Will we ever have the power to fly a starship?
Consider a basic starship design, with a payload of several tens of thousands of tonnes, thus large enough to carry a human community of some hundreds or thousands of people, and propelled by a high-thrust, high-energy rocket engine.
First, we need to estimate what sort of speed we want to cruise at. From both the technical and the social points of view, a speed in the region of a tenth of light speed seems to be both attainable and desirable (note 5).
Assuming that we can find and use sufficiently energetic starship fuel, a rough calculation puts the energy consumption of our starship at about 3.6 x 1023 Joules, or 1.0 x 1014 MWh (note 6).
This is equivalent to about one fifteenth of an Earthpower-year.
By 20th-century human standards, a fifteenth of an Earthpower-year is an outrageous amount of energy. Fuelling one starship would require all other human activity to cease for about one thousand years.
But will this always be so? The Sun generates 1000 times this amount of energy every second. It has done so for billions of years and will continue to do so for billions of years to come.
Suppose that it is possible to store solar energy for subsequent release in a rocket engine to produce thrust -- an obvious suggestion is to store it in the form of antimatter, which is permitted by the laws of physics as at present understood, but is probably about as far in advance of our present-day engineering capacities as building a nuclear-powered rocket would have been for the pioneers of steam (Thomas Newcomen introduced the first viable steam engine at Dudley Castle coal mine in 1712; the Phoebus 2A nuclear rocket, with a power output of 5000 MW, was tested successfully in 1968).
Imagine that a solar power collector could be built with a radius of 638 km, producing solar energy in some storable form such as antimatter. For an advanced space-based civilisation this should be no trouble at all. Let it be placed in orbit near the Sun, at one tenth of the distance of the Earth. It will then collect energy at a rate of one Earthpower, in other words one starship-load per month. This is beginning to look like a profitable industry of the future (say, 300 years hence).
The essential point of this discussion is that an interplanetary-level civilisation will have access to the full power output of its home star. When one appreciates that our present-day civilisation consumes less than one ten-thousandth of an Earthpower and that the total solar power available is more than a billion Earthpower -- and this does not begin to take into account the possibility of clean nuclear fusion using helium-3 mined on the giant planets -- one begins to appreciate the potential for space-based economic growth over the centuries and millennia to come.
One last point. We do not of course know whether a space-based interplanetary civilisation will ever become a reality. Maybe there is some fatal flaw in human group psychology or biology which will forever restrict us to this one planet. Nobody can predict the future. But what we do know is that the only way to find out is to get out there and try to make it work. And we also know that no fatal flaws have emerged so far; quite the opposite, as early predictions that astronauts would become disoriented or sick were resoundingly quashed.
People have lived comfortably in orbiting space-stations for periods of over a year; they have flown successfully to the Moon and back and worked efficiently on its surface. The dangers are understood; the rewards potentially astronomical.
To describe our present-day society -- with all its economic problems, its drug-taking, its famines, its poverty, its wars and its terrorist outrages -- as a society on the threshold of infinite possibilities is to be no more than a hard-headed realist.
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Useful units of energy and power
1 calorie = 4.185 J
1 erg = 10-7 J
1 kW = 8766 kWh/year (and similarly for W and MW)
1 kWh = 3.6 MJ
The energy content of TNT is about 4 MJ per kilogram (various sources consulted).
(J = Joules, of energy; W = Watts, of power, i.e. energy per unit time; kWh = kilowatt-hours; kg = kilograms, MJ = Megajoules.)
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Energy content of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb (the Hiroshima bomb, except that Duncan Steel, Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets (Wiley, 1995), gives that as 13 kilotons) = 80 x 106 MJ.
Energy content of the Tunguska impactor (1908) = between 10 and 20 megatons (Steel, p. 44); 15 megatons = 60 x 109 MJ.
Energy content of most powerful nuclear device exploded by Man = 67 megatons (Steel, p. 59) = 268 x 109 MJ.
Energy content of impact of Fragment G of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter (Scientific American, Oct. 1994, p. 8) is thought to have been at least 6 million megatons = 24 x 1015 MJ.
Energy expenditure of starship which accelerates a 30,000 tonne payload onto an interstellar cruise at a speed of 13% that of light and decelerates it at its destination = 360 x 1015 MJ.
Energy content of the Chicxulub dinosaur-killer = at least 100 million megatons, and probably very much greater (Steel, pp. 56-57), = about 100 million megatons (CCNet, 18 Dec. 2000, item 2), = a force of impact equivalent to an earthquake about 10,000 times stronger than the one that leveled San Francisco in 1906 (CCNet, 18 Dec. 2000, item 3); 100 million megatons = 400 x 1015 MJ.
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One Sunpower = the total power radiated by the Sun at the present epoch = 3.85 x 1020 MW.
Equivalently: one Sunpower = 3.375 x 1024 MWh/year.
The Solar Irradiance = the solar power passing through unit area at the orbital distance of the Earth = 1.368 kWm-2.
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The definition of an Earthpower is not so straightforward. Earth receives energy from two main sources: radiant sunlight and internal radioactivity. About a third of the sunlight falling on Earth is immediately reflected back into space (i.e. Earth's albedo is about 0.33, though varies somewhat depending on the degree of cloud and snow cover); the rest is absorbed into the atmosphere, oceans or land and is eventually re-radiated as heat after driving the climate and Earth's biosphere. Internal radioactive decay heats Earth's interior and drives geological processes such as volcanoes and continental drift, before again eventually escaping to space as waste heat.
I propose the following definitions:
One Earthpower = the amount of sunlight falling on Earth = the Solar Irradiance times the area of the disk of Earth as seen from the Sun = 1.748 x 1011 MW = 1.533 x 1015 MWh/year (as per the calculation given at the top of this page).
The purpose of this unit is to act as a convenient and easily visualised unit of large amounts of power, particularly in the context of the large-scale harvesting of solar power by space-based collectors for industrial use.
One Earthpower-year = one Earthpower sustained for one year = 1.533 x 1015 MWh = 5.52 x 1024 J.
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One Absorbed Earthpower = the amount of sunlight actually absorbed into Earth's atmosphere and surface = approximately two-thirds of an Earthpower, or around 1.0 x 1015 MWh/year. (With the Absorbed Earthpower we might make comparisons between the energy input by the Sun and that input by human industrial activities on Earth, currently around 1011 MWh/year, i.e. one ten-thousandth of an absorbed Earthpower.)
Geothermal power is relatively small. Don Anderson, Theory of the Earth (Blackwell, 1989), gives it as about 1013 calories/second. If he means gram-calories, then this is 4 x 107 MW. John S. Lewis, Mining the Sky (Helix Books, Addison-Wesley, 1996), p.224, gives it as 1028 ergs/year, or 1015 MJ/year. Since 1 W = 1 Js-1, 1 W = 31.5576 MJ/year, and his figure for the geothermal heat flow is about 3 x 107 MW, in reasonable agreement.
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Estimate of energy available in the helium-3 reserves of the giant planets
A mature space industrial civilisation will have access to considerable reserves of fuel suitable for nuclear fusion reactors. The reaction of deuterium with helium-3 is especially suitable for power generation, whether in an electrical power plant or for rocket propulsion, since the main branches of the reaction do not produce free neutrons and thus relatively little unwanted radioactivity is created. The only snag is that, whereas deuterium is widely available, helium-3 is virtually non-existent on Earth.
Robert Parkinson MBE gives an estimate of at least ten thousand trillion tonnes (1016 tonnes) of helium-3 in the atmosphere of Jupiter (Daedalus Report, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 1978, p.84). His estimate assumes that 17% of the Jovian atmosphere is helium and that the abundance of helium-3 relative to helium-4 is a cautious one part in 100,000, though he expects the actual abundance to be nearer one part in 10,000.
John S. Lewis points out that helium-3 is just as accessible in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune (Mining the Sky, Helix Books, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ch.13). The longer flight times between these outer planets and the inner solar system would be irrelevant once a regular supply line had been set up, while their lower escape velocities would greatly facilitate lifting the helium-3 collected off the planet and returning it to where it was required. The escape velocities of the four giants are:
Jupiter: 60 km/s;
Saturn: 36 km/s;
Uranus and Neptune: both 20 km/s;
Compare with Earth: 11.2 km/s.
This means that the rocket energy necessary to launch a tonne of helium-3 off either Uranus or Neptune is only about one-ninth that required to launch it off Jupiter, and therefore that Uranus (the nearer of the two) is likely to be the first planet to supply helium-3. Nevertheless, the rocket power required is still considerable, and will demand a nuclear engine. Hydrogen for the return journey (the reaction mass for the nuclear rocket) will not be a problem, since it is the commonest constituent of the atmospheric gas and will be a byproduct of the helium-3 extraction process.
How long does it take to reach the giant planets? For regular flights by automatic spacecraft we cannot rely on the gravitational slingshot effect used by the Pioneer and Voyager probes. Jupiter is only aligned correctly with Saturn once every 19.9 years, with Uranus once every 13.8 years, and with Neptune once every 12.8 years. So our space tankers will probably fly the low-energy Hohmann transfer ellipse between Earth and the outer planet of choice. A complete mission would involve a flight out, a period of time spent in the giant planet's atmosphere extracting helium-3 or loading it from an extractor plant already in place, and a return to Earth (assuming that the helium-3 was to be delivered to Earth). The time for the flights out and back is easy to calculate: it is simply the period of an ellipse whose perihelion is 1 astronomical unit and whose aphelion is the distance of an outer planet (all of which move in almost exactly circular orbits). Those periods are as follows:
Jupiter: 5.5 years;
Saturn: 12.1 years;
Uranus: 32.1 years;
Neptune: 61.3 years.
Given that we may already be within a decade or two of building a practical fusion reactor, these lengthy round-trip times, especially to Uranus and Neptune, plus the time required on site to load up with helium-3, suggest that we could well start right now with a pilot project to bring back the first samples.
How much of the stuff is there? John Lewis considers the atmosphere of Uranus down to a depth where the pressure is 12 atmospheres, and estimates the helium-3 resource to be 16 trillion tonnes (16 x 1012 tonnes).
How much energy will this generate in a fusion reactor? The reaction is 2D + 3He –> 4He + 1p; mass fraction converted to energy is 0.0039 (Daedalus, p.47); burnup efficiency may be around 10% (Daedalus, p.57-60). One tonne of helium-3 in combination with 2/3 tonne of deuterium then yields 5/3 (tonnes) x 1000 (kg per tonne) x 0.0039 (fraction converted to energy) x 0.1 (efficiency = fraction of fusion fuel actually consumed) x 9 x 1016 (speed of light squared) = 5.85 x 1016 J, or 1.85 GWyear.
If current annual global industrial energy consumption is 10,000 GWyear, this is equivalent to the use of about 5400 tonnes of helium-3 in fusion reactors (John Lewis, p.211, makes it 450 tonnes per year, but starts from a power figure of 8500 GW and probably assumes that the fusion fuels can be reacted at 100% efficiency, which is unlikely).
Let us assume that John Lewis's figure for the helium-3 resource of Uranus is accurate (i.e. that atmospheric mixing is only efficient down to a depth where the pressure is 12 atmospheres), and that the resources of the other giants are in proportion with their masses. Then the energy reserves in the atmospheric helium-3 of the giant planets, expressed in years at the present-day rate of use, are as follows:
Jupiter: mass 318 Earth masses, estimated helium-3 resource 350 trillion tonnes, equivalent to 65 billion years;
Saturn: mass 95 Earth masses, estimated helium-3 resource 104 trillion tonnes, equivalent to 19 billion years;
Uranus: mass 14.6 Earth masses, estimated helium-3 resource 16 trillion tonnes, equivalent to 3 billion years;
Neptune, mass 17.2 Earth masses, estimated helium-3 resource 19 trillion tonnes, equivalent to 3.5 billion years.
On the subject of mining helium-3 on the Moon, see John Lewis, p.137-41, for reasons why this is unlikely to become practical.
From Space Age: the Energy Page
Basically, the concentration of helium-3 absorbed into the lunar regolith is expected to be about one part in 100 million, whereas its concentration in the atmospheres of the giant planets seems to be about one part in 100,000, or 1000 times greater. Lunar regolith, being solid, is very much harder to work than atmospheric gases. A lunar helium-3 mine would consume large amounts of electrical power, and also require constant maintenance. The energy advantage of extracting helium-3 is little greater than that of devoting the same effort to collecting solar power and using it directly, with the difference that the helium-3 is a non-renewable resource whereas solar power will continue for billions of years to come. The helium-3 sources of choice are therefore, in Lewis's view, the atmospheres of the outer giants, starting with Uranus.
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Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Roger Helm's Opinion
October 11, 2009, 4:16 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized
Regular readers of this column are familiar — perhaps sick and tired — of hearing me go on, Cassandra-like, about the energy crisis we’re facing. We’re already paying over the odds for domestic and commercial electricity, as we fund the government’s lunatic dash for wind, and the “Renewables Obligation Certificates” that mean that turbine companies are farming not wind, but subsidies.
And they’ve heard me say over and over that we risk running out of electricity sometime around 2015, as the wind-farm development programme falters; as we fail to build the mainstream baseload back-up capacity we need; and above all as our elderly nuclear fleet is decommissioned, and as Brussels forces us, through its Large Combustion Plant Directive, to close down perfectly good coal-fired power stations to satisfy its climate alarmism.
To be fair, I wasn’t quite a lone voice. Others like Professor Ian Fells of Newcastle University were saying the same thing. But now OfGem itself, the government’s own Quango tasked with regulating the industry (www.ofgem.gov.uk), has issued a report saying much the same things.
They’ve done detailed studies on a range of future scenarios, and they predict that electricity prices will rise in real terms by at least 14% by 2020, and more likely 25%, with a possible worst-case peak of 60%. The £2000 a year household energy bill could soon be with us, pushing further millions into fuel poverty.
If we wanted to go to Dublin, we wouldn’t start from here. Ten years ago, this government should have been looking at long-term energy security, and facilitating a programme of nuclear construction. They should perhaps also have looked at prospects for mining UK Coal in the face of rising prices for imported fuel. They were utterly derelict in their duty. They failed to do these things, and we will all pay the price — literally.
What do we need to do now? Press ahead with new mainstream generating capacity, coal and nuclear, as fast as possible. Abandon the folly of wind power, whilst investing in research and development of potentially viable renewable technologies — tidal power, bio-mass, solar, waste incineration with energy recovery, anaerobic digestion — and of course efficiency and energy conservation. Build major new gas storage facilities, to make us a little less dependant on short-term price fluctuations. Create a tax and regulatory environment to ensure we make the most of our rapidly dwindling North Sea Reserves. But above all, more nuclear capacity. And fast.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Regular readers of this column are familiar — perhaps sick and tired — of hearing me go on, Cassandra-like, about the energy crisis we’re facing. We’re already paying over the odds for domestic and commercial electricity, as we fund the government’s lunatic dash for wind, and the “Renewables Obligation Certificates” that mean that turbine companies are farming not wind, but subsidies.
And they’ve heard me say over and over that we risk running out of electricity sometime around 2015, as the wind-farm development programme falters; as we fail to build the mainstream baseload back-up capacity we need; and above all as our elderly nuclear fleet is decommissioned, and as Brussels forces us, through its Large Combustion Plant Directive, to close down perfectly good coal-fired power stations to satisfy its climate alarmism.
To be fair, I wasn’t quite a lone voice. Others like Professor Ian Fells of Newcastle University were saying the same thing. But now OfGem itself, the government’s own Quango tasked with regulating the industry (www.ofgem.gov.uk), has issued a report saying much the same things.
They’ve done detailed studies on a range of future scenarios, and they predict that electricity prices will rise in real terms by at least 14% by 2020, and more likely 25%, with a possible worst-case peak of 60%. The £2000 a year household energy bill could soon be with us, pushing further millions into fuel poverty.
If we wanted to go to Dublin, we wouldn’t start from here. Ten years ago, this government should have been looking at long-term energy security, and facilitating a programme of nuclear construction. They should perhaps also have looked at prospects for mining UK Coal in the face of rising prices for imported fuel. They were utterly derelict in their duty. They failed to do these things, and we will all pay the price — literally.
What do we need to do now? Press ahead with new mainstream generating capacity, coal and nuclear, as fast as possible. Abandon the folly of wind power, whilst investing in research and development of potentially viable renewable technologies — tidal power, bio-mass, solar, waste incineration with energy recovery, anaerobic digestion — and of course efficiency and energy conservation. Build major new gas storage facilities, to make us a little less dependant on short-term price fluctuations. Create a tax and regulatory environment to ensure we make the most of our rapidly dwindling North Sea Reserves. But above all, more nuclear capacity. And fast.
Labels:
Roger Helm renewable energy
Burn Straw for Heat- Denmark
SAMSO, Denmark — The people of this Danish island have seen the future, and it is dim and smells vaguely of straw.
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Enlarge This Image
Jakob Dall for The New York Times
Mr. Tranberg uses a special pump to extract the heat from his cows’ milk, then uses the warmth to heat his brick farmhouse.
Related
Times Topics: Global Warming
Enlarge This Image
Jakob Dall for The New York Times
Jorgen Tranberg purchased a wind turbine for $1.2 million, with a bank loan; it now stands in a row of five behind his farmhouse.
The New York Times
Samso residents say they have become energy self-sufficient.
With no traffic lights on the island and few street lights, driving its roads on a cloudless night is like piercing a black cloud. There is one movie theater, few cars and even fewer buses, except for summer, when thousands of tourists multiply the population.
Yet last year, Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island’s sparse sunshine.
By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. “We just met it,” said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders.
In December, when the United Nations-sponsored summit meeting on climate change convenes in Denmark, many of the delegates will be swept out to visit Samso. They will see its successes, but also how high the hurdles are for exporting the model from this little island, a hilly expanse roughly the size of the Bronx.
On a recent visit, Mr. Hermansen recounted, the Egyptian ambassador to Denmark admired all the energy-creating devices the islanders had installed, then asked how many people lived here. When he was told about 4,000, he replied with exasperation, “That’s three city blocks in Cairo!” Undaunted, Mr. Hermansen told him, “That’s maybe where you should start, not all of Egypt, take one block at a time.”
Jorgen Tranberg, 55, agreed. “If there were no straw, we’d have no fuel, but we have straw,” he said, sipping coffee on the 250-acre dairy farm where he milks 150 Holsteins. “Everywhere is different,” he said. “Norway has waterfalls, we have wind. The cheapest is oil and coal, that’s clear.” The farmers, he said, used to burn the straw on their fields, polluting the air. Now, they use it to heat their homes.
Counting only the wind turbines on the island, but not those that the islanders have parked offshore in the Kattegat Strait, the island produces just enough electricity for its needs. (With the offshore turbines it can even export some.) However, its heating plants, burning wheat and rye straw grown by its farmers, cover only about 75 percent of the island’s heating needs, continuing its reliance on imported oil and gas.
The islanders have been inventive. Mr. Tranberg uses a special pump to extract the heat from his cows’ milk, then uses the warmth to heat his house. He has even invested in wind turbines. He purchased one outright for $1.2 million, with a bank loan; it now stands in a row of five just behind his brick farmhouse. He later bought a 50 percent stake in another turbine.
But all that spins is not gold, he soon found out. When a gearbox burned out in one mill three years ago, the repair cost more than $150,000. He did not say how much he makes from selling the electricity.
Energy experts emphasize that it is crucial for the islanders to squeeze energy out of their island without relying heavily on sea-based turbines. Not every region of the world is blessed with an expanse of thousands of miles of ocean at its doorstep.
“Otherwise, it becomes a public-relations exercise,” said Philip Sargent, one of the founders of the Cambridge Energy Forum in England. Yet the experiment could also be useful as a demonstration of technology, he said, or simply to clarify the scale of what is needed, “on densely populated islands like the British Isles.”
Many islanders, like Uffe Bach and his wife, Else Marie, have treated the energy experiment as a profit-making venture. Mr. Bach, 63, who sports a ponytail, is a Johnny Cash fan and boasts that he is the only owner of a Harley-Davidson on the island. He says he did most of the work rebuilding the schoolhouse where they now live, installing a special wood-burning oven to heat the downstairs and laying 1,300 feet of pipe in a field behind the house to pump warmth from the ground to heat the rest of the house.
Ten years ago, the Bachs paid $40,000 for a share in a wind turbine off the south shore, last year pocketing a dividend of $4,700 from the sale of its electricity. Else Marie, 45, said it was only natural for the islanders to embrace the energy project. “People here were poor,” she said. “So they had to think differently.”
On the winding main street of Tranebjerg, whose population of 829 makes it by far the island’s largest town, Jytte Nauntoft, 46, sells appliances in a store that her husband’s family has owned for generations. The islanders, she said, have all the necessary home appliances, like washers and dryers, refrigerators and stoves. Yet, she added, “Electricity is expensive, so they buy the basic models.”
There is no gas, so gas stoves are nonexistent, and the cool climate makes air-conditioners unnecessary. Five years ago, she said, with the help of state subsidies, she and her husband erected a small windmill behind their home, which now supplies almost all their electricity. Like Mr. Bach they use a heat pump to draw warmth from the ground to heat their rooms.
In the bookshop opposite Ms. Nauntoft’s appliance store, Liselotte Andersen, 50, a sales clerk, said “it became natural for us” to embrace the energy project. The project was also crucial, she said, to provide islanders a sense of purpose, and jobs. The island has no high schools, so older children leave for boarding schools or live with relatives off-island after grade school. Many do not return.
Two of Ms. Andersen’s three sons are living off the island. Asked whether she thought they would return, she replied, “We hope some will come back.
“I think the eldest will come back,” she added. “If he found a small farm
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Jakob Dall for The New York Times
Mr. Tranberg uses a special pump to extract the heat from his cows’ milk, then uses the warmth to heat his brick farmhouse.
Related
Times Topics: Global Warming
Enlarge This Image
Jakob Dall for The New York Times
Jorgen Tranberg purchased a wind turbine for $1.2 million, with a bank loan; it now stands in a row of five behind his farmhouse.
The New York Times
Samso residents say they have become energy self-sufficient.
With no traffic lights on the island and few street lights, driving its roads on a cloudless night is like piercing a black cloud. There is one movie theater, few cars and even fewer buses, except for summer, when thousands of tourists multiply the population.
Yet last year, Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island’s sparse sunshine.
By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. “We just met it,” said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders.
In December, when the United Nations-sponsored summit meeting on climate change convenes in Denmark, many of the delegates will be swept out to visit Samso. They will see its successes, but also how high the hurdles are for exporting the model from this little island, a hilly expanse roughly the size of the Bronx.
On a recent visit, Mr. Hermansen recounted, the Egyptian ambassador to Denmark admired all the energy-creating devices the islanders had installed, then asked how many people lived here. When he was told about 4,000, he replied with exasperation, “That’s three city blocks in Cairo!” Undaunted, Mr. Hermansen told him, “That’s maybe where you should start, not all of Egypt, take one block at a time.”
Jorgen Tranberg, 55, agreed. “If there were no straw, we’d have no fuel, but we have straw,” he said, sipping coffee on the 250-acre dairy farm where he milks 150 Holsteins. “Everywhere is different,” he said. “Norway has waterfalls, we have wind. The cheapest is oil and coal, that’s clear.” The farmers, he said, used to burn the straw on their fields, polluting the air. Now, they use it to heat their homes.
Counting only the wind turbines on the island, but not those that the islanders have parked offshore in the Kattegat Strait, the island produces just enough electricity for its needs. (With the offshore turbines it can even export some.) However, its heating plants, burning wheat and rye straw grown by its farmers, cover only about 75 percent of the island’s heating needs, continuing its reliance on imported oil and gas.
The islanders have been inventive. Mr. Tranberg uses a special pump to extract the heat from his cows’ milk, then uses the warmth to heat his house. He has even invested in wind turbines. He purchased one outright for $1.2 million, with a bank loan; it now stands in a row of five just behind his brick farmhouse. He later bought a 50 percent stake in another turbine.
But all that spins is not gold, he soon found out. When a gearbox burned out in one mill three years ago, the repair cost more than $150,000. He did not say how much he makes from selling the electricity.
Energy experts emphasize that it is crucial for the islanders to squeeze energy out of their island without relying heavily on sea-based turbines. Not every region of the world is blessed with an expanse of thousands of miles of ocean at its doorstep.
“Otherwise, it becomes a public-relations exercise,” said Philip Sargent, one of the founders of the Cambridge Energy Forum in England. Yet the experiment could also be useful as a demonstration of technology, he said, or simply to clarify the scale of what is needed, “on densely populated islands like the British Isles.”
Many islanders, like Uffe Bach and his wife, Else Marie, have treated the energy experiment as a profit-making venture. Mr. Bach, 63, who sports a ponytail, is a Johnny Cash fan and boasts that he is the only owner of a Harley-Davidson on the island. He says he did most of the work rebuilding the schoolhouse where they now live, installing a special wood-burning oven to heat the downstairs and laying 1,300 feet of pipe in a field behind the house to pump warmth from the ground to heat the rest of the house.
Ten years ago, the Bachs paid $40,000 for a share in a wind turbine off the south shore, last year pocketing a dividend of $4,700 from the sale of its electricity. Else Marie, 45, said it was only natural for the islanders to embrace the energy project. “People here were poor,” she said. “So they had to think differently.”
On the winding main street of Tranebjerg, whose population of 829 makes it by far the island’s largest town, Jytte Nauntoft, 46, sells appliances in a store that her husband’s family has owned for generations. The islanders, she said, have all the necessary home appliances, like washers and dryers, refrigerators and stoves. Yet, she added, “Electricity is expensive, so they buy the basic models.”
There is no gas, so gas stoves are nonexistent, and the cool climate makes air-conditioners unnecessary. Five years ago, she said, with the help of state subsidies, she and her husband erected a small windmill behind their home, which now supplies almost all their electricity. Like Mr. Bach they use a heat pump to draw warmth from the ground to heat their rooms.
In the bookshop opposite Ms. Nauntoft’s appliance store, Liselotte Andersen, 50, a sales clerk, said “it became natural for us” to embrace the energy project. The project was also crucial, she said, to provide islanders a sense of purpose, and jobs. The island has no high schools, so older children leave for boarding schools or live with relatives off-island after grade school. Many do not return.
Two of Ms. Andersen’s three sons are living off the island. Asked whether she thought they would return, she replied, “We hope some will come back.
“I think the eldest will come back,” she added. “If he found a small farm
Sunday, October 11, 2009
David Suzuki Quote
A quote attributed to David Suzuki:
"...wind farms, like any development, need to be sited properly and appropriately placed in areas where they can have the greatest positive effect with the smallest environmental footprint. After all, the whole point of clean energy is to reduce our environmental burden, not make it worse."
David Suzuki
"...wind farms, like any development, need to be sited properly and appropriately placed in areas where they can have the greatest positive effect with the smallest environmental footprint. After all, the whole point of clean energy is to reduce our environmental burden, not make it worse."
David Suzuki
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envirionmental footprint
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Your incredible photos, videos, and posts shine a positive light on the importance of the Clean Energy and Climate bill that will be voted on in the U.S. Senate in the coming weeks.
Poetic Social Mission -- Moving Stars and Earth for Water
Look up to the stars this Friday for Moving Stars and Earth for Water -- a truly unique event of the Poetic Social Mission, to be carried out from space by Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil and president of the ONE DROP Foundation.
The Poetic Social Mission is the world's first artistic and social mission from space. Seeking to help advance the movement in favor of water for all, this one-of-a-kind global event, broadcast on the One Drop home page Friday October 9, will be a beautiful 2-hour artistic event.
Click here for more info.
October 24th -- International Day of Climate Action
350.org is calling on people around the world to organize an action on October 24 that incorporates the number 350 at an iconic place in their community, and then upload a photo of their event.
The International Day of Climate Action will cover almost every country on earth, the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. Your actions on October 24 will help our leaders realize we need a real solution that pays attention to the science at the crucial UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen in December of 2009.
Click here for more info.
Thanks and be sure to visit LiveEarth.org next week for a special announcement!
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Hello ,
Great Photos and Prizes from 'Love, The Climate' Giveaway! Thanks to everyone who participated in the "Love, The Climate" Giveaway! Over the course of ten days we received thousands of entries including hundreds of Flickr photos, Facebook photos and posts, videos, and voicemails giving thanks in advance to those who act to preserve our environment today. It takes the energy of a global movement to help solve the critical environmental issues of our time.
Your incredible photos, videos, and posts shine a positive light on the importance of the Clean Energy and Climate bill that will be voted on in the U.S. Senate in the coming weeks.
Poetic Social Mission -- Moving Stars and Earth for Water
Look up to the stars this Friday for Moving Stars and Earth for Water -- a truly unique event of the Poetic Social Mission, to be carried out from space by Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil and president of the ONE DROP Foundation.
The Poetic Social Mission is the world's first artistic and social mission from space. Seeking to help advance the movement in favor of water for all, this one-of-a-kind global event, broadcast on the One Drop home page Friday October 9, will be a beautiful 2-hour artistic event.
Click here for more info.
October 24th -- International Day of Climate Action
350.org is calling on people around the world to organize an action on October 24 that incorporates the number 350 at an iconic place in their community, and then upload a photo of their event.
The International Day of Climate Action will cover almost every country on earth, the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. Your actions on October 24 will help our leaders realize we need a real solution that pays attention to the science at the crucial UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen in December of 2009.
Click here for more info.
Thanks and be sure to visit LiveEarth.org next week for a special announcement!
Digby Neck- from the Ottawa Citizen
Goodbye, Small Town, North America
Canwest News ServiceOctober 9, 2009Be the first to post a comment
StoryPhotos ( 1 )
Small towns across North America, such as the hamlet of Cayley, Alta., above, are experiencing brain drains into big cities that make life harder for those who stay behind.Photograph by: Lorraine Hjalte, Canwest News ServiceExperts say rural communities are feeding their own demise by encouraging their best and brightest to leave while not nurturing those young people who choose to stay behind. Shannon Proudfoot explains.
An exodus of young people seeking education, adventure and success in bigger cities, combined with economic upheaval that has left little opportunity for those who stayed behind, has resulted in a dramatic "hollowing out" of North America's small communities. And worse, by not adapting to this new reality, small towns are playing a big part in their own demise.
"The big question in a small town is, 'Do you stay or do you go?' " says Patrick Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers University and author of the new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America. "This is the key question, not just for coming of age, but for the town itself: Who do you hold onto and who do you not?"
The book is a collaboration between Carr and his wife and co-author, Maria Kefalas. They spent several months living in and studying an Iowa town of 2,000, tracking who stayed and who left.
Small towns have always encouraged their best and brightest to leave in search of better opportunities, Carr says, and that worked fine a generation ago when agriculture, manufacturing and the auto industry provided stable, decent-paying jobs for those who stayed behind. Those industries have been gutted and small communities are now "colluding" in their own demise by continuing to groom some young adults to leave while neglecting the "stayers" who will be the town's future, Carr says.
"It's this ironic contradiction between rural schools encouraging students to spread their wings, but then basically encouraging kids to leave their communities as a result of being over-educated for what the community has to offer," says Aniko Varpalotai, a professor specializing in rural education at the University of Western Ontario.
Parents who once would have hoped their children would take over the family farm are instead struggling to compete with "mega-farms" and urging their children to get an education and choose a different life, she says.
Agriculture is shifting to fewer and larger corporate farms, Carr says, while a globalized, post-industrial economy has replaced previously reliable and well-paying blue-collar jobs with precarious industries, part-time jobs or unemployment in small towns.
And by continuing to focus resources and attention on the young people bound for post-secondary education, these towns are "under-investing" in those who stay, Carr says, leaving them ill-equipped for the new employment landscape.
Michael Corbett, an associate professor of education at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., has seen similar patterns in his research on fishing communities in the Digby Neck region of Nova Scotia. He tracked about 750 people who left the local elementary school between 1957 and 1998. He found that as commercial fisheries swallowed up family livelihoods, and the western oilpatch jobs that attracted people from the East dried up, education became both the major reason people left and their ticket to success elsewhere.
The population and age structure in Canada's small towns and rural areas reflects this out-migration pattern. More than one-third of city dwellers (36 per cent) are young adults aged 20 to 44, but that group makes up only 28 per cent of the country's rural areas and small towns, according to census figures.
"In the declining areas, it's the younger people that are moving out and, on average, the older generation are staying," says Ray Bollman, a research economist with Statistics Canada who specializes in rural data analysis.
This exodus comes at a price, not just for the shrinking towns, but also for those who feel compelled to leave, Corbett says.
Warner, Alta., faced the closure of its high school nearly a decade ago because of its dwindling population, which slashed property values and threatened to further decimate the village of 300 people just south of Lethbridge. Propelled by a grassroots effort, the community reinvented itself by founding the Warner Hockey School for girls.
Other small towns have taken a page from the Warner playbook, with Vauxhall, Alta., founding a baseball academy and Cardston, Alta., starting up a rodeo school. Now, Warner is also thinking of launching a flight school, says the hockey school's principal, Mark Lowe.
Carr and his wife are convinced that small towns are the canaries in the coal mine for national economies. They could see the shadows of the current recession there seven or eight years ago, he says, and more attention paid to the strain on small towns might have revealed the communities' vulnerabilities.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Canwest News ServiceOctober 9, 2009Be the first to post a comment
StoryPhotos ( 1 )
Small towns across North America, such as the hamlet of Cayley, Alta., above, are experiencing brain drains into big cities that make life harder for those who stay behind.Photograph by: Lorraine Hjalte, Canwest News ServiceExperts say rural communities are feeding their own demise by encouraging their best and brightest to leave while not nurturing those young people who choose to stay behind. Shannon Proudfoot explains.
An exodus of young people seeking education, adventure and success in bigger cities, combined with economic upheaval that has left little opportunity for those who stayed behind, has resulted in a dramatic "hollowing out" of North America's small communities. And worse, by not adapting to this new reality, small towns are playing a big part in their own demise.
"The big question in a small town is, 'Do you stay or do you go?' " says Patrick Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers University and author of the new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America. "This is the key question, not just for coming of age, but for the town itself: Who do you hold onto and who do you not?"
The book is a collaboration between Carr and his wife and co-author, Maria Kefalas. They spent several months living in and studying an Iowa town of 2,000, tracking who stayed and who left.
Small towns have always encouraged their best and brightest to leave in search of better opportunities, Carr says, and that worked fine a generation ago when agriculture, manufacturing and the auto industry provided stable, decent-paying jobs for those who stayed behind. Those industries have been gutted and small communities are now "colluding" in their own demise by continuing to groom some young adults to leave while neglecting the "stayers" who will be the town's future, Carr says.
"It's this ironic contradiction between rural schools encouraging students to spread their wings, but then basically encouraging kids to leave their communities as a result of being over-educated for what the community has to offer," says Aniko Varpalotai, a professor specializing in rural education at the University of Western Ontario.
Parents who once would have hoped their children would take over the family farm are instead struggling to compete with "mega-farms" and urging their children to get an education and choose a different life, she says.
Agriculture is shifting to fewer and larger corporate farms, Carr says, while a globalized, post-industrial economy has replaced previously reliable and well-paying blue-collar jobs with precarious industries, part-time jobs or unemployment in small towns.
And by continuing to focus resources and attention on the young people bound for post-secondary education, these towns are "under-investing" in those who stay, Carr says, leaving them ill-equipped for the new employment landscape.
Michael Corbett, an associate professor of education at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., has seen similar patterns in his research on fishing communities in the Digby Neck region of Nova Scotia. He tracked about 750 people who left the local elementary school between 1957 and 1998. He found that as commercial fisheries swallowed up family livelihoods, and the western oilpatch jobs that attracted people from the East dried up, education became both the major reason people left and their ticket to success elsewhere.
The population and age structure in Canada's small towns and rural areas reflects this out-migration pattern. More than one-third of city dwellers (36 per cent) are young adults aged 20 to 44, but that group makes up only 28 per cent of the country's rural areas and small towns, according to census figures.
"In the declining areas, it's the younger people that are moving out and, on average, the older generation are staying," says Ray Bollman, a research economist with Statistics Canada who specializes in rural data analysis.
This exodus comes at a price, not just for the shrinking towns, but also for those who feel compelled to leave, Corbett says.
Warner, Alta., faced the closure of its high school nearly a decade ago because of its dwindling population, which slashed property values and threatened to further decimate the village of 300 people just south of Lethbridge. Propelled by a grassroots effort, the community reinvented itself by founding the Warner Hockey School for girls.
Other small towns have taken a page from the Warner playbook, with Vauxhall, Alta., founding a baseball academy and Cardston, Alta., starting up a rodeo school. Now, Warner is also thinking of launching a flight school, says the hockey school's principal, Mark Lowe.
Carr and his wife are convinced that small towns are the canaries in the coal mine for national economies. They could see the shadows of the current recession there seven or eight years ago, he says, and more attention paid to the strain on small towns might have revealed the communities' vulnerabilities.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Monday, October 5, 2009
Kenya- Some Poignant Thoughts about Renewable Energy
Monday, October 5, 2009
Donor Funding: Pseudo Worries About Pseudo Aid?
The parabolic solar cooker, made from an umbrella lined with tinfoil, works well when it comes to heating up water. I'll try cooking with it when I have found a suitable pot with handles and painted it black. Meantime, I wish to demonstrate the 'Cookits' that I bought from Solar Cookers International to an audience that could turn out to be as many as 20 people, far from ideal. I'd prefer very small groups of people but I've agreed to it.
As I am trying to win people over to solar cooking, I'm concentrating on things that people here like to eat. Thankfully, that's quite a small range of fairly basic foods. Tomorrow I hope to cook githeri, a mixture of beans and maize. It will take some time to cook so I'm hoping for 4 or 5 hours of uninterrupted sunshine. I'll have to cook something else that doesn't take so long or my credibility could be open to question.
Actually, the credibility of some Westerner lecturing people in a developing country about renewable energy and sustainable cooking techniques is pretty questionable as it is. Someone recently claimed in an email to me that people in the US have shown great interest in his solar cooker. It's a pity they couldn't show a bit more interest in reducing energy and resource consumption on a national level. And if every American family purchases one of those particular solar cookers, the amount of plastic needed to manufacture them will be phenomenal.
When people ask me if we all use solar cookers in Ireland, I tell them there is not enough sun. This is true, but does everyone there use wind, wave or tidal power? I don't think so. Come to think of it, one of the more dubious gems of wisdom sent from rich countries to poor countries recently is biofuels. In addition to using up scarce land, water and other resources, people here are very unlikely to make much money from such activities. They need food, not biofuels and they need to grow food for themselves, not accept handouts in return for biofuels. Enough land in developing countries has already been destroyed in order to produce cheap raw materials for rich countries.
Questions are now being raised about jatropha production, a biofuel crop that is said to grow in marginal land. Well, they say that about all biofuel crop production. Unsurprisingly, people at the Nairobi Trade Fair last week were promoting jatropha even for farmers with as little as one acre to spare for cash crops. Perhaps just about anything being hawked as good for small farmers by rich countries should be viewed with great suspicion. We in developed countries don't have a great reputation for telling the truth.
Questions are also constantly being raised about the effectiveness of aid, especially now that so many wealthy countries are feeling the pinch from the current financial crisis. Personally, I'm not against all aid or all aid agencies. However, much of the money that is called foreign aid is spent on furthering the economic, strategic and political interests of wealthy countries and corporations. The most important questions should be about how much 'aid' money even leaves the donor country and what (and whom) the money that does leave is being spent on. The idea that developed countries bestow lots of goodies on developing countries and get nothing in return is pure bullshit, but sadly not the biodigestible kind. Sphere: Related Content
Posted by Simon at 5:12 PM
Labels: aid money, biofuels, development, development by omission, renewables, solar cookers, sustainable development
Donor Funding: Pseudo Worries About Pseudo Aid?
The parabolic solar cooker, made from an umbrella lined with tinfoil, works well when it comes to heating up water. I'll try cooking with it when I have found a suitable pot with handles and painted it black. Meantime, I wish to demonstrate the 'Cookits' that I bought from Solar Cookers International to an audience that could turn out to be as many as 20 people, far from ideal. I'd prefer very small groups of people but I've agreed to it.
As I am trying to win people over to solar cooking, I'm concentrating on things that people here like to eat. Thankfully, that's quite a small range of fairly basic foods. Tomorrow I hope to cook githeri, a mixture of beans and maize. It will take some time to cook so I'm hoping for 4 or 5 hours of uninterrupted sunshine. I'll have to cook something else that doesn't take so long or my credibility could be open to question.
Actually, the credibility of some Westerner lecturing people in a developing country about renewable energy and sustainable cooking techniques is pretty questionable as it is. Someone recently claimed in an email to me that people in the US have shown great interest in his solar cooker. It's a pity they couldn't show a bit more interest in reducing energy and resource consumption on a national level. And if every American family purchases one of those particular solar cookers, the amount of plastic needed to manufacture them will be phenomenal.
When people ask me if we all use solar cookers in Ireland, I tell them there is not enough sun. This is true, but does everyone there use wind, wave or tidal power? I don't think so. Come to think of it, one of the more dubious gems of wisdom sent from rich countries to poor countries recently is biofuels. In addition to using up scarce land, water and other resources, people here are very unlikely to make much money from such activities. They need food, not biofuels and they need to grow food for themselves, not accept handouts in return for biofuels. Enough land in developing countries has already been destroyed in order to produce cheap raw materials for rich countries.
Questions are now being raised about jatropha production, a biofuel crop that is said to grow in marginal land. Well, they say that about all biofuel crop production. Unsurprisingly, people at the Nairobi Trade Fair last week were promoting jatropha even for farmers with as little as one acre to spare for cash crops. Perhaps just about anything being hawked as good for small farmers by rich countries should be viewed with great suspicion. We in developed countries don't have a great reputation for telling the truth.
Questions are also constantly being raised about the effectiveness of aid, especially now that so many wealthy countries are feeling the pinch from the current financial crisis. Personally, I'm not against all aid or all aid agencies. However, much of the money that is called foreign aid is spent on furthering the economic, strategic and political interests of wealthy countries and corporations. The most important questions should be about how much 'aid' money even leaves the donor country and what (and whom) the money that does leave is being spent on. The idea that developed countries bestow lots of goodies on developing countries and get nothing in return is pure bullshit, but sadly not the biodigestible kind. Sphere: Related Content
Posted by Simon at 5:12 PM
Labels: aid money, biofuels, development, development by omission, renewables, solar cookers, sustainable development
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