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Dearest Friend,
Today I am thinking about power. The physical property of power – using energy to do work. I think we used the lights a lot last night, and Chloe borrowed an inefficient charger for her phone, and now the batteries are at less than 10 volts (a very stressed-out battery) and the solar charger keeps throwing an error.
Suddenly, my project with my mentee is front-of-mind. We have determined that there’s enough wind here on the hill for a turbine, but have gotten stuck in deciding which turbines are a gimmick and which actually work.
There are youtube videos of people having both an experience of real power generation from cheap online turbines and of them buying things off Amazon which don’t work anywhere close to what we’d expect from the specs. There’s smartly-written articles of people saying the entire concept of a home turbine is a flawed endeavor. So, caveat emptor? Why is this so difficult?
Everybody is throwing up solar panels, but they just don’t make a lot of sense in dark, foggy, snowy Maine. So does this mean our whole idea of clean energy in Maine is flawed? Or just that there’s some secret market force making wind turbines a black art?
I had started digging into the bigger picture of this a few weeks ago, when my father told me California is already experiencing big blackouts from electric car charging. I was confused, wasn’t California already having a lot of blackouts? But apparently now they can’t meet demand even during supposed off-peak times – so most likely electric cars are to blame. I can’t see this problem clearly yet.
What is clear: California claim to be depending on residential rooftop solar for an enormous amount of their increased electricity generation. This seems weird to me. How are rooftop solar panels going to be a bigger thing that offshore wind? Offshore wind is proven technology, and the USA already generates more wind-based electricity than any other country, even as a percentage of total generation.
Something feels wrong about the push for electric cars and solar panels. I have used solar panels. I drive a truck. The system I’d need at home to provide enough power to charge a truck would be massive, it would exceed the cost of the truck itself. By rough math, the fuel I would consume over 100,000 miles comes to about 80% of the price I paid for the truck. And with solar, you need a massive amount of reserve battery.
Who will pay for all of this stuff and how can rooftop solar possibly make up the defecit?
Most people cannot possibly have enough space for enough solar panels to charge two cars, not to mention their lawn mowers and mini-splits. There is a problem with how we are thinking about power.
Here is how I described it to my aunt recently: The best cyclists in the world, with all their training and their huge legs, can sustain about 400 watts for an all-out push on one leg of the Tour De France. A tiny 2-seat Smart car has an engine which produces about 66,000 watts. So when you accelerate onto the highway to go the the supermarket, you are applying the work of 165 pro cyclists to propel your tiny car. Somebody has to feed those cyclists.
I want to learn more about how this is likely to actually play out in global energy systems, because I have so many questions and so few journalists seem to be captivated by this.
Having lots of electricity on tap (lots by our standards, which is still about a tenth of what a typical American house might consume) is the big comfort project for us here at Inchoate. Without reliable electricity, we are forced to fiddle with generators and haul fuel, our food spoils faster, and we can’t charge our tools.
I built the cabin in the woods where in winter we get good light. The sun heats through two layers of clear roof material, then in spring, when it starts to get too toasty, the trees leaf out and we get built in air conditioning. The windows are also facing with the prevailing winds, with big openings, to allow cool breezes.
In winter, we heat with wood, sustainably harvested on the property.
So the hungriest power need is refrigeration – keeping our food. I’d also like to roast coffee sans-generator, have dance parties, and with enough excess, maybe keep an electric bicycle and sometimes heat my workshop space with electricity.
It is surprisingly complicated. Lead acid batteries are heavy and don’t like being deeply discharged. Lithium batteries need to be kept warm in winter, and can’t be charged when they are colder than the freezing temperature of water (why exactly that temperature, I wonder?). Many people run a heater for their batteries off of their batteries so that they can then charge their batteries. A bit Rube Goldberg, but apparently the best method.
On top of this you have to figure out all kinds of formulas to decide how your local weather is going to affect your ability to produce power, and as a result, how you will design your systems to collect and store energy. And there’s a wild card, because our weather is becoming more unpredictable with climate change.
We have been having a very strange winter here. The heavy wet snow cracked a timber in half on the woodshed, so that the entire shed now looks mutilated and deformed, caving in on itself. If it fails completely, it will probably destroy the solar panels along with it.
The ground is not really frozen yet, even in late January, so the driveway has become impassable, even when covered with a foot of icy snow. We ski in and out with our water and groceries.
I’m reminded of the empty wood yards up north. They can’t harvest timber (one of the world’s most sustainable building materials) because the ground isn’t hard enough and the heavy equipment turns trails into erosion slushies.
Chloe and have talked about enclosing the outdoor shower, putting in an on-demand water heater, and running a pipe below the frost line in the well so that we can make wintertime hot showers a reality. I think if it is well-enough sealed, the space will heat itself when you run the shower.
But I must go now to get on to finishing projects for my town. The town is, to some degree, depending on me. I hope you are very well, and I am thinking of you fondly.
Love, Brad