Solar service and wind work-ups

Renewable energy equipment is much like any other kind of equipment. You have to regularly inspect it for faults and test it for functionality, and it sometimes needs to be dismantled from one location and re-mantled in another. The basic procedure is something I learned more than thirty years ago now, working on other kinds of equipment, mostly airplanes, and really there isn't very much difference in terms of the intellectual tools needed to do the job.

To be honest and realistic, if we could only get this message across, explain that the new energy ideas are in fact not much different from the old ones in terms of their intellectual content, we'd speed up the process of retrofitting the economy ten-fold, because there are literally millions of unemployed or underemployed technical workers who are capable of learning the new equipment.

But humanity's innate conservatism being what it is, much of the world continues to walk around thinking that specialist training is needed. To some extent, that is true. Specialist training is needed to measure and account for the quantitative effects of renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements. Renewable energy differs from fossil fuel and other forms of conventional energy in that it is distributed unevenly across the landscape, and unevenly or cyclically in time. This, and accounting for GHG emissions, takes a slightly different kind of math.

But I can teach this math to anyone with basic bookkeeping skills, and some decent, high-school level geography, so even that isn't so very different or hard.

And the equipment is just equipment, and once you've learned a few slightly different safety procedures, in addition to the ordinary safety training currently given to technical level personnel, you can do the work.

So, for example, solar panels when not in use are turned away from the sun so they don't produce electrical potential that can create a spark if the wrong connections are shorted or if a tool drops across a couple of wires. Wind turbines are immobilized using positive brakes, electromechanical brakes, or both, before work commences, so no-one can be hurt by an unexpectedly spinning turbine. You always disconnect the negative terminal of an off-grid battery pack before disconnecting the positive, so as to eliminate unnecessary arcing if a circuit is unexpectedly closed somewhere.

And so on. Not so very hard, is it?

Yesterday's project was to dismantle the entire off-grid solar and wind power installation at the current student "Eco-Cottage," making it a non Eco-Cottage, or an Eco-Cottage in name only.

The current cottage-style dorms are slated for demolition, and the first ones to be demolished will come down shortly after graduation, to be replaced by the G.O. Logic Terra Haus concept dorm, a truly ecological building that will require only 10% of a normal building's energy input.

Yes. That's what I wrote. A building that needs 10% of the energy requirements of the ordinary or average kind of building.

Makes you winder why we're so concerned about oil and nuclear power right now, doesn't it?

But unless you understand passive solar building design, you're behind the times on energy.

Which, I venture to say, means that 99% of the population is behind the times. It also means that the standards people apply when buying new or retrofitting old houses need to be upgraded. People simply need to know about passive solar.

Not everyone will need to know everything, of course. But enough ordinary people need to understand passive solar design in more or less the way that literally millions of practical folks understand how to size a new truck engine to a job need, or how to get a mortgage they can afford, or how to grow a tomato plant.

It's the same kind, and level, of understanding that is needed.

To be absolutely scientifically correct, the new eco-dorm will require little or no net energy over the course of the year. It will make most of its own solar heat and most of its own solar hot water and some of its electrical energy in real time. Some of the time in winter it will borrow electrical energy from the grid. In summer it will pay that energy back to the grid. It will still require base load, particularly to run the ventilation and the back-up heating system, and big appliances like the fridge. It won't have quite as large a solar array as our other prototype low carbon passive solar building, the Unity House, so it will borrow slightly more of this seasonal energy, and it's unlikely that it will be "net zero energy" like the Unity House is. But I venture to say that the passive solar concept and design detail in the Terra Haus is just slightly more worked out than the Unity House, so the back-up heat supply will be smaller.

The Unity House has a relatively massive 5KW solar array that more than makes up for its slight design flaws. The Terra Haus won't need that, and so will be a much cheaper system once the prototype is marketed as a production model, or if the concepts were adapted to other building formats.

Anyway, there will be more on the Terra Haus later. For today, we were talking about working on energy equipment. Because of the Terra Haus plans, we no longer needed the old off-grid solar and wind demonstrator to actually feed power into the cottage. The Unity House long superseded the old Eco-Cottage as the solar demonstrator of choice on campus, and the Terra Haus will just add to that capability. This freed up the solar and wind equipment for some other purpose, and we decided to fit it to the new barn, which needs lighting and power supply in any case.

Even prior to this decision, the whole set-up was in need of a good service. Student Justin Cupka suggested that he be allowed to do this work for his Environmental Challenge class project. I agreed, with the caveat that the servicing happen in the context of the dismantling and refitting to the barn.

I got to the site at about 8.30 am, and quickly stripped out the old wiring, switchgear, inverter, and battery pack.

(I'll know when I'm getting too old for this job: when I can no longer manage these eighty pound batteries.)

That left the solar panels and wind turbine. I went for lunch, and then to our annual scholars day and awards ceremony, where, it just so happens, my promotion to Professor was announced.

I was back on-site at 12.20 and Justin and the Sustainability Office work study crew showed up at 12.30. After a brief inspection of clothing and shoes, and fitting of hard hats, we began dismantling the turbine, then dismantled the solar panels from the roof. We then took all this gear, including the 25 foot steel turbine tower, over to the barn for temporary storage. We cleaned up most of the remaining scrap lumber at the barn site, where it has lain, shamefully, for nearly a year while I waited for my teaching schedule and administrative and research duties to allow time for the work to get done, without destroying family life or sanity.

We used the dump truck to drop the lumber at the scrap lumber pile, then went back to the Eco-Cottage to pull the ground anchors for the wind turbine guy wires.

These are screw-in anchors or "ground augers," and the procedure, when removing by hand, is to insert a long steel bar in the eye of the anchor, and then literally walk around in circles as if driving a old-fashioned nautical capstan.

The main danger with this procedure is dizziness, since the effect is basically the same as in the game where you put your forehead on the top of a broom handle and run around in circles to make yourself dizzy.

I sang a line or two of a sea shanty since it seemed appropriate.

What was most interesting about this group of students is how much they enjoyed the work. This is a new generation of students and thus far they haven't had much chance to engage with these kinds of more technical projects. Jesse, our Sustainability Coordinator, has them working busily on recycling, on gardens, and on outreach, but I've had a year first of particularly heavy teaching and then heavy administrative workload, and I hadn't been assigned a single class with a work project or lab component, except for the Environmental Challenge class for which Justin's project is due.

So we'll have to be careful to schedule more of this kind of hands-on time in my workload, since it gets students engaged and asking questions. If it isn't in my formal workload, though, it tends not to get done because I have to deliver the programming and administrative product I'm assigned to deliver, first and foremost.

Justin, for his part, now has to figure out and execute an appropriate bench test for each component of the system, the two solar panels, the battery pack, the inverter, and the turbine, so we can cost the repairs needed.

That should keep him thinking hard through the end of the semester.

The Sustainability Office work study students, for their part, all asked, indeed almost begged, to be allowed to do more such work.

That's right, late-teenagers and early 20-somethings begging to be allowed to work!

Well, we should be able to accommodate this, although not so much this semester. Jesse will have a good summer Sustainability Office crew, though, while I will have the wind research crew. The two crews can be informally combined from time to time this summer for programming and projects. And there are appropriate classes throughout next academic year to give me the workload time I need to get practical renewable energy projects started.

Scottish musician Dougie Maclean has a song I've always liked which provides the basic philosophy in lyrical form:


RITE OF PASSAGE

Take the young ones to the desert, teach them how the arrow flies
How to smell the beast upon the wind and run with mother nature’s loving lies
Show them how to balance what is wrong and what is right
And make their own directions through the longest darkest night

CHORUS
Oh you need that rite of passage before you can continue on
That brave self understanding you can lean your dreams upon
You may want for children, you may crave for man and wife
But you need that rite of passage to the summer of your life

Show the children to the master, put the tools into their hands
Show them how to work the grain and how to hold the ever-moving sand
Place with them the knowledge of the far and of the near
And lead them through the waiting storms that will never ever clear
CHORUS

It’s a sad deluded vision this creature of our time
It’s body now is broken, it’s smile it rarely has the chance to shine
It stands so high and mighty with its never ending needs
While somewhere in the beating heart the earth it vainly pleads
CHORUS

Learning by doing

Yesterday was a nice day out after a long hard Maine winter of way too much administrative work and classroom teaching for me, and way too little experiential learning for the Sustainable Energy students.

But finally the sun shone, the snow melted, and we had a fun event to attend, the Energy for ME fair at the University of Maine's Hutchinson Center in Belfast.

Deputy Director of Unity College Admissions, Joe "Salty" Saltalamachia also came along to host our table and answer the high schoolers' questions about college and careers in energy.

So what was this big gathering all about?

Energy for ME is a STEM and service-learning program in coastal and island high schools in Maine. It's run by a partnership led by our friends the Island Institute, who are also important members of the coalition of forces behind the Fox Islands Wind Project, the great State o' Maine's first ever community wind project (and extremely successful, generating roughly 12,000 MWh of super-cost effective clean wind energy per year).

Maine islands, and some remote coastal communities, suffer from terribly high energy costs, the result of general remoteness, and in some cases, of being off-grid completely. This makes the cost analysis of renewable energy systems very favorable. Wind and solar power in particular need neither fuel nor transmission lines, and so may save a lot of money for island home-owners.

So the island high-schoolers and their friends from nearby coastal towns were brought in with their teachers for a day of conferencing and hands on demonstrations led by local energy advocates, regional energy firm engineers, energy policy wonks like me, and of course, some of our energy-wonk-in-training Unity students -- by special invitation, no less.

Graduating seniors Jamie Nemecek, of White House Solar Road Trip Fame, and Abie Sullivan, who won the research award at this fall's student conference for her poster on public acceptance of wind farm development, were with me to present their work.

All I had to do was to introduce them, a very great pleasure for me, and hold a little discussion session with the high-schoolers and their teachers.

Also present were the state's Americorps Vista crew, who do work in energy education, and our good Friends from Chewonki summer camp with their many solar demonstrators and educational toys.




Here's Peter Arnold, the main energy education guy at Chewonki, with their solar hot water demonstrator. This had hot water running fairly quickly, after just five minutes of April sunshine. The solar PV panel runs a small circulation pump.

Then, my favorite, a concentrating solar energy demonstrator made from a disused TV satellite dish covered in cheap reflective Mylar.





As you can see from the smoke emanating from the two sticks, this simple parabolic mirror made an excellent demonstrator of the energy available from less than a quarter square meter of the earth's surface. Both sticks were aflame in seconds. The temperature at the focus reached over 600 degrees F, easily enough to flash water into steam and drive a small steam turbine.

I was well-pleased with Jamie and Abie's presentations, which if you think about it, also represented experiential learning. Both will go on, I expect, to have excellent and productive graduate school and working careers solving policy and public relations problems in energy and climate change, and so what could be better than some early practice at making a presentation?

For Abie in particular, this was immediate, since her new advisors at the University of Maine's Policy School will soon decide whether she's to be a Teaching Assistant or a Research Assistant in the fall.

If the former, she'll need her public speaking skills.

Jamie, on the other hand, is looking for a gap-year job (also to be followed by policy school), and so will need to do well in upcoming interviews.

Jamie went first, and described ruefully how the Solar Road Trip students were mishandled by the White House's PR crew and, essentially, sent packing, but expressed their delight when the Obama administration announced only days later that they would solarize the White House.

This is a young woman who will go on in life knowing that youth and idealism can make a difference.

Abie showed how helpful anthropological methods, particularly ethnography, could be in understanding difficulties in public acceptance of energy and climate related policy. This emphasis on qualitative social science was close to the heart of the Island Institute's Suzanne Pude, one of the organizers. The Institute uses a lot of interesting social science, including ethnography, in its work, and so Abie succeeded not only with the students, but also with influential adults in her chosen graduate school field.

While all Joe and I had to do was sit back and watched in admiration.

Among the high-schoolers in the audience, nary a yawn was to be seen. Anyone who's ever taught teenagers knows how rare an event that is. Although neither Jamie nor Abie's presentations were completely pitch-perfect, and there was a minor fluffed line or two, it didn't matter, because they had the audience in the palms of their hands.

And so that, dear readers, is what I called Friday this work week.

Now the weather is better, a pent-up flood of sustainable energy project work will rush out.

Next week will also be busy with hands-on projects. Tuesday, young Justin Cupka and I, with help from the Sustainability Work Study Crew will begin moving our small wind power and solar power demo installations from their old home on the old Eco-Cottage, now slated for demolition (to be replaced with the new passive solar Terra Haus project). The panels and small turbine will go to our agricultural barn where they will have a productive life providing off-grid light and power.

Thursday will be a big day at the Womerlippi Farm, the biggest day of the spring, as the student animal care team comes to help with lambing, giving tetanus shots, trimming hooves, and dung-tagging.

With the late snow this year, there's a lot of outdoor experiential learning to cram into only three weeks of class.

And after that, the famous Unity College community wind power assessment crew gets back to work, with no less than three enormous community wind anemometer towers to raise this year, not to mention the servicing of last year's sites, the data analysis, and the mapping of Maine's wind power resource. The best possible kind of outdoor education for future energy analysts.

And you even get paid.

The hiring call will go out very shortly. Watch this space for a job announcement soon.

Cold lamb

Today's "Lambing Live" drama was a hypothermic lamb. Poppy, a shearling ewe, didn't quite know what to do with her first baby, so she left it on the cold hard frosty ground for quite a while.

I'm not sure how long. It doesn't take long when the ground is iron-hard and twenty degrees.

Of course, we try to watch them like hawks this time of year. I'd been up on night checks at 9am, 2.30am, 4am, and then every forty minutes or so.

But once the sun was up, I was struggling with a big round bale and a balky tractor and trailer, trying to feed the rest of the sheep. I heard the little one before I saw it, and picked it right up, but it was already cold.

Poppy had her own problems. She was backing into a brush heap, totally terrified of what was happening to her body.

To begin, I just bought Poppy and the lamb in and put them in a lambing pen with a heat lamp.

But Poppy didn't so much as lick the newborn even once.

Holding Poppy down, I squirted a little milk in his mouth, direct from the teat, but that didn't bring him round either.

After about another half hour of this, I bought the little one in, popped it in a blue WalMart tub in the kitchen with a heat lamp. Normally they go under the wood stove, but the stove was out.

Yet another use for those blue WalMart tubs. We must have twenty of the things around here.

Then I sterilized the intubation kit, just in case. But I didn't need it.

After a while the lamb was trying to stand in the tub, but his mouth was still cold when I stuck my finger in. Still, he did suckle. When they really go down they can't even do that. So back in the pen with mom he went. He tried gamefully to find the nipple but he was still too weak, and mom was more concerned about her second newborn so she didn't help much. She kept putting her leg in his way, and he'd fall over and have to try again.

So then we laid Poppy out once more, and put the lamb on the nipple. After a little initial confusion, with Poppy pinned firmly under my left knee (complaining loudly at this treatment) so she had no choice in the matter, I got him a good feed.

And then back under the heat lamp. If he follows the usual pattern, he'll sleep off that first feed and then when he gets up the next time he should be strong enough to find the nipple on his own.

And when I last saw them Poppy was giving the cold one a good licking.

And yes, the BBC does actually have a reality TV show called "Lambing Live." It's my new favorite show. Right up there with "University Challenge."

But Aimee prefers "Survivor."

I'm not giving you a link to Survivor.

You can find it yourself.

Lambs!

The best moment in the shepherding calendar arrived at about 8.15am this morning. I went out to feed the sheep as usual, a little late because today is not a teaching day. I heard them before I saw them, bleating away.

I couldn't help but laugh out loud in glee.

They were Nellie's. I wasn't expecting them for a couple-three more weeks, but sometimes they come early. These were fairly small lambs, and Nellie is on the skinny side right now. They probably popped out pretty easy, which is good for the mother. They'll catch up in weight soon enough.

Nellie was pretty hungry, and we expect snow tonight, so I grabbed both lambs and mom and put them in the indoor pen by themselves. Nellie got a good feed all to herself, and the lambs have a heat lamp to offset the nasty weather.

So it begins. Who's next? Molly here is lying down, just like Nellie was yesterday.

Molly is not, however, a skinny sheep. She always reminds me of Shirley, the fat one on Shaun the Sheep. She may need a little assistance to give birth.

Energy speech is call-to-action for sustainability experts

I enjoy a good speech, always have. I particularly enjoyed this one. We've waited a long time for Obama to roll out his energy plan.

Unfortunately, without more bipartisanship in Congress, it will be very hard to fund. There's going to have to be a lot of pork mixed in with the greens. That's how I see the ethanol thing, actually, a big fat pork-pie that buys votes and congressmen in corn country.

So much for the patriotic heartland of America. But at this point, I'll take whatever works.



Appendix: Here's a post I wrote to Andy Revkin's NYT blog on this topic this morning:

It was a good speech. I enjoyed it. There are hidden, controlling, realities, though, realities that I'm sure the staff are aware of, but that don't make good soundbites. Any future plan for energy is going to have to navigate these realities like rocks in the water. Most of them are to do with price points in markets for capital goods that consume energy, where energy-efficient and clean energy alternatives are now available.

The biggest is oil price. If I do some econometrics and derive empirical price points for oil over supply, model out demand growth at roughly 2/3rds of global GDP growth, and look to see the impacts on supply, accounting for reserves and even growth in the current rate of discovery, I get a steady increase in the price of oil. This isn't "peak oil" theory: production doesn't need to peak to see the price rise. We just need an increase in demand relative to supply. But this reality will condition markets for substitutes. Lots of currently expensive substitutes will look pretty good in just a few years time if present trends continue. Gas for transport, wind, solar, and fourth generation nukes for electrical power, heat pumps and super-insulation, hybrids and battery electrics that are all just a bit too expensive now will seem a lot cheaper.

So on the basis of price alone we could see a large reduction in imports in the next fifteen years. Global oil production may increase, but we won't be using it because we'll have cheaper alternatives.

On the question of buildings that use 90% less energy, these things are real. We've already built one prototype and are building another this year. They cost more than conventional buildings but don't require lifestyle changes on the part of inhabitants. The trick will be to train up architects and other folks in the building industry. The excess price will then come down, too. I've seen this happen. A prototype 2,000 square foot passive solar house that cost about $800K to develop is now available as a modular home for $250K, with the added incentive of massively reduced utility bills, and greatly increased home comfort. The problem, the rock to navigate, to overcome is price, but there's also education.

Another example is household solar. The price of panels keeps dropping. The price of installation and inverters remains high. Recently I noticed some Chinese grid tie inverters on the market that undercut current market leaders. Rooftop solar is currently cost-competitive with grid power in large scale installations (box stores) in California with subsidy. But it wouldn't take much for it to be cost-competitive in other sunny states soon, in smaller installations a little time after that, and eventually without subsidy. Price, and education, because it takes some knowledge to crunch these numbers.

I could go on but readers have heard much of this before from me. Main point -- Obama has Adam Smith on his side. Grumpy old Adam wins every time.

Jobs for the troops

The Huffington Post has a new article out about sustainability managers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/the-profession-of-sustain_b_841308.html

Looking at the world and seeing it whole...

A very readable Observer article today explains how EF Schumacher, author of the very early sustainability book, Small is Beautiful (1973), is extremely influential, perhaps even a "household god" in David Cameron's reformed UK Conservative Party.

I find this all somewhat unlikely, or at least aspirational, but enjoyed the article for it's biographical detail. Schumacher has always been a great influence on me. I have Schumacher's biography on my bookshelf, as well as Small is Beautiful, but I had somehow missed some of the defining moments, such as his time as a German internee in Britain during WW2.

Small is Beautiful was one of the books that began my career in sustainability thinking back in the mid-1980s. At that time, with Margaret Thatcher's attacks on the communitarian north of England quite rampant, I was still in the service, a young NCO aircraft engine fitter on 111 Squadron at RAF Leuchars, and found myself trying to explain things to myself anyway I could. Leuchars is just five miles from the ancient university at St. Andrews, and I was able to get library privileges there. I spent much of my free time in the library trying to get an education, and trying to understand what was happening to my country.

The squadron was worried about new potential deployments at the time, in the wake of the Falklands War. For a generation the air station had played what was essentially a static role with its defenses pointed across the North Sea to the Tupulov "Bear" bomber bases around Archangel. The Falklands War came as a huge shock to the British military, and the squadron's F4 "Phantom" aircraft were, essentially, useless in that far-flung conflict, lacking any kind of useful mobility. In particular, mountains of equipment were needed, to keep the ground systems running that kept the Phantoms running. One third of the main hangar was given over to ground equipment. As a partial response, I was assigned to go through all this ground equipment and make it ready for more rapid deployment, with boxes, packaging, and so on. I was given a small workshop and a crew of one Senior Aircraftman, and left to my own devices.

That was the British government's first and last mistake as far as young RAF Corporal Womersley was concerned.

The mistake was, the workshop had a desk and a reading light. So on my tea breaks and lunch hours, instead of hanging out in the crew room listening to the other airmen talk about beer, soccer and women, I read. I devoured the likes of Shumacher, Gandhi, and the then-fresh faced, then-young Brit environmentalist Jonathan Porritt (now "Sir" Jonathan), sitting right there at my RAF-issue desk in my greasy RAF workshop, and so slowly became a green.

There wasn't much place for a green in Margaret Thatcher's military, and so I left. Within a very few months I found myself at one of the early sustainable communities inspired by Schumacher, the Findhorn community, also in Scotland. Three years later I was in America, and by the end of the decade had embarked on an academic career in sustainability.

What is interesting to me about this most recent article is how the thinking of the west is beginning to converge on a set of solutions to the current set of problems, and how this is beginning to bring together many of the components of my rather far-flung history.

Because as David Cameron is allegedly reading Schumacher, whose arguments against dependency on non-renewable source of energy would have been anathema to Thatcherite conservative thinkers, he's also sending RAF Tornadoes and Typhoons on what is essentially a air-mobility mission to Italy, to attack Colonel Gaddafi's ex-Soviet air force. That was the mission that 111 Squadron couldn't perform, at the time of the Falklands War. And the mission is being performed in pursuit of an new doctrine in international relations, the "duty to protect," particularly on the part of the United Nations Security Council. This doctrine, essentially an argument for liberal intervention, would have also been anathema to Thatcher-era conservatives. But it's the kind of mission that might have convinced me to stay.

A few years after, the guy I had roomed with during my time on 111 Squadron (and my time on the RAF Leuchars Mountain Rescue Team), then a Sergeant, now retired Warrant Officer "Heavy" Whalley, was the senior RAF Mountain Rescue Team Leader at the Lockerbie Air Disaster, courtesy of Colonel Gaddafi.

Back then, Thatcher had committed the British nation to an energy policy dependent on North Sea oil and gas. The fledgling renewables lobby was still a radical group. The idea that sustainable North Sea energy might mean wind turbines was unheard of.

Today, at home, the new British conservatives are committed to a program of new renewables, smart grid, and energy efficiency redevelopment of the UK's aging fossil-fueled infrastructure, including household energy efficiency, electric cars, rooftop solar, North Sea wind, high speed rail, and on and on. This is expected not so much to drive economic growth, which Cameron is also beginning to formally abandon as a measure of economic sense, but to develop "gross national happiness."

He's taken another leaf out of Schumacher -- "man does not live by GDP alone."

So the new leader of the party of Margaret Thatcher, the party whose earlier political economics drove me out of my first career and even out of the country, is now taking up most of the solutions I embraced back in the mid 1980s. Ironic. But natural, if you think about it.

But all of which would be almost impossible to imagine from an American conservative at this point in time.

What a funny world we live in. After half a lifetime of living on the radical fringe, my kind of thinking is now, essentially mainstream conservatism in the UK.

While here in the US, where the penny hasn't yet dropped, I'm still essentially a radical green.