Let's consider a real paradigm shift
I posted this for the kids on YouthForThePlan, thought about it a bit and decided I wanted input from the people here also. If we are going to change, let's really change.
www.odemagazine.com
Blaine Greteman | September 2008 issue
Talkin' 'bout my generation
In the 1920s, millions of rural Americans got their energy the same way they got their butter—they made it themselves. Off-grid when off-grid wasn’t cool, they used some 600,000 windmills to run radios and power, maintaining sputtering lights with an electric current that ebbed, flowed and sometimes simply disappeared with the prairie wind. Fully 90 percent of those windmills disappeared within a generation, as even the most isolated farmers eagerly plugged in to the new centralized power system.
But today the same technologies that help iPod-bedecked college students steal music are reviving the model of microgeneration—clean, decentralized power that people make themselves—by linking homes into a vast network that keeps buzzing even when the wind stops blowing. Microgeneration, meet the YouTube generation.
“We’re talking about a new meaning of ‘power to the people,’” raves Jeremy Rifkin, alternative energy activist and adviser to the European Union and many European governments. Forget about wind farms and solar plants run by conventional utility companies, he says. “In the new energy regime, the people are the utilities and their houses are the power plants.”
From Rifkin’s perspective, the problem with those early windmills wasn’t only the technology, which was primitive, but the zeitgeist, which had gotten going in a totally different direction. A global industrial revolution was afoot, and its ethos wasn’t rural self-sufficiency but centralization.
According to Hermann Scheer, a member of Germany’s Bundestag and president of the European Association for Renewable Energies, “The route to modernity was like the Olympic principles, ‘faster, higher, stronger’—centralized technologies and societies.” Growing central governments built centralized power plants that ranked as the largest human structures ever created, quickly electrifying everything from big new factories to sprawling new homes to giant media companies that piped a steady stream of information to everyone on the vastly expanded grid. The model for both energy and information was the one-way street.
Today, however, pioneers on the green energy frontier are remaking the power grid in the image of the Internet. “Can you imagine the generation that grew up on file-sharing, Wikipedia and MySpace surrounded by coal-fired or nuclear power plants?” asks Rifkin. “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit the gestalt of anyone under 40. It’s just old-fashioned, centralized top-down technology.”
The dawning alternative, he claims, will not only remake the way we get our power but represents a paradigm shift so complete that it will also change human consciousness and social relations. “When energy revolutions converge with communications revolutions, those are the pivotal points in history that change the human equation.”
The cornerstone of this new grid is buildings that produce, rather than just consume, energy. (See “Power couple” on page 28.) Instead of sucking energy from a centralized plant, these homes and office buildings convert wind, solar and biomass into electricity, which they use, store for later as hydrogen and “upload” onto the grid. The technology is leaping forward at the same pace that turned personal computers from geeky boutique items to essential home appliances in less than a decade—in fact, it’s being developed and financed by the same high-tech titans who led that charge.
You can see the shape of things to come in an office park just outside Paris. There, the French property development firm Bouygues Immobilier recently laid the foundation for one of the world’s first large energy-positive buildings (oil giant Abu Dhabi is competing for the title of “first” with the building that will serve as headquarters for its planned zero-carbon city, Masdar). When completed in early 2010, the 23,300-square-metre (250,000-square-foot) French facility will generate 69,900 kilowatts more per year than it consumes—enough to power 14 average European homes.
The American snack food company Frito Lay is even proving that energy-intensive manufacturing plants can be made to fit this model. Its factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, once used enough natural gas to heat 13,000 homes; after a retrofit due for completion by 2010, it’ll power itself using only the sun and biomass from leftover food scraps like potato peels.
Experts like Rifkin and Scheer argue that soon our power could come from tens of millions of buildings like these—large and small, making their own energy plus a little bit extra to sell back to the grid—instead of a handful of big power plants. The same technology that fuelled the Internet revolution could link them, so if it’s cloudy in Brussels, solar-fuelled homes there could draw their energy from beach houses on the Costa del Sol in Spain or office parks in the Parisian suburbs.
Moreover, as Rifkin explains, “Sensors and software will connect every appliance across the continent—every washing machine, every toaster—so if there’s too much demand in a region at some point, the software can tell 100,000 washing machines to go down one cycle per rinse or adjust 50,000 thermostats by one degree.” Users will be able to pre-set their own consumption limits so they never have to worry about involuntarily taking cold showers when they’ve consumed their quotas—unless, of course, they decide it’s worth a cold shower to sell premium-priced, peak-load electricity back to the grid. Rifkin likes to call this kind of network an “intergrid.” Others describe it as a “smart grid” or “intelligent utility network.”
This connective, decentralized model answers the primary argument that has made renewables the poor stepchild of the big energy family for so long. Renewables ebb and flow and are, by definition, distributed all over the globe. So you can’t build enough big power plants to collect their energy and run a national economy—much less a global one—even though enough sunlight shines on the planet every hour to power it for a year. By contrast, fossil fuels are concentrated and ready to extract and feed into big, powerful plants.
But the Internet has taught us a few things about harnessing distributed power; namely, that if you hook thousands of small home computers together on a network, you can generate computing power at a magnitude that could never be matched by the largest mainframe supercomputer. Many have experienced this phenomenon while “sharing” music on the Internet: programs like LimeWire allow hundreds of people to download a single file, without crashing anyone’s system or eating up too much bandwidth, by carefully redistributing the load. Likewise, Rifkin notes, “We can take IT to the power grid, too, and it will exceed anything you could produce with centralized coal-fired or nuclear power plants.”
This isn’t just wishful thinking. A study by the U.S. Department of Energy showed that Seattle area residents reduced energy bills 10 percent and peak loads 50 percent by using smart grid technology—even without installing green generating capacity. If the Bouygues Immobilier building were connected to this kind of grid instead of to the current one, it could help power not 14 houses but more like 14,000, while making its owners lots of money. And none of us would have to turn off our computers and sing “Kumbaya” when the fog rolled in.
The Seattle project incorporated IBM’s “service oriented architecture” (SOA), now being used to build smart grids in several U.S. states and Australia. Country Energy, Australia’s largest utility, hopes to have a 10,000-home pilot project running by the end of the year, and convert its entire network by 2020.
An IBM survey of 1,900 households around the world uncovered a surprising finding: The ability to “be on a more equal footing with their providers” was a bigger incentive than either cost or environmental impact in opting for a smart grid. Given the chance to upend the traditional power structure by selling energy back to the utility companies, 62 percent of households were eager to turn their homes into power plants—a case of ethos over economic interest.
Hermann Scheer, who authored Germany’s groundbreaking Renewable Energy Sources Act, has seen how powerful this model can be. “Scheer’s law,” as it’s sometimes called, provided guaranteed rates to those selling renewable power back to the grid, and helped catapult Germany’s green energy industry forward. The country now adds more than 3,000 megawatts of renewable energy each year.
To put that into perspective, it takes about 18 months to build a typical 500-megawatt natural gas plant, and it took 23 years for the U.S. to build its last nuclear power plant, the 1,161-megawatt Watts Bar reactor. “It can be done as fast as the transition to mobile telephones,” says Scheer. “Society begins to reorganize itself around the reorganization of energy.”
That empowering potential is especially promising for the developing world. Energy access is perhaps the most profound divide separating the rich North from the abject South. Right now, a quarter of humanity has no access to electricity whatsoever, and those 1.6 billion people are among the least economically and politically empowered on Earth. Stats like that are especially troubling since the UN has long argued that energy access is crucial to facilitating its wide-ranging Millennium Development Goals, from improving education to reducing infant mortality and HIV/AIDS. Indeed, studies of South Africa’s massive post-apartheid electrification program show that for every 100 households electrified, 10 to 20 businesses are created. Women, who previously spent much of their days gathering cooking fuel, made particularly large strides in health and employment.
Meanwhile, development campaigners have despaired of ever building a central infrastructure that could solve the problem. In fact, Scheer argues that centralized power structures helped create the problems: “We took a highly centralized power system that had developed in our countries over 100 years, and transplanted it to these rural societies overnight. It was a disaster for these civilizations.” Without money to extend the central grid to remote areas, only the cities were electrified, and they soon experienced an immigration boom that overburdened infrastructure and left rural areas behind.
Mobile phones, however, have already shown one way new technology can leapfrog the old infrastructure in the developing world. Africa, for example, has only 35 million fixed lines but has added 70 million mobile connections in the past year, for a total of 282 million cellular links. Smart grid technologies may have the same potential.
In fact, a pioneer of the mobile phone revolution in the developing world, Iqbal Quadir, has already taken up the gauntlet. In a little over a decade, Quadir’s company, GrameenPhone, revolutionized his native Bangladesh, adding 20 million subscribers in one of the world’s poorest countries and inspiring hundreds of thousands of “phone ladies” to start small businesses offering cellular service to neighbours. GrameenPhone registered net profits of $137 million in its most recent annual report, which is why Quadir believes his new venture, Emergency Energy, won’t only save lives and eradicate poverty, but make money.
Emergency Energy plans to put small, biogas-fuelled generators in the hands of rural entrepreneurs throughout the country. Each generator can electrify up to 20 homes, and in trial runs consumers eagerly paid to plug in and power up. Such models aren’t just a good option for areas that have been left behind by globalization, says Scheer, they’re “the only chance.” Rifkin agrees. “We just need to get the technology cheap enough and we can empower a revolution that will give us globalization from the bottom up.”
Scheer recalls critics of the Renewable Energy Sources Act who were determined to derail it, telling him, “You’re illusionists, dreamers that would endanger the economy.” Now, Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment estimates the act has helped create in excess of 130,000 jobs. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative whose election spooked some in the renewables sector, enlisted Rifkin to help formulate and implement a plan to revitalize the world’s third-largest economy.
Indeed, the timing for a paradigm shift couldn’t be better, in part because things in the traditional energy sector can’t get much worse. When Frito Lay announced its Casa Grande project in 2007, oil prices were far below $100 per barrel and some observers saw it as more of a publicity stunt than a smart business decision, since it would take 25 years to pay off. Today, with oil racing toward $150 per barrel, such decisions look even better on the bottom line than they do in the press.
Jeremy Leggett, CEO of the UK’s largest solar company, Solar Century, cites the recent unexpected depletion of the world’s second-largest oil field, Mexico’s Cantarell, as a sign of things to come. “When the world oil supply starts Cantarell-ing, we’ll have to make very rapid choices, and this debate won’t last very long,” he says. “It really is possible that we’ll get to that utopian vision very quickly.”
That doesn’t mean it’s destined to be easy. “These are incredibly powerful entities, extremely resistant to change, and not just the power industry but also people who think in the old way in government,” says Leggett. “That kind of thinking has the potential to create a lot of damage.” Adds Scheer: “Optimistic is one thing, but one should not be naive. The new energies make them feel vulnerable. And they are right to feel that way. Their business model will disappear.”
As the world’s largest industry tries to maintain its grip on a centralized power structure, Scheer believes, “They will argue that even with renewables, we need large power stations and big investors and that we have to wait for them.”
Perhaps it’s a good thing, then, that the people who gave us YouTube, Google, Wikipedia and MySpace are also known as Generation Now.
© Ode Magazine USA, Inc. and Ode Luxembourg 2008 (further information in Privacy & Copyright)
www.odemagazine.com
Blaine Greteman | September 2008 issue
Talkin' 'bout my generation
In the 1920s, millions of rural Americans got their energy the same way they got their butter—they made it themselves. Off-grid when off-grid wasn’t cool, they used some 600,000 windmills to run radios and power, maintaining sputtering lights with an electric current that ebbed, flowed and sometimes simply disappeared with the prairie wind. Fully 90 percent of those windmills disappeared within a generation, as even the most isolated farmers eagerly plugged in to the new centralized power system.
But today the same technologies that help iPod-bedecked college students steal music are reviving the model of microgeneration—clean, decentralized power that people make themselves—by linking homes into a vast network that keeps buzzing even when the wind stops blowing. Microgeneration, meet the YouTube generation.
“We’re talking about a new meaning of ‘power to the people,’” raves Jeremy Rifkin, alternative energy activist and adviser to the European Union and many European governments. Forget about wind farms and solar plants run by conventional utility companies, he says. “In the new energy regime, the people are the utilities and their houses are the power plants.”
From Rifkin’s perspective, the problem with those early windmills wasn’t only the technology, which was primitive, but the zeitgeist, which had gotten going in a totally different direction. A global industrial revolution was afoot, and its ethos wasn’t rural self-sufficiency but centralization.
According to Hermann Scheer, a member of Germany’s Bundestag and president of the European Association for Renewable Energies, “The route to modernity was like the Olympic principles, ‘faster, higher, stronger’—centralized technologies and societies.” Growing central governments built centralized power plants that ranked as the largest human structures ever created, quickly electrifying everything from big new factories to sprawling new homes to giant media companies that piped a steady stream of information to everyone on the vastly expanded grid. The model for both energy and information was the one-way street.
Today, however, pioneers on the green energy frontier are remaking the power grid in the image of the Internet. “Can you imagine the generation that grew up on file-sharing, Wikipedia and MySpace surrounded by coal-fired or nuclear power plants?” asks Rifkin. “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit the gestalt of anyone under 40. It’s just old-fashioned, centralized top-down technology.”
The dawning alternative, he claims, will not only remake the way we get our power but represents a paradigm shift so complete that it will also change human consciousness and social relations. “When energy revolutions converge with communications revolutions, those are the pivotal points in history that change the human equation.”
The cornerstone of this new grid is buildings that produce, rather than just consume, energy. (See “Power couple” on page 28.) Instead of sucking energy from a centralized plant, these homes and office buildings convert wind, solar and biomass into electricity, which they use, store for later as hydrogen and “upload” onto the grid. The technology is leaping forward at the same pace that turned personal computers from geeky boutique items to essential home appliances in less than a decade—in fact, it’s being developed and financed by the same high-tech titans who led that charge.
You can see the shape of things to come in an office park just outside Paris. There, the French property development firm Bouygues Immobilier recently laid the foundation for one of the world’s first large energy-positive buildings (oil giant Abu Dhabi is competing for the title of “first” with the building that will serve as headquarters for its planned zero-carbon city, Masdar). When completed in early 2010, the 23,300-square-metre (250,000-square-foot) French facility will generate 69,900 kilowatts more per year than it consumes—enough to power 14 average European homes.
The American snack food company Frito Lay is even proving that energy-intensive manufacturing plants can be made to fit this model. Its factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, once used enough natural gas to heat 13,000 homes; after a retrofit due for completion by 2010, it’ll power itself using only the sun and biomass from leftover food scraps like potato peels.
Experts like Rifkin and Scheer argue that soon our power could come from tens of millions of buildings like these—large and small, making their own energy plus a little bit extra to sell back to the grid—instead of a handful of big power plants. The same technology that fuelled the Internet revolution could link them, so if it’s cloudy in Brussels, solar-fuelled homes there could draw their energy from beach houses on the Costa del Sol in Spain or office parks in the Parisian suburbs.
Moreover, as Rifkin explains, “Sensors and software will connect every appliance across the continent—every washing machine, every toaster—so if there’s too much demand in a region at some point, the software can tell 100,000 washing machines to go down one cycle per rinse or adjust 50,000 thermostats by one degree.” Users will be able to pre-set their own consumption limits so they never have to worry about involuntarily taking cold showers when they’ve consumed their quotas—unless, of course, they decide it’s worth a cold shower to sell premium-priced, peak-load electricity back to the grid. Rifkin likes to call this kind of network an “intergrid.” Others describe it as a “smart grid” or “intelligent utility network.”
This connective, decentralized model answers the primary argument that has made renewables the poor stepchild of the big energy family for so long. Renewables ebb and flow and are, by definition, distributed all over the globe. So you can’t build enough big power plants to collect their energy and run a national economy—much less a global one—even though enough sunlight shines on the planet every hour to power it for a year. By contrast, fossil fuels are concentrated and ready to extract and feed into big, powerful plants.
But the Internet has taught us a few things about harnessing distributed power; namely, that if you hook thousands of small home computers together on a network, you can generate computing power at a magnitude that could never be matched by the largest mainframe supercomputer. Many have experienced this phenomenon while “sharing” music on the Internet: programs like LimeWire allow hundreds of people to download a single file, without crashing anyone’s system or eating up too much bandwidth, by carefully redistributing the load. Likewise, Rifkin notes, “We can take IT to the power grid, too, and it will exceed anything you could produce with centralized coal-fired or nuclear power plants.”
This isn’t just wishful thinking. A study by the U.S. Department of Energy showed that Seattle area residents reduced energy bills 10 percent and peak loads 50 percent by using smart grid technology—even without installing green generating capacity. If the Bouygues Immobilier building were connected to this kind of grid instead of to the current one, it could help power not 14 houses but more like 14,000, while making its owners lots of money. And none of us would have to turn off our computers and sing “Kumbaya” when the fog rolled in.
The Seattle project incorporated IBM’s “service oriented architecture” (SOA), now being used to build smart grids in several U.S. states and Australia. Country Energy, Australia’s largest utility, hopes to have a 10,000-home pilot project running by the end of the year, and convert its entire network by 2020.
An IBM survey of 1,900 households around the world uncovered a surprising finding: The ability to “be on a more equal footing with their providers” was a bigger incentive than either cost or environmental impact in opting for a smart grid. Given the chance to upend the traditional power structure by selling energy back to the utility companies, 62 percent of households were eager to turn their homes into power plants—a case of ethos over economic interest.
Hermann Scheer, who authored Germany’s groundbreaking Renewable Energy Sources Act, has seen how powerful this model can be. “Scheer’s law,” as it’s sometimes called, provided guaranteed rates to those selling renewable power back to the grid, and helped catapult Germany’s green energy industry forward. The country now adds more than 3,000 megawatts of renewable energy each year.
To put that into perspective, it takes about 18 months to build a typical 500-megawatt natural gas plant, and it took 23 years for the U.S. to build its last nuclear power plant, the 1,161-megawatt Watts Bar reactor. “It can be done as fast as the transition to mobile telephones,” says Scheer. “Society begins to reorganize itself around the reorganization of energy.”
That empowering potential is especially promising for the developing world. Energy access is perhaps the most profound divide separating the rich North from the abject South. Right now, a quarter of humanity has no access to electricity whatsoever, and those 1.6 billion people are among the least economically and politically empowered on Earth. Stats like that are especially troubling since the UN has long argued that energy access is crucial to facilitating its wide-ranging Millennium Development Goals, from improving education to reducing infant mortality and HIV/AIDS. Indeed, studies of South Africa’s massive post-apartheid electrification program show that for every 100 households electrified, 10 to 20 businesses are created. Women, who previously spent much of their days gathering cooking fuel, made particularly large strides in health and employment.
Meanwhile, development campaigners have despaired of ever building a central infrastructure that could solve the problem. In fact, Scheer argues that centralized power structures helped create the problems: “We took a highly centralized power system that had developed in our countries over 100 years, and transplanted it to these rural societies overnight. It was a disaster for these civilizations.” Without money to extend the central grid to remote areas, only the cities were electrified, and they soon experienced an immigration boom that overburdened infrastructure and left rural areas behind.
Mobile phones, however, have already shown one way new technology can leapfrog the old infrastructure in the developing world. Africa, for example, has only 35 million fixed lines but has added 70 million mobile connections in the past year, for a total of 282 million cellular links. Smart grid technologies may have the same potential.
In fact, a pioneer of the mobile phone revolution in the developing world, Iqbal Quadir, has already taken up the gauntlet. In a little over a decade, Quadir’s company, GrameenPhone, revolutionized his native Bangladesh, adding 20 million subscribers in one of the world’s poorest countries and inspiring hundreds of thousands of “phone ladies” to start small businesses offering cellular service to neighbours. GrameenPhone registered net profits of $137 million in its most recent annual report, which is why Quadir believes his new venture, Emergency Energy, won’t only save lives and eradicate poverty, but make money.
Emergency Energy plans to put small, biogas-fuelled generators in the hands of rural entrepreneurs throughout the country. Each generator can electrify up to 20 homes, and in trial runs consumers eagerly paid to plug in and power up. Such models aren’t just a good option for areas that have been left behind by globalization, says Scheer, they’re “the only chance.” Rifkin agrees. “We just need to get the technology cheap enough and we can empower a revolution that will give us globalization from the bottom up.”
Scheer recalls critics of the Renewable Energy Sources Act who were determined to derail it, telling him, “You’re illusionists, dreamers that would endanger the economy.” Now, Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment estimates the act has helped create in excess of 130,000 jobs. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative whose election spooked some in the renewables sector, enlisted Rifkin to help formulate and implement a plan to revitalize the world’s third-largest economy.
Indeed, the timing for a paradigm shift couldn’t be better, in part because things in the traditional energy sector can’t get much worse. When Frito Lay announced its Casa Grande project in 2007, oil prices were far below $100 per barrel and some observers saw it as more of a publicity stunt than a smart business decision, since it would take 25 years to pay off. Today, with oil racing toward $150 per barrel, such decisions look even better on the bottom line than they do in the press.
Jeremy Leggett, CEO of the UK’s largest solar company, Solar Century, cites the recent unexpected depletion of the world’s second-largest oil field, Mexico’s Cantarell, as a sign of things to come. “When the world oil supply starts Cantarell-ing, we’ll have to make very rapid choices, and this debate won’t last very long,” he says. “It really is possible that we’ll get to that utopian vision very quickly.”
That doesn’t mean it’s destined to be easy. “These are incredibly powerful entities, extremely resistant to change, and not just the power industry but also people who think in the old way in government,” says Leggett. “That kind of thinking has the potential to create a lot of damage.” Adds Scheer: “Optimistic is one thing, but one should not be naive. The new energies make them feel vulnerable. And they are right to feel that way. Their business model will disappear.”
As the world’s largest industry tries to maintain its grip on a centralized power structure, Scheer believes, “They will argue that even with renewables, we need large power stations and big investors and that we have to wait for them.”
Perhaps it’s a good thing, then, that the people who gave us YouTube, Google, Wikipedia and MySpace are also known as Generation Now.
© Ode Magazine USA, Inc. and Ode Luxembourg 2008 (further information in Privacy & Copyright)
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Gary Munson on -
If they are both true, two promised technologies will change the world overnight. Google 'Nanosolar' to research their new process for solar cells tech. Although their new nanotech is not as efficient, the cost is claimed to be so much lower that the increased amount of panels required will still come in at 1/4 to 1/5 the cost of current silicon tech that, despite years of hard work, remains too expensive even with the current high cost of fuels. The second thing to watch is EEstor's ultra-capacitor. If they deliver on this, the world will change. The possibilities it will open up are staggering. It's so good, it reminds me of the Keanu Reeves movie, 'Chain Reaction'. Probably game changing enough for the oil industry to want those involved dead or bought out. Watch this website for news on EEstor....
http://www.eestorbatteries.com/
They are pretty secretive and don't have their own site. I'm quite disturbed by their recent partnering with Lockheed Martin....I can see their research disappearing into the warehouse shown at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Pairing those two techs will give us houses free of the grid that will also power our vehicles. Overnight the power companies, oil industry, and internal combustion industry would implode....a real 'paradigm shift'
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Permalink Reply by Lou De Frog on -
Hi Gary
Problem with Photo Voltaic is the large amount of energy needed to produce the product relative to the energy produced by the product. That is energy return on investment. Below a certain threshold the product does not produce enough energy to manufacture the next batch of Photo Voltaic. Second problem is the poor energy yield. If it takes a football size area of plastic film to drive a wall clock, it really serves no useful purpose. Look at solar/thermal and bio-gas. Cheap and relatively low tech.
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Permalink Reply by Lou De Frog on
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Luane
We are learning how to do more with less. We are learning that a kid with a computer can now do a lot of things that used to employ a university grad. We are learning that we don't need as many people running Government.
We are moving into the future, and as we do a lot of people will discover that they are no longer essential to keep the wheels turning. We will need local Governance, local food production, some form of local banking and some form of sustainable energy production. Not going to look much like what we have now, but any community that has those essentials will have a resident waiting list and lots of qualified volunteers for every activity on the things to do list.
Hope the U.S. Government doesn't miss this opportunity to take control of the Federal Reserve. It really should be able to print its own money instead of having to borrow it.
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Permalink Reply by Bill Tucker on -
All Scientists, Engineers, and Designers,
Over the course of the past few months I have found myself embroiled in debates that range from politics to the best type of heat exchangers. I will say now that I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer especially when compared to people such as your selves.
The Pickens Plan has provided a place for us all to come together, to voice our opinions, push our ideas, argue for a better future, and pool our collective talents.
My talents are a long story but my story is necessary to a theme, so I would ask you to listen. When I was young like many children I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I grew up on Florida’s Space Coast in the midst of monumental human achievement in technology and science. My parents encouraged me to take “the hard subjects” in school, calculus, physics, and chemistry. I did well in my studies, but was unfulfilled something was lacking. Eventually I would leave my studies and join the Army. I traveled the world, was exposed to many different ideas, peoples, and philosophies. After a decade plus of serving King and country I came home and decided to return to my studies. I listened to opinion of family and friends and decided on Electrical Engineering as the course I would pursue. Once again I did well, and thoroughly enjoyed my studies. Alas I found myself once again unfulfilled and left college just short of completing my senior year and obtaining my degree. I opted to enter the construction industry where I have worn many hats over the years.
Now that I have completely bored you allow me to come to the point. My life’s experiences have given me (at least in some small ways) the tools I need to understand at least at basic levels what you are putting forth on the forums in terms of technology and the mechanics there of. In my humble opinion I am one of the few that can follow (even if it takes a lot of work on my part) what it is you are proposing and why that it might be the way to go. My talent has always been in the form of leadership to make a failing system work as intended. Systems not made of technology but of people. I do not do well with all people, but I have had over thirty years of experience in leading people to do all kinds of things. But that is my talent. Your talents are something that you understand.
But here on the Pickens Plan where people of all walks of life and all experience and educational levels want to affect change and want to understand, are your arguments really having the effect that you want?
I would propose to the Scientists, Engineers, and Designers, that collectively you all get together and develop a basic guide line of terms and processes that speak at a level that everyone can understand. I am not talking about educating everyone to your level, but providing a basic set of tools that allow everyone to fully grasp those things that are the most important. Facts, figures, base loads, graphs, infrastructures that can not handle significant increase to the grids, ammonia generation, and rising sea levels are all well and good but if they do not reach the lay person what good are they? News papers write at 8th grade levels so that they reach far more people with the news than if they were written at advanced degree level.
If many of the things that the Scientists, Engineers, and Designers discuss on the forums here were broken down like “science fair projects” more people would actively embrace these things and more pressure could be brought to bear to expedite change.
I do not profess to have all the answers and I certainly do not have you all’s background or expertise, but I do know that knowledge is power. If you want broader base support more people have to understand (at least at basic levels) what you are talking about.
Here on the Pickens plan there are many teachers and public speakers and such that could help. I just jumped way out on a limb there. We should consider as part of the plan,
Forums that discuss and teach in as non technical as possible how solar power works, how the electrical grid works, where natural gas comes from, how ocean thermal power is turned into electricity, how hydrogen is produced, how fuel cells work, and such.
I am not saying that the people here are uneducated, but if you look at many profiles you will find a recurring theme, “I don’t know much about renewable energy but I am trying to learn”. Many of you have been involved in your various areas for several decades; please allow the rest of us to benefit from your experience and knowledge.
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Permalink Reply by David Scott on -
I like many of these ideas. In fact, you might say this is the Pickens plan in action. A grid or where to place power has to be foremost in our minds as the solar corridor and the wind corridor gathers energy. The solar roadway is a cheaper alternative for roadways of alternative power which would consume our interstate highways and give back all the power we need in the United States and give us a communication backbone for a decentralized grid. Hydrogen is a great serviceable fuel which can be the byproduct of many depots of energy gathering. Especially in our oceans right of the shore where the wind is known to be plentiful and consistent. Imagine tankers that create a spill and produce more water!
What is noteworthy to me is that commercial companies see the commercial possibilities and are sinking their hard-earned research dollars into contestants for future implementation of renewable energy. And in the case of the solar roadway technology, the university system is lending its hand and providing the additional expertise because the solutions in this area consume a wide variety of technologies.
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Permalink Reply by Jessee McBroom on -
Hello David. I would like to propose another approach to the matter of meeting the energy needs with respect to transportation and homes and businesses. A closed looped on demand system; employing either the breakdown and recombination of salt or water will; I believe prove more useful and immediately employable with respect to the production and use of energy than any other approach I have seen in that these two things will for all intents and purposes eliminate the need for an ever expanding infrastructure no matter how "Smart" the infrastructure may get; it in itself is the most costly aspect of providing and meeting energy demands. I say this with good intentions not out of arrogance or misplaced affection for one technology over another.
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Permalink Reply by David Scott on
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Interesting idea but only a hint of it. I found a bit on it at this website. There are many technologies that are out there that are promising. And some day we'll use them. The question is how long will it take? And do they create a national grid? I think the Solar Roadway is something we could do today for the cost of repaving the roads which must be done every so often anyway. And it leaves us with a grid we can plug into and use as a nation. It gives us a renewable energy resource. I don't own any stock in Solar Roadways nor do I feel any one solution is enough for renewable energy to work. I think we should be open to all solutions. And I'd be interested in seeing some good sites to read about "the breakdown and recombination of salt or water".
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Permalink Reply by Jessee McBroom on
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I think you would be able to take heart in the fact that the State of California is very much pursuing the Smart Grid Technology as well as Smart Building Designs. Take a look at their Public Interest Energy Research grants program.
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