The Power Of The East River  

Gothamist has an article on progress harnessing the tidal / current power of New York's east river - so far they are encountering problems making the turbines strong enough to handle the forces exerted by the flow. Once the teething problems are sorted out it will interesting to see just how much energy we can extract from tidal areas in the coming years.

The alternative energy company that has plans to install hundreds of turbines in the East River to harness tidal energy and generate zero-emission electrical power is running into trouble due to the massive amount of energy they are dealing with. The small number of turbines already placed in the East River by Verdant Power have been temporarily removed as the strong currents continue to overwhelm the physical construction of the underwater "windmills." The six turbines that were placed in the water last December and were capable of supplying 1,000 daily kilowatt hours of power and serving the Gristedes supermarket on Roosevelt Island could not withstand currents.

turbinefield.jpgThe East River is not actually a river; it's a tidal strait, and one can easily observe the current moving in opposite directions with the tides. Verdant Power's plan is to install a field of turbines anchored to the bottom of the East River and use the currents to generate pollution-free electricity for the city. The currents have proven so strong, however, that the turbine propellers have been sheared off a third of the way down, and stronger replacements were hampered by insufficiently strong bolt connections to the turbine hubs.

The New York Times reports that the company is encountering the setbacks with optimism, encouraged that the East River possesses even more power than originally planned for. "'The only way for us to learn is to get the turbines into the water and start breaking them,' said Trey Taylor, the habitually optimistic founder of Verdant Power."

Hydro-kinetic power generation is drawing increasing interest. The predictability of tides makes it attractive in a way that wind-powered turbines lack. KeySpan is currently partnering with Verdant Power in its project to install East River turbines and a second company, Oceana Energy, recently secured a federal permit to install turbines further up the East River from Verdant's. Some concern has been expressed about the effect of turbines on aquatic wildlife, but Verdant is funding a close examination of the impact of its turbines on fish and other river species.

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging has a post on Incremental Infrastructure.

Ethan has a terrific piece in the Boston Globe on his concept of incremental infrastructure:

[T]he idea is to build essential facilities -- telephone networks, power grids, roads -- in small pieces using private investment, instead of relying on large, centrally planned, government-run projects.The rise of mobile phone networks linking more than 100 million Africans across the continent and the blossoming of cybercafes from Cape Town to Dakar are evidence that incremental infrastructure is already transforming the continent. But Africa needs go beyond telephones and computers. Many nations lack roads, electric power, schools, hospitals, clean water. If the lessons learned from building telephone and Internet systems can be applied to other types of African infrastructure, African entrepreneurs could find themselves wiring villages, paving roads, and perhaps even building airports -- building the new Africa while turning a profit in the process.

Conceptually, this idea is sort of the crossing of two themes we frequently discuss here, mixing the power of leapfrogging technologies with the transformational abilities of the better sort of microcredit programs. As such, it is immediately interesting, and offers obvious potential not only for development, but, with the proper tweaks, sustainable development. After all, there's no reason why infrastructure acquired in an incremental manner ought not to be green, efficient, sustainable (indeed, in some cases, like energy, the green alternatives already strongly out-compete the old polluting infrastructures, especially when they're being assembled in a distributed fashion -- think of solar energy in Africa, for instance).

TreeHugger has a post on Herman Miller's Approach to Sustainable Design and their adherence to "cradle to cradle" design rules.

The good people at Metropolis magazine have posted a transcript of a terrific talk given by Herman Miller's Scott Charon and Susan Lyons about their Design for Environment, their sustainable design program based on the Cradle to Cradle protocol.

Using their task seating as an example (the Mirra chair, pictured above, is divided into its 96 percent recyclable pieces on the left and the other 4 percent on the right), they talk about materials chemistry, usability, recycling and more. If you've ever wondered why TreeHugger gets in to this stuff, it's a worthwhile read; they talk at some length about the process required to design, assemble, disassemble, reconfigure and recycle their projects, which is no easy task.

From the Metropolis magazine article:

We have an initiative called Perfect Vision; by the year 2020 we want to be a totally sustainable company. That means we want to have zero landfill, zero hazardous waste, and zero air/water emissions. We want to purchase 100 percent renewable energy, and to have all our buildings at least a minimum of Silver LEED certification.

We want to make sure that 100 percent of our products are designed from the environment protocol. Today we are at about 16 percent, last year we were only at about 6 percent. Improvements have been made not only with our new products coming out of the gate, but with our existing products as well. ...

We are working with a company called McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), they are out of Charlottesville Virginia. Bill McDonough is a famous architect who is one of the principals, as well as a gentleman named Michael Braungart who is a German chemist. These two guys got together in the mid-1990s, formed this comprehensive protocol called Cradle to Cradle. We have adopted it, and made it a part of the way we do business.

Bill and Michael talk about the two metabolisms. The technical metabolism—an example of that is steel or aluminum, like we use in our products today—which we can recycle at the end of their life. And then we also have the biological metabolism which is about taking from nature and making a product from nature and putting it back to nature.

There are three areas we look at. First is the material chemistry. We take a really deep dive and want to know all of the chemicals that are in the materials that we use. We also want to make sure we are able to disassemble our products at the end of life so we can get these materials back into the technical or biological cycle. Recycled content is important, but more importantly is whether the materials are able to be recycled at the end of the product’s life.

We use a simple spreadsheet to score all of our products three times during the launch process; the early stages, middle stage, and then when we launch a product.

Material chemistry is an area where we spend a lot of time. We are working with some of the biggest chemical companies in the world in order to get very specific information. We ask them for data sheets, or material safety data sheets.

Let’s say we have a material like nylon, which is a plastic material. We need to know all of the components, all of the chemicals that go into it. Materials have a Chemical Abstract Surface (CAS) number that is like a social security number tied to an individual chemical. It explains what the function of that chemical is and what the relative percentage is. And then we also look at recycled content of a material. Did it come from post-industrial or post-consumer? Did it come from a renewable resource and what is its relative recyclabilty? A lot of our suppliers come to us and ask, hey why can’t we just give you the standard government compliance information. We let them know that the Cradle to Cradle protocol is more than compliant, we want to go above and beyond compliance. It is a hazard identification system, which means if there is a small amount of something that might be considered a carcinogen we’ll know—we don’t want to have any of that in there. Basically what we are doing is positively identifying all the chemicals that are in the materials we use in our products.

We have a simple stoplight approach—green, yellow, red, orange—to assessing a material. We get the chemical information from our supply chain and then a consultant rates it based on this scale. ...

I think what’s interesting about what Herman Miller has done is that it has really embedded the idea of sustainable development into its process. In order to see the kind of change that we want to see it is critical for companies and individuals to start thinking about this in a systemic way. It’s not just plucking out a recycled material here for a marketing benefit, you have to look at the whole lifecycle of a product, and the whole lifecycle of the system that supports it. There is obviously a ton of work that we need to do in that direction.

It’s great that large companies, and small ones as well, are starting to put pressure on the chemical companies because the chemical companies make all the stuff that makes other stuff. It is very exciting when large companies use their buying power in that way, and of course we as individuals can do that as well.

I was in Abu Dhabi a couple of months ago and I learned a lot of interesting things, but two in particular. In Abu Dhabi they shipped their first oil in the beginning of the 1970s and in 2047 they will run out of oil. They are working very actively now to develop an economy that is not oil based because they see the clock is ticking. The whole issue of resource scarcity is a very compelling one, and probably the big issue we are all going to face, and certainly our children will face. You hear all these doom and gloom stories that the next war will be fought over water and other resources.

It is exciting to see conferences like this and all of us working together to start thinking about harvesting the built environment for resources. We need to stop looking to the planet to supply all of our resources, and to start being clever and smart in designing our products so we can harvest them when their useful life is over.

The process we use at Herman Miller is very much about designing for the end of life. It’s fun to conceive of a product. What is it going to be made out of? What is it going to look like? But if you are not thinking about where that product is going to end up after you are finished with it, you are doing a disservice to the product, the community of users, and certainly to the planet. What happens to a product? Are all the systems in place to recover the product and recover the value of the resource it’s made with? No, absolutely not, there is a lot of work to be done, but I think we are starting to think in those terms.

The other thing that we discuss a lot is developing a local supply chain. When you are talking about energy this issue of transporting materials in a global economy becomes critical . As much as possible we are trying to work with local resources and developing relationships so we are not having to transport them. But we are a global company. I am not claiming we are only using things from 100 miles around us. But we are mindful of those choices. ...

If you look at a disassembled Aeron chair at the end of its useful life you can see there are a lot of different components that make up the furniture. When we did the breakdown we were told we really need to be better at disassembly. It took a couple of hours to disassemble the chair, and we need to make sure we can get those materials into proper recycling bins.

There are four questions we ask. First, are the materials homogenous? Meaning they can't be molded steel and plastic together. Did we use common tools to take them apart? Did it take one person more than 30 seconds to reverse a connection? If it takes longer than that the material might end up in a landfill. The materials have to be identified and marked; the plastics have to have the proper recycling codes on them so they can be recycled. If the answer to all of those questions is yes we are going to give ourselves 100 percent credit, if one of those is No, we are not going to give ourselves any credit. Finally, recycling. If a material fits into the technical or biological nutrient cycle we will score that 100 percent, if it's down-cycled we will give that 50 percent and if we can incinerate it for energy recovery we will give that 25 percent. If it has to go to a landfill we are not going to give ourselves any credit within that score card. ...

The second Cradle to Cradle chair that was brought to the marketplace is the Celle Chair. In this case we have made it even simpler to take the chair apart and simpler to eventually redeploy those parts and pieces once we have a system to send them in to their next cradle. The whole idea of Cradle to Cradle thinking is embedded in the design process that we use. It is about trying to think about closing the loop, even though there may not be some systems in place to do that yet.

The local press has been issuing a steady stream of reports on all the various lockdown indignities Sydney is going to suffer as part of the upcoming APEC summit (I still think every inconvenienced business and individual who suffers financial loss because of these restrictions should be able to sue government for compensation). One report claims Google have fuzzed Google Earth imagery of Sydney in preparation for the summit. Another report notes that they'll be commandeering Bondi Beach and the roads in and out so the APEC leader's wives can have lunch there one day. Get out of the way proles - the elite are coming through...

Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union apparently used to have something called Potemkin villages - pretend towns built to impress passing dignitaries that actually served no useful function. We seem to have reversed the concept - take a real working city and shut it down to impress passing emperors and their families with the peaceful atmosphere and lack of industry (and protesters).

In some ways, this is also a reversal of the "Temporary Autonomous Zone" idea - instead of a transient free zone you have a transient unfree zone - an area where almost everything is illegal...

Bruce Sterling has a interesting post that touches on this phenomenon - "That was the Old Medievalism. This is the Postmodern Late-Capitalist HyperUrban Medievalism"

Link: Subtopia: The City in the Crosshairs: A Conversation with Stephen Graham (Pt. 1).

[Stephen Graham] The ‘postmodern medievalism’ is a fascinating argument, I think. There is certainly a sense amongst military theorists of scrambling to look back at the proxy urban wars of colonialism – and elsewhere – to learn lessons that might help inform tactics in places like Baghdad.

However, I don’t think we really are going ‘back to the future’ in some simplistic way. Rather, political violence and war are being re-inscribed into the micro-geographies and architectures of cities in ways that, whilst superficially similar to historic defensive urbanism, inevitably reflect contemporary conditions. Important here, at the very least, are some important distinctions:

• The constant real-time transmission of video, images and text via TV and the ‘Net;

• The increasingly seamless merging between security, corrections, surveillance, military and entertainment industries who work continually to supply, generate, fetishise, and profit from urban targeting, war and securitisation;

• A proliferating range of private, public and private-public bodies legitimised to act violently on behalf of capital, the state, or ‘the international system’;

• The mass and repeated simulacral participation of citizens within spaces of digitised war, especially Orientalised video games produced by the military;

• The particular vulnerabilities of contemporary capitalist cities to the disruption or appropriation of the technical systems on which urban life relies. (These are caused by the proliferation, extension and acceleration of all manner of mobilities, the tight space-time coupling of the technical infrastructural flows that sustain ‘globalization’, and, more prosaically, the fact that modern urbanites have few if any alternatives when the fuel stops, the electricity is down, the water ceases, or the food and communication stops; or the waste is not removed);

• The ways in which borders and bordering technologies are emerging as global assemblages continually linking sensors, databases, defensive and security architectures and the scanning of bodies;

• The centrality of urbicidal violence or neglect to the new geographies of ‘primitive accumulation’ through which private military corporations and ‘reconstruction coalitions’ produce, and benefit from, what ‘disaster capitalism’ (Naomi Klein’s term) or “accumulation by dispossession” (David Harvey’s phrase) – whether in Baghdad or New Orleans; and

• The growing importance of roaming circuits of temporary securitised zones, set up and policed by cosmopolitan roaming armies of specialists, to encompass G8 summits, Olympics, World Cups, etc.

Added to this, we have new relationships emerging in the long-standing interplay of social and urban control experiments practiced on the populations of colonised cities and lands, and appropriated back by States and elites to develop architectures of control in the cities at the “heart of empire.” Thus, biometric borders emerge around Fallujah before being inscribed into the world’s airline systems....

Moving onto a country that is almost entirely under lockdown, Alternet has an article on the mercenary armies operating in Iraq - "Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities".

n a revealing admission, Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing Bush's troop "surge," said earlier this year that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq by "contract security." At least three U.S. commanding generals, not including Petraeus, are currently being guarded in Iraq by hired guns. "To have half of your army be contractors, I don't know that there's a precedent for that," says Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating war contractors.

"Maybe the precedent was the British and the Hessians in the American Revolution. Maybe that's the last time and needless to say, they lost. But I'm thinking that there's no democratic control and there's no intention to have democratic control here."

The implications are devastating. Joseph Wilson says, "In the absence of international consensus, the current Bush administration relied on a coalition of what I call the co-opted, the corrupted and the coerced: those who benefited financially from their involvement, those who benefited politically from their involvement and those few who determined that their relationship with the United States was more important than their relationship with anybody else. And that's a real problem because there is no underlying international legitimacy that sustains us throughout this action that we've taken."

Moreover, this revolution means the United States no longer needs to rely on its own citizens to fight its wars, nor does it need to implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq war politically untenable.

During his confirmation hearings in the Senate this past January, Petraeus praised the role of private forces, claiming they compensate for an overstretched military. Petraeus told the senators that combined with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission."

Taken together with Petraeus's recent assertion that the surge would run into mid-2009, this means a widening role for mercenaries and other private forces in Iraq is clearly on the table for the foreseeable future.

"The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say 'mercenaries' makes wars easier to begin and to fight -- it just takes money and not the citizenry," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose organization has sued private contractors for alleged human rights violations in Iraq.

"To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire. Think about Rome and its increasing need for mercenaries."

Privatized forces are also politically expedient for many governments. Their casualties go uncounted, their actions largely unmonitored and their crimes unpunished. Indeed, four years into the occupation, there is no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law -- military or civilian being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts. And no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts because in 2004 the U.S. occupying authority granted them complete immunity. ...

On the Internet, numerous videos have spread virally, showing what appear to be foreign mercenaries using Iraqis as target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Despite these incidents and the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to possessing child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.

Dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on murder-related charges alone -- but not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.

U.S. contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today." International diplomats say Iraq has demonstrated a new U.S. model for waging war; one which poses a creeping threat to global order. ...

The Iraq war has ushered in a new system. Wealthy nations can recruit the world's poor, from countries that have no direct stake in the conflict, and use them as cannon fodder to conquer weaker nations. This allows the conquering power to hold down domestic casualties -- the single-greatest impediment to waging wars like the one in Iraq. Indeed, in Iraq, more than 1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation have been killed with another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American citizens, and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by casualties.

Links:

* Business 2.0 - California's Green Energy Solution: "Nega-Watts"
* EE/RE Investing - CSP For Dictators. Tom suggests Libya should be getting in on the "deserts of gold" act instead of going nuclear.
* Alt Energy Stocks - Investment Opportunities in Large Scale Electricity Storage
* CNN Money - An electric car for the common man
* Philips - A Simple Switch
* TreeHugger - Alfalfa On Ethanol Rotation
* TreeHugger - The 10 Solutions to Save the Oceans
* The Age - Rodent rejects climate rebel views. You can tell a government is collapsing when its own members start wedging it.
* Grist - Why cap-and-trade or carbon taxes alone won't solve global warming, and why we still need them
* Reason - Confessions of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore
* The Oil Drum - Energize America - two years on
* The Oil Drum - Oilwatch Monthly - August 2007
* Tom Whipple - Peak Oil Review - August 13th, 2007
* Forbes - China's CNOOC wins bid to explore for oil in Australia - commerce ministry
* The Sietch Blog - Watercone - An Ingenious Way To Turn Salt Water Into Fresh Water
* Grist - World Government Blvd.. I don't know if this one is quite as fictitious as you think Dave - and the associated conspiracy theories are entertaining if nothing else. Anyway - I'll bet 10 Ameros it eventually manifests itself across Texas and beyond...
* Financial Times - Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned. I think it may be too late - the corruption seems irreversible now...
* Lew Rockwell - Is the Perfect Storm Forming for Ron Paul?
* Danger Room - DARPA Hearts HAARP; Tinfoil Hats Melt