Active roads – a new poetry of motion
October 9, 2009
A couple of media stories, a long road journey and my recent change of status to homeworker provoked this thought – what are active roads up to ?
Let’s define what I mean by active roads first.
These are energy transfer or recovery systems that are part of the vehicle/road combo that moves mass around the world. Technologies like piezo-electric road surfaces, hydraulic speed bumps, and wireless power transmission work together to increase the overall efficiency of transporting that mass around.
I’m guessing that most people know by now that conventional internal combustion engine-based independent transport systems (some people know them as cars running on roads) are pretty inefficient in energy terms. Most of the stored energy in petroleum is liberated as heat which goes to the nearest sink (usually the atmosphere, though I did see a patent on recovering some of that heat to power refrigeration in lorries). I’m also guessing that most people know that there are some economic, environmental and social implications of using petroleum distillates to power this transport system. And I’m also finally guessing that you are rapidly tiring of my use of silly words to describe it all, but that is deliberate so I make no apologies for it.
The reason why is because the car/road combo is a system. I want to make it seem as complicated as it is. It includes oil exploration, production, pipeline construction, rig (de)commissioning, environmental monitoring and remediation, demand planning, road route design and optimisation, integration with utilities such as electricity and water at local and district level, industrial planning to make sure that mass in all it’s living and non-living forms reaches its various destinations safely, regulation to make sure that safely really means safely, structured and orderly markets to buy and sell all the bits necessary to run the system, mines to supply the metals for the vehicles, quarries to provide the road making materials, people to maintain all the elements of the system, police to enforce speed limits, ambulances to scrape people of roads when they break those speed limits, etc, etc, etc. And that’s not even thinking about the pleasure & leisure aspect of vehicle ownership. Or the food distribution and consumption aspects. Or the philosophical aspects. I could go on, and on, and on. But I won’t.
It boils down to this – cars are life in our industrial societies. Which makes roads as much part of our world as food or football. They feed our mind, body and soul. I’m willing to bet that there are many, many people out there who wouldn’t even exist were it not for the influence of the car/road system.
They are so embedded in our psyche, in our culture, in our economy, even in our sense of self that any radical change to the car/road combo is a big deal.
However the road isn’t personally ours, so we forget about it for the most part unless it has a hole in it or is full of other masses being moved or is about to be built/not built somewhere we want/don’t want it to be built/not built. But it is the real enabler, the car is parasitic on the road. There is no such genre as ‘the car movie’, yet ‘the road movie’ continues to provide a backdrop to examine the journey of our lives. OK, that’s a bit florid, but you get the idea.
So now roads themselves are starting to have an active part in the conversation. They are becoming more than they once were, harvesting energy from mass in transit that would have otherwise dissipated and giving it back to the next lump of mass, so that each mass can continue to travel along the road further and faster.
I think that the road has the measure of us.
Our civilisations grew up with roads. Drovers roads to move bovine mass. Roman roads to move Italian mass. Freeways to move free mass.
As a technology the road is persistent and pervasive. Almost every other technology is parasitic on the road. Even numbers. Without trade no need for numbers, without roads trade would be limited to barter, so roads are also responsible for the existence of money.
And yet it has taken until now for roads to start to be taken seriously as a participant in the conversation. They have watched from the sidelines, maybe a little shy, maybe just soaking it all in before revealing their master plan with a flourish.
Maybe not.
It was a VERY long drive and I wasn’t under the influence of anything apart from tiredness. But there is a serious point that I wanted to raise. If you feel that energy systems should be optimised then the movement of mass is an essential part of that. If you have to move mass, move as little as possible as efficiently as possible then look at recovering waste energy around the edges. But first consider whether the movement of ideas is more efficient than the movement of mass.
Copper in Wind Power
September 24, 2009
Based upon the research that I detailed in my previous post we can say the following with a reasonable degree of certainty;
The UK will need to increase its raw copper imports by at least 10%, from 2007 levels, if it is to achieve its wind power objectives AND manufacture the components of that new industry on British soil.
The further offshore that wind farms are built, the more copper they use per MW of installed generating capacity (kind of obvious but you still need to crunch the numbers to show it).
The UK currently exports more copper scrap per year than would be required by the proposed new wind industry, based on figures from the British Geological Survey.
The copper cables that are being buried during wind farm construction are not planned to be recovered upon decommissioning. This policy constitutes a planned consumption of copper that is contradictory to the principles of sustainable development since it ‘offshores’ energy consumption and environmental impact associated with copper production in preference to reuse. However, it provides the UK with a readily available source of copper in the form of recoverable buried cables with a known location. This could be considered a hedge against security of copper supply in the long term.
I have found no evidence that this possible long-term hedge against copper supply risk is a conscious and explicit government-led policy, but given that we have another 3 billion people coming to tea before 2075 and that copper has no viable substitute for 100% of its applications, it sounds like it might be a sound policy from a security of supply standpoint. Completely unethical of course, harvesting resources from other nations to hoard for future use, pushing up prices by artificially constraining supply and forcing developing nations to utilise resources earlier in their development cycle than they would have otherwise. But pragmatically better to establish a new form of copper mine within UK territory before supply really gets constrained.
The question is what are the alternatives ?
The obvious answer that I came up with was recycling. The UK only recycles about 42% of its scrap copper (from the BGS again). Of that 37% comes from manufacturing (offcuts, the remains after pressings, and the like), the rest is recycling as you and I know it. The old copper heating pipes and wires from old motors that we have finished with only make up 5% of the UK’s total copper (re-)consumption, 19 times more comes from new mined resources and from the pristine factory scrap. That is massively wasteful on all sorts of levels.
I recently read a paper on a Markov Chain analysis of copper (Eckelman & Daigo, 2008) use that concluded that the average copper atom was used 1.9 times for technology in the 60 years between its extraction from geological reserve and its dissipation back into the environment. If we assume that copper should theoretically be used around 20 times before it is dissipated (using a conservative 5% reprocessing loss), we currently have a copper system in the UK that is roughly 10% efficient.
That has to offer massive opportunities to the copper recycling business, as well as opportunities to decrease the environmental impact of the copper cycle without compromising the ability of the UK to meets its wind power goals.
Random Energy Ideas Part Four
August 5, 2009
This one is a bit convoluted, but bear with me I wouldn’t type it all out just to annoy you.
Heat is an up and coming issue in the UK, specifically what to do with all that waste industrial heat from power stations and steel plants (if there are any left). Excess domestic heat can be dealt with by just opening the windows, or if you want to be super hi-tech pumping it into liquid or solid storage, but try that with the excess heat from even a modest power station and you’d end up standing in a pool of magma. What you really need is a set of complimentary large-scale parasitic industries that need large amounts of heat (almost) all day (almost) every day.
Apologies to proponents of domestic heating grids, but I don’t see the point of digging up the roads and changing everyone’s central heating system, if you can use the heat as efficiently in industry or agriculture. You are increasing resource use not decreasing it and I like to be able to control the heating in my house. I assume that everyone does, which means that we will all use the heat at the same time or not. Where does it go when ‘not’ is the majority thought ? The overall aim is surely, most efficient use of energy on a country-sized scale, which makes commercial or industrial use of waste heat much more preferable, especially since factories don’t care about the view and can be located next to the heat source on land that is cheap and nasty.
Here are some possibles, most of which turn out to have been mentioned before, but hey, in for a penny;
Industrial laundry – Got a few hospitals, hotels and army barracks that don’t need ‘special fabric conditioner’ ? Well, you most likely also have a full-time laundry. Its hot, it uses heat, it produces heat. Hitching these up to a waste heat system seems like a no-brainer. You have to factor in transport to and from the site to make sure that its actually a more efficient use of energy, but that happens all the time anyway.
Server Farms – what ? Don’t they need coolth rather than warmth ? Well yes, but any heat difference can be converted to the opposite heat difference with a bit of fancy thermodynamic engineering, you just can’t do it with 100% efficiency. Not only are server farms big electrical power consumers, so the shorter the cable run to them the better, but they also require large amounts of refrigeration. Instead of using electricity to power that refrigeration why not use waste heat from the local power plant. Don’t spend a million on PV so that you can tell your shareholders that you provide enough to do the server room lighting, spend it re-locating next to a power plant and knock holes in your energy budget. Or if you simply have to be somewhere else warm your own and neighboring buildings with excess heat from servers.
Greenhouses – worried about food security, food miles, invasive species, pesticide use, water consumption, whatever floats your boat really. The world of agriculture is a lot more controllable under glass. With waste heat you can heat or cool a set of glasshouses, collect & store the rainwater and you can control the humidity, exercise some degree of hygiene and you can keep more of the beasties off your cabbages. You’ll still need fertilizers and pesticides, but since they are not getting wsahed straight into the local river you need less. More to the point you can produce much more food locally over a larger portion of the year. No energy other than waste heat required.
Fish farms – along the same lines. UK fish stocks are said to be struggling. World fish stocks are said to be plummeting. I have no idea whether that is true, all I know is that whenever I’ve cast a hook over the side for mackerel I have never failed to catch my dinner. But I don’t do it very often and I’ve noticed that cod is not always alone on the menu in the chip shop these days. Anyway…..
On the shores of Lake Victoria the fishermen prize the tilapia. Its a nice looking fish with firm, white, tasty flesh. Its great fried whole, but will take the same range of flavours as a sea fish like a bass. They are freshwater, algae feeding, quick growing and easy to ‘domesticate’. They are an ideal farming fish as far as I can tell as a non-pescitorialist. They just won’t breed at a water temperature of less that 30C.
Again the food security, food miles argument comes in, but it also has a conservation element since we aren’t munching on sea-caught, wild stocks. Just a word of warning though, the tilapia that you can buy in the local UK supermarket are a farmed cousin of the tilapia nilensis that is hooked out of Lake Victoria. Its still tasty, but just not quite as nice, and a bit smaller. Maybe that’s wild vs farmed I don’t know.
You would have to do this fish farming in covered ponds with good circulation but, again, nothing but waste heat required. You could even float some aquaculture on the top of the ponds so as to grow the fishes food on-site and maybe take a crop from (I’m thinking of something like corriander with fibrous roots), but that’s only guesswork.
Other industrial-scale heat sinks
Food processing factories – all those cook-chill ready meals are prepared somewhere.
Ceramics – from tiles to toilet bowls, they all have drying facilities and large kilns that could benefit from pre-heating
Swimming pools and leisure centres – or indeed any large spaces that are heated year round like
Airports – heated runway ? well, terminal buildings anyway
Shopping Centres, hospitals, large office complexes.
Basically what I’m saying is, keep those damn heat pipes out of my house ! There’s plenty of other places to shove them before you get to me. If you want to include them in new developments that’s fine, I can decide to move into one or not, but my house is my home is my castle is my cave is my den. I don’t let just anyone in. Don’t even get me started on smart meters !
That sounds crazy but I’m only joking a little. The whole retrofit and external influence on home life is a serious issue and one that often gets forgotten in a blizzard of techno fixes and macro economics. Energy services are there to make life better. If the downsides outweigh the upsides don’t do it.
Demand Reduction Mortgage Endowments
March 9, 2009
Thinking about how to build demand reduction into home ownership.
When taking out a mortgage in the UK most (if not all) lenders require the borrower to have some form of life insurance so that they can mitigate the risk of non-payment because of death. This has often been in the form of an endowment policy.
How about we turn that around and require the banks to provide an demand reduction endowment for borrowers ?
The issue is this; if we carry out extensive home improvements aimed at demand reduction the value of a home will probably go up. A report published today by Oracle Inc puts US willingness to pay at just under $30,000 extra for a home that is close to energy self-sufficient. That all sounds great if you are a home owner, but it means that if you are on a low income or a first-time buyer the barriers to your entry into the home market gets higher the better the home’s energy efficiency. Effectively the market builds in inequity and forces those with least ability to pay higher energy prices into the least efficient housing stock.
By asking/forcing lenders to put part of each mortgage payment into an endowment that pays directly for demand reduction improvements you could ‘build-in’ the cost of those improvements. Put a tax break on the policies to offset any damage done to lender profits and you get a rolling program of housing stock finance. The endowment pays out on a sliding scale as technologies become affordable and you drive down energy demand across the board.
The cheap stuff is often the most effective by proportion, so the endowments target lower income households, while making sure that the money is saved. Bigger ticket items, like solar PV, come later in the mortgage when the household is hopefully more affluent. As a government you get the flexibility of being able to hand spot payments out to mortgage holders accounts, without being accused of wasting money because it has to go on home improvements. As a householder you know that whatever you do your home’s energy efficiency will go up over time, so taking out some of that uncertainty about what is best to do.
As with a pension you could allow homeowners to add to their improvement pot, but you know that most won’t because they are already paying in their mortgages it doesn’t make much sense to pay in extra.
The upshot could be an improving housing stock where the most efficient homes still command a premium price, but where the market does not discriminate against low income households. Just a thought.
