Combined Heat and Power and Distributed Generation

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is my favorite energy solution.

Large scale electric generation is most often a huge waste of energy resources.  Electric generation needs a kind of energy intensity to spin a turbine to spin an electron flow and as a result roughly half the input BTU’s are released as ‘waste’ heat.  Heat is not a bad thing, the problem is, we often site plants in rural areas where the heat is not used. Second, moving the electron stream over powerlines, another 15% of the input BTUs are lost as friction on the line.  That means, when you plug in an appliance to your wall socket, your one unit of energy pulled required 3 units to make.

There are roughly 60 centralized, large-scale power plants in NYS (coal, hydro, natural gas, nuclear) and we are part of a national grid system where we push and pull electricity to and from VT, NJ, PA and Canada across massive powerlines.  That is why, a plant failure in Ohio can cause a brown-out in NY– the inter-state flow was crippled and the demand drained the system.

However, there are wonderful examples of systems that use the waste heat and reduce the losses to the grid lines.  In addition these examples begin building a distributed generation system. Distributed generation is a move away from a few centralized large scale plant toward developing lots of smaller plants along the grid.  Distributed generation diversifies the larger system, making the whole system less vulnerable to human or technical failure, terrorist attack or natural disaster.  That is, distributed generation is a diversified portfolio of scale (small to large), type (hydro to nuclear), timing (daylight solar capture to variable wind patterns) and location (near biomass resources, near particular energy demands) of energy generation.

CHP as part of a distributed generation is generally smaller scale but sized appropriate to the local demands so the electricity and heat are used thus reducing grid friction losses and waste heat losses.  Using the co-products from electricity,  CHP transforms 35% efficient systems to more than 80% for well-designed systems (that means our finite natural resources go twice as far, a great ROI both financially, ethically, and environmentally).

Ex. 1.  Cornell University CHP.  Cornell has just recently moved from a coal based CHP to a natural gas based CHP in order to reduce it’s greenhouse gas footprint.  They generate electricity as the co-product based on the univeristy need for heat. That is, there is little waste heat, bc the plant is scaled to cull the highly priced electricity off the top and direct the ‘waste’ heat to warm campus through a maze of steam tunnels across campus.  Unlike most electric generation in NYS which is only 35% efficient, the Cornell plant is ~80% efficient as the ‘waste’ heat is used on campus and the electricity is used on campus reducing the grid line friction losses.

Ex. 2.  Boston University was heating a gigantic swimming pool.  Heat generation is 80-90% efficient – so why bother putting in CHP?  Well, bc there is waste heat generated all over the place in order to produced electricity.  Why not localized that waste heat at a swimming pool and earn money from the high value electricity.  I believe, BU, is actually making money from their electricity (savings or sales) while they heat their swimming pool.

Ex. 3.  Lyonsdale Biomass in Lyons Falls NY is a wood biomass powerplant that used to be a CHP system.  That is their waste heat used to go to a pulp plant across the way to dry the paper that was being produced.  It is unclear to me why this stopped, but the paper plant is now using natural gas heat and I’m throroughly bummed.  What kind of economic, political, or technical hang-up is involved in this regression of logic?

Ex. 4.  East River Electric Generating Station on 14th St in NYC uses natural gas to generate a large portion of NYC’s electricity, and a lot of the waste heat (no I don’t know how much) is used by neighboring businesses and buildings.

Innovate on DontFlush.Me

It is ridiculous that NYC still has 8 gallon flush toilets, both on gallons of  drinking water use and volumes of diluted sewage requiring treatment.

So, I’m proposing a ?simple? innovation topic to act as an example group innovation build upon Leif Percifield and Liz Barry’s Don’t Flush Me project.  So please comment and I’ll manually include your comments into this post.

PROPOSAL:  UPGRADING (NYC) TOILET WATER USE EFFICIENCY.

PROBLEM:   27 billion gallons of raw sewage is dumped into NYC water ways every year due to storm events overloading sewage treatment centers. [LP]

Fact – 70% of NYC sewage treatment combines storm water with industrial and domestic sewage. [LP]

Fact – the 14 NYC sewage treatment plants can handle 2x normal day load.  Rain and storm events often exceed the twice normal loading. [LP]

Fact – when NYC receives 1/10 inch in an hour or 4/10 inch in 24 hours, many of the treatment plants are over capacity and untreated sewage is dumped thru 460 Combined Sewage Outflows directly into  the harbor (CSOs are emergency release pipes located below the water line and when the treatment system gets overloaded, monitors open the gate and raw sewage is dumped directly into NYC’s harbor). [LP]

“Fact” – Some NYC toilets use as much as 8 gallons per flush. [LP]

Fact - My toilet uses 1.6 gallons per flush. [JW]

“Fact” – The average NYC flush uses 5 gallons. [LP] Concern –  I’m surprised at the AVERAGE of 5 gal/flush in NYC. [ML]

“Fact” – Most NYC water (in) and sewage (out) is paid for by landlords. [JW]

PROPOSAL – create 3 documents that give an estimate of cost/benefit for retrofitting NYC apt buildings for installing lower water-use toilets.

Brainstorm a cost analysis:

1. money paid for 1.5, 3, 5, and 8 gallon toilets
2. money paid for water in and sewage out 
3. money paid for labor to change out toilets
4. in 30-unit, 50-unit and 200-unit apartment building (prewar, +/-6 stories)

Potential User: Designed for  tenants (and/or landlords) who want to reduce the cost of rent, reduce the untreated sewage released into NYC waterways, and conserve fresh drinking water use in their building.

GOAL:  Active tenants can choose the appropriate assessment for the toilet type, building composition, etc and present a ready-made cost/benefit argument to their landlord for replacing 5 or more gallon toilets simply on sewage and water use pricing. 

Plumbing Question- Does a 1.5 gallon toilet require different pipes or pumps to achieve a certain flush pressure? ANSWER:  there is no difference in terms of installation between 5 (or 3.5) and 1.6 gallon toilets–it’s the tank size, not the waste pipe size. [ML]

Energy Question- How much energy does one save by pumping 1.5 gallons of water up 1 floor as opposed to pumping 8 gallons of water per floor? ANSWER: unless they are taller than 6 stories (I think), buildings do not pump water up to any floors but instead rely on city water pressure. Therefore, calculating the cost of pumping certain amounts of water up certain numbers of floors depends on how many total floors there are and who’s paying for it. [ML]

Cost Question – How much does one (a home owner, a landlord, and NYC govt )pay per gallon of clean water? ANSWER: The cost of clean/tap water is $3.17 per one hundred cu.ft. (1 cu.ft = ±7.48gal) as of July 2011: But, the minimum charge for service is $0.43 per day per water meter within a Bill Period. So for very small buildings, this might factor in). [ML]

ALSO there is a flat fees per toilet: Ultra low flow toilet, as approved by the Commissioner is $30.40; All other fixtures are $66.52.  So the building saves $30/year/toilet if they go to UTLRA low flow (don’t know if that’s 1.6 gal or not).[ML]

Cost Question - How much does does a homeowner, a landlord, and NYC govt pay for a gallon (cubic foot?) of waste removal?  ANSWER: To calculate the waste water rates, see this:”The wastewater charge for any property supplied with water from the Water Supply System is … 159%…of the charges for water supplied to that property from the system, including any surcharges, unless otherwise provided in this Rate Schedule.” So use the clean water supply cost and multiply by 1.59. [ML]

Labor Question - What kind of contractors, laborers would we need to hire, for an average installation (hours) and estimate of appropriate NYC hourly rates?

Building Type Question – What should we use to make 3 scenarios for a tenant to use as a rough estimate to landlord? (building age, number of units (bathrooms), number of floors (energy), 1.5, 3, 5 and 8 gallons)?

Jeni in Black, Leif in Grey, Meret in Orange, Coburn in blue

Concern – I seem to remember a recent news article about a minimum amount of water being needed to keep the solids moving in the system and low flow toilets were aggravating the situation.  Assuming my recollection is correct, placing high waste water commercial users at the start of each line would be a good fix. [CW]

Tangential Point - Permeable surface parking lots help also [ML]  

Tangential Point - Are grey water systems legal in tenant-occupied buildings?[ML]

NYC Marathon and horsepower.

Last year was the first time I watched a marathon.  I was glib about it, but my mom was visiting, a friend was running, so it all came together and I said, Why not?  Turns out, it made me cry.  In my 1-block area at mile 6, hundreds of people all came out to support the runners.  Runners who had been preparing their muscles, nursing their knees and tendons for months, were now pushing the limits of their being, physically and emotionally.  But that is not what made me cry.  What made me cry, is that the by-standers weren’t just cheering for their one friend, they were cheering everyone on.  I was cheering everyone on. We were invested not only in the success of total strangers, but in their earnest desire to try to meet a personal challenge. If I had seen 10 runners, I would have been non-plussed.  There were 10s of 1000s of runners and even more supporters.  This was real.  Those people were not stuck in some cubicle pushing paper and toner around, they were pursuing something very personal.  En masse, I saw the freedom and willfulness of choiceful agency I long to see daily.

In the background of this experience I noted –with a kind of perverse glee — that the Brooklyn Queens expressway was backed up with traffic.  With all their promise of power, speed and freedom, those 1 and 2-ton EnergyIntensiveSteelAndPlasticGhouls spewing carbon dioxide were at a standstill;  this year’s marathon winner averaged ~13 miles per hour.

This summer, I was home in NH and I went to our famous country fair to watch the horse-pulls – teams of 2 horses collectively weighing less than 3300 lbs.  The winning team pulled 10,900 lbs loaded on a ~6′x10′ sheet of metal across packed dirt (I refused to watch the ox pull bc they incentivize the ox by pulling a nose-ring; the winning ox team pulled 12,600 lbs!).  Including their own body weight, the horses carried more than 14,000 lbs or 7 tons.   Watching their loins is the stuff of legends.  It’s great design.  It’s powerful.  It’s erotic.  The horses prance off – seemingly proud of their accomplishment- when untethered from the massive load.

According to wiki, “horsepower is the name of several units of measurement of power. The most common definitions equal ~750 watts. Horsepower was originally defined to compare the output of steam engines with the power of draft horses in continuous operation. The unit was widely adopted to measure the output of piston engines, turbines, electric motors, and other machinery.”

The 2012 Toyota Hybrid Camry boasts its “engine produces 156 horsepower”.  Yes, horses are slower, but horses eat hay.  And not only that, hay grown in the summer and stored in sheds during the non-photosynthetic months.  Like their own personal canning-closet, horses garner calories from high cellulose food that the biochemistry and fauna in our intestinal track can’t even begin to digest.  Years of bleak access to dead grass buried under the snow, has built layers of efficiency mechanisms to make them survive winters and run up to 55mph at their peak.

Humans can run 27mph, but neither horses nor humans can sustain the speed the way the internal combustion engine can.  But it all comes down to how one defines efficiency.  Efficient use of time or efficient use of resources.  How fast one accomplishes work, or how sustainable?  Over thousands of years of evolution (aka biological invention and innovation conjured by the persistent and notorious scientist named Time), horses and man have evolved incredibly efficient systems to capture and thrive on real-time photosynthetic energy.  Cars are neanderthals dragging their knuckles.

Now I am very American and I do love a car ride, but in general driving is overrated and ecologically insane.  I’m certainly not anti-design or anti-machine. The fastest man has gone 83mph (Sam Whittingham) and the fastest woman has gone 75mph (Barbara Bursford) with a regular bicycle on a paved surface.

A human on a bicycle is pure evolutionary genius.  It’s hot.

Feedback Loops, why fossil fuels are financial candy

One of my favorite thought experiments involves the oil industry.

Supply Side Feedback Loop:  Even though fossil fuels are a finite trust fund of stored up solar energy, unlike most other resources, when harvested, it provides energy to harvest more of itself.  Fossil energy is one big positive feedback loop.  Estimates suggest that its energy return on investment (EROI) is a 5:1 ratio.  That is, it takes 1 unit of energy to pull up 5 units, for a net of 4 units.  One can pay back the first unit and combust those 4 harvested units to mine 20 new units. The oil industry has exponential growth written all over it.  This densely-rich fuel source is a no-brainer for any business person.

Demand Side Feedback Loop:  Mining oil, has many co-products.  The most valuable are for synthesis of organic compounds – the long carbon-chains in fossil resources are a chemical engineer’s wet dream. Then there is jet fuel, and diesel fuel and petroleum.  It’s a long list, including a processing ‘waste product’ we now call tar.  So Ford invents the business plan to get every person a car.  The cars start driving, slowly, on bumpy roads.  As more cars drive slowly on bumpy roads, a co-product of petroleum starts to amass – tar.  So some resourceful supply chain engineer says, Wo-ah, lets make asphalt.  We essentially landfill this asphalt on our highways resulting in smoother driving and better gas mileage bc the friction has gone down. In these more pleasant conditions, citizens drive faster to more places and longer distances.  We learn the American cliche of “Freedom” and “Power” and “Speed”. Every doubling of speed results in a quadroupling in air resistance which lowers gas mileage.  Citizens use more fuel, and generate more tar, creating more roads to drive more miles.

Now here’s the kicker.  I’m no economist, but applying the supply and demand charts to oil just screams cash cow.  First, there is an increase in supply (remember, oil is internally accountable to itself, it is the source of energy to mine more of itself, generating oodles of cheap energy), which society relentlessly entertains itself with.  This results in an increase in demand.  Sure the price fluctuates, but an oil baron doesn’t care, bc implicitly the oil company already has a 5:1 return on investment just within the system of fuel extraction, say nothing of mark up.  Cheap or expensive to the end-user, the company is in the clear.  Now, add scarcity, or the perception of scarcity to a society that has grown dependent on oil (to boil the water, get kids to school, power the computer, cool the refrigerator, run the A/C, and light the bathroom).  The oil company doesn’t care, bc the demand is so high, scarcity makes the price go up and they’ll mine until it’s no longer profitable and the trust fund runs out.  They’re going to milk that cow until it’s bone dry.

Sure, alternative energy can’t compete w cheap oil; oil is trust-fund privilege and renewable energy is blue collar hard work.  So how do we convert over to a more efficient energy-society with renewable fuels?  Like any venture, we invest in it.

Brain Spores- the advantage of 7 billion people

So, the world turned 7 billion.  Anxiety for a finite planet? or a hot bed of brain spores.

I’m terribly fond of mushrooms for all kinds of reasons.  For example, a mushroom in Oregon may be the world’s largest single organism.  “This 2,400-acre (9.7 km²) site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it. Estimated at 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees.” —Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running

Mushrooms don’t have seeds; mushrooms drop spores.  The dispersed spores land like birdshot on a field of resources.  Then the spores look for each other and connect by hyphae.  Like any node (spore) and edge (hyphae) configuration, as the nodes connect edges, the ability to extract and allocate resources across the field increases as the network becomes more connected.

Today is Day of the Dead – and mushrooms know how to dance on the grave.  That is, mushrooms thrive by working the reciprocal relationship of exponential growth with exponential depletion.  Mushrooms understand and thrive on a steady state economy.  What is so exquisite about this mycelial mat, is that the mushroom mat can kill and eat a tree that is floundering in a shady area and move those resources to feed another tree in a brightly lit area.  That is, the system gleans and allocates from across a large landscape for the success of the overall system.

R Williams estimates the human brain has about 100 billion (10¹¹) neurons and 100 trillion (10¹⁴) synapses.  Multiply that by 7 billion brains; we have a force of nature.

While our collective population is a force of nature currently pushing toward the limits of our finite system in myriad ways (e.g. exponential increase in energy use causes exponential depletion of oil reserves which is directly related to exponential increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases thus exponentially increasing heat retained from the sun and disappearing ice pack reserves…), we are a reflective species.  In the same way we can learn how the exponential function is a way to access resources, it is also the means by which we can understand that growth is predicated on depletion in a closed system.  Geometrical cause and effect.  We can begin to change our focus of vitality based on the abstract monetary system of economic growth to one of steady-state ecological stewardship of our material home.  Economics and Ecology both come from the Greek oikos “house, dwelling place, habitation”.

What I’m trying to talk about here is how each and everyone of us is a witness of the state of our home.  Embodied within the global citizenry are perspectives, ideas, and solutions to global problems to redefine these status quo behaviors and inform sustainable solutions. This think tank project liberates, combines and sequentially layers ideas from people who might be geographically remote to each other to generate solutions that impact the global ecosystem.  By releasing these ideas, we will have a greater capacity to respond to our rapidly changing environments.  We can harness the power of the exponential to redefine civic action.

Let’s mat together.

Improv: To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

This blog tips its hat to Buckminster Fuller and his “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”.

Buckminster Fuller talks about the Great Pirates.  From wiki:  “The source of their power is that they are the only masters of global information in a time where people are focused locally. Specifically, the Great Pirates (G.P.’s) are aware that resources are not evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the G.P.’s exploit for their own advantage.”  So as the 99% speak around the world, and the current political climate of our leaders rings out “No and No”, I suggest we let the current paradigm huff and puff itself to exhaustion and focus our energies on charting a path to improvise on our current system and build a new one.

Improv works by saying “Yes, and…”

My favorite definition of Improvisation is : To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

I like this definition, bc it has a distinct sense of a finite set of conditions.  There is a base, a trumpet, and a piano. There is a comedian, an audience, a theme, and a moment in history.  There are acquired skills, honed intuition, resources, memories, experiences, feedback loops, desires, wants, needs.  Improv is definitely informed by past events, but it is very much motivated by current context. It is extemporaneous.  It is immediate.  What I love about improv, is that it is constantly pushing the edges of innovation.  It is the generative outcome of play.

I’ve been culling rules of improv from the web that I like.  I appropriated them from all kinds of authors in all kinds of fields to act as conceptual guidelines to define for ourselves Sustainable Systems by group play.

10 Rules for Innovation Improv:
1) Say Yes.

2) Say Yes, and..

3) Be Specific, Provide details. Offer up changes. Share. Contribute. Add one idea per line.

4) Don’t Ask Questions, Posit solutions.

5) Don’t Block or Deny. That’s a Know-No.

6) Pay Attention, Read, Listen, Watch

7) Build. Bring anything from anywhere. You look good if you set the frame for another good idea. Don’t feel self-conscious, your idea is an inspired stepping stone to an improved or divergent pathway.

Flat world -> Round world -> Finite world w 7 Billion people

Throughout history, we have come upon ideas that are difficult to integrate.  It’s normal.  Think of when we thought the earth was the center of the Universe.  It was a completely reasonable idea based on our immediate senses.  Or that the world was flat – also a reasonable hypothesis.  Or that the world ended at some edge of some ocean – just bottomed out like the edge of our bed!  Or that the earth was round, a very reasonable hypothesis.  Following this hypothesis, explorers from the flat world were rewarded with gigantic landmasses of unmined natural resources – ‘the new world’.  So while we don’t have to worry about sailing off the face of the earth at some unknown (but infinitely far) edge, we now have to worry about its finite surface area.  The possibilities implicit in finding the new world, also defined some basic physical limits.

And like our predecessors who tried to integrate sensory perception w abstract thought to conceptualize a round earth when for all intents and purposes it was flat, I recognize it is difficult to think about a finite earth when I can buy asparagus in NYC for $2/lb in October.

As a biologist, I often struggle w economic structure (asparagus in October for $2/lb, really?!); economists (generally) think of material resources as just subservient materials to the agency of humans rather than being the very intimate and mineral cycling of what we call humanity.  But Herman Daly is an economist I actually like.  In his “Beyond Growth”, he sees the disgruntled logic when an infinite economic growth paradigm is placed in the context of the Laws of Thermodynamics.  I’m going to quote at length from the first chapter of his book that set up the notion of a steady state economy:

“The growth advocates are left w one basic argument:  resource and environmental limits have not halted growth in the past and therefore will not do so in the future…

Earl Cook offered some insightful criticism of this faith in limitless ingenuity in one of his last articles (1982).  The appeal of the limitless ingenuity argument, he contended, lies not in the scientific grounding of its premises nor the cogency of its logic, but rather in the fact that:

‘the concepts of limits to growth threatens vested interests and power structures; even worse, it threatens value structures in which lives have been invested… Abandonment of belief in perpetual motion was a major step toward recognition of the the true human condition.  It is significant that “mainstream” economists never abandoned that belief and do not accept the relevance to the economic process of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; their position as high priest of the market economy would become untenable did they do so.’

Indeed it would.  Therefore, much ingenuity is devoted to ‘proving’ that ingenuity is unlimited.  Julian Simon, George Gilder, Herman Kahn, and Ronald Reagan trumpeted this theme above all others.  Every technical accomplishment, no matter how ultimately insignificant, is celebrated as one more victory in an infinite series of future victories of technology over nature.  The Greeks called this hubris. “

Daly ends this section by quoting from Cook again “without the enormous amount of work done by nature in concentrating flows of energy and stocks of resources, human ingenuity would be onanistic.  What does it matter that human ingenuity may be limitless, when matter and energy are governed by other rules than is information (Cook, 1982, p194).

So as we enter this magnificent period of the internet of ideas on a materially finite world, I am reminded of a book I read by Barbara Novak titled “Nature and Culture; American Landscape and Painting”.

America has become wealthy for many reasons.  In my mind, entering a pristine landscape and discovering oil catapulted the American dream for the various ex-patriots that arrived in ‘the new world’.  But that dream was predicated on growth by increased access to unspoiled resources.  America was rich in natural resources.  So incredible economic growth was totally possible (in that context).  What I like about Barbara Novak’s book, is that she notes the transition of styles of landscape paintings of the 1800s that I think reflect an important transition in thinking about nature.  There developed a tension between the pristine quality of the untouched land and the opportunity for mobilizing unexploited material wealth.  Artists went on dangerous expeditions to capture and record the virgin landscape and then they documented the transformation of that virgin landscape.  Landscape images ranged from untamed wilds of nature, to wilderness mysteries, to gardens of eden, to utilitarian topographic maps,  to pastoral narratives, to pre-industrial documentation.  What kind of landscape paintings do we have today?

In the 1800s, people on a crammed and overpopulated European continent, moved to an underpopulated and materially rich continent.  Growth! Unless we get to the moon and can grow our carrots there, there is no place to expand this growth paradigm as we currently understand it.  Given that I accept I live on a finite round earth, receiving a finite amount of sunlight daily, yet thriving on a trust fund of fossil energy, striving for a sustainable world is a real concept – an hypothesis that seems worthy of serious thought and meaningful exploration – not to be reduced to cynicism about how people appropriate the word ‘sustainable’.

We are not the center of the universe.  We do not live on a flat planet.  We live on a finite planet.  And on Halloween 2011,  world population is projected to hit 7 billion, each of us with varied demands on this finite surface, but 7 billion, none-the-less.  Trick or Treat.

How many calories to produce a 1-calorie can of coke?

As a child, I had an older couple next door that acted as adopted Grandparents, Helen and Jim.  Helen and Jim let me play on their piano, watch Sesame Street on their TV, took me to my first ballet, and treated me to my first Chinese meal where I was charmed by the red walls, the velvet curtains, the gold filigree, the pink sauce, the chopstick mayham, and of course the animal calendar.

Jim was a minister, varnished trash cans w charming images he cut out from magazines, and had a sweet sense of humor.  He used to ask me questions like:  if Ivory soap is 99.44% pure, what is the remaining 0.56%?  One time, at the Chinese buffet, when the waitress asked him for his drink order, he said:  I’d like something w no calories, no artificial coloring, no artificial flavoring, and no caffeine – Can you do that for me?  The waitress looked at him quizzically.  He meant he wanted a glass of tap water.

In 2003, I was in the position of hiring some undergraduates to work on a life-cycle analysis project with me.  By that time, I had become obsessed with where things came from and where they went.  Think about it, choose one thing on your table and try to follow all the steps back in its creation?  A pencil, for example.  Think of the package it came in.  The receipt you got at the register and the metals that made the register.  And what about the electricity in the shop, and the mining of the coal to light and cool the store.  What did the clerk eat for breakfast that morning – Where were the eggs laid and what was the egg carton made from.  What about the tractor trailer that brought the pencils to the store? and the tires that wore down on the highway getting pencils, in general, across America.  When the truckdriver stopped to load up w diesel, what bag of chips did he pick up and where was the phosphorus mined that fed the corn (or potatoes) that made those chips?  As you can see, I haven’t even gotten to the construction of the graphite, the harvest of the tree, the paint for the surface, the processing of the tin that holds the eraser, or the material basis of the eraser.

Now take that simple pencil example and extrapolate all the human cooperation and natural resources to bring you all the things on your desk.  It’s mind boggling.  Walk outside and take in all the things you don’t own, or that we as a society own collectively.  And for me, it fills me w tremendous gratitude.  Gratitude for all those that worked together and also gratitude for the land base that generated it.  It also gives me anxiety, bc I know there is inequity, injustice, and a limit to our natural resource base.

So, here I am interviewing smart Cornell undergraduates.  Yes we asked normal questions, but the question I wanted to know How they answered was this:  How many calories does it take to produce a can of 1-calorie Coke (and why). The choices were:  1-500 calories, 500-1500 calories, or >1500 calories.

I wanted to see the range with which the students thought.

The key word in the sentence is actually ‘can’.  Making an aluminum can from bauxite uses tremendous amounts of energy.  Some reports say 1600 calories for just the can alone.  Say nothing of the shipping, advertising, processing of the water, the carbonation, the creation of color, synthesis of caffeine and taste, etc.

The conceptual point here is simply that our lives are based on calories.  Calories we eat, and calories we don’t eat.  The pragmatic import here is, if you are only going to recycle one thing, let it be your aluminum!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling.  A recycled aluminum can uses 5% of the energy a brand new can uses (making this life cycle analysis more complicated).

Those points aside, what is sustainable packaging? and what exactly is the logic of a 1-calorie coke?  From an energy use standpoint (the 1969 slogan “It’s the real thing” aside), what organism would use more than 1500 calories to make a 1-calorie beverage that an individual pays a dollar for?  A 1-calorie can of Coke burns the fat of the land.   It might be my definition of futility.

Strategizing Solar Sheds

In 2004 I organized a workshop named “Mapping NY Resources” funded by a small grant I procured from the Crop and Soil Sciences Department at Cornell.  The idea of the workshop was to get some of the most interesting minds in NY who thought about different natural resources to convene a kind of collaborative mapping sensibility.  Expanding on the idea of watershed protection for water use, the goal was to begin to layer different resource maps (cropland, forestland, sunlight, wind, water) to begin integrating what I called “Energy Sheds” to meet the energy demands (heat, electricity, food, transportation) of the distributed population.  One of the speakers was Richard Perez from the University of Albany.  He talked about solar maps – maps that indicate historical sunlight patterns across regions to estimate solar capture potential.

But then what Richard pointed out, was a relationship of solar potential to peak energy loads.  Notably, that peak energy load in upstate NY occurs in the winter when there are less daylight hours, lower intensity, and snow covering panels.  In contrast, the peak energy load in New York City occurs in the summer, when the light is longest and strongest.  Therefore, it would behoove State policy makers to advocate for solar panel installation in NYC.  Solar panels in NYC provide the best simple return-on-investment and also support the complex infrastructure required to meet our very expensive peak load.

Everyone talks about how expensive solar is.  And yet, people may choose a more expensive car for aesthetic reasons.  Solar may not be the most cost-effective way to get your energy but that is because there is no discussion about the ethics of energy. Solar has so many aesthetic and ethical benefits.  Namely, it is capturing today’s sunlight, Today!  Fossil fuels are a trust fund of solar energy that took millions of years of biological photosynthesis to accumulate.  Unless we change our pattern of behavior, we will blow that massive trust fund in 300 years.  Yes, in history, we are the Energy Generation with little regard for future generations, say nothing of the environmental impact our fossil-blow-out-party is causing.  No matter how ‘inefficient’ one might label a solar panel, it has a lot of intrinsic benefits.  Maybe the best panels only capture 20% of the solar energy that hits them, but that is 20% more than we had before, which is also that same quantity of reduction of non-renewable fossil energy demand.

Solar panels distributed across our neighborhoods shore up the electric grid in a number of ways.  First, they provide energy during the day when most energy is consumed.  Second, given that most electricity production occurs in remote locations at large scale, we lose 7-15% of that electricity through friction on the powerlines.  Solar electricity connected to the grid is going to be used in the vicinity of production and not subject to grid loss.  Except for production pollution, they don’t give off CO2 everytime you plug in.  They don’t require cooperation with other countries, and once you’ve purchased them, no embargo will stop them from running.  Solar panels provide a beginning for a more distributed electrical grid system that makes our social system more resilient and less susceptible to natural disaster or terrorist attack on the few large plants (NYS has 62 electric generating plants).  Solar panels are a kind of independence.

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK)

Random Hacks of Kindness is a community of innovation focused on developing practical open source solutions to disaster risk management and climate change adaptation challenges. Random Hacks of Kindness was founded in 2009 in partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank.

RHoK works by bringing together experts in development and volunteers with a broad set of skills in software development and design. The goal is to produce practical open source solutions to development problems. Events give the community an opportunity to sprint on projects, but the community continues to collaborate around the year.

I’m going to target you RHoK!