The Future Is Now, Vol. LXXXIV: Village Greens

The Peace Corps reports on the growth of green power generation among remote villages, including solar, water, biofuel and wind generators that power hyperefficient lighting and other low-wattage, high-value appliances.

Return to Biosphere 2

What happens to a building designed as a science experiment on sustainable habitats after 25 years? It slowly but surely falls apart. Sustainability exists only under two support models: total reliance on nature and high-technology-high-maintenance. Biosphere 2 was a case for the latter, and is swiftly being reclaimed by the former model. Although the Fulleresque skeleton seems to be holding up nicely, the carefully cultivated plantlife succumbed to the desert environment. Keep that in mind if you're launching yourself on a 250kiloton asteroid for a 1,000 year journey a la Charles Stross.

Deniergate

After the hacked emails of Climategate, the team at New Scientist not only showed that the scientific conclusions behind global warming, they've also published a handy reference to 10 debunked denier theories:

1. Fun with the sun

In 1991, the journal Science published a paper by researchers Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, then at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen. It included graphs that appeared to show a remarkably close correlation between solar activity and terrestrial temperatures – suggesting that other factors, such as carbon dioxide levels, have little influence on global temperatures.

The graphs were seized on by climate change sceptics and have been widely reproduced ever since. But according to Peter Laut of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, the close correlations in the original graphs, and in updated versions published in 1995 and 2000, exist only because of what he describes as a "pattern of strange errors".

Green Shoots

The key signs of real economic recovery include the presence of large orders for capital investment projects. Here's one now, a $1.6B order for windmills from GE. This is a very good sign.

Now, we need a large company to begin hiring a thousand people or more in support of growth efforts.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Thomas Friedman on the greening of China:

China’s leaders, mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles. In that world, E.T. — or energy technology — will be as big as I.T., and China intends to be a big E.T. player.

“For the last three years, the U.S. has led the world in new wind generation,” said the ecologist Lester Brown, author of “Plan B 4.0.” “By the end of this year, China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we won’t even see it go by.”

I met this week with Shi Zhengrong, the founder of Suntech, already the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. Shi recalled how, shortly after he started his company in Wuxi, nearby Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, choked to death from pollution.

“After this disaster,” explained Shi, “the party secretary of Wuxi city came to me and said, ‘I want to support you to grow this solar business into a $15 billion industry, so then we can shut down as many polluting and energy consuming companies in the region as soon as possible.’ He is one of a group of young Chinese leaders, very innovative and very revolutionary, on this issue. Something has changed. China realized it has no capacity to absorb all this waste. We have to grow without pollution.”

Greening is a seriously smart business strategy, because it cuts risk and improves the performance of the inputs of production. We'd better get to it sooner, rather than later, or we're going to be puffing hard to catch up.

The Future Is Now, LXXV: Geoengineering: Cheap, Easy, Dangerous

For $100B, you can pump sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to counteract greenhouse gases, turning the sky red in the process. Only problem is, no one knows for sure what will happen if you do, or what happpens when you stop.

T he scariest thing about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.

Even if Richard Branson behaves, a single rogue nation could have the resources to change the climate. Most of Bangladesh’s population lives in low-elevation coastal zones that would wash away if sea levels rose. For a fraction of its GDP, Bangladesh could refreeze the ice caps using sulfur aerosols (though, in a typical trade-off, this might affect its monsoons). If refreezing them would save the lives of millions of Bangladeshis, who could blame their government for acting? Such a scenario is unlikely; most countries would hesitate to violate international law and become a pariah. But it illustrates the political and regulatory complications that large-scale climate-changing schemes would trigger.

Grim Meathook Past

Origin of the phrase "grim meathook future", because there's an increasing, non-zero probability that I'll need to reference this at some point. Originally coined by Joshua Ellis, and adopted by, well, everybody.

Buffett Buys Some BYD

Warren Buffett recently invested in BYD, a Chinese battery-powered car company. Why? Because the business model fits with Buffett's investing philosophy: innovation + low cost production + fanatically hard working staff = profitability.

[Wang Chuan-Fu] started BYD with a modest goal: to edge in on the Japanese-dominated battery business. "Importing batteries from Japan was very expensive," Wang says. "There were import duties, and delivery times were long." He studied Sony and Sanyo patents and took apart batteries to understand how they were made, a "process that involved much trial and error," he says. (Sony and Sanyo later sued BYD, unsuccessfully, for infringing on their patents.)

BYD's breakthrough came when Wang decided to substitute migrant workers for machines. In place of the robotic arms used on Japanese assembly lines, which cost $100,000 or more apiece, BYD actually cut costs by hiring hundreds, then thousands, of people.

"When I first visited the BYD factory, I was shocked," says Daniel Kim, a Merrill Lynch technology analyst based in Hong Kong, who has been to the fully automated production lines in Japan and Korea. "It's a completely different business model." To control quality, BYD broke every job down into basic tasks and applied strict testing protocols. By 2002, BYD had become one of the top four manufacturers worldwide - and the largest Chinese manufacturer - in each of the three rechargeable battery technologies (Li-Ion, NiCad, and NiMH), according to a Harvard Business School case study of the company. And Wang stresses that BYD, unlike Sony and Sanyo, has never faced a recall of its batteries.

Big Wind

Near coast wind farms could provide 25% of total US energy needs.

Carbon Eating Cement?

Calera claims to have a net-carbon-negative cement. Others disagree. Discuss.

Smart Grids

Lynne Kiesling is gearing up for a mega-lecture on next generation smart utility grids. This technology is going to be one of the medium term drivers of the new green economy, because it is able to adapt to the diffuse manufacture and delivery of energy required by the green energy revolution.

What is the definition of smart grid, and what are its most important and relevant features? I encourage you to think of smart grid from two different directions simultaneously — its technologies and its functionalities. Technologically, a smart grid is a digital communication overlay and integration into the electric power network. This communication technology includes

* Digital switching networks
* Remote sensing and monitoring in wires and in transformers
* Fault detection
* Devices for automated fault repair
* Intelligent end-use devices in homes, stores, office buildings, garages, and factories.

These various smart grid technologies enable a variety of functionalities in the electric power network, such as

* Transactive coordination of the system (many of the following functionalities contribute to this coordination)
* Distributed resource interconnection, including renewable generation
* The ability of a resource/agent to be either a producer or consumer of electricity, or both
* Demand response to dynamic pricing
* The ability of an agent to program end-use devices to respond autonomously to price signals
* Distribution system automation by the wires company, leading to better service reliability

The integration of these technologies into the electric power network will embed distributed intelligence in the systems that the network comprises.

(via mr)