Monday 27 May 2013

Preliminary Peak oil technical challenge report.

This is just the draft form of my upcoming technical report for the Archdruid's challenge here. As such it currently won't include any citations. While the preliminary research of its potential viability has been done I am still in the process of research. Part of this research will involve me studying Fluid and Therm- dynamics next semester so the finished version of this report will be some time off.

Problem: 
  
In modern industrial society there is a major difference in urban life than in most previous urban societies. I currently live in an apartment in the city and I have a kitchen in which I cook, in most previous societies and even in many non-western industrialized societies I wouldn't have a kitchen and likely wouldn't even cook at all. If I lived in a city I’d have gotten cooked food in the street, whether from street vendors (think Malaysian hawkers or hot dog stands), restaurants, cafes and such. Thermopolium were the Roman equivalent of fast food and taverns could also function in a similar manner as well as being standard restaurants and the first drive through (for travelers) is thought to have been built in ancient Persia (Iran).

This is the ancient equivalent of fast food though it existed in a different context and plays a slightly different role in society. It was more nutritious, often contained less meat and was considered healthier and more important than contemporary fast food for example, and was designed to be served to a large group. A giant pot of soup mix, Paella or a mixture of curries for example, every urban culture has some equivalent. Street vendors also existed and they sold a variety of foods, Malaysian hawkers are on of the many surviving examples but their exist others. The criteria is that it is pre-cooked and is cooked in large batches.

The economic reasons for this are fairly simple, kitchens are expensive and in most cities were unaffordable for all but the well off. By having communal kitchens, you save on equipment and benefit from both specialization and the economics of scale that the individual private kitchen simply doesn’t provide. You can also save on fuel costs, something which is extremely important when fuel is both scarce and expensive (as it’s likely to be in the future). In the cities (and most towns) of the future, this model of cooking is likely to become near universal once again. The measure of its economic viability is the fact that for every 60 citizens of Pompeii there was 1 Thermopolium, and there existed other fast food dispensers, such as Popinas (wine bar, often for breakfasts such as wine soaked bread or vegetable stews) alongside more restaurant like places such as tavernas. 


So this presents us with a problem in need of a solution. How do we take advantage of this model of cooking while fueling it with renewable energy? After all, most renewable energy sources produce mechanical energy (wind and hydro for example), while the main historical source of heat (biomass) is likely to be scarce and large scale use of wood in the cities would lead to deforestation. Where can the energy for this cooking model come from and how could it be put to use in a sustainable manner?


Overview of a solution:


The specific technical solution I’ll be looking at in this paper is that of combining solar concentrating technology with that of molten salt thermal storage to counteract the main disadvantages of solar cooking. The components of this solution are the; solar concentrators, the various transfers of the heat, molten salt storage units, the specialized cooking equipment needed and the difference between building integrated units and standalone units. Adapting this solution for mobile stands is also a topic and in this case is simple change in how the systems used. Also covered is the side project of producing a standardized set of connectors (similar to USB ports) between the various components to allow both a modular design and ease of distribution/production. Also, its possible to run refrigeration off of heat sources, so this system could easily be coupled with an absorption refrigeration system that uses the waste heat.

Specifics of the solution:

Solar Concentrators: How the salt is heat, the two methods are to either run the molten salt through pipes that are heated or focus the sunlight on a tower that contains the molten salt. For this application, solar troughs on the roof are probably the best bet and they would heat a central pipe through which the molten salt is pumped or flows due to heat differences. In some instances, such as buildings surrounded by open land, heliostats and a receiver tower could be the best option.

Molten salt thermal energy storage units: As a thermal energy storage method, molten salt has been around in various solar projects for 20 years and is also used in some non-solar industries as a heat transfer fluid. The system works by storing the salt as a liquid at 288°C in an insulated cool tank, then the salt is pumped into the solar collectors and heated to about 570°C. After that it is sent to the insulated hot storage tank where it can be stored for a week or so before the heat is used and the salt sent to the cool tank. Heavy insulation should be used so the slat doesn't freeze, through this shouldn't be a problem in the locations for which this solution is applicable.


There are two main storage methods to be considered. A single large tank as is currently used in stationary applications would be adequate for cafes, restaurants and other such eateries. The heat can then be piped to the cooking equipment as needed. The other option is to develop a heat battery that can be placed in vendor carts and such to power them for about a day, the batteries should not be to heavy but more research is needed to confirm, or delivered to small eateries unable to gather the heat themselves. The second type would simply be placed under a Fresnel lens until charged and each vendor could easily store 2-5 days’ worth of batteries (at home, not with the cart) at any time to account for intermittency. The other main design issue is how to allow a backup heat source to be used (say biogas) to heat up the salt when required.

Heat Transfer system: This is the component that transfers the latent heat stored in the salt tanks to the kitchen. The transfer of salt from the solar collectors to the tank is covered in that system separately, this is from the hot salt tank to the kitchen. For this specific model, the heat transfer will  use the molten salt to create steam; the salt is then pumped to the cool tank and the steam to the kitchen pipes. Other such methods exist, through this method allows secondary use of the steam, such as steam cleaning, sterilization (say by an autoclave) or space heating. If steam heat grids are locally available, then this system's waste steam can be feed into it for further use.

Specialized cooking equipment: Since the heat energy is delivered via steam (or another such method), the cooking equipment will need to be specially designed for this system. A simple oven design would be to have an inner surface surrounded by a cavity in which steam can be pumped into which is then surrounded by heavy insulation. A fan could be powered (for the appropriate dishes) easily by a thermoelectric unit built into the oven, similar to the BioLite stove's system. Stove tops would have a cavity underneath them in which high pressure steam (to increase the temperature) can be pumped as needed, similar to today's electric stoves. Other devices could be modified as needed and using devices like hayboxes would certainly make the stored heat last longer.

Building Integrated units: If a restaurant, café or tavern is being built with the express purpose of serving a large quantity of food, then this system could benefit by being designed into the building itself. The pipes could be easily placed inside the walls and benefit from their insulation properties, the roof designed for solar collection and so on. The more challenging task would be to retrofit existing structures with this system due to the number of pipes required.

Mobile vendors: While they are currently far more common in Asia than in the West, street vendors were common in western pre-industrial cities. Malaysian hawkers, hot dog stands and small mobile cafes (like doughnut trucks) are all covered in this category. Here the use of small molten salt heat batteries would probably be the most useful, if enough heat can be stored then they’d simply be swapped in and out each day (or twice a day). The batteries could be charged by a Fresnel lens or other solar concentrator and stored in a specialized container. If both the container and charger could be the same equipment it would certainly save on costs. Weight is the main issue but as previously mentioned more research on my part will be needed to determine how large it potentially is. Their could easily be a charging station vendors visit often or a service to deliver charged batteries, it wouldn't be hard to time the system to function within the daily rhythms of life.

Standardization: If before large scale manufacturing began, the connectors and links between the various components could be standardized (especially for the mobile vendors), then a great deal of effort and resources could be saved. Especially if standardization of the salt batteries was done, similar to how batteries are classified now. If that was done, then the molten salt batteries could easily be used as a backup heat source for the buildings. This would allow components to be swapped in and out by the various end users according to their needs while also making the work of local manufacturers and repairmen much easier and simpler. 

Absorption Refrigerator unit: Before electrically powered fridges came into use, absorption refrigeration was the standard. Seeing as it only needs a heat source to be powered and this system would be able to provide both significant primary and waste heat, this could easily be added as a plug and play component. Adding this component allows the system to be self-sufficient in all its core energy requirements (heating and cooling) as well as allowing the use of refrigeration something not able to done by by pre-modern eateries. 

Conclusion:

This is one way to potentially power a feature of urban life that is very likely to become near universal once again. The underlying technologies are all in use today and more solar cookers are being developed that use latent heat in some form, very little in the way needs to be invented for this system to work. All it requires is for a prototype to be built of the various models and a codified set of standardizations. There are two levels this project can be applied at, that of an individual to power an isolated vendor and that of a community (or similar scale) to build a sustainably powered restaurant, various government organisations would also find this project useful, such as militaries or prisons.

Sunday 19 May 2013

Thinking about Renewables: Part 2

Going on from last week let's start with Infrastructure and the meta-costs of technology. Here the Archdruid uses system costs to refer to costs needed to apply the energy resource,the meta costs include this and the necessary social/cultural structures required to use the technologies (such as rampant consumerism or the belief in progress). To properly use renewable energy in an eco-technic society, due both to the differing energy distributions and the different social/cultural structures, would require a different infrastructure set to what we have now, though it could easily share many basic components and structures, and that would take time, resources and energy to both maintain it and create it. It would also involve much more decentralized economies and probably polities as well. So the best strategy is to use as much of the current infrastructure as you can while slowly developing the alternate infrastructure that will exist in the future to reduce the transition costs.

That's part of the reason I thing the Zero Carbon Australia plan is a good first step, it uses most of current infrastructure while implementing some of the changes needed. It isn't the end of the process, only the start. Yes, the electricity grid was incredibly expensive to build and that needs to be accounted for the true cost of the project, but the electricity grid is already there and can be put to use now. Rebuilding our entire infrastructure from scratch is both impossible and stupid, better is to slowly modify the existing infrastructure and build up the new components needed while scrapping what's not needed over time. The more the meta-costs are spread over time, the cheaper it is each year, the more can go to the production side and the less dramatic the changes are, likely leading to less resistance to the transition. All those plans to switch over to renewables, yes they are often quoted unrealistically and compared to past examples, but the advantage now is that most of the infrastructure is already in place and doesn't have to be built from scratch, like railways (for coal use) were, thus reducing both costs and time.

The differing scales that societies operate on is especially important to energy use and distribution. The energy use of someones day to day life is different from the energy use used to create the structures necessary for him to live that daily life and that is again different for the energy use a society uses to keep itself functioning. Peasant farmers normally don't smelt their own ore and use it to make tools, city dwellers often don't make many of the artifacts/resources they use and infrastructure is similar, those that benefit often don't make /maintain their infrastructure or tools. The energy use and distribution for the manufacturing scale is different than the energy use in the peasants daily life. What about the energy use of a state and its armies, its a very different pattern than the daily life of a peasant, much more of a pulse compared to the steady inputs of the former.

We need to tailor renewable energy usage to these different scales and patterns, and tailor these scales to renewable energy. Solar hot water, solar cooking and food can provide the majority of daily energy use but they can't be used in manufacturing. Large windmills, charcoal production, solar furnaces aren't so useful in daily life, but they can provide the energy used to manufacture stuff, including solar cookers or hot water systems which are useful in daily life. States and armies would use stored energy, like biofuels, and use them every now and then (like during wars or during large infrastructure projects). These different scales will use/require different infrastructures and technologies, the pipe system of a house or a city, a micro-grid, national grid or only the wiring in a single building and so on, but there's significant overlap. This is the main problem with the Zero Carbon plan, not a lot of local actions or small scale changes, but its understandable as to why. They should just add support to local renewable energy ideas and projects at this stage of the plan, saying any improvements there are extra. Other actions and plans are better suited to the local level.

From these changes a variety of differences would appear. A redistribution of wealth to different sectors, similar to the concurrent change to organic agriculture, along with the consequent changes to employment, education and transport such changes bring. Along with this, the values of the general population would begin to shift (its a process that happens over generations and so would be fairly hard to detect accurately), so they'd become more appropriate to the new economic enviroment. A similar process happens to the idea of courage in battle when technology changes, same process different context (also a bit slower). Transport routes will change, some will come into being while others die or experience a resurgence while others decrease or increase in relative importance and from this a large range of economic changes will occur. And so on, Societies will change in response to their enviroment and its various industries. The current consumer culture is nonviable on the long run, so something else will appear to take its place.

Supporting technologies is related to how renewables develop but lets look at them first. The supporting technologies for fossil fuels are different that those of renewables, storage is one of the best examples so we'll look at that. Storage for fossil fuels involves storing them in their natural state either as a gas, liquid or solid but most importantly you can simply leave them like that and burn them when you want to. Renewables on the other hand generally (this is not true for wood or food to some extent)  have to be stored either as potential energy (say in a battery) or in a different form than what they come in. I'll use electricity storage, but heat and mechanical storage are in a similar position. There is no point developing large scale electricity storage when you use fossil fuels, its easier to simply leave them in their extracted form and burn when necessary, but that option isn't available for renewables (except Hydro). The exact layout and shape of the electricity grid reflects this.

So the technologies to store electricity on a large scale are only being developed about now, see this salt water battery or storing it as liquid oxygen. The advantage of the last one is if you have the storage next to a factory that produces heat, you can use that heat to raise the engines temperature to about 100°C and in effect reuse the waste heat to increase efficiency. Both of those technologies can be implemented with current technology, air compression is over 50 years old and most chem labs have the equipment, they just haven't been developed because there isn't any point if your using fossil fuels. That's another reason to slowly change our infrastructure, we don't know what will be useful or necessary yet and we need to let the potential technologies develop first before choosing what infrastructure to build/modify.

The development of renewable technologies is also important and there are several categories involved. Some technologies are mature and unlikely to change greatly, solar hot water and hydro are good examples, without a revolutionary change. Other technologies are still being developed and may or may not take off Vibro-wind Piezoelectric, wind lens (which can purportedly double or triple a turbines output) or solar furnaces for example. Notice how solar furnaces and concentrated solar thermal (CST) use the same underlying technology, reflective panels. That would be the way to use the organic change of societies over time, create the manufacturing capabilities for the reflective panels for CST as it makes sense as the first step, and then use that same capabilities to build solar furnaces and other such devices later on.

Quite a few of the basic components/technologies that are used in the large scale renewable technologies are equally viable on smaller scales or for direct use and vis versa. See the use of salt heat storage here, salt heat storage is also used for the big CST plants. Then there's how renewables are being deployed now and why. At the moment the big push is for electricity generation, even though chances are direct use is better, but there is a logical reason for that push and many of the technologies being developed will still be useful later on.

Here's a way that the salt heat storage could be used to solarize a common historical feature of urban life. Take away and fast food is often seen as a feature of modern industrial civilization, when it is in fact as old as city life (and sometimes village life) itself. A significant portion of city dwellers cooking at all is actually unique to modern Industrial civilization. There was 1 Thermopolium, effectively a Roman fast food restaurant, per 60 residents in Pompeii alongside tavernas and such, while the ancient equivalent of a drive through window, for travelers on the road, probably came into being in ancient Persia. Things similar to restaurants are also incredibly ancient and sometimes even villages had their equivalent, and for the same economic reasons this is likely to be true in the future. A kitchen is expensive, so is fuel and in most historical settings the majority of urban dwellers can't afford them anyway and even if they could, its often not worth it for them to take the time and expense to cook. And so takeout, taverns and restaurants flourish. The only question is since firewood is likely to be a scarce resource, how can we adapt these features of urban (as in towns upward) life to a post Overshoot world. Also just to clarify what counts here, its cafes, restaurants (of various sizes), take outs, fast food franchises, taverns, inns and street vendors. Below is one idea.

Solar cookers are (in the right context) a wonderful technology, with only sunlight as an input they can cook food, which saves a great deal of fuel. However they have several short comings, they require sunlight (which is intermittent and time restricted), conventional designs have a limited amount they can cook at once and they're often designed for a family or individual use. But if we have an entire restaurant to work with and use salt (or another type of) heat storage we can remove those shortcomings. Instead of focusing the sunlight onto a cooking surface, use the roof of the restaurant to collect sunlight that either makes steam or heats the salt. Ovens would have a cavity between the heavily insulated casing and the inside in which heat can be pumped from the storage and the stoves would work by using the stored heat to heat a hotplate.

The system would often (doesn't have to be, but it would help) be built into the building itself and while it would work on the same principles as most solar cookers, it wouldn't look and behave as current models. The heat storage can be quite large, lets say its in the basement, and would optimally store a few days to a weeks worth of heat and have a backup in the form of the ability to burn wood or charcoal to add to the heat. That's a likely way that renewable energy would be used in the future and in the process make urban life that much more livable than otherwise. The main economic variable will be if its cheaper to build solar powered restaurants, cafes or potentially street vendors than for most urban dwellers to have their own kitchen as well as the efficiency of scale for heat storage.I'm currently writing a basic technical (first time I've written one) paper outlining the problem and solution above for the Arhcdruid's contest (post it next week).

How Industrial societies are currently implementing renewable energy is also important, they are simply adding them to current energy sources. Replacement of some fossil fuel use is happening, bio-fuels are the best example of that process through solar hot water and cookers also count. If you have a growing economy (which we had until just recently) then if your adding a new energy source, then it makes sense to simply add it to whatever energy form is growing in use (that's currently electricity) instead of replacing an established energy form. Then their's the fact that quite a few industries use electricity because of its various advantages and that at the moment only oil is stagnating. Since its a transport fuel, which is hard to replace with renewables, the replacement will again take longer while replacing coal and natural gas is relatively easy.

The effect of this strategy is that the direct use of renewable energy as heat or mechanical won't be pursued in all but a handful of cases, even through it makes more sense as a starting point. Mind you, the direct use of renewables will increase, but again it will happen over time as our societies change. Also the ideology/religion of progress partly drives this trend, after all from the perspective of progress electricity is the way of the future, in Lewis Mumford's words towards the 'neo-technic' future. Once fossil fuels start declining noticeably (rather than the slow decline/stagnation happening now) and more basic energy needs need to be filled by alternatives, the direct use of renewables should see a noticeable uptick.

Renewable energy is not a single thing and its a complex reality. And the process of getting from where we are now to the future endpoint is not a simple process that follows a linear path towards a set goal. It will be an organic process as new technologies are implemented, some technologies disappear, certain resources run short, strategies are tried out and so on. Figuring out how to get from step to step with the resources at hand and with the current limitations is the first goal, hence using electricity since the grid is already there and therefor allowing time for the support technologies to develop, also here in Australia our grid is roughly 80-90% efficiency  (in America its 30%, due to distance, bad maintenance and old equipment). Later on something else will be tried and so on. The end goal of a fully renewable society that is tailored to the particular traits of whatever renewables are available is not going to be achieved for the next few centuries. Few of the technologies or technical tricks of such a society could currently exist now, they are still being developed or yet to be conceived of. Saying here is the endpoint so lets build that isn't helpful, figuring out a path that gets us there is.

Tuesday 14 May 2013

Thinking about renewables: Part 1

In the peak oil and climate change spheres, their are plenty of absolutes about renewable energy thrown around, as is common in many areas of thought. Some of them are more useful and/or accurate than others. The main problem with this generalized approach to renewable energy is that renewable energy isn't any one thing, but more a collection of very different energy sources and collection methods. Something like what sci-fi is, Sci-fi/Fantasy isn't actually a single genre but a collection of a dozen or so overlapping genres (even the difference between Fantasy and Sci-Fi is muddy).  The most accurate absolute is that renewables cannot simultaneously solely support a middle class lifestyle (either the current European or American) and produce the energy needed to replace themselves.

 One absolute that is not so useful or accurate is this one from the Automatic Earth "Technologically harnessable renewable energy is largely a myth", even through in the original article its more accurate. They refer to higher technology for use in country wide electricity grids, like PV panels, however if you just said that statement without any qualifiers (like they did), then it is completely false. Windmills for grinding grain or waterwheels to run machines directly are technologically harnessed renewable energy, so is solar passive technology, they're just not currently considered 'high' technology (they were back in the medieval ages).

Now I have problems with that AE article, I support the Zero Carbon Australia side, but them I'm training to be an engineer in the sustainable field and so I'm almost certainly biased. I also think that for a variety of reasons we can expect electricity to be fairly common in the future (though much more common in urban areas than in rural areas), but that's another post since it would take some explaining the various corollaries and way's this could be done and the benefits. As it stands, that quote from them is only even vaguely accurate if you classify technologically harnessed renewable energy as used for grid electricity and using modern high technology (as in PV panels or large wind turbines) forms of extraction. But I'm going to take them on their word and use that phrase without those qualifiers, so technology as a blanket statement for any tools or human artifact, since if someone quoted that from the AE or saw that referenced and didn't check, they wouldn't see the qualifiers. Also standing on its own, it provides a good example of a very stupid absolute phrase.

So the first thing you could say about it is that technologically harness-able renewable energy exists, PV, wind turbines, hydro dams etc are pieces of technology that are harnessing renewable energy even if they themselves aren't sustainable on the long-term. however there's the fact that the Romans (and other ancient civilizations) had water wheels, which were artifacts of technology that harnessed renewable energy, windmills are thousands of years old and while solar (in a form other than food) is a recent addition, its feasible to make a very basic solar thermo-electric generators with ancient technology as well as solar cookers.

The meaning of renewable energy is also important, they used it to mean only electricity for the grid which as a blanket statement is absurd. Electricity doesn't need to be used in a grid, heat is another form of energy, so is chemical, kinetic, potential etc. At it's most basic renewable energy refers to sunlight and the various processes it powers, like the wind and hydrological cycle and a few others sources such as tidal and geothermal, which aren't sun powered. The harnessed forms of these energy flows isn't the renewable component, that's the continuation of the flows. But more importantly renewable energy technology isn't any one thing.

As I mentioned above renewable energy technology definition is similar to Sci-fi/Fantasy's, its a collection of dozens of different groups that sometimes only have tangential connections. PV panels and a focused solar thermo-electric generators do the same thing, turn sunlight into electricity, but otherwise they're incredibly different technologies with very different limits, manufacturing, support structures, capabilities and so on. Tidal operates on similar principles to hydro, yet it's not ultimately powered by the sun like hydro is (sunlight drives the hydrosphere, whereas tidal is powered by the orbit of the moon). Biomass produces chemical energy, either as food, ethanol, bio-gas, bio-diesel, wood and so on, which is unusual among renewables who normally provide heat or mechanical energy.

So obviously in terms of capabilities and limitations, they aren't the same. The manufacture of PV panels is completely different to the manufacture of thermo-electric generators (one requires very advanced materials while the other only basic metals) which is again different to the manufacture of solar hot water, or solar furnaces. And so on, basically renewables don't share that many traits with each other, even the typical low EROEI isn't shared by all, hydro's is about 40, though the Wikipedia page says it's 100 in the US. Also important is how these attributes interact with society and the response this draws from society. Renewable energy technology is a collection of various disparate technologies (low to high tech) that uses energy flows that are continually replenished by nature, beyond that very few hard and fast rules apply to all renewable technologies (subsets will have hard and fast rules amongst themselves). Qualifiers are needed when talking about renewables as a whole.

The absolute that PV panels can't support a modern consumer lifestyle and produce the energy to make itself is accurate and useful partly because it has a qualifier. If the lifestyle its supporting is changed, say to only using 1/4 of its current energy use, then the analysis is different. At that level of energy consumption the PV panel could could support the lifestyle and power its manufacture, though social complexity may be to low to produce them. However an important point needs to be addressed, silicon is not the only material that PV panels can be built out of. Other alternatives exist, like organic solar cells and dye-sensitized solar cells, and there complexity limits could be very different once those technologies are developed.

Weatherize before you solarize is the appropriate phrase, reduce energy consumption and renewables become far more viable and able to support themselves at a lower tech base than otherwise. One of the good points about the Zero Carbon plan is that it aims to reduce overall energy consumption by about 60%. Part of that reduction is exploiting the high efficiency of electricity in heating and transport, which is why the plan includes a 40% rise in electricity use. Various processes are very efficient when electricity is used, such as induction furnaces (compared to blast furnaces) or ground heat pumps for heating or cooling which are more efficient than other active heating/cooling systems (through passive housing is a better first option). 

So how well renewables work out depends largely on the context their used in, change the context (such as energy use) and how they work changes. Of course the current way we use renewables isn't viable and our societies will have to change because of that, however there is a specific way that happens. Human societies change over time in a process, not sudden leaps or drastic changes, the only times that happens is when some cataclysmic event happens, such as an eruption or 90% death toll due to diseases (Overshoot isn't cataclysmic and even the shortest timescales it will last decades). Some things change and events happen, then some more changes happen and eventually society has reinvented itself. Its a continuous process that when you glance over history looks to be stepwise, but when your living in it, it isn't stepwise but more often a continuous change. If we want to pass through Overshoot with the least amount of trauma and suffering, this needs to be taken account of and used. Demonizing steps in this process just because they aren't the final product is both stupid and in the long run counter-productive.

I'll use Zero Carbon as the starting point for an ideal process, no complications, no roadblocks and the plan works as almost as advertised. This is not how it would go, but this is to provide an example of what I mean in a simple way. So lets say that the various Zero Carbon plans; energy, transport, building, land use, industrial processes and coal export replacement are enacted and they work. Since only the energy plan has been released, we'll use their plan that all transport is electric or biofuel, energy use is 40% of what it is now, also lets assume population is stable (makes it simpler) and so on. So over ten years (or the more realistic 20-30 years) what has changed. Well the society is broadly the same, yet it only uses 40% of the energy, runs on renewables, new supporting technologies have been developed and if all goes well direct solar and wind technologies are being developed and the basic versions implemented (more solar hot water systems). Public transport has exploded in both coverage and usage, well being by measures of material/energy usage would be lower, growth would have stopped or even reversed and Dutch disease would no longer be a problem due to lowered exports and imports, social complexity would also be lower. Additionally the demographics of the economy would change as more people move from services and mining into manufacturing and agriculture.

This is important, since infrastructure changes are slow and expensive the best strategy is one that uses existing infrastructure and phases in technologies and new infrastructure slowly. Now the 10 year plan they have is probably unrealistic, at least with the level of effort that could be mustered for it. 20-30 years is more likely, even though it's taken longer for other similar energy revolutions in the past. The difference this time is that the Zero Carbon plan uses and expands existing infrastructure (electricity grid) rather than building its own. After all before coal could be used for transport you needed to build railways and coal ports, oil required its own infrastructure while the proposed renewables can simply be plugged into the grid which can then power transport (here I refer to public transport only, Cars are different) and such. Any improvements aside, the grid is already there and has been built, which saves a lot of time and resources. While their could easily be alternate forms of infrastructure, we don't know what they are and how to easily build them, that's something for the future.

Lets assume that the society is still unsustainable on the long run and further changes (after a gap of several decades) happen over 20-30 years (this could be because coal and gas have to be used to make up energy shortfalls from optimistic projections or some of the technology used cannot be made at that level of social complexity or internally). These changes could be to use more direct solar, in the Zero Carbon plan direct solar makes up a small amount of energy use, along with more direct use of wind and hydro/tidal for industry and home usage. So solar furnaces start being used, along with solar steam generators for sterilization or industrial heat production, small scale machine shops are powered by small rivers when possible or windmills, various factories (mills for grinding grain is traditional) are now directly powered by windmills and animals are being used again in certain areas for agricultural work and transport. This results in various things such as reduced production and again even lower imports and exports etc.

Now the society looks noticeably different from what we have now, but it doesn't look as different from the previous society and it evolved from our current society in  two steps. And so on down the line until a stable eco-technic society arrives and climax community is reached, by that point the society could only have the most tenuous similarities to ours but it got their by gradual changing and going through many different stages on the way. Our current strategy shouldn't be to create a perfectly stable and self-sufficient renewable energy base right away, if that option ever existed its well gone, but to create the conditions and start walking down the path that will get us there with the least suffering and difficulty. That may involve stuff along the way that seems counter productive to the end goal, such as expanding the electric grid to allow viable large scale use of renewables, or an expansion of farmland, but that facilitates one or more stages. We need an overall meta-strategy on the century scale (basically a goal and a vague idea of what needs to be done) that tactics over the decades can be slotted into to eventually reach the undefined endpoint.

Now the process outlined above is the best case scenario, its likely to be far more difficult, ragged and a lot of it will be propelled by various short and long term crises. But it points out a few topics that need to be discussed and looked at. Infrastructure change and the meta-costs of technologies, the differing scales societies operate on, supporting technologies and how renewables could develop over the long term. These topics are incredibly important to understand how societies could change and adapt in the face of Overshoot. The main point though is that societies change over time in an organic way, they do not suddenly leap into new forms fully formed. People adapt, change behaviours or implement different technologies as they go, eventually the changes add up and you can say that the society has changed from one form to another. It is a process that mostly happens on a larger scale than individual human lives, through everyone contributes to it.

More on those topics next week.

Sunday 5 May 2013

Understanding legitamacy and Cultural levers via memtics.

As the Archdruid has stated many times, the key obstacle to adaption in the face of Overshoot is not the technical issues, but the cultural, political and in short psychological issues that block adaption. For various reasons, the understanding of these issues is incomplete, the Archdruid mentions one of them here. Another is the inevitable simplification pundits and various radicals use to make their cause look better, whenever you here someone say something like "all (something, often government x) is illegitimate/irrational/ what have you" or something along the lines of "this is the cause of (something, say suffering)" even when that something is caused by multiple things. A common one is "all authority is illegitimate" or "Governments shouldn't regulate markets", or the same statement with the value sign flipped "Governments should regulate everything". This absolutism and simplistic thinking has not helped and is part of the reason many radicals and/or activists can often completely misunderstand governments and politics, see this View from Brittany for examples.

The effects of these cultural issues are quite apparent now. The collapse of perceived governmental legitimacy in America is precisely a cultural phenomena (though by technical definitions, such as those for insurgency/counterinsurgency theories/practitioners, its legitimacy is still strong), so is the stranglehold of current economic theory and the financial sector. In this post Damien talks about the fate of the bank of Saint George and its lessons. to quote "Our situation is, mutatis mutandis, similar to the ancien régime kings. Even though we are theoretically in position to severely restrict or control the activities of the banking industry, or of any other sector of the economy, we are, in fact prevented to do so by a corset of self-imposed rules."  Those self-imposed rules are cultural phenomena, they only exist because everyone has decided they do. Ask yourself this, why do pay taxes? submit to your government? Use money? or any other behaviour which only makes sense because their is a cultural backing to them. The idea of money is incredible fluid, it can be paper or plastic notes, giant carved stones, shell necklaces, or in parts of Africa they use phone credit as money. This is not to say that these rules can be ignored with impunity (most would result in jail time), its just that they aren't as hard as say the laws of physics.

To tackle this problem it's probably best to use several angles. The Archdruid has recently started from a religious angle here  and I'm going to use a different one, that of memetics. To be specific, I'll be using a guide from the SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) Foundation, a fictional internet horror site, called Understanding Memetics for a basic understanding of memes. Memes are basically cultural information, however profound or base that information is, so catchphrases, single rituals, behaviours etc. When you have a lot of them in a coherent whole, you can call the result a memplex. Religions are memplexs, so is any system of knowledge, large behavioral sets or organizational cultures (including tribal or otherwise). Now as the guide mentions, memetics as a theory isn't taken very seriously, but here we can use them as a convenient vehicle for understanding certain cultural phenomena. Like legitimacy or how most power centers work.

So memes are bits of information that make you act, feel or react in certain ways. People are perfectly willing to trade strips of colourful paper or plastic for goods and services, accepting orders from an authority, feel certain emotions when hearing music or only willing to consider certain actions in the face of a crisis. Memplexs are complexes of information that encompass a huge range of emotions, actions and people. How they interact with a given person or society depends on a great many factors, their upbringing, existing memes, personality and such. The interaction also depends on how the meme is contextualized. I'll use an example from a previous post.

'For example, the author of this article (an Australian) was once giving a presentation to an Australian university class [post grad marketing]. To explain the difficulty in building a patriotic image for a brand in Australia, he draped an Australian flag over his shoulders and struck a pose as if looking at the sunset in an American aftershave commercial. Noting that the class looked unimpressed, he took the flag off his shoulders and enthusiastically polished his arse with it. The class started laughing. He then asked if anyone was offended. A chorus of nos went up. A lone voice said that, although he wasn't offended, he was disappointed. The lecturer, who had previously worked for the defence forces, gave the presentation a distinction. It the same thing had been done in America, expulsion from the university would have been a distinct possibility.' The difference between the reaction of Australians and Americans to someone using their flag in that way has to do with the memes that exist in the respective cultures. It's also a product of the differing contexts the national flag occupies in their respective memplexs. In the Australian one it has little attachment while in the American one it has a sacred place.

These contexts change over time and in reaction to events. This can be a slow process, as this View from Brittany mentions, it can take centuries for a shift to happen. it took 380 years after Jesus was born for Christianity to be the sole official religion of Rome, a similar time frame for the Reformation and the ideology of Progress to come to become dominant. On the other hand, there are contexts that can change far more quickly than that, the lose of legitimacy for governments can happen within decades, sometimes sooner. Mind you this is because the changes are smaller, government in general doesn't become illegitimate, only a specific government, a far smaller change than the hegemonic ones that take centuries. This sort of change in the political sphere is outlined in this Archdruid report. You can even see it now in in America and parts of Europe, the context is being changed by events as they unfold and from that change the legitimacy of the current governments is slipping away. The appeal of Neo-Nazism in Greece is one offshoot of this change, the conspiracy theories that the recent Boston bombing was staged by the US government is another. It should be stressed that these changes are not simply the switching of value signs, but actual changes to the information processing or information content of those places. Remember, nothing destroys a political platform like ridicule.

The simpler and less connected to other memes a meme is, the easier it is to change its effects. While the advice given in the guide, "Imagine the fearsome entity is wearing a bright pink nightgown. Draw a mustache on the haunted painting. Pee on the stone altar. Wear the terrible sculpture like a hat.", isn't specifically useful in our current situation, the general thrust is correct. If the information is presented in a different way, the effect changes.Doesn't matter if it's a perception of the real world or part of a fictional one, the effects the same.

So remember; Wear it like a Haaaaat!!