A more positive look at surviving the upcoming energy crunch

[CaptainChewbacca]

Moved by request.

Myself, I'm looking at the immediate effect the crunch will have on American economy, which will be a sudden(Historically speaking) revival. Industry and construction will snap up like crazy as the plateu(sp) continues.

I'm confused, what do you mean that industry and construction will 'snap up'? Do you mean new energy sources will lead to new infrastructure opportunities?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Remember that the USA has an awesome railroad network, too.

To demonstrate, here is a map of ACTIVE railroad lines in the country only--there's also thousands of miles of mothballed lines, and many more abandoned track right-of-ways which are still intact and can have track relaid on them.

Take a look and find your city on that map if you're an American. Then figure out how many railroad lines go into it. As a basic rule, a commuter of 2-hours in each direction is the maximum acceptable. So imagine how many commuter lines you can have that would go up to 60 miles away from your city--and how far away from those lines (you should, using that map, be able to then go locate the potential lines) you could live and 1. bicycle or 2. take the bus to reach the commuter line, and still get into the city centre in a total of 2 hours.

That gives you an idea of how big the suburbs of your city can still be relying only on bus, bike, and rail. Get involved, therefore, in the development of a commuter rail system in your community: Lots of communities have such systems ranging from the state to the city level, and advocacy groups for them that you can join and help. If you don't leave in the commute zone, or have a job that's outside of it, look to change your employment and to move within the commute zone.

Also look to see if there's any subway or light rail advocacy group. Get involved with them. Protest the development of rail-trails in your area and encourage the development of potential such trails and ones that already exist into light rail or interurban commuter rail systems instead. Form your own group if none exists. Advocate adding a double-track high speed line down the median of every freeway in the area instead of adding more lanes to the freeway. Try to get your local leaders to think long-term in that regard. Make sure to work on support for light rail, and even for things like downtown streetcars and other effective ways of offering easy mobility.

[Sea Skimmer]

I wouldn’t waste time advocating running railways literally down highways; it’s just physically not practical to find space for the stations, or to build the thing without huge disruptions. Plus the gradients and turn radiuses aren’t right, and highways often bypass useful locations a new line ought to have a station at.

Finding an alternative right of way can be difficult, but building impractical light rail lines isn’t going to help anything in the long term. It will just turn more people against them, which is already a problem. Several recent high profile projects have turned into expensive screw-up worthy of the US department of defense.

Improvements in public transportation need to start in the city centers anyway, so that people arriving to the cities without cars can get around. As it stands some US cities are far better off then others in this respect, and it will do no good to build a web of 60 mile tracks that don’t feed a decent local system.

It will be great though, if and when the day returns when you could take a trolley car from New York, or Philadelphia, clear across the Chicago, using interlinking systems. Never once would you actually ride a normal full scale passenger train

[His Divine Shadow]

It also sucks when there is more wind than the system can handle and you either need an automatic shutdown or risk catastrophic failure.

Aren't there new wind-mill designs being put out right now, windmills that look more like round towers than huge propellers? Supposedly more efficient and less resource intensive too, which is important since wind has a bigger carbon footprint than nuclear for instance.

[SirNitram]

Moved by request.

Myself, I'm looking at the immediate effect the crunch will have on American economy, which will be a sudden(Historically speaking) revival. Industry and construction will snap up like crazy as the plateu(sp) continues.

I'm confused, what do you mean that industry and construction will 'snap up'? Do you mean new energy sources will lead to new infrastructure opportunities?

New infrastructure, more industry... And this is ignoring the massive capitalist incentives to anyone who can partially restore what we lose. As I've often said, if someone finds a way to make the personal automobile feasible again after the crunch, they will have a liscense to print money.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I wouldn’t waste time advocating running railways literally down highways; it’s just physically not practical to find space for the stations, or to build the thing without huge disruptions. Plus the gradients and turn radiuses aren’t right, and highways often bypass useful locations a new line ought to have a station at.

Finding an alternative right of way can be difficult, but building impractical light rail lines isn’t going to help anything in the long term. It will just turn more people against them, which is already a problem. Several recent high profile projects have turned into expensive screw-up worthy of the US department of defense.

Improvements in public transportation need to start in the city centers anyway, so that people arriving to the cities without cars can get around. As it stands some US cities are far better off then others in this respect, and it will do no good to build a web of 60 mile tracks that don’t feed a decent local system.

It will be great though, if and when the day returns when you could take a trolley car from New York, or Philadelphia, clear across the Chicago, using interlinking systems. Never once would you actually ride a normal full scale passenger train

Both Chicago and Washington D.C. have an extensive length of their subway/L trackage operating down interstate highway right of ways--how did they accomplish that, then?

[Broomstick]

Protest the development of rail-trails in your area and encourage the development of potential such trails and ones that already exist into light rail or interurban commuter rail systems instead.

>cough<

Let's not get too carried away with that - for rail lines that are truly obsolete/redundant there's no reason not to convert to trails. It can provide a very direct route for human powered travel that doesn't have to compete with vehicles on the road. We're going to continue to have road traffic even as fuel prices rise.

I wouldn’t waste time advocating running railways literally down highways; it’s just physically not practical to find space for the stations, or to build the thing without huge disruptions. Plus the gradients and turn radiuses aren’t right, and highways often bypass useful locations a new line ought to have a station at.

Obviously, you've never been to Chicago.

The Red and Blue lines both run down the medians of freeways. Yeah, it was "disruptive" when it was being built, but no more so than road repair. It may not be practical everywhere, but don't discount it off hand because it's already been done and that was in era of relatively cheap gas.

Certainly, for light rail this is a practical alternative in some areas. We won't be just carrying frieght - people-carrying trains are a different matter. And in Chicago the gradients tend to be rather minimal, with the greatest ones being transitions between subway and elevated trains.

Finding an alternative right of way can be difficult, but building impractical light rail lines isn’t going to help anything in the long term. It will just turn more people against them, which is already a problem. Several recent high profile projects have turned into expensive screw-up worthy of the US department of defense.

And some light rail projects have been very well done and practical. Don't mistake corruption and incompetance for bad engineering. As I said, it won't be practical everywhere, but it certainly can be, and has been, done.

Improvements in public transportation need to start in the city centers anyway, so that people arriving to the cities without cars can get around. As it stands some US cities are far better off then others in this respect, and it will do no good to build a web of 60 mile tracks that don’t feed a decent local system.

And that is very true. It does no good to bring people into a city center if they then can't get around from there.

It will be great though, if and when the day returns when you could take a trolley car from New York, or Philadelphia, clear across the Chicago, using interlinking systems. Never once would you actually ride a normal full scale passenger train

What's wrong with "normal, full scale passenger trains"? I ride 'em every day to and from work.

[Edi]

One thing that could take a lot of demand off the power grid is battery-powered, wind-rechargeable lighting poles. There have been prototypes in Finland, basically you have a battery built into the lighting pole, and a small windmill on top, basically just a S-curved plate that catches the wind, spins and recharges the battery. It will keep the light going for up three days when fully charged, even if there is no wind. So if you replace lighting poles with these things, it's goin to be expensive up front but once you have them running, they draw nothing off the grid.

I don't know the figures, but given the amount of street and highway lighting, they are bound to be big.

[sketerpot]

Are street lights really necessary? If you just want to navigate, flashlights or headlights or even a lantern will give enough light to do a decent job.

They're nice for making areas feel safer at night, but if it came to that, we could turn them off. I kind of miss having nights be dark.

[Alferd Packer]

I look forward to getting to know more of my neighbors. As it is, a majority are immigrants from India or other areas of southeast Asia. Since they have the majority in my complex, they tend to socialize with other immigrants from the same country, if they socialize with anyone at all. Beyond making attempts to be friendly with them, there's little I can do, because it's not as if they're loud or disruptive in any way. In fact, it's just the opposite: aside from going to or coming home from work, you hardly see them. Their blinds are almost always drawn. If you didn't see them go in and out, you'd think that their apartments were unoccupied. Rarely do they sit out on the front stoop and just shoot the shit, for lack of better term.

I thus imagine that, in a post-Peak world, such isolation will not be possible. I mean, if your TV burns out and it costs to much too replace it, and it's 85 degrees out at 8:30 PM and it's too expensive to run the A/C for more than a few hours a day, what exactly is keeping you inside? Of course, I hope to be in a house of my own by the time the shit hits the fan, but the premise remains the same. If you can't cloister yourself in a climate-controlled den of electronic entertainment, then you might as well chat with the neighbors every once in a while to pass the time.

[aerius]

That's pretty much what happened during the big blackout in 2003. Everything was dead except landline phone service and battery powered radios. We actually got to see our neighbours and other people on our streets for the first time in years, we gathered on each others' lawns and driveways to pass some time and figure out what the hell we were gonna do.

[Edi]

Are street lights really necessary? If you just want to navigate, flashlights or headlights or even a lantern will give enough light to do a decent job.

They're nice for making areas feel safer at night, but if it came to that, we could turn them off. I kind of miss having nights be dark.

Streetlights are not going to go away in a hurry until the real crunch comes and the stuff I posted about is aimed at lessening existing drain on finite resources.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Re: Rail Trails. The reason why I said these should be opposed--only in favour of keeping the rails intact, even if disused--is simply because rail lines will create their own population density around them even if they're currently utterly worthless now. Old, abandoned rail routes will rapidly become as densely crowded around as the operational ones as the government restores services, and the lucky and smart people establish homes near there, and the rest of the unfortunates when the big crunch comes scrape by living in Hoovervilles along the trackside. The important part being living, and working, and indeed, fixing things. I don't really forsee that many people dying in the western world from peak oil.

[Alferd Packer]

And that's why I want to move into a house; the houses I'm looking at are within 1/2 mile of a twin-track commuter rail line stop. The only problem with it is that the lines aren't fully electrified, so they have to run diesels. I figure, even if I pay a lot now for a house within 10 minute's walk of a train station, it'll be worth a whole lot more in ten years.

[Mr. T]

This caught my eye in the paper this morning:

Harnessing wave power
Canada has a glorious opportunity to take lead in harnessing the ocean's immense fury

Jul 30, 2007 04:30 AM
Tyler Hamilton
Clean Break

Some are bobbers, others are turbines, and there are even models that move around like snakes.

They're all capable of harnessing electricity from the movement of our oceans, whether it's waves moving objects up and down or powerful tides that routinely push and pull.

Wave or tidal power doesn't get much attention in Canada, but technologies for extracting energy from ocean motion could end up following the same growth curves we have seen for wind and, more recently, solar power.

Canada's two coasts and Nunavut have the potential to generate more than 150 terawatt-hours of clean electricity a year using ocean or tidal power systems. This represents about a quarter of the country's annual electricity consumption, and the power would be predictable and constant – unlike wind and solar.

"Canada has the opportunity to be a leader in the long run on harnessing this vast renewable resource in a cost-effective, reliable way," according to Gouri Bhuyan, director of civil infrastructure and alternative energy technologies at Surrey, B.C.-based Powertech Labs Inc.

The question is whether we are taking advantage of this opportunity. On the surface it appears we're not, but behind the scenes there is activity going on. It may be a surprise to learn that Canada is the world's third-most active developer of ocean-energy technologies, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom.

We joined the International Energy Agency's "Implementing Agreement" on ocean energy systems back in 2003 to promote research, development and demonstration of such technologies. The countries in the group have a goal of seeing cost-competitive tidal and wave systems enter the market by 2020.

We're also one of the first to have a working commercial ocean-energy power plant. A 20-megawatt tidal plant was built in 1984 at Annapolis Royal by the Bay of Fundy. But since then the projects have been small and experimental – mostly demonstration projects, like the Race Rock tidal current system off of Vancouver Island.

There are currently about 10 of these smaller tidal and wave projects spread out between our west and east coasts, some of them funded by Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Canadian companies focused on the technology include Finavera Renewables, Blue Energy Canada, Clean Current Power, and New Energy Corp., and most are members of the Ocean Renewable Energy Group, which is a collaboration of industry, academia and government.

To help assist the development of new projects, Natural Resources Canada has created an ocean-energy atlas that quantifies and maps the best places in the country to establish tidal and wave systems.

The opportunities, however, aren't confined to Canada. The United States is beginning to wake up to the potential of ocean energy, and established energy companies such as oil giant Chevron Corp. are even getting into the game.
To help kick-start new projects, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced last week it would speed up the licensing process for new ocean-energy pilot projects – down to six months from what can often take five years. It reportedly has more than 50 licence applications pending.

The Canadian government should follow this path, since regulatory barriers – perhaps more than technology and economics – appear to be a key reason why ocean energy has been slow to develop. This isn't to suggest we don't take a hard look at the impact of these systems on marine life, coastal erosion, navigation and water recreation, but for all these considerations the environmental effects are believed to be small.

We also have to remember that ocean energy is more than simply about generating renewable, emission-free electricity. It could also play a significant role in dealing with a coming global water crisis.

What's the connection? Desalination technologies that take salt out of ocean water will increasingly be relied on to address water scarcity problems around the world. Ocean-energy power plants can play a strategic, complementary role. By definition they have access to an endless supply of salt water as well as the electricity needed to turn that water into a drinkable product.

Drought-stricken Australia is serious about taking this path, as are a number of other coastal countries concerned about their long-term supply of water, including the United States. Clearly, future demand could be immense and the economic opportunities for Canadian companies equally massive.

Canada needs to make larger waves in this market

article

I don't know much about the technology but hopefully it turns out to be feasible on a large scale and will be funded well enough to be implemented as soon as possible. Having a renewable, clean power source that best of all, can deliver power reliably will be almost priceless as we try and face down the carbon twins.

Mind you we need to create an integrated Canadian power grid as well so the power isn't fragmented at the various sections of the country but this seems like a huge potential. Combined with the James Bay Project and our existing nuclear reactors Canada looks to be sitting extremely well in terms of electical power supply at least. We just have to hope we don't have a U.S takeover (although I think fears of this are pretty overblown).

It's looking as if Canada could meet its own needs pretty well and probably have enough power to supply the U.S Northeast with lots of leftover electricity. Maybe this is one thing that's been overlooked when examining the U.S, if you live in a state that has a power grid connected to Quebec, life will be that much easier.

[J]

Except that this magic funland has never existed, except during the 19th century, and only with basic goods like skillets - it's kind of hard to break a cast iron skillet.

How do you think repairmen were in business in the 1920s and whatnot?

My 1940's Sunbeam toaster disagrees, as does my fiancé's 1960's vacuum tube stereo. He's taken both apart for inspection and cleaning and the build quality and attention to detail is something which isn't found anymore in consumer goods. To give an example, some of the fasteners in the toaster were (and are) safety-wired to prevent loosening, my fiancé noted that it's quite rare to see something like that outside of aviation or other such critical applications. No one makes a toaster like that these days, they're stamped & crimped and held together by a prayer, something is almost guaranteed to break within 5-10 years.

Or take clothing for example, say a nice Canadian made winter jacket. The seams are all very well put together, lots of double-stitching and so forth which not only makes the seams durable, but also wind & water resistant. There are no loose threads and the seams do not come apart. A cheap Asian-made winter jacket? Single-stitched in many places, poorly placed seams, loose threads hanging out the cuffs and all sorts of other defects and shortcuts in manufacture. Not surprisingly they only last a couple years.

As electronics is more my fiancé's specialty, I'll bug him to answer those points, but I suspect it's not going to come out in your favour.

[Spyder]

More people living closer to cities might make them more interesting. Could cause a number of other problems too, but there might be a benefit or two in there.

[Simplicius]

I'll go ahead and say that the pace of technical discovery after the war, married to the business imperative of maximizing sales and profits, can be blamed for the decrease in the quality of consumer goods. The simpler a product is to make, the more of them are available for sale, and the cheaper something can be made, the higher the profit margin - thus, a trend toward cheaper and crappier construction. I'll even go so far as to suggest that the 1950s consumer boom can be picked out as the real start of this. Not only had technical development sharply increased as a result of the war, but there was a large pool of cash as a result of wartime savings, and a real desire on the part of businesses not to see their wartime growth contract back to peacetime levels. Starting in that decade, the incentive to crank out as much as possible and sell as much as possible was particularly sharp.

[aerius]

What you're whining at over is large scale integration in the electronics industry; if the 1960s TV broke, it was actually possible for someone with SOME level of experience and intelligence to open it up and find the broken electronic part and replace it.

Now, everything is all massively integrated onto circuit boards; which means you'd have to be an EE to find and fix it, unless you get really lucky and it's just a obvious blown component.

Same thing happened with cars. Used to be in the 1950s and 1960s, when you opened up the hood, you had plenty of free space to move around and work in. Nowadays, with fuel efficiency standards, etc everything is all crammed together to use maximum volume efficiency. Cars last longer, but when they break, you're most likely going to have to disassemble half the engine to get to the broken part.

I don't know if you ever seen the insides of a 1960's TV, but let's just say those things were works of art, and many of them were built like precision lab instruments. Every last part was tied together and soldered properly, hell, on some of the old Zeniths they'd actually align the colour bands on all the resistors. That's the kind of quality and attention to detail which isn't seen anymore these days outside of boutique manufacturers. Same thing on my vacuum tube FM tuner, Fisher built the damn thing to military/aerospace standards.

Today, you ain't gonna see anything like that in consumer goods. Pull apart a TV and you'll see that half the parts are mounted crooked and the soldering is shit. Some joints will have huge blobs of solder while others will have way too little. Not to mention the shit parts they use, you'll often find parts which don't meet the required spec (a 2W resistor instead of a 3W unit, 25V capacitors instead of 35V) and all kinds of other questionable crap. I worked in the industry before I became a Customs worker, I've seen all this crap firsthand. This is why modern electronics have such a short lifespan, they use the cheapest shit available and they're built like crap.

[Sea Skimmer]

Obviously, you've never been to Chicago.

The Red and Blue lines both run down the medians of freeways. Yeah, it was "disruptive" when it was being built, but no more so than road repair. It may not be practical everywhere, but don't discount it off hand because it's already been done and that was in era of relatively cheap gas.

And they serve what purpose exactly, without being tied into a much more extensive system? You can’t just start laying track down the median of freeways and expect it to be viable. Putting in new lanes does relive congestion along the road, which ties into all other roads which probably do not operate at maximum capacity. You can’t directly replace one with the other.

[Broomstick]

Obviously, you've never been to Chicago.

The Red and Blue lines both run down the medians of freeways. Yeah, it was "disruptive" when it was being built, but no more so than road repair. It may not be practical everywhere, but don't discount it off hand because it's already been done and that was in era of relatively cheap gas.

And they serve what purpose exactly, without being tied into a much more extensive system?

500,000 people a day commute into central Chicago every work day, not only from Illinois but also from Wisconsin and Indiana, and there are only about 50,000-60,000 parking spaces. Obviously, they aren't all driving their cars downtown. Those two train lines are part of a system that moves hundreds of thousands of people a day.

The Blue line connects downtown to O'Hare Airport, which is itself one of the world's busiest travel hubs. The red line connects the south side of Chicago to downtown, where various transport systems converge. The red line is walking distance to Union Station (from which Amtrak operates) the Olgivie transportation station (which has train lines that run to Kenosha, Wisconsin), LaSalle Street Station (trains out to Joliet), the Greyhound bus terminal (goes all over the nation), and Randolph/Water Street station a.k.a. "Millenium Station" (trains out to South Bend, Indiana termininating at yet another airport). How is that not "being tied into a much more extensive system"?

And, oh yes, the terminal ends of the train lines have parking lots, so people driving from further out can park at the train line and ride the train the rest of the way (in the case of the Blue Line the big parking structure is actually one stop from the terminal end), and the suburban rail has parking lots at every station out past the city. Those lots are full and overflowing every work day.

I lived in Chicago for 15 years, 8 of those without a car. During those years I had no problem getting around not only the city itself but getting myself to other cities without needing a cab or a friend to drive me around. It's not unusual even these days to meet Chicago residents who never bothered to get a driver's license (although I wouldn't say it's really common, either). With monthly passes available, my cost per ride is about half that of paying ride by ride. There no way I could drive to work for anywhere near the same price for which I ride which is why the commuter lines, in particular, are doing well in Chicago. People ride the train not because the want to save the planet, they do it because it's much cheaper than driving.

As I said, it's been done. Of course, Chicago's rail system predates the automobile and it's been argued it's a relic... but the Blue Line wasn't completed until the 1980's, the Orange Line didn't exist at all until the 1990's, and there are serious plans to further extend the overall system (in my area, the are plans to extend the South Shore south, deeper into Indiana). The point being it's an example that rail can work.

[Broomstick]

Here is an interesting product from an interesting farm. I first heard about these guys on the Discovery network's Dirty Jobs. These dairy farmers compost cowshit (which they have in abundance), extract methane from it to help run their farm, use the liquid leftovers to fertilize their fields (returning nutrients to the soil and reducing reliance on artificial feritlizers), and the solids to produce planting pots which eliminate plastic garbage and, again, fertilize the soil they wind up planted in. Again, it's not that they are completely energy independent, but that they are reducing their reliance on dino-fuels and truly recycling the waste products of their operation. This is what the world needs more of.

[Broomstick]

The world doesn't need a better mousetrap, it needs a better toilet. This profiles a man and a toilet that uses little water, is mechanically simple, produces disease-free fertilizer from human waste and, for the large-scale public-use model, generates methane through natural processes (decomposing shit generates methane whether you want it to or not). It simultaneously solves problems in regard to water quality, waste disposal, energy generation, and where to take a shit. It won't solve every problem, but it certainly reduces or solves some that every human society has had to deal with since started living in one place for any extensive period of time.

The system uses about 2 liters of water per flush, which is lower than western-style "low flow" toilets. Some models can be built for $10. They don't require septic systems or sewer networks. According to this UN site over one million of these have been installed in households in India, and over 5,000 larger toilets that produce biogas from human waste to, for instance, supplement power systems for lights. This guy is a hero - he takes noxious waste and turns it into something safe and useful. It's not a theorectical dream - he's actually done it. Why don't we hear more about people like this?

[Gigaliel]

...

When we were doing thermodynamics in Physics, one of the problems we went over was about a power plant which works on the temperature differential between the surface of the ocean and the bottom of it and the problem was, based on the facts, how efficient was it, how much power could you get out of it, and was it worth (the answers being some, not terribly efficient, and depends). At the end of it, the teacher mentioned he did a feasibility study of the thing during his graduate school days and at the time, they deemed it not worth it because the kilowatt hours that fell out of it, which was completely fuelless as the Sun was the ultimate provider of energy, weren't worth it based on the maintenance costs of keeping the thing running. It was only like 5% maximum theoretical efficient and produced a few megawatts. However, you've got to wonder that if we are really reaching a maximum energy production situation, whether those sorts of schemes, like dotting our coasts with offshore temp differential powerplants that are sucking some megawatts off the oceans per platform, might become seriously looked at.

Those would be OTECs. And just to add on, the water that is pumped up (if it's deep enough) is rich in nitrates which you could either collect for fertilizer or use for aquafarming (algae, kelp, fish, crustaceans, etc). The amount you get is truly enormous as you have to pump a LOT of water to make that 5% efficiency worth it. India has built one or two for experimentation purposes, I believe. Also, mass algae farms would help with global warming! Woo. Also useful for biodiesel when specifically engineered types are grown. Plus, ocean colonization is good practice for space!

And to echo IP's request for information, how dangerous is the degradation of topsoil? As I understand from hydroponics, we can just dump the nutrients required via irrigation. Of course, sand doesn't really stay in place all that well and irrigating in the nutrients means that a harvest could be exterminated by mismanaged mixtures. There's also run-off and contamination of the water tables, I suppose. I imagine we'll have depleted those anyway.

I would also like to note the low lead times for solar photovoltaics (3-4 months!), wind, and tidal will make them quite useful for increasing the power available over the grid. They should average out nicely, since most cities are near coasts and it's typical either sunny and windless or vice versa. This should alleviate the burden needed to switch our infrastructure to nuclear/electric.

The Duchess's idea of deepwell/borehole geothermal could also be explored, as the temperature of the Earth's crust increase fairly uniformly as you drill downward. The drilling technology would also be useful for finding deeper sources of ores as well. The Soviet's proved it was feasible with the Kola Superdeep Borehole AND they did it with 1970s technology!

So really, being positive isn't too unrealistic as long politics doesn't fuck anything up.

[phongn]

This is why modern electronics have such a short lifespan, they use the cheapest shit available and they're built like crap.

Ugh - don't get me started on the legions of poorly constructed laptops dominating the market (many quite expensive). It's very rare to see any sort of attention to design detail other than making something look cool.