Heat Pumps: What I Imagine an Environmental Community Could Do

A friend pointed me to a recent Wired magazine story, "The hunt for the most efficient heat pump"

https://www.wired.com/story/heat-pump-maximum-efficiency/

Seems that friendly competition is generating interest in heat pumps in the UK and elsewhere with nearly 200 installations connected to real-time monitoring systems trying to score the highest Coefficient of Performance [COP] or Seasonal Coefficient of Performance [SCOP] at HeatPumpMonitor.org (https://heatpumpmonitor.org/).  Heat pumps with higher COPs and SCOPs provide more heat output for every input of electricity.  Standard installations are now at 2-4 COP, for every 1 kW of electricity in 2-4 kW of heat comes out.  There are some on the  leaderboard (mostly UK but at least one Danish and one USAmerican system) with COPs and SCOPs of 5 edging toward 6.

The International Energy Agency published a global estimate that heat pumps could reduce CO2 emissions by 500 million metric tons, the "equivalent to taking every car in Europe off the road."  

I dislike comparing everything to cars.  Since it's heating and cooling of houses, let's measure emissions reductions in terms of households:  "each home emits 10.97 metric tons of COS per year from all energy use combined, versus 7.27 metric tons of CO2 per year from electricity alone." 

Source:  https://www.epa.gov/energy/frequent-questions-epas-greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Calculations%20and,per%20year%20from%20electricity%20alone.

So 500 million metric tons is about 46 million households (and there are 127 million households in USAmerica).  Heat pumps could remove the annual CO2 emissions of more than a third of all households in USAmerica.

Switching from gas and electrical resistance to heat pumps will reduce the necessity to burn fossil fuels and reduce the demand for electricity due to their (much) higher efficiencies.  Natural gas boilers typically have COPs between 0.7 to 0.9 and conventional electric resistance heaters have a COP of 1.0.  Heat pumps would use at least half of the electricity we generate for HVAC now if not a quarter, fifth, sixth... as heat pump installations attain higher COPs and we build a better future.  

Of course, CO2 emissions is not the operative consumer criterion but cost per square meter, usually what homeowners are most concerned with, will go down as more installations and installers come into the market.  Heat Geek has an online tool to help you think through your own heat pump conversion at https://upgrades.heatgeek.com/;  and, if you want to participate in the COP monitoring race, a typical monitoring setup costs between £500 - 700 ($640 - 897, given current exchange rates).

I can imagine the environmental community speeding the heat pump transition.  Filling the HeatMonitor with more and more efficient heat pumps, speeding the hunt for the most efficient ones, training the HVAC professionals and the public about the advantages, economic, ecological, and social.  A report every Friday from the Future, a practical act of Extinction Rebellion.  

This is what I call a positive protest and the experience of Safecast (https://safecast.org/), developing citizens' science radiation monitoring equipment and a monitoring network in Japan after Fukushima, is one example that could be followed.  Safecast continues their work today.

There is another, additional energy efficiency aspect of heat pumps that I saw when I visited Vietnam in 2020, just before COVID-19 began.  In the apartment in one of the new high-rises in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) where I stayed, my cousin's, there were air to air heat pumps in every room.  The living room was next to the kitchen and that heat pump exhausted into the laundry room helping to dry the clothes hanging there.  I wonder if that use of energy is included in the present calculation of COP and SCOP.

Heat Pump Monitor is a project of Open Energy Monitor (https://openenergymonitor.org/) and more on Heat Geek at https://thenextweb.com/news/heat-geek-startup-heat-pumps-brits

One Easy Shift to Solar

Emergency electricity is technologically, economically, and practically trivial.  You don't need to know how to build lightbulbs, batteris, PV cells... from scratch.  They are all readily available for affordable prices as mass commodity products.  If you get them now before the fertilizer really hits the ventilation system (which is as good a descriptpion of the greenhouse effect as any other, at least for me).  If you also use them in your daily life, that will another infinitesimal drop out of the machinery of destruction and provide some personal security for yourself.

A solar light with battery charging capability for at least AA batteries costs about $10 retail. That provides you with the light, the power for a cell phone or radio, and recharging when the batteries run down.  I’ve used mine for years now and will probably get quite a few more years of use out it.

This is also entry level electricity for the bottom billion.

I’ve advocated for decades that cities like mine could do a bulk order for their citizens and help supply at least one of our sister cities around the world who needs such a program as well through a buy one get one program — solar civil defense at home and solar development abroad.

Add bicycles chargers and power take-offs for all electric vehicles, micro-mobility e-bikes/scooters/et cetera and we have an incipient emergency grid if we plan it right.  

Here’s one version of a Personal Power Set

http://solarray.blogspot.com/2018/09/personal-power-set.html

I recently suggested to a strategy session of the local Extinction Rebellion [XR] group that working on practical climate preparation can be an effective and positive protest.  I don’t know if they’ll do anything about it but we’ll see.  I believe that we could change USAmerican energy policy and REALITY in one growing season if we went to the farmers’ markets every week throughout the growing season teaching people what they can already do and helping them do it.  

 

Here’s one version of that vision

https://flourishfiction.substack.com/p/mister-franklins-folks

 

Preparing now for the next weather emergency or disaster, whatever that may be, is climate adaptation and can be good climate mitigation as well.  Organizing people to get ready that way is something, I believe, XR, Fridays for the Future, 350.org, as well as the mainline environmental groups should be doing as well as their street and legislative actions.

The Climate Mobilization Project is organizing around some of these ideas this year

https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/organizing/

as is the People’s Response Network

prncoalition@gmail.com

There’s also Communities Responding to Extreme Weather

https://www.climatecrew.org

Lots of possibilities.  In fact, we are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.  Who wants to go opportunity climbing?

"We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all."  Lew Welch

0Recommend

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).

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.

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

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.

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 

(https://www.eskom.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Weekly_System_Status_Report_2023_w28.pdf)

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

https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/ckx7gv5qm3et

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.