green washing dirty laundry — my love affair w CHP continues.

So several weeks ago, while doing laundry across the street from my apartment, I tried speaking w the Chinese owners about an Idea.  The idea of using his natural gas to generate electricity before running the dryers.  His english was not so good and my mandarin was non-existent.  He thought I was trying to sell him something.  He thought it was a scam.  He said electricity was too expensive so how could he make it.  He said he already had a private natural gas contract.  He basically flipped me away w his hand.

But hold on.  I live across the street from a pharmacy, a pizza shop, a chinese joint, and a grocery store loaded with refrigerators.  And of course, a laundry and drycleaner that doesn’t seem to do any of its own drycleaning.

Not only that, there are a ton of residential buildings.  And the laundramat is open from 7am to 8pm, hitting both the morning and evening residential peak loads.

Here is the basic flaw in logic.  People know that generating heat from natural gas is >80% efficient.  So why make electricity?  well, bc electricity is being made elsewhere at 35% efficiency and wasting heat all over the place.  What is so great about the stores across the street from my apartment, is that they have diverse energy needs, not all complementary, but certainly, my laudremat would make more money selling its natural gas fueled electricity to its neighbors than burning straight w my 4 quarters to dry my clothes for 28 minutes.

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is appropriate in certain circumstances and city laundry would be one of them.  (Say nothing of the fact that CO2 IS the organic dry-cleaning solvent and why organic drycleaning makes me crazy that it is more expensive – so wouldn’t it be neat if someone captured the exhaust CO2 and compressed it into liquid form to make the solvent).

Good News!  This weekend, I spoke w Llew Wells of Living City Block… an initiative to develop a green neighborhood in the dirtiest community in the 5 borroughs.  He said there was a gigantic laundry facility in the middle of their target block… NYC is going to have CHP and it’s going to be SMART and Very clean.  My kind of green washing.

Local Law 38 – will someone please make an ap?!

To reduce brown-outs, NYC implemented Law 38.

“Local Law No. 38 prohibits commercial establishments from unnecessarily opening their doors while air conditioning is on, in an effort to conserve energy and reduce strain on the electric grid. The legislation provides for escalating civil penalties for successive violations and specifies the Department of Consumer Affairs as the enforcing authority. Intro. 264 was approved by City Council on Aug. 14, 2008 and signed in to law by Mayor Bloomberg on Sept. 3, 2008.” -NY League of Conservation Voters

If you’ve never experienced the sheer insanity of it, here is a great blog post about a person’s walking tour of open door retail stores flooding the street with A/C in 2009. Here is a NYT article 9 stores that were fined $200-$400 for leaving their door open in the summer of 2010.  These are single day incidents of single locations – but it happens everywhere in NYC, summer and winter and it makes me crazy!

Unfortunately, as this is not an energy savings law, it is a ‘let’s keep the grid from unnecessarily failing’ law, this does not apply to retail doors propped open in the winter letting out heat.

Will someone please make a reporting ap – so that next summer w my new i-phone, I can report every door I see propped open and do some citizen surveillance of common sense!

Please?

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.

DontFlush.Me

Last weekend, I participated in NYC’s first ever ECOHACK - a room full of well-intentioned geeks that come together to try to integrate environmental data and effect change thru knowledge generation.  It was so much fun.

Besides eating a delicious vietnamese sandwich, I was completely charmed by the incredible and generous atmosphere of cooperation, the diversity of skills and talents, and the innovative spirit.  There were many interesting projects and I chose DontFlush.Me (Information on NYC sewage outflows in this blog come from discussions w Leif Percifield and Liz Barry at the Ecohack event).  Together, our group of almost all strangers, created a web presence to assess how a NY-er can be alerted to minimize their water-use during storm events to help reduce the 27 billion gallons of untreated waste water that enters NYC waters annually. In brief, 70% of the NYC sewage system combines storm water with industrial and domestic sewage. So when NYC has 1/10 inch rain in an hour or 4/10 inch rain in 24 hours, the sewage system gets overloaded and raw sewage is released into NYC waterways.  The objective of our Hack, was to have a user input their home address and be notified when rainfall in their ‘sewage collection shed’ was likely to overload the system and release raw sewage.  That a water user could modify their behavior for a 24 hour period until the storm water passed.  While problematic in many ways in its current state, it is a wonderful first draft.

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.

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.

Goal: Crowd Source Think Tank

The goal of this website is to form a Crowd Sourced Think Tank.  The Think Tank provides a platform where we collaborate by identifying problems (technical, financial, social and policy) and respond with inspired solutions.  But notably, the objective is to create integrated solutions that shave off inefficiencies by layering improvements of incremental efficiency gains across the larger system. The idea is not that we present one-off solutions, but that we weave our various ideas together to come up was a sequential series of improvements along the chain of production for an overall improved system.  So for example.

Say NY decides to implement an incentive policy to increase private solar panel use to diversify the State energy profile.

Someone suggests it be linked to the grid to shore up the grid and reduce battery needs.

Someone suggests that it be prioritized for NYC in the beginning because it would provide most benefit to the State by getting the most light capture at peak load to benefit the State electric system as a whole.

Someone suggests that isn’t fair, bc upstate NY’ers don’t get a chance to experience solar.  Someone makes an amendment and suggests all upstate schools have solar panels and monitoring systems and when the NYC system is maxed out, other NYS areas are targeted in a methodical way.  Someone else notes that by addressing NYC solar opportunities first, NY State reduces the State per capita GHG emissions fastest.

Someone suggests that whoever gets the solar panel incentives, must also be required to paint their roof white or silver to increase the albedo (reflected light) that reduces warming in the city, thus also reducing demand for A/C in the city.

…

The Goal of the Think Tank is to redefine civic entrepreneurship, by LAYERING ideas, LAYERING complex systems, and LAYERING efficiencies in the larger system to get the most return on investment, financially, socially, and environmentally.