A test. Remember our three core facts from the first post?
1) Oil is a finite resource. We don’t know how much is left.
2) Food is important. If you don’t eat, you don’t shit. If you don’t shit, you die.
3) Stupidity and Hydrogen are two constants in the Universe and I’m not convinced about Hydrogen.
Electricity comes from coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear or hydroelectric generation, with a percentage from solar, geothermal or wind. All the good rivers for hydroelectric generation are taken, so that leaves mostly oil-based and nuclear-based: Things burning to make heat.
Making electricity most often means making heat to make steam to turn turbines to generate the electricity. A nuclear reactor is a way to make heat to make steam. The downside of nuclear generation is the waste will kill you and we don’t quite have a handle on how to keep the waste safe for five thousand years, despite what the commercials say.
We can’t uninvent nuclear and we haven’t figured out how to make it go away safely. Let’s just leave nuclear generation of electricity at the level where it is and not make any more problems for ourselves. As the nuclear plants age out, shut them down.
That leaves oil-based generation and the percentage of renewable energy generation. Coal and natural gas are for our purposes, oil-based. Wind works well enough but solar has issues, as we have clouds on this planet and solar doesn’t work at night. Geothermal is not widely available, like in Iceland where almost all their electricity comes from geothermal sources. Maybe there is an active volcano in Mississauga, but I haven’t found it yet. I think the city would tell us if there was.
The issue is only partially how we make electricity. The underlying issue is the storage of electricity. You can’t store it, except in batteries (or the energy potential in a dam, but those are all taken) and batteries aren’t enough for cities or businesses.
Just to make it harder, you have to make electricity near where the users of electricity live, as those pesky electrons don’t like to travel very far. Lazy buggers those electrons.
Which leads us to: Reducing the use of electricity means using less oil-based generation. How do you reduce your personal use of electricity?
Compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs last longer, generate less heat and provide significant energy saving over the course of a year. I have exactly two conventional incandescent lights now. One in the stove and one in the fridge. The rest are CF or low-voltage halogen. I’m saving my landlord money, but the concept is the same: Not using as much electricity as I could.
Living in a highrise apartment, I face north, so I don’t use as much air conditioning as a south facing apartment, however, when I go to work, I close the drapes and reset the thermostat to not cool the apartment, unless the temperature gets over 90 F, or 30 C.
When I get home, I turn the AC on, if things are too muggy and turn if off at night. In the winter, the heat might come on five times a day, as a twenty-floor concrete building is a fabulous heat sink. Every unit around me is heated, so the only thing I technically heat are the windows. I would, if I could, put all this on an electronic thermostat, to do it automatically for me, in case I forget.
Yes, the fridge runs all the time. So does this computer, the router and the cable modem. There is the usual leakage of what are called vampires. The cable box, the microwave, or anything that could be blinking 12:00 -12:00 – 12:00 uses some electricity to keep the clock running and the electronics warm.
For example, your TV never really turns all the way ‘off’, despite what the button on the remote says. If you hook an ammeter up to a TV, you’ll see it still draws electricity to keep the power supply and the picture tube idling. When you press ‘on’, the electron guns in the picture tube are ready to show you Dr. Phil in about a second.
Otherwise it is like the Ye Olde Days Of Television where you would power up the mighty Philco or Electrohome and wait 30 to 60 seconds for the tubes to come up to temperature before you could see the Indian Head Test Pattern on WWNY-TV from Watertown, NY. Captain Kangaroo is going to be on soon!
Ideally, you should unplug those culprits. However, the geek in me is deeply offended by electronics that blink 12:00 – 12:00 – 12:00, so I don’t. I offset that by physically turning off the computer monitor at the power switch, which on an LCD display, actually stops power draw.
By the way, if you have an older computer monitor, the big tube-type conventional display, you might think you’re using less power by using a screen saver. You would be wrong.
Look at the monitor, running the ‘blank’ screen saver in a dark room. You’ll see the electron guns in the picture tube are actually painting ‘black’ on the screen, which means they’re using electricity. Hit the power switch for the display and see what ‘off’ really looks like. Leave the computer itself running if you want to, but turn the display off with the power button and you have reduced the electricity demand by about 70 percent for that computer. Or, break down and buy an LCD display that uses significantly less electricity.
Rule of Thumb? If it is electronic and feels warm, it is probably using electricity. Don’t unplug hospital equipment please. There are some things that should be running all the time and Grandpa Hubert’s ventilator is one of them.
Using less electricity means using less oil, coal, natural gas or other stuff that burns and we can’t replace.
There are Green electricity sources. Wind power is one I like, as the technology is very simple and simple is usually very Green. In my perfect world, there would be a modest, self contained electricity generating wind turbine on the top of any building more than three stories high. Everyone would generate a bit of wind power and that which the building didn’t use would go back into the grid.
This would mean that the electrical meter on your house would have to spin in two directions. One way when you’re using electricity that you aren’t generating yourself and costing you money. The meter would spin the other way when you are generating more electricity than you are using, saving you money, deducting from your bill.
Theoretically, you could be getting a cheque from the Electrical utility and not paying for any of your energy use, as you are generating enough for your own needs and then some. Needless to say, the electricity companies are not keen on this, as the centralized, metered and highly regulat
ed generation of electricity is how they make grotesque amounts of money.
Until a government with a set of big attachments orders a change, all we can realistically do is use less electricity. We can always yell at the government, but we’ve seen how well that works most of the time.
When it comes to Green electricity, there are some excellent things going on with wind power. Germany is the leader in using a highly distributed grid of wind turbines to supplement their conventional generation. You find small clumps of wind turbines all over the countryside in Germany, turning gently, rolling out a few more kilowatts of power. Multiply that times thousands of individual turbines and you cut back on the amount of stuff that gets burned to power your Nintendo Wii, xBox360 or electronic garlic press.
In the Bruce Peninsula, towards Owen Sound, there are several modest sized wind power farms that add some more electrons to the bucket. There are people who consider them a blight on the landscape and others who are vitally concerned about the rare species of innocent Pileated Monk Gulls that die horrible deaths flying into the whirling Blades Of Death at a wind farm.
Both sides are right, but both are also being stupid. If we don’t reduce our consumption of oil-based electricity, then the Pileated Monk Gull (I made it up, don’t bother searching for Pileated Monk Gull) and the rest of us are going to die because the atmosphere will be unbreathable. The clouds of pollution will make it impossible to see the landscape anyways. Objections to wind farms as aesthetic blights or as a Bird Cuisinart are not looking at the larger good, over a longer term.
There are some nifty technologies. The Peel Region Algonquin Power program burns material that will not compost to generate heat, to make steam to make electricity. This also includes the international airline garbage, that must, by law, be incinerated for safety reasons. The system burns it twice, the second time in a high temperature (+1,000 F) oxygen-rich environment to make sure all the little bits are sterilized.
The fly ash is captured, the exhaust heat is recirculated to extract as much energy as possible, then scrubbed with water, catalysts and activated carbon to clean it. The dregs are scanned with a big magnet to collect any ferrous metals that might have melted out, then the final bits are used as part of the daily landfill cover. Peel has several kilometers of roads paved with a mix of asphalt and bottom ash from the incinerator and so far, it seems to work fine.
Incineration doesn’t mean we can throw everything into the trash and forget about it. The Peel Region program however, does show that if you must incinerate stuff, you should suck every last erg of energy out of it using all the technology you can to make it as safe as you can, to make electricity and find a way to use the leftovers too.
Geothermal is a superb idea. The inside of our planet is very hot, molten rock. Stick a tube into it and pump the heat up to a boiler to make steam, to make electricity. Except the hot molten rock is five to ten miles below the surface of the earth and is nearly impossible to get at, unless you live on, or near volcanoes or geothermal hot spots. In those locations, the hot rock from the interior of our planet are much closer to the surface.
Iceland is is far along the process of using almost no oil to generate their electricity and Iceland gets dang cold in the winter too. It is one answer, but is dependent upon having an active geothermal hotspot nearby. This doesn’t quite work for most major cities.
That leaves us with solar: Solar power has been around for more than 50 years and works well for cottages and travel trailers. The two problems with solar are that it doesn’t scale up to feeding a business or town, and it doesn’t work at night. You get caught in the storage issue of batteries, which works for individual houses, but doesn’t scale to a town of 25,000 people.
It can also be argued that solar cells contain poisonous heavy metals like Cadmium Telluride, Copper Indium Selenide and Gallium Arsenide. Solar cells are basically light sensitive transistors and most folks can’t whip up a batch in the bathtub over a weekend, paint it on the roof, hook up some wires and be done with the commercial grid. Not to say that solar isn’t good, as it is very good, but as a percentage of renewable energy, not the whole answer.
The Whole Answer is a bit of everything. Some wind, some solar, some super high efficiency burning of waste that would be going to a landfill anyways, with what ever we have left from hydroelectric sources and a declining amount of nuclear.
The Rule of Thumb? Burning things to make electricity is not good for the planet, as a general guideline. If we must burn stuff, then have the sense to extract all the energy out of it and make sure that what is left is safe, benign, and reusable in something else that we need.
Ideally, all electricity should be produced by falling water, blowing wind, or solar cells, as those are things don’t have a lot of footprint, are self-sustaining and we don’t have to technologize it too much.
The easiest fix is to use less electricity in the first place. Conservation.
Conservation is inexpensive to do. It is easy to do, as long as you know how to screw in a lightbulb. (I mean ‘screw in a lightbulb’ as in remove the current one and put a new one in, you dirty-minded jokesters) Turn off lights and appliances you aren’t actively using. Use less air conditioning or heating. An electronic setback thermostat is cheap (about $50) and easy to install if you’re the forgetful type.
Get a modern, high efficiency fridge, stove, washer, dryer or dishwasher the next time you have to replace a major appliance. For those of us who have landlords, ask the direct question of them: May I please have a new, Energy-Star certified Fridge and Stove? It will save you, Mr. Landlord, a bunch of money on the electricity for the building and pay for itself in about five years.
There are some ‘activist’ things you can do, that are very simple. If you shop at a store that is lit up like Christmas when we’re short of energy, ask the manager, very politely and nicely, if he or she would be so kind as to turn off about half the display lights in the store.
If they can’t (and some corporations don’t give their store managers that kind of latitude) ask politely if the manager would be so kind as to tell head office that it would be good corporate citizenship for the business to cut back on their electricity use. Leave it at that.
You’ll be amazed what happens with anecdotal requests from customers that get passed up the corporate foodchain. Retail is so cutthroat competitive that you might just be listened to. Or fill out a customer comment card and ask them to cut back on the lights, please.
As for the politicians. Hmmm. We can’t burn them for heat, as the laws discourage that. We can’t harness the unmitigated manure that falls out of their mouths as a source of bio-fuel energy.
About all we can do is remind them that conservation is much cheaper and faster than building new coal or nuclear plants. Conservation can happen over a few months: A new power plant takes about 5 years to bring online. A new nuclear plant takes close to 15 years until it starts spitting out electrons.
Five years from now might as well be 11,000 years from now to a politician, so bring your timeline down to months and use their unmedicated ADD to your advantage. Green Now = Votes Now. Use a colourful handpuppet and a funny voice if you have to.
If they say they ‘have to study the implications and economic paradigms for transparency and efficacy’ you have a Stepford Candidate and should in all decency run away, taking your vote with you. Let the colourful handpuppet tell them that, as you get the hell out of the constituency office.
In the next installment, we’ll talk about Food.
RoadDave 