Beyond Fire, Insurance

The term conservative has more than one meaning. In politics, conservative means "disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change."

In risk assessment and decision-making, conservative means: "cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate."

Another consideration is that risk can be asymmetrical. The likelihood that buying fire insurance will bankrupt you is very low. But even though the probability that your house will catch fire is very low, if you don't have fire insurance and your home does burn down, your finances will be in shambles.

There is a fire alarm wailing – people in the know are telling us that climate change will lead to unprecedented chaos. We have been alerted that the fire danger today is extreme. But does the fire brigade even hear the siren? You realize, of course, that losing a planet is far worse than losing your home. A house can be replaced, but good planets are hard to find. (They're scarce and few.) It is highly unlikely that humanity could find another one if ours burns up.

Compared to the asymmetrical risk asssociated with lighting the match that would destroy our planet's experiment in consciousness, the cost of insurance is obviously negligible, even if it turns out to be a full time task for every human being on the planet to put out the fire.

A yardstick against which climate change has been measured is global temperature, influenced in turn by CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere. Another yardstick is the acidity of the oceans.

A politically conservative response might be to leave well enough alone: "... disposed to preserve existing conditions..."

For effective risk assessment and decision-making, on the other hand, clearly the conservative estimate would mean to err on the side of doing too much.

In 1824, Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831) wrote a pamphlet, "Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition." Her appeal was the first public voice that dared to challenge the notion that abolition must, by its very nature, be gradual and measured. A few years later, one bloody war and the Emancipation Proclamation put slavery to rest.

Many suffered under slavery. Continuing to use hydrocarbons as energy is a death sentence for all. This is a call for immediate, not gradual transformation from illicit energy to renewable energy. Ground transportation can be solar powered. We must prove that it can be done and expand it rapidly to alleviate the suffering inherent in climate change. 

Meeting the Challenge

Notwithstanding glamorous advertisements of automobiles posed in pristine natural landscapes, there is nothing to celebrate about machines dominating the urban landscape, nor in aiding and abetting humanity’s nasty habit of digging up those toxic carbonaceous substances again to burn and spew those byproducts of Fire into the atmosphere. Climate change and resource depletion are potential threats of such enormous proportions that, in a world nearly 100% dependent on Fire for transportation, any solutions must have high leverage and produce immediate results.

Such high leverage options are available. Though implementation to date has been fragmented, cities are developing automated transportation networks integrated with solar Electricity, notably in Uppsala in Sweden, at 60º North (2/3 of the way from the equator to the North Pole) and in Silicon Valley. With research and engineering support from San Jose State University and the Presidio Graduate School, several Silicon Valley cities are organizing to create a sustainable alternative to automobile centered transportation, beyond Fire.

Given the risk of abrupt and devastating climate change, the incumbent carbon-dependent industries are in turn increasingly at risk of losing access to their asset portfolios (e.g., oil / gas / coal reserves). Governments will be forced to put out the Fire in order to alleviate ever-increasing and devastating climate instability. The movement will be slow at first. Then Mother Nature will “pick up the bat” and, in the face of looming unrelenting and unequivocal pressure from Her, the momentum for sweeping societal change will be unstoppable.

Can we stop the curtain from falling on the human saga? Now is the time for humanity to respond to the central challenge of the 21st Century.

Beyond Fire

What is all this madness?

Humanity is facing stunningly challenging times in the coming years (not decades: years). We have learned that, for our very survival, we must quit burning carbon. This is common knowledge; there are no mysteries here. Yet major institutions continue aggressively pursuing carbon power, not only burning the deadly stuff, but even building more voracious furnaces to accelerate the suicidal madness.

Yet it is reasonable that humans cling to Fire. The discovery of Fire defined humanity's humble origins, after all. Fire has been at the very core of human existence for eons.

Long before humans harnessed Fire, there was a great happening in the primeval world, the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE). Primitive photosynthesis in the oceans extracted oxygen from water (H₂O) which then first combined with mineral salts (producing, e.g., rust). Much later as oxygen saturated the ocean's minerals, it then emerged into the atmosphere and helped break down methane into CO₂ and water, and primitive life forms slowly continued to evolve. From the time when CO₂ was almost 20% of the atmosphere, much of it was gradually absorbed into the ocean and plant life or was buried away, opening the way for large oxygen-breathing organisms. During the Carboniferous Period 360 million years ago, coal was formed and submerged, capturing even more carbon from the atmosphere and further making way for modern life forms. These conditions were in place when humans appeared on the stage... and all was well.

Then very recently things changed. Humans began burning that long sequestered carbon in earnest, in pursuit of a better way of life. All of that seemed reasonable for a time but then scientists became keenly aware of the dangers of releasing great quantities of carbon back into the atmosphere, and finally their message has been laid out plainly for all who will listen. However, like the sorcerer's apprentice, humans are fascinated with the power that can be released from burning carbon. As pyromaniacs, we are altering the climate, threatening the delicate composition of the atmosphere and the very survival of the living organisms upon which our own survival depends.

But is it possible to turn away from Fire, the very phenomenon which once defined humanity and now ironically threatens our very existence?

Yes. A couple of centuries ago, another great discovery was made that has forever changed the human experience – Electricity. It is now Electricity that defines human society: Electricity is at the very core of modern civilization. Ironically, though, until now much of that transformative Electricity has been produced under a Faustian bargain with our once dependable servant Fire.

Stated differently, in the process of transformation, humanity's friend Fire has become the arch-enemy. The prescient Wizard of Electricity, Thomas Edison, laid down the gauntlet over 100 years ago, in 1910:

Sunshine is spread out thin and so is Electricity. Perhaps they are the same, Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.

Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property.

There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen....

Two more great discoveries have opened the door to such a viable future beyond Fire, both attributed to that other prescient Wizard, Albert Einstein. One was the release of the energy of the atom. The other was to capture the sun's energy, e.g., with silicon. (It was for his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921, not the theory of relativity which remained controversial at the time.)

Unfortunately the effective exploitation of atomic energy in a controlled manner remains elusive. The possibilities of fission and fusion are constrained by the unpredictability of human behavior and the very real danger of radiation escaping from manageable concentrations, under some combination of human error, warfare, climate change and natural disasters.

That leaves us with one option – "natural forces" – the solar energy, wind and tides which Edison was able to see so clearly ahead. And, ironically, to validate Edison's challenge and keep the atmosphere in balance, humanity must put out the Fire. Thankfully, burning wood in modern cities has been reduced to a summer ritual (the charcoal barbeque). But we like squatters are still burning hydrocarbon minerals to make Electricity ... and to get around town. Though progress is being made to produce Electricity with solar and wind, infernal Fire-belching machines are still running around loose on the streets.

It is encouraging that city dwellers have abandoned Fire in the kitchen (at least wood fires, that is) so the next step for humanity's survival is to banish Fire from the streets. Further, given what humanity knows today, it is just plain absurd to allow machines on wheels to dominate the urban landscape. We can take the Solarevolution to the streets and liberate ourselves from machine dominance. We can return our streets to the people again.

Northern Lights and Cold Nights

It is incredibly simple but seemingly impossible for architects and engineers in the construction industry to find the north arrow on a compass. Maybe they just didn't join the Boy Scouts when they were growing up?!

To heat a home in the winter, whether in the desert (which can be sunny and yet cold) or in a cloudy temperate zone rain forest in northern climes, the best solar collectors bar none are windows on the south side. Trouble is,  first you have to find the south side. That's apparently the hard part.

If your floor plan offers you a garage on the south side, forget it. You might have a warm car but you will be burning the midnight oil to keep warm. If you have only doors, hallways, closets and bathrooms on the south side, your clothes might be warm when you put them on, but you will still be needlessly spending a lot on heating. Windows South! 

In the past few years, the construction industry has introduced new "low-E" window technology which offers high insulating properties. But when government got on board, this new advantage got bundled with a severe hidden liability. The government had to take into account the fact that designers no longer carry compasses.

What could possibly have gone wrong when government jumped on board to achieve their laudable energy conservation goals? Sadly, in order to simplify the regulations to accommodate those developers and architects who had lost their way, all windows are now conveniently deemed to be the same, regardless of window orientation (north-south-east-west). The result is low-E glass, delivering good cold weather and night time insulation combined with severely filtered solar heat gain, down to 25%-30% of normal. You're sitting by the window; it's cold outside but the sun is streaming in through the window ... and you're nearly freezing.

With these well-intentioned energy efficiency regulations, your heating costs can get much worse. You can see this on the Energy Star website. Here you will be obliged to conclude that the southern half of the USA is hot all year long ...

... because the energy standard requires that all of your windows block out the sun in the winter:

In the yellow, orange and red zones, all which experience cold winter weather (except perhaps for southern Florida), Energy Star requires that all windows must be stingy and let through less than 40% (yellow), 30% (orange) or 27% (red) of the sun to keep you warm.

In the colder northern zone, your solar heat gain (SHGC) is only required to be greater than 35%-40%. I'm sorry, that's just not enough.

Though low solar heat gain makes sense for windows on the west side of a home, to cut out the sunlight on the south side is a travesty.

If you are specifying windows for your home, seek out windows for the south side which use "low-E hard coat" glass such as Pilkington's Energy Advantage which can deliver over 70% solar heat gain while preserving the attractive low "U-factor" with its high insulating properties. "Energy Advantage™ is a pyrolitically on-line coated low-emissivity glass." In other words, they bake the coating right into the glass while it's being made, not as an afterthought like the so-called "soft coat" low-E glazing. The regular window manufacturers, dealers and installers know close to nothing about this until you get pretty far north (it's the law in Germany) but the Pilkington people are very helpful and knowledgeable. They can put you in touch with window companies where people understand the Energy Advantage.

By the way, if you want to keep the sun out in the summer time, all you have to do is put an overhang over the window, like this:

MicroSolar Defined

MicroSolar is an approach to solar energy that is geared to the scale of individual and family needs. It is the other end of the spectrum from the growing push to create large scale multi-megawatt solar fields in the desert. It means new ways of meeting traditional needs -- the light, the cookstove, the message.

The Basic Principle

The basic principle is: More with Less. In one sense, it's about that simple.

Replacing fossil fuels with solar energy is necessarily a shift from consuming materials to transforming natural flows -- from burning up irreplaceable solids (coal), liquids (oil) and gases (natural gas) to re-learning how to use perpetual water flow (hydroelectric), air flow (wind generators, kiteships) and solar radiation (photovoltaics). It also means creating new artifacts to deliver the services that are built into modern civilization -- getting rid of internal combustion engines (~ 20-30% efficient) by substituting electric motors (~ 90% efficient), eliminating incandescent light bulbs (~ 10% efficient, which at only 65 watts will burn through a barrel of oil equivalent per year of steady operation) by installing solar tubes (delivering natural light into windowless areas) and LED lights (~ 40% efficient).

Integrated Supply and Demand Innovation

The critically important conceptual shift is to integrate innovations in solar generation ("supply") with innovations in ultra-efficient consumption ("demand"). It is absurd to connect a MicroSolar system to a "Macro" fancy modern refrigerator (which typically consumes at least the equivalent of a barrel of oil per year) -- or an incandescent light bulb.

It is equally absurd to use solar energy to produce a liquid fuel to be wasted in an inefficient internal combustion engine in the same profligate way that petroleum has been wasted for a century. MicroSolar principles enable us to embrace altogether new forms of transportation. Our forebears were liberated from designing within the limitations of the horse. (Imagine a parking lot at the Mall, filled with unattended horses and buggies!) Now urban design can be liberated from the limitations of the automobile.

Integrating Solar into Building Design

As people become more concerned about the environment, they may ask their architect to add a solar energy system to their new building -- to make it more "green". But if the building orientation has already been decided by the layout of the street or the view, or the architect has specified a lot of cute gingerbread for the roofline, it can be quite difficult and costly to integrate solar features. The sun appears in the sky in a well-understood arc which we are not going to change, so our buildings must be oriented to that arc. It's not hard: Windows South  (in the northern hemisphere), roof ridge-lines running east-west, and so forth. Furthermore, the heat from solar energy captured by windows in the wintertime -- or shaded from entering windows in the summertime -- is as important as solar panels on the roof.

Methodology

Even though the benefits of MicroSolar are profound, it can be very difficult for people to adapt to new ways of thinking and acting. New methodologies are also needed. 

One such methodology is very straightforward: youth doing exploratory design science.

It is easy to see the consequences of consuming fossil fuels: when the tank is empty, it has to be refilled. But it is hard to see air flowing and you can't use a bucket to quantify solar radiation. Electricity is invisible, so these MicroSolar energy flows require a metering tool, an energy awareness engine.

With such tools, a group of students, from Middle School level to University level, can take on the challenge of structuring a Solar Nations Initiative to find appropriate solutions.

• identify a need, 
• specify minimal requirements,
• investigate marketplace solutions,
• identify good designs and product prospects,
• test and compare product performance,
• recommend solutions,
• conduct a pilot project,
• develop a training campaign,
• guide implementation on a large scale. 

As an example, consider the cookstove:

• identify a need: to cook without biomass or fossil fuels under varying sun conditions (sunny/cloudy, day/night)
• specify minimal requirements: temperature, volume, heat storage, time to completion
• investigate marketplace solutions: locate various vendors and/or invent new products
• identify good designs and product prospects: acquire samples from numerous vendors
• test and compare product performance: test under rigorous conditions and determine best solutions
• recommend solutions: recommend product(s) to stakeholders
• conduct a pilot project: test in real conditions with numerous families to verify performance
• develop a training campaign: bring teams together from numerous communities to learn new techniques
• guide implementation on a large scale: marketing and sales on a large scale.   

Key Elements of MicroSolar ("Legs of the Stool")

MicroSolar principles (more with less) can be applied in all domains of living. In each of these domains, a research project can be established to identify, test and then implement MicroSolar solutions. 

• AGRICULTURE, FOOD PROCESSING, COOKING
• EDUCATION
• HEALTH CARE
• ENERGY GENERATION, ENERGY EFFICIENCY
• SHELTER, BIOCLIMATIC DESIGN
• TRANSPORTATION
• COMMUNITY INFRASTRUCTURE
• TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Agriculture / Food Processing / Cooking

• Solar water pumping
• Solar tractors
• Food drying
• Solar box cooker
• Solar concentrating lens for high temperature cooking (invented by Prof Guasumba of Ecuador)
• Solar bakery at the village scale
• Complete solar kitchens

Education
 

Please refer to the section on Methodology, above. 

Health Care

• Solar powered refrigeration for medicines
• High temperature solar equipment sanitization
• Solar electric for remote clinics 
• Telemedicine (internet access to medical information and remote healthcare consulting)

Energy Generation and Energy Efficiency

• MicroSolar devices
• MicroAppliances
• MicroGrids. Once individual solutions are in place, microgrids can be established in a village or neighborhood. Each microgrid is semi-autonomous and can function independently of larger systems.  
• MiniGrids. Once MicroGrids are in place, they in turn can be linked together into larger scale minigrid units, which in turn can also function independently as necessary.
• Electrical Distribution Systems
• Global Electricity Grid

Shelter, Bioclimatic Design

• Energy audits with small sensors
• Bake off between model solar home and regular home (based on the Solar Decathlon)

Transportation

• Utility Solar Vehicle 
• Solar Powered podcars

Community Infrastructure

• Waste management

Telecommunications

• Remote telecenters
• Wireless networks
• Upgrading cell phones
• Downsizing microcomputers

Finance

Solar solutions have now become sufficiently sophisticated that the consumer can purchase very small devices, or modular components that can be expanded at will, working within family budgets. In cases where solar devices offset other costs over time, microloans can be created.

Conclusion

In the world of electricity, the concept of MicroSolar has not yet been applied on a national scale to serve 100% of a country's population. This elegant use of solar energy is only now truly available, as robust solar systems and reliable components are finally reaching the marketplace. Rather than being seen as "underdeveloped" or handicapped, the rural nation that employs MicroSolar principles will leap ahead of those other countries which are trying to modernize by mimicking industrialized countries with fragile transmission lines and overbuilt, high-energy-consuming appliances. The MicroSolar nation may even leap ahead of those industrialized nations which have become excessively dependent upon complex unstable energy infrastructure. With their unwieldy long supply lines, these industrialized nations are more vulnerable to economic chaos as their access to fossil fuels inevitably goes into decline.

For developing countries with large deep rural populations, MicroSolar is a first step towards modernization that does not require centralized power management which inevitably has to deal with transmission line failures that leave everyone on the line stranded without basic services. MicroSolar offers the most resiliency and equity -- if there is a component failure in one household, help is next door where a neighbor's system is still functioning. Basic energy services can be priced within the means of rural people -- first with small affordable devices, and then expanded in a modular, brick-by-brick fashion, to add more solar equipment each year, always within a family's budget.

Solar Energy Myths and Challenges

The peak oil community owes a debt of gratitude to King Hubbert, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, Buz Ivanhoe and others in the petroleum industry who brought to light the challenge which humanity faces. And of course it is only logical that they were among the first to ask, "What next?!" It is also logical that when all you know is a geologist's pick, you respond by swinging that pick. The first solution that comes to mind is: find more oil. Trouble with that, of course, is that eventually this algorithm fizzles out, and another has to take its place. Since petroleum industry folks don't necessarily consider themselves to be in the energy business, it is not surprising that most of them would have little knowledge or appreciation for the potential of solar energy solutions.

In fact, it would not be surprising if petroleum people were to bring prejudices to the party and find fault with renewables:

Solar (wind) is intermittent.

• Good point. I guess we will need to hire intermittency engineers.
• Better than exhaustible.

Solar is diffuse.

• Same as highly distributed. Lots of people (countries) got cheated out of oil, but everybody gets enough sun, even the penguins.
• Okay, so match your energy conversion device to the conditions: Thin is in. (Go hire diffusivity engineers.)

Solar isn't efficient enough.

• As I pointed out before, your car is < 1% efficient, even after 100 years of refinement.
• Solar panels are 20% efficient and getting better. Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black!

Solar can never match the energy density of gasoline.

• Gasoline is a dangerously flammable liquid. Solar energy is a flux. I can make better devices that run with flux than you can with liquids. There is no comparison.
• I grant you that oil is pretty magical stuff but using it for energy is like burning the furniture to keep warm on a cold winter night.
• So we had better keep as much of our oil as possible.
• In a pinch we can make solids, liquids and gases from sunlight (e.g., for airplanes and rockets).

Bottom line, if you are designing an energy-something that has never been built and you aren't a solar engineer, I recommend you hire one.

And it might also be time to start asking some questions.

Since we use most of our oil for transportation, the first question might be, "How do we engineer a transportation system based 100% on renewable energy (that isn't compound stupid)?"

Now at least we have a definition of what we need to do next. If instead of building more energy-efficient cars, we get busy designing and building solar transportation, it might take fifty years, but we won't be wasting our children's inheritance.

How can solar power fuel transportation?

Like this:

This is not a pipe dream.

1. Encitra is working with the City of Uppsala in Sweden to design such a system based on a presentation "How Can We Turn Sun Radiation into Automotion?" (pdf) at "The Future of Automotive Energy: Fossil Fuels, Agro Fuels or Photovoltaic Cells," hosted by The Swedish Institute for Transportation and Communications Analysis (SIKA) and Center for Sustainable Development (CHU) at the Royal Institute of Technology on November 6, 2007.

In that presentation it was demonstrated that solar powered podcars may be able to perform across the board 5 to 10 times better than the automobile: more than 10X lower operating costs, much more than 10X safer, 10X more efficient, 10X fewer emissions, 10X less land use, 10X less materials, etc.

Which countries will capitalize on this advantage? Certainly not a country which puts all of its dwindling natural resources into "improvements." It's too late for incremental change. We need a breakthrough.

2. Swenson Solar has just completed a 600 kW solar project in Santa Cruz where a canopy has been constructed just about like the one in the illustration above.

Solar transportation will happen. The only question is whether the USA will get on board soon enough to become a leader (exporter) rather than a follower (importer).

Congress might like to see the USA become a leader in developing new export opportunities. Will the USA lead or follow those already under way in the UK, Sweden, and the UAE, plus projects under consideration in China, India, etc.?

We have to shift our point of view. We have to automate with computer robotics something that is erroneously called an "automobile." We must take the "automobile" off the ground where it has imposed mortal danger to humans and animals for a century. Protecting the world's dwindling sources of oil has also put our youth in harm's way. That would be reason enough to change our point of view. After all, the automobile wasn't fashioned after a horse.

Returning now to the question,

How can solar power fuel transportation?

The answer is to get off fuels altogether. Use the flux of the sun and convert it to electricity.

Do President Obama and Congress actually want to get the USA off foreign oil? They need to know that flex fuels won't even get us close. Neither unfortunately will the electric car. It just isn't efficient enough. Solar podcars will use electricity as it is being generated (most traffic is during daylight hours) whereas the EV fleet will need mountains of batteries to be charged mostly at night, completely out of phase with travel time.

Congress needs to know that there is a solution that can be made right here in the USA, and won't require any fuel supply. Fuel -- any of that liquid stuff which goes into a vehicle's tank only to deliver a net efficiency of less than 1% -- in 2011 is as out of date as hay was becoming in 1911.

We will be able to build 5-10 miles -- including a permanent power supply -- for the budget in every mile of new high speed rail, and we don't have to worry about property acquisition or safety at grade crossings. We will use only the air rights over existing rights of way. Upgrade Amtrak to bi-directional passenger rails for far less and use the balance of the $500 billion envisioned to replace oil-based routine travel with solar.

Join the Solarevolution!