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.

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.