For years now, environmental lobbyists have been warning us about environmental disasters like the one we just witnessed in the Gulf of Mexico.

At first glance, we might see this as proof of their position. In fact, the opposite is true.

Their premise has been that, with sufficient political pressure, offshore drilling can be halted. This is simply not true. 150,000 jobs depend on oil drilling in the Gulf. The US is critically dependent on foreign oil, enough to fight wars over, enough to kill soldiers, enough to create huge budget deficits.  The massive spill in the Gulf, enough to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools every day, is dwarfed by US oil consumption. That amount of oil is consumed by Americans every four minutes.

So no, offshore drilling can not be halted, not by any amount of pressure.

Given that fact, what is the reasonable goal of an environmental organization? I suggest that it is to protect the environment in spite of the drilling. A strategy of accommodation rather than prevention should be adopted when prevention is impossible.

The failure potential of blowout preventors is well documented, so the use of a single rather than a double one on  Deepwater Horizon recklessly endangered the crew and the environment. In spite of numerous indications from the well at Macondo Prospect that things we not under control, BP and Transocean continued “full speed ahead” to meet their planned deadlines, cutting corners, taking shortcuts, and disabling pesky safety devices that interfered. Why was this permitted to happen?

The “good ‘ol boy network” of drillers, regulators and lobbyists have reduced government oversight to the submission of boilerplate drilling applications and rubber-stamped permits. Inspections are lax, record keeping poor, and exceptions, exemptions and extensions are often granted. (The Deepwater Horizon’s last three safety inspections took under two hours to complete.) With no one minding the store, disasters like the destruction of Deepwater Horizon, precipitating the largest environmental disaster in history and the loss of eleven lives, are simply bound to happen.

And where were the environmental groups while all this was happening? They weren’t lobbying for more and better safety measures. They weren’t insisting on better and more  thorough  safety inspections. They weren’t busy trying to accommodate oil exploration by making it safer for BP’s workers and the environment. They were pursuing their “all or nothing” strategy of trying to prevent drilling altogether.

It’s easy to see why. For one thing, it is hard to point to a lack of disasters as a success. Pointing to clean, accident-free offshore oil drilling is a difficult way to raise money. It’s much easier to vilify large faceless corporations as evil and blame them for whatever goes wrong.

Sadly, the BP Gulf disaster will probably be very good for environmental fund raisers, but the money raised is unlikely to make oil drilling safer in the future.

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This morning, at 1:17 AM, the power failed at my house. I’m a geek, so a power failure at my house might look different than it does at yours. Emergency lighting automatically switched on. The alarm system notified the central monitoring station in Ojai, which sent a text message to my phone. The soft but incessant beeping of UPS systems upstairs and down reminded me that nonessential systems had been shut down while Internet and telephone had been switched over to battery backup. Within 2 minutes, I knew that PG&E had detected the failure at 37 of their monitoring points, they did not know the cause or have a correction time, and that 5,000+ customers were affected.

The last time we had a power failure was about four years ago, and this one lasted about 15-minutes. That gives us a reliability of about 99.99998%. Pretty good, as far as systems go, but not what Americans expect. They think of electricity like gravity; always there 100% of the time.

In reality, this level of reliability is amazing when you consider the fact that your house sits at the end of a long chain electrical components, some of them redundant (like the power plants at Hetch Hetchy and Diablo Canyon) some of them not (like the transformer on the pole outside your house) which stretches over thousands of miles. Although power outages in this part of the world are infrequent, they are a regular fact of life on many parts of the planet. And they are about to get more frequent here as well.

As we switch over to smart grid technologies in the attempt to improve grid efficiency and integrate green technologies like solar, wind, wave and small cogeneration facilities, we are going to have a lot more of these little inconveniences and perhaps a disaster or two.

Smart technologies, while more efficient than traditional approaches, are also less robust. They lead to the kinds of problems we are now seeing on the Toyota Prius, where in the quest for the power efficiencies of regenerative braking, some owners are experiencing brake failures. These systems fail suddenly and in unusual ways, like digital television which gives you a perfect picture until it suddenly goes away completely rather than degrading slowly into a snowstorm of static. (By the way, the current generation of kids, raised exclusively on digital media, doesn’t even know what static is.)

As we move into this brave new green world, consumers are going to have to take more responsibility for their infrastructure if they don’t want to be inconvenienced. We are ever more reliant on electricity and communications to make our day-to-day lives possible, which means that in addition to stockpiling supplies of water and food, you are going to need to start thinking about emergency supplies of electricity.

Fortunately, the same technologies that threaten our piece of mind are there to save it. New innovations like home hydrogen fuel cells, whole-house battery backup systems (developed for solar applications) and even small but mighty traditional generators with automatic transfer panels can, for the first time in history, put the reliability of your electric systems in your own hands and can actually make you look forward to the next power outage.

Links:

ClearEdge Power

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1. Using Power to Brag about Saving Power

"Same S*** Different Fuel"

Ahhh…the hydrogen economy. What a wonderful idea! Hydrogen can be made from electricity and water. Then you can put the hydrogen into your car where it is turned directly into electricity in a fuel cell, and the only waste product is water. It’s a completely closed system; water to hydrogen to water to hydrogen to water. There’s really only one problem with it:  it doesn’t work.

A little basic science: Hydrogen, in its cleanest form, is made from water by putting in electricity (one electron for every hydrogen atom.) But the process is highly inefficient. The very best that you could even theoretically hope to achieve would be breaking even (although we realistically have no hope of ever coming close to that). Which means, you have to think of hydrogen as a battery (although not a very efficient one). It stores energy from electricity (that you have already made elsewhere), gives some of it back, and wastes the rest.

The simple truth is, there is no free lunch. There are no hydrogen mines and hydrogen can never be used to make the electricity to make itself because it is a net consumer of electricity. So why are we even talking about it?

Oil companies are promoting H2 (that’s science geek speak for “hydrogen”) for a couple of reasons. First of all, you will still have to go to the pump to fill up on hydrogen. This means they don’t have to release their stranglehold on you and your gas tank. The very thought of a world where people have clean energy delivered directly to their homes WITHOUT making a trip to the 167,000 gas stations in America is terrifying.

Secondly, you have to ask “Where are they planning to get all this hydrogen?” Simple, the same place they get everything else; oil!  That’s right, just because you can make H2 from water doesn’t mean you have to. Remember, splitting the hydrogen out of water requires putting energy into the process; more energy than you get out by using the hydrogen. Even if they wanted to make hydrogen the clean way, where would they get all that energy?

Nope, better to just make hydrogen from oil. After all, half of the energy in simple hydrocarbons (natural gas and such) comes from hydrogen. The problem is, the other half comes from carbon (read “greenhouse gas”). That means that oil companies can just retool their big refineries into making hydrogen instead of gasoline. Problem is, splitting the hydrogen out leaves a big pile of carbon (probably as carbon dioxide). That leaves us back where we started which, frankly, is just what they had in mind.

The oil companies are hoping that you were asleep during high school chemistry and that, with a little sleight of hand, they can make the carbon “disappear” and get you off their backs. But the truth is that we have built these massive global enterprises with the sole purpose of digging up carbon and distributing it to everyone inexpensively so they can burn it. Until we stop doing that, we’re going to be in trouble. As the old saying goes, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Car companies are promoting hydrogen, too. What’s their angle? They know that economical availability of  hydrogen is years away. By coming out in favor of hydrogen, they can appear to be promoting a green technology which, unfortunately, just isn’t there yet. Net result, again, business as usual. No need to retool the factories and no need to sell electric cars until the hydrogen fuel cell is available.

But why resist? Wouldn’t they make just as much money selling electric cars and regular cars? Yes, and therein lies the problem. Car manufacturers and their dealer channels don’t make any money selling cars. They make their money servicing cars; performing oil changes every 6,000 miles and servicing the the thousands of parts in an internal combustion engine that are damaged by the high temperatures and RPMs or simply wear out. Electric cars, on the other hand require almost no service. Electric cars would put the traditional dealer channel out of business.

Electricity is the answer. For now. Converting oil into hydrogen and carbon dioxide doesn’t fix the problem. Converting electricity into hydrogen and back into energy doesn’t make any sense. The only thing that makes sense is putting electricity directly into your car and using it as electricity.

Where will we get all this electricity? There isn’t an easy answer to this question for now. We have hydroelectric today, and solar and wind are coming online fast, with geothermal and tidal and a host of other technologies in the wings. And for the time being, a bunch of it will have to be generated by burning carbon and using (God help us) nuclear reactors.

But we don’t have any electricty to waste, and hydrogen is a wasteful technology. Its only advantage is that it props-up oil company and auto company profits.

So, tell the car companies that you know they are stalling. Tell the oil companies that you know they are hiding all that carbon somewhere. And let’s quit pretending that there ever could be such a thing as a “hydrogen economy.”

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"I will use less power."

I hate to keep picking on the big oil companies, but really, they set themselves up for it. I mean, who would even think of running an ad on a giant electric billboard to tell us how committed they are to using less electricity.

Here’s a shot of the kilowatt monstrosity near the east entrance to the Bay Bridge. To add insult to injury, there’s another one near the Ashby exit in Berkeley.

And you wonder why I am so cynical.

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Did you ever stop to think about what else you could do with those giant cargo containers used on ships? It’s kind of the ultimate recycling project. They are watertight, durable, inexpensive and (duh) easy to transport.

There has been growing interest among some architects to use them for constructing modular buildings. I’ve gotten fascinated by the idea and started designing some of my own. I plan to build a beach house out of them in Mexico some day.

Here are a couple of my designs:

This is the largest of the series, using 7 of the 20-ft containers. It has a nice balcony on the second floor, while the roof is used for solar panels.

This design uses five containers, four for living space and a fifth as a garage/storage. More solar panels, of course.

Here's a rear view of the same structure. You can see the natural gas tank (for cooking, heat, and backup electricity), solar panels, and the satellite antenna (for Internet and TV).

This is a cute little structure made from 4 containers. The two on the bottom are separated from each other and enclosed with a small roof piece making a big living room/kitchen. This also provides a large patio above. Upstairs is a master bedroom with a semi-enclosed porch. Underneath is covered parking.

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