Kickstarting Power

I like to cruise through Kickstarter and find neat projects that people are working on. Occasionally I'll pledge money to a project. Perhaps it is aspirational: I may have a project of my own some day, and would appreciate having backers.


This week, after dithering for a few weeks about whether I wanted to plunk money down on it, I have backed the Siva Cycle Atom bike generator. This little widget mounts to the rear hub and uses a fraction of your pedal power to generate electricity. That power gets dumped either into a lithium-ion battery or to a USB port on the device.

If Hilary and I ever make good on our hope to bike tour across Nova Scotia, this would be mighty handy. It would also be a useful backup for our phones it we lost power for a long while. Goodness knows Hilary and I crank out many watts on our bikes. In fact, maybe we'll use it to power the iPad next winter, where we'll spend many hours watching netflix while on the stationary trainer in our pain cave.

Or, who knows, perhaps it'll end up as a gift to a deserving two-wheeled friend.

Tweet Map

I'm not on Twitter, and don't follow anyone on twitter other than what ends up in wider social and media circles. But I'm not a luddite - I'm an engineer and technophile - so I am not immune to Twitter usefulness and impact on the world. So I read with interest a blog post from the Smithsonian, reporting on research done by The Global Twitter Heartbeat project out of the University of Illinois. They took the geographic information from millions of tweets and graphed it on a map:


Which looks impressively like the global distribution of electric lights:


But they went further and looked at the where is, and more importantly, where there isn't overlap. For instance, the maps show places that don't have widespread electrification, but a decent amount of twitter traffic (e.g., the Amazon). Conversely, places that have electrification but very little twitter traffic (e.g., Iran, where twitter is banned).

There is also geographic analysis of what language gets used where. So, for instance, they found that, unsurprisingly, that a country's native language is also the most likely to be used for tweets from that country. However, they could also find where, for instance, there were heavy infusions of Spanish-language tweets from within the U.S.

Good data visualization is something I greatly enjoy. These guys have done a neat job with it. I urge you all to have a look.

LED lighting and microeconomics

If you believe Michelle Bachmann, the legislated phase-out of the incandescent lightbulb is a facet of an insidious plot to destroy freedom [1] [2] [3]. We reserve the right to be as idiotically wasteful as we please!

You can guess from my sarcasm that I don't give that much creedence. But sticking to the incandescent is, with all apologies and respect to Thomas Edison, a downright stupid thing to do. Why? It's more expensive. Reserving your right to be as idiotically wasteful as you please is also reserving your right to throw away money and needlessly contribute to the ruination of our one and only home. Hoarding 100-watt bulbs in your basement? Congratulations: you have just tied yourself to a decade of spending much more than necessary to light your home. You are doing no one, particularly our nation, our freedom, and our planet, any favors. I'll get to the numbers in a minute.

I can understand the reticence. Look at a typical 60-watt incadescent - it costs less than a dollar. Burns out: swap it and go on with your life. Now compare to what had, until recently, been the primary alternative - the compact fluorescent. I have paid to replace incandescents with CFLs in three residences over the last decade - a few dozen bulbs from different manufacturers at varying price points. The energy savings are undeniable. The steady-state color is pleasant from most bulbs. The mercury content didn't bother me much; it was a manageable inconvenience. I've never had much use for dimmer switches.

But, despite my environmental leanings, I had my gripes with the CFL. The turn-on time was the biggie for me. Some of my bulbs came on to full brightness immediately. But many, and unfortunately some I used most often, would be sluggish. Coming down to the kitchen in the pitch black of a January morning, with the thermostat showing 55F, flicking the switch would spark a weak, sickly pale, purplish green glow, which would take a minute or more to demonstrate itself worthy of being called light. There were probably better bulbs out there, but at $5/ea, it's not something I could change out casually. Besides: what to do with the old bulbs? yes, I could recycle them, but they are still perfectly serviceable and represent a significant "sunk energy" cost in their manufacture.

But I am very optimistic about the future of lighting: LEDs. I've tinkered with LEDs in one form or another since college. I've even incorporated them into Brynna's nightlight. I've followed the development of the LED lighting industry from niche to mainstream. I would say that the products available now, from reputable vendors, are ready for widespread adoption for the uncompromising masses. A decade from now, I'm willing to assert, in my capacity as an engineer, that there will be little justification for buying another incandescent.

And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.

I will be the first to admit that digital photography is a difficult way to judge lighting. My own equipment is not exactly stellar for this task either. The camera is not an eye. Still, bear with me.

Which are incandescent? Which are CFL? Which are LED?

The answer is that there are no incandescents. The two bulbs in the hanging fixture are CFLs. The recessed lights (seven in the kitchen and pantry) are LEDs. You are seeing them here at full brightness. Were I to turn them off, let them cool for a few hours, then return and flick the switch, the recessed lights would be back at that full brightness in the blink of an eye. That's the big sell for me: the instant-on. The fact that they do not contain mercury, are less energy intensive to produce than CFLs, last longer, use less power for equal or better light, and are entirely compatible with dimmer switches are nice bonuses. And this technology will only get better and cheaper.

The recessed lights you see here are sold under the EcoSmart brand at Home Depot and retailed for $35 apiece. I also managed to score a $10/ea rebate from the local utility (take that, RGGI haters). They replace the entire recessed can, but screw into the standard socket at the back. Installation took all of three minutes apiece.

Now for some numbers. These bulbs are rated for 30,000 hrs lifetime. Given how they are used in our home, that works out to a decade or two. The rebate I got is not universally available, but you can probably find something in your area. Let's call the cost $30 apiece. That works out to an amortized cost of $0.001/hr. To produce the equivalent light of a 65-W incandescent, these pull about 10 W. If you take my monthly electric bill and divide by the energy used, it runs about $0.18/kWh. All told, the operating cost per bulb works out to about 1/3-cent per hour.

Compare to an incandescent. A little searching will find a 65-W PAR 30 bulb retailing for about $2. It will last upwards of 2000 hours. This yields an amortized capital cost of, TADA!, $0.001/hr. In other words, hour for hour, the new LED fixture costs the same to purchase as the conventional incandescent. The LED bulb uses 1/6th the power to produce the same light, and so it costs 1/6th as much to operate.

This is a clear win. Over their lifetime, I estimate each LED fixture will save me $100-$200; about $1000 just for this one room.

The comparison to a CFL is a bit tricker and less clear cut. A CFL bulb will run perhaps $10-15 (depending on quality), last about 1/2 as long, and use a touch more power than an LED. Depending on how you work these estimates, the CFL can be the cheaper option in terms of Total Cost of Ownership. However, as I mentioned above, I have grown dissatisfied with CFLs. CFLs may be great in most respects compared to incandescents, but they now seem like a poor compromise compared to what's available now in LEDs. So why aren't we all running out to the local big box store for a mass conversion? There are plenty of reasons. Consumer inertia is one reason. By that I mean that consumer behavior is difficult to change. Plenty of people (my electrician included) stick with incandescents as the default choice because of their consistency, long standing existence, and low upfront cost. Those who were inclined towards CFLs on their merits have largely already converted, and aren't too anxious to junk that investment. Other consumers have been burned (figuratively) by CFLs for a variety of reasons; deserved and otherwise. Lots of people rent, and why make capital improvements in a place you don't even own? I also admit that, as an engineer, these kinds of calculations and considerations are second nature to me; most people simply cannot be bothered. That's OK to an extent: there are plenty of matters that, being outside my area of expertise and experience, I simply cannot be bothered with. Cost is probably the biggest hurdle. I've converted the kitchen because it is the lighting we use most frequently. It's the place with the greatest room for improvement over CFLs. The PAR30 form factor (i.e., recessed can) provides a more favorable economic and aesthetic case compared to the usual bulb. Even so: I dropped a few hundred dollars for this one room. Sure, they'll save lots of money over their lifetime, several times what I've put in, but it's still a lot of money. There's a decent chance, too, that we won't even live in this house long enough to recoup the investment.

The way that I look at it is the way that I think many people will eventually come to look at it - as a capital investment. Think of all the important components in your home: the heating and cooling equipment, the toilet, the refrigerator, the stove. Why shouldn't we start to view lighting as another big ticket item along these lines? When a lightbulb's lifetime can be measured in decades, it has moved out of the category of consumable items like toilet paper, razor blades, dish detergent, automotive oil. Instead, it has become a piece of equipment: something that is installed in the home; a fixture.

Lights Out

Wouldn't'cha know? A hurricane comes blowing into town and we lose power. Well, only for about an hour - things are back to normal for the moment. (UPDATE: we lost it half an hour later, and cooked dinner using a Peak 1 in the garage. We had it back by 3 am. Thank you, linemen!) But we discovered that, among our many headlamps and flashlights, one of the best sources of light is Brynna's lightsaber, recently repaired for last Friday's homecoming bonfire. Go Big Green!

Kickstarting Fireflies

If you aren't familiar with Kickstarter, it's a way to crowdsource funding for small-ish projects. For instance: a band wants to cut an album, but don't have the cash to get studio time. They put up a sampling of their music on Kickstarter and say "We need $X. If you pledge $Y towards our goal, we'll give you a band T-shirt. If you pledge $Z, we will give you a first-run CD when we finish it." Other kickstarter projects work along similar lines: soliciting pledges with various tiers of support.

Come to think of it, it's a lot like an NPR pledge drive. Like an NPR pledge drive, each project has a total dollar figure in mind ($X). Unlike NPR, if the goal isn't met within a specified time period (say, one month), no money changes hands and everyone walks away. Only if the pledge amount is met do credit cards get charged, and the entrepreneur gets their funding. Kickstarter takes a cut of a few percent.

Kickstarter is starting to make a splash. They've successfully funded some 20,000 projects to the tune of $200,000,000. They recently made a splash, covered in the new york times, when a project for a wireless watch shattered their initial goal of $100k by raising over $7 million. At the moment, with 10 days to go, that project has over $10 million committed.

There's no guarantee that you'll ever actually get your tchotchke, of course. This isn't venture capital, either - there are no ownership stakes involved. Some people just have bad business plans and fold before ever producing. Others drastically underestimate how much work there is in actually finishing something, and so instead of taking months it takes years. Some are just plain incompetent. A few might actually be scams. Caveat emptor.

As an engineer and occasional tinkerer, who happens to work with other engineers and tinkerers, and a follower of the maker movement, I've been following various projects on Kickstarter for a while. While the wireless watch seems neat, I'm not keen on dropping $115 on a watch I don't need, even if the project is really cool.

Instead, I've just made my first contribution to a more modest project: a circuit board with a solar cell that creates fireflies.

Dilbert, Light Bulbs, and Oil

Like I sometimes do with the newspaper, let's skip over the serious stuff and go straight to the funnies.



This is, in a nutshell, the problem with our energy policy - the inability to weigh long term costs properly. Yup, it's going to cost a whole freakin' boatload of money and creative destruction to upgrade the electrical grid, bring renewables up to a very large fraction of the energy mix, scrap inefficient equipment with newer stuff, alter our whole infrastructure to not rely on cheap petroleum, and accept that leveling West Virginia mountaintops and shattering the bedrock is not actually a better alternative to funding up petro-dictatorships on credit. A fair bit of behavioral and attitude changes will be necessary, too.

Sadly, a whole pile of economic arguments, mountains of scientific data, the informed opinion of every regulatory body in the government, and most of the U.S. military doesn't seem to count for much against the overwhelming burden of ideology in Congress. The sooner we accept the big transformative changes that are necessary, the better off we'll be.

Most importantly: even if it costs a boatload of money and pain to start now, it will be a whole hell of a lot cheaper and easier than facing crisis after crisis when they hit. Our collective inability to internalize this notion, and demand that our elected leaders have this kind of long term policy, is a ruinous course.

Which brings us to my next exhibit of human irrationality: apparently there is some hubbub about the impending demise of the traditional 100-watt incandescent light bulb. I'll admit: they give off such pleasing color, and have been around for so long, that it's hard to let go. On the other hand, the engineer in me knows that they are only about 5-10% efficient at converting electricity to light and makes me eager to relegate them to the dust bin of history. Who actually likes being so willfully wasteful? If people were rational, we wouldn't need to worry about government intrusion. As a matter of national pride, we would have been dumping incandescents into Boston Harbor years ago and clamoring for alternatives.

And incandescents are wasteful not only of energy and the environment, but of the owner's hard earned money. Compact fluorescents, even the highest quality ones (indistinguishable from incandescents), can pay for themselves in a year or two. The LED lamp you buy today may well be the last light bulbs you ever buy for a particular socket. Yet there are people so worked up about an overbearing government that they are stockpiling 100-W incandescents for the upcoming end times (of Edison's little wonder). Do they not realize that they are spending roughly the same amount that it would cost to upgrade all their lamps to CFLs and LEDs? Or that their stockpile won't last as long are modern bulbs, and they'll spend 5-10x for the electricity over that lifetime?

And now for our third exhibit: rising gas prices. It seems to me that we've been here before quite a few times. Should we be surprised at this point? Outraged? If there is outrage, it ought to that nothing has changed since the last time three years ago. In fact, rather than repeat myself with much tedious typing, I'll just point you to what I said about it then.

The conventional wisdom, particularly from the wingnuts of the nut wing of the Republican party, is that if we just let the oil and gas companies pave paradise expand domestic production, everything will be fine. This position is, more or less, unchanged since the last gas price crunch. Remember Sarah Palin's big energy policy speech before the election? Neither does anyone else, but the echo chamber of "say it enough times and it'll be true" carries the message on to this day.

Here is a very simple calculus: the world consumes nearly 90 million barrels of oil per day. The U.S. consumes about 20. We produce about 6. 90-20-6. If we drilled everywhere and laid pipelines through everyone's backyard, we might be able to extract a few million barrels per day more...for a perhaps a decade, maybe two. Would that bring gas prices back to the heady days of $1/gal? Will we be less susceptible to the fickle nature of the global oil market? Probably not, because by the time we do all that drilling, worldwide demand will probably have expanded by just as much, leaving us more or less right back where we started. 100-25-10. What's worse, this is an energy policy (or, at least, a gasoline policy) that has a lifetime of a decade or two - less than a generation.

90-20-6. Before any politicians opens their mouth about energy policy, they should preface it with those numbers. Anything less is pandering, ignorance, or deception.

What's my solution: use economics. People are irrational in their behavior. Failure to weigh long term costs is just one example of that. But one lesson from the last gas price crunch that continues today is that when gas gets expensive, people use less of it. What cars are manufacturers and consumers most interested in today? Hybrids and electrics - even if they can't yet get behind the wheel of one.

If we ultimately want to use less oil, making it more available by increasing its supply is not the way to accomplish it. That is an axiom of economics. One way to use less oil is to make the alternatives less expensive, so that people choose to use less of it. That could work, but we would need to have at least one, and probably many, really cheap replacements for oil available today to make the compelling argument for a whole economy to switch over. I see nothing on the horizon to indicate that.

No, if we want to kick the habit, then make gas expensive. This, too, is an economic axiom, and it can be put in place quickly. It works with cigarettes: higher tobacco taxes lead to lower smoking rates. Turn gasoline into the latest vice, and tax it accordingly. The increased gas price can, and should, be offset by lowering taxes on a whole bunch of other things such as the income tax - possibly even making it revenue-neutral. It won't be the end of the world: Europe and Japan somehow manage to get by with gas more than twice as expensive as ours. Shorter commutes get promoted, importing from halfway across the world won't look so appealing, big agriculture's rapacious appetite for petroleum-sourced fertilizer will shift, the economics of alternatives become more favorable, and our road infrastructure gets less of a pounding. Conservatives always want to let the free market figure things out. Let it, but with the proviso that oil is no longer gets a free ride. And essentially it does: the federal gasoline tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, and hasn't changed in years. The price at the pump swings more than that in a week these days.

It would have one additional benefit: at times when the price of oil really is up, a high gas tax provides a way to immediately and substantially reduce the pain at the pump.

Although it may be good medicine, I'll admit the middle of a spike in gas prices is not the best time to introduce such a proposal. The time to do it was when we weren't facing a serious problem: a year or two back, when gas was $1-2/gal less than today. But might-have-beens don't count for much in debate, and even less in policy-making. We ought not to live in the past, even when history can be instructive. We are faced with the challenges of the present. What will we do about it?

If history is any indicator, we'll have another crack at lower gas prices eventually. But, alas, history also indicates that we'll probably skip that opportunity in the pursuit of more demagoguery and grandstanding. There's an election coming up, don'tcha know?

Green vs. Greener

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when I hear talk about this or that product or technology being "green" or "clean."

That Prius might use 1/3 - 1/2 less fuel than my Jetta for fulfilling the same transportation need, but it isn't green by any stretch. It's still two tons of highly-refined materials (steel, nickel, copper, magnets, rubber), shipped from all over the world, driving on roads made of concrete and asphalt, and still burning a frighten amount of gasoline.

And clean? As in clean coal? No such thing. Even if things like carbon capture and sequestration come to pass, burning coal for heat and electricity still won't be clean. There's plenty more dirty about coal than just what goes up the stack: fly ash is pretty darned toxic stuff, and the techniques for mining coal leave tremendous and permanent scars on the land.

My problem with these two terms, aside from the diluted sense in which they are used (greenwashing), is that they are absolute terms. This is green, that is not; this is clean, that is not. Something of such complexity as an energy source can't be described in such clearcut terms. It is much like how I get squeamish when pundits and politicians (of all people!) start talking about what is right and wrong, or the devout go on and on about how their's is the one true faith.

Perhaps I'm some crazy hippy for not putting much stock in absolute terms. Still, I would much rather prefer if folks started using comparative forms. Instead of "green" use "greener"; instead of "clean," "cleaner."

What good would that do? Doesn't that lead to the equally nasty trap, opposite of absolutism, or making everything relative? Perhaps, but I am only focusing on these two words and the way that they are used to describe a thing's impact on the world. In that form, clean coal would become cleaner coal. The marketing guys would love it! Now we're not just clean, we're cleaner. However, once you get over the shallowness of such a marketing claim, the audience is left with the seed of a question: Cleaner than what? Cleaner than what we've got. Still...not clean in an intrinsic sense. Plus, the term implies that there could yet be something even cleaner. Just like with temperature: you might think it's cold in Minnesota in January, but it could always be colder. What seems hot for a human is barely a tiny fluctuation the vast range of temperatures we can access. I would hope that building the comparative into the debate would urge us to strive for continual improvement, to always seek for better.

As an American, I take great pride in our system of government, and marvel at the wisdom of those that instituted it. But perhaps their greatest wisdom in creating the new government was the realization that they weren't omniscient or infinitely wise - that they would need to build in some flexibility. The preamble to the Constitution speaks of forming a more perfect union, and for good reason. The founding fathers didn't go around claiming they'd come across the perfect form of government. No, they just tried to set up a framework that worked reasonably well for the day, but would allow the nation to seek to become more perfect. So, too, should we seek to do when addressing the need to do more with less.

Palin's Big Energy Policy Speech

Didn't hear about it? I'm not surprised. Sarah Palin delivered her second big policy speech of the campaign on Wednesday, this one about energy. Or, rather, a load of waffle and platitudes that all boils down to: somehow, somewhere, we're going to burn our way to the future. Yeehaw!

Let me set the stage: Palin, the former commissioner of oil and gas for the Alaskan government, now the governor, is by extension supposed to be some sort of expert on energy policy. As I have mentioned earlier, knowledge of and reliance on oil and gas isn't nearly enough to inform someone on how to craft energy policy for the next generation. It might have been fine in, say, 1960, before the first oil embargoes and energy crises, and it was sure great around 1973, when the Alaska oil pipeline got the go-ahead. But, hey, it's 2008, and the decisions on energy policy for the next administration need to look forward to what we want to see come 2050, not 1950.

Palin gave her speech at the Xunlight factory in Toledo, which I feel added a certain dose of cognitive dissonance to the whole affair.

The text of the speech I'll be working off of comes from the McCain-Palin website. It starts off well enough:

All who work in pursuit of new and clean energy sources understand that America's energy problems do not go away when oil and gasoline prices fall, as they have in recent weeks. Oil today is running about 64 dollars a barrel -- less than half of what it was just a couple of months ago. And though this sudden drop in prices sure makes a difference for families across America, the dangers of our dependence on foreign oil are just as they were before.

The price of oil is declining largely because of the market's expectation of a broad recession that would lower demand. This is hardly a good sign of things to come, and should only add to our sense of urgency in gaining energy independence. When our economy recovers, and growth once again creates new demand, we could run into the same brick wall of rising oil and gasoline prices -- and now is the time to make sure that doesn't happen. In Washington, we can view this period of lower oil prices as just one more chance to make excuses -- and on the problem of energy security, we've heard enough excuses. Or we can view it as an opportunity to finally confront the problem.

In reality, volatile oil prices are just the most immediate consequence when foreign powers control our energy supplies. They are an economic symptom of a strategic problem. And prices will stabilize only when we have reached the great goal of energy security for America.

Not bad. One could almost hear the same from Thomas Friedman of the NY Times. Then comes the call to action and criticism of the past:

Achieving this objective will require a clean break not just from the energy policies of the current administration, but from thirty years' worth of failed policies in Washington. As in other challenges that confront our nation, we must shape events, and not simply manage crises. We must steer far clear of the errors and false assumptions that have marked the energy policies of nearly twenty Congresses and seven presidents. Some tasks will be the work of decades, and some the work of years. And they all will begin in the term of the next president.

I can give her some credit for calling out the current administration. All the cool kids are doing it these days. Really one could go on for hours about how backward the Bush administration has been on energy. If one counts back seven presidents, though, you get to Nixon, which means that you also include Jimmy "Cardigan" Carter, which hardly seems fair.

Nevermind. She continues into her well-worn in-the-trenches narrative of Alaska, and how qualified she is on energy policy (see my introductory paragraphs), how she took on the oil companies regarding a natural gas pipeline, and:

When the last section is laid and its valves are opened, that pipeline will lead America one step farther away from reliance on foreign energy. That pipeline will be a lifeline -- freeing us from debt, dependence, and the influence of foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.

While it is true that she strongarmed an agreement to get the pipeline built, it's not like the thing is set in stone. No definitive plans are in place, the deal could still fall through, no approvals have been given, no land purchased, no pipe has been laid, and it'll probably be another decade at least before the thing is actually built. More information here.

The notion that the pipeline will be a lifeline "freeing us from debt, dependence, and the influence of foreign powers" is demonstrably false. Bear with me while I introduce some numbers - they may be tedious, but if the policy-makers ever bothered to check them, we might get somewhere.

The United States consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year. (Because demand has seasonal fluctuations, I'll use an annual number.) We produce about 20 trillion domestically, and import 4.6 trillion; the rest is lost, stored, or exported.

So, right here, we find one fallacy. The US imports only about 20% of the natural gas we use. Of that 4.6 Tcf/yr we import, 3.8 Tcf comes in pipelines from Canada and Mexico, hardly the boogey-man countries that don't have our interests at heart. The rest comes as liquified natural gas - gas that has been compressed and cooled enough to become liquid and put onto special tanker ships. Of the 0.7 Tcf of LNG we import from abroad, 0.45 Tcf comes from Trinidad (of all places, who knew?). If you look at the list of who we get our natural gas from, we do find some sorta-unfriendly places, like Algiers, Egypt, Nigeria, and Qatar. But these still only add up to about 6% of our annual imports, so only about 1% of annual consumption.

The capacity of this new pipeline, whenever it comes online, will be 4.5 Bcf per day, or about 1.6 Tcf per year. So, it will increase domestic production by about 8%. It could, theoretically, offset 1/3 of the natural gas that we import (again, from Canada and Mexico). That ain't nothing, but it isn't all that the governor would like us to think it is. In fact, it is likely that, by the time the pipeline is finished, growth in demand will have already consumed the pipeline's contribution, meaning that not much will have changed.

So, we are neither in the thrall of foreign powers when it comes to natural gas, nor will this pipeline free us from the natural gas we import, mostly from allies.

Let's continue with the speech:

To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of world's oil supplies ... or that terrorists might strike at a vital refining facility in Saudi Arabia ... or that Venezuela might shut off its oil deliveries ... we Americans need to produce more of our own oil and gas.

In the worst cases, some of the world's most oil-rich nations are also the most oppressive societies. And whether we like it or not, the money we pay for their oil only makes them more powerful and more oppressive. Oil wealth allows undemocratic governments to crush dissent and to subjugate women. Other regimes use it to finance terrorists around the world and criminal syndicates in our own hemisphere.

By relying upon oil from the Middle East, we not only provide wealth to the sponsors of terror -- we provide high-value targets to the terrorists themselves. Across the world are pipelines, refineries, transit routes, and terminals for the oil we rely on. And Al Qaeda terrorists know where they are.

Here comes another chestnut, partly false, that everyone loves to pull out: we are dependent on the Middle East for our oil. I won't pretend that, if OPEC wanted to flex its muscles, or Al Qaeda blew something up, we wouldn't take a hit at a pump. But it is easy to dispute that we get the majority of our oil from the Middle East. The US consumes about 20.7 million barrels of oil per day. We import about 13.5 million barrels per day, or about 65%.

That's a whole lot, but where is it coming from? Look closer at that table, you'll see we get about 2.1 million from the Persian Gulf, and 1.3 million from Venezuala. But then there's also 2.5 million from Canada, and 1.5 million from Mexico (bless 'em!). We haven't imported any from Iran since the early-1990s. In fact, we import about as much from OPEC as we do from producers outside OPEC. However, being a global commodity, the actions of OPEC impact the price of oil worldwide, so we have good reason to be wary of what Iran or Venezuala does with their oil.

So what should we do? McCain-Palin to the rescue:

In a McCain administration, we will authorize and support new exploration and production of America's own oil and gas reserves -- because we cannot outsource the solution to America's energy problem. Every year, we are sending hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country for oil imports, much of it from OPEC, while America's own oil and gas reserves in America go unused. And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: we've got lots of both.

As a matter of fairness, we must assure affordable fuel for America by producing more of the trillions of dollars' worth of our oil and natural gas. On land and offshore, we will drill here and drill now!

I'll remind you here that she's giving this speech in a solar panel factory.

No. No. No. No. No. Drilling isn't the answer either. The simple fact remains that there isn't enough oil domestically to even come close to replacing that 13.5 million barrels we import each day. Even if we decided to drill in ANWR, the first oil wouldn't come online for 10 years. The Alaska pipeline has a peak capacity of about 2 million barrels per day. The North Slope fields used to fill that capacity; now they're down to less than half that. Let's say ANWR oil could pick up the slack, it's still only be about 5% of the oil we use each day, and only 1% of worldwide use. What of the continental shelf? Again, it's 5-10 years out, and still wouldn't be enough to offset our imports. (One interesting tidbit - to get at the continental shelf oil you need to drill very deep, which means you have to explore very deep. It turns out that the deep-drill rigs needed for that kind of work are already booked for years to come.)

Besides, being a global commodity, the oil we produce here wouldn't necessarily stay here, not unless McCain-Palin are ready to inaugurate high tariffs or other encumbrances to free trade. In order to have a real impact on prices at the pump, we'd have to start producing oil at a prodigious rate, something to make a dent in the global demand of about 85 million barrels per day. Even if we could, which we can't, should we? Oh, I forgot, this speech is being given by someone who didn't believe global warming was real.

She continues with a pledge that a McCain administration would put the country on track to build 100 new nuclear plants by 2030. I am ambivalent about nuclear - I don't like it, but find it to be a better and more practical part of a long term solution than, say, coal. Still, it's something that will take years and years to even get started. Bush pushed nuclear pretty hard, too, and new plants have yet to even begin construction. She doesn't address the hurdles to reprocessing or long-term storage that would make it possible, nor the related problems of skyrocketing uranium prices and nuclear proliferation. I'm told that, at least, she managed to pronounce it correctly. Whatever.

Then she launches into a blurb on clean coal, but mostly uses it as a flank to attack Obama and, especially, Biden. When she has exhausted that line of attack, she gets back to her point:

As for our coal resources, America has more coal than the oil riches of Saudi Arabia. Burning coal cleanly is a challenge of practical problem-solving and human ingenuity -- and we have no shortage of those in America either. So, in a McCain administration, we will commit two billion dollars each year, until 2024, to clean-coal research, development, and deployment. We will refine the techniques and equipment. We will deliver not only electricity but jobs to some of the areas hardest hit by our economic troubles.

The thing about it, though, is that clean coal doesn't exist - not in the rainbows, bunnies, and CO2-free way they mean it. We're probably as close to practical clean coal as we are to nuclear fusion. People understand the fundamentals of what needs to happen, more or less. But the devil's in the details, and no one's sure if it can be made to work on a large, cost-effective scale. No full-scale demonstration plant exists, and most attempts to build one have been stymied when people realize how expensive it will be. I have some hope for clean coal; but more than that, I hope we don't base our future strategy on it.

After speaking for twenty-some minutes, she starts winding it down to her conclusion and, finally, mentions alternatives and conservation:

To meet America's great energy challenge, John and I will adopt an "all of the above" approach. In our administration, that will mean harnessing alternative sources of energy, like wind and solar. We will end subsidies and tariffs that drive prices up, and provide tax credits indexed to low automobile carbon emissions. We will encourage Americans to be part of the solution by taking steps in their everyday lives that conserve more and use less. And we will control greenhouse gas emissions by giving American businesses new incentives and new rewards to seek, instead of just giving them new taxes to pay and new orders to follow.

Boooyah! There it is, folks! You came to a solar panel factory, and now is your moment. Don't bask in it too long, though, because this paragraph is the sole token gesture to folks like you. McCain has a sort of mixed relationship with renewables like solar and wind. He thinks they're great, but can't ever provide even a sliver of the U.S. power needs. I would say that lacks forward thinking. I don't want to go on and on about how McCain voted on what and when, because that can get very muddy very quickly. Suffice to say that McCain hasn't been very kind to wind in particular, and renewables in general.

What about increased mileage standards? What about smart grids and electric cars? What about distributed generation and micro-grids? What of stricter building codes? What about mandating LEED certification for every new federal building, and phasing in older buildings over time? What about national requirements for generating renewable energy? What about feed-in tariffs? What about increased federal funding for energy R&D (other than coal). What about expanding Energy Star requirements into more product categories? What about greening the military - the federal government's biggest user of energy? What about expanded long-haul freight and passenger rail? What about cellulosic ethanol and algae biodisel? What about geothermal, tidal, and other nascent technologies? What about loan programs and assistance in weather-proofing and winterizing older homes?

What about, heaven forbid, asking Americans to sacrifice - the thing that Bush and every member of government should have done on September 12th, 2001? No? Nothing? Let's continue...

Again and again, our opponents say that drilling will not solve all of America's energy problems -- as if we all didn't know that already. But the fact that drilling won't solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all.

No, we can't "drill our way out of the problem" entirely. But this is America, the most resourceful country on earth, and we can drill, and refine, and mine, enrich, reprocess, invent, build, conserve, grow, and use every available means to regain our independence.

My problem with kind of thinking is that, when you look at the numbers, it's not just that drilling won't solve every problem, it won't solve any of our energy problems. Yet at the same time, it incurs tremendous costs that will have to be repaid for generations. As soon as you make a resource more available, there is an inevitable tendency to use more of it. When resources remain scarce and expensive, people will use less or find substitutes. Gas hits $4/gal, and people rethink their SUVs. If the Republicans are such big fans of the free market, why have they managed to forget the first principles about supply and demand? And if the oil within our borders is so valuable now, won't it be more valuable in a generation or two? Shouldn't we keep it in the ground until our needs are even greater? If we restrain ourselves from thinking that drilling (and mining) is an option, we'll have all the more incentive to do something else - the substantive, long-lasting changes we are going to make now to ensure a better future. It'll be easier and cheaper to do it now than to wait until we have a real crisis.

We are addicted, not only to oil, but to cheap fossil fuels in general. The only place we can get by drilling is to dig ourselves in deeper. In an earlier post about gasoline prices, referring to a local Republican candidate that believes drilling will solve our problems, I said: The candidate's position is short sighted at best, and delusional at worst. But, hey, what can you expect from an addict.... To an addict, there can never be enough. Addicts, when it comes to their next fix, aren't rational about it, where it comes from, how they'll get it, or what it'll cost. One doesn't treat an addiction by looking for the next fix; that only makes the withdrawal that much the worse when the stash runs out. The only way to treat the addiction is to reduce the dependence on the substance.... Instead of dickering over where we can get another million barrels a day, we should be seeking out where we can find a replacement for that million barrels.

If Palin was really so in favor of "all of the above" when it comes to energy, why hasn't she advocated doing more of the above in Alaska? Certainly, with all their oil wealth, now would be a good time to start diversifying their energy portfolio. It is ironic that, although they have access to more oil than they need, Alaskans pay a whole lot more than most for a gallon of gasoline. Where we live, we've recently dropped down to about $2.20. In Anchorage, it's still $3.30. Communities further inland face even higher prices. On the North Slope, where all that crude oil is found, the cost is astronomical. Alaska's problem is twofold: they lack refining capacity to turn that crude oil into gasoline and diesel (crude gets shipped down to the west coast or Asia, then shipped back as refined product), and Alaska's large size and sparse population make for very high transportation costs. Alaska should have long ago been looking for alternatives.

Certainly, Alaska should diversify their tax portfolio; some 85% of the state's budget comes from oil and gas taxes. The Alaskan government is so tied to oil that their tax division website has the daily commodity prices on it. Alaska has no sales tax, no income tax, and is aglut in enough oil wealth to be able to give it's citizens an annual dividend check from the Alaska Permanent Fund. The dividend is about $1000-1500 in most years, but over $3000 in 2008 due to the skyrocketing price of oil and a windfall profits tax enacted under Palin. (See politifact and the Alaska Legislative Digest for more on the Alaskan budget and oil taxes.) But just how permanent will that permanent fund be? Unfortunately, like seemingly all oil-rich places, their myopia cannot envision a future when that wealth is exhausted, and so have done little to plan for it.

Some more platitudes and rainbows, the requisite "God Bless America," and there we have it: the Barracuda's take on what energy policy should be for the next administration and, by extension, the next generation or two. For those of you who were keeping count, she devoted a lot of her time to natural gas, followed by drilling for more oil, followed by coal, followed by nuclear, sprinkled with a lot of talk about how the other guys are all wrong. There was a single paragraph into which she wrapped up everything else - alternatives and conservation. So, in essence, her big policy speech roughly matches the energy consumption of the US today: lots coal, followed by oil and natural gas, then nuclear, and a small amount of everything else, mixed with a whole lot of finger-pointing, and lip service paid to conservation. If that is Palin's idea of America's energy future, I'd say it looks a whole lot more like the past and present.

Pig + Lipstick = Pig

So why have I spent so much time excoriating this candidate and a policy speech that, basically, no one noticed? For one thing, I want to make it very clear: this woman doesn't have a clue. Perhaps it is a moot point, if McCain and Palin aren't elected. Then again, there are some who are already looking to her in 2012. Another reason I have gone on at great length is because, unlike many social and economic policies, there are is no shortage of hard facts and figures to substantiate arguments. It is also a subject that, by virtue of my education, I feel qualified to speak on. I don't need to appeal to common values or hypothesize about the future - it's all in the numbers!

Finally, I feel that this is an issue that is important enough that it requires real action from real leadership, and this just ain't it.

Turning Chilly

Well, it was bound to happen eventually, but we had to turn on the furnace this past week. Daytime highs have only been in the 40s and 50s for a while now, with nighttime lows cold enough to generate a little frost on the ground a few times. I hope that we can hold out a little longer before a hard frost, so that we can squeeze out the last few peppers from the garden. Anyway, the house has definitely been cooling off. So, we've had to fire the furnace up here and there. Like many in the upper Midwest, we have forced-air heating run off natural gas. We get some supplemental heat from the glassed in, south-facing front porch. The house is, thankfully, quite tight for one of its age; it was something we specifically looked for when we were buying. Still, we've undoubtedly got a long heating season ahead of us.

Because of my interest in energy and energy efficiency, I have kept track of our natural gas usage month-by-month by pulling a few key numbers from our utility bills. Dividing the monthly energy usage being billed by the number of days in the billing cycle yields an average daily usage. Below is the house's average daily usage for the last 3+ years.

Yup, those big cyclical spikes are the winter heating season, which ramps up during the fall and extends well into spring. The low-level baseline is what we use for our hot water heater, which has little fluctuation.

At the height of winter, when the daytime highs can regularly fail to reach double digits, or even above zero, the house is using around 4 therms of natural gas per day. If a kilowatt-hour is a weird unit of measure for electricity, at least one can trace it back to its fundamentals. A therm is just a made-up unit, which one needs to search around to find an explanation for. A therm is 100,000 BTUs of energy, which is roughly equivalent to the energy content in 100 cubic feet of natural gas. I say roughly because the actual composition of natural gas can vary from day to day and month to month. Sometimes it has more ethane, sometimes more propane, sometimes more butane, each of which has a different energy content. Also, being a gas, it will expand and contract with temperature and atmospheric pressure, so the cubic foot of gas delivered to your house will likely be different than the standard cubic foot of gas they bill by. So, the gas company will multiply the amount of natural gas they have metered to you by the therm factor for that month to determine the actual energy they have delivered to you. Confused yet? Well, at least my gas utility actually calls out these calculations in the bill, even if the definition of the terms isn't given.

Of course, once they figure out the number of therms to charge you for, they then need to figure out the amount to bill you. The cost of natural gas, like all energy commodities, has fluctuated a lot in the last couple of years, trending upward. The market price will also vary a lot by season, since there's a whole lot more demand for it in the winter (just extrapolate the graph of my house to a few tens of millions of households and you'll get the idea). During the winter months last year I paid about $1/therm. This year, projections are more like $1.60/therm or more. I count myself lucky - I hear that the cost of fuel oil, quite popular in the northeast where our parents live, will roughly double over last year's price, and has roughly quadrupled over the last decade.

If ever one wanted to make a case for investing in energy conservation, home heating would be a pretty good place to concentrate. Compared to the cost of heating a home this winter, insulation is cheap. A programmable thermostat, even the highest-quality and more feature-filled model, could pay for itself in a cold month. Heck, even replacement windows start to look affordable.

Leaf Blowers

Leaf Blowers, of all the pernicious creations of man, must be one of the most idiotic. An embodiment of excess and laziness, but ironically also an iron weight that rarely saves us time or effort.

Witness one of my neighbors. I hadn't ever noticed the extent to which he loves his leaf-blower, since I haven't spent long days at home until now. When I saw him use it, or heard the the drone of is ultra-polluting two-stroke engine for, seemingly, hours, I figured he was just using it because it was the weekend and he was catching up on yard work. But, as it turns out, this retiree doesn't consider his lawn care to be just a weekend activity. Three times today I witness him brandishing the long plastic hose to move the leaves that had accumulated on his immaculate 1/8-acre greensward in the last few hours. Not content with merely clearing his lawn, he extends his treatment out past the curb, around the cars of commuters parked there, and around to the opposite curb as well. The fact that he lives on the corner of the block, and thus has twice as much curb-frontage, only makes this exercise more irritating.

Leave aside the ear-buzzing, brain-fuzzing noise for a moment. Leave aside the oblivious, conspicuous, and obscene consumption of energy. Leave aside the fact that, for all the time he spends doing this multiple times in the day, he could have raked once. Leaving aside all else, I ask you:

For f&#k's sake, who cares that much about the appearance of their lawn?

Kilowatts and Kilowatt-Hours

A recent article in the local newspaper on a solar-panel installation at a local high school reported that "[t]he entire school uses roughly 700 kilowatts per month." This is a mistake that I have seen several times in the media recently: the confusion between electrical power and energy, kilowatts versus kilowatt-hours. It is as jarring to an engineer like myself as confused homophones (buy/by, their/they're/there) likely are to an newspaper editor.

Power is a time-rate quantity – how quickly energy is used up over time. It is analogous to pounds-per-hour, gallons-per-minute, rods-per-hogshead, etc. The difficulty is that, unlike those other rate quantities, watts aren't expressed as per-whatever - the time portion is already built in. In residential electricity, the typical unit of measure for power is the kilowatt (kW, or 1000 W). A 100-watt lightbulb consumes power at a rate of 100 watts, not watts/second or watts-per-whatever.

If you want a more full answer, a watt can be expressed as a per-whatever; one watt is one joule per second second. A joule is measure of energy that makes wonderful and consistent sense in the SI (metric) units system, but isn't something that people have an intuitive grasp of. A joule is roughly 1/1000 a BTU, if anyone knows what that is, and about 1/4 of a calorie (not the calories listed on food packages, which are actually equal to 1000 of these calories chemists care about). More information on this, and an expanded rant about the weirdness of the watt is here.

Note that the "watt" does have this quirk in common with another power unit: the horsepower. If ever there was an anachronistic unit of measure, it's the horsepower. One horsepower is theoretically the mechanical power output of one horse, 33,000 foot-pounds per minute. Yeah, try to wrap your head around that one. And yet, we use it as some sort of measure of the capability of an internal combustion engine, and somehow people manage to understand that. Horsepower will be useful in a explaining a car analogy a little later in this post.

Energy is power integrated (summed up) over time, like total number gallons used to take a shower at such-and-such gallons/minute. That 100-watt lightbulb, if left on for ten hours, would consume a total of one kilowatt-hour (100 W * 10 h = 1 kWh). A kilowatt-hour is equivalent to 3.6 million joules or about 3400 BTUs. The kWh is a convenient unit of measure for residential electricity, because the typical U.S. household uses between 10 and 30 kWh per day, or upwards of 1000 per month. I say it's convenient, because imagine how much more confusing it would be for folks to be billed in gigajoules of electricity.

The electric utility charges customers based on the number of kilowatt-hours (total energy) they have used in a month, not on how quickly (kilowatts) they were used. The going residential rate (around here) is about $0.11/kWh. A typical household, depending on the time of day and the conscientiousness of its residents, needs between zero and, say, five kilowatts at any moment. When people talk about a new wind farm powering so many thousands of homes, they are assuming the typical home is using about 3 kW all the time. (Three kilowatts, 24x7, is actually an obscene amount of power for a home, but that’s another story.) Summed up over the course of a day, the typical U.S. household usage is around 30 kWh, for which the customer is charged a few dollars. H and I have managed to get our typical daily usage below 10 kWh, and we know of people that have achieved about 5 kWh/day.

This power/energy relationship for electricity is analogous to how your car's engine provides somewhere between a few and several hundred horsepower, depending on whether you are idling or accelerating hard from a stop light. That’s power varying in time. If you sum up that power usage over a long while, you can equate it to total energy in terms of how many gallons of gasoline you’ve used. In time, as hybrid and all-electric vehicles become more prevalent in the market, it may become useful to speak of the power rating of the electric motor in your car, in kilowatts, and the capacity of your battery bank, in kilowatt-hours.

So, back to the recent story reporting that "[t]he entire school uses roughly 700 kilowatts per month." That makes as little sense as saying my car uses 200 horsepower/second or 30 mpg/day. Perhaps the school uses 700 kilowatt-hours per month. That's unlikely, since it would mean their electric bill is only about $75/month. It is more likely that the school uses 700 kilowatts during peak hours of the day, and somewhat less during the night. Over an entire month, then, I estimate the school uses something like 250,000 kilowatt-hours. I can’t guess what the cost for that electricity is, because the school district probably pays a lower rate than residential customers, and they probably co-generate some of their electricity on-site alongside their heating and cooling.

Readers of this blog know that I have an interest in energy policy. In order to have meaningful conversations about energy, energy conservation, and energy policy, it is important to understand the terminology. Even beyond the terminology, it is important to have ballpark ideas of what’s reasonable and what’s not. How much power does a home actually use, how much does it need, how much could be saved with simple measures, and how much does this all cost?

These days, I suspect most people could tell you what their car’s mileage is, and how far they can go on a tank of gas, and how much a gallon of gas costs. I am often surprised, then, how few of those people also know how much energy their home uses each month and what the cost for that energy is.

Gas Prices

This was on a sale announcement that came to us in the mail the other day. I find it very amusing. We're hovering around $3.90 here. Thankfully, other than occasional forays up to the Cities, H and I manage to avoid driving much at all.

Gasoline Insanity

It is true that the price of gas these days is a bit insane. Thankfully, due to our lifestyle, Hilary and I are somewhat insulated from it. We don't drive all that much; we have reasonably efficient vehicles. In that, we consider ourselves lucky. That is not to say that a $40 tankup doesn't go unnoticed - it hurts. I can't imagine the pain of the 100-mile/day commuter driving an SUV. It is small consolation that the price of gas in Europe is a fair bit higher - between $7 and $9 per gallon, or about twice our current pain.

But what's more insane than the price of gasoline? What people propose to do about it. Heard of Senator McCain's proposal to suspend the federal gas tax, which amounts to a whopping 18.4 cents per gallon? Or Senator Clinton's rejoinder? What about our dear President?

I have been mentally composing this blog post for a few days. I felt some of my thunder stolen when I read today's piece from Thomas Friedman, opinion columnist for the NY Times, largely on economic and environmental matters and how they impact the larger picture. I suppose I shouldn't feel too bad - it's tough to compete with the organization, resources, and bite of a professional columnist. Anyway, here's his take on this current insanity. Note the name of the piece is "Dumb as We Wanna Be."

But some fuel got added to the fire of this rant when I read a piece in the local paper by the Republican candidate for our congressional district. (He's so going to get his butt kicked, but I digress.) His solution to our current energy woes? Rely more on domestic sources of oil, such as off-shore and ANWR. In his view, there's still plenty of oil lying under American soil, and drilling it would start to address the problem of rising gas prices and a stalling economy.

Well hot diggity, we're off to Beverly Hills!

At the same time, however, he acknowledges that it'll take years (perhaps a decade by most accounts) for the first drops to begin flowing - hardly a fix for our current woes. He proclaims that there's enough crude in ANWR to supply the whole US demand for ten years. It depends greatly on whose numbers you believe - it could be as little as six months. Even if it is ten years, that's less than a generation. I would expect a candidate for Congress to advocate solutions with a slightly longer time horizon to what is, essentially, a permanent problem.

Whether it's ten years or ten months is kind of moot anyway - the Alaska pipeline only has so much capacity. Throughput peaked at about 2 million barrels a day back in the late 80s. Nowadays, as the North Slope oilfields decline, the current rate is about 1 million barrels a day. So, realistically only about one million additional barrels of crude a day could be transported out of ANWR. Considering that the US uses about 21 million barrels of oil a day, an extra one million equates to less than 5% of daily demand. That assumes that it's all used domestically, of course, which isn't necessarily the case. Global demand for oil is increasing, even if US demand is slowing. ANWR is the proverbial drop in the bucket in terms of global oil production and demand.

Don't expect that extra 5% of domestic production to lower rates at the pump by 5%, either. It isn't like that oil is free, or significantly cheaper than, say, oil from Canada or Saudi Arabia. Oil is a global commodity, no matter where it comes from. $120/barrel is the going rate whether you're in Valdez or Abu Dhabi. Sure, you save a bit on transportation costs - Prince William Sound is closer than the Persian Gulf, but transportation costs are pretty small compared to the price of the oil itself or the price of refining it into gasoline and diesel.

In short, domestic oil isn't going to bring the price of gas back down to a reasonable level.

Not today.
Not in ten years.
Not ever.

We will never be able to drill our way to energy independence. Really, the only place we can get by drilling is to dig ourselves in deeper.

The candidate's position is short sighted at best, and delusional at worst. But, hey, what can you expect from an addict. He, you, I, the whole country, are all addicted to oil. Heck, even the oilman President says so. To an addict, there can never be enough. Addicts, when it comes to their next fix, aren't rational about it, where it comes from, how they'll get it, or what it'll cost. One doesn't treat an addiction by looking for the next fix; that only makes the withdrawal that much the worse when the stash runs out. The only way to treat the addiction is to reduce the dependence on the substance. Cold Turkey can be a violent upheaval and doesn't always work in the long run. Weening can work better, and replacement helps to. What's the methadone or chantix for our addiction to oil? That is what the nation and world need to be doing right now. Instead of dickering over where we can get another million barrels a day, we should be seeking out where we can find a replacement for that million barrels.

That is what political leaders ought to be putting forth. We're in a tight spot, and we're gonna get roughed up pretty bad before things ease up (and they will, eventually the factors contributing to high gas prices will diminish - just don't expect to see it quickly or dramatically). Nothing any politician can do will ease the pain of the pump in an appreciable way anytime soon.

Want to impress me as a voter? Don't pander to me about saving two bucks per tank for a couple of months. Don't make me feel like David with talk about windfall taxes for the Goliath oil companies (removing the tax rebates they enjoy would be more appreciated). Tell me how you are going to change the economic game that got us into this fix. Tell me about increasing gas mileage standards (the ones that recently passed? Please! Europe and Japan are already there). Tell me about making gasoline less palatable so that people are encouraged to use less of it (did you know the federal gas tax hasn't changed in over a decade?). Tell me about investing billions into alternative energy and conservation technology. If we don't, someone else will, and then where will the trade deficit be?

Realistically, nothing anyone can do today is going to have an appreciable effect on the price at the pump. The more important question is: what does one do for tomorrow?

Licht-N-Stein

An engineering acquaintance of mine, living in SE Minnesota, set about designing and building his home a few years ago. As the project developed, it became known as Licht-N-Stein (he's from Germany, and the name translates to "light and stone", but is also a play on the tiny principality in Europe). He created a home that was off-the-grid, off-the-well, and off-the-furnace. In short, he set about completely freeing himself from fossil fuel usage at home.

What he created is, from my perspective, and engineer's dream project. Off-the-grid is a fairly common term these days, and indicates that he gets his electricity from renewable sources; primarily a 1-kW wind turbine, though that will be supplemented with photovoltaics. The windmill and PV dump power into a lead-acid battery bank, which powers a 110 V inverter to power the rest of the house. Off-the-well is an uncommon thing these days, but was once quite common in this area and others - he doesn't have a well for his water service, but rather collects rainwater into a several-thousand gallon cistern in his basement. His roof is sheathed for easy collection, and 1-inch of rain about half fills his tanks. The water gets treated before use, but it doesn't take much. Off-the-furnace means that, rather than heat his home with natural gas, as many in this area do, he heats it with a combination of passive solar and gorgeous wood-burning fireplace (a so-called Russian Stove). His hot water comes from a combination of solar-thermal and the fireplace. The wood is deadfall from the several acres the house sits on. The floor of the main level is a 6" concrete slab that provides a substantial thermal mass that prevents the wild temperature swings common in 1970s passive solar homes. He has a large hot water tank in the basement, with heat-exchanging coils that allow bring heat in from the solar-thermal on the roof and from the fireplace, and takes heat out for the hot water service and radiant in-floor heating. At the moment, because he doesn't have the photovoltaics installed, he supplements the wind turbine with a propane generator. He can also boost the hot water with an on-demand water heater. When all is said and done, however, the only fossil fuel usage he anticipates using in the house is a trickle of propane for cooking.

Now, to be clear, he is not a granola hippy content with showering once a week and living in the dark. His home has all the accommodations that you would expect a new home to have: comfortable living space (about 2000 sq ft), lots of light, a really sweet kitchen, an impressive home theater, wired and wireless networking, a dishwasher, laundry, two-car garage, etc. He likes his comforts, as do we all, but he went about it in a way that drastically reduces his carbon footprint.

He had a number of motivations to do it this way. There was an economic motivation: an electric grid connection to his lot would have been $10,000+, and required an easement from a cantankerous neighbor; his off-grid electrical system cost him about that much. Living atop a bluff, he would have needed to drill a well several hundred feet down to be able to access very hard water laden with nitrates from the local agriculture. His rainwater collecting gives him ample water, already soft and 99% clean, and cost less to install than sinking the well would have done. He does want to live a green lifestyle, and wanted to show that it doesn't involve as much sacrifice as people think. He is showing that it is possible to live a comfortable Western lifestyle using a fraction of the electricity, water, and heating that a typical new home does. He wanted a closer connection to his environment: he is far more aware of the weather and changing of the seasons. He also used local materials and green products as much as he could, and got to know a lot of really interesting regional businesses as a result. Everything from certified lumber to Minnesota limestone to recycled-plastic deck lumber to milk/chalk paints to pressed-sunflower-husk cabinet panels. He put in a lot of sweat-equity into the home, partly because he wanted a close connection to his home, partly because it was cheaper to do so, partly because there wasn't local expertise in these systems do it for him, and partly because he's an engineer and likes to tinker. Being able to build a home like this requires a fair bit of detailed planning, but provided him ample time to design the overall flow and feel of the house - to be acquainted with it before he even broke ground (the not-so-big-house philosophy).

He has been pretty successful in his endeavors, too. He's lived in the house for over a year now. His lights stay on, he has a hot shower every day, and the house remains a balmy 65-75 F even at the winter solstice. The house cost a bit more per square foot than typical new construction, but that has less to do with the "off-the-" systems and more to the amenities he added (for instance, the fireplace has a few tons of limestone in it, and probably cost $20k in itself, but could be done more plainly for a third of that).

In short, he has done precisely what Hilary and I desperately want to do in our lives. Perhaps not on a bluff in Minnesota, but rather someplace in VT or NH. Maybe a different mix of wind and solar. Maybe the addition of geothermal. Perhaps the rainwater collection won't be necessary (although would be useful for a grey-water system, and for watering the horses). Granite instead of limestone. Still, as a piece of systems engineering, it is a marvel that I hope to emulate. As a way to live, it is an inspiration to the both of us.

Technetium-99 Shortage

My work involves being knowledgeable about both medicine and technology. Sometimes it allows me to totally get my geek on. Just yesterday I delved into the realm of nuclear chemistry to find out information about a worldwide shortage of technetium-99. You may heard about it in the news - it has been having an impact on the practice of nuclear medicine for the last couple of weeks.

A little history first (hey, I found this stuff out, so now you get to hear about it, too). Technetium, element 43, is the lightest element that has no stable isotope. That is, any form of technetium either already has or soon will decay into some other element. That is why is was not conclusively discovered until 1937. However, using the power of his invention, the periodic table, Dmitri Mendeleev was able to predict both its existence and some of its material properties decades in advance. Due to its location on the table, he figured it would be similar to manganese, and so called it ekamanganese. The reason it is called technetium today is because of its greek root, which means "artificial." Technetium was the first synthesized element - it was isolated from a molybdenum target used in early cyclotron experiments.

Nowadays, technetium is a workhorse in nuclear medicine. It is injected into patients in various forms and compounds, and emits radiation from the inside out that is used for bone density scans, determining the extent of a heart attack, and other diagnostics. The particular isotope, Tc-99m ('m' for metastable), undergoes a reshuffling of the protons and neutrons in its nucleus, settling into Tc-99, and spitting off a 140 keV gamma ray, which is soft enough to be picked up by X-ray equipment. The slightly more stable isotope, Tc-99, is a run-of-the-mill beta-emitter and gets excreted from the body pretty soon thereafter, limiting the total overall dosage. Tc-99 gets used in radiation calibration standards.

The decay from Tc-99m to Tc-99 has a half life of about 6 hours. That means that it doesn't stick around too long once it is made. Not long enough, even, for it to get transported. Its precursor, Molybdenum-99, however, has a half-life of nearly 3 days, which is ample time to transport it, extract the desired Tc-99m, and inject that into patients before it decays to diagnostically worthless Tc-99. Hospitals typically receive once weekly shipment of Mo-99 in what's called a technetium cow.

Working our way back up the supply chain, it is worth asking where all the Mo-99 comes from. As it turns out, nearly all the Mo-99 used in North America, and a fair portion of that used worldwide, comes from a single source: a heavy water nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. There are a handful of other sources worldwide, but Chalk River is the heavy lifter, and not only for Mo-99, but also other isotopes used for diagnostics and treatment.

As it happens, the reactor was shut down on Nov 18th for five days of scheduled maintenance. Once they got started, however, they realized there was other maintenance that they really ought to do then, too. So, rather than five days of downtime (roughly two half-lives of Mo-99), the hiccup stretched into weeks. The projected restart for the reactor had gone out as far as mid-January. That works out to about 23 half-lives of Mo-99, meaning that 1 gram of Chalk River Mo-99 that was out there in mid-November would have decayed to about 0.1 micrograms of Mo-99, a few nanograms of Tc-99m, and 0.999 999 grams of Tc-99.

To put it another way, the extended downtime of the reactor meant that the supply of Tc-99m was inexorably drying up (or, more specifically, decaying). Effects varied here and there, but by and large it meant that some tests were delayed, patients were put in a priority queue, and diagnostics were done with lower dosages (and hence, yielded poorer results). By some accounts, it was a mounting crisis.

Enter the Canadian Parliament and the Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Yesterday, as I was doing this research, the Parliament passed legislation ordering the reactor to start up again. The startup was ahead of schedule and against the advice of Canada's nuclear regulators. Still, a crisis is a crisis.

With the reactor ramping up again, the production of medical isotopes and reach full capacity within a week.

I wish I could come up with a nifty epilogue to this story, but that's about all I've got. I suppose this even could strengthen calls for additional redundancy in the supply chain - create the ability at other nuclear reactors for medical isotope production. If nothing else, with was a fun bit of research in an otherwise ordinary day.

Jones Seminars and Energy

One of my favorite things back when I was at Dartmouth (particularly in my later, heavy-engineering years) was the Jones Seminars at the Thayer School. Friday afternoons, at the end of a long week (usually with a long weekend ahead, too), we'd gather in room 100 for coffee and cookies and a lecture. Yes, this is a geeky way of kicking back.

These were general interest lectures in science and technology given by distinguished guests or Dartmouth professors. Some of my more memorable ones were about the Columbia Accident investigation, bio-engineering a yeast to produce complex human hormones and proteins (now the focus of a successful Dartmouth spinoff), some interesting futures in robotics, the two-mile time machine, high-efficiency solar cells, and so on.

This fall, the subject of all the Jones Seminars are on energy, climate change and, most importantly, what can we do about it. Being a mostly-engineering audience, the focus of the interventions are things like cellulosic ethanol (another dartmouth spinoff) and carbon capture and sequestration. But, consistent with the Thayer School's mission, there were have also been speakers from non-profits and, just yesterday, from BP. There was a tie-in to an energy symposium put on the by the Thayer School as well.

Absolutely the best part about all this is that these lectures, which were always videotaped, are now available as video podcasts, too. I can remember a few years ago wanting to watch one of these lectures again, and having to wait four weeks for the videotape to be post-produced and available through the library (not on the shelves, even). Now, the post production is done in a day or two, and the video can be downloaded and watched by anyone, anywhere. They are available in large video format (640x480, approx 100 MB / lecture), small video format (QVGA, about 60 MB), or just straight audio. Unfortunately, they need to be transcoded (i.e., reformatted) to fit properly on my iPhone. The transcoding is kind of slow, so mostly I just watch on my computer.

Although these series are given to a mostly engineer audience, they are accessible to most folks. The focus this term on energy and what we can do about it is, I believe, particularly important. These are very informative and entertaining lectures given by very intelligent people, and I encourage all our readers to check them out.