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.

 

“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

 

Solar Towers and Their “Spatial Byproducts”

We read on infranetlab.org about the the solar updraft tower, “a combination of a solar chimney, greenhouse and wind turbine.” Yet another example of an old technology made new, this particular kind of solar machine was first dreamt up in 1903 “by Spanish Colonel Isidoro Cabanyes in the magazine La Energia Electrica.”

The solar tower exploits a very large low-lying greenhouse to create an artificial wind as the air rushes to escape up the enormous chimney at the center of the plant. Regular wind turbines can then convert that energy into electricity.

The power of the turbine depends on the differential between the hot air at the bottom and the cold air at the top of the chimney meaning that the bigger the tower, the more power you can produce, perhaps up to a couple hundred megawatts, if you have a few dozen square kilometers around.

Between Colonel Cabanyes and the present day, we find a few examples of other solar tower designers. Ernest Drucker first began filing patents for solar towers back in 1976 in the wake of the Arab oil embargo that launched a thousand inventions. His design, as you can see below, is a bit different. It has wind turbines all the way up, like a ladder of energy production. (Sadly, the Czech Drucker, “architect, builder, inventor, and entrepreneur” died in Toronto just last December.)

Renewable Energy World notes that the only known prototype was built in 1982 by Schlaich Bergermann in Manzanares, Spain to test out the efficacy of different greenhouse skins.

Sunlight penetrates this membrane, and the solar radiation is converted to heat upon hitting the ground. The air underneath the membrane quickly increases in temperature due to the greenhouse effect and flows towards the chimney, which, through the stack effect, becomes the lowest point of pressure in the system. This continuous airflow spins a turbine located at the base of the chimney.

The greenhouse that collects the energy also works like a regular greenhouse, i.e., plants like being inside of it. Infranetlab takes this as the jumping off point for a fascinating observation:

The prototype solar tower built in the desert, fostered conditions conducive to the growth of plant life. This was due to condensation created at night that enlivened the soil with moisture, essentially transforming the desert into arable land. Not only can these collection areas add water to otherwise unproductive land, the towers could be linked with other programmes. Think of large office or residential towers that have a solar chimney at their core.

The argument here is that an entirely new type of city could come into being the energy source powering it changes. In this context, it seems far fetched at first, but it’s actually an idea with deep roots in the energy  literature. David Nye’s Consuming Power posits that the form of cities has always been driven by the dominant power source in which it was built. Energy and its distribution become the organizing principle for all human environments.

“Steam power,” Nye writes, “made possible a number of new industrial cities in the East.” Not only that, steam powered railroads changed the perception of distance between places. “As trains moved faster, geography seemed to shrink. The space between the new cities was annihilated, reduced to a passing panorama behind plate-glass windows.”

He describes how “in the areas served by canals and railways, the cost of shipping dropped dramatically, expanding what been a local marketplace to continental dimensions. Such communities fundamentally changed in structure because of the enormous increases in horsepower that the steam engine made available. Investment matched the size of the market, concentrating manufacturing and population in the city.”

Think about the modern agribusiness. Without cheap energy that could be run out to the middle of nowhere, it would be impossible to maintain such energy-intensive and people-light farms going. It’s these types of issues that Infranetlab.org seems like it’s going to explore, which is awesome. Who wouldn’t want to read what “a research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics” has to say about anything, really?

Via > @Bruce Sterling > InfraNet Lab

 

Solar Vs. Atomic – 1953

A persistent lesson in green tech history is that, since the advent on the nuclear physics, solar and atomic power advocates have spent a lot of time and resources opposing each other. The atomic power industry clearly had some deeper pockets and won out most of the time. Case-in-point is this article from Popular Mechanics, which makes it sound like solar energy was already late to the party. It’s entitled, “Why Don’t We Have… Sun Power”?

Lloyd Alter, over at Treehugger, pulls a choice quote about how the policy battle of the day was developing.

Its development problems are comparatively simple and its costs but a fraction of the tremendous atomic outlays. Moreover, the world’s supply of usable uranium is definitely limited. Sunlight, however, will last as long as our solar system. It will still be with us long after our last uranium has fissed.

As former Secretary of the Interior, Julius A. Krug remarked, “Congress would do well to appropriate a few hundred million dollars to find new sources of energy.” High on the list he placed the development of power by solar heat.

In fact, many analysts, including Palmer C. Putnam in his report to the Atomic Energy Commission, have recommended solar energy research down through the years.

Via > @sarahrich > Treehugger > ModernMechanix

 

Old Solar Architecture

If you are one of the rare early adopters of green tech history, you owe it to yourself to check out George Mokray’s Old Solar series of posts at his blog at Daily Kos.

I particularly liked his post on Edward Sylvester Morse’s solar air heater, patented in 1881.

“A simple glazed box on the south wall with a dark absorber, an air space, and two sets of vents at top and bottom, to the outside air and the inside of the house, this is a basic air heater that can be modified for wall or window,” Mokray writes. “Edward Sylvester Morse built at least three of these. One was at the Peabody Museum in Salem, MA and used an iron absorber panel. The second had a slate absorber and was on his own home, also in Salem. The last was at the Boston Athenaeum.”

Image: The Boston Athenaeum in 1906. Library of Congress

 

Required Reading: “A Golden Thread” and “Wind Energy in America”

Happily, in just the last 72 hours, I’ve received two key books for my research: Ken Butti and John Perlin’s A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Robert Righter’s Wind Energy in America: A History. These texts, along with the Canadian Center for Archictecture’s Out of Gas exhibit book, are absolute must-reads about the history of alternative energy.

I’m the farthest in Righter’s book and I’m immensely pleased with how well-researched and fanatically sourced it is. He’s particularly good at combing through the agricultural journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ferret out the story of the small wind-electric plants installed on farms across the country. He argues that most farmers got their first exposure to the pleasures of electricity through these small units produced by Jacobs and Wincharger and Aero-Electric. The section on Marcellus Jacobs and his turbines is one of the finest pieces of alt energy history that I’ve read.

He traces this reliable, excellent wind power generator through its various ups-and-downs, including a unit’s travel to Little America in Antarctica with Byrd, the explorer. (That’s the image). That picture was borrowed from the still-operating Jacobs Wind Electric Co.

Perlin and Butti’s book, first published in 1980, is fascinating not just for the history it covers but as a piece of history itself. On the back we find sparkling reviews from a host of high-level publications.

The New York Times calls it, “A clear and evocative account of the 2,500-year history of a technology–solar energy–that many people thought was a purely 20th century development.” The Washington Post provides an even better review calling it a “careful, thoughtful”  book that touches on “an awesome range of solar uses and issues.”

And now this seminal book is basically out-of-print and hard-to-find as hundreds (thousands?) of lesser “green” books flood the shelves. It’s a shame.

 

The DOE’s Solar Photovoltaic Budget 1975-2002

I recently read Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute spouting nonsense about how much funding the Department of Energy has wasted on renewable energy.

“[Mr. Chu] is an indication that Obama really is committed to pursing renewable energy, which the Energy Department has been subsidizing and researching for 30 years,” Ebell told the Washington Times. “It’s a boondoggle.”

Well, for the best-known alt energy technology, solar photovoltaics, here’s what that “boondoggle” has cost the taxpayer: less than $75 million a year since the early 80s. That’s nothing!

I’d be willing to be that our government probably spent more than that on beer for the military.

Via > National Renewable Energy Laboratory

 

The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery

Now, friends, this is what I call an economic stimulus plan! John Adolphus Etzler, writing in 1836 , recommended a strict diet of solar, tidal, and wind power — and if we followed his recommendations, we’d end up with, well, you know, utopia:

I promise to show the means for creating a paradise within ten years, where every thing desirable for human life may be had for every man in superabundance, without labour, without pay; where the whole face of nature is changed into the most beautiful form of which it be capable; where man maj live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without his labour, in one year more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years; he may level mountains, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, intersect every where the land with beautiful canals, with roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for travelling 1000 miles in twenty-four hours; he may cover the ocean with floating islands moveable in any desired direction with immense power and celerity, in perfect security and in all comforts and luxury, bearing gardens, palaces, with thousands of families, provided with rivulets of sweet water; he may explore the interior of the globe, travel from pole to pole in a. fortnight; he may provide himself with means unheard of yet, for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence; he may lead a life of continual happiness, of enjoyments unknown yet; he may free himself.

Not even Barack has that much hope for green renewal. Although, it is rather impressive that it turns out that we can do all of the stuff that he suggested.

From: The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men by John Adolphus Etzler

Image: A big turbine and a little barn. flickr/tlindenbaum

 

he who unites the paranormal and the solar

Charles Greeley Abbott wasn’t any ordinary head of the Smithsonian Insitute. One of the world’s preeminent astrophysicists and a specialist in all things sun,  he invented one of the first solar cookers, seen above. And he happened to believe in paranormal phenomenon. All around, he must have been a pretty interesting guy, particularly after a few drinks.

Abbott wrote a book in 1938, while director of the Smithsonian, in which he ran down the state of sun science, The Sun and the Welfare of Man. The fascinating thing about this work is that it’s a scientific work about observing and measuring — spots, strength, variability, etc — that happens to include a chapter about “Harnessing the Sun.” It’s hard to imagine an astrophysicist just kind of dropping solar machines into the center of his book, but that’s what Abbott did. And along the way he provided a decently comprehensive history of early solar machines, courtesy of a many-page long quotation from A.S.E Ackerman, first published on US soil in the 1915 Smithsonian Report.

One rarely mentioned project is pictured below.

Here’s what Ackerman had to say about this very, very early solor motor:

A.G. Eneas, in the United States, used the popular truncated, cone-shaped reflector, collecting about 700 square feet of solar radiation. The weight of the reflector was 8,300 pounds.

The boiler was formed of two concentric steel tubes, the two together being incased in two glass tubes with a air space between them and another air space between the inner glass one and the outer steel tube. The water circulated up between the inner and outer steel tubes and down the inner tube. The boiler was placed at the axis of the cone. Its length was 13 feet 6 inche, its water capacity 834 pounds, and steam space 8 cubic feet. Hence the diameter of the outer tube appears to have been 1 foot 2 inches and the concentration of radiation 13.4; i.e. 13.4 square feet of sunshine were concentrated on each square foot of the external surface of the boiler…

The sun-power plant known as the Pasadena one was described and illustrated in the August, 1901, issue of Cassier’s Magazine by Prof. R.H. Thurston and on page 103 of the Railway and Engineering review of February 23, 1901. It is stated to have been designed by, and erected at hte expense of, ‘a party of Boston inventors whose names have not been made public.” …

‘According to newspaper accounts the all day average work performed by the engine is 1,400 gallons of water lifted 12 feet per minute, which is at a rate of 4 horsepower’ …

The Pasadena plant is said to have cost 1,000 pounds and Willsie, writing of it in 190, says it was the “largest and strongest of the mirror type of solar motor ever built.”

Image: Abbot, Charles Greeley. The sun and the welfare of man. (Smithsonian Scientific Series, Volume 2)
New York: Smithsonian institution series, inc., 1938. Scanned by the University of Wisconsin library.

 

“the free enterprisers”: ancestors of the green venture capitalists

The first thing we notice on opening Putnam’s Power from the Wind is how unenvironmental it is. The people who built the first grid-tied wind farm weren’t trying to beat coal power, they were trying to join it. This wasn’t about preserving nature, it was about subduing it.

The book, we read, “is directed to anyone interested in man’s instinctive urge to subdue and harness his environment, and particularly to those in Government and Industry who are interested in eking out dwindling supplies of low-cost fuels with other sources of power.”

Subduing and harnessing nature? How raw! (The BDSM approach to environmentalism?) The book is clearly going to promote the idea of Progress, capital P.

The introduction, by the way, was written by Vannevar Bush, an early backer of the project who also happened to be FDR’s head science guy and author of the essay, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” and who a reviewer of a biography of Bush credits with helping “create what has become known as the military-industrial complex by heading the research effort that united science with the military and helped win World War II.”

In short, you couldn’t imagine a more different group than the hippie-powered renewable energy types of the 60s generation, who wanted to destroy the selfsame military-industrial complex that Bush, Putnam and their ilk had built. In fact, Putnam’s description of the group of people who built the project couldn’t be more Silicon Valley VC, just replace Silicon Valley with old-money New England, the sailing types.

“The experiment is another proof that the spirit of exploration and and adventure had not yet died out in those ancient citadels of capitalism, New England and Pennsylvania,” he writes. “This chapter briefly describes the development of the project, backed by a group of Down-east Yankees, and free enterprisers from York, Pennsylvania.”

Free enterprisers is an intriguing term that we don’t often hear these days. I found a nice demeaning reference to “free enterprisers” from an old San Francisco Communist party critique. And I dug up this fascinating reference from the January 14, 1940 New York Times in an article about the greatest inventions to that point in time.

“Nor will historians of technology be willing to admit that a great invention must of necessity come out of a profit-making society like ours. Such great primitive inventions as the wheel, the fire drill, the bow and arrow came from primitive Edisons who were ridden by taboos and who thought and acted tribally rather than as free enterprisers.”

So, it’s the tribal types versus the free enterprisers. Given the long-time hippie association with Native American ideals and ideas (Gary Snyder, anyone? Actually, I love Gary Snyder, particularly his essays on Chinese), it’s easy to see that whatever that type of thinking is, free enterprisers are pretty much the opposite of that.

The focus on money that free enterprisers implies is borne out in Putnam’s description of how he first got interested in wind turbines. There’s no mention of Nature, or coal, or cleanliness, or pollution. Nope. It was all about cost, an idea derived from the economics of his own personal life.

“In 1934 I had built a house on Cape Cod and had found both the winds and the electric rates surprisingly high. It occurred to me that a windmill to generate alternating current might reduce the power bill, provided the power company would maintain stand-by service when the wind failed, and would also permit me to feed back into its system as dump power the excess energy generated by the windmill.”

And unlike the offgrid back-to-nature (tribal?) hippies, he built the idea of a grid-tie — of centralization — into the core of his idea.

The last difference between traditional environmentalists and the Putnam-Bush crowd is that they were focused on individual projects. They were engineering, not theory-making, and it considerably cut down on their opportunities for poesy.

Let’s compare a description of the importance of wind from Putnam’s book with one from a nearly contemporaneous and massively important environmental tome, A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold. First, Putnam in Chapter II, How Does Wind Behave?:

“An intimate knowledge of the habits of wind-flow will permit one to select a site for a turbine where the free-air velocity has been speeded up 20 per cent or more. The power in the wind varies as the cube of the velocity.”

Wind, in Putnam, is just energy waiting to be harnessed. Since you can measure it, management of it seems sure. Most importantly, Putnam is concerned with a specific wind. A special wind that can be turned economically into money. Now Leopold:

“A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over the phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across the bog-meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.”

Now, I don’t know that I need to point out the obvious differences. The wind is like God in this passage; it feels like a description of awakening from death and finding yourself in heaven, as if Leopold’s next line might be, “The gates emerge.”

But, and I think this is important, this language is as big as one’s place on earth: “horizon to horizon.” It’s sun, sky, and moon writing, a creation story. (Perhaps the only equivalent in engineering occurs in “financial engineering,” when would-be financial wizards create billion-dollar industries in 2015 with a few simple clicks of the mouth.) That’s the opposite of engineering, which is about details and particularities. It’s as specific and precise as math, P = v³.

For all these reasons, it’s easy to see why the environmentalists steeped in 60sness would not have looked back to Putnam and seen an ally. But it’s exactly those differences that make him a role model, an ancestor, a predecessor of the current green tech boom. He’s a pragmatist, a free-enterpriser, an engineer, a lover of innovation for its economic potential, connected as all-hell, and rich as a Kleiner Perkins partner.