No Tech Magazine

Open Source Energy Production: The Solar Fire P90

Solar Fire is currently testing a larger version of its low-tech solar concentrator; the Solar Fire P90. Just like its smaller predecessor the Solar Fire P32 (which we covered before), the machine can produce heat, electricity and direct mechanical energy, making it suitable to manufacture almost anything on your roof or in the garden.

The Solar Fire P90 delivers up to 5 kW of electricity and 40 kW of thermal energy, is built using simple, abundant and non-toxic materials, and requires no foundation in the ground. The frame size is 11.5 x 11.5 metres and the machine requires an area of 16 x 16 metres for revolving.

Tracking is done by hand using a simple but ingenious system -- one person can operate up to five of these solar concentrators at the same time. The Solar Fire P90 is an open source design, but it can also be bought for about $ 12,000, excluding transport costs.

A video of the tests can be found here. For more information on the workings and the possible applications of this kind of machines, see the article "The bright future of solar thermal powered factories".

Picture: Solar Fire.

Energy Cannibalism

Energy cannibalism refers to an effect where rapid growth of an entire energy producing (or conserving) technology industry creates a need for energy that uses (or cannibalizes) the energy of existing power plants or devices. For the deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies to grow while remaining net greenhouse gas emission mitigators, they must grow at a rate slower than the inverse of their energy payback time.

• "Optimizing greenhouse gas mitigation strategies to suppress energy cannibalism", J.M. Pearce, 2nd Climate Change Technology Conference, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, May 12-15, 2009. (PDF).
• "Energy payback for energy systems ensembles during growth", Timothy Gutowski, International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technologies, Washington D.C., May 16-19, 2010. (PDF)
• "Toward real energy economics: energy policy driven by life-cycle carbon emission", R. Kenny, C. Law, J.M. Pearce, Energy Policy 38, pp. 1969-1978, 2010. (PDF)
• "Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology", Joshua M. Pearce, Int. J. Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology, Vol. 2, No. 1., pp.113-130, 2008. (PDF)

Previously: Can renewables power consumer societies? The negative case.

Public versus Private Energy Resources

"I'd like to propose what I think is an important and useful distinction - between public use of energy and resources and private use of energy resources. The former, I would argue, is essential to maintaining a good life, the latter is not." Read more. (via TOD).

How To Build Your Own Industrial Civilization

"The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. Key features of the GVCS: Open Source - Low-Cost - Modular - User-Serviceable - DIY - Closed-Loop Manufacturing - High Performance - Heirloom Design - Flexible Fabrication."

"A modern, comfortable lifestyle relies on a variety of efficient Industrial Machines. If you eat bread, you rely on an Agricultural Combine. If you live in a wood house, you rely on a Sawmill. Each of these machines relies on other machines in order for it to exist. If you distill this complex web of interdependent machines into a reproduceable, simple, closed-loop system, you get these 50 machines."

The GVCS is a work-in-progress. See the wiki, the blog and (the best introduction) the movie.

Related: How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware.

Can Renewables Power Consumer Societies? The Negative Case

"Virtually all current discussion of climate change and energy problems proceeds on the assumption that technical solutions are possible within basically affluent-consumer societies. There is however a substantial case that this assumption is mistaken. This case derives from a consideration of the scale of the tasks and of the limits of non-carbon energy sources, focusing especially on the need for redundant capacity in winter. The first line of argument is to do with the extremely high capital cost of the supply system that would be required, and the second is to do with the problems set by the intermittency of renewable sources. It is concluded that the general climate change and energy problem cannot be solved without large scale reductions in rates of economic production and consumption, and therefore without transition to fundamentally different social structures and systems."

Read more: "Can renewables solve the greenhouse problem? The negative case" (pdf), Ted Trainer, Energy Policy, March 2010. Also check out the author's website, where you can find similar papers, like this one.

Early 20th Century Wave Power

“Los Angeles will be a smokeless and sootless city, clean pure. It will be made so by all the power and heating plants being supplied with power and heat from the ocean waves by the Starr Wave Motor.”

Read more: three inventors who tried to bottle the ocean's power. Hat tip to Klaas Van Gorp.

Ten Reasons Why Jatropha is Neither a Profitable nor a Sustainable Investment

1. Jatropha does not guarantee high returns
2. Jatropha does not thrive on marginal land
3. Jatropha needs significant amounts of water
4. Jatropha is not pest resistant
5. Many jatropha investment projects have failed
6. Jatropha competes with food production
7. Jatropha causes displacement of local communities
8. Jatropha plantations are not pro-poor
9. Jatropha plantations negatively impact biodiversity
10. Jatropha is likely to increase carbon emissions

Jatropha: money doesn't grow on trees (.pdf), a report by Friends of the Earth. Via Energy Bulletin. Previously.

UK Lawmakers Call for Energy Rationing with Personal Fuel Quotas

"TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas) is an electronic system which guarantees reductions in a nation's use of fossil fuels, and involves energy users and communities in the task of working out how to achieve this in the light of local conditions and opportunities." Media coverage / UK report / Book / Website.

Digital Billboards

"The growing number of digital billboards on U.S. roads and highways consume large amounts of energy and are creating a wide variety of electronic waste, according to a new report (pdf). The new study says the typical digital billboard consumes about 30 times as much energy as the average American household."

"The digital billboards use more efficient LED (Light Emitting Diode) lighting than traditional signs, but deploy so many of the LED bulbs on each billboard that energy use is high; traditional billboards use just one or two large bulbs to illuminate signs. In addition, digital billboards are illuminated day and night, and require cooling systems that use more energy."

Source: Yale Environment 360.

Previously: Viva Las Vegas - LEDs and the energy efficiency paradox.

Tax Resources, Not Labour

"In our society, high taxes on labor drive businesses to minimize the number of employees. Resources remain untaxed, so we use them unconstrained. This system causes both unemployment and scarcity of resources." Read. Via Femke Groothuis.

A Low-tech Trick to Eliminate Standby Power Consumption

Standby power use is the electricity consumed by appliances and other equipment when they are switched off or not performing their primary purpose. It is responsible for 3 to 12 percent of residential electricity use worldwide (source, pdf). Freelance journalist Robert Buzink has a low-tech solution for this - all you need is a pair of scissors and a screwdriver. The text is in Dutch but the pictures speak for themselves.

Waste Heat

"A 2007 study of Tokyo showed that summer temperatures in neighborhoods with office buildings are warmer by nearly 2 degrees Celsius when air conditioning units are running - because as the units cool the insides of buildings, they also pump heat into the air." Read, via.

Materials = Energy

Following the intriguing but oversimplified graphic on materials scarcity published by New Scientist (a graphic that turns out to be 2 years old, by the way), this in-depth article at the Oil Drum Europe (original article here) gives a well founded look at the problem of metal minerals scarcity. Especially interesting is the link between energy and minerals:

"In case of unlimited energy supply, metal minerals extraction would only be limited by the total amount of mineral resources. However, due to the scarcity of energy, the extraction rates of most types of metal minerals will cease to follow demand. Probably the only acceptable long-term solution to avoid a global systemic collapse of industrial society, caused by these resource constraints, is a path towards managed austerity. Managed austerity will have to be a combination of changes in technology and changes in both individual and collective human behaviour."

Related: Historical statistics for mineral and material commodities.

Kicking the habit: the Oil Depletion Protocol

"By agreeing to reduce oil imports and exports by a specified amount each year, about 2.6 percent, signatory nations will help mitigate the negative consequences of an over-reliance on cheap oil and help prepare for a global decline in the world’s oil supply.

The premise of the Protocol is inherently straightforward: oil importing nations would agree to reduce their imports by an agreed-upon yearly percentage, referred to as the World Oil Depletion Rate, while oil producing nations would agree to reduce their rate of production by their National Depletion Rate.

This simple and sensible formula will produce, in effect, a global rationing system. If the entire world adopted the Protocol, global consumption of oil would decline by almost 3 percent per annum, thus stabilizing prices, preserving the resource base, and reducing competition for remaining supplies."

The Oil Depletion Protocol (via).

Economy = Energy

"The world economy will contract for at least the next 50 years as oil production declines since oil is such an important proportion of world energy use and oil energy facilitates the production of other energy forms (e.g. coal mining, solar, wind). There may be some local and temporary economic growth in regions with local concentrations of available energy but, on the whole, contraction will be the rule". Read.