The Wei Forward.

A new article about the verity of China's purported technological leadership in green power strikes the kind of skeptical note I think is important.

I think the Chinese excel at the older kind of production line system, where labor is used instead of robots. This is why I wrote several months ago that the loss of Evergreen solar, a second generation polycrystaline PV manufacturer, was no great loss to the west.

What would be a huge blow would be the loss of technology such as the PV production systems belonging to Nanosolar. Each Nanosolar factory, and there will eventually be many, can make enough PV capacity to retire top-of-the-line coal-fired power plant every two to three years.

Other touchstone technology we westerners should be proud of? "Bloom" boxes? Fourth generation nukes? The couple kinds of floating turbine currently in the design phase? Plug in hybrids? Passive solar houses? Grid scale battery storage?

There are any number of contenders.

Luckily, and just in time, there are now the backstop technologies we can deploy as oil price rises, several of which, like Nanosolar, are in the production phase already.

There was a time, somewhere between Newcomen and Watt, when the failure of the old wood, water and wind powered economies to provide enough power for British industry was obvious, but before the key new steam idea, the separate condenser, had been developed.

Separate condensers were the thin film solar of their day, an idea that could take an existing technology and double or triple the energy output per unit cost. But the build-up to their deployment was a period of intense competition and industrial rivalry.

I think we may have passed the separate condenser point. I think we can now pick some winners, and even some winning combinations.

By the way, we wouldn't have to worry about China if they abandoned the one-party system and became a pluralistic democracy. It's inevitable that they do, you can't hold back the creative drive of the Chinese people very much longer, but how long will it take?

Ai Wei Wei is in many ways a silly western style abstract artist, and like most technologists and engineering types, I don't understand or care about his art. Lowry, MacColl, and Orwell are more my style: direct visual and written criticism that hits the establishment where it hurts, not a silly room of fake sunflower seeds.

But I care that he's now in jail because the Chinese government is made up of cowardly apparatchiks that are afraid of an idea.

Power storage tech

One of the major problems in renewable energy generation is the storage problem. Until recently there were few cost-effective solutions. Pumped hydro power storage was really the only large scale solution.

But a new announcement suggests that dry cell battery technology may have come of age for storage. If this technology does prove commercially viable, if it stands the market test of time, then it has much meaning for Maine wind and solar planning, for our remote off-grid islands (Monhegan), or end of the transmission line islands (Vinalhaven), and for planned or proposed, grid-connected, renewable energy capital projects such as DeepCWind or Grid Solar.

(The latter a good idea now moribund for various reasons political and legal.)

Cost effective grid-scale storage will add to our ability to harden the grid against interruption, add to our ability to use renewables, not only for power but also for oil-free heat, and reduce the need for transmission line building.

The new trick will be to include the new technology in cost analysis, especially taking the temporal variable into account.

I would definitely think our friends at Fox Islands Electric Cooperative would like to know how much the new systems cost.

It sounds like it might be around a million dollars a megawatt-hour. When you consider that turbines cost around three million dollars a megawatt of rated output, there's going to be a whole new cost analysis to do to work out how many dry cells you need per turbine to get the best price or value for your power.

Sheep school

Yesterday was one of the twice-a-year days when the Womerlippi Farmers host first year students from Unity College's Captive Wildlife Care and Education degree program for training in animal handling using sheep.

The sheep need the handling, while the students need the experience, so this is a good trade for all of us. The sheep, for their part, get all their shots, their hoofs trimmed, their dung tags removed, and so on, the 3,000 mile service.

While the students get what we believe is exceptionally good experience, handling large, balky and even hostile animals.

Timing is everything, and in this case the timing was great for the students, but not so good for the sheep. We had hoped to get the students in before lambing, but as usual the stupidity of the college schedule defeated our plans.

If I ever happen to meet the absolute moron it was that decided one fine day that something useful to humanity could be learned in a fifty minute class, and then filled up students', and faculty members' days with these classes, carefully spaced apart so as to allow only a minimal amount of time for practicing difficult things or concentrating hard on tricky jobs, or, well, just plain thinking about things, well, I'll have something to say to that person.

My idea of a good class is at least a half a day, maybe more, of practical application solidly linked to theory.

We had two hours and ten minutes, and made the best of things. I had everything set up ahead of time, and we worked our way though the animals as methodically as we could in the time available.

We started with a good scrubbing of student's welly boots in disinfectant, to remove or kill any disease organisms from other farms, or the zoos and wildlife centers that these students regularly visit.

We then had a good briefing, in which their major professor, Cheryl Frederick and I emphasized that what we were about to do would be hard work, dirty, unpleasant, risky to the animals, and based on hard science. This is an important moment because the students in this particular program sometimes arrive with what I call the "Animal Planet" mentality, which is something along the lines that cute, fuzzy animals are entertaining, and that because I'm in this degree program and not, say, straight biology, I don't have to take the hard biology classes that are required, or at least, I don't have to take them seriously.

These students, along with the Marine Biology students, I'm sorry to say, routinely get the worst grades in genetics, cell biology, and similar "hard" courses, as well as in math. They often see these more abstract courses as unpleasant and unnecessary.

(This is particularly frustrating to Aimee, who often comes home quite angry about it.)

Whereas in reality, all serious modern animal care and medicine is applied biology, and if students don't pay attention in genetics or cell biology, they may not fully understand procedures, and, in their future careers, at best they'll have to resort to the use of rote systems and depend on others to actually work out systems of care, being handicapped in doing it themselves by their ignorance of the biological basis of care.

At worst, they'll kill animals.

Which we nearly did yesterday, more of which later.

So the students got a five minute briefing in which we connected the systems of care they would learn to the biology in classes, emphasized the hard work and need for grit and guts in handling the animals. Seeing a few glazed eyes and minds already wandering (which is normal for first years, but not good, a sign of poor high-schooling and short attention spans and the like), we made eye contact, and I made sure they were paying attention with a mild but gruff warning.

Once we had their full attention and minds on task, we got stuck in.

With only two hours to go, everything had to be set up ahead of time. Earlier I had penned the sheep into the back of the barn, where they spend the winter. This is a safe place for them and they were quiet and settled. I stepped in and started handing out lambs, one by one. Each lamb got a subcutaneous injection of tetanus vaccine. The students gave the shots. They had earlier been told how to do it, and then we showed them how, with the first lamb; after that each student got to inject a lamb, and later, the ewes.

The best place to inject a sheep with tetanus vaccine or any other subcutaneous medicine is in one of the four "armpits," the area of bald, loose skin on the inside where the limb meets the body. It's easy to pinch up a flap of this skin, insert the needle, and inject the medicine right under the skin layer, avoiding muscle tissue and blood vessels.

The students had been warned that as soon as the ewes were separated from the lambs all kinds of noise would break out, making it hard to concentrate, and this duly occurred as babies were separated from mothers.

Each lamb was then returned to the lambing pen, still isolated from the mothers.

The next job was to work on the mothers themselves, and just naturally the angriest mothers presented themselves first at the gate of their pen, very hostile, and bleating for their babies. It was a simple matter to let them out one at a time, catch them, and take them outside into the sun for their routine work.

A romantic notion of sheep handling might have left the lambs with the mothers, but this might have resulted in lambs getting crushed while mothers were caught.

Again, students need to learn to let go of soppy sentiments and plan out systems of handling and care that are best for the animals and realistic of the difficulties involved.

Taking the angriest mothers first this way was good, because that meant we got all the most difficult sheep done first. And of course, first of all was Nellie, then Tillie, then Molly, then Poppy.

Tillie is probably our Number One best mother, and most experienced. But Nellie is the most caring mother we have. Molly is an easy third, and Poppy is just learning, so the order in which the angry sheep appeared at the gate was just naturally the exact order of their ranking of motherly ethic.

Our Corriedale-Romney cross sheep are big, solid and very strong, no pushovers. A Corriedale ewe is just naturally one of the finest and feistiest mothers in the animal world. All the mothers wanted very badly to be back with their babies.

It was no mean feat to catch each one, give her a shot, trim hooves and dung tags.

Once fixed up, the mothers could then go back to the paddock,, and each set of lambs could then be brought out, given five cubic centimeters of vitamin paste (containing selenium for protection against white muscle disease), and then released to the mothers.

The noise level slowly dropped.

A moment of quiet drama ensued when a student accidentally nicked one of Tillie's arteries with the needle while giving the tetanus shot. Bright red blood leaked out of the wound under the skin, making a bulge.

This might easily have caused Tillie's death. What happens is that the slug of liquid medicine in the blood vessel becomes in effect an embolism, and if it enters the blood vessels of the heart, can stop that organ beating.

This is called thrombosis, and humans get it too, when we have a "stroke."

Luckily it was one of Tillie's arteries that was hit, not a vein, based on the bright red color of the blood that we saw.

Arterial bleeding from a puncture wound will usually stop, so I wasn't worried about Tillie bleeding to death. But I was worried about a thrombosis.

But again we were lucky in that it was an artery and not a vein, and so any medicine that made it into the vessel would have had to have been pushed through capillaries and the tissue they serve, and so necessarily dispersed before making it to a vein, then to the heart. In addition, the pressure in an artery is greater, so it's harder to push the medicine in to the blood vessel. More likely the arterial pressure pushed the medicine out, and we had instead a bulge of blood mixed with medicine under the skin, which would go away eventually, and the medicine would still be effective.

This accident was partly my fault for not mentioning as positively as I should have that it was important to get the medicine just under the skin, and not in a muscle or blood vessel.

I showed the students how to do it, but I didn't tell them this last part.

And not all students were perhaps paying full attention to the demonstration.

Again, if we could only have them for longer periods, so things weren't so rushed, this kind of mistake would be harder to make.

Once we realized what we had done, we just stopped work, let Tillie go, found her lambs and gave them back to her, and then just watched her for a few minutes to make sure she didn't keel over.

And she didn't.

Phew. Good lesson for students, better lesson for instructor.

One way to be sure that you haven't nicked a blood cell is to pull back on the syringe after the needle is inserted but before depressing the plunger, but this is usually not needed for a simple subcutaneous shot like this one.

Next time I'll be even more gruff about getting everyone's attention, and make sure each student sees the demonstration before doing the job themselves. Also, when I was training to be a military medic we practiced on skin/muscle analogs -- loose skinned oranges, actually, but I'm sure we can buy something bespoke from a hospital supply warehouse.

The student that gave the faulty shot was very surprised when we assigned her to give the very next shot. But you have to get right back on the horse that threw you while the adrenaline is still in your system. If you don't fear may take over, and you may never succeed at learning the job.

She did a much better job of the next injection. Well done.

After a while all the mothers were happily reunited with their lambs and the mayhem quieted. The remaining sheep got quite a bit of attention, except for Jewel, the second oldest ewe, who characteristically fought us all off, and went into the paddock without treatment.

This may not be such a bad thing, as it may soon be time to take her to the butchers.

I perhaps should have mentioned this too to the students, but an old retired ewe like Jewel will die eventually, either as her teeth wear out, or as she gets one or more of the hundreds of dread diseases of sheep. Jewel herself took ill last year, to Listeriosis or "circling diesease" and nearly died.

It's much better for them to die quickly in the slaughterhouse and for us to get the meat (which I usually have ground up for shepherds pie and sausage), than it is to die of starvation from worn-out teeth, or from some dread disease.

Cheryl and her academic partner in this program, Sarah Cunningham, make sure to prepare students for this kind of eventuality. The very first lecture the students get is on death, an immediate inoculation against the "Animal Planet" mentality.

And the first (lesson) shall be the last (lesson).

Sheep school

Yesterday was one of the twice-a-year days when we host first year students from Unity College's Captive Wildlife Care and Education degree program for training in animal handling using sheep.

The sheep need the handling, while the students need the experience, so this is a good trade for all of us. The sheep, for their part, get all their shots, their hoofs trimmed, their dung tags removed, and so on, the 3,000 mile service.

While the students get what we believe is exceptionally good experience, handling large, balky and even hostile animals.

Timing is everything, and in this case the timing was great for the students, but not so good for the sheep. We had hoped to get the students in before lambing, but as usual the stupidity of the college schedule defeated our plans.

If I ever happen to meet the absolute moron it was that decided one fine day that something useful to humanity could be learned in a fifty minute class, and then filled up students', and faculty members' days with these classes, carefully spaced apart so as to allow only a minimal amount of time for practicing difficult things or concentrating hard on tricky jobs, or, well, just plain thinking about things, well, I'll have something to say to that person.

My idea of a good class is at least a half a day, maybe more, of practical application solidly linked to theory.

We had two hours and ten minutes, and made the best of things. I had everything set up ahead of time, and we worked our way though the animals as methodically as we could in the time available.

We started with a good scrubbing of student's welly boots in disinfectant, to remove or kill any disease organisms from other farms, or the zoos and wildlife centers that these students regularly visit.

We then had a good briefing, in which their major professor, Cheryl Frederick and I emphasized that what we were about to do would be hard work, dirty, unpleasant, risky to the animals, and based on hard science. This is an important moment because the students in this particular program sometimes arrive with what I call the "Animal Planet" mentality, which is something along the lines that cute, fuzzy animals are entertaining, and that because I'm in this degree program and not, say, straight biology, I don't have to take the hard biology classes that are required, or at least, I don't have to take them seriously.

These students, along with the Marine Biology students, I'm sorry to say, routinely get the worst grades in genetics, cell biology, and similar "hard" courses, as well as in math. They often see these more abstract courses as unpleasant and unnecessary.

(This is particularly frustrating to Aimee, who often comes home quite angry about it.)

Whereas in reality, all serious modern animal care and medicine is applied biology, and if students don't pay attention in genetics or cell biology, they may not fully understand procedures, and, in their future careers, at best they'll have to resort to the use of rote systems and depend on others to actually work out systems of care, being handicapped in doing it themselves by their ignorance of the biological basis of care.

At worst, they'll kill animals.

Which we nearly did yesterday, more of which later.

So the students got a five minute briefing in which we connected the systems of care they would learn to the biology in classes, emphasized the hard work and need for grit and guts in handling the animals. Seeing a few glazed eyes and minds already wandering (which is normal for first years, but not good, a sign of poor high-schooling and short attention spans and the like), we made eye contact, and I made sure they were paying attention with a mild but gruff warning.

Once we had their full attention and minds on task, we got stuck in.

With only two hours to go, everything had to be set up ahead of time. Earlier I had penned the sheep into the back of the barn, where they spend the winter. This is a safe place for them and they were quiet and settled. I stepped in and started handing out lambs, one by one. Each lamb got a subcutaneous injection of tetanus vaccine. The students gave the shots. They had earlier been told how to do it, and then we showed them how, with the first lamb; after that each student got to inject a lamb, and later, the ewes.

The best place to inject a sheep with tetanus vaccine or any other subcutaneous medicine is in one of the four "armpits," the area of bald, loose skin on the inside where the limb meets the body. It's easy to pinch up a flap of this skin, insert the needle, and inject the medicine right under the skin layer, avoiding muscle tissue and blood vessels.

The students had been warned that as soon as the ewes were separated from the lambs all kinds of noise would break out, making it hard to concentrate, and this duly occurred as babies were separated from mothers.

Each lamb was then returned to the lambing pen, still isolated from the mothers.

The next job was to work on the mothers themselves, and just naturally the angriest mothers presented themselves first at the gate of their pen, very hostile, and bleating for their babies. It was a simple matter to let them out one at a time, catch them, and take them outside into the sun for their routine work.

A romantic notion of sheep handling might have left the lambs with the mothers, but this might have resulted in lambs getting crushed while mothers were caught.

Again, students need to learn to let go of soppy sentiments and plan out systems of handling and care that are best for the animals and realistic of the difficulties involved.

Taking the angriest mothers first this way was good, because that meant we got all the most difficult sheep done first. And of course, first of all was Nellie, then Tillie, then Molly, then Poppy.

Tillie is probably our Number One best mother, and most experienced. But Nellie is the most caring mother we have. Molly is an easy third, and Poppy is just learning, so the order in which the angry sheep appeared at the gate was just naturally the exact order of their ranking of motherly ethic.

Our Corriedale-Romney cross sheep are big, solid and very strong, no pushovers. A Corriedale ewe is just naturally one of the finest and feistiest mothers in the animal world. All the mothers wanted very badly to be back with their babies.

It was no mean feat to catch each one, give her a shot, trim hooves and dung tags.

Once fixed up, the mothers could then go back to the paddock,, and each set of lambs could then be brought out, given five cubic centimeters of vitamin paste (containing selenium for protection against white muscle disease), and then released to the mothers.

The noise level slowly dropped.

A moment of quiet drama ensued when a student accidentally nicked one of Tillie's arteries with the needle while giving the tetanus shot. Bright red blood leaked out of the wound under the skin, making a bulge.

This might easily have caused Tillie's death. What happens is that the slug of liquid medicine in the blood vessel becomes in effect an embolism, and if it enters the blood vessels of the heart, can stop that organ beating.

This is called thrombosis, and humans get it too, when we have a "stroke."

Luckily it was one of Tillie's arteries that was hit, not a vein, based on the bright red color of the blood that we saw.

Arterial bleeding from a puncture wound will usually stop, so I wasn't worried about Tillie bleeding to death. But I was worried about a thrombosis.

But again we were lucky in that it was an artery and not a vein, and so any medicine that made it into the vessel would have had to have been pushed through capillaries and the tissue they serve, and so necessarily dispersed before making it to a vein, then to the heart. In addition, the pressure in an artery is greater, so it's harder to push the medicine in to the blood vessel. More likely the arterial pressure pushed the medicine out, and we had instead a bulge of blood mixed with medicine under the skin, which would go away eventually, and the medicine would still be effective.

This accident was partly my fault for not mentioning as positively as I should have that it was important to get the medicine just under the skin, and not in a muscle or blood vessel.

I showed the students how to do it, but I didn't tell them this last part.

And not all students were perhaps paying full attention to the demonstration.

Again, if we could only have them for longer periods, so things weren't so rushed, this kind of mistake would be harder to make.

Once we realized what we had done, we just stopped work, let Tillie go, found her lambs and gave them back to her, and then just watched her for a few minutes to make sure she didn't keel over.

And she didn't.

Phew. Good lesson for students, better lesson for instructor.

One way to be sure that you haven't nicked a blood cell is to pull back on the syringe after the needle is inserted but before depressing the plunger, but this is usually not needed for a simple subcutaneous shot like this one.

Next time I'll be even more gruff about getting everyone's attention, and make sure each student sees the demonstration before doing the job themselves. Also, when I was training to be a military medic we practiced on skin/muscle analogs -- loose skinned oranges, actually, but I'm sure we can buy something bespoke from a hospital supply warehouse.

The student that gave the faulty shot was very surprised when we assigned her to give the very next shot. But you have to get right back on the horse that threw you while the adrenaline is still in your system. If you don't fear may take over, and you may never succeed at learning the job.

She did a much better job of the next injection. Well done.

After a while all the mothers were happily reunited with their lambs and the mayhem quieted. The remaining sheep got quite a bit of attention, except for Jewel, the second oldest ewe, who characteristically fought us all off, and went into the paddock without treatment.

This may not be such a bad thing, as it may soon be time to take her to the butchers.

I perhaps should have mentioned this too to the students, but an old retired ewe like Jewel will die eventually, either as her teeth wear out, or as she gets one or more of the hundreds of dread diseases of sheep. Jewel herself took ill last year, to Listeriosis or "circling diesease" and nearly died.

It's much better for them to die quickly in the slaughterhouse and for us to get the meat (which I usually have ground up for shepherds pie and sausage), than it is to die of starvation from worn-out teeth, or from some dread disease.

Cheryl and her academic partner in this program, Sarah Cunningham, make sure to prepare students for this kind of eventuality. The very first lecture the students get is on death, an immediate inoculation against the "Animal Planet" mentality.

And the first (lesson) shall be the last (lesson).

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.