September 2009 Archives
09/17/09 11:28 AM
The Frugal Genius of "Swarm Power"
The Germans have found a new way to solve a classic greenhouse gas logic puzzle while keeping their auto assembly lines running.The puzzle: What's the cheapest way to increase electricity generation while reducing carbon emissions, bearing in mind that installing more wind and solar will require investing $2 trillion in new transmission lines and a single 1 Gigawatt nuclear power plant now runs about $17 billion?
Two additional facts: Generating electricity accounts for 41 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and two-thirds of those emissions are the result of energy being lost as heat, i.e. wasted.
The German Answer: Put thousands of VW workers on the assembly line to make home-sized natural gas furnace/hot water heater/generators. These generators, based on a natural gas engine already used in the Golf, are 92 percent efficient (because they can use the waste heat for heating water or homes) and can either produce electricity for home use or put it out on the grid. In other words, they're removing much of the second fact (waste), and also removing the need to build many more transmission lines. And, if the company Lichtblick is to be believed, they'll be creating the generation capacity of 2 nuclear power plants (2 Gigawatts) by installing 100,000 of these units in German homes at a total cost of $1.5 billion. (Far cheaper than the nukes, with no radioactive waste or risk of its weaponization.)
But wait, this is more than a fancy furnace. It's also a business model and a stealth energy policy. The units, networked together as "SchwarmStrom" or swarm power could be turned on and off by a smart grid controller to balance the mix of wind, solar, nuclear and what all on the grid at a given time, earning homeowners some bonus money for the power they generate and eliminating the need for some of those transmission lines and backup generators to deal with the ebbs and flows of wind and solar.
And then there's the super ultra unasked bonus question. Two percent of the US's greenhouse gas emissions are from manure ponds alone, and more are from municipal sewage and landfill. The Swarm Power generators could run on biogas, reducing methane emissions from manure AND emissions from coal fired generation in one go.
VW isn't the only car company working in this space; Honda also has similar unit. I haven't heard that US companies are working on this idea, but it would be a good three-fer as a stimulus program: build the engines, do away with the $8000 tax credit for first time home buyers and just give them a combo furnace generator; and jump start the process of building a smart distributed grid with lower CO2 emissions. Having a power plant in the basement has a certain Little House on the Prairie appeal too.
But will we? I think this is the kind of pragmatic path US policy makers are likely to miss. They're so focused on BIG GREEN projects like offshore wind or floating windmills and on small chartreuse projects like corn-derived disposable silverware and CFL lightbulbs that the vast middle ground of wasted energy is ignored.
Look at this chart of energy flows--it's a giant bowl of spaghetti and meatballs with 99.2 quads of energy entering on the left and 42.15 going to work on the right. (Note the tiny vermicelli like threads contributed by wind and solar, and the enormous lasagna noodle of waste aka "rejected energy"--57 Quads!) If you can get beyond the geekiness of the image, there's something poignant about it. Weirdly, it reminds me of the Andrew Wyeth painting called Christina's World, where the paralyzed woman in the dress crawls slowly across a rolling field. The energy flow chart is a portrait of paralysis--of policies and prices that have made it more profitable to waste energy than to put it to work. Stare at the broad gray lines depicting waste and see frittered potential, a failure of can-do, a sad stasis of the imagination. Christina, of course, didn't make her world, but we've spent generations making the flow chart and we have to figure out how to un-make it. Swarm Power is a good place to start.
(Photo: Flickr User christian.senger)
09/10/09 2:22 PM
Climate Change and the Culture of Surrealism
The political debate over Waxman Markey and the US response to climate change is on brief hiatus, but the cultural process of adjustment crunches onward obliviously. This hit me while reading Lorrie Moore's new novel A Gate at the Stairs, where the following scene occurs on a Midwestern farm: "We pushed past the gate at the far end of our property and walked down
one of the old half-frozen cow paths terraced slightly with old roots
and stones to form steps. A small fly buzzed past my ear, then
vanished. I had never seen a fly before at Christmas, and I swatted at
it, feeling, as we had been taught to feel in Art 102, the surrealism
of two familiar things placed unexpectedly side by side. That would be
the future."
There's so much tasty stuff in this paragraph, it's hard to know where to begin, but the kicker, from the standpoint of the 20-year-old narrator, is that everyday surrealism "would be the future." In contrast to the relentless graphs and dog paddling polar bear of an "An Inconvenient Truth," Moore's observation feels emotionally real to me. I hear my friends folding the new surrealism, the new reality, the freakish uncertainty, into their lives and conversations in exactly this unscientific way. And it also made me feel sad for the days when Christmas flies may seem normal.
But what are the politics of this adaptation strategy? We use surreal now to describe objects that are unexpectedly juxtaposed. But when it was started by European artists struggling to come to terms with the horrors of World War One, Surrealism was a movement for social change. I guess nearly a hundred years of modernityn have turned surrealism into a passive spectacle--a way of viewing reality as art arranged by a dotty curator. Odd juxtapositions no longer provoke an organized political response, but the confusion of cognitive dissonance.
I've been experiencing that all week as I get on the 880/980 onramp in downtown Oakland and note that someone lost an entire truckload of mattresses on the side of the freeway. I've been amusing myself by trying to figure out the right metaphor for the scene. So it didn't even occur to me until this morning that both the city of Oakland and the state of California are too far gone to pick up a bunch of mattresses littering the roadway. Surrealism has become a gateway drug for passivity and acceptance, failure of government... and more surrealism.
Take for example, this recent report by National Geographic on technological fixes for climate change, which include:
Flying Volcanos
Cloud Ships
Space Mirrors
Real and Unreal Trees
Artificial Rock Weathering--Deliberate acid rain applied to mountains and rocks to dissolve them and bind CO2 into the new compounds formed from dissolved rock. One scientist described this as "the endgame."
(It reminds me of that end times spiritual that goes "Oh Sinner! You will weep for the rocks and mountains, when the stars begin to fall." (See the Seekers version; or a wonderful bunch of high school kids singing in a well-tuned, bunker-like stairwell.))
Sin, Surrealism, Faith in Juels-Verne-style Technology--these are the cultural tools we have to understand this change, and our options, and they fall short. It's ridiculous to think of carbon emissions, energy use, and SUV's in terms of sin and equally misguided to count the Christmas flies. We don't just need a climate bill, I think we need a new way to conceptualize what we're going through. A "new" surrealism.
Foad Mardukhi operates an idiosyncratic list serve and he recently forwarded an old Op-Ed about climate change as an existential crisis for Western civilization written by Anatol Lieven that seems more relevant now.
"The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.
If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests."
There's so much tasty stuff in this paragraph, it's hard to know where to begin, but the kicker, from the standpoint of the 20-year-old narrator, is that everyday surrealism "would be the future." In contrast to the relentless graphs and dog paddling polar bear of an "An Inconvenient Truth," Moore's observation feels emotionally real to me. I hear my friends folding the new surrealism, the new reality, the freakish uncertainty, into their lives and conversations in exactly this unscientific way. And it also made me feel sad for the days when Christmas flies may seem normal.
But what are the politics of this adaptation strategy? We use surreal now to describe objects that are unexpectedly juxtaposed. But when it was started by European artists struggling to come to terms with the horrors of World War One, Surrealism was a movement for social change. I guess nearly a hundred years of modernityn have turned surrealism into a passive spectacle--a way of viewing reality as art arranged by a dotty curator. Odd juxtapositions no longer provoke an organized political response, but the confusion of cognitive dissonance.
I've been experiencing that all week as I get on the 880/980 onramp in downtown Oakland and note that someone lost an entire truckload of mattresses on the side of the freeway. I've been amusing myself by trying to figure out the right metaphor for the scene. So it didn't even occur to me until this morning that both the city of Oakland and the state of California are too far gone to pick up a bunch of mattresses littering the roadway. Surrealism has become a gateway drug for passivity and acceptance, failure of government... and more surrealism.
Take for example, this recent report by National Geographic on technological fixes for climate change, which include:
Flying Volcanos
Cloud Ships
Space Mirrors
Real and Unreal Trees
Artificial Rock Weathering--Deliberate acid rain applied to mountains and rocks to dissolve them and bind CO2 into the new compounds formed from dissolved rock. One scientist described this as "the endgame."
(It reminds me of that end times spiritual that goes "Oh Sinner! You will weep for the rocks and mountains, when the stars begin to fall." (See the Seekers version; or a wonderful bunch of high school kids singing in a well-tuned, bunker-like stairwell.))
Sin, Surrealism, Faith in Juels-Verne-style Technology--these are the cultural tools we have to understand this change, and our options, and they fall short. It's ridiculous to think of carbon emissions, energy use, and SUV's in terms of sin and equally misguided to count the Christmas flies. We don't just need a climate bill, I think we need a new way to conceptualize what we're going through. A "new" surrealism.
Foad Mardukhi operates an idiosyncratic list serve and he recently forwarded an old Op-Ed about climate change as an existential crisis for Western civilization written by Anatol Lieven that seems more relevant now.
"The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.
If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests."
09/02/09 3:58 PM
Talking Donkeys, Ramadan with Barack, and Our "One True Friend"
This morning, Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry whined that its U.S .ambassador was invited to
Hilary Clinton's post-Ramadan feast but NOT Barack Obama's. Azerbaijan
has been described as America's "one true friend" on the Caspian, a key
ally in the thing formerly known as the "war on terror," a major player
in the U.S.-backed Baku Ceyhan Tiblisi oil pipeline and BTE gas line, as
well as the most important "undecided" in the potential Nabucco
pipeline, which is supposed to break Russia's ability to control
European gas supplies at whim. Is there trouble in the friendship? The
experiences of a talking donkey suggest that there is. For the U.S., Azerbaijan--with its Russian, Georgian, Turkish, and Iranian borders--has been too small and too strategic to fail. One member of the country's beleaguered opposition told me that from the Azeri perspective the fall of the Soviet Union just moved the Politburo from Moscow to Washington, which stepped in to provide security guarantees, asking for pipelines and influence in return. One cost of that friendship was that Azerbaijan wasn't much of a democracy. In its short modern history of the country, the State Department runs out of euphemisms for lousy elections before mentioning that the country's parliament abolished presidential term limits in March of this year.
Despite that, President Aliyev (son of the previous President Aliyev. Ahem.) appears to feel awfully insecure and is now engaging in a crackdown on trivialities. Security forces recently arrested two so-called "donkey bloggers" for posting on Youtube a donkey answering questions at a fake press conference and praising the government for its treatment of donkeys. (Late addition: I have been told they were actually arrested for brawling in a restaurant.) Last month, state security services detained the 43 Azerbaijanis who dared vote by text message for an Armenian singing group in a Eurovision song contest. "When I was called to the MNS, I thought they were arresting me for the strong criticism of President Ilham Aliyev I'd written on Facebook. I had even forgotten that I'd voted for Armenia. When in the MNS they started to interrogate me about this, I almost burst out laughing," said Rovshan Nasirli, who was called to the ministry on August 12. "After they kept me for two hours in an empty room, two men came to me, saying they worked for the main department of the MNS. One had a list in his hand of all the people who voted for the Armenian entry, and their addresses. They said that people like me should be sent to prison. They said, 'Today you vote for an Armenian, tomorrow you will go to blow up the metro for them.'" Crackdowns can appear to reaffirm the power of an angry paranoid state in the short term, but in the long run they breed revolutions.
There are other, less seemingly trivial, issues afoot in Azerbaijan. Recently, the country struck a deal to put some gas in Russia's pipeline. And after years of being the posterchild for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative by publishing its national oil contracts, it made two deals without revealing the details.
Beyond doling out Ramadan invites, I'm not sure that the U.S. has the attention, the strategic leeway, or the policy tools to ask more of Azerbaijan now. But as the relationships between Europe, the Caucusus, the Middle East, and Russia evolve, the U.S. is going to need more of all three. More importantly, we're going to need a more sophisticated sense of our own role in the world, and a more nuanced sense of just how important those pipelines are to us.
Photo Credit: www.flickr.com/photos/statephotos/3583378144
