January 2009 Archives

At the Taste3 2008 conference, hosted by TED talks, the chef Dan Barber tells a wonderful story about sustainable agriculture and foie gras. It is a story of a Spanish farmer and producer of foie gras, who is in love with his geese and does not force feed them but instead allows them to gorge in the fall on the fruit of his olive and fig groves, in order to produce what Dan Barber says is the best foie gras in the world¹.

From Dan’s closing remarks:

We need now to adopt a new conception of agriculture. One in which we stop treating the planet as if it were some kind of a business in liquidation. And stop degrading resources under the guise of cheap food. We can start by looking to farmers like Eduardo, farmers that rely on nature for solutions, for answers; rather than imposing solutions on nature [they are] “listening to nature’s operating instructions”. The great thing for people that care about food and cooking is that the most ecological choice for food is also the most ethical choice for food. And it’s also, almost always, and I haven’t found an example otherwise, the most delicious choice. That’s serendipitous.

1. In 2007 Eduardo Sousa was awarded the Coup de Coeur for the best foie gras by the Paris International Food Salon.↩

I just came across this quote from Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince on the Gristmill weblog which I think is worth chewing on:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out … than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who could profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arriving partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had an actual experience of it.

An interesting article on the incredible amount of waste produced by home building and some tips on how to reduce it while saving money and building a better house.

According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) study, an estimated 8,000 lbs of waste is created from the construction of a 2,000 square foot home … Much of the debris was either unnecessary material or material that could be salvaged or recycled.  The problem can be solved by streamlining the material coming into the construction site and better managing how the waste is separated and where it ends up.

(Via Jetson Green.)

From the Jetson Green weblog/magazine on green building:

Looks like Chicago city planners have big ideas for a 1140 acre swathe of land in South Chicago.  The spot is former U.S. Steel land, and planners have been mulling development options for the spot since about 2000.  Now, they’d like to submit a proposal for a green development with sustainable neighborhoods, green buildings, street cars, and bicycle paths, etc.  Officially referred to as the “South Chicago LEED Neighborhood Development Initiative,” the plan would be rated by the USGBC’s LEED-ND pilot program and would unravel over roughly 20-30 years. 

So this guy, Dave Chameides, decided to keep all of his trash in the basement for a year and not throw anything out. And he has a family. Amazingly, he managed to keep his total trash down to 30.5 lbs plus recycling. It looks like he has a great blog with all kinds of inspiring tips on reducing your waste, and on more sustainable living in general. I like his byline: “noone can do everything but everyone can do something”. Here’s the video of the final result:

“Takin’ Out The Trash” from Sustainable Dave on Vimeo.

Interesting piece on making a small solar heater out of 2x4’s and pop-cans:

Insulating the garage would go a long way to help keep the bitter Vermont cold out, but that’s a project for another day. I decided instead to take advantage of the south-facing side of the garage and build a solar furnace to collect some of that sunshine just bouncing straight off my garage.

I’m not sure if this has anything to do with green building, but I think this one room apartment – described in a recent New York Times article – which can be transformed into 24 different rooms, from a kitchen to a spa to an entertainment room, is very interesting. This flexibility might find some traction with the “small house” movement:

This room — the “maximum kitchen,” he calls it — and the “video game room” he was sitting in minutes before are just 2 of at least 24 different layouts that Mr. Chang, an architect, can impose on his 344-square-foot apartment, which he renovated last year. What appears to be an open-plan studio actually contains many rooms, because of sliding wall units, fold-down tables and chairs, and the habitual kinesis of a resident in a small space. As Mr. Chang put it, “I glide around.”

Be sure to check out the photos if you follow the link through to the article.

(Via Kottke.)

From Wired:

“We’re starting to see the path forward coalesce,” says Aaron Bragman, an auto-industry analyst with IHS Global Insight. “They’re all rallying around electric vehicles, and these aren’t cars that are five or 10 years away. These cars are on production timelines.”

Extended-range electric vehicles take us another big step away from petroleum. Cars … use electricity to drive the wheels and a small internal combustion engine to recharge the battery as it approaches depletion … eliminat[ing] the “range anxiety” that can make EVs a tough sell.

With the infrastructure already in place, battery-driven electric vehicles have a key advantage over their hydrogen fuel cell powered counterparts.

Michael Grunwald in TIME on “America’s Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency”:

This may sound too good to be true, but the U.S. has a renewable-energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available.

This miracle juice goes by the distinctly boring name of energy efficiency, and it’s often ignored in the hubbub over alternative fuels, the nuclear renaissance, T. Boone Pickens and the green-tech economy.

(Via Gristmill.)

Mark Jacobson provides an excellent overview and ranking of carbon-reducing energy technologies from solar to nuclear by their potential to positively affect the climate and air quality, their land-use impact, and their ability to supply sufficient energy to meet global demand. There is also an online presentation available with some useful graphics which summarizes the results.

Here is the take-home point for those who don’t wish to read the whole article:

In summary, the use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, solar, wave, and hydroelectric to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs result in the most benefit and least impact among the options considered. Coal-CCS and nuclear provide less benefit with greater negative impacts. The biofuel options provide no certain benefit and result in significant negative impacts. Because sufficient clean natural resources (e.g., wind, sunlight, hot water, ocean energy, gravitational energy) exists to power all energy for the world, the results here suggest that the diversion of attention to the less efficient or non-efficient options represents an opportunity cost that delays solutions to climate and air pollution health problems.

and here are a few choice quotes:

• Globally, about 1700 TW (14900 PWh per year) of solar power are theoretically available over land for PVs … the capture of even 1% of this power would supply more than the world’s power needs.

• [W]ind resources off the shallow Atlantic coast could supply a significant portion of US electric power on its own.

• Converting to corn-E85 could cause either no change in or increase CO2 emissions by up to 9.1% … Converting to cellulosic-E85 could change CO2 emissions by +4.9 to −4.9% relative to gasoline.

• [I]nvestment in an energy technology with a long time between planning and operation increases carbon dioxide and air pollutant emissions relative to a technology with a short time between planning and operation … the delay permits the longer operation of higher-carbon emitting existing power generation, such as natural gas peaker plants or coal-fired power plants

(Via Gristmill.)

I was struck by the following statements in a GristMill article the other day:

Archer and Jacobson, perhaps the world’s leading experts on wind potential, estimate that wind energy at 80 meters in commercially developable sites alone could supply five times the world’s current energy demand …

Is it power variability that worries experts? Jacobson and Archer have documented that connection via long distance transmission can reduce that variability.

Both of these statements run against the grain of what I understood to be the common sense notions (myths?) about the fallibility of wind power. Intrigued, I decided to look in more detail at what Archer and Jacobson had done to arrive at these conclusions.

The first of the two articles cited, an “Evaluation of global wind power”¹, contains a detailed estimate of wind power availability from over 8000 measurement stations all over the world. Among these stations Archer and Jacobson found that 13% had an annual average wind speed greater than 6.9 m/s at a height of 80 m, meaning that these sites have a wind power class of 3 or greater² as preferred for low-cost wind power generation. Areas of great wind power potential are found all over the world, and tend to be clustered along the coastlines of the continents. Interestingly, many of the most promising sites (of wind power class 7) are found on the east and west coasts, and in the Great Lakes region of Canada.

To calculate the global wind power availability Archer and Jacobson assume that global wind distribution is well mapped by the 8000+ measurement stations in their study, and hence that 13% of the earth’s land area of 130 million square kilometres would have a wind power class of 3 or greater. They further assume that this land area could be covered by wind turbines at a density of 6 per square kilometre, with each turbine generating 720 kW of power (on average, as calculated from the wind speed data). Based on these numbers, they find that the global economically available wind power is approximately 72 TW (or 54 000 Mtoe³ per year). To put this in context, the global demand for electrical power in 2001 was in the range of 1.6-1.8 TW (14 - 15 x 10¹² kWh per year) and the global demand for energy for all purposes for the year 2001 was 7-10 000 Mtoe. Cheap, readily available wind power alone could thus meet 40 times the 2001 global electricity use, and over five times the total energy use for all purposes.

Meeting global energy needs from wind power alone would require the installation of 20 million wind turbines over 16 million square kilometres (2.5% of the earth’s land area), generating 15 TW of electrical power. To put this in context, the total installed wind capacity for the world was 94 GW in 2007 ⁴, and it has been increasing by ~20 GW/year. In order to meet the global energy demand by the year 2050 through wind alone, approximately 370 GW or roughly 500 000 new wind turbines would need to be installed every year for the next forty years. It’s time to get moving, but then we already knew that, didn’t we.

One of the commonly expressed concerns with wind power is that the variability of wind makes it unreliable as a primary source of electrical power. In a 2007 article⁵, Archer and Jacobson examine one possible method for reducing the variability in the power generated: the interconnection of networks of wind farms over a large area. Because some wind turbines can be turning on one farm, even while they might not be on another some distance away, a network of wind farms is able to average out the peaks and troughs and deliver some level of stable power. By examining a network of 19 wind farms in the American mid-west, over an area spanning 850 km, Archer and Jacobson found that the interconnected wind farms could deliver guaranteed power of 222 kW/turbine at the same level of performance as a coal-powered generating station⁶. This means that as much as one-third of the total available wind power in the network could be used to supply reliable baseload electrical power, while the remaining, intermittent, two-thirds of the power could be used to, for example, charge batteries or generate hydrogen gas.

Taken together, these two articles strongly suggest that wind power alone could meet global electricity and energy needs, with room to spare. And that is reason for hope.

1. Cristina L. Archer and Mark Z. Jacobson, J. Geophys. Res. 110, D12110 (2005).↩
2. Wind power classes are linearly related to the power density of the wind at different wind speeds. See the AWEA Wind Energy FAQ for more information.↩
3. Mtoe: Millon tonnes of oil equivalent.↩
4. From the Wikipedia entry on Wind Power.↩
5. Cristina L. Archer and Mark Z. Jacobson, J. Appl. Meteor. and Clim. 46, 1701 (2007).↩
6. Interestingly, Archer and Jacobson also find that interconnecting the wind farms can allow for a reduction in the size of long-distance transmission lines carrying the electricity from the network to a city. Because some farms will have low wind speeds at any given point in time, the total capacity of the lines can be reduced without losing energy. This reduction would allow for the cheaper construction of long-distance transmission lines, thus making wind power even more economical.↩

Yikes! I hadn’t been aware of this ugly aspect of coal-powered generation which has lead to the devastation of a large area in Tennessee:

United States coal plants produce 129 million tons of postcombustion byproducts a year, the second-largest waste stream in the country, after municipal solid waste. That is enough to fill more than a million railroad coal cars, according to the National Research Council.

Federal studies have long shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium, which can cause cancer and neurological problems.