James Kunstler has repaired his archives!

The Krispy Kremer werewolf quote is restored to all its former glory...

September 19, 2005

Take a good look at America around you now, because when we emerge from the winter of 2005 - 6, we're going to be another country. The reality-oblivious nation of mall hounds, bargain shoppers, happy motorists, Nascar fans, Red State war hawks, and born-again Krispy Kremers is headed into a werewolf-like transformation that will reveal to all the tragic monster we have become.

And glad it is that I am to see it. My faith in his punditly integrity, weakened nigh unto death, waxes strong again.

So what's he been chatting up lately? Anything new and noteworthy? Nah. But, ignoring the content, there's an interesting increase in the stridency of his tone. Here, let's look at a brief, de-contextualized excerpt from January 23rd...

Now, why on earth would Mr. Reich believe that China can possibly keep behaving the way it does for another two or three decades?...

There is no way that China can put another one half percent of its population behind the wheel of a car without sending its army and navy out to seize foreign oil fields...

Note to Mr. Reich and the rest of the people he is smoking opiated hashish with: you've got it backwards. Over the next twenty, thirty years America gets to be more and more like Chinese peasant life in 1949.

Why? Because neither America nor China (nor anybody else) can continue running industrial economies the way we have been, or even a substantial fraction of that way, in an energy-starved world. Nor will anybody come up with a miracle technological rescue remedy to keep all the motors humming.

Our second peckerhead of the day is David Brooks of The New York Times. Actually, Brooks could qualify for peckerhead of the decade among mainstream news pundits, since his fantasies about America diverge so extravagantly from the realities our nation faces...

Peckerhead, eh? More later, but first let me point to the crux of my disagreement with the Kunstlerian Vision...

Nor will anybody come up with a miracle technological rescue remedy to keep all the motors humming.

I believe that they will.

Almost all of my disagreement with the man flows from that particular example among his many other unsupported assertions. Here's a slightly different version of his hellfire and brimstone schtick...

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it...The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true...

Wishing has nothing to do with it. It'll take brains, money, and gut-busting hard work, as ever.

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture...

and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy...

What do industry representatives have to say about that?

Danish turbine manufacturer Vestas undertook a life cycle assessment of their latest wind turbine...according to their research...one of the company’s V90, 3.0 MW offshore wind turbines has to generate electricity for approximately 6.8 months before it produces as much energy as is used during the manufacturing lifetime. This, they say, means the turbine model earns its own worth more than 35 times during its energy production lifetime.

Lousy Danes. Somebody get Mr. Kunstler a fact checker, stat.

We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.

Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run.

What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net energy loser...

That conclusion is not so clear cut as he would have you believe...

"It is better to use various inputs to grow corn and make ethanol and use that in your cars than it is to use the gasoline and fossil fuels directly," said Kammen, who is co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and UC Berkeley's Class of 1935 Distinguished Chair of Energy.

Clearly not a reliable source. Back to Kunstler...

...you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products.

And the Berkeley Boffins say?

"The people who are saying ethanol is bad are just plain wrong,"..."But it isn't a huge victory - you wouldn't go out and rebuild our economy around corn-based ethanol."

The transition would be worth it, the authors point out, if the ethanol is produced not from corn but from woody, fibrous plants: cellulose.

"Ethanol can be, if it's made the right way with cellulosic technology, a really good fuel for the United States," said Farrell, an assistant professor of energy and resources. "At the moment, cellulosic technology is just too expensive. If that changes - and the technology is developing rapidly - then we might see cellulosic technology enter the commercial market within five years."

Hopelessly unworldly academics that they are, you just want to chuck them under the chin and tranquilize them with milk and cookies.

Kunstler, on the other hand, is a worldly, wisecracking, shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy. College audiences love him. In terms of presentation, imagine Bruce Sterling with an impaired IQ and mild Tourette's. Sure, he may not have all his facts straight. But then, facts are for losers. What he has (with apologies to Stephen Malcolm Anderson), is style. Too bad I'm immune. He just irritates me.

If you're looking for an antidote to his clownish melancholy, try Green Car Congress. I would challenge anyone to scroll through their archives and not notice that a lot of unwatched pots are starting to boil. Here, check out December, January and February. Or check out The Energy Blog. Delve into their blogrolls and banish those doomsday blues.
Before you know it you'll be nattering on about Fischer-Tropsch Processes, coal-to-gas, coal-to liquid, IGCC, and who knows what all else.

I suppose that's well and good, but saved or not, I don't want to leave you on such a mundane note. Coal power. Huh. Dirty, dangerous, archaic...I'd been hoping for fusion generators.

Let's look at a couple of blue sky concepts, notions with some zip.

The first one has been floating around the blogosphere for a few weeks now, but you might have missed it. It's a tethered airship/wind turbine/pinwheel thingy. Floating hundreds to thousands of feet overhead, as the wind blows the device rotates, generates power at its hubs, and sends the resultant electricity down the tether cable to you, the consumer.

Sure, there's no prototype. Sure, at this stage it's all just pixelware. But the audacity of the notion can't help but earn my admiration. Thinking outside the box, I believe they call it. What an imagination...

Treehugger has an interview with the inventor, and I really hope his clever idea can take flight.

Next up is a notion that I was initially reluctant to mention. Being a liberal arts major, I have only the dimmest comprehension of the laws of physics. F equals mA? Whatever. What I do remember from my long ago high school classes can't help me much with this one. It seems counterintuitive, to say the least.

The developers call their notion "Atmospheric Cold Megawatts" and I shall quote liberally from their website...

ACM is a system for the generation of energy based upon differences in the atmospheric pressure at geographically spaced sites, and comprises at least one long conduit - in the order of many miles long.

In operation, the air flow in the conduit will accelerate to a high velocity wind without the consumption of any materials and without the use of any mechanical moving parts. A power converter, such as a wind turbine, in the conduit converts the high wind velocity generated by even small pressure differences into energy of any desired type.

The opposite open ends of the conduit are located at geographically spaced sites, selected on the basis of historical information indicating a useful difference in barometric pressure. A plurality of conduits, each having open ends in different geographically spaced sites, may be interconnected to maximize the existing pressure differences, and will produce higher and more consistent levels of energy production. The ACM conduit configuration of the invention can transform even barometric pressure differences in the order of one tenth pound per square inch into wind velocities in the sonic range.

No fuel is required or consumed to produce the power. No pollutants are introduced into the atmosphere as the result of the generation process. The cost per KWh is a fraction of traditional (and alternative) generation methods. Because there are few moving parts, maintenance costs are minimal and the projected lifespan of installations is considerably longer than any other generation method.

Yikes. It's like cold fusion, but without the fusion. Modestly sized pipelines that, instead of transporting oil or natural gas for eventual combustion, transport nothing but thin air. But is it too good to be true?

Here's their patent (pdf).

I've thought about this for awhile now, and I'm coming around to the point where I think it might work. I had to sidle up to it crabwise, with frequent rest stops. First, it's not perpetual motion, no more than a windmill or a waterwheel is. There's a moving fluid or gas energized by the sun, and the machine just extracts some energy from it in passing.

Consider a breezeway as a humble example. As wind is channeled through the space between two buildings, it picks up speed. Very refreshing on a hot, muggy day. If you've ever walked through a big city on a breezy day, you may have noticed the same phenomenon on a larger scale. The skyscrapers can channel and focus a fairly innocuous zephyr until it's downright blustery. The effect is often local, and sharply delineated.

This pipeline business seems to be a similar effect. Why wouldn't air flow from a high pressure zone to a low pressure zone? It does it every day. What's clever is the notion of trapping and channelling it (as in a breezeway) but then continuing to taper the channels so as to increase the wind velocity even further.

From a wiki article on the company...

Anyone who has seen a weather report has seen maps with high pressure systems on one part of the map, marked by a large, bold H; and a low pressure systems on another part of the map, marked with a large, bold L. Between these pressure systems, there are the isobars – those wavy white lines that lie across the space between the two different pressure zones, indicating equal amounts of pressure, which create a pressure gradient (hill) that allows wind to flow naturally from high pressure to low pressure.

To imagine how Cold Energy, LLC's technology would work, just think that if you could run a pipe between the high and the low pressure areas, you could tap into a tremendous amount of energy as the air rushes from the high pressure area to the low pressure area, and spin an electric generating turbine from the flow of air between the two locations.

So, why am I still uneasy?

With two to three decades of data from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) at their disposal, the company has run analyses over a number of different locations, and with the help of interns hopes to have modeling for two to three locations for most countries of the world soon...

For example, studying five years of atmospheric readings from Flagstaff and Tucson, Arizona, with an elevation difference of 3,700 feet, separated by 260 miles, they found the pressure difference to be in the range of 0.5 to 0.7 psi (pounds per square inch) on a daily basis, never going below 0.5 psi...

"That is sufficient to generate a wind of 2,500 mph (miles per hour), which is 3.5 times the speed of sound,"...

The pipes would be about 2.5 meters in diameter, and the air flow would be enough to generate around 1,000 to 1,400 megawatts of electricity...

The conduits are designed to be unidirectional in flow, tapering gradually to a smaller diameter to increase the air flow speed. Hence, in a flatland scenario such as Kansas, there would need to be two pipelines to allow for flow in either direction.

Okay...

Time to come down from the clouds. To cushion our re-entry here are some parting thoughts from Mr. Kunstler, regarding the SOTU speech the other night...

I hate to keep harping on this, but Mr. Bush could have announced a major effort to restore the American railroad system. It would have been a major political coup. It would have a huge impact on our oil use. The public would benefit from it tremendously. And it would have put thousands of people to work on something really meaningful. Unlike trips to Mars and experiments in cold fusion, railroads are something we already know how to do, and the tracks are lying out there waiting to be fixed.

So it's public transit he's wanting then? Well, he need seek no further.

Click on this link. Words don't do it justice, so just go have yourselves a look. Clearly, some people are powerfully moved by such possibilities, but I'm afraid I'm not one of them. The romance of rail never really clicked with me, being as I'm more of a giant airship man. I mean, as long as we're wishing...

No matter how fancy the coach you're in, at whatever altitude, you'll still have to "Present your papers, please". Better even than airships, I'll take a flying car, thank you.