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A Transitory Opportunity

Posted by wastedenergy on March 30, 2012

Anytime I’m about to say what I’m about to say, I feel it necessary to open with a qualifying statement:  Better to be half right than completely wrong.

So when it comes to comparing energy and transportation policies between the major political parties of the United States, it is very important to keep in mind that Republicans couldn’t have it more wrong.  Their notion of an energy policy is to remove all environmental barriers to fossil fuel production in ways that would have no impact on domestic supplies or prices while continuing to provide unneeded subsidies to old industries and systematically undercutting support for any alternatives.  In other words, they want you hooked on their patrons’ product, and they don’t want people entertaining any ideas about alternatives anytime soon.  What they want is for you to get steadily nickeled and dimed into oblivion so they can blame you for our nation’s financial ruin and use your subsequent reliance on the dole as excuse for even further cuts to the public services that provide some semblance of first-world civilization.  It’s just as bad as their positions on everything else.

Really, to anyone who claims to be too apathetic or disenchanted with the parties to vote, my response is to vote not for the meek and useless Democrats, but against Republicans, whose purely greed-based agenda that can only be described accurately as the absolute dark substance of evil incarnate, should they fully take the reins of power, will fuck you and everyone else so hard it will make your head spin and launch our pre-existing condition of an economic and environmental death spiral into overdrive.  Really, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

President Obama’s policy proposals are at least an improvement from those emanating from the Republican hive overmind, although this may be the definition of damnation with faint praise.  He and his party are essentially proposing to maintain the status quo for as long as possible, which is decidedly better than pushing to regress to 19th century policies for an interconnected world of over 7 billion people.  The non-Republican transportation bills floating around the Hill today wouldn’t completely shred a hundred years of environmental protections and would provide funding for infrastructure maintenance and add jobs instead of celebrating “firing government workers” like the leading Republican presidential candidate, while Obama has been on a bit of an energy kick lately, talking a lot about “wind, solar, biofuels and advanced batteries.”  Better than nothing?  Sure, but I can’t help but notice that not mentioned even once in any of the president’s recent speeches is the single most effective measure, far and away, that policymakers can take to reduce dependence on “foreign oil,” or any oil at all.

Anyone who bothers to take a serious look at transportation in the U.S. will readily be able to identify the root cause of why Americans feel so much “pain at the pump,” to use the tortured phrase, every time the price of oil inches upward: we drive too much.  For some reason, stating this obvious fact is anathema to anyone even in low earth orbit around the political establishment.  Challenging automobile culture is off limits, and the only meaningful way to do it, which goes by the name of “transit,” is a third rail in U.S. politics.  Maybe it’s just me and my zany green socialist inclinations again, but I think if you’re going to talk about transportation policy and oil dependence, the ideas you propose should have some bearing on the problem.

This is all because of you!

But wind and solar power, while fine ideas in themselves, are not even linked to transportation; biofuels are not scaleable, require massive subsidies and have probably already contributed to the global rise in food prices the last few years; and advanced batteries are, to be honest, still not ready for prime time and will only get you so far, both literally and figuratively; and even much more fuel-efficient vehicles still run on oil, and I have serious doubts that improvements in fuel economy can move fast enough keep up with depleting oil reserves and rising prices.  I do not expect technological revolutions in any of these areas in the near future that will suddenly make a serious difference.  A serious effort to electrify transportation infrastructure can and would.  How complicated is this, really?  There are a million excuses given as to why we can’t, shouldn’t or won’t build out electric rail systems in this country, all of them empty and all of them empirically disproven by the fact that we already did it in the first half of the 20th century!

This is the perfect opportunity to talk about something that actually will make a difference in addressing the root cause of the problem, but nobody will even mention it by name.  Someone tell me what’s going on here; what parallel universe are we living in here?  It’s like watching a baby smash its head against a brick wall!  Does anyone really think the climate for public investment is going to improve anytime soon?

Speaking of climate, is that even on anyone’s radar anymore?  Since when do we look at increased fossil fuel production as an unqualified good?  Maybe come summertime people will care again, if only for a brief moment.  The good news is that the window of time for caring grows longer and longer every year.

In any event, some will surely point out that what I have suggested is politically impossible in today’s environment; the idea of public transportation, or public anything for that matter, will be denounced as (gasp) socialism!  This may well be true, but it’s still a point worth making.  And maybe it is time to move on to other subjects now.  But I still just have this crazy feeling that won’t go away, and it tells me that just because the current officeholders and the teabag nation that elected them reside in La-La Land, that is no reason the rest of us should be forced to abandon all reason and adapt our ideas to fit more closely within their warped notion of how the world operates.

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Flat Earth Society

Posted by wastedenergy on March 16, 2012

I think it’s great that we here in the United States are finally having discussions around the dinner table, in major media outlets and in the halls of Congress about energy issues.  Nothing gets people to acknowledge and pay attention to the fact that the rising cost of energy has the potential to cause serious economic pain like…well, the rising cost of energy causing serious economic pain.  So it’s definitely good that people are talking about some of the fundamental reasons behind the price rise and starting to talk about some serious measures to finally tackle the problem.  There’s just one tiny problem, which is that not all the factors are getting as much attention as they should.  And I don’t mean to nitpick here.  I should probably count my blessings that people are paying attention to what has been my pet issue for some time.  But in the end, I happen to think it’s a pretty serious problem when the single most important point is something everyone in a position of influence seems so careful to dance around.

President Obama has been stumping around recently talking about gasoline prices and how we need a real energy policy in this country with long-term solutions to deal with a long-term problem.  Good for him.  Let’s keep things in perspective here:  He’s way more correct than anyone in the Republican presidential field, from Newt Gingrich, who openly mocks The Limits to Growth in his campaign appearances (fact check for the former environmental studies professor:  he might want to go back and reread the book to see what was actually predicted and how those predictions have panned out over the years) to Mitt Romney, who seems to think the only serious issue facing the economy is that taxes on corporate executives are too high and regulations over the behavior of investment bankers too restrictive.  Obama rightly denounces the drill-baby-drill crowd as flat-earthers and correctly identifies rising demand in emerging economies and political instability in oil-producing regions as important factors behind gasoline price shocks.  But there’s another part of the price equation he doesn’t mention.

Let’s review some fundamental facts here.  The earth is a sphere, and so it necessarily contains a finite volume of stuff.  Moreover, the crust of the Earth, the part that we, as surface critters, are actually able to penetrate to gain access to the materials we use to build and power our society, is a heterogeneous mixture of substances with silica as the most abundant component.  Only a handful of locales are geologically capable of giving rise to the phenomena we know as fossil fuels, and specifically thermally mature oilfields that can be readily tapped to produce the liquid fuels on which the economy depends.  This brings me to the central point that everyone has been ignoring:

The majority of these locations have already been tapped and are beginning to run dry.

Now, if your brain is on, this might seem like a rather obvious point to you.  But if your head is in the sand like most members of the news media and economics profession, the idea that natural resources are finite and actually deplete is a novel and revolutionary concept as transformative as the idea of the Earth being a sphere itself.

That is not to say every tenet of the field of economics is incorrect.  In fact, the real problem here is that economists and others analyzing the oil price situation are ignoring an essential teaching of economics:  that price is governed by the relationship between demand for goods and services and the ability of the economy to supply them.  Obama and some others have done a good job of talking about the demand side of the equation.  But rising demand by itself cannot be responsible for rising prices.  A rise in price driven by increasing demand must be accompanied by the inability of the economy to produce supply that can increase at the same pace as demand; if supply and demand rise in tandem, then all other things being equal, prices should remain flat.  This clearly has not been the case, as anyone who has been to a gas pump recently knows.

Yes, China is buying more oil.  But that’s not the only issue at hand.  It’s also that the oil everyone is buying is just plain more expensive and harder to get to than it used to be.  If China’s demand collapsed tomorrow, the resulting global price decline would mean our own “domestic oil boom” that everyone seems to be talking about (although I don’t personally consider an increase from 5.4 to 5.6 million barrels per day any kind of boom) would disappear overnight, especially because fracked shale plays require an extremely high drilling rate to replace wells that  decline more quickly than conventional oilfields, another fact almost nobody mentions.

So again, maybe I’m just being overly picky.  Maybe I should just be satisfied with a surface-level treatment of the issue and hope that the people and their elected representatives will start to understand enough of what is going on that they will call for and implement policies capable of actually addressing the root causes.  But would it really kill the president, Paul Krugman and others who pull weight in reality-acknowledging circles to use the phrase “peak oil” every once in a while?  Or would that do to much to acknowledge the truth that has been spoken for years by those whom these same crowds have long dismissed as cranks?

Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Big Drivers

Posted by wastedenergy on March 4, 2012

OK, so if you’re like most Americans, you’ve probably noticed you’re paying a lot more to fill up your tank these days, and I don’t just mean the M-1s still kicking around Afghanistan and hopefully not crossing the border into Iran anytime soon.  Now, perhaps you, like me, are among the lucky ones with access to public transportation and haven’t felt the squeeze directly at the pump, but that doesn’t mean you’re immune to the effects of rising fuel prices.  It also means you’re paying more for access to basic necessities like food that are intimately tied to the prices for oil and oil-derived inputs, something you probably can’t afford given that real wages have stagnated and even declined in recent years, unless of course you happen to be among the extremely lucky at the top of the economic ladder.

What’s really going on here, anyway?  If you’ve been tuning in to what passes for debates among presidential candidates like Newt “Amateur Paleontologist” Gingrich and Mitt “Coupla Cadillacs” Romney, you might be under the impression that environmentalists restricting access to “vast supplies of cheap oil” offshore, in Canada and in shale plays like the Bakken and Marcellus are responsible for the recent rise in gas prices.  On the other hand, Nancy Pelosi and some of her colleagues on the Democratic side have recently been in the habit of blaming “speculators” on Wall Street for artificially inflating prices through their trading.  A quick examination of the facts reveals such scapegoating claims on both sides to be full of enough baloney to feed a moon colony for years.  The key underlying drivers of prices are in fact the same fundamental economic and geological factors as always, with a little help, it’s true, from above-ground happenings like unrest and political instability in key oil-producing areas, most notably the Middle East, but perhaps soon Russia as well.

There are lots of factors that feed into the ultimate price of oil and how it trickles down into the rest of the economy, but the most important thing for everyone to understand is that rising global demand for a finite and shrinking resource is a recipe for prices to rise, and quickly.  Oil is the foundation of the global economy, which has operated for as long as we can remember under the assumption that there would always be more than enough to go around, and at prices cheap as free.  This assumption is simply no longer valid, and the economy has begun to adjust to the new reality.  Of course, anyone who was paying attention over the years knew this day would eventually come to pass, but still the public and media cry like children, or possibly drug addicts, begging those in power to open the spigots just a little more so we can at least pretend it’s still business as usual.  The problem is there is no way to do so for anything other than a brief moment at best.  The spigots are open all the way, and everyone who can do so is producing full throttle.  The passing of peak oil several years ago, but more importantly, the passing of peak global net export availability, marks the key transition from a buyer’s to a seller’s market.  If you were wondering why Big Oil today has the American public by the balls like never before, you now have your answer.

Wait a minute, you might ask; what about those aforementioned vast domestic supplies of energy?  What about Saudi Arabia; don’t they have the ability to produce as much oil as we could ever want at a moment’s notice?  What about all those vast undrilled areas offshore?  What about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?  Surely there must be something we can do, right?

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, not really.  Yes, there is plenty of oil in the ground, but the part that people really need to understand better is that the cheap oil is gone, burned up and now floating as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  What is left is expensive, slow to discover and even slower to produce, and more and more of it is being eaten up every day by China, India, Brazil and the rest of the developing world as their economies continue to grow at a breakneck pace.

All right, then why do we seem to keep hearing so much from right-wingers about the supposed easy answers we are avoiding?  Well, the most important thing to understand about today’s Republican Party, especially after the stunningly bad court decision a few years ago in Citizens United, is that it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate plutocracy, and nobody does more to underwrite their regressive politics than the coal, oil and gas interests like Koch Industries, Exxon-Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute and the big utilities and mining interests.   Everything you hear a Republican politician say, and yes, a lot of what you hear Democratic politicians say too these days is colored in some way by oil.  The best policy for you as a critically thinking voter is to recognize this fact and discount their credibility accordingly when you see them quoted in media outlets.  There are still some good ways to follow the money and figure out why which politicians advocate which policies, particularly websites like Open Secrets that lay the facts as bare as they can be laid.  And remember that the resources these forces have available to spend on shrewd campaigns to market their twisted notions should not be underestimated, so it is probably best to completely tune out any information that comes at you in advertisement form.  This may have something to do with why you keep hearing so much blather about the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar sands-derived synthetic crude from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries for export, or the out-of-proportion focus on the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a naked attempt by entrenched fossil fuel interests to undermine the credibility of the solar industry and nip in the bud a meager threat at the margins to the massive profitability of fossil fuels.

As for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the idea that this could possibly constitute a meaningful hedge against rising prices is utterly laughable.  The reserve was designed as a stopgap measure to keep oil flowing in case of short-term supply disruption due to political factors, not to supplant declining net exports on the scale of what we buy from the rest of the world or to compensate for the increased cost of drilling for oil in shale as compared to traditional, conventional oilfields.  And while limiting Wall Street speculation on commodity futures through heightened oversight and regulation may be a good idea for other reasons and could have some impact on limiting price volatility, it will do nothing to address the fundamentals at play behind rising prices.

Given that both sides of the political spectrum continue to make empty promises and ignore the real issues at play here, what are some real actions we can take from a policy standpoint or as consumers to protect our wallets and loosen the oil industry’s death grip on the global economy?  There is actually quite a lot we can do.  For one thing, we need to stay focused on long-term solutions to address the long-term drivers, and that means limiting demand through meaningful investments in nonpetroleum transportation infrastructure and substitutes for petroleum inputs in industry.  We can take measures to limit our own consumption and to collectively build an economy that does not require constantly expanding consumption of petroleum and other finite resources for people to thrive, something we will ultimately need to do to have any hope of survival on this rock.  These are all topics big and important enough that it would be a disservice to attempt to cover them in detail here, so I will save further discussion for another time.

And we can also avoid going down the absolute worst path for everyday people around the world: sanctions on Iran or other oil-producing countries that do little to harm their corrupt governments but plenty to harm their people, or the next step that many on Capitol Hill seem to be pushing for these days of military action, a move that can frankly only be described, in Gingrichian terms, as profoundly idiotic.

So the next time someone tries to insult your intelligence by suggesting there is an easy answer to rising oil prices, an answer that doesn’t require any real work or sacrifice, you can go ahead and show them where they can stick it.  A hole in the ground might not be the worst idea after all.

Houston, you have a problem!

Posted in Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Power of a Thousand Suns

Posted by wastedenergy on March 8, 2011

The Power of Ultracapacitors

For the math wizards out there, one of the most promising areas of research in today’s clean energy sector is the ultracapacitor. This novel battery-like machine is capable of charging and discharging at many times the rate of even the most advanced batteries today, and with the advance of nanomanufacturing and advanced nanomaterials, it is possible that they could even store more energy as well.

Image Source: Energy Information Administration

First, a brief explanation of the concept: an ultracapacitor is an energy storage technology that has been around for a couple of decades, but whose potential has only begun to be realized, let alone exploited. It stores electrical energy, but the idea is very different from a conventional battery: rather than storing the charge as chemical potential energy, charge is captured as it sits along a surface area, usually carbon nanotubes or some other nanomaterial such as crumpled graphene. Since an electron occupies essentially no volume, it is able to lie flat along the surface, and so the greater the interior surface area of the ultracapacitor cell, the more charge is able to be stored. Because the exploitable area is based on two dimensions but is stored inside a body built in three dimensions, there is no theoretical limit to the amount of charge that can be stored in a cell of a given volume; the only limit is a practical one, related to how much accessible surface area we can create using the materials available to us and the amount of energy available to be stored in this way.

Current batteries have higher energy densities than today’s ultracapacitors, but since lithium-ion batteries and other advanced battery chemistries are unable to charge at the power density needed for certain applications such as electric bus service, trams, and advanced high-speed rail systems, ultracaps are already being used to replace batteries for these as well as other energy storage systems such as those in hybrid vehicles. Research being conducted at MIT and Argonne National Laboratory is rapidly improving the materials science behind ultracapacitors, and they could easily play a major role in solving the energy storage dilemma and saving humanity from fossil fuel addiction.

Better manufacturing techniques, improved technological concepts and materials, and economies of scale have the potential to dramatically reduce down the cost and improve the performance of such devices, even by orders of magnitude. They can also be used them to store energy from home-scale solar energy production systems as well as the electric grid, to save up energy for when solar, wind, and wave power are unavailable or for when solid or liquid fuel shortages emerge. Altogether, given the proper level of engineering, ultracapacitors can offer tremendous potential, and they beckon examination from those interested in offering technological aids to help solve humanity’s energy crisis.

Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

One for a Rainy Day

Posted by wastedenergy on March 7, 2011

OK, so, suppose you’ve got no sunshine, the wind’s not blowing, your battery is blown out, your ultracaps are busted, you’ve got no trashy fuel left to burn, and for some reason even your geothermal flux capacitor is broken, but you still need some energy. What else are we supposed to do?

A lot of people will try and tell you the only way to balance things out is with natural gas. Well, that might not always be the worst idea in the world, but first check thyself, forst you wreck thyself. Should we really be using natural gas as the first option, as so many people seem to be suggesting? Is it really going to help us transition to renewable energy? I find the proposition dubious, as you probably know by now. Moreover, natural gas is too valuable to be wasting trying to replace coal and oil. We might actually need it for those moments when the lights all but go out.

And, it’s not exactly as clean as some folks might be trying to tell you, either.

Well, we sure fracked that one up.

So, what can we do to cut these guys down to a more appropriate size?

Let me give you my thoughts on a big part of the answer.

Hydropower. Like trashpower, it’s one of those things that gets trashed a lot by otherwise well-intentioned environmentalists. Don’t get me wrong: there’s been many an ecosystem that’s been wrecked before being checked by huge dams. But just like with waste-to-energy, with better living through technology, we can not only fix the problems that were making it dirty before, we can also make it a powerful ally in our quest to rid the world of dirty energy. But what do I mean by that exactly?

Hydropower is good for many things, first of which is providing a steady lightening of the load for when your other sources of lightning power won’t fire.  Let’s have a quick look at the Netherlands as an example. They know how to do it up proper, when it comes to both liquid and gas (sidebar: they also recycle half their trash, and burn the other half – for energy). First, they know how to save their gas for when the time is right. Compare them to Britain, which Thatcherized its gas industry and is now facing an energy crisis of epic proportions that might be fixable only with a nuclear fix, at least in the short term. I still have faith that they’ll get the offshore wind and wave power figured out, though – they have some of the best resources in the world, once they figure out how to tap into them. The Netherlands, on the other hand, owns the largest gas field in the North Sea, the largest in Europe even, instead of letting it own them via corporate control. The country has long had a penchant for demanding individual sacrifice for the greater good, though not so much that the State sucks all the flavor out of life. They’ve done a good job of conserving it and of actually tapping into the smaller, scattered fields first, so as to save the best for last. Eat your heart out, Bakken Shale and Kochheads everywhere.

Not only that, but they’re actually finding more of it all the time. The good stuff, too – no fracking required. What can I say, the Dutch know how it’s done. Keep burning that eternal flame.

But enough fire for now - let’s get to the water part.

Water, water, everywhere. We’re going to get wet. Lest you think those crazy Dutch were only about the windmills, let me be blunt with you: they know how to roll with the tides as well, and also a little thing about rolling on a river. They may be living in Flatland, but they’ve still got quite a bit of hydropower going on in their own little world too. And monster dams big enough to block out the sun aren’t the only way of doing things either: if you’ve never heard of microhydro, well, it’s time for you to get crackin’ and frackin’ on a little bit of your OWN research. Talk about untapped potential!

That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t something to say about big hydro as well, since sometimes, as she said, you better go big or go home. Just look at what America’s Hat has to offer up, if we can only manage to get some transmission lines past those confounded nimbies. Power to the people, anyone?

Think classic was the only way I could do it? Here’s a little new wave that might be up your alley, and I’m not talking wave power, although that’s great too. Inspect this gadget, and I’m willing to bet you’ll go WOWZERS, or possibly even YAKAWOW!!! The dreaded Dr. Koch has got nothing on this one. I’m talking, of course, about the variable speed water turbine. We’ve been fangling this one for a while, but it’s ready to roll out now. You see, one of the problems that tends to arise is when the water level falls, and the pressure drops out. The solution? Add a turbine that can go at any speed and still pump out juice. Inconsistent generator speed got you down? All it takes is an extra flux capacitor to smooth out the output a little bit. So simple, you can even do it yourself.

Hey, hipster techno fans out there, I got the news: this time, we’re keeping the lights on. Wouldn’t want to miss out on that quadruple rainbow, now, would ya? As for me, I’m always on, even when I’m out cold. Five stars. Heads up. Look out below. Shoot past the moon, reach for the stars. Forget the rivers you thought you knew, try a waterfall instead. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.

I HAVE THE POWER OF A THOUSAND SUNS!!!!!!!!!!

Posted in Energy Production, The Ether, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Slice and Dice

Posted by wastedenergy on March 5, 2011

This is my diss track. Scrubs, you see, get no love from me. None whatsoever. Not a drop. Not even once. No energy wasted, and once I’m done with this one, the pigeons will be squirming in their borrowed shoes, and no further diss will be necessary.

How many Dicks does it take to frack to the center of the earth and make it pop? Answer: only one, and he used to be the CEO of a little company called Halliburton. These same bad boys who brought you boys back in body bags and $20 canned meals not fit for dog food not only cemented BP’s bad drill job in place to make the history books, but also invented a little process called fracking, you see. Lest you think they were coming along with a brand new ride, as so boldly pronounced by Exxon and their ilk, they invented it in 1947. That was before we even invented the hydrogen bomb. Talk about primitive!

While Republicons and Decepticrats were both dicking around trying to figure out how to make a quick buck for the private stash, the good people of America were paying the true price for their shenanigans: once again, oil in the water, in this case countless millions upon millions of gallons of the freshest stuff instead of fire on the salty seas. Well, what’s a headache and a few bloody noses here and there? A small price to pay for cheap natural gas, right? Well, not so much on that cheap part. ‘Cause it wasn’t just the good Americans who paid that price: I got news for you tea party types, there’s more than one way for a cat to catch a mouse. And by that, I mean there’s more than one way to subsidize drilling: environmental externalities aside, it was the shareholders who were paying that two or three times the price on the futures market for each thousand cubic feet. Fiscal conservatives? Hardly, these guys have a mountain of debt all the way to the Kingdom Come they’ll be sending us all to climb on our own two feet if they have their way.

Speaking of which: did you know these guys want to cut funding for the next-generation energy technologies we need to save our skin? Yes, that’s right, apparently the future is a low hanging fruit to some, and they don’t mind picking it right off the tree before it’s even gotten to its full size, let alone ripened. Apparently, anything that slices even a dollar off the profit margin of Koch Industries is considered bad for America. Well, it’s certainly bad for general motoring, that much we know without a doubt. The conspiracy to which I refer, of course, is the attempt to de-fund the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This would be roughly the equivalent of ending the Space Program at Mercury.  We may be abusing plastic like it’s our job, but remember that if it weren’t for public sector investment in science and technology, we’d never have the stuff in the first place, and I don’t just mean trashy bags, but the also what lets me tell you this over the tubes right at this very moment. Let’s hope these boys get caught Red-handed just like the CIA with their friends in the Taliban and left and right, but mostly Right, all over South America. Talk about Forbidden Fruit! (Sidebar: do I even dare mention the extraterrestrials? Nah, save that one for another day. First things first.)

And if that wasn’t enough, they dare not touch those Red State agricultural subsidies either, oh, no sir! When it comes to pretending to be pound-wise, these guys have even the old Reagan, Reagan II, and Reagan III and IV administrations beat! Oh yeah, I went there, and I’ll even go a step further: everyone’s beloved Saint Reagan was even worse than Bush II. Sure, he may have had the gift of gab, but just because a pigeon can cluck doesn’t mean he has anything to say. His vision for America included painting red stripes right over the blue background for the stars, and I don’t mean a smooth brew from Jamaica: we’re talking red and white bottles of high fructose chemical poison processed from the fruits of God’s Green Earth. If only we had the foresight to support real green agriculture, we might be eating a lot more fruits and vegetables, but corporate criminals get first dibs when it comes to government handouts, so it’s not just the price of wheat going up these days, but cabbage and tomatoes too. Shrub, grandchild of the famous friend of fascists, may have taken it to the next level in dropping a cool trillion on fruitless wars in the Mideast, but his ideological predecessor and the source of his worst Dicks and Donnies was the one who set the stage. Reagan invented neoconservatism, and you just can’t top that when it comes to Worst President Ever.

Last, but not least, I’m willing to bet some private waste management contractor has some skin in the game when it comes to the recent dicing of the Green the Capitol initiative. And de-funding the EPA, whose total budget amounts to a mere handful of billions, isn’t exactly the best way to balance the budget. Remember, not every office has its head in the sand like the one that lets the haters keep hating on waste-to-energy so much: these are the folks who make sure our rivers don’t catch on fire and air doesn’t contain enough smoky soot to choke a camel. Next time you need to pull off a balancing act, try using your head instead.

Look at that, I even managed to hit all seven categories, and then some. Eat your heart out, double rainbow, I got sixteen ways ’til Sunday to call out a Scrub and make him run crying back to the hole he came from! Speaking of which, it might be time to return to our ongoing discussion soon. But ah, as the Good Book says (and a little bird or two as well): to everything, there is a season. How I do love Spring!

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, The Ether, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Zap

Posted by wastedenergy on February 27, 2011

Are you a math geek? Like solving problems? Needed a quick jolt to knock you into action? This one’s for you.

Say hello to my little friend: he’s gonna pop a cap in you. An ultracap, that is. Never heard of him? You have now.

First, a brief explanation of the concept: an ultracapacitor is an energy storage technology that has been around for a couple of decades, but whose potential has only begun to be realized, let alone exploited. It stores electrical energy, but the idea is very different from a conventional battery: rather than storing the charge as chemical potential energy, charge is captured as it sits along a surface area, usually carbon nanotubes or some other nanomaterial. Since an electron occupies essentially no volume, it is able to lie flat along the surface, and so the greater the interior surface area of the ultracapacitor cell, the more charge is able to be stored. Because the exploitable area is based on two dimensions but is stored inside a body built in three dimensions, there is no theoretical limit to the amount of charge that can be stored in a cell of a given volume; the only limit is a practical one, related to how much accessible surface area we can create using the materials available to us and the amount of energy available to be stored in this way.

OK, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that while we were all asleep at the wheel of our electric cars thinking that lithium-ion batteries were the end-all-be-all for electric energy storage and that a concept over two hundred years old (the voltaic pile, or battery) was all we had in our arsenal for the fast-charging and energy-dense storage devices we need to make clean energy sources like solar power viable at the scales and in the applications where we really need them, those whiz kids over at Argonne National Laboratory were busy working with extraterrestrial intelligence to fangle something truly new and exciting.

Currently, ultracapacitors using nanocarbon materials are already in use for fast-charging hybrid and electric buses and a few other applications. But their potential extends far beyond current usage. As usual, better manufacturing techniques, improved technological concepts and materials, and economies of scale will bring down the cost and improve the performance of these devices. I’m talking about fast-charging electric vehicles of all types, capable of storing more than a few dozen miles’ worth of charge. Not only that, but we can use them to store energy from home-scale solar energy production systems as well as the electric grid, to save up energy for when our shining star can’t quite reach us. Skeptics will say the technology isn’t ready yet, but I say it’s just a matter of time – and a little effort. Hey, politicos: instead of slashing energy research budgets like the blind leading the blind, why don’t you think about cutting off the arms of the armed forces instead, and doubling, tripling, or even sextupling the budget for our national labs so they can get this stuff off the bench and onto the market where we need it?

Of course, it won’t solve everything: we still need to conserve our natural resources and ecosystems properly and with respect to the needs of future generations, and we still need to actually develop and build out the clean energy sources we’ll use to charge these things up in the first place. But put all the pieces together, and you begin to see that it can be done. We have the technology, and we can build it.

Think you’ve seen it all? I got news for you: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I recall, lightning struck itself…

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Triple Rainbow All The Way

Posted by wastedenergy on February 16, 2011

Have you ever seen the sun? You know, that big shiny ball of fire in the sky? Well, you might want to have a second look.

New wave is great, but today we’re talking old school. There’s something to be said for the perfect fusion of form and function, and in terms of modern technology, such an ideal synthesis is found in the concept of a building or community that is in itself an ecosystem, recycling all its products and generating an output at least equal to its energy intake.

A lot of observers of the energy markets tend to dismiss solar power as too expensive, too variable, and too insignificant to have a real impact on energy consumption. As it happens, they are incorrect on all three counts. Photovoltaics and other solar energy technologies become cheaper every day and have already passed grid parity in many markets, and they will continue to do so as the cost of fossil fuels continues to rise inexorably. The problem of variability in renewable energy sources is easily addressed through complementary technologies from advanced batteries and other energy storage technologies to smart grid management and interconnections. And the scale of solar development has been increasing almost faster than we can even measure it, with total worldwide deployment of PV doubling roughly every two years and with “largest solar array yet conceived” headlines gracing the pages of the daily papers with ever-increasing regularity.

Let’s address each of these concerns with the supposed non-viability of solar power point by point.

“It’s too expensive.”

Not so. The typical cost of solar photovoltaics today, factoring in subsidies, is around $2 per watt, which works out to about $0.20 per kilowatt-hour, depending on your latitude and degree of sunshine. That is already a lot less than some of us pay on our electric bills, and some seven times cheaper than twenty years ago. These costs are only likely to continue to decrease as manufacturing processes become more efficient, as new systems like thin-film PV using nano-scale materials become increasingly popular, as economies of scale are achieved within the solar energy industry, and as the energy return on investment for solar energy continues to increase. It truly is just a matter of time before solar and other renewable energy technologies are cheaper than coal not just here and there, but everywhere. And that’s not even counting all the tax revenue we could be generating by forcing coal burners and deepwater drillers to actually pay for all the pollution and excrement they create for once!

“It’s too variable.”

Not when done right. One square meter of photovoltaics is enough to generate between fifty and one hundred watts of power; a rooftop covered with solar panels is enough to generate many times over the amount of energy used by a well-designed building filled with efficient appliances. It’s really just a matter of storing that extra energy, and contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, we already have one or two ways of doing that. Not only that, but I’m pretty much convinced that ultracapacitors are going to be the wave of the future, not just for their current uses for fast-charging hybrid buses but for home-scale and grid-scale energy storage as well. These machines, which require an additional post on their own to truly describe their potential, store electric charge along a surface rather than as chemical potential energy as in a battery. Imagine how much surface area you can pack into a volume of a given size, combined with the potential of nanotechnology, and you may begin to see things as I do. And let’s not forget that there ARE, in fact, base-loading and on-demand renewables as well, like geothermal and waste-to-energy, that can serve us well to provide backup power when the lights go out in the sky.

“It doesn’t scale.”

Nothing scales better. Indeed, solar energy comes in all sizes, from small domestic-scale hot water or hybrid PV systems to mult-gigawatt power plants that disabuse the land of its former disuses. Now, compare that to an alternative that a lot of “techno-fetishists” like to cite as the future: nuclear power. Not only does solar power not cause radioactive releases or the occasional meltdown and reactor explosion to permanently alter all our DNA as well as that of our children and do little to support the nuclear-weapons-industrial complex, it can also scale both up and down as needed. How are we doing on modular nuclear reactors these days, Bill Gates? Any progress yet? And, it almost goes without saying, but unlike certain other ways of getting energy, it won’t blow out a huge hole in your wallet, nor in the ocean floor.

Are you still unconvinced? Well, haters gonna hate, as they say. But I can paint a sharper picture than they can by pointing out that all the deficiencies they love to cite are merely omissions or oversights. Eat your heart out, guys. In the meantime, the rest of us will go ahead and do our best to actually fix the problem.

What goes down must come up.

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FIRE ME

Posted by wastedenergy on February 11, 2011

It’s been a while since I’ve stated the obvious, but it still needs stating for the oblivious.  If you’re looking for hope for humanity in the face of such daunting challenges as peak oil, the steady obliteration of our natural resource base, and the unkiltering of the global climate, look no further.

There are still those poor, pitiable souls out there who believe the highest possible, and even the only possible reuse of a partially rotted-out apple crate is to keep loading it with apples until cows walk down stairs. If you start talking about burning your old smelly couch and actually getting real some use out of it, they start welling up with tears. Don’t worry, it’s not dioxin or sulfuric acid in the eyes causing your small-minded friend to cry. The real problem is that old habits die hard, and when one has been taught by one’s forebears for so long that a practice is wrong, it can be hard to disabuse onesself of such thinking. In this case, so many are willing to continue believing old facts they picked up from their environmental senseis, including many of the founders of the environmental justice movements whose only real fault is unwillingness to consider newer and better evidence. And to be fair, the fault lies just as equally with the purveyors of our miracle technology, for their own failure to confront the PR disaster of an industry’s history. The problem with such longstanding adherence to old beliefs is that even the old master must die eventually; there’s a reason only a Sith has the power to live forever (and his own actions will eventually undo him anyway). As times change, so must ideas.

They say the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. It’s true in a sense: the very best of what we are able to do with advanced networks of machines is paralleled in nature to the circuitry of a multicellular organism or even an ecosystem, with such a degree of complexity and inter-utility that the base components of the machine on their own could never be used to predict the ultimate outcome of the total system. To the untrained eye, it truly is magic.

Consider for a moment the waste-to-energy plant.

This modern marvel can turn your trash into mere ash, burn away the remnants of rotting pulp from that smelly couch or funked-up mattress so nobody has to blow out their wrist going at it with a box cutter, spring the springs back out of your couch and the nails out of your old crates and pallets with magnets, in the process add value to old fossil fuels so we don’t have to frack everything up so much and blow up so many mountains,  and maybe even pop out few rock solid pellets of aluminum and yes, even gold and silver in the process. And, on top of that, it has none of the variability of most other renewable sources of electricty, with slight variations to the process (and a few precautions) can turn the used product into chemicals or fuels instead of heat if that happens to be more valuable at a particular place in time, and even does so at a cheaper cost than most renewables as well. Why on God’s Green Earth would you ever want to bury this stuff?

Not only that, but if you really like, you can also turn your work of engineering into an art piece. Personally, I think there’s something to be said for simplicity as well: a nice solid functional item that works exactly as it should and blends in perfectly with its surroundings.  But if you want to get all wild and wacky with it, that’s alright with me too. Either way, let’s let this magic genie out of its bottle already, for crying out loud!

“Oh, hey down there little guy…whatcha lookin’ at? Just a-rockin’ and a-cruisin’ up here.”

Posted in Energy Production, Solid Waste, The Ether | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Freedom Is Free

Posted by wastedenergy on January 20, 2011

You’ve probably been taught that the “invisible hand” of a “free market” is the most “efficient” way of generating the largest amount of wealth for the largest number of people, and that those who don’t participate in the system are “lazy welfare queens.”  It would be best if you disabused yourself of these notions.

I’ll repeat here a thought experiment I’ve mentioned to a number of people over the last day or two: imagine a world in which all labor is automated (and note that you don’t have to get all the way there for the conclusions of the experiment to hold true).  The requirement for less intensive human labor should, in theory, ease the burden on everyone.  But under a system of dog-eat-dog capitalism, where all wealth must be considered “earned” through engagement in the labor market, and where virtually all jobs are eliminated by ever-increasing automation, the only ones who stand to gain are the oligarchs who own the machines, pulling the strings at the top. The entire economy would reorient itself to serve only the needs of those elites.  Do you suppose we might be headed in this general direction?  And if so, should we continue full speed ahead?  Or should we at the very least pause and consider what the purpose of employment really is, whether it is an end in itself or simply a means to an actual end, that of improved general welfare at the median of society?

Consider this one: if you want economic stimulus through job creation, the most effective way to do so might be something like this:

WASHINGTON—In an effort to boost the economy and promote job growth, representatives from the newly revived Works Progress Administration announced Thursday their plan to dismantle, piece by piece, the 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete forming the Hoover Dam, and then immediately rebuild it. “This is a vital initiative,” said WPA director Ted Doogan, who was appointed last week. “Systematically tearing down such a massive edifice will create at least 25,000 jobs over the next five years. And then reassembling it, using all the same pieces in the exact same configuration, will employ another 25,000 workers. America is back.” Other public works projects currently underway include the bulldozing of libraries, the burning of national forests, and the defacing of public murals, which will be followed by a massive plan to rebuild libraries, revive national forests, and repaint public murals.

Efficiency at its finest, no?

If you happen to be among the lucky ones whose work hasn’t yet been outsourced, automated, or otherwise eliminated, if you are among those who would object to the idea of providing a guaranteed minimum livable income to all citizens, you might ask yourself a few questions: could a robot do your job?  How about someone in Bangladesh? Does your work really require any “skills” outside of formatting Excel spreadsheets and keeping an Outlook inbox neat and tidy?  Do you have to work with your hands? When was the last time you had to use any aspect of your “higher” education?  Is there any creativity or artistry involved on a day-to-day basis?  How many times per week, or even per day, do you find yourself unable to engage in the activities from which you truly derive some pleasure or passion because you must instead act in a way that serves a corporate interest that does not concern you directly?  And finally, does your work create any real, lasting wealth, or are you one of the multitudes involved in transforming fossil fuels into garbage?

Now, let’s step back for just a moment.  I don’t mean to suggest that all jobs are worthless, or that the idea that anyone who does one deserves no more wealth than someone who does literally nothing except sit on the couch watching reruns of Family Guy.  I do mean to suggest, however, that such a person in many cases creates the same aggregate value as someone who works day in and day out, and in some cases more value (considering the number of business models predicated on the creation of negative value and the outsourcing of unpaid externalities). And considering any of the above criteria, can you really honestly say to yourself that someone not engaged in this activity does not have the right to a decent standard of living?  What about those who are entirely able and willing to contribute to the creation of value for society in some way, but whose entreaties to do so are rejected by the ruthless inefficiencies of the corporate economy?  Do they deserve hot meals?  Is it really a better economic model to force someone to “earn” her keep serving poison to the masses at Burger King than to simply pay her to stay at home doing nothing?

Oh, whoops, this one is proprietary!  Another great example of how large corporations create positive wealth for society at large, no?  Ah, well, at least you can still watch it on YouTube…

Let’s return briefly to the idea of negative externalities, and how much of our economic system is oriented around encouraging people to take jobs that promote them, at the expense of the public’s general welfare.  Externalities are a lot more important than most economists assume.  In many cases, they are the very heart of the matter, the basic reason why one choice is better or worse than another (and remember, kids: economics is about making good choices, not just about maximizing profit for the corporation).  Most economic analysis either ignores externalities entirely or at the very most treats them as some kind of side consideration, perhaps shifting around some prices but too difficult to bother including in any economic model.  But consider the following claim, some variation of which we’ve seen from a number of related vested interests:

“Continuing to burn coal creates more jobs than solar or wind power because it maintains the need for coal miners.”

And why is it that the dirtiest fuel creates this particular economic “benefit”?  Precisely because it requires continual depletion of a non-renewable resource!  Now, you try and tell me there is any real value in maintaining these jobs for their own sake.  So we don’t even need to consider how our present economic system treats any of the other externalities of coal burning, and there are many, all of which “add” value to the economy in the form of jobs (in the health care and environmental remediation sectors) and an increase in the GDP through their management, to the extent that they are managed.  Just the very nature of the activity is, in itself, a negative externality to society as a whole: it permanently destroys a resource for all time, making the next round of coal that much harder to find and burn.  And there are still those out there who believe the game we’re playing isn’t rigged to make bad choices?

Now how about this one: Michael Vick.  The man gets paid bajillions.  What value has he created?  He has tortured dogs, but even setting aside that negative value, let’s consider just what it is that he does that enables him to “earn” his keep: he’s good at tossing around a dead pig.  What value does that create?  Well, for one thing, it inspires many television viewers to get piss-drunk and gorge themselves on nachos while living vicariously through a machismo colloseum spectacle.  What a great example for the children!  And another type of value he creates: by getting more people to tune in through his display of athletic prowess, he creates lots of revenue for advertisers.  You know, those corporate parasites who make their living by turning the very premise of free-market capitalism on its head: convincing people to buy products that won’t benefit them through misrepresentation and manipulation in lieu of the “information” that is supposed to be the greatest asset to the perfectly rational economic human consumer.

The list goes on.  Ke$ha.  Charles Koch.  Lloyd Blankfein.  T. Boone Pickens.  R.J. Reynolds.  Coca-Cola.  The entire prison industry.  All of them, making fortunes by taking advantage of unpaid externalities that vastly outweigh any positive benefit to society.  For every instance you can find of a millionaire or billionaire who has transformed civilization for the better, I can come up with ten examples of those who make their fortunes by turning fossil fuels into garbage.  At some point, we have to ask ourselves: where does it all end?

Real Wealth?  It’s Gone Daddy Gone…

I’ll go ahead and end this one on a positive note: you only live once, so stop worrying about it and go do something you really enjoy!  I myself am going to go make some art, and create something of real value.

Posted in Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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