Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence

by Daniel B. Botkin

  I confine my bike riding in New York City to the separate, park-like bike paths because riding in the streets is too dangerous. I’ve seen car/bike accidents, and friends and relatives have been hurt bicycling in cities. I would love to bicycle more in the city—in fact, I prefer it to walking, driving, or taking a bus or subway, as long as it isn’t raining or snowing. When I meet neighbors bringing their bicycles up the elevator in our apartment building, I try to strike up a conversation about where they’ve been and how they feel about bicycling in a big city. Almost everybody tells me that they realize it’s dangerous, but they love it, so they do it anyway.

  My conclusion is that the number one way to get more people out of their cars and onto bicycles is to make it safe to do so. The methods—well known, straightforward, and in use in many European cities—include bicycle lanes either separated from motor vehicle traffic by a cement curb or on a route entirely their own.

  New York City recently took a tentative step in this direction by turning an entire lane of busy downtown Ninth Avenue into a bike lane, with cement curbs separating the bikes from motor vehicle traffic. I wish the lane were longer and that the entire city had them.

  Of course, just as large numbers of motor vehicles on crowded city streets require driver adherence to strict traffic rules, so will increased numbers of bicycles. Right now, too many New York City cyclists seem oblivious to traffic rules, including stoplights, and routinely endanger pedestrians and themselves.

  To be honest, I love to travel, and I haven’t met a form of transportation I haven’t liked. Trains, planes, cars, buses, ships, barges, canoes, kayaks, freight steamers in the Philippines, Amazon River boats—for me, again, it isn’t a moral issue but a matter of convenience, practicality, and fun. But it’s clear that we can’t go on driving as we have. There just isn’t enough cheap energy anymore, and also the heavy traffic negatively affects the quality of our lives. Riding down the Hudson River bike path on a Friday afternoon, I watch in dismay as thousands of cars, most with just one occupant, inch their way north at the end of the workweek, barely moving while their tailpipes spew exhaust that forms a haze over the city.

  Cities that are especially friendly to pedestrians and cyclists

  I lived in Portland, Oregon, as part of a project I once did, and loved the way that city made it pleasant to be a pedestrian. One way it did that was with pedestrian walkways cutting midway through some of the city blocks, paths planted with trees, shrubs, and flowers, and with miniparks along the way. This led me to imagine a city of the future where bicycle paths and walkways followed such routes. Of course, in cities like New York, where land is so valuable and so many buildings are already in place, this is going to be difficult. But it’s not impossible. Highway engineers working with landscape architects could lead a major step forward.

  Another key that is growing in popularity is to make it possible and convenient to use a bicycle for short trips even if you don’t own one. Paris, France, has started to do this with a program that provides bicycles at many locations for a small fee and lets you pick up a bike at the location nearest to you and drop it off near where you’re going. Amsterdam has also adopted this program, and it’s highly popular.

  Carless cities: what more can we do?

  If offering attractive alternatives doesn’t make a big enough dent in inner-city traffic congestion, what more can be done? Nobody seems to have worked it out yet. One approach is “congestion pricing”—fining those who use personal vehicles in the busiest parts of cities at the busiest time of the day or week. One example is the charge to drive in downtown London, an approach that New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg tried to adopt for Manhattan, but the New York State legislature nixed it in 2008.

  That’s the “big-stick” approach, and it appeals to some because it seems simple to just fine people for driving. But kinder alternatives—“carrots” that work—have admittedly not been easy to find. In New York City at the time of this writing, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had a big deficit, and badly needed improvements in the city’s huge subway system weren’t happening. New York City’s subways work amazingly well in terms of transporting a lot of people very quickly, and this system is the world’s largest and one of the few that operates 24 hours a day. However, they are screechingly, ear-splittingly noisy, often jam-packed, and none too clean. Also, many stations are far underground and have minimal people-movers to get crowds up to the street. If you want to tempt drivers out of their comfortable cars, it would help if this subway system could become as quiet and pleasant as the metros in Washington, DC, and Paris.

  Many major cities are on seacoasts or major rivers—that’s because water transportation was so important that cities were founded at good river and ocean junctions. Ferries used to be common, but they too have become unfashionable and mostly abandoned in the United States. Still, there’s hope. A small comeback is happening in New York Harbor with yellow Water Taxis and other subsidized ferries taking people across the Hudson and East River much faster than they’d get there by bus and subway, or even by car sitting in long rush-hour lines at tollbooths (and then looking for and paying dearly for parking).

  Which brings us to another approach: building or rebuilding cities so that cars just can’t get into them—or with few if any parking spaces—and at the same time improving bicycle and pedestrian pathways and various kinds of public transportation. You will probably be surprised to learn that the biggest close-to-carless area in a major U.S. city is not in one of the ecofriendly cities on the West Coast, like Portland. It’s New York City’s Roosevelt Island, a two-mile-long, 147-acre island in the East River. The main transportation to and from Manhattan for the island’s 10,000 or so residents is by subway or by aerial tram across the river.

  Most other car-free areas of cities are historic districts like medieval portions of European cities, or newly built planned communities like Vauban, 1,700 houses on what was a military base in Freiburg, Germany; its 4,700 residents accept streets too narrow for most automobiles. In Great Britain, Prince Charles has promoted car-free parts of cities, but this has met with considerable criticism.

  Ironically, as traffic jams decrease, people have less reason to abandon their cars. As long as there are highways, broad avenues, and freeways/interstates/turnpikes, the traffic level will tend to have a negative feedback and the amount of traffic on them will tend to stabilize—the lower the traffic, the greater the growth in traffic; the worse the traffic jams, the greater the decline in traffic. Thus, part of the solution has to be to stop building ever-broader streets, avenues, and freeways, and instead put transportation money into light and heavy rail, as well as bicycle paths and park-like walkways.

  A further note: microgrids can help

  The increase in microgrids, described in the Chapter 10 on transporting energy, would also lead to an overall decrease in the transportation of freight and people, because energy would be produced and used locally, and people would live nearer to their jobs. How much of an energy savings this might yield, however, is not possible to predict right now.

  The bottom line

  • Prior to mid-2008, cars and light trucks used more than 90% of transportation energy in the United States, while trains and buses together used only 3%.

  • Energy use for transportation is the most easily and quickly changed and therefore is key to rapid improvement in energy conservation.

  • U.S. energy use could drop more than 6% if we simply stopped moving coal around to generate electricity. This would offer a double savings, eliminating pollution from the dirtiest fossil fuel and increasing the nation’s energy efficiency.

  • American society has never decided whether transportation is a public service and thus should be funded by government, or just another commodity that should fend for itself in a free market. America has to make this choice.

  • If railroads replace cars and light trucks, energy use for transportation could drop by two-thirds.

&nbs
p; • While restoring the infrastructure of the United States will cost $1.6 trillion, new railroads could be built along the major transportation routes in the United States for about $14 billion, less than 1% of the infrastructure-restoration costs.

  • Government subsidies for highways cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year, while Amtrak gets less than $1 billion, along with a slap on the wrist.

  • Rising gasoline prices have led to a rapid decline in automobile travel, suggesting that in this case the free market worked, but government subsidies have an opposite effect, promoting highway travel.

  • The redesign and restoration of major cities can greatly reduce automobile traffic, improve the quality of life in cities, and be an important part of the long-term solution to energy use.

  12. Saving energy at home and finding energy at your feet

  Figure 12.1 Indian dwellings in Mesa Verde, Arizona, showed that the Anasazi understood the benefits of energy conservation, as did all early peoples. They had no choice—they lacked the abundant, cheap energy that we are accustomed to. The Anasazi in Mesa Verde built their houses on the south-facing slopes of cliffs, beneath an arch, so that they were shaded from the intense midday sun but warmed by the early-morning and evening sunlight at lower angles. This was only one of many ways that they lived with only small amounts of fuel. (Photograph by Daniel B. Botkin)

  Key facts

  • In many places in the world before the industrial/scientific revolution, homes and workplaces were designed to conserve energy. That changed in the 20th century. The buildings that we now consider standard and normal are actually novel in human history in terms of energy wastefulness.

  • Cave dwellers many thousands of years ago made use of the ability of soil and rock to store heat from the sun, and many of the world’s peoples still do so today.

  • We are rediscovering geothermal energy and realizing that it could be a major and relatively inexpensive energy source.

  • Modern construction materials and careful architectural design can reduce energy use in buildings by 60% or more.

  • Costs for these energy-efficient buildings appear only slightly higher than typical 20th-century designs.

  Energy-efficient buildings

  Long experience throughout human history shows without any doubt that thoughtful design of buildings can save large amounts of energy. The book A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, by Ken Butti and John Perlin, tells a beautiful and moving story of how the ancients from many cultures—probably all—designed and situated their homes and public buildings to make them as comfortable as their technology allowed and minimized the need for fuels.

  You may be surprised to learn that people are not the only ones who build to make good use of solar energy. Huge termite mounds stand tall among the short grasses in the plains and savannas of East Africa. They not only are warmed by the sun but also have ventilation and even a kind of air-conditioning. Air passages extend from the base of the mound to the top. The sun heats the air at the top, causing it to rise, which in turn draws cooler, oxygen-rich air upward from the bottom. This is “design with nature” designed by nature (Figure 12.2).

  Figure 12.2 The remnants of a large termite mound in the grasslands of Zimbabwe show that these structures take advantage of passive solar energy but also provide good ventilation and a kind of air conditioning. (Photograph by Daniel B. Botkin)

  Recent architectural designs using the best of modern materials have led to new buildings that use much less energy than those characteristic of the Industrial Age. Building for energy conservation is often discussed today as if it is a new idea dreamed up in the most recent decades. But if there has been anything new in modern times—“new” in the sense of novel—it’s the way buildings were constructed in the developed nations during the 19th and 20th centuries, when fossil fuels were abundant and cheap. The old lessons were forgotten, and houses and commercial buildings were designed without a thought to energy conservation. With uninsulated or poorly insulated walls, ceilings, and floors, they required large wood-burning fireplaces and woodstoves to keep rooms livable.

  I lived for a year in a classic example of this kind of house, a restored early-19th-century farmhouse in Acworth, New Hampshire. The house, situated on a hillside, had a thick skirting of open boards that separated the downslope side of the basement from the elements. In winter, the winds blew right through these and wafted up into the living room. A furnace had been added in the basement, but did not work, so we heated the house with a shallow fireplace in the living room, another in each of the bedrooms, and a wood-burning cookstove in the kitchen. It was a charming house, and it looked inviting on a summer afternoon, but it was far from cozy on a winter’s night.

  All this is changing rapidly. Today, friends who live near that house are building houses of amazing new materials invented in recent decades. Imaginative architects and engineers have pursued their use, combining these new materials with the old lessons, lost for several centuries, of designing with nature and with the best of modern technology. Like many preindustrial buildings, these new buildings take into consideration where the sun shines, where the soil and rocks protect, where nature provides easy and convenient energy sources and energy storage, where and how vegetation makes buildings warmer, cooler, more pleasant—and a lot cheaper.

  This combination of the new and the old has developed today into a sizable business with many projects, ranging from individual homes to housing developments and commercial buildings. There are many books on energy-conserving building designs; here I can only introduce the topic, focusing on the potential energy savings.

  Among many recent examples is a house built in Denver, Colorado, by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity. The house makes use of active and passive solar energy and highly insulating modern materials (Figures 12.3 and 12.4). Since its construction in 2002, it has been studied by NREL, which has found that “when the energy efficiency features of the home are combined with solar water heating and solar electricity, the home saves about 60% of the total energy that would be used in an identical home built with standard features.”1 The energy-saving features are grouped into passive and active methods.

  Figure 12.3 A zero-energy house designed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and built in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity. Studies of the house by NREL show that it uses 60% less energy than a house built with standard 20th-century materials and methods. (Courtesy of DOE/NREL. Photo by Pete Beverly)2

  Figure 12.4 Some key features of the zero-energy house designed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. (Reprinted from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL, 2009. “Zero Energy Homes Research: A Modest Zero Energy Home.” http://www.nrel.gov/buildings/zero_energy.html. Accessed December 29, 2009.)3

  Passive methods are just that—they arise from the location of a building in relation to the environment, and from the way the building’s materials respond to that environment without any additional machinery. Among the passive features of the house are spray foam insulation in the walls, ceilings, and floors; skylights to reduce the need for artificial lighting; less window area on the east and west sides and more window area on the south side; light-colored roof tiles to reduce indoor temperatures in the summer; and adequate attic ventilation. This last feature is crucial; without it, the perfectly insulated building would be a toxic Thermos bottle. The optimum building design allows just enough air flow to provide the oxygen that people need and to prevent the buildup of air pollutants. Some of the cleverest designs have a two-way ventilation system, with air coming in through one set of metal pipes next to another set that allows air to leave. The exiting air can thus pass some of the heat it picked up inside the house to the air coming in, further reducing the need for heating fuels.

  Active methods involve machinery to produce electricity and run pumps and other devices to move air and water and to control the use of
energy. Active technologies used in the Denver house shown in Figure 12.3 include a 1.8-kilowatt solar-electric system that connects to the electrical grid and feeds energy to the grid when energy production on the rooftop exceeds home use; energy-efficient lighting (in this case compact fluorescent bulbs); and a radiant wall heating system (rather than forced warm air), using heat from a high-efficiency boiler to heat pipes in the walls.

  The climate near the ground influences energy use in buildings

  In the second half of the 20th century, people began to realize that they could reduce energy use within buildings by taking a new look at some ancient ideas that dominated building design in most civilizations before the availability of cheap fossil fuels. This led to the pursuit of more and better energy-conserving materials. Ecologists studying plants and non-human animals and their relation to their environment began to talk with climatologists and meteorologists about energy exchange, and with architects and landscape planners about human housing.