When it comes to sustainable energy, America really IS the land of opportunity

There is a sad fact that we have to face....the US is a very wasteful country. Our politicians like to talk about all the waste in our federal government, but truth be told, that pales in comparison to the amount of food, energy, water, material that we waste on a day-in and day-out basis. This attitude of waste grows logically out of two different characteristics of our early country: First, the amount of available space that existed in North America during the 17th through 19th centuries, and second, the fact that our country developed all of its lasting infrastructure after the Industrial Revolution and during an era of nearly-free energy resources. Efficiency was not an issue...progress, prosperity, and profit ruled the day.

Now that we are dealing with the repercussions of that, one might think that we have to completely change our infrastructure to move to a more sustainable future...

But they would be wrong.

Precisely because we have been so wasteful, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make improvements...potentially even more so than even Europe (where infrastructure naturally supports sustainable action more effectively) or China and India (where they are starting with mostly a clean slate and do not have the burden of sunk investment. In order to move to a more sustainable economy, but without the financial shock that comes from contraction, we need to make three major shifts:

1.  Eliminate fossil fuels from our mix of electricity generation.
2.  Shift fossil-fuel burning as a source of heating energy from our buildings.
3.  Reduce vehicle milage per unit of GDP and shift remaining to cleanly generated electricity.

If we were starting from scratch, we would need to develop a large grid infrastructure to handle the new loads shifting from fossil resources for buildings and vehicles. Because we are so wasteful, we can build this capacity much more cost effectively through efficiency in our existing buildings and systems. Meanwhile, as we close coal, nuclear, and natural gas electricity-generating plants (in that order) and add new renewables, we can, again, use efficiency to reduce the pain associated with dropping new generation.

This also opens up great opportunities for innovation. New technologies and design strategies make it so that as we renovate or replace buildings in existing, developed cities, we can introduce distributed generation assets that are easier to install. With advances in communication, grid operators can have an even better handle on these distributed resources than they traditionally had on large utility-scale generation. We are learning that the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy resources can happen more swiftly and with less disruption than previously thought.

Many environmentalists treat our culture of inefficiency as a pox that we should try to wipe out by degrading all of us for years of efficiency sins. Instead of that negative view, we should focus on the opportunity...we can make great strides, very quickly, and with no disruption to quality of life. In fact, if we do it well, we can increase quality of life dramatically...across the whole spectrum of Americans...while we grow more and more efficient. Americans have shown, as Churchill said, that we will do the right thing once all other options are exhausted.

We are just starting to do the right thing...and we will all be the better for it.

www.folkartfromtheharbor.com

Flashes: July 23, 2014

US per person annual textile fiber consumption 71.8 pounds per year (2012, down from peak of 91.0 in 2005) and 91.3 pounds per year of textiles were discarded -- 14.3 pounds recycled and 77 pounds discarded to landfill.
 Sources USDA & EPA

US per person annual food consumption 1,996 pounds per year (2011) not counting the nearly 500 pounds per person discarded.
 Sources USDA & NRDC

US per person annual energy consumption 6,784 kg of oil equivalent per capita (2013, down from peak of 8,438 kgoe in 1978) compared with an average of 4,150 kgoe per capita for the average of the OECD, 3,020 for the UK, and 2,087 for Portugal....for the record, Canada is at 7,270 kgoe per capita.
 Source World Bank

US per person annual water consumption 625,152 gallons (2011) compared with the world average of 304,657 gallons, the average for Germany at 313,676 gallons, and the average for the UK at 276,721 gallons.
 Source Waterfootprint.org

Currently, the US could completely support itself on recycled textiles, support an additional 40% of population without growing an ounce of more food, and support an additional 100% (minimum) more population without generating an additional BTU of energy or pumping an additional gallon of water...

If we wanted to.

Enjoy the journey!

Carbon rules are coming...and they will be easy to meet

Today, the President Obama and the EPA – bolstered by recent court rulings - will announce rules for carbon dioxide emissions targets.  Reports vary from 20% reduction by 2020 to a 30% reduction by 2030.  Regardless of the actual target chosen, we should all remember one thing…

We will beat that target easily.

Politics, we should all remember, has as its foundation the “art of the possible”.  Most everyone in industry, except for those whose commodities will have less value because of reduced demand for carbon-based fuels, recognizes that energy efficiency and renewable energy have a better economic trajectory than fossil fuels or even nuclear.  In setting this goal, the current administration simply identifies where industry easily thinks they can get.  Just as they did with the automobile efficiency standards, they have put in place a benchmark that we will meet far before the target date.

Lest pure political analysis prove unpersuasive, consider the economic argument.  For years, analysts claimed that we needed to tax fossil fuels in order to capture externalities and make renewable energy more competitive.  What we got instead was an energy market that remained depressed by a combination of stagnant demand and temporarily increased supply.  That should have spelled a death knell for renewable energy.  Instead, we have seen wind and solar have their most successful years economically in a time when low energy prices should push them out of the market.  Recent long-term contracts and court rulings in the Midwest have bolstered this fact that even as of today, renewable energy-based electricity generation betters coal and nuclear, and competes with natural gas.

On the technology front, current building codes currently restrict energy use in new buildings to levels about half of what they were a decade ago.  Over the next ten years, we will see this decline even further, and that will carry over into the existing building marketplace.  We will see even more efficient use of energy in buildings (a sector that uses about 1/3 of the energy in the economy), and continued reduction in vehicle emissions.  Industrial use (the final 1/3) already has stagnated as industry continues to find excellent investments in efficient ways to update equipment and processes to use less energy.  Our economic growth no longer relies on increased energy use, and in fact, we may see the opposite hold true for decades to come.

On an even more important front, most politicians recognize that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies create more jobs per dollar than the fossil fuel industry.  Few groups take the “sky is falling” approach to carbon regulation, but the some continue to flap their wings and claim that regulating carbon will cause economic collapse.  Thankfully, most recognize that pollution limits actually create jobs by shifting capital (human and financial) from extractive industry to productive ones.  Spending money on new wind turbines, smart-grid technology, weatherization of homes, or pollution capture technology…these all put people to work and shift expenses from one sector to another, but it does not threaten the economy as a whole.

One need look no further than the acid rain policies of the 80s and 90s to see a parallel.  Back then we sought to reduce sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants because these reacted with the atmosphere to produce rain that damaged crops, buildings, and communities.  Industry predicted it would create a $1,500 per ton drag on the economy.  What happened instead was that it cost only $250 per ton, and the savings from increased property value, reduced medical expenses, and job creation more than paid for the investment.

For years, we have had to choose between the more economically stable sector and the higher-priced, but better-for-us sector.  Especially in tough economic times, asking anyone to make that choice is tough.  Now, we have reached a tipping point where we do not have to sacrifice anyone’s quality of life in order to cost-effectively provide the energy that supports our lives.  Challenges lie ahead, but we should take solace in the fact that the Obama administration is taking this step today.  If there’s one thing we know about politicians….

They rarely stick their necks out unless they’re certain of the outcome.

If Indiana is against energy efficiency, then what are they for?

Indiana's governor, Mike Pence has a serious decision to make.  The Indiana General Assembly has come out against energy efficiency with an overwhelming vote to end the popular, and by most accounts effective, Energizing Indiana program.  Senate Bill 340 originally sought to give large industrial customers a chance to opt-out of the program - shifting more of the responsibility to small and mid-sized customers.  The House hijacked it, however, and turned it into a bill that as of December 31, 2014 would make it illegal for the Indiana regulatory commission to require an energy efficiency program.  In 2009, that regulatory body enacted the program to help drive energy efficiency and boost job growth in the state, keeping up with programs enacted in most of the neighboring states.  Since its inception, the program has created as many as 5,000 permanent, direct jobs, resulted in three times as many indirect jobs, and saved almost a billion kilowatt hours at a cost of approximately $500 million.

More importantly, the programs have reduced demand by 100 MW, and if continued would reduce it by almost 1800 MW in 2020 when the program would have cost $2 billion.  We often think of building new power plants to meet increased demand, but given the size of our current demand, we can offset increases by reducing usage elsewhere.  Every dollar we spend on permanent energy efficiency avoids us having to build a power plant.  Currently, the reductions of energy efficiency cost about $5 per kilowatt of power.  By 2020, the 1800 MW reduction will have cost about $1 per kilowatt.  Compared with $6 per kilowatt of nuclear, $2.3 per kilowatt for coal, and $1 per kilowatt for natural gas, the investment makes the most economic sense.  This is especially true when factoring in the job creation impact.  Energy efficiency creates twice as many jobs per dollar invested as any of the fossil fuels, and just slightly more than nuclear energy.

The reason for the backlash against the bill comes from the utility industry in Indiana.  Although they accurately claim no direct sponsorship of the bill, their interests get ignored if the program continues. In Indiana, unlike other states, the utilities still control both the generation assets and the delivery network, and their profits are coupled to usage: as people use more energy, they receive more revenue and profit.  In deregulated states, utilities can decouple their charges from usage, recouping the cost of investment even as usage flattens out or drops.  Although this creates a whole set of issues that all utilities will have to deal with by changing their business model, it at least gives the utility economic incentive to improve reliability and efficiency.

The other issue, and perhaps more important one, comes from the fact that the program resulted not from direct legislation, but rather from a legal order from a regulatory agency.  Although fully supported by the governor at the time, and even the majority of the legislature, the program did not come from a newly enacted law as in other nearby states.  This perceived "over-reach" provides an opportunity for those who would oppose the effect to claim that the rules do not have the appropriate legitimacy.

Both of the objections raise valid arguments, and after nearly four years, it makes sense to revisit programs to make sure they maintain relevancy and effectiveness.  Mike Pence has a hard decision because his own party did not deliver him the most important thing he needs right now....

Options.

By making it an all-or-nothing, the governor faces the decision to either eliminate jobs and create a further burden on the middle class, or further enrage a portion of the corporate base.  (I should note that business groups come down on both sides of this issue as many large and small businesses have seen growth in the marketplace because of the program.)  If the legislature had proposed a fix that addressed the concerns of utilities, and provided some realistic relief for large corporate customers, the decision would not be about a politically-charged ending of a program, but rather a fix.  There are many possibilities the legislature could have proposed: scaling the contribution based upon customer size, fully deregulating the utilities to allow them to decouple cost from usage, and/or setting the rate of contribution at the cost of new investment to ensure that energy efficiency targets only the most cost-effective programs.  Any of these would have made reasonable sense, and given the governor options.

But right now, he really has no options.  He must veto this bill and tell the Assembly to start anew.

A year in green tech: 3-D printing

Like most members of my generation, I remember the red and blue glasses that people would wear to watch three-dimensional movies - which had been invented a generation earlier - and then three-dimensional television.  They did not really work all that well for TV, but the movie experience was entertaining...even if most of the movies were not.  It is funny now that almost every major action movie gets released in a 3-D version, my family and I vote much more often to watch the 2-D version.

With three dimensional entertainment still more of a fashion than a value-added experience, there is a 3-D technology that could completely change our quality of life and even the way that we think of moving goods and resources.  Three-dimensional printing offers the possibility to create objects with a minimum of waste, and at the user scale not the industrial scale.  The technology follows a simple principle of adding material to create a model, item, or form.  Traditionally, we either cast items in injection molding, or we machine away material from a stock to create a solid object.  The first takes significant amounts of energy to accomplish the end goal, while the second either wastes material or takes time to collect and recycle the remnants.  In 3-D printing, the device continuously layers material to build the item.  It uses only the material necessary to create the finished product.


How will this change the way we live?

Airwolf 3D

Currently, we use most of the items we own only a fraction of their useful lives.  For many of these, we only need them for minutes, then we do not need them again for a long period of time.  Instead of having to own all of these only to use them sporadically, what if we could use the item, break it down into its constituent materials, then reform it into something else that we need.  If we continue to do this over and over again, we not only eliminate the concept of waste, we minimize the amount of resources we need to support our quality of life.  It will take the addition of energy to continually make the changes to the material, but given the amount of renewable energy available to us, and the knowledge we have of how to do most everything else with a minimum of energy use, tackling both concerns coincidently seems well within our technological grasp.

In manufacturing, 3-D printing can reshape industry.  Currently, our manufacturing industry works with a small number of relatively large scale points taking stock resources and assembling finished products that they then ship to a larger number of wholesale or retail outlets.  This requires "double handling" of first the stock material and then the finished product.  It also creates "feast and famine" economies for many towns that host these large scale operations.  Down the road, as technology improves, we can move to the point where each community has multiple manufacturing centers similar to today's big-box retail.  In those spaces, stock materials and a small-number of manufactured-for-assembly items would arrive, and a local workforce would use these inputs to create the products that their community needs.  If a resident or small business owner needs a specialty replacement part, they do not have to worry about a manufacturer no longer supporting the item, they just send a scale image to the center and receive a new one within hours.  Institutions already are doing this and saving both time and money.

Three-dimensional printing does have challenges.  First, the process moves slowly, and currently only supports small-scale items on even a remotely commercial level.  Also, with the level of current technology development, the quality of the finished product does not meet the expectations many of us have for some items.  Industry has made much progress, and just today, HP announced that they have made some breakthroughs on both these issues and will have an announcement later this year.  That may just amount to corporate propaganda, but the presence of such a large company in the arena means that capital and talent have converged on the issue.

The technology will not, in and of itself, feed an ever-growing population, or right all the injustices of inequality that threaten our quality of life.  It does move us one step closer to making life easier to support with fewer resources, and given our current projected predicament, every improvement helps.

A year in green tech: Energy recovery ventilation

I live in a one-hundred-plus-year-old house.  Even with some attention to sealing up gaps and replacing windows, I still have drafty spots where cold air leaks in during the winter and warm air leaks in during the summer. 

And I am ok with that.

Truth is, we need fresh air in buildings just as much – if not more – than we need thermal comfort.  We have mechanisms in our body and choices we can make to cope with feeling warm or chilly, but if we have poor air quality indoors, then we have no manner to cope with that individually.

That fresh air comes at a cost, however.  Heating and cooling fresh air can cost as much as fifteen percent of a building’s energy budget.  Because of this, in the early 1980s, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the organization that establishes standards for building system performance, reduced the acceptable level of outside air required to ventilate buildings.  The thinking held that because we needed to improve energy performance, if we lowered the amount of outside air, we would lower the cost.  It worked, but immediately, we saw a rise in complaints about sick-building syndrome.  The lower ventilation levels could not keep the indoor air fresh enough to maintain occupant health, and within a decade, the levels returned to their previous level.

Flash forward to today where we have made great strides at reducing heating costs through insulation and electricity costs through better equipment and lighting, and ventilation air consumes an even larger chunk of our energy.  We have strategies such as demand control ventilation to mitigate the costs; in demand control ventilation, we monitor the occupants in the space, and if the number drops below the expected threshold, we reduce the amount of air we deliver.  This only works when you have the system to monitor, and when the building exhausts an amount of air significantly less than the amount needed for ventilation.

Popular Mechanics

Fortunately, we have a technology to reduce energy while keeping ventilation high that over the past years has dramatically dropped in price and improved in performance:  energy recovery ventilation.  The process works  on a simple principle that requires some complex application.  In the winter, when outdoor air sits at 0F to 20F, our buildings generally maintain indoor temperatures at 68F to 73F.  Adding to this the heat gained from lights and equipment, and the air that we exhaust from our buildings could have a temperature of 75F to 78F.  Without the concern for energy, we would just throw that air out of the building.  However, that air contains valuable heat energy that will benefit us if we can transfer it to the incoming air.  Similarly in the summer, we have building air at 75F, and more importantly with a relative humidity near 50%, and outdoor air as warm and moist as 95F with as much as 80% relative humidity.  In this case, the exhaust air could absorb the heat and moisture from the incoming air.

This process requires complex planning and materials development.  We need to determine the type of energy we want to transfer: do we want to change just the temperature or do we want to move moisture as well?  If we only want to transfer heat to change temperature, we can get away with a setup that passes both air streams through a highly conductive metal enclosure that isolates the air molecules from each other, but allows the heat to move.  If we want to transfer the moisture as well, we need a wheel with specially-designed coating material that absorbs water from one air stream and passes it into another.  Also, we need to plan the path for our air flows so that the exhaust air passes near our incoming air.

Dessicant and enthalpy (or total energy) wheels perhaps have the most interesting characteristics.   The surface material of the wheel has microscopic “holes” in the surface specifically designed to pull water vapor from one air stream.  When exposed to the less-humid stream, they then release that water.  Such a highly specialized surface requires a precise manufacturing process, and originally the cost of this exceeded the value delivered.  With recent developments in technology, however, the costs have declined to the point where energy codes now require these types of wheels in certain applications.

Not all exhaust streams work with total energy or dessicant wheels.  Toilet exhaust, for example, has contaminants that we do not want transferred to the incoming air.  In those cases, we may use the sensible heat transfer wheel, or a simple air-to-air heat exchanger.   In that way, we can at least recover the heat while avoiding the contamination that can come from taking the moisture from one air stream and transferring it to the other.

Depending on the balance between exhaust air volumes and the needed ventilation air, energy recovery can significantly reduce the cost of treating outside air.  If the exhaust and outside air rates nearly match, we can lower costs by as much as 50%.  In some applications, we can reduce the cost even further.

Not every form of green technology comes from the sun or some newly developed electronic gadget.  Sometimes, green tech simply looks for untapped energy sources right under our noses, then efficiently transfers that energy on a novel way.  ERV is just such a technology: not fancy or exciting, but effective.

You want jobs? Efficiency not mining

Over the next several weeks, the media will cover ad nauseum President Obama's decision on the Keystone XL pipeline that developers plan to run through the upper Midwest to connect the tar sands mining operations of Canada with the Gulf Coast export terminals of Texas.  Ignoring for now the potential cost in human life due to increased emissions of carbon soot and carbon dioxide, the increased risk to drinking water and arable land from pipeline breaks (which happen regularly), and the increased environmental damage to the Gulf Coast region where the tar sands refining operations will take place, the pipeline makes no sense from the point of view of a financial investment.  Depending on the source, the pipeline plans to create between 1,000 and 5,000 temporary jobs, 50 and 1,000 permanent jobs, and potentially influence the development of as many as 20,000 jobs.  It will cost at least $5.3 billion, and none of the fuel produced from the delivery and refining processes will go to support American machinery...it will all go to a burgeoning Latin American market.  This pipeline represents profits for the corporation that owns it, not energy independence for the US or Canada.  The jobs created by the investment - even if they happen at the highest level imagined - do not justify the expense, and we have much better ways to invest the capital.

For the sake of analysis, I consider a temporary job to have the value of one-tenth that of a permanent job; this assumes that a permanent job will last on the order of ten years, and the temporary job around a year.  This puts the range of direct, combined jobs at somewhere between 150 and 1,500.  At an investment of $5.3 billion, the investment-to-job ratio sits at around $35 million to $3.5 million per job.

The best alternative to the Keystone XL pipeline, energy efficiency investments, not only avoid all the human health problems KXL will cause, but it also creates more - and better - jobs.  Two recent energy efficiency programs serve as a basis for this argument.  The Energy Impact Illinois (EI2) program used ARRA money to match utility incentive program and private homeowner contributions to winterize homes and reduce the demand for heating energy.  In the US Southeast, ARRA funds also contributed to the Better Building Neighborhood Program (BBNP) which operated in the same fashion.  For each of these programs, the investment-to-jobs ratio looks like this:

Program                    Investment                      Jobs created                      Ratio         
EI2                               $24.0M                              140                          $171,428/job
BBMP                          $37.9M                              350                          $108,285/job

For an investment in energy efficiency on the scale of Keystone XL, the $5.3 billion investment would mean somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 permanent jobs.  With a simple return on investment (ROI) somewhere in the 10-50% range for the direct savings (reduced utility costs), and a multiplier effect resulting in an ROI of up to 375% regionally from the boost to jobs and economic growth.

For decades, many have argued against investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency because they "cost too much".  This argument had merit on the renewable energy side when new technologies had no scale or access to market, and on the energy efficiency side when energy costs remained artificially low due to market manipulation and the absence of externalities (like the additional healthcare costs and property damage that results from burning fossil fuels).  The charge that clean energy costs too much no longer holds water.  Investments in energy efficiency bring greater ROI than investments in fossil fuels, and result in hundreds of times more jobs.  In a time when we see coal plants shuttered because owners cannot afford to pay for maintenance, and power producers investing in wind over natural gas, the time is right to stop investment in fossil fuel projects that will lead to forty more years of guaranteed, high volume use of fossil fuels.  The time is right to say, "No!" to Keystone XL, and instead put that money into energy efficiency (first) then renewable energy.

Because it will put Americans back to work and make our quality of life better.  Is that not what we should expect from our economy?

A year in green tech: It's not the hover car we were promised, but it's really close

Connexions.org

Ever since the invention of the wheel, humans have known that our ability to do work will always encounter resistance.  In most cases, we know this resistance as friction - the force that opposes movement between surfaces.  I bring up the wheel because in that case, we finally understood that we could take advantage of friction and put it to use.  Prior to the wheel, moving an object meant lifting or sliding, with sliding preferred for its ease.  In each case we have to expend significant effort to overcome either the weight of the object or the friction from the surface.

School of Champions

The wheel takes advantage of this resistance to motion.  When we turn a wheel, the rotation wants to force the surface of the wheel to move relative to the ground, the friction resists this motion, and responds with a force the propels the wheel forward.  The energy required for motion still takes some loses due to friction, but much less so than sliding along the surface does.

This brings us to a technology that has its roots in centuries of research, but which has only gained market penetration over the last decade: frictionless bearings.  Much of the equipment that runs our life uses rotational systems.  We use fans to move air for ventilation and cooling, we use wheels and axles to move people and freight over long distances, and we use compressors to drive air conditioning systems.  In order for a rotational system to work, something must hold the rotating shaft in place while allowing it to spin and perform its service.

If we simply hold it in place, the friction between the rotation shaft and the surface of what holds it (also known as the bushing) will create significant waste heat and eventually result in the wearing out of either one or both surfaces.  To significantly reduce this friction, we return to the concept of the wheel and introduce bearings to the system.  A series of smooth balls arranged in a collar around the shaft comprise the bearing system (many may know these as "ball bearings" or BBs...famous for their other application in toy guns for kids).  When the shaft rotates relative to the support surface, the bearings roll to provide the structure needed to hold the shaft in place, but with a minimum of friction between the shaft and support.  They provide the same function that the wheels do in a car, and with the same result...more motion with less wasted energy due to friction.

As well as they perform, bearings still cause the loss of anywhere from five to ten percent of the input energy.  Although they minimize friction, they do not eliminate it.  In order to minimize or eliminate the remaining losses, we need a technology that removes contact altogether, and with a minimum of energy input.  Thankfully, such a technology exist....

Hovercrafts.

Ok, so maybe not hovercrafts, per se, but the same idea...magnetic bearings.  A rotating system uses metal shafts and metal bushings, and the property that provides strength also creates the wear.  Metal also reacts in a magnetic field.  If we can create a magnetic field of sufficient strength and stability, we can support the rotating shaft, allow it to move freely, but not have surface contact.  The rotation without friction virtually eliminates the energy loss, and the only cost comes from the input energy to keep the magnetic field stable.

Magnetic bearings come in three varieties: active fields, passive fields, and hybrid (a combination of active and passive).  Active fields use an electric current to create and control the field.  This requires the use of electrical energy, thus eating into some of the savings, but usually somewhere in the range of twenty percent of the friction losses.  Passive fields use specifically chosen magnets to create the field without electrical input.  In the latter case, the material availability of the proper magnets drives up price, a condition not created in the former where more standard materials create the field when the system applies electricity.  The hybrid case combines both in a balance that reduces both energy and material cost.  The bearings must account for support in both the rotating direction and the direction parallel to the shaft (to prevent the shaft from shooting straight out through the bushing).

Magnetic bearings will not change the world and eliminate the need for energy.  They make an incremental change over the previous technology.  When added to other incremental changes, however, we can create a technology base that requires less and less energy.  With lower energy needs, we increase the likelihood that renewable energy will handle the loads, and create the platform on which we can build a zero-cost energy future.

Plus wouldn't it be cool if this led to the invention of a working hover car?