Our Foolish Energy System

                                                                                         written 6 October, 2024

                                                                                   published 13 October, 2024

  

            Recently, Helene came ashore as a category 4 hurricane, 600 miles in diameter.  A tropical depression just a few days earlier, the very hot water in the Gulf of Mexico rapidly amplified the storm, and increased the amount of water it carried. 

            Helene made landfall in the Big Bend section of Florida, the third, and strongest, hurricane to hit there in just 13 months, producing a 15 foot storm surge, the largest ever recorded in that area.  Moving quickly inland, Helene dropping torrents of rain, before dissipating hundreds of miles north.  The hardest hit parts of North Carolina had already experienced days of rain before Helene arrived, and some areas received as much as 24 inches, causing epic flooding and destruction.

            Another tropical depression has formed in the Gulf of Mexico, and will reach Florida before this article is printed, possibly as a category 3 hurricane.

            The Project 2025 authoritarian plan for the United States claimed in the climate section that "climate change is overstated, and will be mild and manageable."  The reality now being dealt with in the southeast is neither mild, nor manageable.  Insured costs and infrastructure repair expenses are estimated at over $150B, and will take years to accomplish.  This doesn't include uninsured losses, or business income lost during recovery.  When your home and place of work have been destroyed, getting back to "normal" can take time.  Some of the people in Florida haven't recovered from the previous two hurricanes, and may not ever rebuild there.  Home insurance in Florida is already four times more expensive than California, and the industry may not survive the current impacts. 

            The climate we experience today is the result of more than a century of changing atmospheric chemistry, resulting from human energy production, trapping more heat, which is then distributed in more extreme weather events.  Storms are becoming more numerous, stronger, larger, and carry more rain.  No place on Earth is immune.

            For those willing to actually look at the issue, the challenge is stark: stop adding to the problem (economic decarbonization), and begin removing what has already been done (carbon sequestration).  For those addicted to the money of the status quo, and willing to ignore the reality of the ongoing impact, this is intolerable.  We saw that at the Vice-Presidential debate, a few days after the Helene devastation.  When asked about the climate crisis, Vance faithfully parroted the party line.  Republicans are committed to "clean air and water" (without mentioning greenhouse gases), and the solution is "Drill Baby Drill".

            Without even considering the climate crisis, our current energy solution is foolish, leading to economic bankruptcy and societal collapse.  Classic fiscal advice is to conserve your savings, and live on the income.  The cautionary tale is the person who rapidly spends their inheritance, and then dies broke.  Humanity inherited a vast supply of stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels, laid down over tens of millions of years.  In just two centuries, we have burned through about half of that inheritance.  These have been the most accessible reserves, which produced the cheapest power.  As we continue to deplete our finite energy savings, all future fossil fuels will become increasingly more expensive.  This same limitation is inherent in nuclear fission, which also consumes rare, finite material.

            The alternative is learning to live within our income.  We can now efficiently harvest our daily energy income, collecting it as solar, wind, or hydro power (collectively called renewables), and efficiently store this energy until needed.  Unlike all energy produced by combustion, this energy is free, needing only the hardware to collect it, which is a fixed cost.  Furthermore, the collection/storage hardware can be produced in a range of sizes, from vast systems to those scaled for a single dwelling.  This helps free us from the constraint of centralization, which requires huge capital investments and massive distribution systems.  Such energy systems are useful all over the planet, and the increasing scale of manufacturing keeps reducing the costs every year.

            Tapping another free energy source, the emerging technology of closed loop geothermal power collects the internal heat of the planet.  It can be located almost anywhere, with a modest physical footprint.

            Learning to live within our energy income is sustainable well into the future.  The existing energy system is getting more expensive, and produces unintended consequences that are killing our society.  Are we wise enough to change?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

 

Gambling On Nuclear

                                                                                   written 29 September, 2024

                                                                                     published 6 October, 2024

    

            PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, located on the coast near San Luis Obispo, is the last operating nuclear facility in California.  The two 1,100MW reactors came online in 1985 and 1986, designed to operate for 40 years.  In 2016, PG&E announced plans to close both reactors by 2025, rather than incur costly upgrades.

            Nuclear power is baseload power, meaning it operates 24 hours a day, but output can't easily be adjusted to meet variable grid loads.  These days, it is the most expensive form of utility scale electricity.  As with all combustion power sources, uranium is a finite fuel, and most deposits easy to access have been depleted, driving up fuel costs.  Each reactor holds tens of tons of enriched uranium fuel, but the nuclear decay by-products degrade the energy efficiency of the fuel rods, requiring refueling after just 5 percent of the uranium has been consumed, contributing to the high operating costs.  After 70 years of commercial nuclear power, there is still no adequate storage for the highly radioactive used fuel rods. 

            While it is accurate that a normally functioning nuclear reactor does not emit any greenhouse gases, there is great concern about what happens when a reactor fails.  Greenhouse gases last for ten centuries, but radioactive contamination lasts for a thousand centuries.  There have been three major reactor malfunctions that made the news (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima), so we know such failures are possible. 

            The Diablo Canyon reactors are at the end of their design life, without any upgrades, and it is known that prolonged, intense radiation embrittles metal, weakening it, increasing risk of failure.  There are three active seismic faults within three miles of the Diablo Canyon plant, each capable of a magnitude 7 event, including one running right through the site.  PG&E tested for embrittlement in 2006, but refused to make the results public, claiming "proprietary information", and has postponed any further testing.  A structural failure of a weakened reactor cooling system due to an earthquake could cause wide spread radiation contamination.

            Fukushima failed when the tsunami flooded the emergency backup generators, causing several reactors to overheat and melt down, with resulting hydrogen explosions.  This was a direct result of original cost cutting decisions about how high to build protective sea walls, and sea level placement of the generators.  Safety is always sacrificed when decisions prioritize maximum profit.

            The reactors at Fukushima broke thirteen years ago, and real clean-up has yet to begin because the site is still too lethal for even robots to operate.  Cleanup costs are estimated at over a trillion dollar, and will take 4 decades, considered optimistic, as clean up on this scale has never been accomplished before.  

            PG&E is not liable for any radiation contamination damages, or cleanup costs, by long standing federal legislation.  No insurance policy in the country has ever covered such losses, because the price is indeterminant and the risk is completely unknown.  

            In 2021, the California Energy Commission became concerned about summer blackouts resulting from increasing air conditioning loads due to growing planetary heating, and recommended Diablo Canyon continue operating until 2035.  Recently, all electric utilities were told they must share the cost of keeping the plant open, even if they aren't in PG&E territory.

            Despite plans to operate past the original design life of the system, PG&E has not been required to make any major plant upgrades, which would be expensive and time consuming.  In addition, PG&E has not been required to make public the embrittlement testing done 18 years ago, or make any new tests on the current state of the system.  We are supposed to just "trust them", and hope for the best.

            This is the nuclear gamble: operate an aging nuclear plant, in an unknown operating condition, sitting on known fault systems, hoping for no seismic events for the next decade.  On the one hand, it has worked so far, and PG&E continues to get massive profits from the most expensive power on the grid.  However, should a low probability seismic event occur, and the reactors break, contaminating the center of California, PG&E is fiscally responsible for nothing.  However, we all get to deal with, and pay for, the result.  

            This is typical corporate financial reasoning: capitalize the profits and socialize the losses.  Sweet deal for the company, which has already demonstrated its complete disregard for customer welfare over the last few decades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

 

Wealth and Power

                                                                                   written 15 September, 2024

                                                                               published 29 September, 2024

 

            While democracy is central in the American mythos, exclusive gain has been rooted in America from the beginning.  Arising from the erroneous belief in separation, it perceives a hostile world, so control seems imperative. Thus, concentration of power and wealth is deemed essential for survival of a ruling elite, with the axiom "all for ourselves, and nothing for anyone else".  The "founding fathers", wealthy landowning men, fought the revolution to eliminate control by a small overseas elite, and created control by a larger domestic one instead.  

            Noam Chomsky's "Requiem For The American Dream" lists 10 practices which have been used to concentrate power in the last century.

            1: Reduce Democracy.  The ideal of democracy is the empowerment of the entire population.  Since exclusive gain produces wide spread poverty and misery, the democratic threat is the poor will rise up, demanding a larger portion of the economic pie.  The elite works to avoid this.

            2: Shape Ideology.  The economic crash of 1929, the result of wealth inequity and financial excesses, brought a wave of democratic policies to restore the country, spreading wealth through governmental actions.  This endured until the early 70's, when businesses began complaining they were "losing control", as worker's rights, civil rights, women's rights, and environmental concerns worked to limit the unfettered greed inherent in the so called "free market".  Socialism was demonized as an "excess of democracy", and critics were derided as unpatriotic, amplified by increased media concentration. 

            3: Redesign The Economy.  Production shifted overseas, chasing cheaper labor and fewer regulations, maximizing profit while destroying the democratic power of domestic unions.  As the economy shifted from manufacturing to financing, New Deal financial regulations deterring reckless bank activities were removed, allowing governmentally insured deposits to be speculatively invested.  Short term profits were prioritized.  

            4: Shift The Burden.  The progressive tax structure, which redistributed wealth and reduced economic inequity, was dismantled.  As the wealthy pay less, the poor pay more, working longer at more jobs to afford to live.  Instead of a strong middle class as our social foundation, wealth now supposedly "trickles down".  

            5: Attack Solidarity.  Compassion, an innate human trait, is a threat to exclusive gain.  Social Security supports economic solidarity, creating a stronger society, but is described as on the "verge of bankruptcy", and targeted for privatization.  However, most of the income of the wealthy does not contribute, exacerbating this apparent economic crisis.  An educated public makes a stronger society.  Reducing taxes precludes governmental support of free education, once quite common, making education a privilege, because a less educated public is more easily controlled.  A healthy population makes a healthy society, and should be a basic human right, but American health care is mostly privatized and expensive.

            6: Run The Regulators.  Regulations attempt to limit the damage of unrestrained capitalist greed.  But regulations are now often written by the regulated industry.  The regulators become part of doing business, described as "regulatory capture".

            7: Engineer The Elections.  Corporations are now "people", and donate unlimited election funds, sometimes totally anonymous, thanks to years of effort by Republicans on the Supreme Court.  The Senate and the Electoral College were designed to be undemocratic.  Republican policies are unpopular, so gerrymandering and voter purges are their electoral response.

            8: Keep The Rabble In Line.  The labor movement has been a constant opponent to the exclusive gain of the elites.  Consequently, businesses have worked to destroy unions, increasing wealth inequity.

            9: Manufacture Consent.  Power is always in the hands of the collective, so efforts are made to keep them divided.  The public relations industry accentuates societal differences and obscures similarities.  It also supports the distraction of the consumer industry, keeping people in debt, struggling to buy the "next new thing".

            10: Marginalize The Population.  Public policy controlled by the wealthy is prioritized to meet their needs, but not those of the majority.  This leads to desperation, depression, and rage.  Trump taps into that rage, even though he has no policies to help his faithful, as he is one of the elite.

            All democracies eventually go one of two ways: increasing authoritarianism until eventual collapse, or sustained effort to reduce economic inequity.  The climate crisis adds a new imperative, which will speed the collapse if we ignore it much longer.  Any real climate solution has to be globally inclusive, eliminating the foolishness of exclusive gain everywhere.  This election will tell the tale.  How will you vote?

 

 

An Energy Proposal

                                                                                   written 15 September, 2024

                                                                               published 22 September, 2024

   

            The growing climate crisis threatens our planet's habitability.  For those not in denial, or too addicted to fossil fuel money, the solution is clear: stop adding to the problem as soon as possible (decarbonization) and rapidly begin removing what has already been added (sequestration).

            California has accepted the decarbonization goal, which requires producing more non-carbon electricity, and instructed all electrical power agencies to move in that direction.  The limited capacity of the existing transmission grid means any timely solution will involve widely distributed power production and storage, and new power management tools to manage these more complex systems.  

            A year ago, NCPA, Ukiah's power provider, told our utility to produce 15 percent more of our power locally, amounting to 45 megawatt hours/day (MWh/d).  Averaged over the year, 11 megawatts (MW) of solar array would collect that much power. 

            As the climate crisis grows, so do lethal heat events.  City emergency response provides cooling centers for people who can't afford air conditioning in their homes.  Increased air conditioning loads stress the grid during episodes of high heat, and can cause the grid to fail, as was barely avoided last summer.  A grid failure during a heat wave could be fatal, so every cooling center has to have some form of reliable backup power.

            According to the City Manager's office, Ukiah has two designated cooling centers: the Civic Center, and the Conference Center.  However, the Conference Center Manager says it is no longer a designated cooling center.  Both have fossil fueled backup power, which can operate for more than a day, but then needs refueling.  The Ukiah Senior Center is also listed as a cooling center, and also has a fossil fueled backup power system.

            These backup systems, which are never operated unless needed, are effectively "sunk costs", assets that hardly produce any return on the investment.  Although they are tested regularly, during the 2019, four day PSPS grid blackout, two grocery stores (Lucky's and the Co-Op) had their fossil fueled backup power systems fail, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost food.  Even when these systems operate, they contribute to the problem that is destroying our civilization.  

            A more creative, cost effective energy solution would operate all the time, covering its cost by contributing to the normal production of electrical power, without producing the carbon pollution that threatens our society, yet be able to operate independent from the grid when needed.  In our valley, this would be a solar array with adequate battery storage, and the associated power management hardware.  Storage allows cheap mid-day power to replace off-peak power, which can be 5-10 times more expensive.

            In 2020, the Ukiah Unified School system added 750 kilowatts (KW) of canopy solar arrays over parts of their parking lots, installed at three sites outside the City limits.  This work was grant funded.  Averaged over 25 years, this produces fixed cost power of about $0.10/KWhr, less than 1/3 their previous power costs, which were going up every year.  In addition to saving on electricity costs, the parking lots are now shaded in the summer and protected from rain in the winter.

            The Senior Center building and parking lot could support about 500KW of array (assuming 50 percent of the area is covered).  The Civic Center building and the parking lots could support about 700KW.  The Conference Center building and parking lot could support about 400KW.  If all three cooling centers were shifted to renewable, full time power, with emergency backup capacity, they would account for 1/7 of the total new power NCPA is asking the City to install.

            Once this kind of project is accomplished, the City would know how to handle the grant writing, project construction, and most importantly, distributed power management techniques required to handle such versatile power systems.  This is the wave of the future, and the City needs to start learning these skills now. 

            As the City expands its local power generating capacity, other possible cooling centers could be created, such as churches, mobile home parks, and retirement centers.  Essential aspects of the community could made power resilient, like the hospital and power hungry grocery stores, all beneficial for long term disaster survival.

            While making the entire City power resilient is a worthy goal, it has yet to happen.  A first step is essential.  Let's start with a focus on keeping everyone alive during a blackout caused by a lethal heat wave.

A Thank You Letter to Ukiah

                                                                                   written 8 September, 2024

                                                                             published 15 September, 2024

  

            I have moved a great deal in my life, but have lived in the City of Ukiah longer than anywhere else.  As a resident, I thank every City employee, including the City Council, department heads, administrative staff, and all the workers with boots on the ground.  "We The People" own and operate the essential systems of life, which provide water, sewage treatment, electricity, and roads.  

            Ukiah is blessed with a natural underground lake as a result of our geographic location.  Our water system draws from this source, storing, treating and delivering potable water throughout the City, with enough extra to offer to other communities in the county, as needed.  Constant repairs and upgrades ensure reliable delivery, and long-term planning keeps the system expanding ahead of needs. 

            Our sewage system has multi-level, state of the art treatment, and now, with the grant funded purple pipe project, recycles more than 3/4 of that water for City parks and local agricultural, among the first in the state, maximizing the use of this precious, finite resource.  

            The electrical department, publicly owned for over a century, consistently delivers reliable power, at half the cost anywhere else in the region.  System improvements are ongoing, steadily increasing operational reliability.

            Our city roads are being upgraded with grant funding, replacing essential aging infrastructure, and turning a former business highway into a lovely community thoroughfare.  Despite being disruptive in the short term, which have been managed to a minimum, it satisfies goals that will pay off for decades.

            The planning department has allowed Ukiah to be one of a handful of communities in the state who exceed mandated housing goals, preserving planning rights lost to all the other cities.  

            The City Council unanimously passed a Climate Emergency Resolution, recognizing the growing climate crisis.  A Climate Resiliency Officer has been hired to coordinate actions by all the City departments to work efficiently toward preserving a habitable planet.  This function is rare for a city the size of Ukiah.  However, we are a viable test bed, with all the issues facing larger communities, but on a more personal scale, making changes more possible.  What we accomplish here will be a model applicable everywhere.

            All this has been done with limited staff and budget, leveraging state and federal grant opportunities.  You have collectively created a living example of a functional socialist community, where the benefits of the system accrue to everyone.  With public ownership of water, sewage treatment, electricity, and roads, prices reflect the actual cost of operations and staffing, with the "profit" returned to every citizen as reliable, high quality service.  

            It is important to notice, and honor, the good work that is already happening.  People appreciate being appreciated.  Therefore, I want to acknowledge, and express my deepest thanks.  

Deficits

                                                                                   written 1 September, 2024

                                                                               published 8 September, 2024

 

            When the "outgoing" is greater than the "incoming", a deficit arises.  In political discussion, this usually refers to the US fiscal deficit, which has risen from $5.7T in 2000, to $35.3T today.  Bush the younger spent $4.3T on the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Obama spent $9.6T bailing out the economy after banks crashed housing.  Trump spent $8.1T on tax cuts for the wealthy.  Biden spent $7.6T keeping the economy out of depression during the COVID pandemic.  Republicans spent on wars and billionaires, and Democrats spent on keeping the economy alive, both parties showing their core concerns.

            The deficit is large and growing, with real economic consequences, but it is really only a fiction.  Money is a concept, of value only by virtue of collective social agreement.  As a concept, money can be conjured into existence.  When money is deposited into a bank, the bank can then loan out 10 times as much, created on nothing more than "trust".  These days, most money has no physical existence, living only as electronic data.  The 8 percent that is "hard" currency has little physical value of its own.  

            While the fiscal deficit draws most attention, especially during campaign years, other deficits have greater real-life impact, and unlike money, solutions can't be created out of nothing.

            The US loses topsoil 5 times faster than it is being created, for a net deficit of 58B tons over the last 160 years.  Healthy topsoil has 200B organisms per cubic foot, essential for plant nutrition and water retention.  As this living system degrades, and the soil erodes, growing food becomes more difficult and expensive, and what is grown has declining nutritional value.  Yet commercial farming focuses on making money to service their debts, which takes priority over restoring topsoil.

            Another deficit is ground water, which provides drinking water for half the US population, and 50B gallons a day for agriculture.  Ground water aquafer recharge rates vary, some as slow as thousands of years.  As population and agriculture production increases, using bigger pumps on deeper wells, larger ground water deficits occur, and land subsides as much as 5 inches per year in some areas.  The changing climate has affected rainfall patterns, bringing flooding and droughts, making ground water extraction more critical and precarious.

            All physical systems begin to deteriorate as soon as they are constructed, demanding periodic servicing to identify problems and make needed repairs.  This is an ongoing expense, which is often deferred due to budget limitations, or desires to appear more "profitable", creating a physical deficit that grows with time.  The long-term consequences can be disastrous and expensive. 

            The US has over 90,000 dams, with an average age of 60 years.  Engineering and seismic designs have progressed enormously in that time period, so what seemed "good design" at the time is now more questionable.  Add in the consequence of "deferred maintenance", and over 2,000 are in poor condition, endangering life if they fail, requiring over $80B to repair.  As rainfall becomes more extreme, the stress on these dams increases.

            The US has over 600,000 bridges, with 40 percent over 50 years old.  Due to age and neglect, 46,000 are structurally deficient and in "poor" condition, yet they carry almost 180 million vehicles a day.  Mitigation will cost over $100B, and the current rate of repair is half what is required, resulting in increasing risk over time.

            This is just a partial list of real-world deficits that affect our social wellbeing.  These problems stem from the growing focus on maximizing "profit" over every other concern.  For instance, stock buybacks are on the rise, which benefit the shareholders, but reduces the capacity of the industry to maintain their infrastructure or modernize their operations.  As wealth accrues disproportionally to the very wealthy, who then use their political clout to reduce their taxes, cities and states are under increased budget pressures to defer essential planning and maintenance.

             The common factor is lack of whole systems planning and the belief in exclusive gain.  Making money by ignoring the consequences, and getting "someone else" to pay the cleanup cost, is considered "good business".  Our culture honors those who accumulate more than everyone else, but complains when things fall apart, which happens because the world is totally connected.  This is a deep societal dysfunction, with thousands of years of history.  Change may seem slow, but it is inevitable, because the alternative is collapse.

The Unity Challenge

                                                                                       written 25 August, 2024

                                                                                published 1 September, 2024

  

            The text of "Course In Miracles" speaks from the perspective that the root of all human dysfunction is the belief in separation, because it is in conflict with a world that is fundamentally unified and whole.  Aldous Huxley found that every spiritual tradition on the planet has some form of the Golden Rule, consistent with unity reality.  In addition, quantum mechanics supports unified material reality, and the resulting transformative technologies validates that.

            Unity is a challenge because it presumes reality without limits, where everything is included, the definition of infinity.  Unity transcends physical manifestation, in the same way national borders are experienced as irrelevant when Earth is viewed from the moon.  

            But like all concepts, living the experience of unity is the important part, where the real work lies.  For thousands of years, our cultures and economies have focused on material differentiation, with attendant chronic suffering, overlooking the foundation that binds reality and gives it purpose.  So, we have lifetimes of patterning to overcome.  

            It is important to differentiate between spirituality, which is any internal investigation of a transcendent reality, and religion, which is an organization, usually defining a specific structure for the transcendent.  Throughout history, religions, which can be of help with spirituality, have repeatedly been co-opted, succumbing to the egos of men who strive for economic power and social domination for their organization.  They insinuate themselves between the individual and unity, limiting and defining what a transcendent reality is, rather than helping expand each person's experience.

            By drawing dogmatic lines, defining what is "acceptable" and "unacceptable".  some parts of reality are excluded, and the whole idea of unity is denied, the root of all evil.  The excised parts then become the objects of hate, or fear, furthering the nature of the divide, giving self-righteous justification for misogyny, racism, nationalism, and classism.  

            The worst offenders are those most caught up in orthodoxy and fundamentalism.  They worship a little god.  These are the people who hate deviation from their organizationally approved dogma, and will kill in the name of their deity to insure religious "purity".  

            However, every spiritual tradition has mystics, who understand all words are concepts, which can only be metaphors at best, and that any concept is incomplete.  Mystics are open to learning from all traditions, and most especially from the living of life.  

            At the individual level, when the line is drawn at the self or the body, everyone and everything "outside" is something to fear as a "predator", or something to dominate as "prey".  Internal self-worth is then determined by external forms like clothes, cultural beauty standards, and material possessions, leading to life-long acquisition of things.  But things never really fulfill for long, because the yearning is for the internal experience of the connected unity, which nothing "external" can ever satisfy.

            Embracing inclusive reality demands complete social and economic reconsideration.  For example, every meal I eat, something has to die that I might live.  In unity, we are connected, so I need to have gratitude for their contribution to my life, and assure that their lives have dignity and respect, as I expect that for myself.  In a unity awareness, every person involved in growing, processing, preparing, and delivering the food must thrive if any of us thrive.  Since all life depends on the health of the planet we share, respect for the entire planet is essential for the survival of any of us.  

            The root of suffering is being at war with a fact.  The contrast between a unity awareness and our existing society is profound, which explains why suffering is endemic.  Our economy has extreme wealth disparity, where a few people have billions, while millions lack essentials to survival, such as clean water, nutritious food, adequate shelter, and access to health care.  Our society is extremely polarized, with each side convinced the other is an "existential threat" to our way of life, and some are willing to resort to violence to assert their perspective.  Yet unity requires understanding that all these folks are connected, demanding a response different from fear or attack.

            This election, we are faced with two clear alternatives.  The GOP preaches fear, division, and retribution, the traditional consequences of the illusion of separation.  The Democrats preach working together for the benefit of all.  Without a doubt, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but they are moving toward a unity reality.