integrative design

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Integrated Design Makes “Smart Garage” Part of Utility’s Infrastructure

December 5, 2008 in energy storage, green building, transportation by nils | Add your comment

Garage of the Future

Garage of the Future (photo by Elsie esq., CC 2.0 Attribution License)

The Rocky Mountain Institute's Andrew Demaria blogged a few weeks ago about "smart garages" that combine smart cars, a smart home network, and much smarter utilities into a synergistic system that optimizes power usage. After describing a "day in the life" of a smart garage:

Given the utility is experiencing a peak load period, it asks my house if it can use the spare power in the car's battery and send that electricity elsewhere in the grid. What's more, it will pay me for that power. Since I like being paid, I have already programmed the system to accept such requests.

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Amory Lovins Named A World’s Best Leader By U.S. News

November 25, 2008 in business benefits, energy efficiency, integrative design, policy by nils | Add your comment

Amory Lovins
Amory Lovins

Amory Lovins is one of my true heros, and I'm thrilled to hear that U.S New has named him one of World's Best Leaders in their report this week. Lovins has inspired multitudes (and this blog) with his vision of "getting off oil at a profit" and "drilling for negabarrels under Detroit." The Rocky Mountain Institute, a "think and do" tank that he founded 26 years ago, takes this vision and makes it happen for Fortune 1000 companies, the military, and governments around the world (including Portola Valley, just up the street from me, where he spoke a few weeks ago).

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Sahara Forest Project: An Awesome Example of Mega-Integrative Design

October 17, 2008 in energy generation, integrative design, solar thermal by nils | Add your comment

The Sahara Forest project will use seawater and solar power to grow food in greenhouses across the desert. Photograph: Exploration Architecture

The Sahara Forest project will use seawater and solar power to grow food in greenhouses across the desert. Photograph: Exploration Architecture

The Sahara Forest project represents integrative design at a huge scale. (Integrative design combines multiple design improvements to get an overall improvement that's bigger than the sum of its components.) As it says on the the Sahara Forest project home page:

The project combines two proven technologies in a new way to create multiple benefits: producing large amounts of renewable energy, food and water as well as reversing desertification.

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Running Some Numbers On Rooftop Solar Energy in 2018

October 2, 2008 in green building, integrative design, solar electricity by nils | 1 comment

Solar power systems installed in the areas def...

Solar power systems covering the areas defined by the dark disks could provide more than the world total primary energy demand in 2006 (assuming a conversion efficiency of 8%). Image from Wikipedia.

I recently asked physicist Richard Muller whether he thought the price-performance of solar electricity generation would follow a Moore's Law-type curve. He said that this would not occur due to improving the efficiency of solar collection, as the current levels of efficiency - 20-40% - are reasonably high. However, he added

"I do expect the price to drop by a factor of 10, so we will have lots of solar."

Well, in the nature of things, there's definitely a limit to how much energy a solar PV collector can get from a square meter of sunlight. (There's about 1kw of energy in a square meter - as I learned in Physics For Future Presidents, by Professor Muller - so we can expect to get 400 watts or less.) The amount of this energy per square meter we can collect will go up, but asymptotically approach (at best) the physical limits.

On the other hand, I'd argue that the cost of collecting it can go down a nearly unlimited amount - certainly multiple orders of magnitude. So what will solar PV look like in 2018 - ten years from now?

Carbon Mitigation Through Carbon Fiber?

August 18, 2008 in carbon mitigation, transportation by nils | Add your comment

A cloth of woven carbon filamentsImage via Wikipedia

Here's an idea - let's just suck the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbon fiber to build superlight cars! These superlight cars would significantly reduce our demand for gasoline in the short term, and enable a right-sized hydrogen-based transportation fuel economy in the long term! Sounds great, right? But it's a pipe dream right now - today carbon fiber is made from PolyAcryloNitrile (PAN), which is made from petroleum, and it's an expensive and time-consuming process to make the fiber, and to make automobile parts from it.

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How is it profitable?

August 7, 2008 in Uncategorized by nils | Add your comment

The simple fact is that, when done using integrative design, energy efficiency and changing over to greener sources of energy is profitable. As Amory Lovins says, efficiency and renewables suffer from the same problem the Hubble Space Telescope did - a "sign error." Everyone thought it would cost more to be efficient and to save energy, but in fact it costs less.

For example:

  • Implementing your office building's HVAC system in the most efficient manner (not the way we're taught to do it in trade school) results not only in significant energy savings, but also in significant productivity improvements - your top line benefits as well as your bottom line.
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What is “Integrative Design?”

August 7, 2008 in Uncategorized by nils | 1 comment

"Integrative design" is another name for "whole system design." The key concept is that optimizing each component of a system independently leads to non-optimal complete systems, especially when energy efficiency becomes a goal.

Consider a very simple example. Assume you are designing a pumping system that consists of a pump and a pipe. The normal approach to designing this system would be to determine how big a pipe to install based on how much liquid you have to pump, given a certain "acceptable" amount of friction in the pipe. The bigger the pipe, the more expensive it is, so you don't want to get it too big. Once the pipe is sized, you then size the pump. but this approach turns out to only optimize the pipe.

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About Keeping The Lights On

August 7, 2008 in Uncategorized by admin | 1 comment

Keeping The Lights On is devoted to news, opinion, and information about "busting barriers" to profitable applications of energy efficiency and alternative renewable energy sources. The barriers to using energy more efficiently arise in several ways:

  • Conflicting incentives result in short-term decisions that have significant long-term costs
  • "Traditional" design practices that optimize subsystems instead of whole systems
  • The assumption saving energy is costly and not profitable
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