Power From the People

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

Brian Doherty from the May 2008 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Colorful experiments like the Café Racer are below the radar of the larger distributed generation community. A growing number of policy intellectuals, activists, and entrepreneurs see systematic, not merely personal, benefits from relying less on big power plants. A 2006 monograph by the environmentalist Avory Lovins, called Small Is Profitable, neatly sums up the arguments for distributed generation, from efficiencies of scale to lower greenhouse emissions to an energy infrastructure more resistant to terrorist attacks. The journal Distributed Energy exudes a worldview far removed from Mason’s unregulated, do-it-yourself mentality. It’s a world enmeshed in, and seeking help from, either government or the existing big utility system at every turn, from subsidies to changing local regulations that delimit or complicate pumping self-generated power back to the grid.

Some people excited about the Mason model think it can become something bigger than a passion for hobbyists. Charlie Sellers, a member of Mason’s Mechabolic crew, brings gasification-based cooking and heating technologies to off-the-grid areas of the Third World.

Tom Price is a 20-year veteran of environmental policy wonkery who worked for Burning Man this year as their liaison to the environmental and energy communities. He helped organize a corporate gift of desert-based solar panels that after the event began supplying free solar power to nearby Nevada communities. He has spun that project off into a company called Black Rock Solar, looking to repeat the experiment in other high desert locales. He’s been talking up the Mechabolic project to people in the enviro-tech community, and says “the consensus opinion is Jim Mason is six months ahead of the curve.”

When Price and Rinaldi took the Café Racer to the CleanTech 2007 convention in Santa Clara, California, last May and “explained how we were making hydrogen out of junk, we ended up surrounded by CEOs and [venture capitalists] who were flabbergasted. I’ve been working on environmental issues for 20 years on the policy side, and I had always assumed like many people that the best solutions came from large institutions set up specifically for this purpose.

“We have in this country both a tradition of independence and a tradition of machines bringing ever increasing levels of comfort. And the latter has been in the ascendant. But there is in our cultural DNA this idea that we can provide for ourselves without any outside help.” When it comes to the potential of gasification, Price says, “only a few hundred or a few thousand technically understand what we are talking about today. But I suspect the number will increase exponentially in very short order.”

The Ride of the Mechabolic
Maybe. But Americans who are not convinced for reasons of ideology or identity that the top-down, flick-a-switch, pull-up-to-the-pump model of power distribution is passé might contemplate the travails of the Mechabolic project and decide there’s no reason to rush into any big changes.

Constructing the monstrous slug involved months of legal fighting, last-minute entreaties for cash injections from the far-flung Burning Man community, and weeks of all-nighters. Then everything had to be taken apart and moved in shipping containers and trucks to the Black Rock Desert, where the crew reassembling it faced a punishing sun, toppling and blinding windstorms, and the sinking morale that comes from realizing you’ve bitten off much more than you can comfortably chew.

Through the week of Burning Man, Mechabolic remained a work in progress. The curious sight of the 120-foot-long metal skids topped with mulchers, shiny engines, gasifier hoppers, and vegetable and spice plants, including radishes, zucchini, and sage, with fewer than half of the ribs that were meant to give the sculpture the shape of a slug, made people stop and ask what was up. Thus Mason got to do what he liked most: explain the potential of gasification and terra preta for humanizing and diversifying our relationship with power while reducing our carbon footprint.

Shortly after sunrise on Sunday, September 2—the next-to-last day of the event—it came together. I was around through sheer luck. I had been up all night, Burning Man–style, listening to a singer playing banjo and ukulele, and I wandered by the Mechabolic work site to find Mason finally turning over the engine. Some other up-all-nighters and I helped to get the machine moving by pushing it, and the loudly throoming engine barreled the monster through the playa dust that had built up around its wheels. It was moving! And shaking! Bottles of homemade wine passed from person to person crouching on the beast’s skids, grinning and whooping. The air was thick with the joy of the improbable and absurd achieved.

About a minute later, with a ferocious cough of transmission fluid all over Mason, the Mechabolic groaned to a halt. It had moved about 68 feet—nearly one for every $1,000 spent on the project, Mason mordantly noted with a smeared smile.

I had assumed, at that moment of triumph, that the Mechabolic was running off pyrolized waste matter. I was mistaken. It turns out the gasification system was only providing gas to burn for fire effects, and powering a generator for lights. When you’re trying to get a car to run via gasification, it works best to start it off with a standard fuel and then ease it over to the gasified junk. So for that minute of motion, the Mechabolic actually was running on off-the-shelf motor fuel. The dream still had some bugs.

The Homebrew Power Club
The costs in time and sanity borne by Mason and his crew were apparent. They were also far beyond what most of the non-art-obsessed will want to pay. But so were the innovations that arose from, say, the Homebrew Computer Club of Silicon Valley, that mid-’70s gang of PC enthusiasts—including a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—dedicated to DIY computer making. Yet from the homebrewers’ irrational enthusiasms arose the modern world of personal computing.

We haven’t reached the point where flicking a switch for coal-fired power from far away seems as inadequate as the five-mainframes-for-the-nation computer vision that the proto-hackers of the ’70s were rebelling against. But Mason notes that all sorts of human endeavors, from our computing to our food to our transportation, have evolved away from bare resource economizing. They’ve become instead arenas for play and assertions of identity—or, as Mason likes to think of it, areas in which there is at least some opportunity to impress girls.

“We can turn power into something experiential, expressive, personal,” he says. “Not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be explored, like the cultural movement in food from a thing you eat for raw energy to food as an idiom of pleasure, creativity, and expression, an excuse for gathering friends and family.

“Computing had a similar transformation. It wasn’t until the computer became an idiom of personal expression that it exploded into something ubiquitous as clothes on our body.

“So much of our energy dialogue is still about how big corporate players can do better things, or forcing carmakers to do more reasonable things by taxing the bejesus out of oil so the government can smartly fund new research.…There isn’t enough faith that things can come up meaningfully from the bottom, that through a culture of hacking and play there could be broad, self-realized solutions.”

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This Is Burning Man (BenBella) and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement
(PublicAffairs).

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.

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