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Empire editorial: Crisis lesson: Communities should unite
Editorial, Juneau Empire
It’s too soon to say Juneau’s energy crisis is over, but Alaska Electric Light & Power Co.’s announcement late last week that transmission line repair work will be completed in a matter of days came as welcome news.
Juneau experienced a wrenching month and a half of uncertainty following the April 16 avalanches that cut the city off from its main source of cheap hydroelectricity and forced the utility to raise rates by 447 percent to cover the cost of expensive diesel fuel.
When the avalanches struck, no one knew how long this crisis was going to last or how painful the economic hit would be. The prospect of paying extremely high rates for up to three months had many people and businesses doubting their ability to weather the crisis.
But rather than panic, our community kept cool and started to conserve electricity. People began turning to conservation Web sites and online forums, as well as their neighbors, for tips on how to cut back on energy use. Armed with this information, people switched off lights, turned down the heat, lowered the temperature of water heaters, and dried their clothes on racks and clotheslines.
The result: The community cut its energy consumption by an unprecedented 30 percent.
When the crisis began, our community leaders sought assistance from the state and federal governments. When aid wasn’t forthcoming, again, rather than panic, our leaders quickly realized that we alone had to pull ourselves out of this crisis.
(1 June 2008)
Wasted Energy
Hannah Fairfield, New York Times
It’s gone before you even knew it was there: As energy is unlocked from fuels at power plants, two-thirds of the energy consumed to create electricity is lost.
The laws of thermodynamics dictate that conversion efficiency will never be 100 percent, because heat is lost at every step of the conversion process. But new technologies may be able to greatly increase conversion efficiency, moving from an overall rate of 36 percent to closer to 50 percent.
(1 June 2008)
Recommended by Big Gav and Treehugger with the post headlined: “It’s The Efficiency, Stupid: New York Times Gets It Right This Time”
What a Waste! Expert Says Data Centers Waste Up to 90% of the Electricity They Use (Part 1 of 2)
Energy Tech Stocks
As the world struggles to meet what is expected to be a 100% increase in electricity demand by 2030, the information technology industry is wasting an extraordinary amount of power, according to Bill Coleman, CEO of privately-held Cassatt Corp., a California-based company whose software is designed to increase the efficiency of data centers.
In an interview with EnergyTechStocks.com, Coleman said data centers waste up to 90% of the electricity they use. Because data center power consumption, which today represents 1.5% of all electricity consumed in the U.S., is expected to grow sharply, accounting for 3% of all U.S. consumption within five years, Coleman’s 90% estimate, if accurate, represents not only an extraordinary squandering of the world’s natural resources. It also represents a huge untapped opportunity for America – and the world – to avoid the financial and environmental cost of building new power plants.
(2 June 2008)
Contributor Bill Paul writes:
Incredibly, data center operators keep everything turned on because they don’t know what applications are running on which server at any given time!
Contributor Big Gav writes (June 4):
This is a little unfair – what they don’t know (as a general rule) is when people might want to use a particular application (which will more than likely be hosted on just one server) or if it is doing periodic tasks of its own accord.
There are some cool techniques for dealing with large groups of servers all running the same software though, where you can optimise how many are running at various points in time based on past usage patterns and forecasts about future usage – but thats more Google / Microsoft / Yahoo territory than your average application hosted on one or two servers in a hosting centre.
Of course, that’s not to say that data centre operators always know what they are doing – I was talking to a Google guy last week who told me this story about noticing the temperature in one of their data centres steadily rising – they rang the operator to ask what was happening a few times to see what was happening and he kept saying everything was fine. Eventually it got so hot (they have monitoring equipment to measure all sorts of stuff about the server environments) they rang him up and asked if the place was on fire – after a brief check he announced it was ! I think he lost that hosting contract as a result…
Elder care – green, high-tech and ‘old-fashioned extended family ties’
John Foyston, Portland Oregonian
Original: Elite Care debuts in Tigard a living arrangement so seniors can “age in place”
The concept deinstitutionalizes care in a facility heavy with green features
—
TIGARD — Elite Care at Fanno Creek opened this month, bringing a new kind of elder care to Tigard, an innovative blend of high technology and old-fashioned extended family ties that keeps residents involved and active and allows them to “age in place.”
… Many elder-care facilities seem to go out of their way to tell clients they are not home, with designs that include long, windowless hallways and rows of blank doors, and by the segregation of people based on how well they function.
… Elite Care Fanno Creek has no blind halls. Instead, bright, spacious suites radiate like spokes around the central kitchen or, on the third floor, the communal living room. Each of the two houses is home to 12 to 15 residents, and each functions like an extended family, Reed said, where residents look out for one another and are involved.
The only long hallway has a row of windows over a long stainless-steel covered potting table, where residents can garden — there are greenhouses inside and out, and garden boxes ring a second-story walkway. Residents will grow vegetables and herbs for the kitchens, and the Milwaukie site even had a market day recently.
Involving residents in growing food, and monitoring and fine-tuning their energy use, allows them to influence and act upon their world. That is especially the case in weekly home meetings, when residents will talk with staff about how the houses are run and suggest new activities.
(28 May 2008)
The kind of place elders will need for the long emergency. -JMG
Some of the most promising innovations seem to consist of re-discovering traditional ways of life – extended family, gardening, community involvement. As the Baby Boom reaches retirement age, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing more of this trend. -BA
Instruments of Amplification
Pete Friedrichs, Lindsay Books
… Then it’s on to vacuum tubes. That’s right. Homemade tubes. You’ll get details on Pete’s experiments with spice jar glow tubes, a canning jar diode, a bell jar vacuum triode, a tennis ball triode made from a glass votive jar, a hamster bottle triode, and more. According to the data presented in his book, I calculate that Pete’s tennis ball triode has a transconductance of about 400, quite low compared to modern tubes, a plate resistance of about 18000 ohms, which gives a theoretical voltage gain of about 7. And that’s not bad when you consider the first commercial tubes on the market had voltage gains in the realm of 8 to 10.
Oh so you want to build a transistor? Pete will show you his experiments with a copper oxide device which didn’t work so well. But the point contact device he built using a chunk of germanium stripped from a surplus WWII diode worked surprisingly well. And you can do the same.
You get basic theory of triodes, semiconductors, details on Pete’s surplus vacuum pump, details on solid state experiments by others, and so much more. This is one of the most unique electronics experimentation books to come along in decades. Not only can you duplicate Pete’s experiments, but you can use this as a jumping off point into bigger and better projects.
(2003)
Contributor – John Michael Greer writes:
The original has a photo of a handmade brass-and-rosewood vacuum tube — definitely something elegant and useful for the deindustrial electronics craftsperson to build…
BA:
Assuming the world-wide communications infrastructure collapses? What are ya gonna do? One workable solution is homemade radio parts, as illustrated in this book by an Arizona inventor and ham radio operator.
Another book by Pete Friedrichs (Voice of the Crystal) shows “How to Build Working Radio Receiver
Components Entirely from Scratch.” Now, all we need is instructions on how to make a personal computer from homemade parts.
John Michael Greer adds:
Speaking of trailing edge technology, you should certainly take a look at the best of the slide rule sites:
www.oughtred.org/
www.sphere.bc.ca/test/sruniverse.html
The slide rule deserves resurrection as soon as possible — if people in the deindustrial future are going to have convenient calculating devices, something that has no batteries to run down, no silicon chips and circuit boards to burn out, and can be made by a good cabinetmaker out of entirely renewable resources has much to recommend it!
