Big Ideas for Big Problems
What do the experts have to say?
Most supply-air registers are on outside walls at windows. Modern, tight houses with lots of insulation and quality windows can put registers on interior walls. That means shorter duct runs (lower installation cost) and more efficient operation (less static pressure on the fan).
Multi-blade farm windmills to pump well water are just as useful now as when they made life possible in the plains states out West during the frontier days.
Farm windmills still in use:
- 600,000 Argentina
- 250,000 Australia
- 250,000 South Africa
- 60,000 U.S. plains states
Farm windmills are impossible to beat for pumping water in low-wind situations. They usually have a water storage tank so that water is available when there’s no wind.
For a small-diameter rotor, a wind-electric assist pumping system can deliver two to three times the pumping power of a traditional farm windmill. They’re also used to aerate farm ponds in the winter months.
Forest-products firms kill hundreds of bears every year to keep them from scratching up (“marking”) their precious trees, looking for food.
Wind speeds are higher as elevation increases, especially in heavily forested areas. A wind turbine needs to be high enough to reach steady, high-velocity winds. That makes wind power impractical except for rural areas and other locations with plenty of land.
Solar-wind hybrid systems offer complimentary benefits. Often there’s plenty of wind in cloudy months and vice-versa. For hybrid power to function with essential systems, you still need to be connected to the electric grid (or have a fossil fuel backup).
The Passivhaus design standard seeks ultra-high energy efficiency in residential construction, mostly through a very tight building envelope. This method works very well in cold climates like northern Europe, where it’s very popular.
If you want to compare the heating and cooling performance of two similar buildings in different geographical locations, first get the heating and cooling degree days for each site. Then divide the seasonal electricity use by the respective degree hours to get the average cost per degree-hour. Assuming each building has a similar use pattern, e.g., single-story houses, you end up with a good comparison.
Half of the electricity in the United States comes from coal-powered power plants. Coal is the dirtiest energy source, contributing the most to global warming.
Pounds of CO2 per mmBTU of power
- 220 coal
- 160 heating oil (diesel)
- 140 propane
- 117 natural gas
Net energy use in America increased in 2019, but only because many coal powered electric power plants converted to natural gas. The net carbon dioxide emissions of the United States decreased (for the first time in history), but overall energy use increased!
Oil companies use roughly two gallons of fuel for every gallon at the pump.
Auto factories use a tremendous amount of electricity to make vehicles. Before you even drive your new car off the lot, it’s already consumed more energy than you’ll burn in the first forty thousand miles. (Ergo: keep vehicles for a very long time.) Over three billion AC-to-DC “power supplies” in the United States use 2 percent of all electricity generated. Smaller, new high-efficiency power supplies (the little box you plug in with the cord to your appliance) are 90 percent efficient versus the older, bulkier devices, which are only 20 to 40 percent efficient. Get a new one!
Air conditioning use has doubled since 1980. Ninety percent of all new homes have central AC systems, including 75 percent of new houses in the northeast.
It takes an enormous amount of electricity to transform bauxite ore into aluminum. Aluminum production consumes 3 percent of all electricity produced in the United States.
Recycling one pound of aluminum (thirty-three cans) saves 7 kWh of electricity. With the energy used to make one aluminum can from bauxite ore, you can make twenty cans from recycled aluminum.
Tired of traffic? Lobby your city council to build more bicycle-only trails, and ten percent of those drivers will cycle to work. “If you build it, they will ride.”
20.1 THE SUN NEVER SHINES ON TV.
What grocery store chain, given their painfully thin profit margin, can afford to run TV advertising, “Oh boy, a farm-fresh salad bursting with color and sumptuous flavor.” Not going to happen.
They have to compete with fast-food chains (who have huge profit margins because they serve unhealthy foods full of saturated fats, empty calories, and extreme amounts of sugar) who buy in bulk from farms that employ migrant workers paid a fraction of the living wage.
20.2 CAT LITTER COULD SAVE THE WORLD.
A recent scientific study showed that spreading crushed silicate rock dust in farm fields and working it into the soil can act as a carbon sink for the atmosphere. When rain dissolves the fine rock particles into the ground, CO2 is absorbed from the atmosphere and converted into a bicarbonate compound.
This process is called carbon capture. The chemical reaction absorbs CO2 from the air and stores it permanently in new, chemically inert compounds. (Trees capture CO2 as well but release it when the wood decays.)
The best rock to use for this bicarbonate process is basalt, which was formed by volcanic activity. One drawback of the crushed-rock scheme is that crushing the rocks requires a lot of energy. You also have to transport the material to the farm fields, spread it, and plow it into the topsoil.
Powdered rock would benefit the farmland, adding nutrients to the soil. Higher crop yields can be achieved with less fertilizer. (Essential if the planet is to sustain a few billion more people in the next fifty years.) Fewer pesticides for this “natural gardening” means less damage to the whole ecosystem.
So, if you live in a rural area, put the cat’s litter to good use!
20.3 FREE ELECTRICAL POWER CAN TRANSFORM THE CARIBBEAN.
All the islands in the Caribbean have high electric rates because they import all their fuel (diesel, natural gas, coal). Electric rates in Puerto Rico are $0.25/kwh, versus an average of $0.13/kwh in the continental United States.
“The Caribbean? Islands? Lots and lots of sunshine every day of the year? Think solar panels!“
Hurricanes Irma and Maria, Category 5 and 4, both hit Puerto Rico in 2017. High winds obliterated the island’s entire electrical infrastructure. Virtually all the solar panel installations survived (assuming the roof did, too).
Electric rates are so high in the Caribbean (up to $0.50/kwh, five times what we pay in North Carolina), the payback for solar power installations drops by a factor of five. Figure in the quality, consistency, and durability of sunlight, and solar panel paybacks are over ten times faster than in the United States. Instead of a tenyear payback, it’s a year or less.
Excuse me, but it took two or three years to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical power grid. Just like it was before, as vulnerable to windstorm damage as ever. If they had spent all that good money on solar panels, the entire island would now be immune from power outages—forever! (And everybody would now be enjoying free electricity after one short year to pay off the installation cost.)
20.4 NUCLEAR POWER IS BACK.
You’re familiar with the giant, convex concrete towers for nuclear power plants? On a cold winter day, it looks like they’re gushing dirty, polluted smoke into the atmosphere. Relax. That’s not smoke. Those are “cooling towers,” and the “smoke” is steam.
Inside the power plant, nuclear fuel heats water, creating steam. The steam is pressurized, then expanded in steam-turbines, which rotate a generator, creating electric power. Other than the exotic heat source, “nuclear power plants” are nothing but good-old-fashioned steam turbines.
Engineers can’t extract 100 percent of the thermal energy from the steam, so what’s left from the power-generation process is sent to a cooling tower. (Pour water over very, very hot surface, and when it turns into steam, it extracts the “latent heat of vaporization.” Yet one more variation on that theme.)
Engineers call that extra steam waste heat, and a big part of energy conservation in industrial applications is finding ways to put that waste heat to practical use. Can you think of ways to use that heat? Well, they could send all that steam underground to the nearest town for central and space heating. Not that anybody wants to live near a nuclear power plant.
Consider a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. It’s a small city! Steam from their nuclear reactor powers everything. Every damn thing!
Nuclear power plants usually sit next to a very large water source: an ocean, major river, the Great Lakes. The steam-turbine-generator and the cooling tower demand a lot of cheap water. Waste heat from other processes goes directly into that giant water sink nearby: thermal pollution. (All that extra heat would be very noticeable in a stream or small lake.)
20.5 GREASE THE AXIS.
The entire German war effort in World War II—both their military machine and all the factories and cities at home—used 30 percent less fuel than the British used back home in the U.K., excluding the British war effort (and the American war effort, and the Russian war effort).
When are the modern superpowers going to declare war on global warming and get serious about achieving that level of energy conservation?
20.6 NUCLEAR “POWER BALLS” TO THE RESCUE.
The worst drawback of nuclear power is the possibility of a Chernobyl-style meltdown. Otherwise, nuclear power is very green. Scientists have developed a new kind of nuclear fuel that makes meltdowns impossible. (Here’s a brilliant idea: convert all the atomic weapons in the world into fuel for power plants.)
The new “tristructural isotropic” fuel, already being made for the next-generation nuclear reactors, is manufactured using low-enriched uranium. Three layers of graphite and a silicon carbide ceramic surround each uranium nodule. These “power balls” are smaller than a poppy seed (minuscule).
This multi-layer ceramic design keeps the uranium from melting down under any circumstance. Safe nuclear power. Wow!
20.7 THE COAL TRUTH.
During World War II, the Germans had scant fuel reserves. All they had was coal. So they developed the technology to extract hydrocarbons from coal. They made the first synthetic rubber, synthetic methanol, synthetic nitric acid, and synthetic gasoline—all grades of gasoline, up to jet fuel (they also built the first jet aircraft).
In the modern-day, these processes (which have advanced little beyond the German’s WWII tech) can compete head-on with $60 a barrel oil. However, the processes require carbon sequestration (capturing carbon byproducts and storing them permanently) to be sustainable.
As vast as the world’s coal reserves are, is anybody even working on improving these techniques?
The same conversion facility can be used to convert coal, gas, or biomass to fuel. Which is good because America has lots of biomass near the Appalachian coalmines, from farming and forestation.
Sure, coal is a dirty fuel to burn for electricity, but who’s working on new ways to extract energy from coal more efficiently?
20.8 WOODEN CARS – CAPTURED CARBON ON WHEELS.
Scientists have discovered a manufacturing process that makes wood as strong as steel and more durable than titanium. Twelve times stronger than the original wood!
Researchers soak the wood in the same chemicals used to create wood pulp for paper, then compress it to collapse the cell walls. Then they heat the result to develop new chemical bonds between the cells and voila!
The end product is as strong as steel but six times lighter. You can even mold this nouveau wood into shapes, like door panels for a vehicle. It’s as tough as Kevlar but weighs less and is cheaper to manufacture.
Auto manufacturers go to great lengths to shave a couple of pounds off vehicles to make them more energy-efficient. High-tech vehicles replace steel with aluminum or even (more expensive) titanium. What a waste of valuable natural resources. (It takes an enormous amount of electricity to smelt aluminum from bauxite ore).
This new high-tech wood promises to reduce the weight of parts by a factor of six, save tons of money, and capture all that carbon in the process.
20.9 WIND POWER IN THE CARIBBEAN.
If you’ve ever vacationed in the Caribbean, you’ll know it’s windy there. In Aruba, the wind is so consistently strong all the Divi Divi trees are bent over sideways. (Great for sailing.) A wide band of trade winds envelops the whole Caribbean, averaging 11 to 13 MPH all year long.
Giant, commercial wind turbines need a minimum of 7-9 MPH winds to start turning. They keep generating power up to a maximum speed of 55 MPH (roughly a tropical storm). Above that speed, the blades automatically brake to a stop. The assembly overall can handle winds up to 100 MPH (a Category 1 hurricane). Engineers are working on wind systems that can handle up to a Category 5 hurricane.
(Hurry up!)
Like, we always have plenty of advance warning. Can’t they make the wind turbines so technicians can fold down the blades when a storm is threatening? If they can shut down oil rig platforms out in the Gulf, why not wind-turbine blades?
According to weatherspark.com, the average hourly wind speed all year long in Puerto Rico is 12.5 MPH. The calmest average speed is 9 MPH in October (still enough to turn the turbine blades). Daily, in the summertime, the wind speed drops below the minimum threshold of 7 MPH from midnight to 8 A.M. every day (when the electric demand is lowest) and peaks at 4 P.M. (when electrical demand is the highest).
You don’t have to be a “rocket scientist” (which I am, by the way—MSE in aerospace engineering, almost a Ph.D.) to see the possibilities here, both for solar and wind.
Virtually all the Caribbean islands are dirt poor. Renewable energy would create many good jobs and enough power to attract a robust industrial base, for even more jobs and prosperity. (Think of all the Internet web hosting companies that brag that “all our power is green!”)
Otherwise, wind farms (many wind turbines in a cluster) are being considered off the coasts of New England and North Carolina. There are issues, of course: all the innocent migratory birds getting killed, for one thing.
All the rich people with waterfront property: “You spoiled my million-dollar view!” What, for three weeks of the year when you’re on vacation, and maybe another four months when you’re ripping off short-term renters to pay all your tax-deductible expenses? Let the elites pay for barge-mounted windmills and for the cost to tow them away and back each summer.
“You want what? Uncle Sam, to reimburse you for lost property value now that your precious view is full of beautiful wind turbines? A tax deduction? How about a tax increase to pay for the whole damn wind farm!”
(I still can’t figure out why people get to deduct mortgage interest for second homes from their federal taxes.)
20.10 COGENERATION IS FOR THE BRAVE—AND COLD—SOULS.
Small cogeneration systems can generate all the power for a large home, using natural gas as the energy source.
Cogeneration is ideal for very remote locations with no electrical service available. However, a residential cogen system might be economical if your house has a very high heating load. For example, if you’re in a frigid climate, or just a very cold climate, but your home has lots of windows or bare stone/brick walls that you don’t want to insulate.
Cogeneration systems generate a great deal of waste heat, enough to meet all your heating needs: hot water, space heating, maybe even an indoor pool. The payback for this system is going entirely off the grid and replacing all your current power needs.
Natural gas is the cleanest of fossil fuels, and most electrical power plants use coal.
20.11 SOLAR SUN HOURS ARE NOT AN OBJECTIVE CRITERION FOR PHOTOVOLTAICS.
The universal metric for the energy you can extract from a solar photovoltaic system is “solar sun hours.” On a cloudy day, electricity output drops to 25 percent of the rated capacity.
Most of the United States has plenty of sunshine in the summer, and the northern states even have an extra hour or two of daylight. When November arrives, however, the clouds roll in. Worse yet, the daylight hours are shorter.
And so, most people assume solar photovoltaics in the northern states aren’t competitive. “Anybody with solar panels on their roof must be a treehugging fanatic.”
There’s an essential mitigating factor that few people know about: For every 1° F below 77° F, photovoltaic panels become 1 percent more efficient. For example, if you live in western Montana, and the average temperature during the day is 27° F from December through February—precisely when it’s cloudiest—your panels are 50 percent more efficient. They generate 50 percent more electricity for each sunlight hour.
Now compare western Montana with Gulf Coast Florida in the winter months: 25 percent versus 40 percent clear skies (according to weatherspark.com). If Montana’s power output is 50 percent greater, then that 25 percent clear skies is effectively 38 percent.
On the winter solstice, there’s a two-hour daylight difference between Key West, Florida, and along the Canadian border. That cuts into the “clear sky hours” in our example. However, on the summer solstice, there are two more hours of sunlight along the Canadian border, so on an annual basis, the daylight hours issue balances out.
Utilities that allow net metering credit your bill for extra electricity you generate (e.g., summertime in Montana) if you use that credit over the next twelve months, e.g., in the cloudy winter months.
Nobody can beat the southwest for sunlight hours. However, the almost-ass-unny Rocky Mountain area of Colorado has almost as much sun and much more cold in the winter. Given Colorado’s long cold season, that puts them on par with the sunbelt states of Arizona and New Mexico.
Bottom line: The entire continental United States is competitive for solar photovoltaics, even the frigid north and the mountainous areas out west.
20.12 THERMOACTIVE FOUNDATIONS REDUCE THE COST OF GSHPS.
Geothermal foundations are 75 percent less expensive than traditional GSHP “slinky” trench field installations. The “geothermal foundation” idea incorporates ground-well loops into the foundation piles for a structure. Consequently, there’s no extra cost drilling the wells because they have to be drilled for the foundation anyway (at least, to get below the frost line. Any depth beyond that is lagniappe since all the drilling equipment is there and set up already).
Future Tech!
20.13
We need to start building nuclear power plants in the United States again, using the new hyper-safe “power balls” tech.
20.14
Whenever any natural disaster hits (hurricane, forest fire, tornado, flood), the electrical service should be built back to emphasize solar panels, solar water heating, and geothermal.
20.15
Every power plant in America releases a steady volume of waste heat into our waterways. By giving that thermal energy to local communities to use for free space heating of homes and businesses, we can help the environment, too.
20.16
A significant incentive is needed to build new, better, cheaper farm windmills to bring affordable, dependable power to rural America.
20.17
As bad a shape as our highways and bridges are in (a “D” grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers), we need to rebuild them with separate bicycle lanes through urban areas.
20.18
As green as they all claim to be, Democrat mayors of large U.S. cities should declare a Bogata Sunday at least once a month, closing all highways to motor vehicles. Let the bicycles take over the metroplex!
20.19
Every northern house in a region with a deep frost line is constructed with a foundation that extends below the freeze depth. That’s a great opportunity to install a GSHP loop in the ground, at no extra cost. (GSHPs are the most efficient method of heating and cooling in very cold climates.)
20.20
Wooden cars—wooden everything!—with the new super-strength wood capturing carbon in a big way, and for a very long time.
20.21
We need mini-cogeneration systems that can replace the ubiquitous gas furnace in all houses up north (and everywhere else). Cogen satisfies all the space heating needs (including hot water) plus delivers more than enough electricity. Off the grid in one fell swoop!
20.22
The problem with finding a practical use for all the waste heat from power plants (and industrial operations in general) is transporting that thermal energy to the nearest point-of-use (cities). Steam is the usual method because high-pressure steam moves a tremendous amount of thermal energy: super-high-pressure steam lines could solve the whole problem. (Very dangerous, high-pressure steam has to be underground.)
20.23
Large wind turbines that default to a safe configuration to survive a Category 5 storm, then pop open for a ready source of power in the aftermath. Perfect for all hurricane-prone areas in the Caribbean.
20.24
Israel requires solar water heating in all new homes. We should use their technology and do the same thing in regions in America with similar sunlight hours available.
20.25
Most of the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere gets dissolved in the hyper-cold water deep at the south pole, acidifying ocean water worldwide via the main current systems, enough to soften the shells of vulnerable sea life. Good-bye oysters, lobsters, clams, and all the larger creatures right on up the food chain.
20.26
“Fly ash” is the largest coal combustion byproduct—over eighty million tons a year. It’s free; they’ll even pay you to haul it away. Concrete made with “fly ash” is cheaper and more durable. Using 100 percent of the fly ash (versus 45 percent at present) brings the entire industry into competitiveness with other sources of energy. Every concrete project in the land— construction, roads, bridges—everything should be made with “fly ash.”
20.27
I did the calculations a while back: planting eight billion trees (at $1 each) would capture enough carbon to make the U.S. carbon-neutral. Americans already plant 1.2 billion trees a year. We can do it! Recycling paper, reusing lumber—every little thing you do to save wood or paper gets us closer to that nine billion-tree goal!