Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy

_Let It Shine:  The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy_ by John Perlin
Novato, CA:  New World Library, 2013
ISBN 978-1-60868-132-7

(xi)  The authoritative global network REN21 (Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century) reports that in 2012, one-fifth of the world’s electricity and one-sixth of the world’s total delivered energy was renewable.  Half the world’s new electricity-generating capacity added each year since 2008 has been renewable, and so is one-fourth of global and one-third of European generating capacity.  Excluding big hydroelectric dams, modern renewable power (chiefly wind and solar) adds more than 80 billion watts of capacity each year and receives a quarter trillion dollars of annual private investment, and in 2011 invested its trillionth dollar since 2004 - all despite subsidies generally smaller than what its nonrenewable competitors get.

(xix)  Twenty-five hundred years ago, for example, the sun heated every house in most Greek cities.  

(xx)  And as electricity began to power cities, the first photovoltaic array was installed on a New York City rooftop in 1884.

(5) The first account of the use of the gnomon for building comes from the Zhou dynasty, which was established sometime before the twelfth century BCE.  Zhou government officials considered proper orientation too important to be left to chance, and so they instructed builders to establish the cardinal points of the compass for exact siting.  The book _Zhouli_, which contained the rituals and rules established by the dynasty, explained how this would be accomplished.  Builders first had to determine when the equinoxes and solstices occurred, which could be pinpointed by studying the shadows cast by the gnomon.  The longest and shortest shadows of the year would mark the winter solstice and summer solstice, respectively.  When the shadow cast was half as long as the two solstice shadows, the observer would know that one of the two equinoxes had arrived.  At either equinox, the shadow cast by the rising sun would point west, and the shadow cast by the setting sun would point east.  Taking note of where the noon shadow fell, the observer would learn where true north and south lay.

(13)  Socrates according to Xenophon in the Memorabilia:  “Now in houses with a southern orientation, the sun’s rays penetrate into the porticoes [covered porches,] but in summer the path of the sun is right over our heads and above the roof, so we have shade…  To put it succinctly, the house in which the owner can find a pleasant retreat in all seasons… is at once the most useful and the most beautiful.”

[Soc:  "Do you admit that any one purposing to build a perfect house will plan to make it at once as pleasant and as useful to live in as possible?" and that point being admitted, the next question would be:
"It is pleasant to have one's house cool in summer and warm in winter, is it not?" and this proposition also having obtained assent, "Now, supposing a house to have a southern aspect, sunshine during winter will steal in under the verandah, but in summer, when the sun traverses a path right over our heads, the roof will afford an agreeable shade, will it not? If, then, such an arrangement is desirable, the southern side of a house should be built higher to catch the rays of the winter sun, and the northern side lower to prevent the cold winds finding ingress; in a word, it is reasonable to suppose that the pleasantest and most beautiful dwelling place will be one in which the owner can at all seasons of the year find the pleasantest retreat, and stow away his goods with the greatest security."
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1177/1177-h/1177-h.htm)]

(13-14)  Aristotle:  “What type of housing are we to build for slaves and freemen, for women and men, for foreigners and citizens?… For well-being and health, the homestead should be airy in summer and sunny in winter.  A homestead possessing these qualities would be longer than it is deep:  and its main front would face south.”

(14)  People from neighboring towns participating in the break with Athens in 432 BCE moved to Olynthus for protection against Athenian retribution.  The increase in population forced the Olynthians to establish a new district, which its excavators called North Hill.  The latitude was approximately that of New York City and Chicago, and the temperature often dropped below freezing in winter.  Approximately twenty-five hundred people lived there.

North Hill was a planned community from the beginning.  starting from scratch, the settlers could more easily implement the principal ideas of solar architecture.  The town planners situated the new district of Olynthus atop a sweeping plateau and built the streets perpendicular to each other, just as the Chinese had, with the main streets running east-west.  In this way, all the houses on a street could be built with a southern exposure, assuring solar heating and cooling for all residents - in keeping with the democratic ethos of the period.

(15-16)  Olynthian builders usually constructed houses in a blocklong row simultaneously.  The typical dwelling had six or more rooms on the ground floor and probably as many on the upper floor.  These houses were usually a standard square shape and shared a common foundation, roof, and walls with the other houses of the block.  The north wall was made of adobe bricks, which kept out the cold north winds of winter.  If this wall had any window openings, they were few in number and were kept tightly shuttered during cold weather.

The main living rooms of a house faced a portico supported by wooden pillars running parallel to the south side of the building.  The portico led to an open-air courtyard averaging 320 square feet, which was separated from the street by a low wall.  The courtyard provided a place where the occupants could enjoy the outdoors with maximum privacy;  and sunlight, the home’s primary source of illumination and winter heat, entered the house through the courtyard.

The house’s earthen floors and adobe walls absorbed and retained much of the solar energy that came in through its window openings facing the courtyard.  In the evening, when the indoor air began to cool, the floors and walls released the stored solar heat and helped warm the house.  To prevent cold drafts from coming through the open portico into the house, some builders constructed a low above wall between the pillars of the portico, parallel to the south wall of the house, allowing for the warming rays of sun in winter, while shutting out the cold drafts below.

The Olynthian solar house design worked well in summer and winter.  When the summer sun was almost directly overhead - from about ten in the morning until two in the afternoon - the portico’s eave shaded the openings of the main rooms of the house from the sun’s harsh rays.  In addition, the closed walls and contiguous dwelling barred the entrance of the morning and afternoon sun into the east and west sides of the homes.

(20)  The Architect Edwin D Thatcher studied the solar-heating capability of rooms facing south to determine the feasibility of indoor nude sunbathing during the winter.  To simulate actual conditions, Thatcher relied on weather data for a climate similar to that of ancient Greece and western Turkey.  He found that a naked person sitting in the sunny part of such a room would be relatively comfortable on 67 percent of the days during the colder months of November through March. The room used for this study was not as well protected as an average Greek living room, however - and of course the residents of the latter would have been clothed most of the time.  It seems safe to say that for most of the winter the sun would have adequately heated the main rooms of a Greek solar-oriented home during the daytime.  When solar heat was insufficient, charcoal braziers could be lit.

(26)  Windows of glass or transparent stone were a radical innovation.  Colored glass had been used for decorative items for almost three thousand years, but the Romans were the first - in the first century CE - to use transparent materials to make windows that would let in light but keep out rain, snow, and cold.

(34)  Faventius and Palladius recommended an ingenious way to make the floor of a sun-heated winter dining room an ideal absorber of solar energy.  The technique had been invented earlier by the Greeks and passed on in the writing of Vitruvius.  A shallow pit was to be dug under the floor and filled with broken earthenware or other rubble, and atop this a mixture of dark sand, ashes, and lime was spread.  This formed a black floor covering that easily absorbed solar heat, especially during the afternoon.  The mass of rubble underneath stored large amounts of heat and released it later in the evening when the room temperature cooled.  Faventius assured village owners that such floors would stay warm during the dining hour and “will please your servants, even those who go barefoot."

(37)  Confucius, writing of life three thousand years ago, stated that every son who lived at home attached a bronze burning mirror (a fu-sui, later called a yang-sui) to his belt when he dressed for the day.  He would also attach a fire plow, a wooden tool that relied on friction to generate sparks for ignition.  On days when the sun shone, the boy would focus the solar rays onto wood and start the family fire;  on overcast days he would take out his fire plow and rub its wood stick back and forth in a wooden groove to do the same.  The yang-sui was as ubiquitous in early China as are matches or lighters today.

(39)  The Greeks used burning mirrors to light the flame that marked the beginning of their Olympic games.  Plutarch, the famous Greek biographer who wrote in the second century CE, stated that when barbarians sacked the Temple of Vesta - the temple tended by the Vestal Virgins at Delphi - and extinguished their sacred flame it had to be relit with the “pure unpolluted flame from the sun.”  With “concave vessels of brass” the holy women directed the rays of the sun onto “light and dry matter,” which was immediately ignited, and their flame burned anew.

(100)  The Flemish salt manufacturers, Cecil’s [Queen Elizabeth I’s chief economic adviser] men explained, built long, shallow, watertight troughs that opened to the sea.  When operators wanted to fill them, windmills opened the floodgates to let in the incoming tide.  Once enough seawater had run in, the gates were shut.  Then solar heat went to work on the water, which evaporated after several days in the sun.  Only salt remained.  Workers shoveled the salt out and more water was let in to repeat the process.  The English praised the solar saltworks as “a great help for the sparing of firewood."

(103)  In 1887, the amount of sun-made salt surpassed the quantity manufactured with coal.  Solar manufacture of salt had grown to the point that visitors to Syracuse [NY], looking down from a hill in the city, could see a wide and shallow valley all covered with brown wooden troughs open to the sun.

(108)  Many had warned of an impending fuel crisis - warnings largely ignored by the public.  But the devastating effects of a series of coal strikes around the turn of the century, culminating in a massive strike in the winter of 1902, threw “a new and lurid light on [these predictions,]… for many a home has been fireless and many a factory has closed its doors,” according to Harper’s Weekly.  Charles Pope, author of Solar Heat, one of the first books on solar energy, agreed:  “The year of 1902 has added an awful chapter to the history of our need of a new source of heat and power,” he wrote.

(124)  [St Louis’ Willsie Sun Power Company solar power plant in 1904] As the sun warmed the water it traveled to a boiler, where ammonia was heated to produce a high-pressure vapor that drove a 6-horsepower engine.  Through condensation the ammonia returned to its liquid state and flowed back to the boiler.  The water circulated back to the collectors in a separate cycle.

The plant ran on sunless days and at night as well, when an auxiliary boiler powered by conventional fuel took over.  Newspapers in Saint Louis and New York announced the success of this twenty-four-hours-a-day solar-powered generator.

(125)  The solar-heated water produced during daytime operation [of Needles, CA in 1908] flowed from the collectors into an insulated tank.  The amount of water needed at the time went on to the boiler;  the rest was held in reserve.  After dark, when a valve to the storage tank was opened, hot water flowed out and passed over the pipes containing sulfur dioxide, and the engine could continue working.  Willsie could rightly claim, "This is the first sun power plant… ever operated at night with solar heat collected during the day."

(130)  He [Frank Shuman] first built a 1-foot-square hot box with blackened tubes inside that held ether, a low-boiling-point liquid.  The solar-heated ether vapor drove a tiny engine, the kind that was commonly sold in toy stores at the time for a dollar.  Shuman tried using a similar collector to run an engine somewhat larger than the first and was able to produce 1/8 horsepower.
NB:  1/8 hp is about the power a person can put out.

(139)  The Meadi plant could operate twenty-four hours a day.  A large insulated tank, similar to the one used by Willsie and Boyle, held excess hot water for use at night or during overcast or rainy days.  This enabled the engine to drive a conventional irrigation pump at all hours and in all weather, further increasing the efficiency of the plant.

Shuman set up a public demonstration of his sun-driven engine in late 1912.  But the boiler reached temperatures too close to the melting point of the zinc pipes.  Consequently the metal began to sag until, according to one observer, the pipes “finally hung down limply like wet rags.”  The trial run and to be postponed while the zinc pipes were replaced with cast iron.

(139-141)  Shuman’s solar engine compared very favorably to a conventional coal-fed plant.  True, the solar plant still had an enormous ratio of collecting surface to horsepower produced - exceeding 200 square feet per horsepower.  And the purchase price, at eighty-two hundred dollars, was double that of a conventional plant [but had a payback period of 4 years with coal at $15-40/ton]
NB:  25 square feet for 1/8 horsepower

(189)  Estimates of the total number of installations made in the Miami area between 1935 and 1941 vary widely - from twenty-five thousand to sixty thousand.  More than half the Miami population used solar-heated water by 1941 and 80 percent of the new homes built in Miami between 1937 and 1941 were solar equipped.

(190)  The federal government purchased some of the largest solar-heating systems, putting them in the officers’ quarters at the giant naval air station in Opa-Loka, outside of Miami, as well as in the Edison and Dixie Court housing projects, which had a combined population of 530.  In 1941, solar water heaters outsold conventional units in Miami by two to one.

(221)  All houses should be directed toward the sun, all of humanity should live in sunlight - Bernhard Christoph Faust [1824]

(223)  All Buildings of Men Should Face towards the Midday Sun (Zur Sonne nach Mittag sollten alle Haüser der Menschen gerichtet seyn) [book title]

(223-224)  “The sole aim of life is the correct orientation of buildings to the midday sun.  Everything else fades compared to the sun and its benefits - to receive the sun in its greatest abundance, the most important gift that God gave to man and animal."

(229)  [1826] Bavaria’s most respected technologist, Anton Camerloher, the royal Bavarian engineer first class, learned of Faust’s solar building principles through [Gustav] Vorherr [state architect for Bavaria, head of the state-run school of building arts, and publisher of the Monthly Journal for Building and Land Improvement].  After submitting these strategies to rigorous scientific analysis, he declared them “well founded” and enthusiastically joined Vorherr in his fight for their implementation in construction throughout the region.  Camerloher’s opinion on the Faustian doctrine greatly influenced King Joseph Maximilian to mandate implementation of Faust’s teaching in the construction of all new public and communal buildings in Upper Bavaria.  Several years later the Bavarian government published the basics of Faust’s solar building principles with the intent of guaranteeing that “all districts, police, and building departments in the Isarkreis [Upper Bavaria] will give these architectural ideas special attention and support.”  Other German States, such as Hessen and Prussia, followed suit.

(231)  Two municipalities lost to fire were reconstructed in line with Faust’s tenets - Schwaboisen in Bavaria and Palotsay in Hungary.

(235)  In 2009 the United Nations chose La Chau-de-Fonds as a World Heritage site.  The selection was made, according to the World Heritage Site web page, because of the “‘rationalist’ principles… adopted[,] which addressed the relationship between living conditions and ‘health.’  A town plan was developed in 1835 designed by one of Pestalozzi’s pupils (Charles-Henri Junod) and inspired by an ideal town called ‘Sonnenstadt,’ planned in 1824 by a Dr. Bernhard Christoph Faust.  Features included having most houses facing onto small gardens receiving the midday sun.”

This monument to Faust’s dream resonates with his exclamation written more than 150 years before the city’s selection as a World Heritage Site:  “Oh people, face your houses toward the midday sun to give yourselves and your children and their children until the tenth generation the warmth, life, power, joy and blessings of the sun."

(248)  One study cited by the panel [of the League of Nations] showed that a building which opened to the north needed 17 percent more heat during the winter than did a similar structure facing south.  Such findings led to the conclusion that proper siting could go a long way to holding down heating and ventilating costs for householders.

(248-249)  One of the largest and most sophisticated examples was the Swiss community of Neubuhl, now a district of Zurich.  Seven young architects organized Neubuhl as a cooperative housing project.  The two hundred apartments ranged from small bachelor residences to family dwellings with six rooms.  These units were apportioned among thirty-three separate structures perched on a mountain slope. Almost all the buildings faced south or slightly southeast and were spread far enough apart so that no building blocked another’s solar access during winter.  every unit received the same number of hours of sunlight in winter. [1930s?]

(266)  His [Keck] opportunity came in 1940, when he designed a house for an old friend, Howard Sloan, a Chicago real estate developer….  [Sloan] “The house was opened to the public in September as the Solar House.  On one Sunday we had 1,700 visitors.  The demand of the public was such that I subdivided 10 acres into 38 lots and opened it in April, 1941.  [Although] Hitler was overrunning countries in Europe, customers were becoming jittery, [and] prices were going up, houses sold faster than we could build them."

(296)  A solar-heating system there [Tucson, Arizona] could be expected to carry a much higher percentage of the heating load - especially if heating at night were not required.  Such was the case in the first solar-heated public building, Rose Elementary School, which was designed by Arthur Brown and built in 1948.

(299)  George Löf used another solar hot-air system, similar to the one he had developed in Boulder, to heat his newly built, ranch-style home in Denver, Colorado.  In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the engineering firm of Bridgers and Paxton built the first solar-heated office building in 1956.  This system cooled the building in summer.

(303)  [1873 - discovery of photovoltaic effect on selenium by Willoughby Smith]

(305-306)  [Charles Fritts] He spread a wide, thin layer of selenium onto a metal plate and covered it with a thin, semitransparent gold-leaf film.  This selenium module, Fritts reported, produced a current “that is continuous, constant, and of considerable force[,]… not only by exposure to sunlight, but also to dim diffuse daylight, and even to lamplight."

(330)  The photovoltaics industry also got its first significant opportunity to power land operations with the oil and gas industry during the mid-1970s.  Underground aquifers frequently contain salt water, which corrodes well casings and pipelines.
NB:  First non space applications for oil and gas warning bouys at sea, anti-corrosion on land.

(334)  In the fall of 1976, Hunts Mesa became the first solar-powered microwave repeater site in North America and one of the first in the world.

(354)  By 1977, fully 60 percent of California’s 250,000 pools were solar heated.

(386-387)  That Village Homes has not been replicated may be a result of timing.  As that neighborhood really started to take off, Ronald Reagan took office, and his administration’s dim view of solar energy still haunts us today.  An example of that administration’s anti solar bias is its reception of the document _Review of the Demonstration Program of Solar Heating and Cooling Technologies_, which arrived at the White House during Reagan’s inauguration.  The Department of Energy had paid the highly reputable consulting firm Arthur D. Little a quarter of a million dollars to complete the study.  The lead author did not consider the study controversial.  It outlined high expectations for what solar energy could accomplish if properly funded.  “The following day,” one of the members of the staff that produced the report recalled, “word came from the Reagan team:  ‘Do not release this report… copies are to be destroyed… no secret printings… no discussions.’”  And this was accompanied by a threat:  “If any word gets out, Arthur D. Little will not be compensated.”  The staff member added, “I had never witnessed anything so brutal.  There were no pretensions of free speech.  It was swift and ruthless.  One of the chilliest moments of my life.”  Under the Reagan administration, “solar bodies got decimated,” recalled Edgar DeMeo, director of photovoltaic research at the Electric Power Research Institute in the 1980s.  “Reagan dealt the renewable movement a crippling blow,” he added.  Doug Balcomb summed up the destruction brought about by Reagan:  “The president said in the 1980s, ‘The energy crisis, it’s been solved;  there wasn’t any problem left.’  So people weren’t concerned about it anymore, [since] people tend to follow that kind of a lead.  The few of us left working in the solar field in the 1980s were pretty lonely.  The momentum had evaporated."

(396)  In fact, the heat that such solar-energy systems [pool heaters and passive solar houses] harvest is far more compatible with house and pool heating than the energy that fossil fuels and nuclear power plants supply.  Very little energy is wasted, since the collection occurs on-site, doing away with the huge infrastructure required for supplying fossil-fuel and nuclear energy.  And when solar heating takes the place of electrical heating, it does away with the need to initially raise temperatures hundreds of degrees to run turbines, and the need to transport the resulting electricity hundreds, if not thousands, of miles in order to deliver the power to homes - which require a temperature increase of only 30 or 40 degrees, if not less, for household comfort.

Solar pool heating and solar architecture also demonstrate the power of aggregation.  each solar pool-heating system is small, but the combined heat produced by all such systems as of 2013 is equivalent to that produced by approximately five nuclear power plants.

(377)  “The highest average heat value of sunlight occurs about [the time of day] when it is most needed - at mid-day on the winter solstice,” and “a south wall receives almost _five_ times as much heat from the sun in winter as it does in summer” [Tod Neubauer’s emphasis in a study of natural heating and cooling of buildings from UC Davis]

(381)  He [Tod Neubauer] came up with one simple equation for success, a simple formula that Neubauer called the two-percent rule for finding the length of the required overhang on the south face:  multiply by .02 the height of the south-facing window(s) by the latitude.

(381-382)  The data collected and interpreted were translated into America’s first solar-energy ordinance, a reflection of Neubauer’s design ideas.  Journalist James Ridgeway succinctly explained the new ordinance:  “the basic idea… is that new housing built in Davis shall not experience an excessive heat gain in summer nor excessive heat loss in winter.”  It allowed builders two choices.  The first was a prescriptive path that stipulated a south orientation;  the majority of windows would be on the south side, and a minimum of windows would be on the east and west sides and shaded either by eaves, drapery, or vegetation.  The second path permitted more leeway as long as the building conformed to the designated heating and cooling loads set by the city.

(389)  Only subsidies in the form of tax credits, and the big jumps in oil prices in 1973 and 1979, kept the solar water-heater industry growing.  It grew from only twenty thousand solar water heaters installed during 1978 to nearly a million total by the end of 1983.

(390)  When the price of oil dropped in the mid-1980s, the Israeli government did not want people backsliding, as had happened in other parts of the world.  And so it required citizens to continue heating their water with the sun, by mandating the use of solar water heaters in buildings with more than four stories - in which the majority of Israelis live.  At the time of this writing, more than 90 percent of Israeli households own solar water heaters, making Israel the second-largest per capita user of such heaters.

(392)  Barbados is the third-largest per capita consumer of solar hot water.  In the 1930s, Florida solar water-heater companies exported their products to the Caribbean.  Some of these were sold in Barbados, but the Barbados solar water-heater story didn’t really get started until 1964….

Solar Dynamics’ new entry became the first solar water heater in the world to guarantee temperature performance adequate for all domestic-hot-water needs.

(395)  [Austria]  From the self-build groups emerged a national grassroots movement called the Renewable Energy Working Group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Erneuerbare Energie).  The working group set up information centers and workshops to inform the public about, and to teach them to build, solar water heaters.
Michael Ornetzeder, “Old Technology and Social Innovations.  Inside the Austrian Success Story on Solar Water Heaters,” Technology Analysis and Strategic Management 15, no 1 (2001)
Michael Ornetzeder and Harald Rohracher, “User Led Innovations and Participation Processes:  Lessons for Sustainable Energy Technologies,” Energy Policy 34, no 2 (2006)

(397-398)  The success of Ærø Island [Denmark] so impressed all of Europe that the European Union decided to fund the doubling of the collector area of the Marstal solar farm, add to it a boiler that would be heated by locally grown willow chips, and a reservoir to hold the excess solar heat collected in summer for winter use.  It would demonstrate to the world the efficacy of district heating solely with renewable energy.

(402)  The use of photovoltaics for individual remote homes in the developing world was pioneered by the French in Tahiti.  Ironically, it was the French Atomic Energy Commission that initiated the program in 1978.  The agency’s nuclear testing in Polynesia had not endeared it or the French government to the Polynesian people.  Public opinion had to be shored up.

(405)  With 2 percent of its rural populace relying on solar power for their electricity, Kenya became the first country where more people plug into the sun than into the national rural electrification program.  What is more amazing is that photovoltaics’ ascendency occurred without government help.

(411)  Donald Osborn, formerly director of alternative-energy programs at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, in California, outlined other advantages of on-site photovoltaic electrical generation, for both the consumer and the utilities.  “You reduce the electricity lost through long-distance transmission,” Osborn stated, which runs about 30 percent on the best-maintained lines.  Structures with their own photovoltaic plants decrease the flow of electricity through distribution lines at substation transformers, “thereby extending the transformers’ lives.”  “And for a summer-daytime-peaking utility,” Osborn added, “you can offset the load on these systems when the demand for electricity would be greatest,” helping to eliminate “brownouts in the summer and early fall.”  On-site photovoltaic-generated electricity also makes renewable energy economically more attractive than power generated by a large solar electric plant, because it “competes at the retail level rather than at the wholesale level” with other producers of electricity.

(440)  Few realize the value of solar energy today.  The value of the global photovoltaic market alone climbed to over $82 billion in 2010.

(442)  Oil received thirty times more in subsidies from the federal government than solar between 1950 and 2010.  The International Energy Agency Agency reported that in 2012 alone thirty-seven governments spent more than $523 billion subsidizing fossil fuels while assisting renewables with almost one-sixth the funding.

(446)  In California, the state’s revised Title 24 building standards for 2013 will also move solar further into the mainstream.  The new code requires that by 2020 all new residential housing and by 2030 all commercial buildings produce as much energy as they consume, a designation called net-zero energy.  The new building rules require photovoltaics on all rooftops.

To meet the demand for net-zero energy, many architects are combining older solar technologies - solar architecture and solar water heaters - with the newest, photovoltaics.  Solar  pioneer Steve Strong built the first net-zero-energy house back in 1979 by using such a strategy.  Back then, people called this type of structure “an energy independent house.”

(449)  But a new German program provides incentives for homeowners to combine photovoltaics with electricity storage, allowing homes to actually cut themselves from the grid.  The program will reduce the twenty-year cost of a PV system with storage to 10 percent less than one without.  Once again, Germany leads the way in photovoltaics, this time toward autonomous living with solar electricity.

(458)  Robert James Forbes, _Studies in Ancient Technologies_ (Leiden, Holland:  Brill, 1964)
James Ring, “Windows, Baths, and Solar Energy,” American Journal of Archaeology, no 4 (1996)

(487)  Michael Ornetzeder, “Old Technology and Social Innovations.  Inside the Austrian Success Story on Solar Water Heaters,”  Technology Analysis and Strategic Management 15, no 1 (2001)
Michael Ornetzeder and Harold Rohracher, “User Led Innovations and Participation Processes:  Lessons for Sustainable Energy tEchnologies,”  Energy Policy 34, no 2 (2006)

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Design for Limited Attention Spans: 9 Minutes for Energy

Opower (http://opower.com) designs customer engagement programs for more than 90 partners in the utility industry.  They serve millions of domestic and commercial customers on three continents, North America, Europe, and Asia, providing energy efficiency services through customer engagement, helping them to understand and manage their energy use.  This results in higher levels of energy efficiency, increased demand response, and improved grid resilience.

Since "The average person thinks about energy use for only nine minutes per year,” as Deena Rosen, Senior Director of User Experience for Opower said at GreenTechMedia's Soft Grid conference (http://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/the-soft-grid-2014) on 9/10/14, Opower has to design with limited attention spans in mind.  [more at GreenTechMedia https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/opowers-5-principles-of-how-to-design-for-energy-customers

Design rules for limited attention spans:

Always pair data with insight - Opower uses a utility bill format that compares your usage to your neighbors and gives you usable feedback on your energy use.  In some areas, a little star or two at the bottom of the bill for high efficiency customers kept them improving.

Personalize it

Don’t make people work to understand the ideas involved.

Use familiar mental models

Always lead to action - create triggers for the right moments:  changing the label on the can from Trash to Landfill can affect a decision "at that key point where I'm about to throw something away. This is behavioral design,” Deena Rosen said.  "At Opower, we've become experts in behavioral design for energy users.”

Aim for a long relationship - don’t annoy the customer and make communications two-way.

Build for everyone - "Energy users are not a tidy, well-defined group," said Rosen, "35 percent are renters that don't have complete control over the building they live in.”  Know the audience and the channels available:  70% are not digitally available, 8% of men are colorblind and can't read charts by color.

Assume people don’t care.  Opower bears the "burden of relevance: boring until proven otherwise.” Their utility bills provide the raw data within familiar mental models - comparison to average energy use, record of our own use over time, proportions of use devoted to heating, cooling, cooking, refrigeration, plug loads…

Design for the actual behavior people exhibit, "nudge" people in the right direction at the right time in an effective way. 

I wonder how people can apply these proven ideas on behavioral design to climate change, globally, locally, personally, and immediately. 

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Smart Phones to Tricorders

The Tricorder XPrize (http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org) is a $10 million contest 

"to bring healthcare to the palm of your hand.
Imagine a portable, wireless device in the palm of your hand that monitors and diagnoses your health conditions. That’s the technology envisioned by this competition, and it will allow unprecedented access to personal health metrics."

22 teams have paid the $5000 entry fee, 10 finalists will be chosen, up to 10 models will be tested by consumers May-October 2015, and the winning entry will be announced by December 2015.

One of the entries is Scanadu which seems to have a “$150 tricorder" already on the market 

"The Scanadu SCOUT is incredibly easy to use--just raise the handheld device (connected by Bluetooth to a smartphone) to your temple, and wait 10 seconds for it to scan your vital signs, including temperature, ECG, SPO2, heart rate, breathing rate, and pulse transit time (that helps measure blood pressure). 'It lets the consumer explore all the diagnostic possibilities of an emergency room,' explains co-founder Walter De Brouwer, a Belgian futurist and entrepreneur who first prototyped a backpack-sized tricorder-like device in the late 1990s.”

University of Florida’s wireless and remote vital signs monitoring system may be available (for pets) as early as 2016:
http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2014/01/star-trek-for-animals-a-wireless-medical-monitor-for-your-pet.html

Another smart phone environmental monitoring system on the market now is Sensordrone, a successful Kickstarter project (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/453951341/sensordrone-the-6th-sense-of-your-smartphoneand-be):
https://stacksocial.com/sales/sensordrone-bluetooth-sensor-measure-your-world-with-11-sensors-in-one

"Packing more than 11 sensors into one tiny package, Sensordrone turns your smartphone into a carbon monoxide detector, non-contact thermometer, gas leak detector, lux meter, weather station, diagnostic tool & more.

Sensordrone is an open platform for a variety of sensors and Bluetooth peripheral device apps with 11 Android apps available now for free.

Sensordrone Video:
http://youtu.be/J-H12cDI6tk



SafeCast, the people who built the bGeigie Geiger counter that enables citizens' monitoring of radiation in Japan  since the destruction of the Fukushima nuclear reactors, are now expanding their work to other environmental issues:  http://blog.safecast.org

Jack Andraka, the HS student who developed a “cheap, accurate" pancreatic cancer test a year or so ago, has been working with a group of International Science and Engineering Fair students on 

"a handheld device (known as a raman spectrometer) that can be used to detect explosives, environmental contaminants, and cancer in the human body. Today, raman spectrometers are extremely delicate, can be as large as a small car, and cost up to $100,000. Andraka’s model costs $15 and is the size of a cell phone."
These hand-held raman spectrometers are already in industrial use:

RAPIDID fits in the palm of your hand yet delivers fast, highly accurate results wherever and whenever testing is needed. The compact Raman spectrometer addresses the growing need for non-destructive analysis of raw, intermediate and finished products in a range of industrial areas.
The rugged design, clear LED display and push button control makes RAPIDID suitable for the busiest operations. Material identification is carried out by comparing the unique molecular fingerprint to that of known reference materials stored in a pre-loaded spectral library. Additional reference materials can be added in less than a minute.


Thermo Scientific TruScan is a rugged, handheld, lightweight Raman system for rapid raw material verification. Non-destructive point-and-shoot operation enables verification through sealed packaging to minimize risk of exposure and contamination. Its embedded analysis software delivers a PASS/FAIL decision verifying the identity of a sample typically within 30 seconds.

Spectroscopic analysis of just about anything in the palm of your hand is not the future.  It's now.


Previously
Methane Cell Phone Sniffers

Saturday, June 07, 2014

It Ain't How Much Energy We Generate, It's How Much We "Reject" (for the USA at least)

Every year, I look at the US annual energy budget chart and figure out a rough percentage of how energy efficient our economy is, the percentages of "useful" and "rejected" energy (the terms Lawrence Livermore National Labs uses).  Recently, I went back and looked at each year from 1991 to 2013 to see what the trends have been.  

Three things stand out: we "reject" or waste over half the energy we produce;  we haven't improved that efficiency over the last 22 or 23 years;  and we have spent the last 15 years or so at an energy plateau between 95 and 100 quadrillion btu's.

At some point, I might take a look at the growth rates of the economy since 1999 till now to get an idea at how US economic production fares under a relatively steady state energy regime.
 
1991 - 81 quads 
                         30.3 useful [37.40%]
                                                         44.4 rejected [54.81%]
1992 - 82 quads 
                         31.6 useful [39.01%]
                                                         44.4 rejected [54.81%]

1993 - 84 quads 
                         31 useful [36.90%]
                                                        46.9 rejected [55.83%]
1994 - 86.25 quads 
                        31.37 useful [36.37%]
                                                        47.67 rejected [55.269%]
1995 - 90.99 quads 
                        34.4057 useful [37.81%]
                                                        49.47 rejected [54.37%]

1996 - 93.83 quads 
                        35.44 useful [37.77%]
                                                         50.99 rejected [54.34%]

1997 - 93.83 quads 
                        35.7327 useful [38.08%]
                                                         51.8455 rejected [55.25%]

1998 - 94.78 quads 
                        34.3109 useful [35.14%]
                                                         52.0351 rejected [54.90%]

1999 - 97 quads 
                        36.8 useful [37.93%]
                                                         53.2 rejected [54.84%]

2000 - 98.5 quads 
                        34.3 useful [34.82%]
                                                         57.8 rejected [58.68%]

2001 - 97 quads 
                        35 useful [36.08%]
                                                         55.9 rejected [57.62%]

2002 - 97.8 quads 
                       42.40 useful [43.35%]
                                                          55.36 rejected [56.60%]

2003 - 98.1 quads 
                       42.65 useful [43.47%]
                                                          55.48 rejected [56.55%]

2004 - 100.2 quads
                         43.43 useful [43.34%]
                                                          56.75 rejected [56.63%]

2005 - 100.4 quads 
                         42.93 useful [42.75%]
                                                          57.47 rejected [57.24%]

2006 - 99.8 quads 
                        42.32 useful [42.40%]
                                                         57.43 rejected [57.54%]

2007 - 101.5 quads 
                         43.04 useful [42.40%]
                                                          58.47 rejected [57.60%]

2008 - 99.2 quads 
                       42.15 useful [42.48%]
                                                        57.07 rejected [57.53%]

2009 - 94.6 quads 
                       39.97 useful [42.25%]
                                                        54.64 rejected [57.75%]

2010 - 98 quads 
                     41.88 useful [42.73%]
                                                      56.13 rejected [57.27%]

2011 - 97.3 quads 
                       41.7 useful [42.85%]
                                                      55.6 rejected [57.14%]

2012 - 95.1 quads 
                       37 useful [38.90%]
                                                    58.1 rejected [61.09%]

2013 - 97.4 quads 
                     38.4 useful [39.42%]
                                                    59.0 rejected [60.57%]

Data from https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/archive.html#energy_archive
More data at the Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Review page here:
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm

Monday, May 26, 2014

Sun Money

Solar is power and currency not only as energy, electricity, heat but also as politics,  economics, and sociology.  Solar energy is, by definition, local production, swadeshi, what Gandhi called the "heart of satyagraha," soul force, non-violent action.

Gandhi would spin for an hour each day, usually producing a hundred yards of thread, and helped develop a simple spinning wheel (charkha) that allowed many to do the same. He believed that spinning was the foundation of non-violence. I believe this type of practical labor has to be the core of any sustainable ecological action.


We need a solar swadeshi, an ecological practice on a daily basis that allows us to live within our solar income. Gandhi used the charkha, the spinning wheel. What would be an ecological charkha, a solar charkha?
from http://solarray.blogspot.com/2005/05/solar-swadeshi-hand-made-electricity.html

Could we do with electricity what Gandhi did with cloth, at least for emergencies and disasters? Can hand-made electricity, 21st century khadi cloth, provide real electrical power to the people and a survival level of energy independence and autonomy?
from http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/11/10/919251/-Personal-Power-Production-160-Solar-from-Civil-Defense-to-Swadeshi

Here are some examples where solar energy is building economies that are closer to the practices of a Gandhian economics, a non-violent economics, a solar swadeshi, a kind of sun money.

Grameen Shakti [Village Energy] of Bangladesh
http://www.gshakti.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=62

GS [Grameen Shakti] is one of the largest and fastest growing rural based renewable energy companies in the world. GS is also promoting Small Solar Home System to reach low income rural households.

SHSs can be used to light up homes, shops, fishing boats etc. It can also be used to charge cellular phones, run televisions, radios and cassette players. SHSs have become increasingly popular among users because they present an attractive alternative to conventional electricity such as no monthly bills, no fuel cost, very little repair, maintenance costs, easy to install any where etc.
GS installed SHSs have made a positive impact on the rural people. GS has introduced micro-utility model in order to reach the poorer people who cannot afford a SHS individually. Another successful GS venture is Polli Phone which allows people is off grid areas the facilities of telecommunication through SHS powered mobile phones.
GS has developed an effective strategy for reaching people in remote and rural areas with solar PV technology. It involves:
Soft credit through installments which makes SHSs affordable
Advocacy and Promotion
Community involvement and social acceptance
Effective after sales service
Blending Technology with Market Forces

More on Grameen Shakti at
http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/green-energy-for-billion-poor.html

-------

ReadyPay
http://www.fenixintl.com/products/
ReadyPay is our patent-pending financial platform that allows customers to pay-to-own Fenix solar energy systems over time. Engineered to integrate with any mobile money system, ReadyPay enables customers to make payments from a mobile phone and receive a secure code to unlock access to solar power until another payment is due.

From payment history, we are building a massive dataset to create a next generation credit score for the 2.2 billion unbanked adults in emerging markets (Source: McKinsey).

Launched in Uganda in partnership with Africa’s largest telecom MTN, ReadyPay Solar is available now for as little $0.39 per day.


---------

SolarCoin
http://solarcoin.org

Solar currency.
SolarCoin is a digital currency incentivizing solar electricity. Spend it, trade it, exchange it.
Solar energy incentive.
SolarCoin represents one MWh of solar energy generated. SolarCoin rewards solar electricity generators both large and small.
A group effort.
Use Solarcoin. Join the solar power economy. SolarCoin holders help produce 97,500 TWh. 99% of SolarCoins to be distributed to solar energy generators over 40 years.

SolarCoin is an alternative digital currency. SolarCoin is backed by two forms of proof of work. One is the traditional cryptographic proof of work associated with digital currency.  Another proof of work is a 3rd party verified meter reading. SolarCoin is equitably distributed using both of these proofs of work as a means to reward solar energy generation.
Solar Coin Helps the Environment
Solar energy, unlike fossil fuels, does not place excess heat or carbon into the atmosphere. The long term intent is to provide an incentive to produce more solar electricity globally over the next 40 years by rewarding the generators of solar electricity.  SolarCoin is intended to shift the levelized cost of energy (LOCE). Source:solarcoin wiki
Technical details relating to SolarCoin are on Github.com/solarcoin

----------

Richard Komp has been seeding solar cottage industry around the world for over thirty years.  Here is news of his latest project in Liberia.
http://www.mainesolar.org/Komp.html

A group of Liberians living in the Boston area asked me to go to Liberia to give a three part course on solar energy. I have just finished the first part of the course at the Monrovian Vocational Training Center for the 27 students who will be part of a new solar corporation they are now planning. In the first part of the course, the students made small solar cell phone chargers, then graduated to bigger 15 watt PV modules that can be used to light up small squatter huts and rural grass huts. We ourselves used these modules to recharge a 12 volt deep=cycle battery so we would have continuous power to run our tools, since the Center rarely had electricity.

We spent the second week on solar thermal systems, making a solar box cooker big enough to “cook” the large PV modules we made next. We managed to cook both a 65 watt and a custom 75 watt module for a solar water pump we installed, at the same time in the solar oven (a first for cooking two at once).

-----------

Maasai Stoves and Solar (http://internationalcollaborative.org) installs locally made, more efficient cookstoves and chimneys in Maasai homes, reducing the time and material needed for cooking and providing profound health benefits for women and children.

Maasai Stoves & Solar Project addresses profound international health challenges affecting millions.

Read about our work, reducing indoor smoke in the homes of pastoral people in the developing world, caused by the use of indoor cooking fires.
We replace the fires with our stove and chimney that produces ninety percent less smoke, benefitting families and the environment.
Help us achieve these goals
Healthier indoor air quality
Improved health
Women’s empowerment
Locally-built solutions
Environmental conservation
Mitigating climate change

We are well on our way to completing the requirements for carbon credit certification. Part of the process includes baseline surveys and measurement of the wood savings of our stove directly and by efficiency studies, performed by an outside authority.


------------

There is a way you can look at the world that brings energy, money, and information into a single focus where energetic calories, cash and credit, bits and data all melt one into the other and back again.  All these  enterprises are explorations into that world.

Monday, January 06, 2014

Sustainable Development and Climate Change: 2 Free Online Courses

I'd like to participate in an ongoing on and off line brainstorm using Buckminster Fuller's World Game design criteria, "How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?" and one of Bill McDonough's Ecological Design Principles, "Use only available solar income."

Here are some free resources that are edging, gingerly, towards that possibility.
"Age of Sustainable Development (https://www.coursera.org/course/susdev ) gives students an understanding of the key challenges and pathways to sustainable development - that is, economic development that is also socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable."

free 14 week course taught by Jeffrey Sachs
starting January 21

Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided (https://www.coursera.org/course/warmerworld )
"It is now becoming clear that without necessary climate action, the world may become 4°C warmer by the end of this century. As this threatens to roll back decades of development progress, this is a ‘make or break’ point. This course presents the most recent scientific evidence as well as some of the opportunities for urgent action."


free World Bank MOOC [Massive Open Online Course] on climate change
starting January 27


e4Dev, Energy for Development, a student group at MIT is teaching a 4 day course this week (January 7-10, 2014) "Exploring the intersection of energy and human development, Racing Towards Universal Energy Access: Why the Next 2 Billion Users Matter (more than you think).  Eventually, they want to produce their own online course as well but their Fall lectures are already available as videos online:

Prospects for Grid-Connected PV in Kenya
http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/e4dev/videos/26727-amy-rose-esd_e4dev-9-26-13

Technical and Economic Analysis of PV DC Microgrids
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/26728-andrew-campanella-sdm-13-e4dev-10-3-13

Reliable Alternative Energy Options for Access:  Lessons from China's Countryside
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/26729-michael-davidson-tpp-e4dev-10-10-13

Power Africa
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/26730-power-africa-q-a-e4dev-10-17-13

Electrifying Rural India with Solar Microgrids:  Adoption and Impact
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/26731-professor-johannes-urpelainen-columbia-univ-e4dev-10-31-13

Water Desalination:  Prospects for Energy and Demand
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/26732-david-cohen-tanugi-ms-e-e4dev-11-7-13



Previously http://solarray.blogspot.com/2013/12/universal-energy-access-iap-at-mit-with.html



Sunday, January 05, 2014

Toilets, Stoves, and Solar

Susan Murcott, Bob Lange, and Richard Komp are three grassroots environmental activists who are changing lives all around the world.  Susan is a water researcher whose work on simple water filters has benefitted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Ghana.  Her latest project is building a block of toilets for a school in a village in Ghana, the second project of this kind she has been involved with.  Bob is a physics professor who has been doing science education in Africa for many years, an activity that morphed into installing small solar systems for villages in Tanzania and now into designing, building, and installing efficient cookstoves with the Maasai people. This year, his work is expanding into Uganda.  Richard is a solar expert who has worked on everything from the physics of solar electricity to building solar stoves from scrap.   He has been teaching people all around the world how to do solar as a cottage industry for about three decades now.  His latest idea is to outfit a sailboat as a floating solar workshop that can teach people throughout the Caribbean how to better their lives with simple solar technologies. You can read his reports on his international work at http://www.mainesolar.org/Komp.html

I consider myself immensely privileged to know all three of these remarkable and remarkably effective people.

Toilets
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/toilets-for-schools-improving-sanitation-in-ghana/x/5309964
"We are raising money to construct a toilet block for a school in the village of Gbalahi in Ghana."  They need about another $7000 in the next 40 days or so.

Roughly a billion people worldwide live without safe drinking water and each year millions are sickened by waterborne diseases, a condition CEE Senior Lecturer Susan Murcott hopes to improve through dissemination of household drinking water treatment and safe storage systems, a cluster of innovative technologies she has helped invent and promote: one used by about 800,000 people in Guatemala; another that removes pathogens and clarifies turbidity in Ghanaian drinking water used by over 100,000 people; and a third, a filter sold in Nepal to screen out arsenic and bacteria, which has so far reached 350,000 people. All three projects make use of locally available materials and the local workforce to create jobs in manufacturing and sales. Many CEE Masters of Engineering students, School of Engineering, DUSP and Sloan students have worked with Murcott on these projects, which were showcased at the Expo Bid Symposium in October in Dubai and will be honored during the World Expo 2020 in Dubai.Read a related story: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/long-haul-to-bring-clean-water-to-developing-nations-1210.htmlSee also: http://globalwater.mit.edu

Stoves 
http://internationalcollaborative.org
Read about our work, reducing indoor smoke in the homes of pastoral people in the developing world, caused by the use of indoor cooking fires.We replace the fires with our stove and chimney that produces ninety percent less smoke, benefitting families and the environment.

Solar
Floating Solar Workshop SailboatProject for the Miskito Coast in NicaraguaBy Richard Komp, Director - Skyheat Associates
In December I will be going to the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua for the third short solar course I will teach there. This time I will be taking a small sailboat on an overnight trip to get to the remote workshop site.
Our biggest concern is the pirates and drug smugglers in this part of the Caribbean but Nicaragua is currently pretty free of these marauders since the Sandinista government has taken control.
The Donated SailboatWhat I am looking for is a boat that is between 40 and 50 feet long that could be donated by somebody or a corporation. Skyheat Associates is a 501(c)(3) Public Charity and the donation would be tax deductible. We are not fussy about the condition or type of boat but our criteria are floating and able to be fixed up well enough to get from Florida to the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua, where it can be fixed up better and converted to the floating workshop center. It would be good if the boat had a draft of 4 feet or less since many of the places we will be visiting have shallow inlets or bays.
The Grupo Fenix http://grupofenix.org/ in Nicaragua already works in that part of the country and we have good contacts along the Miskito Coast to have this refurbishing work done properly.
Crowdsourcing to pay for the ProjectThis project will take quite a bit of money, both for outfitting the boat and for the cost of all this traveling around the Caribbean. People have suggested that we try raising the money on the Internet and I think I will ask the next person who suggests this to go ahead and do it. I will give that person or group all the information where they can send the check when they are successful.
We are looking to raise $30,000 in total for the project. Most of the places where the floating center will be giving workshops are occupied by 3rd World people who live on less than $2 a day and the workshops will be free for them; but the project will have quite a few expenses for living costs and workshop materials. Of course places like Akumal in Mexico have a lot of student volunteers from the 1st World who can pay for the workshop, so some of the boat’s expenses will be paid that way; but in general, the project will need donated funds to operate properly. Some of the volunteers who wish to take part in this project may also have money to pay their own way. 
I already have lots of people who have volunteered to help me sail around the Caribbean; but we will need volunteers to help raise money and work on the sailboat. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested. We are now setting up a Crowdsourcing website and will send more information when the donation system is running. The plan includes the opportunity to attend one of the solar workshops or sail on the boat as part of the bonus for a larger donation
Contact Information, For more information or help: Richard Komp, PhD, Director Skyheat Associates,PO Box 184, Harrington ME 04643 207-497-2204, 207- 356-0225 cell sunwatt@juno.comwww.mainesolar.org

Monday, December 23, 2013

Universal Energy Access: IAP at MIT with e4Dev

e4Dev, a student group at MIT interested in Energy for Development, is organizing a four day course on
"Exploring the intersection of energy and human development
Racing Towards Universal Energy Access:
Why the Next 2 Billion Users Matter (more than you think)"

I wonder if they'll use Buckminster Fuller's World Game design criteria, "How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?" or one of Bill McDonough's Ecological Design Principles, Use only available solar income.

e4Dev, if they wanted to, might be able to do all or part of the course as a webinar or a MOOC [Massive Open Online Course]. After all, they do have a Ustream channel (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/e4dev) and MIT is part of EdX (https://www.edx.org/school/mitx).

----------------------

"More than 1.5 billion people lack access to basic energy services. This is not inherently problematic as access to energy is not in and of itself a goal of development. Energy access has, however, been identified as a potentially important component in enabling many essential quality of life improvements.

"In a four-day series of lectures, case studies, interactive activities, and the development of an energy access project evaluation strategy, students participating in this course will be exposed to the challenges and opportunities in energy access for the developing world with possibility of continuing work on projects into the Spring if they choose.

"Led and facilitated by Prof. Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, MIT Energy Initiative Deputy Director Rob Stoner, and a variety of guest speakers, lectures will provide working knowledge of:
The current state of energy access (and what it means to provide access);
The connection between energy access and various aspects of human development work; and
Financing mechanisms and business models for energy projects in the developing world

"The course listing is now available on the the IAP 2014 site, and a more detailed description of each day can be found on the MIT Energy Initiative calendar (http://mitei.mit.edu/calendar).

"DETAILS
Date: Tuesday, January 7 – Friday, January 10
Time: 9:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Building E17, Room 128 (E17-128), 40 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139"

More information at http://18.9.62.56/calendar/e4dev-introduction-energy-and-human-development-session-2-energy-and-human-development

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Solar Christmas Present

Wakawaka (http://us.waka-waka.com) makes a
super efficient, sustainable, lightweight, sturdy and compact solar phone charger and lamp. It enables you to charge virtually any type of (smart)phone or small electronic device within just a few hours and will provide you with up to 80 hours of safe light.


They are offering a buy one/give one program which provides their solar lights and chargers to Syrian refugees:
http://www.solarforsyria.org/en/#.UrN0iaWugcs

Perhaps a way to promote the Christmas spirit of peace on Earth and goodwill to all.  (Bah Humbug!)

hat tip to http://inhabitat.com

Here are some other solar Christmas ideas:
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-solar-christmas.html

Monday, October 28, 2013

Pattern Language for an Urban Agriculture System

A series of patterns from _A Pattern Language_ (Christopher Alexander et alia, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1977) for designing an urban agriculture system, from City Country Fingers to Paving With Cracks Between the Stones:

3.  City Country Fingers
4.  Agricultural Valleys
7.  The Countryside
8.  Mosaic of Subcultures
12.  Community of 7000
15.  Neighborhood Boundaries
19.  Web of Shopping
25.  Access to Water
32.  Shopping Street
41.  Work Community
46.  Market of Many Shops
51.  Green Streets
60.  Accessible Green
61.  Small Public Square
64.  Pools and Streams
67.  Common Land
69.  Public Outdoor Room
73.  Adventure Playground
80.  Self-Governing Workshops and Offices
88.  Street Cafe
89.  Corner Grocery
97.  Shielded Parking
100.  Pedestrian Street
105.  South Facing Outdoors
106.  Positive Outdoor Space
111.  Half-Hidden Garden
114.  Hierarchy of Open Space
118.  Roof Garden
119.  Arcades
127.  Intimacy Gradient
134.  Zen View
139.  Farmhouse Kitchen
161.  Sunny Place
163.  Outdoor Room
170.  Fruit Trees
171.  Tree Places
172.  Garden Growing Wild
173.  Garden Wall
174.  Trellised Walk
175.  Greenhouse
176.  Garden Seat
177.  Vegetable Garden
178.  Compost
236.  Windows Which Open Wide
242.  Front Door Bench
245.  Raised Flowers
246.  Climbing Plants
247.  Paving With Cracks Between the Stones

Sunday, September 01, 2013

Canal Restorer to River Restorer?




This greenhouse at the former historic Fisherville Mill in South Grafton, Massachusetts, sits on the banks of a canal by the Blackstone River.  It is cleaning stormwater runoff and water contaminated by #6 fuel oil, also known as Bunker C oil, which leaked from underground tanks.  At the end of the process, 95% of the hydrocarbons are removed without the application of chemicals, using only ecological design.

The Blackstone River can rightfully claim to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the USA as in 1790, Samuel Slater built the first water-powered spinning mill in America for Moses Brown, a founder of Brown University, in Pawtucket, RI using the Blackstone River as a power source.  By October 7, 1828, the Blackstone Canal from Providence, RI to Worcester, MA was completed and became the original industrial corridor of the United States.  Some say the Blackstone was the hardest working river of 19th century America with its water powering factories all along its length.

Perhaps now it will become an example of 21st century American technology that uses ecological systems thinking to clean up the wastes industrial development has left in its wake.


500 to 1000 gallons of water is pumped each day from the bottom of the canal through a filter which was designed to trap particulates and has, over time, developed its own ecosystem that begins to process the pollutants.  Soon samples will be taken of the filter layers to see what organisms are present and thriving in the presence of such contaminants.


The water is then distributed to the black boxes you can see on the right of the greenhouse which contain mushrooms and other organisms.  These continue to filter the water and break down the hydrocarbons and other complex compounds as the mushroom cultures and other organisms feed.


From the mushroom boxes the water goes into a series of six 700 gallon tanks, each of which is a separate ecology with plants, animals and microbes that continue to break down pollutants and contaminants into their constituent parts.  The water gets cleaner and cleaner from one tank to the next until it can support fish and snails and other more complex lifeforms.


The plants floating on top of the tanks are also part of the process with the roots serving as habitat for many different organisms, increasing enormously the active surface area for biological activity, breaking down more compounds into nutrients that feed the leaves, flowers, and fruits.


After passing through the greenhouse, the water is then returned to the canal through an artificial marsh, a floating canal restorer, that continues the process of biological digestion of hydrocarbon pollutants.  The marsh also takes water directly from the bottom filter in a separate cycle, cleaning it as it recirculates back into the canal.


it is the belief of the designer of this system, John Todd, that not only does this system clean the water it filters but that it also distributes micro-organisms that can help clean water downstream.  He suspects that if such a system were to operate over years, it would begin restoring the waters of the canal and the Blackstone River, a result of this experiment which began last year that he will be testing for soon.


John envisions a canal with a continuous band of floating restorers cleaning the contamination and pollution of over two centuries of industrial waste, returning the canal and the Blackstone River to pristine condition.  

John has completed projects similar to this before.  You can read about his Urban Municipal Canal Restorer in Fuzhou, China here [pdf alert]:
http://toddecological.com/clients/PDFs/100623.casestudy.baima.pdf

These are the ecological design principles John Todd uses in building his systems.  Every time I read them, I learn something new.

1.  Geological and mineral diversity must be present to evolve the biological responsiveness of rich soils.
2.  Nutrient reservoirs are essential to keep such essentials as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium available for the plants.
3.  Steep gradients between subcomponents must be engineered into the system to enable the biological elements to evolve rapidly to assist in the breakdown of toxic materials.
4.  High rates of exchange must be created by maximizing surface areas that house the bacteria that determine the metabolism of the system and facilitate treatment.
5. Periodic and random pulsed exchanges improve performance.  Just as random perturbations foster resilience in nature, in living technologies altering water flow creates self-organization in the system.
6.  Cellular design is the structural model as it is in nature where cells are the organizing unit.  Expansion of the system should also use a cellular model, as in increasing the number of tanks.
7.  A law of the minimum must be incorporated.  At least three ecosystems such as a marsh, a pond, and a terrestrial area are needed to perform the assigned function and maintain overall stability.
8. Microbial communities must be introduced periodically from the natural world to maintain diversity and facilitate evolutionary processes.
9.  Photosynthetic foundations are essential as oxygen-producing plants foster ecosystems that require less energy, aeration, and chemical management.
10.  Phylogenetic diversity must be encouraged as a range of aquatic animals from the unicellular to snails to fish are as essential to the evolution and self-maintenance of the system as the plants.
11.  Sequenced and repeated seedings are part of maintenance as a self-contained system cannot be isolated but must be interlinked through gaseous, nutrient, mineral, and biological pathways to the external environment.
12.  Ecological design should reflect the macrocosmos in the microcosmos, representing the natural world miniaturized and reflecting its proportions, as in terrestrial to oceanic and aquatic areas.

from _A Safe and Sustainable World:  The Promise of Ecological Design_ by Nancy Jack Todd
Washington:  Island Press, 2005
ISBN 1-55963-778-1

More information at
Todd Ecological  http://www.toddecological.com
Clark University Living Systems Laboratory  https://wordpress.clarku.edu/fisherville/
CTI Micro-Reduction Technologies, LLC  http://ctigreenpower.com/

By working with Nature, we can create miracles.

The pictures of the Fisherville Canal Restorer and Greenhouse were taken on a tour with the Ecological Landscaping Association (http://www.ecolandscaping.org) on Tuesday, August 6. 2013.

Previously
The Next Industrial Revolution Is Ecological
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/02/1165557/-The-Next-Industrial-Revolution-Is-Ecological
Ecological Restoration:  Cleaning the Fisherville Mill Canal
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/21/1112491/-Ecological-Restoration-Cleaning-the-Fisherville-Mill-Canal
Providential Experimentation
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/26/1190128/-Providential-Experimentation
The Challenge of Appalachia:  Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/05/14/515882/-The-Challenge-of-Appalachia-Comprehensive-Design-for-a-Carbon-Neutral-World
From Coal to a Carbon Neutral World:  Ecological Design for Appalachia
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/07/01/543978/-From-Coal-to-a-Carbon-Neutral-World-160-Ecological-Design-for-Appalachia

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Sixpack of Solar: How Many Solar Devices Can You Make from a Plastic Bottle?

How Many Solar Devices Can You Make from a Plastic Bottle?
A clear PET plastic bottle can help disinfect water.
6 hours of sunlight's UV-radiation kills diarrhoea-causing pathogens in water making it safer to drink.
A clear bottle full of water and a little bleach can become a solar skylight, providing the equivalent of a 50w incandescent light to a windowless shack.
Cut the bottom off a clear plastic bottle to make a mini-greenhouse, a hot cap, to protect seedlings from frost.
Surround that bottle hot cap with a circle of other bottles full of water for solar heat storage to extend the growing season.
Here's a bottle inside a bottle inside a bottle to heat water in the innermost bottle
and a variation of this design using a clear bottle, a dark can full of water, and a set of reflectors.
They illustrate the essentials of solar thermal energy:
light reflects
dark gets hot
clear keeps the wind out
With that knowledge you can move, concentrate, and store energy.
This clear plastic water heater is much larger and more practical for household use.  It is made almost entirely from recycled packaging waste.
You can make a window out of plastic bottles, too,
and a south-facing window is already a solar collector.

But that's another story.





Friday, May 17, 2013

Simple Solar Principles




Simple solar principles
dark gets hot
light reflects
clear keeps the wind out
insulation keeps heat in
heat can be stored and moved
and any window that sees sunlight
is already
a solar
collector

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Free Energy: Solar and Dynamo LED Keychain Lights




Last year, one of the vendors at NESEA's Building Energy conference (http://www.nesea.org/buildingenergy/) gave away a keychain fob, a little two LED hand crank light.  This year, another vendor gave away three LED solar keychain lights.  A few weeks later, I got another solar LED light as a giveaway from the MIT Energy Initiative.

A little searching found where these promotional gifts are available in bulk:
1.61 @ per 5000 solar keychain lights
http://promotionalproductsonline.com/products/Colored-Solar-Powered-LED-Keylights.html

1.32@ per 5000 hand crank keychain lights
http://www.dhgate.com/top-50-pcs-lot-brand-new-2-led-mini-dynamo/p-ff80808133cfdac80134165da92c2e25.html#s1-1-1

I wonder what happens when these cheap sweatshop trinkets meet the necessary invention of the bottom billion and a third, billion and a half people who do not yet have access to reliable electricity.




In 1988 I visited China.
One evening, I walked out of the White Swan Hotel
on Shamian Island and crossed the bridge
into the city of Guangzhou.
There I saw a line of men
standing behind small folding tables
in closed shop doorways.

Coming closer, I saw that they were rebuilding and
reselling
plastic "disposable" lighters.

I want a solar rechargeable reading light
just as cheap, adaptable, and readily available
as a disposable cigarette lighter.
We need to make it possible
for every child around the world
to read in bed
and dream.

That's one way we could transition to a more renewable economy.

Richard Komp has been practicing another, seeding solar cottage industry systems around the world for the last few decades.  He teaches people how to assemble their own panels, from  AA battery to household, school, or hospital scale, out of raw solar cells.  You can read more about cottage industry solar at
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/25/1196968/-Solar-as-a-Cottage-Industry

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Boston Solar House Tour, 1990



A tour of suburban homes and urban apartment houses using solar energy around the Boston area from 1990 or so. Some of these houses were built as early as the 1960s.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Energy Critical Elements


"Energy Critical Elements"

Wednesday, January 16, 2013
1:30p–2:30p
MIT, Building 6-120, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Speaker: Robert Jaffe - Morningstar Professor of Science, Department of Physics
I will then turn to our recent report on "Energy Critical Elements: Securing Materials for Emerging Technologies", describing rare elements' roles in emerging technologies, constraints on availability, and government actions to avoid disruptive shortages.

Web site: http://student.mit.edu/searchiap/iap-9289af8f3b3c7818013b3d15ee340001.html
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): Physics IAP
For more information, contact:  Denise Wahkor
617-253-4855
DENISEW@MIT.EDU


American Physical Society (APS) and Materials Research Society Energy (MRS) Critical Elements report:
http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=236337

Since the Chinese have recently monopolized rare earths production, energy critical elements have become a serious economic and policy concern.  The US has responded by engaging in rare earths mining and now produces 20% of some of them.  Australia is also beginning rare earths mining.  If the usual model of capitalistic boom and bust, which we've experienced with the silicon market over the last decade, is any indication, there will be an over-investment in rare earths elements (REE) and then a subsequent bust as the market settles.  However, the fact remains that the US is 90% dependent on imports for critical energy materials.

Some of these energy critical elements include:
Gallium, germanium, indium, selenium, silver, and tellurium, all employed in advanced photovoltaic solar cells, especially thin-film photovoltaics.

Dysprosium, neodymium, praseodymium, samarium (all REEs), and cobalt, used in high-strength permanent magnets for many energy-related applications, such as wind turbines and hybrid automobiles.
Most REEs, valued for their unusual magnetic and/or optical properties. Examples include gadolinium for its unusual paramagnetic qualities and europium and terbium for their role in managing the color of fluorescent lighting. Yttrium, another REE, is an important ingredient in energy-efficient solid-state lighting.
Lithium and lanthanum, used in high performance batteries.
Helium, required in cryogenics, energy research, advanced nuclear reactor designs,
and manufacturing in the energy sector.
Platinum, palladium, and other PGEs, used as catalysts in fuel cells that may find wide applications in transportation. Cerium, a REE, is also used as an auto-emissions catalyst.
Rhenium, used in high performance alloys for advanced turbines.

Tellurium is one fourth as abundant as gold.  It takes 80 tons of Te to get a gW of peak power in thin film pv solar according to Jaffe.  (However, thin film pv is not the most efficient pv currently available and I doubt that anyone would consider deploying large-scale thin film pv installations.)  The estimated world production of tellurium is 500 tons per year.

Neodymium and praseodymium are used in wind turbines and are about one tenth of world rare earth production.

Terbium production is about 450 tons per year.

Rhenium is perhaps the rarest material with an annual world production between 40 and 50 tons per year.

In the next few years the US will sell off its helium stockpile. Helium is a by-product of natural gas, at 4 parts per billion, but only some natural gas deposits include it and those have not been adequately mapped.

10% of world's silver production now goes into silicon pv contacts.

Almost all of these materials are by-products of other materials and their prices are artificial because of that:
Rhenium with molybdenum
Tellurium with copper (also zinc and lead)
Indium and germanium with zinc
Gallium with aluminum

Thorium is frequently present in rare earth deposits as well but usually disposed of because it is not economic to capture it. As are many other useful materials.  Witness the flaring of gas from the fracking operations in North Dakota.

In addition, as by-materials, they depend upon the main ores and the processes used to produce them.  For instance, copper can be processed in such a way that tellurium is lost.

The report recommends some changes in policy:
a "coordinated response" which is beginning as the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has established a task force on critical and strategic mineral supply chains led by Cyrus Wadia;  the US DOE has selected the Ames Laboratory to house the Critical Materials Institute;  and, although the Bingaman-Murkowski amendment of the energy critical materials bill died in the last Congress, it will be re-introduced in the next Congress with the sponsorship of Ron Wyden and Barbara Murkowski since Jeff Bingaman has retired from the Senate;

"comprehensive, reliable, and up-to-date information on all aspects of the life cycle of ECEs as present information on many of these materials is very uneven";

"research and development to both expand availability and reduce dependency" on such materials and to train scientists and technologists in the field especially since it takes 5-10 years for research and develop substitutes and another 5-15 years to bring new sources online;

and "recycling" as many of these materials are not yet recycled or even tracked through the materials flows of our industrial and commercial systems.

Thomas Graedl of Yale is one scientist working on recycling and materials flows:
"The historical reservoir for the materials used by our technological society has been virgin stocks (ore bodies, mineral deposits, and the like). For a variety of reasons, those stocks may become inadequate or unavailable at some times or places in the future, and the loss of resources by dissipation or discard is often problematic from an environmental standpoint. These issues can be addressed by developing cycles for the stocks and flows of materials of interest, particularly if the cycles are temporally and spatially resolved.


"I, along with my colleagues, have characterized regional and global cycles, current and historic, for copper and zinc, determining the stocks available in different types of reservoirs and the flows among the reservoirs. GIS techniques are used to display some of the results in spatially-gridded form. The work provides a new basis for assessments of resources sustainability, environmental impacts over time, and related policy initiatives."
source:  http://environment.yale.edu/profile/graedel/research

Europe is actually doing some recycling now.  EU Rare Earths Recycling study:  http://reinhardbuetikofer.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Rare-earths-study_Oeko-Institut_Jan-2011.pdf

One company is Solvay
http://www.solvay.com/EN/NewsPress/20120927_Coleopterre.aspx

Of course, there is an industrial association and lobbying group, RARE, the Association for Rare Earth (http://www.rareearthassociation.org/)
RARE is the premier international advocate and opinion leader for rare earth industry suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers dedicated to improving the future through rare earth innovation.


One interesting parallel track Robert Jaffe didn't mention is the Center for Inverse Design
(http://www.centerforinversedesign.org/) which is doing a systematic examination of the periodic table for new and more efficient properties, in some cases using genetic algorithms. Carla Gomes of Cornell is also doing some interesting work on the computational analysis of new materials.  After hearing talks on the Center and then, a few weeks later, Dr Gomes, I alerted her to the Center's work.  I have emailed Dr Jaffe about both and hope that something useful can come from making such connections.

In addition, there's the currently outlandish possibility of nuclear transmutation of elements.  Here is a presentation by Yasuhiro Iwamura of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on transmutation reactions delivered at the American Nuclear Society on November 12, 2012:
http://youtu.be/VefCEaLAkRw

It is always good to remember
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

But I wouldn't hold my breath in anticipation of such (scientific) miracles.