The future of energy is about looking up

There are two ways to look at how we are going to power our modern lifestyle. Look down or look up. I mean this quite literally. The fierce conversation revolving around clean coal, nuclear, solar, and wind can be better understood by where you look. When you use electrons, they may seem the same at the plug but can have a very different path they traveled to get there.

For the last 150 years we have been looking into the ground to source the power we need to energize our machines. We dig for coal, put it in a furnace and spin turbines for electrons. Natural gas does the same. Nuclear power came along and it promised abundant electrons as long as we looked past its pollution. Uranium from the ground is processed into a much more radioactive product that we can’t put back into the ground again. Hydropower has shown to be useful up to a point, but that point was realized decades ago.

The next decade will ask us if we are finally willing to look up. The sun has been a central topic about how to relieve ourselves from our current dirty power. Solar is a tricky force to negotiate with. Wind and sun comes and goes as they please, with some predictability but without consistency. We have used electricity for a few generations now to successfully sever our relationship with the lack of consistency of nature. Renegotiation with nature will be the only solution in the long run to keep our fires from changing the chemistry of our atmosphere into something that becomes much more unpredictable.

Looking down we see our past. What we are burning now is the fossilized and condensed form of solar power. Natural gas and coal result from plants capturing the sun and turning that energy into sugars. Those surgers over time have condensed and fossilized into hydrocarbons. Burning hydrocarbons is cheap but ridiculously inefficient from the point of view of energy expended and increasingly polluting. Most of our infrastructure has been build around this minable energy. (The exception is geothermal energy which comes from radioactive decay.)

This inefficiency in how we use our energy is easy to calculate. Take a regular light bulb and add all the energy it took to get coal from the ground to the actual percentage of electrons that made light for you to read. The amount of usable energy is 2.5 percent. This number is so low that there must be an error somewhere along the way, but the real culprit is that we did not build our systems with the idea of entropy in the equation. We made up the difference by putting more energy into the system, and moving the energy production further away so fewer people could see it.

Looking up we see the force that make all these electrons happen in the first place. We receive solar power in three immediate forms- thermal, radiation, and wind. Ways to turn these into viable energy sources require a host of technologies, not just one magic bullet. It is tricky to get this power to be usable when we want it and where we want it.

When you are looking up you may have to squint. It is not an easy prospect to renew our infrastructure and lifestyle to harness this truly infinite and extraordinary clean form of electrons. The electrons we produce will have to do more for us than they do now. Efficiency, distributed production, energy storage, smart grids and buildings are just the start of what our future looks like. We will need to integrate our transportation, food and housing with our new forms of energy production. Looking up is the only way to see our future.

Green Building with the Naked Eye Video

A video on Green Building With the Naked Eye. My friend John Fassler and I did a great job eating up the clock talking about the basics on green building. Take a look. (you may have to down load a driver to see it, but its worth it)

This was presented by Northern Colorado Renewable Energy Society and produced by Colorado State University Extended Studies.

Confessions of a Green Builder

Twelve years ago I set out in designing and building an addition to my off grid house and a workshop. After a lot of thought about design, cost, and implementation I now realized I made a mistake. Well, a few. The largest mistake was not fully appreciating how a building worked. I am typing this newsletter in that house right now, looking over a snowy morning where 9 degrees Fahrenheit seems just about right. I am comfortable, have a great view, and am in need for some coffee. The reason I am comfortable is that I put a log in the fireplace every few hours to keep the place heated. For you romantics out there, relax. Living in the Colorado wilderness off the grid in front of a fire on a chilly morning is great. Only after 15 years you would be interested in using less firewood to do the job.

Here is what I thought. R19 fiberglass seemed like a lot of insulation. I framed my walls out with 2x6 lumber and got smart by putting it on 24 inch centers. This saved me materials and reduced thermal bridging. That is where my thinking stopped since I had really did not understand how a good wall system worked. The shell of a building is also ironically its heart. Everything that makes a home work is dependent on the walls, roof and ceiling working well together. In my case this is what I didn't take seriously:

1. Seal all those holes where the wires run between studs with expanding foam

2. Caulk where outside sheathing meets the floor and ceiling and caulked where the drywall meets these transition points on the other side

3. Made sure every little bit of wall cavity was insulated, especially behind the wires, and at the back of electrical boxes

4. Filled every opening to the attic or crawlspace with a hard facing

5. Seal corners

6. Avoid the use fiberglass

7. Connect the roof, wall and foundation air barrier

8. Install foam panels underneath the siding

I'll let Dr. Joe Lstiburek take it from here http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/superinsulation-cant-work-if-windows-leak

Incredibly boring stuff I admit (although Dr. Joe certainly isn't), but the details make the difference. Like a certain recall from a certain company, we may well be recalling all the homes that did not get built with the details taken care of. "Cash for caulkers"may just be the nudge (just avoid the temptation to mindlessly swap out windows, another newsletter). After you build or retrofit like this then all of a sudden you can control your energy, allergies and some real money.

My other major mistake is in not understanding how much energy it takes to do a simple task like moving air. Smart was putting in a large thermal mass to regulate heat in the home. Not so smart was using passive approaches and forced air to move heat to and from that thermal mass. The science of moving energy from one place to another is that it takes 3 times as much force to move air than it does fluid. I did not put tubing under the floor to heat it up, instead I rely on ducts. Living off the grid means that I just wasted a lot of energy and potential by using a poor heat distribution system.

In the summer I installed operable windows built to the afternoon prevailing winds, which was brilliant if only for a couple months in the year. Dumb was that the cool heavy air at night comes sliding down the hill and I installed only a small operable window to let that lovely air in. Night cooling is a perfect fit for many of us but we need to make it work.

My hybrid, earthship workshop has skylights for heat and lighting. I unfortunately placed them on the lower portion of the roof and don't get the heat and light where I need it. In my house I learned to install the two modestly sized skylights high up so sunlight reflects off the wall an fills the main room all day with lovely indirect light that does not over heat. That was a lesson learned on time.

I can overcome all these problems with energy sucking motors and plenty of propane, but with a little more insight into how I was designing to the land and how energy moves through a house I would be much more ahead of the game. So it's time to get busy. One inch of foam board around the house exterior, air sealing, tubing retrofitted in the floor hooked up to a solar thermal panel, and larger opening on the uphill side of the house.

Your building can be smart too. I am in business to bring not just my hard learned lessons, but the entire industries to your building project. We learned whole lot in just the last decade, but the problem is many building professionals have not kept pace with this knowledge or have become so specialized the greater function of the building can get lost. If you are dependent on out-of-date building information or inappropriate systems then you will have big problems baked into the cake. If you put the proper forethought into the way the building is put together your pay back is not just in lowered energy bills, but health, durability and adaptability. I know you heard this before, now it's time to make this a reality. After all, the deliberate life is informed by a deliberate space.

Time for some coffee and another log.