltaic panels produce DC electricity, and our building infrastructure relies heavily on AC electricity.  Third, the current mix of materials, construction, and operation have a low efficiency as measured through comparing the amount of incident light energy that the solar cell (the core component of the panel) against the actual electricity generated.  Last, the use of the electricity from solar photovoltaic panels has not yet gained widespread support among grid operators.  These technicians need stability, and the thought of hundreds of thousands of electricity panels sending varying numbers of electrons with varying energy  levels into their infrastructure scares them.

Material selection and construction
The last ten years has seen great advances in the materials that produce electron movement when bombarded with light.  Currently, relatively rare elements like cadmium and hard-to-work-with materials like silicon, comprise most of the working part of the panel.  Recent research seeks to adjust the manner in which the conductive layer harnesses and moves the electrons.  Additionally, we have seen advances in ways to use more readily available materials.  We could be only a few years from such an advancement.  Research and development into solar photovoltaic systems also has produced consistent reductions in the size and weight of panels.  The length and bulkiness of the standard panel construction creates a mess of structural system, and recent advances in thin-film systems (those only a few micrometers thick) and material construction have increased the use of lighter and less material to produce the desired result.

AC versus DC
Ever since the battle for the grid was won by Westinghouse and Tesla over Thomas Edison, our method for delivering electricity over long distances has been AC.  In order to now integrate solar photovoltaic electricity into this system, we must convert it from DC into AC...a process that results in lost energy.  The devices that perform this transformation, called inverters (because they shift the oscillating wave of electricity into a steady flow, thus "inverting" part of the pattern) used to take up large amounts of space and require significant infrastructure while wasting energy.  Newer micro-inverters cover a smaller portion of each system, but also have better performance, and increase the ease of maintenance since having several smaller points of failure means more of the system stays active than when we have a single point of failure.  The next step in maximizing the performance of solar photovoltaic systems may come in the exploration of the DC grid.  As more of our systems rely on DC power (electronics, computers, communication equipment), some have considered installing microgrids of DC power, especially in large buildings and campuses.  This shift would improve the economics of solar photovoltaic, and ease transition.

Overcoming hundreds of years of infrastructure
For better or worse, we have an electric grid based on large, utility-scale electricity generators connected through large transmission lines and substations to areas of population that use electricity.  This relatively small number of generators makes it relatively ease to keep the grid stable and electricity flowing where we want it.  If every building were to have a photovoltaic array on the roof, and during period of low electricity use, all decided to send their electricity into the grid, it could (not would, but could) cause an instability that could disable the system.  Edison and others who favored a DC grid, foresaw the need for battery systems throughout the grid to help stabilize the system, and much effort (including out at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago) has gone into the development of better, and more easily deployed battery technology to provide this stabilization.

In addition to the grid infrastructure, the physical and virtual infrastructure of our construction processes provide obstacles to solar energy deployment.  The improved material selection has certainly affected the weight of the panels, and thus lowered the cost and need for structure to support the panels.  We have extended this to now building the photovoltaic material into other building components (like windows, roofs, and wall sections) in what we have termed building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV).  In addition, the simplification of the electrical components has lowered the complexity relative to integrating the electricity into the building systems and even into the local grid.  Even with these significant improvements, municipalities and local utilities still introduce costly permitting processes that hurt the economics of the systems through requiring unnecessary equipment and materials, and through limits on the production from the panels.

NREL

Even with many of these obstacles, the cost of solar panels has dropped significantly over the past five years, and with new advances regularly, this decline looks to continue for at least another five years.  With the potential for solar electricity in America at least as large as it is in Europe, where the number and production of solar panels dwarfs that of the US on a per capita basis, and costs declining, we approach a tipping point where new electricity installations will have to compete with the long-term benefits of solar: no commodity to purchase, low maintenance, and no moving parts.  Over the course of the year we will look at ways in which we seek to improve upon solar photovoltaic electricity systems, and create the backbone of a new energy economy with the technology.

Friday Five: January 17, 2014...Seeing double?

I recently heard a great twist on an old saying: "Those who learn from history are destined to sit back and watch all of us repeat it."  We have yet to learn from the Law of Unintended Consequences, and instead maintain unreasonable confidence in our own genius.   
A century later, the expensive lesson of reversing the Chicago River
"$18 billion sounds like a lot of money, an especially huge amount for a deadlocked federal government to put aside for what on the surface sounds like an environmentalist’s pet project. But an accounting of both the costs and benefits, as well as the history of what’s already been put into this project, makes a compelling case for figuring out a real solution to the problem."
To tackle inequality, the first priority is to fight climate change
"...the divide between environmental and social is mostly artificial, and that's especially true with climate change. Our changing planet is the ultimate social issue, since those with the fewest resources are least able to adapt."

Could we have foreseen that releasing carbon into the atmosphere would raise temperatures?  Maybe.  Could we have predicted that rising temperatures would have melted thousands of years of built up sea ice?  Likely not.
Are we salivating at the economic benefits that come from this?  Absolutely.
Do we really grasp the costs that come with those benefits?  I doubt it.
Arctic passage opens challenges for US military
"As the ice surrounding the North Pole retreats, officials say, commercial shippers will be able to eventually move goods faster between Asia and Europe. More open seas will also give energy companies greater access to offshore oil and gas in regions controlled by the U.S. and estimated by military officials to be worth $1 trillion."
Arctic sea ice gaps drive toxic mercury conveyor belt
"The gaps, which come as the region shifts from perennial ice to thinner seasonal ice due to climate change, drive convection currents in the lower atmosphere that cycle mercury and ozone from higher levels toward Earth’s surface, where oxidation converts the mercury into a more toxic form, according to the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature."

We need look no further than our continued, and expanding, reliance on a finite resource, and the "sigh of relief" that comes from the latest (and even more damaging) method to extend our addiction.  Peeling back the euphoria, we see that our future is far from certain...and that it will cost us even more than we think.
Big oil gambles and we all lose
"The decline rates of all conventional crude-oil fields producing today are spectacular; the International Energy Agency projects output falling from 69 million barrels per day (bpd) today to just 28 million bpd in 2035. Current total global production of all types of oil is some 91 million bpd."
Four states confirm water pollution from drilling
"The Associated Press requested data on drilling-related complaints in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Texas and found major differences in how the states report such problems. Texas provided the most detail, while the other states provided only general outlines. And while the confirmed problems represent only a tiny portion of the thousands of oil and gas wells drilled each year in the U.S., the lack of detail in some state reports could help fuel public confusion and mistrust."

There are some glimmers of hope that the economic engines that have driven our push to pursue damaging practices might shift toward opportunities to improve quality of life for all, not just some.
Wall Street giant backs away from Washington coal export project
"New York-based Goldman Sachs has sold its stock back to the companies proposing to build the Gateway Pacific Terminal. If built it would transfer 48 million tons of Wyoming coal each year from trains to ocean-going vessels bound for Asia."
Time for investors to move out of high carbon assets, says UN official
"'The pensions, life insurances and nest eggs of billions of ordinary people depend on the long-term security and stability of institutional investment funds. Climate change increasingly poses one of the biggest long-term threats to those investments and the wealth of the global economy,' said Ms. Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)."

Even more hopefully, our realization that our genius within, and not instead, of nature's genius might provide the surest path to sustained quality of life.
Why some mushrooms may be magic for climate change
"They found that soils dominated by ecto- and ericoid mycorrhizal (EEM) fungi contain as much as 70% more carbon than soils dominated by arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. That’s because the EEM fungi produce more nitrogen-degrading enzymes, which allows them to extract more nitrogen from the soil."
Just add compost: How to turn your grassland ranch into a carbon sink
"The grasses were drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and transforming it into sugars, which the cows were transforming into meat: An alchemical conversion of air into brisket. If that was possible, why couldn’t he also turn carbon into dirt?"

Happy Friday!

If you make a mess, clean it up...don't make a bigger one

Photo:  Skyonic

I am not a fan of geoengineering, the proposals to modify the planet and/or atmosphere to counteract the negative impacts of climate change.  It has always seemed to me a dangerous "sit-com like" response to a problem caused by our own actions.  Instead of just changing our behaviors away from damaging ones to beneficial ones, we instead seek to continue doing damaging behaviors, then try to engineer nature to mitigate the bad response...kinda like eating all the fat and sugar one wants, then taking a pill to keep us thin.

Through this lens of skepticism for geoengineering solutions, I must look interestedly at a solution that has gained momentum, and just recently received support from the UN: extracting gases that cause climate change from the atmosphere.  Unlike solutions that seek to add particles or chemicals to the atmosphere, or install infrastructure to prevent some of the worst flooding and damage from sea-level rise, this one has it's roots in nature.  

Prior to significant human interaction, plants and animals lived in a delicate balance relative to the combined needs of water, air, and fertile soil.  Animals breathed air and exhaled carbon dioxide, and at the same time ate plants (and other animals) and drank water, producing waste products.  Plants absorbed the carbon dioxide, and using water, produced oxygen and the sugars animals (including us) need.  In the process, some of these plants, inconjunction with microbes and small animals, processed the animal and plant waste products into useful form.  This balance developed over billions of years to an efficient albeit not perfect method of sustaining life.

Among the otherwise prideful suggestions of how we as humans can solve the problem, the idea of extracting CO2 (and potentially other damaging gases) from the air has promise.  First, the natural mechanisms for removing CO2, the action of plants, would require a significant expansion of planted areas and targeted implementation.  Once carbon dioxide levels decline, it would leave us with more plants than needed for the balance, and the natural decay would release methane into the atmosphere...an even more potent driver of climate change.  If we can find a way to mimic the processes that extract CO2, restore a reasonable balance in the atmosphere, then shutdown these systems, we can address the problem without creating unforeseen ones.

Flashes: January 15, 2014...How long do we wait?

The telephone was invented in 1877...

     by 1930, 9 out of 10 American buildings had one.

The television was invented in 1927...

     by 1960, 9 out of 10 American homes had one.

The personal computer was invented in 1965...

     by 2010, almost 8 out of 10 American homes had one.

The first commercially available solar panels were available in 1959...

     by 2014, almost 1 out of every 500 American homes has one.

Enjoy the journey!

One person's convenience is another person's catastrophe

A friend posed a question on social media looking for recommendations on choosing between two stores at which to stop.  Many offered economic preferences, several offered social justice preferences, and some offered service preferences, and one person offered the following preference...

"Whichever is more convenient."

For decades, corporate America has sold us on the idea of consumption to update our life with all of the "modern conveniences".  We moved from developing cities in which people could live without a car to a society in which each household requires two cars to survive.  A TV in every home moved to two or three, at least.  A single phone line gave way to multiple lines and call waiting with caller ID, which has further given way to individual cell phones.  The family computer that introduced itself to American households in the 80s and 90s has become the family of tablets and laptops.

This proliferation of conveniences has counterbalanced the significant increases in efficiency of large appliances, automobiles, and home design, maintaining the US as one of the largest per capita consumers of energy.  Only in the last five years has our appetite for energy stabilized even as population continues to rise.  While much of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries (those against whom our economy compares best, and compared with some of whom our quality of life pales) survives and even thrives on half of the per capita consumption of the US.  Our continued desire for more conveniences (including entertainment) drives two prime factors that hinder our ability to get smarter about energy use and quality of life:

We see any reduction as a sign of less convenience, and we put our head in the sand when confronted with the impact of our energy use...mostly because most of us do not directly feel those impacts.

(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Three stories from the last six months highlight this latter point.  In Colorado, significant flooding at the change of seasons from summer to fall last year placed surface water in jeopardy when as many as 80,000 fracking wells and their support infrastructure (including surface ponds of both supply and waste water) fell underwater.  Nearly four months after the flooding started, officials still cannot determine if, or how much, pollution occurred and where.  Over the past several years, on the southeast side of Chicago and northwest Indiana, refineries have stored pet coke - a powdery byproduct of the refining of heavy crude like tar sands - in large, uncovered piles.  Prevailing winds have spread the substance over houses, patios, and depending on the day, even a neighborhood of family barbecues.  Last week, in West Virginia, the storage containers for a chemical used to clean coal failed and leaked 7,500 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (MCHM) into the water supply for as many as 300,000 West Virginians.

All of these processes - the pressurized fracturing of rock to draw out gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons stored within, the transformation of heavy liquid hydrocarbon into the form we most frequently desire, and the chemical processing of solid hydrocarbons to reduce emissions - require complicated steps with chemical and energy inputs that result in waste heat, pollutants, and residual matter along with the usable energy.  In each of the cases noted above, the victims of the catastrophe represented a fraction of the people who benefit from the convenience the energy provides.  Their individual and combined voices will not, and cannot, sway industry to make changes...no market-based mechanism gives them the power to affect the corporation.  Even with significant empathy (that does not seem to have awoken, even with mine collapses, coal dust pollution, and increased earthquakes added to the list of catastrophes), our addiction to energy, and the services it provides, tempers our emotions so that we may pray for those affected, but not recognize our own role in the matter, and certainly not drive us to act in ways that will help them.

The solution offered by government regulation holds little hope to provide significant relief.  The knowledge and workforce required to keep up with the vast fossil energy industry would require a government much larger than the current political climate would allow.  Even if politics allowed for such a significant regulatory infrastructure, it would lag the innovation and development of industry, rendering it nothing more than a CSI unit determining guilt but not preventing damage.

We need to have a tough national discussion on how willing we are to sacrifice the lives and health of our fellow citizens of the world and country, and within that willingness, how much value we truly place on the lives of others.  Can we truly say that our choices place equal value on other lives relative to our own?  If you buy natural gas to cook or to heat your home, gasoline to power an automobile (or take a bus or commuter rail to work), and/or electricity to enliven your TV and refrigerator, the answer can be no better than "maybe".

With that as our best current response, we need to look toward a future that eliminates the risks.  That can take the form of an outright ban on fossil fuels phased in over an aggressive, but achievable, time period.  It can take the form of placing the burden on polluting entities to relocate all of those impacted negatively by their operations.  It can take the form of reinsurance that forces those responsible for a catastrophe to bear the burden, and not the public at large.

And it requires each of us opening our eyes to the damage caused by our pursuit of convenience.  Only then can we have the honest conversations that will lead us to a future where we achieve high quality of life for all .

How can we prepare if nobody can tell us where we are going?

Recently, the Energy Information Administration released the early release of the Annual Energy Outlook 2014.  In it, the following chart predicts what we can consider the future of energy consumption by source over the next twenty-five years or so:

US Total Energy Use by Type (quadrillion BTU)

With the following projection for the breakdown of energy use for electricity generation:

US Total Electricity Generation by Source (terawatt-hours)

Paying close attention to the electricity chart shows that after a 3% gain in share of energy production by renewable energy in the first twelve years of this century, over the next twenty-six years, we should expect....

Only 4% more.

And after coal has dropped by 15% over the same timeframe, it will continue its drop for another...

Whopping 5%.

Regardless of your point of view on coal and renewable energy sources, this should make no sense.  In a good analysis of the subject, this CleanTechnica blog post notes that the assumptions in the EIA Outlook lock in any policy currently codified in law (like subsidies and tax credits for fossil fuels), and assume that any policies or laws that need reauthorization (like the Production Tax Credits for wind and solar, or research grant programs for renewable energy) will expire without renewal.

Note also, that although the last five years have seen a relatively flat oscillation of total energy use, the next twenty-five years picks up the steep increase in total energy use that accompanies a projected increase of population (but an assumed stagnation in the per capita energy use).

If we follow some more likely scenarios, including:

1. Although population will continue to increase, at worst, we should expect energy use to remain approximately flat, because in either an economic recovery or continued sluggishness, increased costs of living will force the elimination of some expenses in order to survive, and energy is one of the few costs we can avoid with good planning.
2. As US car manufacturers meet new CAFE standards, as the number of electric vehicles increases, and as people continue to drive fewer miles per unit of GDP, usage of oil will continue to drop on its current trajectory.
3. The costs to maintain and build new coal and nuclear plants will continue to out downward pressure on the capacity of both in the electricity market.
4. Because of the amount of new natural gas generating capacity being brought on line, and the continued reliance on it for heating fuel in most of the country, we should expect it will remain a significant piece of our energy portfolio for the first half of this century (even though we could eliminate it over this timeframe easily).
5. Economics tells us that with the number and size of companies getting into the renewable energy markets, and with policies focused on energy production and not the production of goods (like turbines and solar panels), that politicians will not be able to whimsically eliminate the currently "temporary" subsidies for renewables...at least not while maintaining permanent ones for fossil fuels.  Although wind will not maintain it's meteoric rise of the past fifteen years, it will continue to grow, and solar can and will sustain an accelerated growth pattern for at least ten to fifteen years as new materials and improvements in efficiency continue.

With all of these in play, the future looks more like this:

Projected US Total Energy Consumption by Source (quadrillion BTU)

If you do not believe me, then look to the markets.  Investment banks like Goldman are bearish on new coal investments, while power suppliers in the Midwest are investing in wind and solar over natural gas.  The assumptions made to get to the modified projection do not assume imposition of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade policy, one that most corporate leaders see on the horizon.  With that sort of policy in practice, we can expect even greater reductions in coal and natural gas, with compensating increases in energy efficiency and renewables.  Note that the project above is not my opinion on what can be done, merely what appears likely to come about based upon trends.  We can eliminate all but a fraction of fossil fuel use in the next eleven years, with the economic benefits that come with it, if we so choose.

I would like to see more thought put into these projections.  I understand the need to show what will happen if we do nothing, but it does not help the public discourse to hide what will likely happen if we keep working on the path we have over the last twenty years.  We are on the right path, and the momentum favors a clean energy future...the only questions that remain are how quickly we will get there, and will it be soon enough?  Our national projections, the ones that garner all the media attention, should show what can happen if we do nothing, what will happen if trends continue, and what can happen if we do even more. 

Friday Five: January 10, 2014

Outside of the fact that I am a sucker for cleverness, this description of the workings of the movement of heat is one of the best I have read.  It highlights one of our great misconceptions: that cold moves.  Science tells us that heat moves, and it is that movement of heat that is at play this week.
Go home Arctic, you're drunk
"What is happening instead is the cold air mass that usually sits up on the Arctic during the northern Winter has moved, drooped, shifted, gone off center, to engulf part of the temperate region. Here in the Twin Cities, it is about 8 below zero F as I write this. If I go north towards the famous locality of International Falls (famous for its cold temperature readings often mentioned on the national news) it will in fact be colder. If I go even farther north, at some point it will start to get warm again, as we leave the giant blob of cold air that has engulfed us. In fact, it is relatively warm up on the North Pole right now. Alaska and Europe are relatively warm as well."

Advocates against renewable energy cite intermittency as one of the obstacles that the market will never overcome.  It is interesting that, as we have seen in Texas this week, "conventional" sources have their own intermittency.  Anything with moving parts requiring maintenance cannot run 100% of the time, and as anyone who has been inside a plant that produces steam can tell you, the systems have many sources of failure requiring attention.  They also have economic intermittency associated with the availability of fuels that have to be purchased.  When all is said and done, the reliability of conventional and renewable sources does not vary enough to make a difference in the marketplace.  Grid operators have to be ready for any source to be unavailable, especially as our weather continues to vary from what we knew to be "normal".
Cold pushes Texas power to use winter record
"Monday's power emergency lasted less than three hours, but was reminiscent of February 2011 when ERCOT was forced to implement rolling outages for several hours after dozens of power plants were knocked offline or were unable to start due to frigid weather and strong winds across the state.
One of the state's largest power plants, Luminant's Comanche Peak 1 nuclear reactor, is operating at 72 percent of capacity for a second day."

I have read many knocks against this technology because some assume the lights get turned off. As the article mentions, the technology reduces the lighting level so that in-person viewing remains intact, but the level needed for security cameras only comes into play when motion is detected.  In an era when we scrutinize every dollar spent in education and safety net programs, finding millions of dollars of savings in every city and state should be on the table.  Especially when the level of service does not change.
Clever? Smart street lamps light up only when needed
"The reason why street lamps are so bright, he explains, is to accommodate security cameras, which require a certain amount of surrounding illumination to make out people's faces and other vital details. The Tvilight modified street lamps supposedly do not interfere with these recording systems since they are sufficiently bright whenever someone is within view. Additionally, the dimming levels can be adjusted depending on the known traffic pattern of particular locations. Offhand, for instance, he states that busy intersections can be safely dimmed down by 30 to 40 percent, while that number can drop as low as 70 percent for vacant parking spaces and industrial lots."

How much chemical are you willing to put into your body to have a place to sit that will not burn?  Consider this against the reason for the practice in the first place was the frequency of people falling asleep while smoking?  Does my couch have to poison my daughter because someone else smokes?
This win against toxic couches will make you love seats
"The problem with the flame retardant is that it didn’t stay put. It dispersed into the air. It bonded with dust. The closer you were to flame-retardant treated polyfill or foam, the more you became, over time, part flame retardant yourself. Researchers found that children in the U.S. had seven times the levels of flame retardant in their blood as children who had recently emigrated from Mexico. In the Arctic, very far away from most of the world’s furniture, levels of flame retardant began to increase exponentially in seals."

Keep an eye on this idea.  It could mean the beginning of "The Matrix" and the end of our autonomy, or it could mean a much more efficient manner for us to live our lives.  One thing it will lead to is the efficacy of driverless cars as devices begin to communicate with each other.  One note: if you work in an office building, the systems that control temperature and ventilation already do this...so it's not new, just expanding.
Thousands of world's internet-connected things in one place
"A new website seeks to catalog all of the world's Internet-enabled devices. So far, they've got more than 2,000 listed, and they plan to add many more in the months ahead. There are fitness monitors, medical devices, sound-level meters, and all sorts of other gadgets ready for measuring and monitoring (thermometers, pedometers, and barometers, oh my)."

Happy Friday!

A year in green tech: GeoExchange

Throughout 2014, I will take a look each week at a technology or strategy that holds promise to help us eliminate the need for chemical fuels (also known as fossil fuels) that have the dual drawbacks of finite resources and damaging transformation into useful form.  I will strive to maintain a balance between presenting the science behind the technology, and maintaining some readability.  I look forward to a dialogue on the subject, and welcome comments and feedback that will further our collective understanding of the topic.

Week One:  GeoExchange and Thermal Batteries

On a simplistic level, we use energy in its various forms nearly equally to power our buildings, our transportation, and our industrial activities.  In our building systems, over half of all the energy use (or approximately one-sixth of the total) provides us thermal comfort, what we generally refer to as heating and air-conditioning.  Especially when it comes to heating, shifting away from fossil fuels meets great resistance because of the built-up infrastructure of distribution networks for natural gas and heating oil, the proliferation of equipment to convert the fuels into heat, and the high reliability of these networks of energy transfer.  In order to supplant this significant portion of damaging, but most necessary - at least in the case of building heat - energy use, we need a technology that provides an equal level of reliability and efficacy without relying on the use of a limited resource.  Thankfully, for over half a century, we have had that technology: geoexchange.

Geoexchange, also known as geothermal* or ground-source, systems work on a couple of basic scientific principles.  Before getting into some more detail, I want to introduce geoexchange with an analogy, that of the rechargeable battery.  We all understand that a battery holds onto a set amount of electricity for us to use to power some electronic device, and many of us have seen the battery packs that we can take out of a device and plug into a wall to recharge.  Our phones and computers have rechargeable batteries, and although over time the constant charging and recharging can wear a battery out, for the normal life of an electronic device, it gets the job done.  Geoexchange works on a similar principle, except that instead of energy in the form of electricity, we move energy in the form of heat, and instead of using a chemical solution to store the charge carrying the energy, we use the earth to absorb and store the heat.

US Department of Energy

Before going much further, I should mention a couple of the scientific properties that will help describe what happens in a geoexchange system:

First, one of the fundamental principles of nature states that thermal energy moves from a hot area to a cold area, but never the reverse.  Although we may feel a wave of cold "moving toward us", the movement of thermal energy always moves hot to cold.  This is especially important to understand as we think about things like refrigerators, where we do not "add cold", but rather try to take heat away from a cold area and move it to a hotter one.  In order to do that - essentially violate a law of nature - we have to add significant amounts of energy (although refrigerators have become much more efficient at moving heat over the last twenty years).  Our homes have window air conditioners or equipment that sits on the ground outside the house (called condensing units) that reject heat from our house to the outside.  This law of nature, and the methods we use to violate it, play significant roles in the technology.

Second, some materials do a poor job of holding onto heat and get hot very quickly, then cool off equally as quickly.  These materials have a low specific heat, which is a measure of how quickly the temperature of a material changes for each unit of thermal energy added to it.  For example, in the liquid state, water changes temperature rapidly when heated, and once we remove the source of heat, it reaches the temperature of the surrounding room relatively rapidly.  On the other hand, for a material like stone, it takes a significant amount of heat to change the temperature of the material, but once heated, it can give off heat while slowly dropping in temperature.

Lastly, it helps to understand the concept of evaporation.  We all have seen steam rising from a boiling kettle, but some liquids do not need that level of heat to evaporate, and in fact will evaporate at room temperature or lower.  Some may know of an extreme case of this with dry ice, solid carbon dioxide, which changes from solid to gas at room temperature in a process called sublimation.  This process of evaporation at low temperatures holds the key, especially when we talk about heating with geoexchange.

So how does geoexchange allow us to heat and cool a building with a minimum of fossil fuels?  The basic operation uses the relatively fixed temperature of the ground (below around four to five feet beneath the surface) of anywhere from 45 to 75 degrees depending on where one lives.  In the summer, when we like a space temperature of between 74 and 78 degrees, we can run cool fluid (usually water or a water-antifreeze mixture) from the ground at nearly the temperature of the earth, and either bring it directly in contact with air from the building or use a heat pump to draw heat from the space and add that energy to the fluid.  We then return the fluid, using a fluid pump, to the earth.  With the added heat, the fluid now has a higher temperature than the earth, and will flow from the pipe to the earth.  We help this process by surrounding the pipe with a grout that has high thermal conductivity (meaning it allows heat to quickly pass through it), and since the earth has a high specific heat, we can add significant amounts of heat without changing the temperature.  The cycle then starts over with the lower temperature water returning to the building.

In the winter, when we need heat, we cannot rely simply on the temperature difference, since the earth still sits at 45 to 55 (in the areas that need heat, we get to 75 in areas where air temperatures do not drop to the point where we need heat) and we want space temperatures of 68 to 72 degrees.  In this case we do need a heat pump, which uses that evaporative property in a material called a refrigerant.  The refrigerant in this case will evaporate at the temperature of the earth, pulling heat from the fluid and sending it back down slightly cooler than the ground temperature, then reject that heat into the space to maintain the temperature.  This still requires an input of electrical energy, but a significantly lower input than the chemical energy needed to provide conventional heating.  The fluid returns to the earth to pick up more heat and the cycle continues.

The geoexchange system has some drawbacks.  The system requires that we bury a series of plastic pipes either deep underground (in the case of a vertical system, sometimes as deep as 500 feet) or throughout a large area (a horizontal system, and depending on the building size, this could mean almost an acre).  This requires a significant capital investment, although over the life of the system (which lasts a minimum of fifty years before anyone would have to think of digging up the pipes and starting over) that cost requires much less investment than the annual cost of paying for fuel to heat and cool a building.  Also, the system still requires a source of electricity, and if that electricity does not come from a reliable, renewable source (more on that in the coming weeks), we have not eliminated all of the potential damage caused by our need for heating and air-conditioning.

The greatest impediments to widespread implementation of geoexchange systems fall under three main headings: logistic, application, and economic.  Some buildings do not have the requisite land area or underground access to install the pipes necessary for the system to work.  Innovators have begun looking into phase change materials that can provide the thermal battery storage nearly equivalent to the earth, but without the need to dig, but that will take some time to reach the market.  Geoexchange systems work best when the amount of heat needed in winter nearly matches the amount available in summer, or when the amount removed or added matches the rate at which the earth can rebalance its temperature.  When we cannot achieve that balance, the application of geoexchange requires either a supplemental heat source (further reducing the benefit) or the addition of solar collectors to increase the summer thermal storage (which increases the cost), since over time drawing heat or adding it faster than the earth can tolerate will greatly reduce the performance of the system...even to the point where the building systems will no longer work. Lastly, our energy delivery market currently centers around the selling of electrons and molecules, not the movement of heat.  Since we have nothing to sell after the initial installation, investors and financial markets have not yet found a way to value a system that relies on such little input energy.  This last challenge faces all green technologies: how do we price something that is ubiquitous and readily available?

Over the coming weeks, I will look at other strategies and technologies that work in concert with each other and geoexchange, forming a palate of solutions from which homeowners, designers, and builders can choose today and in the near future to create a "fuel-less" economy.  Some of these, like hyper-insulation, solar photovoltaic, and battery storage, work hand-in-hand with geoexchange, while others, such as earth tubes and energy recovery, can work in place of it.  If you hear of a technology about which you would like to learn more, please let me know and I will try to include it in the series.

* Although geothermal has more popularity in the building industry, another more appropriate application of the term geothermal applies to underground hot springs that can be tapped to produce electricity.  Because they both relate to the energy industry, geoexchange more appropriately describes the process used in buildings.

Flashes: January 8, 2013

• Wind turbines that can be taller because of innovative construction methods
• Electricity production from low temperature waste heat

• Change in Pacific nitrogen content tied to climate change

• Commercial Building Analysis Tool for Energy-Efficient Retrofits
  
• Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model
  
• Energy and Water Use Analysis
  

• A new material for solar panels could make them cheaper, more efficient

Hoax or no hoax, climate action is in our best interest

John Stewart had a great rant on it.  CNN and Fox have beaten it worse than bowl opponents beat the SEC.  Facebook had meme after meme on both side of the issue.  Being stuck inside most of the last couple of days, most could not ignore the story of the year thus far...

Global warming is a hoax because it's so cold in part of the country.

I can discuss (and have discussed...as have many others) how this extreme weather may actually follow from arctic warming, or how Australia finds itself in an intense heatwave, or how climate has to do with long term weather patterns, not short term ones.  But none of that really means anything anymore because all of the actions required to address human-caused climate change are in our best interest economically and socially.

On the economic front, renewable energy sources prove a better investment than new fossil fuel or nuclear sources on the utility scale.  This stands true even in the Midwest where especially solar has had a rough ride.  Both carry some risks, but the risks associated with the cost of commodity in fossil fuel plants greatly outweigh the risks of availability of solar and wind.  Energy efficiency (including the alternative use of renewable sources such as using sunlight for daylight in buildings or providing heating and cooling using geo-exchange thermal storage) trumps them all economically, providing a perpetual return on investment.

Socially, the inequity surrounding the availability and environmental damage associated with energy use exacerbates the gap between the haves and have nots.  Power plants, mines, and wells site near poor communities because the demand for this property gets driven down by the presence of these assets.  This puts only those who cannot afford to live elsewhere at risk.  Especially with assets like coal fired electricity plants, coal mines, and natural gas/oil fracking wells, the local environmental damage placed an extra burden both socially and economically on the communities.  Moving away from these technologies would remove this additional burden, and provide those most at risk with the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.

There is no downside to investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency.  To those who scoff at the potential level of investment, we can show how similar levels of investment in the digital economy paid dividends.  To those who fear the loss of jobs in the industries affected, we can show how the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries have higher jobs per dollar than any of the non-renewable industries.  To those who decry the subsidies that would be required for some of these technologies, we can show the higher level of direct and indirect subsidies that the supposedly mature industries in fossil fuels enjoy.

Switching to an all-renewable energy economy requires the solving of many problems, but none of them insurmountable.  We can continue the development of storage technologies to address intermittency, and adjust load timing to improve the matching of source availability to load.  The only issue we really need to overcome is social: we need to stop finding reasons to argue and start to look at the plain numbers if we act or we do not act.  If we act, and all of this was just hype, we have a more resilient economy with little to no risk of pollution.  If we do not act, and the worst of this becomes real, it will not matter that we were right.  We might be dead right as a species.