MC Weekly Issue #1, Tuesday, November 22, 2005
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”
Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.
One of the most important “design economies” that the Massive Change project explores is energy. Massive Change declares that “we will bring energy to the entire world.”
We continue to design massive hydroelectric and petroleum projects with regional and even global economic, social, and environmental impact, building machines on a scale the world has never seen. At the same time, initiatives for sustainable energy wind, geothermal, and especially solar promise to fundamentally restructure the energy system itself, from a centrally based system to a distributed network of energy production and consumption.
The big projects: In the realm of energy, we are seeking out small, portable options for our decentralized future. Meanwhile, we persist in designing feats of wonder that will fundamentally reconstruct the natural world.
Clean green power: Initiatives for sustainable energy promise to fundamentally restructure the energy industry itself. To stay in the game, the oil industry is evolving away from fossil fuels, towards renewables. The most massive change will happen here.
In the 1960s, the late geophysicist Dr. M. King Hubbert famously foretold the end of American oil production. Based on his research, he came to the conclusion that oil production would peak within a year or two of 1970. He was widely abused for this notion. But it turns out, in fact, that he was right. Current projections indicate that global oil production, too, ought to peak well before our population stabilizes somewhere around mid-twenty-first century, with fertility rates dropping as they are. Natural gas and nuclear are the current forerunners to replace oil. But, in close analysis, neither proves adequate. Natural gas will not be able to meet the world’s energy demand much beyond 2020, and a future of nuclear breeder reactors isn’t exactly an attractive scenario. So major players like Shell, British Petroleum, and Stuart Energy have been working toward alternatives to oil: wind, solar, and hydrogen fuel by way of water electrolysis.
Among numerous renewable initiatives, Shell is developing Noordzeewind, a wind park off the coast of Wales, which will consist of 36 turbines (99 megawatts total) and provide electricity for 110,000 households. British Petroleum’s Hornchurch Connect site (near London) runs entirely on renewable energy, generating up to half of its own power from solar panels and wind turbines. Stuart Energy builds hydrogen fueling stations around the world, enabling the production, storage, and delivery of on-site emission-free fuel.
Solar power: All energy is solar energy, stored in different forms. Every two minutes the sun gives the earth more energy than is used annually worldwide. It is the only renewable resource with the capacity to provide all the energy we need on a global level.
English-born American physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson pointed out in his book The Sun, The Genome, and the Internet that solar energy is most abundant where it’s needed most: in the countryside rather than in cities, and in the tropical countries, where most of the population lives, rather than in temperate zones.
On the global scale, the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) provides technical and financial assistance for solar energy and wireless communication systems in the developing world. SELF has launched what it calls solar rural electrification programs and enterprises in all corners of the globe. These programs have brought photovoltaic systems and often electricity for the very first time to remote areas of China, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, and the Solomon Islands.
On the atomic scale, the Arizona State University (ASU) Center for the Study of Early Events in Photosynthesis researches ways of capturing light and transforming energy. The center is comprised of a multidisciplinary group of scientists, one of whom is synthetic organic chemist Ana Moore, who looks to purple bacteria which can harness the sun’s energy through photosynthesis to better understand these processes and how we might use them as a model for developing improved solar panels one day. The results of this research illustrate the advantages of designing functional nanoscale devices based on biological paradigms.
Local Hero: In Ontario, where Bruce Mau Design is based, we have been blessed with a new start-up energy initiative, Bullfrog Power.
On September 28, Bullfrog Power http://www.bullfrogpower.com was born. Bullfrog Power is Ontario’s first 100% green electricity retailer. Subscribers can stop directing their home and business energy dollars to dirty energy and instead support Bullfrog Power’s mix of power derived exclusively from wind turbines and low-impact hydro projects that meet the Federal Government’s Environmental Choice Program EcoLogo standard.
Wind power is among the cleanest sources of energy available, producing no emissions that contribute to air pollution or greenhouse gases. Bullfrog Power’s wind provider is provided by Sky Generation. Sky Generation’s wind turbine is located just south of Ferndale Ontario on the beautiful Bruce Peninsula. This Vestas 1.8 MW V80 turbine first produced power on November 27, 2002. Today, the turbine has the capacity to generate enough power to supply 400 homes.
Bullfrog Power is increasing the role of renewables in Ontario’s energy mix. Bullfrog Power is bringing new renewable power online. Currently two new wind turbines are in development to meet the needs of bullfrogpowered customers.
Around 2% of the sun’s energy is converted into wind energy. This is at least 50 time more energy that is converted into biomass by all the plants on earth through photosynthesis, so the usable energy potential is enormous, although still under-utilized.
Wind power now represents about 48,000 MW. It is the fastest growing source of alternative power, with capacity quadrupling in the world between 1997 and 2002.
Bullfrog Power receives its EcoLogo-certified low-impact water power from Brascan http://www.brascanpower.com/environment/. To be certified EcoLogo, low-impact hydro must meet a range of environmental criteria including the protection of indigenous species and local habitat, and measures to minimize fish mortality and to preserve fish migration patterns.
Switching is very easy. Ontario residents can go to http://www.bullfrogpower.com and switch in less than 10 minutes. No new equipment or wiring is required to switch to 100% green power.
Some of the text of the foregoing news article derives from the book Massive Change (Phaidon, 2004), by Bruce Mau with Jennifer Leonard and the Institute without Boundaries.
