People - There is No Silver Bullet !

OK, we've got that behind us ! "We do ?" you ask yourself. What I mean is that there is no one single solution to the energy crisis we are facing. OK! I admit the word "crisis" is a tad alarmist, but we DO need to be concerned.

I am not going to jump on the climate-change bandwagon, hoping to spur the masses to action with (possibly) questionable science. Maybe global warming is happening, although you'd never know it where I live - woke up to -29C this morning ! But that's a different story...

Nor am I going to say that the likes of Al Gore and David Suzuki are alarmist tree-huggers. They believe that there is a crisis, while I think the jury is still out. For example, a significant portion of the Greenhouse Gases which are attributed to Global Warming come from bovine burps !

What I _DO_ know is this: we North Americans are addicted to fossil fuels. We use them to generate electricity and to power almost all modes of transportation. The most notable exception is the Nuclear Aircraft Carrier, but I suspect nuclear power is not viable for much else !


Cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships all run on some form of fossil fuels. And some 65% of the electricity generated in the USA is generated using coal. Hence, I believe that even the futuristic-seeming Electric Vehicles are "dirty" because their power also comes from fossil fuels.

"We"ll convert to Hydrogen !", some experts expound. Or "We should build high-tech nuclear plants !", other experts counter. There's a nightmare in the making !

There is no one single technology which can take over all of our energy requirements. I purposely state that no matter WHAT changes are made to whatever technology, our biggest challenge will be complacency. The change needs to be gradual, likely over one or more generations !

I keep wandering back to the paradigm. Is government-owned and regulated power the way to go ? Should we scale back and provide point-sources for power generation ? This would eliminate the need for a power-grid. Failures at one site wouldn't affect the next site.


If each site - be it a building, a block of buildings, a village - took care of it's own energy needs, then we wouldn't see the massive catastrophes like 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. We also wouldn't see the unsightly (OK - freaking UGLY) power-transmission towers which ensnarl the countryside. Efficient AND attractive - what a concept !

In most of my Renewable Energy postings, I focus on the local, small-scale types of projects. Individual photo-voltaic panels and solar hot-water systems are key to our success. I like micro-scale hydro and short-tower wind turbines. I like these as just about any homeowner could implement these solutions without incurring ridiculous costs. Further, they could easily become self-sufficient. Living "off grid" doesn't HAVE to mean you live in some rural, back-country area.

But one of the most important factors in these solutions is that each has it's own strengths and weaknesses. PV systems don't generate electricity at night. Wind turbines won't generate electricity on a calm day. You get the picture ?


Hence, most experts agree that you shouldn't rely on just one system to supply your energy needs. Further, the best designed systems also allow for the inclusion of a gas or diesel generator to provide supplemental power. As you can see, the best practice would be to implement multiple solutions !

Once we agree that there is no Silver Bullet, we can start to look at effective ways of implementing many (if not all) of these renewable-energy solutions.





The opinions expressed in this post are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses; everyone has one and they are entitled to it !

Renewable Energy Paradigm Shift

I was having a discourse with a fellow about renewable energy, when we landed on the topic of efficiencies. He held the belief that the efficiency of the power-generation scheme wasn't as important as the cost. In his mind that was the barrier to universal adoption.

It is generally held that solar photo-voltaic solar systems are only about 11% efficient. That means that they can only convert 11% of the solar exposure they receive to electricity. The rest goes untapped.

But what of other systems ? Wind systems are more efficient, at around

18%. It is due to the fact that it takes a fair amount of energy to start the turbine to spin. That is to say a lot of potential energy is wasted as it goes past the turbine, without enough force to actually turn it.

Much more efficient is the hydro-generation plant. Using nearly identical technology as the wind-turbine, it is at least three times more efficient ! This is because water is much denser than air. So less water has to pass through the turbine to get it to spin with the same force.

But at the end of the day, the system is only useful if we don't squander the energy we are learning to harness. In this particular discourse, my colleague and I drifted into talking about changing the paradigms of renewable energy.


To wit:
1) generate energy from renewable sources - no more dependence on dwindling resources
2) end the dependence on the rigid grid - no more huge power plants & transmission systems that can't handle fluctuating power-generation schemes like solar or wind
3) have each building be responsible for their own energy needs; this is the corollary to #2
4) change building practices to focus on "zero-energy" buildings
5) take advantage of every technology where appropriate & provide government-led incentives (taxes, etc.)
6) waste nothing - everything needs to be used purposefully & converted into something else that useful
7) take a "do no harm" attitude.


The paradigms need to be re-examined from the creation of power; the
effects on the environment of creating that power; the conservation of that power. Unless we, as a society, can accomplish these tasks, we will never be able kick the fossil-fuels dependency.


The opinions expressed in this post are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses; everyone has one and they are entitled to it !

Nano-Scale Hydro Power Generation

Once again, I must confess that my perceptions continue to be challenged. Previously, I had posted that I wasn't particularly interested in Hydro Power generation, as I always perceived it as requiring a huge capital investment, usually by some government body. Further, I was very concerned about the upstream ecological impact of implementing a dam. I thought it was a requirement.



But I have since done some more research, and find out that smaller-scale hydro power has gone on for years. The classic water-wheels that were used for their mechanical potential in grinding wheat into flour are one example. More recently, instead of mechanical potential, they are used for the creation of electricity. In fact, they are many multiples more efficient than either wind or solar, owing largely to the density of the water itself !

Typically, simple implementations divert a portion of the flow (20% is considered more than reasonable) into a large pipe, which is then incrementally decreased. This increases the water pressure without changing the volume. The resulting "jet" of water flows past some form of turbine, which in turn adds mechanical potential to the generation of electricity. Finally, the water rejoins the original flow of water.



The other variables which in turn help determine how much electricity can be generated include head - how far the water falls, and friction-losses - does the flow of water slow down owing to turns or a pipe that's too narrow.

Since my focus is on renewable energy, hydro is remarkably attractive. Presumably, a stream or small river will almost always have some flow. The fact that it flows at all indicates it must have some head. And a stream-side implementation returns the water back to the stream or river. It is clean, non-polluting, and won't cause any upstream damage.

Couple a hydro system with wind & solar, and you have a system capable of creating electricity year round, regardless of what climate you live in !


The opinions expressed in this post are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses; everyone has one and they are entitled to it !

Poop Power ?

As I continue my research into the world of renewable energy sources, I find information that is interesting, informative, and sometimes quite amusing. In a previous post, I explored how Jean Pain used the anaerobic digestion of compost to create methane gas - AKA Natural Gas. So I started to look at ways in which the principles of permaculture could be applied. Permaculture refers to finding ways to mimic how Mother Nature achieves her needs.



The best anaerobic digester of organic matter is the rumen ( the first chamber of a cow's stomach ). The cow macerates the cellulose fibre, and when it enters the rumen, it begins to get digested by the bacteria in the cows rumen. The process is helped by the lack of oxygen (making the process anaerobic), and the natural body temperature of the cow.

As we saw in Jean Pain's experiments & feats of engineering, one by-product of the process is methane gas. A ruminating cow will burp up some 280 litters of methane gas every day ! When you consider that there are estimated to be more than 100 million cows in North America alone, this represents an incredible portion of the greenhouse gases emissions which are blamed for global warming.

Unfortunately, this gas would be remarkably difficult to capture. Fortunately, there is still a considerable amount of undigested material passing through the rest of the cows digestive tract, mostly owing to the fact that a cow will digest it's food over the course of about 24 hours. Harvesting methane from compost takes about 21 days. So that undigested organic material can still be processed - provided you are not squeamish about cow dung !



Each one of those cows produce some 28 pounds of manure - every day !
So a herd of 1800 head of cattle will produce 48,000 pounds of manure a day. Certainly more than enough to keep a commercial anaerobic-digestion facility busy. And further fermenting the semi-digested material would have the additional benefit of reducing the unpleasant odours caused by the poop.

The composting rig that Jean Pain built was perfectly suited for finishing off the digestive process. It was sealed, meaning no oxygen could destroy the process, and the capture of methane gas couldn't be easier. Also it was warmed by the material composting in the heap piled all around his fermenting vessel.



When his compost is complete, both inside & outside the anaerobic digester, the by-products are nitrogen-rich soil, and a slurry form the digester. When pressed, the slurry is separated into liquid & solid materials. The solid materials can be recycled back into bedding for the cows. The liquid is a rich fertilizer for use in the fields.

The system has by-products which further support the process: rich hummus to grow new vegetable matter; fertilizer to speed that growth; plentiful feed for the cattle; and plenty of poop to harvest methane from before starting the cycle all over again. In much the same way as Mother Nature intended.

The opinions expressed in this post are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses; everyone has one and they are entitled to it !

When Profits Hamper Innovation

I have been doing a lot of research in the area of Data Storage recently. The company I work for is a partner of Dell and we sell an awful lot of the Equallogic line of SAN/NAS devices. They have a great model, wherein a customer buys the disk array and is automatically entitled to use all the software related to the device !


This is also a very open model. Consider the fact that the devices contain
commodity hardware: SATA disks, SAS disks, and even Solid State disks, coupled with intelligent controllers that are easily upgraded. Add in firmware solutions including de-duplication, snapshots,copy on write protection, not to mention common protocols like iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS. Clients are left with a robust, resilient and scalable solution. They are priced very competitively in the market.

But that's not good enough for me ! So I started asking myself - is there an OpenSource solution ? The answer is "It depends...", with a gentle poke at my friend Bill Bitner at IBM. There are a couple of options, however they are slightly constrained.

The first one is called BTRFS (pronounced "butter"-FS). It is open source software, under the GPL copyleft license. It is undergoing rapid development, and it expected to be feature-rich in the very near future. Unfortunately, not all of the features are here yet. Which makes it an unviable solution for my corporate clients.

The second solution, pioneered by Sun Microsystems, is called ZFS. It has all of the features listed above, and more. Unfortunately, it was intentionally killed as an open source project when Oracle acquired Sun. Along with the operating system, called OpenSolaris, Oracle abandoned the open development of the filesystem.

ZFS is still available as an Enterprise solution, but in a closed-source, pay-to-play model. Oracle was able to do this, as the original work done by Sun was licensed under the much more restrictive CDDL. In essence, it allows the original authors to "own" any derivative works, and therefore close the source code at any time.

Oracle has in effect killed two well-received open source software projects, in favor of not competing with it's own interests. This is not news. Oracle has been watched with beat suspicion, as they acquired companies which had products that competed with theirs - Sun and BEA are just two examples. But in so doing, they hamper the innovation which is helping grow the limits of their own industry. What will happen to MySQL, or JAVA ?

Fortunately, a company called Nexenta has provided stewardship, and is actively maintaining the code, alongside a consortium of the original developers. The consortium effectively "forked" the open source components of OpenSolaris to a new project called IllumOS, and they continue to work with Nexenta on it's flagship, community project called NexentaStor.
NexentaStor turns an ordinary PC into a SAN/NAS device, very similar to the Equallogic device I described at the beginning of this post. It is feature-rich and open source, having a vibrant community continuing to provide new code and testing.




The opinions expressed in this post are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses; everyone has one and they are entitled to it !