Here's an interesting article by Kurt Cobb over at the The Energy Bulletin. It's about an article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth. While I haven't yet read Taleb's article, Cobb gives some insight.

I've read one of Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets) and found it quit interesting (if not a bit scattered).

The apparent thesis of his recent article is that suppressing volatility creates a worse situation than not suppressing it. As a (recovering) engineer, I can agree and I can cite a number of examples.

The first one that came to mind was the airplane wing. The wing is designed to flex. If it cannot flex, then it will likely break. On a related note, the Wright brothers realized that the wing needed to be flexible for the plane to fly. I have not looked into the physics of this but it appears that the Wright Brothers were right! (pardon the pun).

The more obvious one is in parenting. Imagine you are at a public event (like church) with a toddler and that toddler starts to act up. Sometimes shushing will get him or her to quiet down for a while, but eventually, the restless cherub lets loose.

Lowering my Energy Use Step 1: Where is it going now

I recently had an energy audit done by a company who shall remain nameless (their service after the audit has been embarrassing). Despite their post-visit incompetence, I did learn a few things, and I started a project to evaluate where my energy goes. Here's a quick summary*:

First: Yes I am ashamed of our electricity usage. I have been trying to change the family behavior but it is a losing battle. I'll not go into detail because I value the relationships with my wife and children. I suspect that in the fall, when two go off to college, our electricity usage will drop dramatically and we'll see a bit of a drop in gas usage.

Second: Notice that our heating energy usage is three times our electricity energy usage (in BTUs) yet the cost is about the same. That's right, I purchased more than three times the energy from the gas company but it cost me about the same as my electricity. In other words, electricity per unit energy is more than three times the cost of natural gas. (If there were an efficient way to generate electricity with gas, I would consider doing it.)

Knowing these numbers, I can now begin to evaluate options for energy reduction because I can determine the costs and benefits of many different actions and pick the most effective ones. For example, I now know that every kilowatt-hour I save is worth about 11% of a therm (11,000 BTUs). Or every 100,000 BTUs of gas (1 therm) I save is worth just over 87 kilowatt-hours.

What direction will I go?

Electricity: After switching all of our light bulbs to compact fluorescent and upgrading to Energy Star appliances, the next major leap on the electricity use reduction is behavior change or kicking out some of my family. Since I have two starting college in the fall, kicking out is easy (though expensive). As I've found over the years however, getting people to change behavior is not.

Gas Usage: Cooking is a relatively small portion of our gas usage. The bulk is heating. I've put in the auto-setback thermostats and added insulation to the attic. I'm just getting started on tightening up the house. I believe that the biggest bang for the buck will be reducing the passive loss of heat. Here are some steps I'm considering:
1. Remove fiberglass insulation in attic, spray foam on the ceiling, seal all electrical and other penetrations, replace the fiberglass. This will reduce air leakage to the attic.
2. Seal around all electrical boxes (outlets, switches)
3. Spray foam insulation at sill plate (transition between foundation and house)
4. Seal around all windows (remove moldings, and foam between window and framing.
5. Remove siding and put up rigid foam, tape joints, reattach siding
6. Put 2" of rigid foam insulation on exposed concrete that abuts living spaces
7. Insulate walls between garage and house (garage is unheated).

Granted some of these projects are "small" (#2) and some are huge  (#5). I'll be starting small. First and foremost, I'll be addressing air leaks. (#1 and #2)

-Mark


*Electricity supplied by Hudson Light and Power. Gas supplied by NStar. I divided the total bill by the total usage. Therefore delivery charges etc. are averaged over each kilowatt-hour or therm.

Thermo Bio-pile or heat from compost - Part 1 - Project Background

Back in the fall of 2010, my son Russell was looking for a science fair project. He wanted to enter the regional HS science fair competition. After discussing several ideas, he remembered a web page we discussed about getting heat from decomposing material.

I first learned of the idea from one of my solar customers. She was a long time reader of MotherEarth News and sent me this link right after we installed her solar electric system. (FYI, this customer has a 1,500-watt solar electric array which zeros out here electric bill each month and she grows about 50% of her food on an 8,000 square foot lot (including the house) in Jamaica Plain (Boston).

The link takes you to an article about Jean Pain. In the 1980s Pain built piles of compost and threaded them with piping to capture the heat of decomposition and the methane. It was an early example of someone attempting to live sustainably off renewable energy. Pain's heat capture method was based on water, and, in effect, worked the same as a solar hot water (solar thermal) system.

After getting approval from his Science teacher, Russell began his plans. The key difference between his system and Pain's system was that he wanted to heat air rather than water. He felt that an air system would be easier to build, less costly, and less complicated. I agreed.

NOTE: This was a purely empirical experiment. Russell does not yet have the background to go deeply into the thermodynamics of a system like this and determine beforehand what to expect. Instead he relied on common sense and a bit of  input from me (Dad, a recovering nuclear engineer). I did play a relatively small roll - as the rules of the science fair dictate. (Though after going to the science fair, I'm doubtful that everyone followed that rule.) I also had to play "reminder of the budget limitations" and reminder of the stated objective - "To learn if useful heat could be captured from decomposing material using an compost-to-air-based heat exchanger."

Next Post - Part 2 - Experiment Design

Today's Theme - Limits to Economic growth

I don't pretend to understand all of this but ...

Here is a research paper that treats energy limits on organism growth as an analogy to energy limits on economic growth. The parallels are enlightening. http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/resources/Davidson.pdf

Here's an article on "Tainters Law." His thesis is that social structures generate negative returns when they become too complex. http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/03/31/tainters-law-where-is-the-physics/

Solar Hot Water Numbers in for March 2011

Now that we have a solar hot water system, I've been computing the contribution to the water heating load. My house is at 42.5 degrees latitude in eastern Massachusetts. My solar panels are tilted at 45 degrees and the roof azimuth is 250 degrees (south is 180 degrees, southwest is 225 degrees, west is 270 degrees). I have three Schuco Slimline panels.

• In January, the panels were buried in snow. The solar contribution was 0.0%. 
• In February they were in snow for 6 days. The contribution was 7.6%. 
• In March, the contribution was 19.5%. 

On the best day, the system captured over 18,000 BTUs (British Thermal Unit). A BTU - raises one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. My tank is ~120 gallons or about 1,000 pounds of water. Therefore, if we didn't use any hot water on that day, my tank temperature would have gone up about 18 degrees.

Priceless!

Energy Use as a Predictor of Bankruptcy?

Try this game. See if you can figure out what types of businesses will go away first as energy gets more and more expensive.

The demise of Harry & David (You know, the company that packages up the best looking fruit and ships it all over the place for big bucks...) got me thinking that we might be able to do this. FYI, in a high-cost-of-energy world, wouldn't shipping pretty pears across the country seem insane? (For that matter, it's insane even when energy is cheap.)

I thought of an approach - construct a ratio of "Value provide" divided by "energy use" for each company or industry. Companies with small ratios would be closest to extinction in an energy-expensive world.

To test my approach, I raised the question in the office this morning. My business partner immediately suggested "NASCAR." We all agreed that NASCAR uses lots of energy. What we couldn't agree on was the "value provided." Another co-worker joked that we should count gallons of beer consumed. If beer consumption is valuable, then NASCAR is going to be around a long time. On the other hand, if we base value on "helping mankind survive in a low-energy world," NASCAR's gonna score pretty low.

How would you value a business or industry? What industries do you see going away first in a high-cost-energy world?


Here are some I came up with:
Indoor sports arenas for amateur athletics (big heated shells so kids can play soccer indoors when it's lousy outside)
Carwashes
Dollar Store crap manufacturers
Ski areas
Malls and Big Box stores

Middle East Madness - So True...