Techmix: Camel + Skyscraper

This is the first of a new series of photographic posts that I’ll be doing based on my reading of David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. In it, he describes the disorientation that people experience when their sense of “technological time” is thrown off by the juxtaposition of what they think of as old and new technologies.

His point is that “old” technologies co-exist quite easily with that ever-advancing future we call the present.

“We see technologies such as the camel, the donkey cart, the wooden plough, or the hand-loom as technologies of previous eras,” he writes. “Yet they, just like the aeroplane and the motor car, were made, maintained and used throughout the last century; they existed in the same, interconnected world.”

The name is a play on the Louis Mumford coined term, “technics.”

 

The Great Migration

I’m moving. Or at least this blog is moving over to it’s own, real domain.

For the last few months, alexismadrigal.wordpress.com has been where www.greentechhistory.com takes you. Now greentechistory.com is its own site. If you go there, it should look pretty familiar because it’s exactly this blog reproduced over there. Being horrifically sick finally gave me time to install WordPress and get it tuned up.

So, henceforth, look to www.greentechhistory.com for all of your green tech history needs.

 

The Return of the Make-Your-Own Steam Age

At the beginning of the industrial revolution, right when Watt was getting his steam engine going, there were no centralized power plants. It was hard to move steam, so you put the coal-fired engines right where you needed the power.

Electricity changed all that because it was easier to move electrons. But the old model of making your own power held strong. In the early days of electricity, say, around 1905, it wasn’t clear whether centralized power systems would gain the technological momentum necessary to rearrange the long-standing method for factory functioning.

There were some obvious advantages to making your own power — it was under your control, you could make or less as needed, it might be a competitive advantage, etc. But eventually the hassle of it all and the efficiencies gained by spreading the capital cost of building a plant over more customers won out. By 1915, it was clear that Edison’s model of one power station serving all the customers in a geographical area via an electric grid had won.

Now, we read in the Times’ Green Inc blog that Ausra, a once-hot solar thermal startup, is planning to bring the old model back. They want to sell the hot steam they produce with their concentrating solar systems directly to industrial plants, bypassing the grid altogether. It’s an interesting move by their CEO, Bob Fishman, who is an old Calpine natural gas utility executive.

“Ausra says it will now focus less on solar power generation (which put it in competition with other power generators),” we read, “and more on providing solar-thermal technology and equipment for industrial customers — including fossil fuel power plants — in need of steam.

Who needs steam? Well, for one, traditional fossil fuel plants could use that steam to reduce the amount of coal or natural gas they have to burn. You’d end up with a hybrid system, which sounds like it could be complex. But some regular old industrial customers might want steam as steam. Ausra’s release notes advanced oil recovery and food processing.

For a fossil fuel plant, they could offset a considerable amount of their emissions with one of Ausra’s 50 megawatt equivalent plants. Remember that they lose about two-thirds of the heat content of the coal they burn in turning that heat into electricity. So, you’d really be offsetting something like 500 million BTUs per hour of coal. Different coals generate more or less CO2, but the US average is around 215 pounds per million BTUs. Doing the math for a coal plant that’s running about 90 percent of the time, you’d get a decrease in CO2 emissions of about 423 thousand tons. That seems like a lot, but even if every coal plant in America installed one — an unlikely scenario — that would only reduce the coal industry’s emissions by about 15 percent.

Still, it’s an interesting business model to work with the fossil fuel plants and not against them. It shows how flexible green tech companies are willing to be to succeed and how often they revive earleir models of power production.

Image: The “derelict steam boiler” from an old steam-driven sawmill in Alaska.

 

Solar Cells vs. The Atomic Gadget for Your Desk

Many people know that the solar cell was invented at Bell Labs, helped along by the men who created the silicon semiconductors that underpin electronics. But a far less well-known story today is the nearly simultaneous creation of what were known as “atomic batteries” by Bell Labs’ arch-rival, RCA, in 1954. As described in John Perlin’s From Space to Earth, the battery was made from silicon like a solar cell but, “it used photons emitted from strontium-90, one of hte deadliest residues of radioactive waste, to force the flow of electrons and positive charges” that drove the electricity.

RCA’s founder and president, David Sarnoff showed off the battery at a press event at Radio City, tapping out “Atoms for Peace” on an old-school telegraph powered by the battery in a darkened room. The press ate up the presentation, with The New York Times saying, “even now it ought to be possible to make a tiny wrist watch which would be driven by electrons and which would run for twenty years.” Waldemar Kaempffert, the reporter on the scene, even hinted that radioactive waste “will have important industrial uses, now that a way has been found to generate a current with strontium-90.”

If it was safe (ahem), this member of the press agrees: Atomic gadgets are cool — and this one had found a way to transform radioactive decay directly into electric current using a silicon cell. Why not power your watch with nuclear waste?

Well, it turns out that atomic batteries are weak sauce. The RCA “atomic cell” only delivered one-millionth of a watt. Bell’s Solar Battery — the earliest remotely efficient solar cell — presented in April of 1954, “delivered fifty million times more more power than the RCA device,” Electrical World noted.

Perlin also reveals that the silicon cell powered by strontium-90 would have worked just as well, if not better, if it had just been exposed to light. The strontium-90 was hardly doing much at all, but it was useful for the Cold War aim of the United States: promoting the peaceful uses of nuclear energy — Atoms for Peace, as seen in the video — so we could build weapons without seeming like overbearing goons. The strontium-powered cell allowed the naturally futuristic minds of the public to imagine that radioactive waste would eventually be put to good use, not just end up a big mess. The director of RCA Laboratories grasped that, telling his scientists, “Who cares about solar energy? Look, what we really have is this radioactive waste converter.”

Still, five years later, we find Time writing up the SNAP III, a later “atomic gadget”:

On President Eisenhower’s desk stood a domed metal gadget about half the size of a derby hat. Current flowing from it spun a small propeller. Named SNAP III (for System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power), the little gadget is an atomic battery small and light enough to go into a satellite and keep its instruments and radio voice going at least ten times as long as any chemical battery that the Russians or the U.S. have yet employed.

The Snap III produced a measly 2.7 watts. Of course, the batteries were terrible, so they made the cell look decent. A better comparison would have been solar cells. Both batteries and solar cells were put into the Vanguard I satellite. The batteries lasted 19 days, the solar cells made it seven years. That’s 134 better performance, and a hell of a lot better than the 10x improvement offered by the SNAP III.  Yet there’s no mention of solar cells in the Time article.

Not that the lack of press hurt photovoltatic development for space applications. Solar cells ultimately proved far more economical for satellites and continue to power modern day communications satellites.

 

Hawthorne, 1851: Hyperbolic and the Functional Views of Electricity

Electricity wasn’t always the mundane, ho-hum, flip-the-light-switch power that we go searching coffee shop walls for. It once held great mystery and excitement, at least for the geeks of the mid-19th century, like Clifford Pyncheon, a bed-ridden felon with an interest in metaphysics, in the passage below. After all, electricity had been associated with lightning and lightning was no good for anybody. This substance you couldn’t see and that you could only detect by the raising of the hair could make a dead frog’s legs jump as if it were alive (“It’s ALIVE!”).

In this passage, we see that old view of electricity — the demon, the angel — with the later, functional view of electricity. Clifford screams passionately! The old man just talks about the application, the telegraph, and its impacts on the social world of the day.

“Then there is electricity — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a humbug too? Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain instinct with intelligence! Or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

“If you mean the telegraph,” said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail track, “it is an excellent thing — that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics don’t get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly as regards the detection of bank robbers and murderers.”

The Pyncheon family, by way of making them more interesting to you, were real, and kin to  Thomas Pynchon, the master of the paranoid tech novel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables,

 

Technological Change Does Happen, a Reminder

It’s impossible not to laugh while watching this local San Francisco news broadcast. It tells the story of “the first step in newspapers by computer,” the delivery of copy via Compuserve to people like Richard Halloran, whose tagline, in place of say, citizen or CEO, is “Owns Home Computer.”

There’s something poignant about the last scene of the newspaper vendor who “isn’t worried about his job.”

I post this to remind myself that change happens, even if it’s pretty obvious we suck at anticipating it. But it also brings to mind the difficulty in changing energy supply. No one really wanted, “newspapers by computer,” but plenty of people love the Internet. With energy though, we’re trying to do a direct swap of an identical commodity. At the end of the day, you still want the same damn electricity to come out of the socket. Green tech isn’t going to bring you the Internet, it’s just going to allow you to keep it without the negative repercussions.

 

“A Road Not Taken” — Tracking Carter’s Solar Panels

In the wake of the energy crisis and impending collapse of the nuclear power industry, Jimmy Carter installed some solar hot water panels on the roof of the White House. When Reagan came to power, he pulled them down, like all symbolically. But, wait, then what happened to them?

Turns out that both Google and a couple of Swiss filmmakers, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, are now on the case.  A Google clean energy advocate put together this post, while the filmmakers made A Road Not Taken, trailer embedded above. The short answer? They ended up at tiny college in Maine. Alice Ryan of Google:

In 1992, Unity College located the panels and transferred them from a General Services Administration warehouse to their campus in Maine. After restoration,16 panels provided their cafeteria with hot water for the next 12 years. In cooperation with Unity College, Google was able to bring one of these panels down to our Washington DC office for display throughout the next year.

Frank Laird, of the University of Colorado-Denver provides some pretty sophisticated analysis for how and why the panels become such a symbol of the left/right divide over green energy is his book, Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values. It’s an excellent book — and well worth checking out.

Via > Huffington Post

 

Faulkner on the Automobile, 1935

In William Faulkner’s supposedly racy and minor novel, Pylon, we read that the automobile was:

“expensive, complex, delicate, intrinsically useless, created for some obscure psychic need of the species if not the race, from the virgin resources of a continent, to be the indvidual muscles, bones and flesh of a new and legless kind.”

The car body. Atop which industrial consciousness emerges.

Image: flickr/rnair

 

The Middle Ages of the Electric Utility Industry

The utility industry has been in decline for half a century, according to a mid-80s book by a Merril Lynch analyst, Leonard S. Hyman.

In America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future (which, now would be distant past, past, and recent past, of course) Leonard S. Hyman lays out a narrative for America’s electric utilities that goes roughly like this:

1900 or so: Edison and Westinghouse put the industry together, but there’s substantial competition on all fronts, including the customers themselves, who might very well choose to make their own power.

1907: The utilities get regulated, supposedly because they were a “natural monopoly.” Utilities, in effect, get the government to guarantee that their investors will get a “fair rate of return,” which no one defines. The interesting thing about Hyman’s argument here is that he thinks the utilities allowed/pushed for regulation largely as a way of reducing risk so that they could borrow money more cheaply. It’s yet another way in which financing the kinds of huge project that is an energy plant has affected the structure of the industry.

1915: Things settle down. The electric utility model we know is firmly established. Now, it’s just a matter of making more demand, so that plants can get bigger and run more efficiently.

1915-1935: Holding companies grow as a form of leverage and an easy asset with which to swindle sucker investors. Actually, the form of these companies look a lot like our real estate investment vehicles.

1935-1945: Roosevelt Administration smashes through the holding companies, requiring that they actually have a reason to exist aside from skimming money off the public good. It takes a while to break up all those companies. And there’s a lot of other stuff going on.

1945-1965: These were “the good old days,” Hyman says. “The industry increased the size of power plants, and those new plants utilized fuel more efficiently.” Coal prices went up but were swamped by efficiency increases. Demand rises steadily, something like 7-8% each and every year. All you do to plan is say, “Well, Bob, I say we build more.” Bob assents, each and every time.

1960-1973: The use of oil for electric generation skyrockets. Growing from just 6.1% of generation in 1960 to a peak of 16.9% of generation in 1973. Utilities were trying to get away from burning all that nasty sulfur-heavy coal. Meanwhile, conventional coal plants stop getting more efficient. Demand stops growing. Nuclear power sucks up all the money in the industry as huge plants hit major cost overruns. BUT, here’s the bright side: the use of coal falls to about 44% of the electric mix. And right in the middle of this period, power goes out for 30 million northeastern customers. Everyone says, “WTF? I thought you had this figured out.”

1973: Energy prices skyrocket, consumers pull back. The utilities are stuck with all this excess capacity and cost overruns and all that noise. It’s important to note here that the ‘73 embargo was just the match that lit the powder keg.

1974: Investors start to realize that perhaps utilities are a little riskier than they thought. Too big to fail, but certainly small enough to lose money. That heavily influences how much money they have to pay to borrow more money.

1979-1983: Three Mile Island. Oops. Even if it didn’t kill a whole bunch of people, it sure scared everyone. Another strike against nuclear power. The bigger one, though, was the costs. Here’s an amazing quote, written like a truly outraged analyst, “On October 5, 1983, Cincinatti G&E shocked investors by announcing that the Zimmer nuclear station, supposedly 97% complete, would required $2.8-3.3 billion in additional investment and two to three years of work to be finished. That news was the first of many disastrous nuclear crises that followed.” $6 billion in construction was “written off to oblivion” and stock prices plunged 60-80%.

What went wrong? Here’s Hyman’s short list:

The nuclear crises of 1983-1984 pushed a number of utilities close to bankruptcy. Demand for power was unpredictable. Development of nuclear power had been arrested. Many utilities had excessive capacity. The concept of central station power was under attack. New methods of regulation [he means environmental regs] seemed to put a premium on discouraging demand for central station power… Many utility executives and government officials concluded that electric utilities must turn to smaller power stations (some owned by non-utilities) and must exchange power from surplus to deficit regions as much as possible… Utilities could no longer run as monopolies.

Who won in all this? There’s really no one to cheer for but the anti-hero: Coal.

And now, things look just as grim as they did back in the 70s and early 80s. All those coal plants that provide baseload power for the U.S.? Well, they’re getting old. The Edison Electric Institute says the industry will have to spend between $1.5 and $2.0 TRILLION over the next 22 years just to keep the lights on. Who is going to pay for all that? Probably not the utilities themselves. Take a look at Xcel: they had net income of about $500 million. That’s not much. And Xcel is one of the big utilities.

On the other hand, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, it’s the big problems that present the big opportunities.

 

Coal the Anti-Hero

Gregor MacDonald, of Gregor.us, left an outstanding comment on my previous post, What about the C in RE < C? which looked at how the cost of coal electricity generation has actually fallen during this past century of heavy coal use.

In this comment, he imagines coal as an “anti-hero” stuffed with “cheap BTUs.” It’s brilliant stuff, really. Check out this excerpt:

You’ll find that Coal, to the curious and open researcher, keeps inserting itself into just about every energy equation, both historically and contemporaneously. For a writer on a the trail of a narrative arc, coal is potentially both a protagonist and nemesis. An anti-hero, really. And it’s of course not for nothing nemesis coal appears again in such late iterations of advancement like google.org. I mean, you’d think one could simply ignore coal by now. That coal would have been rendered useless, dumb, mute. But no. There is anti-hero coal stuffed with cheap BTUs. And here is the cool thing about coal: coal causes so many problems, while being so useful, that it triggers the search for alternatives. And yet, coal has this really nasty habit of continually pricing–either in nominal “money” terms or in energy terms–just a notch or two below other fossil fuels.

Sigh.

Kind of mirrors what Steven Chu said a while back when he called coal his “worst nightmare.”

Image: flickr/untitledprojects