solarray

From void into vision, from vision to mind, from mind into speech, from speech to the tribe, from the tribe into din.

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

Two Solar Parabolic Troughs


 



The larger solar parabolic trough on the left I made in the 1970s for the New England Coastal Power Show, an energy show which traveled throughout the Northeast for a few years after the second Energy Crisis.  We used it to heat water, make tea, and demonstrate the availability of solar energy as well as many other working alternatives to nuclear power.

The smaller solar parabolic trough on the right is a solar oven now available from GoSun (https://gosun.co/) which has been making solar cookers for many years.  You can put it together and take it apart in a minute or two.  The collector has something I imagined back in the day but never built, a sealed insulated dark absorber to maximize solar heat collection.  

Another thing I imagined so long ago was applying heat pipe technology (https://www.heatpipe.com/what-are-heat-pipes/) to the absorber of a parabolic trough and wonder, now, if anyone has done anything with that.

I may modify the little GoSun trough so that it can also be a vertical collector like my older model.  The sealed absorber looks like it could boil water just as well as if not better than my old copper one.  

This is a good model for anyone doing public energy demonstrations at such events as science fairs or farmers' markets (https://flourishfiction.substack.com/p/mister-franklins-folks).



Monday, December 11, 2023

100% Wind Water Solar Not "All of the Above"

Why We Must Focus on Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage, Not “All of the Above,” For Solving Global Climate, Air Pollution, and Energy Security Problems

A slide deck from Mark Z Jacobson presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting on December 11, 2023

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSNoMN/2312-AGU-MZJ.pdf

Conclusion

Carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, non-hydrogen electro-fuels, and bioenergy even when powered by wind-water-solar (WWS), all increase CO2, air pollution, and social cost and either fossil mining and infrastructure or land use versus using the same WWS to replace a CO2 source CCS [Carbon Capture and Storage], DAC [Direct Air Capture] always increase CO2 and new nuclear increases cost, time-to-operation, emissions, and catastrophic risk versus new wind/solar.

However, a Wind, Water, Solar (WWS) Solution is practical and we can "electrify or provide direct heat for all sectors and provide [that] electricity and heat with 100% WWS. " The book “No Miracles Needed” explains how to transition to 100% WWS. https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSNoMN/NoMiracles.html


I believe Mark Z Jacobson is doing essential work.





Saturday, October 07, 2023

Stanford Scientists' Recommendations for a "True" School of Sustainability

 A coalition of "Stanford scientists invested in helping the Doerr School of Sustainability achieve its full potential as a beacon of research excellence that accelerates the energy transition, with the speed and scale necessary to avert catastrophe" are making recommendations for a "true" school of sustainability:

 

Summary of Coalition for a True School of Sustainability’s Recommendations

To take effect immediately: review, identify and eliminate benefits to industry donors that present a direct conflict of interest.
Ban: For all research programs, ban sponsorship from any company, trade group, or other organization that engages in the following (see below for details on each criteria):
Does not provide a credible transition pathway
Obstructs climate policy
Plans to explore for further reserves of fossil fuels and supports the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure beyond 2025/30
Establish a Third-Party Enforcement Board to oversee the dissociation process with industry partners on a case-by-case basis.
Disclose: strengthen existing disclosure requirements across the University, including by writing specific guidance for conflicts of interest involving the fossil fuel industry.

More at https://www.truesustainabilityschool.com/big-oil-entanglements


Here is a take on the subject coming from Stanford students filtered through Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIiCXHnKGl4

Hat tip:  Edmund Carlevale

Monday, August 28, 2023

Seeing Three Circles: A Fundamental Failure of Environmental Vision

Seeing Three Circles

3 circle image:
society
economy
environment
Usually seen as equal overlapping circles with a 
sweet spot
in the middle




















3 circle reality:
environment
society
economy
smallest circle economy inside
smaller circle society inside
largest circle environment


Once upon a time,

some MIT enviro scientists
were in Nepal & commissioned
a mandala
It was the usual 3 circles 
all the same size
overlapping in the middle

I asked them why they didn't use
the 3 circle reality

The speaker said they considered it
but liked the usual Venn diagram better

8/28/23

Seems to me this confusion between the image where two human concerns, society and economy, are equivalent to all the rest of entire world and the reality where human economy is smaller than human society and human society is merely a subset of the entire world is the central difficulty in understanding the biosphere and our human place within it.  

The three equal circles overlapping in the center is a design known as the Borromean Rings and is the logo for Ballantine Beer.




Friday, August 11, 2023

BBC Gets Real About Climate

 I stumbled on a BBC documentary called "South Africa: On the edge of darkness" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofwx-kyxHq4) a week or so ago.

It was a hard look at the South African energy and climate situation where coal provides 85% of the electricity while the customers endure frequent load shedding (power failures, brownouts, blackouts) and rooftop solar is taking off* as the country attempts to meet its climate pledges, against vehement and entrenched opposition.  The stakes are so high that André De Ruyter, the anti-corruption CEO who took over ESKOM, the South African utility, in 2019, was poisoned the day after he announced his resignation in December 2022.

*  South Africa rooftop solar installations increased from 1MW to 4.4MW in 14 months 
as the unreliability of the energy sector seems to be driving a transition to independent power.

After that program, BBC showed "Life at 50ºC" which is about how people around the world, particularly in the developing world which is feeling the brunt of the damage, are reacting to the changes in the weather, the climate, their lives

What impressed me about the stories presented is the resourcefulness and determination of the people.  It is life and death and they realize that clearly so the purity of their purpose shows through, no matter what they do.

Thanks BBC for presenting the stories of these remarkable people.




Wednesday, June 07, 2023

An Ecological Vision from Gary Snyder

 From Gary Snyder's essay "Four Changes" [1969]

recast as a found poem,

still a fertile vision:


A technology of communication, education,

and quiet transportation,

land-use being

sensitive to the properties of each region... 


Careful but intensive agriculture

in the great alluvial valleys,

deserts left wild for those

who would live there by skill. 


Computer technicians who run

the plant part of the year

and walk

along with the Elk

in their migrations

during the rest.

Thursday, April 13, 2023

How Many Ways Did He Change the World?: Mel King and the Chain of Change

 My friend and mentor Mel King died at the age of 94 on March 28, 2023. 

I first met Mel when he was a MA State Representative in the mid-1970s.  It was in a State House hallway after a hearing on food and agriculture issues.  He was a big man, 6 foot 5 inches, and, in those days, he was wearing overalls to work.  He was also bald, bearded, and Black.  As I recall, he walked down the hall away from the hearing room still gently lobbying a fellow Representative on the issues.  He was working hard for an urban/rural coalition, building community gardens in the South End and other neighborhoods of Boston while rebuilding the Commonwealth’s agriculture infrastructure with farmers, foresters, and others from far beyond Route 128 and Boston’s South End, his district. 

Over the next few years, he was the focus of a lot of work around these issues as Boston became a hub of urban gardening and the Commonwealth became a model for new methods of supporting local agriculture.  To a great extent, the efforts of those days when there were, at most, 18 farmers’ markets in the state has led to now when there are hundreds, with indoor winter markets and a local agriculture showcase near Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market in downtown Boston.  Mel King was instrumental in the early stages of these changes and a brilliant advisor and advocate all along the way.  In many ways, the rebirth of local agriculture, in part pioneered in Massachusetts, has changed the world.

In 1983, Mel ran as a candidate for Mayor of Boston.  He was the first Black candidate to make it to Election Day.  For that campaign, he wore a straw boater hat, blazers, and bowties.  He cut a very dapper figure as he talked about a Rainbow Coalition made up of all classes, creeds, and ethnicities.  He ran against Ray Flynn from South Boston.  They’d been on opposite sides of the contentious busing issue which integrated the Boston schools but they knew and respected each other.  The racially charged electioneering some feared never materialized.  Flynn won handily but Mel’s Rainbow Coalition was a bridge between Fred Hampton’s original Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 1984.  In 1997 Mel founded the Rainbow Coalition Party in MA, later turning into the Green-Rainbow Party of MA which still exists.  King told The Boston Globe a decade after his mayoral run: “What I believe people want more than anything else is a sense of a vision that’s inclusive and respectful and appreciative of who they are. What the Rainbow Coalition did was to put that right up front, because everybody could be a member.”

As Mel practiced electoral politics he also worked as an Adjunct Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and created the Community Fellows Program (CFP) there in 1970.  The nine month program brings together "community organizers and leaders from across America to reflect, research, and study urban community politics, economics, social life, education, housing, and media.”  He was a director of the program until 1996 and the Mel King Community Fellows program continues today.  The Fellows organized a conference on healthcare this year which happened a few days after his death.

With his equally formidable partner, Joyce, Mel had a practice of Sunday open houses where people would cook and eat and talk and organize.  I went to a couple, once to help Mel think through solar possibilities for his South End row house on Yarmouth Street and another time with a friend who was working on prisoners’ rights issues.  Hundreds if not thousands of people passed through his home learning how to make good trouble from a past master.

Before all of this, in 1968, Mel King led a demonstration of more than 1000 people against a parking garage the city planned to build as part of an urban renewal project,  replacing housing that had been demolished.  It took until 1988 but a 269 unit mixed income apartment complex opened at the site as Tent City, in honor of the protest where the demonstrators occupied the site and slept there in tents.  As Lewis Finfer, a longtime community organizer in Boston and director of Massachusetts Action for Justice, said, “He’s the father of affordable housing in Boston.”  

In 1997, after retiring from MIT, Mel created the South End Technology Center at Tent City, offering community residents free or low-cost training in computers and technology.  It is also one of the inspirations and early sites for a FabLab.  In fact, at a festschrift for Mel King at MIT in 2018, I learned that Mel had been instrumental in making FabLabs happen.  According to Neil Gershenfeld, Mel was the person who told the folks at MIT Media Lab to take the 3D printers, CNC machines, and other equipment and put them in schools and community centers.  Now there are over 1200 FabLabs in over 100 countries.  Mel helped set up some of the first ones in Ghana and Norway and proposed midnight computer programs to complement midnight basketball.

Once I heard someone ask him what was the piece of legislation he was most proud of and he said it was passing the Fruition Project, a bill that provided funding for perennial food plantings on public access lands.  I had distributed a short note to friends in the local agriculture movement about a public access planting project in Santa Cruz, CA back in the 1970s and someone had passed it on to Mel who made it into law.  I was surprised and gratified that the idea sparked Mel’s action and happy that I had, in small way, been one of his collaborators.

Mel King was a quiet but forceful person who never quit.  He changed his neighborhood, his city, his state, his country, and the whole world in many different ways without claiming credit and without stopping.  He was a friend and a mentor whom I will continue to learn from for the rest of my life.  

More on Mel King
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/08/us/politics/mel-king-dead.html
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/03/28/mel-king-obituary

Books by Mel King:
Chain of Change:  Struggles for Black Community Development 
Streets:  Poem Book