Someone pointed me at this end of year article at get realist. Quite sobering. The general conclusion is that government, or cap-and-trade, or international agreements are not on track to succeed in the face of climate change, and that individuals need to take more personal responsibility in making change. I agree. As a friend of mine said “we are all trying to learn how to live the life we need everyone else to live”. We need many innovations, some technical, most social. We need to expand the people working on solving these problems to a group that includes everyone. Every small business owner, every individual.
http://www.getreallist.com/investing-in-an-empire-of-illusion.html
 Good magazine asked me to write something about Heirloom Products. I must have said the words too many times publicly. If you want to read the article at a fancy website with nice pictures and good design layout go here:
http://www.good.is/post/built-to-last/
Or, here are the words:
As an inventor, Saul Griffith has spent a lot of time thinking about how to make useful things. Griffith developed innovative designs for low-cost prescription glasses and energy-producing kites, founded the DIY website Instructables, and created a comprehensive carbon calculator called WattzOn. He was also awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2007. Recently, onstage at high-profile conferences such as TED and PopTech, Griffith has been arguing that we need to stop buying things and then throwing them away so quickly. In short, we need more “heirloom design.”
GOOD: What do you mean by “heirloom design?”
SAUL GRIFFITH: An object with “heirloom design” is something that will not only last [...]
Inhabitat asked me to give my design predictions for 2010.
Here’s the link:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/01/04/green-design-predictions-for-2010/3/
Here’s my words, and yes, I was fairly depressed by Copenhagen result, and it might have tainted my writings:
Green Design 2010:
Given that no binding agreement was reached in Copenhagen, there will likely be no national or international pressure to do real green-house reductions, and hence it is very likely that 2010 green design will be an undertaking of those trying to greenwash their companies. Very likely we’ll see many people misusuing terminology and physical units to overmarket products that aren’t really going to cut the mustard. Remember that a climate friendly world means a reduction in carbon of 80%, that means 5 X less carbon that we produce today, by 2050 or probably even earlier. Given that, we’ll see lots of designs begging you to buy this or that thing because it’s twice as good, or 25% better than [...]
Peak Cars, or Just a Car Sales Trough? New vehicles vs. scrappage 1991-2009 http://bit.ly/6YKD79
Although with BYD and TATA doing their thing, this is probably only a local, (US) effect.
This Onion article wonderfully represents the sociological challenge to an heirloom product culture where we make things that last longer, such that we don’t use the extra energy every time we re-make them (or their replacements).
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_device_desirable_old_device
While some people claim victory in Copenhagen with an “accord” (as far as i can tell an agreement to agree about something we might agree upon at some time in the future) I’m pretty saddened by the Copenhagen result. At times like these I turn to comfort foods. In this case a beautiful photo series on a chinese bicycle factory. Bicycles are still the highest technology in low emission vehicles.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cargocycling/911579868/in/set-72157601030739985/
http://openpv.nrel.gov/
They are seeking more data on PV solar installations for this map. It’s fascinating to see the progression over time of installations, and I was startled at just how active California is compared to the rest of the nation.
578.5 MW to date ! only another 500GW to do !
State
Installed Capacity (MW)
CA
422.828
NJ
62.43
CO
17.363
CT
14.904
AZ
8.252
MA
7.502
MD
1.229
NM
0.753
HI
0.324
MN
0.274
MO
0.003
 I love this, and couldn’t resist posting it. The future could be beautiful.
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2009/10/tezuka-wind-turbine/
This is really quite lovely. Congratulations to Raymond T. Pierrehumbert for using reason, good logic, and real numbers to refute some of the insanity around regarding climate issues. A lovely example of numbers in defense of sanity.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/
I think the solar power area numbers he uses might be a little optimistic, but only by a factor of 2 or so, and not that it would drastically change the conclusion of the article.
 We fill our cars with gas regularly, but don’t even see the liquid go into the tank. If we were to imagine that we had to fill a backpack with the fuels required for a day of our lives, what would we be filling our energy back-pack with each day?
Each day the average american sets out with:
OIL = 10.81 L/Person/day
COAL = 9.54 kg/person/day
NATURAL GAS = 5.88 m^3/person/day
Which roughly converted to those other units is around 22 Pints of oil per day (one per hour!), 22 pounds of coal (another per hour) and 180 cubic feet of natural gas.
I used the annual consumption of coal and natural gas, and the daily consumption of oil, and converted it to the daily average by dividing it out by the population of the US.
The data is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tEXpAv8VzEvgO5lNqze0JNw&output=html
The president’s speech:
http://amps-web.mit.edu/public/amps/webcast/2009/obama-2009oct23/ondemand.html
And even better, my friend Alex Slocum’s post visit interview:
http://cleanskies.com/videos/mit-demonstrates-offshore-renewable-energy-systems
In the summer of 2001, The National Environmental Education Foundation conducted a survey of 1,503 American adults about energy. Although 75% of those surveyed said they knew “A Fair Amount” or “A Lot” about energy, only 12% could correctly answer 7 or more questions on a 10 question energy quiz. The quiz is on pages 4 and 5 of the report (pages 15 and 16 of the PDF). So what’s your “energy IQ”?
 The discussions about a carbon tax, or a cap-and-trade system, tend to revolve around “putting a price on carbon,” which is to say, charging polluters money for dumping carbon into the atmosphere. But how should that money be used? Here’s a graph from Vattenfall, the Swedish power company, showing which solutions become cost-effective at a price of €40 per ton of carbon dioxide.
The yellow section has improvements that pay for themselves, since they’re generally based around not burning fuel to begin with. The green section has the improvements that will be cost-effective at the €40 price, and the blue section has the more expensive solutions.
I haven’t verified any data that went into this graph, which is based on McKinsey’s greenhouse gas abatement cost curves, so I can’t comment on how realistic the numbers are. But from an energy literacy point of view, it gives a nice graphical depiction of how [...]
This list of action items for individual energy savings is the most focused and quantitative I’ve seen. It comes from an October 2008 article in Environment Magazine by Gerald Gardner, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Paul Stern from the National Research Council.
The actions in the list are grouped by whether they’re for transportation or inside the home, immediate or longer-term, and no-cost/low-cost or higher-cost. Each item also includes an estimated percentage savings of total energy use. Here’s an example of an immediate, no-cost action for everyone:
Space conditioning:
Heat: Turn down thermostat from 72°F to 68°F during the day and to 65°F at night
A/C: Turn up thermostat from 73°F to 78°F
Energy saved: 3.4 percent
Compare that to the language from the Department of Energy’s “Tips to Save Energy Today: Easy low-cost and no-cost ways to save energy,” from their Energy Saver’s Booklet (full PDF):
Install a programmable thermostat [...]
In earlier years of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s spaghetti diagrams, such as the above example from 1976, the ends of the swaths were more like the simpler energy flow diagrams. On the above diagram it’s easier to see that the height of the lines on one side would end up around the height of the lines on the other side than it is on some of the newer versions with oversized boxes that serve as labels. But the boxes are a useful tool, and can let us think about embedding another diagram form — box diagrams — into the spaghetti diagram.
Box diagrams are used for teaching electricity, and were developed by Peter Cheng and David Shipstone in the UK. The picture below is from part 1 (Word doc) of their introductory paper (here’s the Word doc part 2). Since power is the voltage across a bulb multiplied by the current [...]
This “spaghetti diagram” (aka Sankey diagram, or Energy Flow Chart officially) is the 2008 version. Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) has been making these things since the 1970s. It’s more detailed than a simpler national energy flow diagram because it includes “rejected energy.” It’s also more complex — it actually includes within itself the electricity flow diagram. It’s a pretty cool visualization.
The main thing I dislike is that it doesn’t split up transportation or electricity generation “rejected energy” by sector. Since these are really the two biggest sources of “rejected energy,” you can’t see which group is the biggest “rejector.”
Below, in an undated but funkier design, they’ve not only split up transportation into light duty vehicles, freight/other, and aircraft, they’ve also added domestic and net imports to petroleum and natural gas. They still haven’t split up “Electricity Generation, Transmission & Distribution Losses,” so we don’t know who “loses” the most [...]
I like the general concept of motivating behavioural changes for the low energy option by using fun, beauty, or good design. The larger message here is that personal changes for climate change really need to be better, either more beautiful, more fun, or more healthy, than the other choices.
 Here’s a picture from What You Need to Know about Energy by the National Academy of Sciences. It shows 100 energy units of coal being used by an incandescent bulb to produce light that has only 2 energy units:
Reprinted with permission from "What you need to know about energy," 2008, by the National Academy of Sciences, Courtesy of the National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
Incandescent bulbs get hot because only 2/36 (about 5%) of the energy coming into the house to power the bulb comes out as light — the rest of the energy produces heat. If you trace the energy back to the power plant, it turns out a mere 2% of the energy from the coal is doing the desired lighting job! The power plant itself loses 62% of the coal’s energy! Compact fluorescents use about 5% of the coal’s energy — better, but not much.
It’s important [...]
 This cartoon pretty much sums it up. Let’s plan on the stuff we know works, and invest in the research we know might lead somewhere. Not hold out for alien finger’s crossed we don’t understand it technology.
“you want 3 TW of new nuclear.
that’s a 2.3GW plant every week for 25 years…
you have 1X 3GW plant a week for 25 years which would overshoot your goal.
am i missing something?”
First, and to be clear, I don’t “want” 3TW. In doing the numbers on what would be required to stay under 450ppm of CO2 it looks like you need to create 11.5-12TW of clean power as well as keeping demand at current levels (16TW). I tried to agnostically apportion that 11.5 TW across known working technologies, solar PV, solar thermal, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and biofuels. It’s a thought experiment, and I would be happy with any solution for climate change, hence more or less of any one of these is fine with me as long as it all adds up. And yes, 450 isn’t necessarily a ’safe’ target, so I’d be happy for that to be lower, [...]
I love a hot shower in the morning. While it’s not a human right just yet, occasionally it feels like one. So how much energy does it take to have a hot shower?
The simple version looks like this:
First we establish the conversion units…
liters_in_gallon=3.78541178
H2O_heat_capacity=4.18 (J/g/K)
seconds_in_day = 60*60*24
density_water = 1 (g/cm^3)
Now assume 2 gallons per minute of shower from my low flow shower head and assume 5 minute hot showers at 40 degrees celsius (about 100F).
showers_per_day =1
gallons_per_minute =2
minutes_per_shower =5
liters_per_shower = liters_in_gallon * gallons_per_minute * minutes_per_shower
grams_per_shower = liters_per_shower * 1000 * density_water
shower_Temperature=40
ambient_Temperature=8
shower_heat_Joules=showers_per_day *(grams_per_shower * H2O_heat_capacity *(shower_Temperature-ambient_Temperature))
daily_shower_Watts = shower_heat_Joules/seconds_in_day
shower_heat_Joules = 5063400
daily_shower_Watts = 58.6038
Which is of course just the energy or power that my water heater consumes. The above estimate is probably low because I assumed 100% efficient water heater, and no losses in the piping. One might call each of those 10% losses (or 90% efficiencies) which would make it around 70 watts. If [...]
Energy is measured in Joules (J)
Power is measured in Watts (W).
1 Watt = 1 Joule / second
If you would like to quantitatively understand the relationship between your lifestyle, global energy use, and climate change, you need to establish the language with which you can translate between these things.
There are many different ways we use energy, many different ways we produce energy, and many different consequences environmentally.
Power and energy are being measured around us all of the time. You get your electricity bill in kilowatt hours (kWh), your gas bill in Therms or British Thermal Units (BTUs), your car’s performance is measured in horsepower, and your lightbulbs are rated in watts. To compare these things you need a common set of units.
The first problem with comparing these things is that some of them (BTUs and kWh) are measures of energy consumed, and some of them (horsepower and watts) are measures of [...]
If you would like to quantitatively understand the relationship between your lifestyle, global energy use, and climate change, you need to establish the language with which you can translate between these things.
There are many different ways we use energy, many different ways we produce energy, and many different consequences environmentally.
Power and energy are being measured around us all of the time. You get your electricity bill in kilowatt hours (kWh), your gas bill in Therms or British Thermal Units (BTUs), your car’s performance is measured in horsepower, and your lightbulbs are rated in watts. To compare these things you need a common set of units.
The first problem with comparing these things is that some of them (BTUs and kWh) are measures of energy consumed, and some of them (horsepower and watts) are measures of power. To understand the rest of this book, you need an intuition for the difference between [...]
1. Your energy consumption is a result of your lifestyle choices.
2. Global energy consumption is the result of everyone’s choices.
3. Energy can be generated from many sources.
4. Different energy sources have different environmental effects.
5. We are collectively choosing the global climate by choosing how we generate this energy.
6. Our climate choice (PPM) determines how much carbon dioxide we can emit using fossil fuels.
7. Producing enough energy for humanity while solving the climate problem is an enormous engineering challenge, but within the limits of what we can do today.
I’ve cut and pasted in the chat room chat below from today’s webcast. Blue is who. Black is what they asked/said. Red is answers and pointers from me.
from O’Reilly Media to All Participants:
Hi Everyone, thanks for joining us today. We’ll begin at 10 am PT. There will be silence or faint music until then.
from O’Reilly Media to All Participants:
Hi Everyone—thanks for joining us today. The presentation will begin at 10 am PT. There will be silence or faint music until then.
from Pat Walsh to All Participants:
for the streaming audio: should I be hearing background music of any sort or any other noise at this time? or is silence correct at this point?
from O’Reilly Media to All Participants:
If you’re a twitter user, we’re using the hashtag #energyliteracy for this webcast
from Pat Walsh to All Participants:
thank you
from Raju Varghese to All Participants:
I can hear faint music. When I increase the volume the [...]
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