Power From the People

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

Brian Doherty from the May 2008 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

The Mechabolic Hypothesis
The key in making a 21st century environmentally friendly process out of an old 20th century machine is the char left over after gasification. In the Amazon rain forest, scientifically mysterious processes create a charcoal known as terra preta (“black earth”) or “agri-char,” which has been used for thousands of years to enrich the soil and boost agricultural productivity. More recently, it got a glowing write-up in Scientific American in May 2007 and made Wired’s “JargonWatch” this March.

By taking the leftover carbon char and plowing it back into the ground, gasification might do more than the mostly carbon-neutral act of burning biofuel. The process is potentially carbon-negative, keeping most of the carbon in the ground rather than the atmosphere while helping plants grow faster, which takes still more carbon out of the atmosphere.

At the 2007 Burning Man gathering, for which the art theme was “green man,” Mason planned to unveil a huge sculpture illustrating the potential of gasification and its terra preta byproduct. He called it the “Mechabolic,” after what he had started to call the Mechabolic Hypothesis.

“Whether food or fuel, animals or engines, it is the same chemical process, partaking of the same inputs, exhaling the same exhausts,” he says. “Fuel, machines, and fire are the synthetic forms of food, body and respiration.” All involve putting together and breaking apart carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It’s important to be mindful of the complicated interconnections of it all; the carbon in anything is going to remain in the entire bio-economy in some form, whether burnt or composted or eaten. But some ways of transforming it, such as gasification, are better in terms of greenhouse gases than others. Plain composting, for example—an environmentalist favorite—if done without proper aeration during the process, produces methane, a particularly heinous greenhouse gas, worse than carbon dioxide.

The 120-foot-long Mechabolic was meant to resemble a huge mechanical slug, with a “mouth” that mulched waste and a “stomach” that gasified it. The gas would be used to run an old dragster engine that would propel the sculpture, as well as flame effects. The excretion would be terra preta, which would be fed to edible plants attached to the sides of the moving sculpture. When the Mechabolic was little more than an idea, it was already gaining respectful attention in The New York Times, Business 2.0, and other prominent publications.

Around the time those stories started to appear, in May 2007, Berkeley officials decided enough was enough. The city gave the Shipyard a three-day order to vacate, citing 32 code violations and threatening fines of $2,500 a day. Mason began a counterattack through blogs and the press, ginning up dozens of emails and calls to city officials in his defense.

The tone of some of them is captured well in an email the Shipyard artist Ryon Gesink circulated among friends. Gesink wrote movingly about having to remove huge containers and several years’ worth of art, of seeing his dream of a space to create and innovate squashed. The headline on his account: “Small communist California city to shed 1,000,000 pounds of excessively interesting culture in days; City leaders ensure self righteousness, boredom to be restored shortly.”

While pressuring city officials to back down through mockery and public jousting, Mason also did attempt to address some of their concerns. He disconnected the shipping-container power system. (The system had alarmed Orth, the fire chief, because of the non-professional wiring and all the batteries, and potentially flammable battery acids.) Mason hired an architect to negotiate with the city a way to bring the shipping-container structures up to code, and in the meantime he removed most of them from the lot.

Although the artists were not legally permitted to do anything at the Shipyard, the Mechabolic and other gasifier-powered art vehicles were nonetheless constructed on the site throughout that summer. As late as November 2007, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates was bringing people by the facility to show off the ingenuity happening in his city, even though it was illegal.

In January 2008 city officials began meeting again with Mason and his team. MacQuarrie, the building inspector, said in January that she was pleased with the signs of cooperation she had seen thus far and that she hoped the innovative art space and its power experiments can maintain a happy home in her city. Just as long as Mason and his friends obtain the proper permits and meet all use, zoning, building, and safety regulations. In February, the Shipyard officially received a use permit and legal power at one of its two addresses, and is on track to make the other legal as well.

Still, Mason feels crushed by the conflict—and radicalized. While others on his team are more optimistic that it will all work out, he thinks experimental living in a highly regulated context might ultimately be hopeless. Never any kind of libertarian, he was shocked to discover that “giving someone the right to shut down a physical site is no less a significant power than giving someone the power to arrest me. The lives of 30 people have been stopped, and there is no immediate review of that decision.

“I live life in economies based on what is interesting,” he adds. “I’ve found no matter what the rules or processes, in the end the thing that’s interesting somehow gets chosen. But getting beat down, I realized that is completely irrelevant. They will not listen or make consideration for interest in anything. They only care, what does the letter of the code say, and does that completely encapsulate the conditions they determine are sitting in front of them? It’s an impossible set-up in which to engage the messy flux of the world.”

Local Power
Mason is inspired by the cultures of hot-rodding and hacking, areas where control over one’s machines, life, and pleasure is small, personal, and imaginative. He’s not out to replace one big power system with another, or to convince the world that we all need to run our cars on wood chips.

But every time John Rinaldi would take the gasified Café Racer out to demonstrate how gasification could turn trash to fuel with techniques anyone could potentially execute in an afternoon, something would happen, he says. After a few seconds of interested delight, someone would ask: How does this scale up?

The questioner would seem a bit disappointed when he’d say, it’s not meant to scale up. It’s supposed to change your whole view of how power can be generated and distributed: not top-down but bottom-up, not adding unpleasant waste to the world but eliminating it.

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.