Power From the People

What happens when creative consumers decide to generate their own energy?

Brian Doherty from the May 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Their experiences also indicate that industrial creativity has a hard time co-existing with current urban regulations—and that the old model of generating and distributing electricity, with all its flaws, is unlikely to be knocked off its perch any time soon.

The Shipyard vs. the State
During the summer of 2007, I was introduced to a new way of thinking about personalized power as I watched a group of bohemian machine-artists grapple with gasification, trying to master it, teach it, and ultimately transform it into a huge art project.

The effort was spearheaded by Jim Mason, a Berkeley artist I knew through Burning Man, an annual festival held in Nevada’s Black Rock desert. Mason was forced to think about self-generated power by the city of Berkeley, which cut off his electricity during a dispute over building code violations.

In 2001 Mason rented a couple of buildings on a big lot in a mixed-used, quasi-industrial part of town to start what he called the Shipyard, an artists’ workshop. It officially covered two addresses on two streets, filling about a third of a block. It had lots of outdoor space for art projects and parties. For storage and more indoor work space, Mason championed what he thought was a quintessentially Berkeleyesque solution: repurposed, recycled shipping containers that he scrounged from Bay Area ports, stacked two high.

Mason and his collaborators threw elaborate art parties. One, celebrating Ernest Shackleton’s disaster-plagued Antarctic expedition of a century ago, featured meals of faux penguin served on ice plates to dozens of guests crammed into a shipping container kept below freezing, with fire effects pumping up through columns of ice all around them. A “How to Destroy the Universe Festival” combined extreme industrial noise acts with fire (and meat) art. The Shipyard artists were self-consciously bohemian, charmingly aware of their own absurdity. During one of my interviews with Mason, I noted a dry-erase board in their shop on which someone had scrawled a list of “tools needed,” starting with “14" chopsaw blade” and “pile of money.” The crew created self-mythologizing slogans: “Shipyard: When Overkill Isn’t Enough,” “Shipyard: When Biblically Huge Machines Have to Be There Overnight.” The artists genuinely believed they were providing a service to Berkeley, a city with a reputation for liberalism and creativity.

But Berkeley Deputy Fire Chief David Orth didn’t see it that way, especially after receiving unexpected calls about 40-foot propane fire jets (typical Shipyard entertainment) in the air over his city. Joan MacQuarrie, the woman in charge of building inspection at the city’s planning department, found nearly everything about the situation troublesome. “No use permit,” she recalls. “They moved cargo containers onto the lot, which constitutes building, without any building permits. There were other safety violations. The cargo containers, some of them were occupied or appeared to be occupied. Fire hazard issues. Exiting issues.”

Mason thought Berkeley was flouting its heritage by being so picayune about his attempts at innovative recycled living. “All the issues came down to trying to solve liability problems,” he says. “Their first thought always seemed to be ‘We must act to cover our ass’ so no one can come back to them over injuries. There was this inordinately high valuation of a culture of safety, even in a city whose reputation is founded on experimentation, creativity, and innovation.”

Filled shipping containers stay stacked, often nine high, on rolling ships; institutions ranging from traveling art shows to specialized communities in Europe had been using them for housing for years. But the containers didn’t fall under any existing building codes and thus there was no standard way to certify them as safe building materials, especially in a city that is seismically active.

The containers could eventually be folded into an existing code, says Orth (who has resigned since being interviewed), but they probably would have to be encased in frames or transformed in some other way to qualify as buildings, thus eliminating the whole point of the Shipyard’s experiment in cheap recycling. “They know they need structural engineering,” Orth says. “It’s not going to be inexpensive to create buildings out of these containers. It’s gonna cost as much as it takes to build a building.”

That New-Car Smell
Regulatory problems soon led to electrical problems. In March 2002 the city government decided that one way to deal with these stubborn artists was to cut off their power. Power generation suddenly became more than just an intellectual curiosity for Mason. Looking around at the existing world of people trying to live without plugging into the existing power grid, he was disappointed, seeing mostly the sort of 1960s mentality that figured if you had solar panels on the roof to heat your herbal tea, you were living a properly low-impact life.

“I wanted to take up power not from a Luddite ‘the world is being destroyed’ mentality that we should all do nothing, sit in a corner, and not consume at all, or since we can’t, just do a little and feel guilty anyway,” Mason says. “I wanted to take it up as a culture of potential abundance, of doing and engagement.”

So he and some of his pals experimented with living large off the grid. Tea, shmea; they needed to operate three-phase industrial power tools. So they scrounged transformers and off-the-shelf generators from junkyards, bought inverter arrays on eBay, assembled solar panels and switching stations. It took them many months and many failures along the way, but they ended up cobbling together a system that successfully supplied their workshop with electricity, controlled by a snazzy computer program that made it possible to trace all operations online. Though it tended to trip out at least once a day, Mason hopes eventually to offer a version of the power system bundled together in one shipping container as a “powertainer” for off-grid use in the Third World and elsewhere.

Hearing Mason explain it all, the Shipyard’s multiyear experimental electricity generation project sounds absurdly Fitzcarraldan—nothing that any normal person would confuse for a suitable replacement for flicking a switch. While the power system he developed for the Shipyard was ultimately a jumble of solar, batteries, and biodiesel generators, while immersing himself in interesting ways to self-generate power, he did stumble upon a simple old technology—gasifier engines—that, he imagined, could help people rethink energy at a profound level, especially when it came to moving vehicles.

Mason and friends built their first gasifier, similar to the one described at the beginning of this article, in one day. Feeling evangelical about this weird old tech, they installed the engine in the bed of a truck owned by the San Francisco artist and 2007 mayoral candidate Chicken John Rinaldi. The gases produced by the contraption were sucked into the engine on its downstroke via old vacuum-cleaner hoses. Rinaldi began preaching the wonders of gasification on city streets and in the parking lots of Silicon Valley tech conferences, explaining how a car could run on coffee grounds. They dubbed the vehicle the Café Racer.

For Mason, gasification demonstrated the potentially wide range of individual choice in power. He began imagining eco-power stores where you could choose what you burned in your gasifier based on the scent you wanted in the exhaust. At the same time you’d be solving an environmental problem by burning for fuel what would otherwise be waste. Thinking further, Mason figured out a way to link gasification to one of the decade’s biggest concerns: carbon footprints.

Comments

Jozef|4.28.08 @ 3:25PM|#

Soooo... When can we expect the artist community to be sued into oblivion for failing to pay fuel taxes?

|4.28.08 @ 3:34PM|#

That was an awesome article. Loved it!

I'm sending links to all my green power buddies.

I've looked at the process for using gas from burning wood to power cars, like many Europeans did during World War II. Technologies which were once common, like that, were abandoned not just because it's easier to buy petrol from a service station, but because the new technologies were more efficient in other ways. My understanding is that using gasification like that in a car used to clog up people's fuel systems, etc. with sludge after only a few years. When gasoline goes up over a certain price, and the R&D dollars go into developing generators and engines that are made to use those fuel sources, some of those old technologies will make a lot more sense again.

In regards to energy becoming more or a distributed phenomenon, I thought immediately of Toshiba's new mini-nuclear reactors...

"Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks."

--20 feet by 6 feet

--200 kilowatts

--fail-safe and totally automatic, will not overheat.

--no control rods

--self sustaining process lasts 40 years

--half the cost of grid energy.

"Toshiba expects to install the first reactor in Japan in 2008 and to begin marketing the new system in Europe and America in 2009."

I think some Hit & Runner first cued me onto the Toshiba mini-reactors. Hat tip to whomever that was, but it looks like exactly the kind off grid, local, distributed power Doherty is talking about.

|4.28.08 @ 3:38PM|#

Okay, here's a link that should actually work for those mini reactors.

ed|4.28.08 @ 3:47PM|#

designed to power individual apartment buildings

Whoo, I can just imagine the condo association meetings.

GRUMPY OLD MAN 1: You want to put WHAT in our building?!
HIS WIFE: Oh my gaawwwd!
GRUMPY OLD MAN 2: I survived Treblinka for this?
PRESIDENT: Order, order!
ALL: No nukes! No nukes!

e|4.28.08 @ 4:02PM|#

As interesting and colorful as the characters in this article are, I wonder if we might also look into redesigning communities so that people don't have to get in their cars and drive for miles to get to the grocery store or run other errands. Or maybe orient communities around public transportation?

Oops, sorry, I am a victim of the centralized, bureaucratic culture, typified by stagnant cultures found in Europe and Japan. Fortunately, the Free Market (TM) has rendered this culture obsolete. Let's just get to work retooling our SUVs to run on coffee grounds; then we won't have to go through the painful process of changing our suburban-oriented communities.

|4.28.08 @ 4:03PM|#

Here in California, former governor, and now Attorney General, Jerry Brown sued, I believe it was both, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties for not including greenhouse gases in their CEQA approval processes.

http://www.cp-dr.com/node/1901

Nevermind that people still argue about how to measure global warming world wide and no one can really say what the effect of your five acre development project will be on climate change--if it's in CEQA, you have to account for it. So if you're a developer what do you do?

A mini-nuclear reactor might be one solution.

I would also guess that these would be great for people who live way off in the boonies too. They can sell you 40 years worth of power and you can take it pretty much anywhere?

Never mind looking for the pony, I don't see any horse puckey.

Kolohe|4.28.08 @ 4:18PM|#

The main issue is the smaller the reactor the less negative reactivity is available (i.e. a large reactor can be 'really shut down,' as you get smaller, the difference between max s/d and criticallity gets smaller). This is the reason I am somwhat skeptical of 'fail-safe' from a 200 kw reactor (and is that thermal power or electical output?)

The army tried small 'field portable' reactors decades ago at the dawn of the atomic age. Unlike TMI, it actually did kill more people than Ted Kennedy's car

robc|4.28.08 @ 4:31PM|#

This propelled the control rod and the entire reactor vessel upwards, which killed the operator who had been standing on top of the vessel, leaving him pinned to the ceiling by a control rod.

I was just making sure this was in Kolohe's link.

Xmas|4.28.08 @ 4:32PM|#

Well, the good thing about Carbon Monoxide poisoning is that you end up a nice pink color. No need for toxic embalming fluids to give your corpse that rosy glow.

Kolohe|4.28.08 @ 4:36PM|#

The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology uses reservoirs of liquid lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The Lithium-6 reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that fits into the reactor core.

First a nitpick - control rods do not per se initiate the reaction - they stop the reaction; you remove them to bring a PLWR critical.

For failsafe criteria, I am curious-
1) How they handle Lithium's *chemical* reactivity - although sodium moderated reactors are not uncommmon, they are hardly 'maintenance free' like this one is supposed to be.
2) I am presuming that the the lithium is also used as coolant in addition to being the moderator (as with sodium reactors - and you absolutely cannot use water). I wonder how they handle a loss of coolant casualty.

bubba|4.28.08 @ 4:38PM|#

Doesn't the military routinely use cargo containers to build forward bases?

alan|4.28.08 @ 4:40PM|#

Welcome back, Mr. Doherty.

Who'd have thought they'd lead ya (Who'd have thought they'd lead ya)
Here where we need ya (Here where we need ya)

robc|4.28.08 @ 4:42PM|#

I wonder how they handle a loss of coolant casualty.

From the reactor side, the loss of coolant is same as loss of moderator, which should power things down. How to keep the coolant from interacting with the environment would be my worry. Im guessing the containment vessel keeps water away.

I always thought sodium cooled/moderated subs was a crazy idea too. I guess you were already screwed if sea water was getting to the reactor core.

Kolohe|4.28.08 @ 4:53PM|#

robc-
Ah you're right about the locc; I was thinking of chernobyl whereby it's design (graphite moderation?) a locc caused a postive reactivity insertion.

It's been at least 8 years since I studied this stuff in any detail.

robc|4.28.08 @ 5:18PM|#

Kolohe,

17 years since I got my NukE degree, 14 since I used it.

Im surprised I remember anything.

|4.28.08 @ 5:23PM|#

To light your living room, you can flick a switch on your wall, completing a flow of electrons that began at a giant (usually coal-powered) plant hundreds of miles away.

Actually power flows from hundreds of miles away but the electrons are already in the wire and are not going anywhere. They just move back and forth 120 times a second. Thats one way for 1/60 of a second for the positive alternation and the other way for the negative 1/60 of a second alternation.

(Talk about nit picky!)

Douglas Gray|4.28.08 @ 5:42PM|#

Click on the link below to read about a company that has created a smaller scale wind power technology that can be used on buildings.

Unlike the conventional wind power gizmos which are these huge things on towers, this is a smaller scale device that blends in with
the architecture of the building.

I hope the Toshiba thing is safe. Even for
conventional reactors who work fine, the cancer rates downwind are 50-80% higher as compared to the normal population. Something that the nuclear power industry does not like to publicize.

http://www.avinc.com/wind.asp

Kolohe|4.28.08 @ 5:48PM|#

Now that I've RTFA, I also agree: awesome article. Best non-Balko one I've seen so far this year.

Dello|4.28.08 @ 6:36PM|#

e,
"As interesting and colorful as the characters in this article are, I wonder if we might also look into redesigning communities so that people don't have to get in their cars and drive for miles to get to the grocery store or run other errands. Or maybe orient communities around public transportation?"

Been done, with some not-so-great results:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Block_(Judge_Dredd)

Dello|4.28.08 @ 6:40PM|#

Ken,
"I would also guess that these would be great for people who live way off in the boonies too. They can sell you 40 years worth of power and you can take it pretty much anywhere?"

Keeping in mind that it puts out 200 KW, it would the you, the boonies, and 40 of your closest friends. I checked our usage, and even with the hot tub and sauna, we only average about 4 KW.

Dello|4.28.08 @ 6:45PM|#

Bobster,
"Actually power flows from hundreds of miles away but the electrons are already in the wire and are not going anywhere. They just move back and forth 120 times a second. Thats one way for 1/60 of a second for the positive alternation and the other way for the negative 1/60 of a second alternation."

Unless its the very first time electricity was put through the wire...no really.

|4.28.08 @ 7:10PM|#

my dong burns on solar energy

|4.28.08 @ 7:21PM|#

Dello | April 28, 2008, 6:45pm | #

Actually power flows from hundreds of miles away but the electrons are already in the wire and are not going anywhere. They just move back and forth 120 times a second.

Unless its the very first time electricity was put through the wire...no really.

Errm, no Bobster has it right. Conductive wire relies on the principal that electrons in certain materials (Cu, Al, Si, etc.) are easily moved from their orbital fields.

When you flip the switch the power plant supplies electricity one electron at a time. That first electron bumps an electron in an atom of copper from its spot into the outer field of another atom which in turn bumps its electron into another and so forth. Think of it as an atomic domino cascade.

It is this "domino effect" that allows electricity to travel at nearly the speed of light and is why no matter how far you are from the power source your action is, effectively, instantaneous. When the power switch is off, there is no electron flow and there is no difference in the wire whether it is connected to power or not.

You don't need to "prime" wire like you would a water pipe attached to a wellhead.

|4.28.08 @ 7:31PM|#

Brian, Good job, but your figure of 70% transmission line loss is off by a factor of 10. Typical loss is around 7% not 70%!

-pEEf

|4.28.08 @ 7:51PM|#

Good article Brian!
I have to admit that I hadn't heard what happened to The Shipyard after it's notice to evacuate. The artists there have put out some interesting stuff including the Neverwas Haul.

Guy Montag|4.28.08 @ 8:33PM|#

Hey Kramer,

I've looked at the process for using gas from burning wood to power cars, like many Europeans did during World War II. Technologies which were once common, like that, were abandoned not just because it's easier to buy petrol from a service station, but because the new technologies were more efficient in other ways. My understanding is that using gasification like that in a car used to clog up people's fuel systems, etc. with sludge after only a few years. When gasoline goes up over a certain price, and the R&D dollars go into developing generators and engines that are made to use those fuel sources, some of those old technologies will make a lot more sense again.

Did you forget about your Seinfeld episode where you were cooking food on Jerry's car engine? Oh yea, that was an accident.

Dello|4.28.08 @ 8:57PM|#

Kwix,
"Errm, no Bobster has it right. Conductive wire relies on the principal that electrons in certain materials (Cu, Al, Si, etc.) are easily moved from their orbital fields."

My "no really" wasn't hint enough? : )

|4.28.08 @ 9:31PM|#

"I wonder if we might also look into redesigning communities..."

Nice to let the authoritarians into a libertarian conversation.

The Bearded Hobbit|4.28.08 @ 9:44PM|#

.. can't believe that I'm the pedant here ..

.. said electrons described above move back and forth every 1/60th of a second .. 60Hz .. the spend 1/120th of a second in the positive side and 1/120th of a second in the negative side ..

.. Hobbit the Electrical Engineer

e|4.29.08 @ 3:49AM|#

"Nice to let the authoritarians into a libertarian conversation."

'cuz sprawl is teh freedoms!!!11

|5.4.08 @ 6:44PM|#

Based on a decade or so of working on the idea of distributed
power, my take is the State of California really dislikes the idea.

Sure, we have net metering, but with a limit. No large (>10KW)
generators. State-wide cap is 2.3% of total power. Myriad restrictions
on home-power production.

Consider a thought experiment. If aliens from a distant world were
to drop off a magic, non-polluting 1GW power plant in your backyard,
could you hook it to the grid, and let all the world enjoy the benefit?
The answer is NO! You would have to pay the cost for the power that publicly-regulated monopolies _would_ have generated. The idiocy
of this situation even made it into Forbes Magazine. Can a company run a natural gas peaker plant to trim off the Tier 3 or Tier 4 power costs? No!

Rogue solar is the safe way to go. A sad fact.