Frankly, I think there isn’t enough energy available on the planet to support such a development unless a dramatic revision of physics occurs. Regardless it is an interesting concept to debate. Kurzweil pops a tremendous number of pills and is likely to suffer greatly as the comforts provided by technology evaporate to all but the super-rich in the decade ahead. I don’t spend much time on the Singularity because I think it is a highly unlikely path our future will take However, its not impossible and is certainly entertaining.

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Post tags: humanity, singularity, technology, video

John Michael Greer adds his commentary to the Lovins v Andrews issue and extrapolates that trend to all the super technologies that will save us that are ‘just around the corner’. The key point being that we are mostly stuck with what we’ve got because nearly all our surplus resources are committed to maintaining the current technological and social order and that those surplus resources are largely gone,

Those specific reasons can be usefully subordinated to a more general point, which is that airy optimism about technologies that haven’t yet gotten off the drawing board is not a useful response to an imminent crisis in the real world. This is a point worth keeping in mind, because airy optimism about technologies that haven’t yet gotten off the drawing board is flying thick and fast just now, especially but not only in the peak oil scene. Mention that industrial society is in deep trouble as a result of its total dependence on rapidly depleting fossil fuels, in particular, and you can count on a flurry of claims that Bussard reactors, or algal biodiesel, or fourth generation fission plants, or whatever the currently popular deus ex machina happens to be, will inevitably show up in time and save the day.

One of the things that has to be grasped to make sense of our predicament is that this isn’t going to happen. Some of the reasons that it’s not going to happen differ from case to case, though all of the examples I’ve just given happen to share the common difficulty of crippling problems with net energy. Any attempt at a large-scale solution at this point in the curve of decline faces another predictable problem, though, which was discussed back in 1973 in The Limits to Growth: once industrial civilization runs up against hard planetary limits, as it now has, the surplus of resources that might have permitted a large-scale solution are already fully committed to meeting existing urgent needs, and can’t be diverted to new projects on any scale without imposing crippling dislocations on an economy and a society that are already under severe strain.

[Read the full post at The Archdruid Report]

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Post tags: collapse, energy, peak oil, post-industrial society, technology

From Wikipedia:

The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a ‘cell’, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as ‘unmechanized’ and are threatened with “Homelessness”. Eventually, the Machine apocalyptically collapses, and the civilization of the Machine comes to an end.

Essentially it predicts: Google, Facebook, online university courses, video conferencing, collapse, the uniformity of our built environment and more.

You can read the entire story here. Or you can listen to the audio.

My favorite passage:

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body – it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend – glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.

‘Where are you?’ she sobbed.

His voice in the darkness said, ‘Here.’

Is there any hope, Kuno?’

‘None for us.’

‘Where are you?’

She crawled over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands.

‘Quicker,’ he gasped, ‘I am dying – but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.’

He kissed her.

‘We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life, as it was in Wessex, when Aelfrid overthrew the Danes. We know what they know outside, they who dwelt in the cloud that is the colour of a pearl.’

‘But Kuno, is it true? Are there still men on the surface of the earth? Is this – tunnel, this poisoned darkness – really not the end?’

He replied:

‘I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the midst and the ferns until our civilization stops. Today they are the Homeless – tomorrow—– ‘

‘Oh, tomorrow – some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow.’

‘Never,’ said Kuno, ‘never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.’

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Post tags: fiction, history, technology

I recommend reading the whole interview but one of my main concerns is the cost of higher ed. While the US higher education is among the best in the world, it is also highly immoral because it typically saddles you with crushing lifelong debt.

How did college tuition costs get so out of control?

On a broad policy historical level, what we have now is an erosion from the high-water mark of the early 1970s. There was a short period of time — from the postwar era with the GI Bill to the early ’70s — [in which] there seemed to be unlimited rounds of investment from the federal government and the state into mass higher education. It was seen as good economic policy, from a national defense and security perspective, and with the Civil Rights Act, there were more and more people — women, minorities — who wanted access to opportunity. College seemed like a way to allow them to prove themselves instead of unleashing them on the job market.

Then the economy turned upside down. There was a political backlash against college students, fueled in large part by the campus unrest in the ’60s, and it was no longer so popular to support students. So states started withdrawing their support, and colleges started practicing cost shifting. States came down on colleges as being fat and happy and full of liberal professors, and colleges put the cost burden on families, and families took on more student loans. As a result, you get this credit bubble effect, similar to what happened recently with mortgages: There’s so much debt available, and so much free money for colleges, that parents and families become less sensitive to price increases, and there’s no political outcry at the state level.

[read the full interview @ Salon]

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Post tags: college, college sports, education, technology

From the abstract:

World wind power resources are abundant, but their utilization could be limited because wind fluctuates rather than providing steady power. We hypothesize that wind power output could be stabilized if wind generators were located in a meteorologically designed configuration and electrically connected. Based on 5 yr of wind data from 11 meteorological stations, distributed over a 2,500 km extent along the U.S. East Coast, power output for each hour at each site is calculated. Each individual wind power generation site exhibits the expected power ups and downs. But when we simulate a power line connecting them, called here the Atlantic Transmission Grid, the output from the entire set of generators rarely reaches either low or full power, and power changes slowly. Notably, during the 5-yr study period, the amount of power shifted up and down but never stopped. This finding is explained by examining in detail the high and low output periods, using reanalysis data to show the weather phenomena responsible for steady production and for the occasional periods of low power. We conclude with suggested institutions appropriate to create and manage the power system analyzed here.

After reading through the study, I’m convinced that it is a novel approach to variability of generation I think it could be cost effective if we could ever get the political will to execute it.

This is a better solution than the natural gas burned at some wind farms to regulate the frequency for use in grid transmission/distribution (which essentially makes wind power a greater generator of CO2 than coal/MW generated).

However, this solution is still very far from making wind a replacement to fossil/nuclear power. Primarily because of the issue of capacity factor. Capacity factor is a ratio of the number of hours in a given year that a generation station operates. Coal plants have a capacity factor of .85 – .95 and nuclear fission plants have a capacity factor of .90-.98. Graphs in the study indicate that the capacity factor varied greatly between the sites, judging from the charts in the article my rough estimate puts a transmission line running up the atlantic coast with multiple wind sites at a capacity factor of .55-.65 at absolute best. In summary, this wind transmission scheme isn’t good enough for baseload power, i.e. a plant that runs to keep the society’s lights and manufacturing on 24/7.

Also, I’m thinking that maintenance on this system would be brutal. Hurricanes would frequently bring parts of the system down and repeated exposure to salt-water would quickly wear-out the blades and moving parts. Nanocomposite materials, like the ones we develop in my lab at UBC could help with this but are nowhere near this scale. My guess is that a system like this would be no more “sustainable” than fossil fuel is sustainable (as in not at all) because of the tremendous amount of raw materials and fossil fuels consumed in maintenance, production and transport of new parts.

Yes, this research solves the problem of idled transmission systems and load balancing that cause utilities to scoff at wind energy.

No, its not a replacement for baseload power produced from fossil fuels in centralized electricity generation.

All the more reason to go decentralized.

Thanks to @jruckman for pointing this one out to me under the headline “Wind Can Replace Fossil Fuel Power Plants“.

If you ever come across an energy claim in a news article and want me to evaluate it, send it my way and you’ll get something like the above back from me… as Mr. Ruckman has now learned.

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Post tags: energy, peak energy, quick analyses, renewables, research, technology

Soon, Puertollano, home to the Museum of the Mining Industry, had two enormous solar power plants, factories making solar panels and silicon wafers, and clean energy research institutes. Half the solar power installed globally in 2008 was installed in Spain.Farmers sold land for solar plants. Boutiques opened. And people from all over the world, seeing business opportunities, moved to the city, which had suffered from 20 percent unemployment and a population exodus.

But as low-quality, poorly designed solar plants sprang up on Spain’s plateaus, Spanish officials came to realize that they would have to subsidize many of them indefinitely, and that the industry they had created might never produce efficient green energy on its own. In September the government abruptly changed course, cutting payments and capping solar construction. Puertollano’s brief boom turned bust. Factories and stores shut, thousands of workers lost jobs, foreign companies and banks abandoned contracts that had already been negotiated.

The Green Economy so heavily touted is far from becoming a reality and will take significant investment to replace our current infrastructure. When our current system is failing what options do we have left other than ever decreasing energy availability?

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Post tags: economy, technology

While I think Google has made our lives significantly easier, I don’t know if it has definitively made our lives better. “Better” is hard to quantify though. What does concern me is that being consistently plugged in to communication and information isn’t a human value it is a corporate value. Google wants us to place more and more of our lives under their domain because it gives them the information they need to provide us with more accurate ads.

In an ideal Google world, they could provide information to us based on our context before we even know we need it. I wrote more on this topic in a previous post but watching through this video revived some of those concerns that I expressed to Mandeep recently in an email exchange,

Google is successful because it gives us what we want when we want it. And they keep getting better at it every day, the more we use it. Their plan is to give us what we want before we know we want it… that’s when it crosses the line to almost eerie. ’tis a brave new world indeed.

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Post tags: corporations, technology, videos

What makes fossil fuels so valuable is the fact that the energy they contain was gathered over countless centuries and then concentrated by geological processes involving fantastic amounts of heat and pressure over millions of years. They define the far end of the curve of energy concentration, at least on this planet, which is why they are as scarce as they are, and why no other energy resource can compete with them – as long as they still exist, that is.

As concentrated fossil fuel supplies deplete, in turn, a civilization that depends on them for its survival will find itself in a very nasty bind. If ours is anything to go by, it will proceed to make that bind even worse by trying to make up the difference by manufacturing new energy sources at roughly the same level of concentration. That’s a losing bargain, because it maximizes the amount of exergy that gets lost: you have to disperse a lot of energy to make the concentrated energy source, remember, before you can get around to using the concentrated energy source to do anything useful. Thus trying to fill our gas tanks with some manufactured substitute for gasoline, say, drains our remaining supplies of concentrated energy at a much faster pace than the other option – that of doing as much as possible with relatively low concentrations of energy, and husbanding the highly concentrated energy sources for those necessary tasks that can’t be done without them.

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Post tags: energy, peak oil, technology

Most of the reports on the Bloom Box’s capabilities are absolutely misrepresenting it. All it does is convert methane (natural gas) into electricity. Fuel cells are essentially batteries that consume fuel and typically they are no better than 50-80% efficient at converting a fuel source into a electricity. I can’t imagine the solid oxide based catalyst is much more efficient than that in converting methane gases into electricity. Additionally, solid oxide fuel cells are renowned for generating high heat bringing to question long-term durability. The electricity generated by the Bloom Box may be more efficient than the electricty generated by natural gas utility companies burn to match peak demand but only because that electricity won’t need to be transmitted.

That’s not to say that the Bloom Box could provide a revolution in distributed generation, it just isn’t a panacea to a world with rapidly shrinking net energy. The sheer level of excitement this thing has generated is an indication to me of how bad things really are. The “something will save us” mentality has never been stronger.

Let’s assume that the conversion efficiency is on the range of 80% though. The Oil Drum ran some calculations based on these assumptions:

Conservative assumptions based on the video: (All amounts in US $).

– $800,000 for a Bloom Box that generates power for 100 American Households
- American household energy usage is 10,000 kWh per year (10,600 in 2001)
- Bloom Box hence generates 1 million kwh per year at an investment cost of $800,000
- Production costs US for electricity from natural gas for residential use is $ 0.10 per kwh (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_3.html)
- costs for 1000 cubic foot of natural gas for residential use is 12 dollars (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_m.htm)
- 1 cubic foot of natural gas has an energy content of 1,034 BTU
- 1 kWh is equivalent to 3413 BTU spent in an hour
- Bloom Box can turn natural gas into electricity at an 80% conversion efficiency

Calculation:

– Costs per year for 1 million kWh from natural gas from centralized power sources is $100,000.
- 1000 cubic foot of natural gas gives 1,034,000 BTU which can be converted at 80% efficiency, hence 827,200 BTU of power which is equivalent to 242 kWh, costing $12 for the fuel. So 12/242 = $ 0.05 per kWh incorporating fuel costs only. Which amounts to a total fuel cost of $50,000 for 1 million kWh.

At an investment cost of $800,000 dollars it would take approximately 15 years (800,000 / 50,000) to pay back investments, excluding the costs of connecting to the grid.

If you are interested in the Bloom Box, here are some good references:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35590515/ns/technology_and_science/ and

http://ecogeek.org/component/content/article/3084

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/video-the-bloom-box-lands-and-the-unanswered-questions-are

A lot of people have tried fuel cells and have failed, that doesn’t mean Bloom Energy’s inks aren’t something truly revolutionary. I’ll be convinced when I see the data. Will we still know about Bloom Energy in 5 years? My guess is no but I hope I’m wrong.

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Post tags: energy, technology

The time you put into reading this isn't free

Chris Anderson’s follow up to his revolutionary The Long Tail (2006, Hyperion) has me reminded of Thomas Friedman for geeks. Stuff that people younger than 25 get naturally but that CEOs and VCs can read and say, “wow, that internets is so amazing!”

Free (2009, Hyperion) sets out to cover new ground in describing the economics of Free but ends up merely relaying interesting case studies and taking a “Gee Whiz” approach to the topic. Anderson states early in the book, “An economy had emerged around Free before the economic model that could describe it” (p.4) And that’s why I’m so disappointed. The Free economy has been well established for the entirety of human history through indigenous societies before Chris Anderson put it all into this singular book. That’s not to say the book isn’t entertaining or that it isn’t a valuable place to read about the history of Free, merely that Anderson’s brillance which shined through in The Long Tail fails to show up in Free with any groundbreaking predictions or observations.

I learned a few things from this book, “the annual deflation rate of the digital world is 50%” (p. 13) and that King Gilette could sell so many razors because he was willing to give them away.  However, from one King to another, Anderson is completely oblivious (as are most neo-classical economists) to the role of energy in the economy. M. King Hubbert’s theory of peak oil production fails to get a single mention and that’s surprising given that the economy derived from cheap oil is the operating system enabling our ability to trade privacy for the Google server farms that eat massive loads of energy to provide us with free word processing and email storage.  Anderson devotes almost two whole pages to the environmental cost of Free (p.226) by addressing the Tragedy of the Commons and stating that “simple economics” has the ability to incorporate the negative externalities ensuring that, “wasting bits will not have the environmental cost of wasting atoms .” The digital economics that Anderson spells out can only last as long as we have inexpensive oil and natural gas running the entire infrastructure of globalization. Semiconductors might represent the triumph of brains over brawn or the, “overthrow of matter in the economy.” (p.83) but if we don’t have the energy to mine coal or buy a barrel of oil for less than $150 USD then I’m sure we’ll be concerned with many other investment strategies than talking about a post-scarcity economy online.

I received  the greatest excitement out of this book when Anderson began addressing Lewis Hyde’s concept of the Gift Economy (p.183) and applying it to interactions on the web. We do a lot of the things we do online because it allows us to contribute in a meaningful way to a community, since all our real-world communities have died in the throes of suburban isolation and dispassionate consumerism. However, many of the actions Anderson assigns to a Gift Economy, like the writing of Amazon and IMDB reviews could equally be chalked up to ego. So I would recommend that you read Free if you’ve got the time, but time isn’t free.

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Post tags: economics, technology