Toolbox for a future - 2 - Permaculture

When thinking about the future it is easy to forget our basic need for food and shelter. Food production used to occupy 90% of the work force. With the help of first coal and then oil, agriculture was radically transformed and mechanized. Today under 1% of the western population work as farmers. The biggest challenge for the future can easily be food production. Modern agriculture IS the use of fossil fuel - many good people are writing a lot about this already.
My focus is technology and my interest is to see if there is some technology that can be of help in the future farming. One of most promising "technologies" I have come about is Permaculture. Its really nothing new, but modern communication and the possibility to send seed and plants across the world has made a new/old way of farming possible and more effective. Permaculture in its current form is not a silver bullet, it is still very labor intensive and heavy work. I have spend many hours talking about this with my eco farmer friends. There is 2 main issues in farming (there is many issues, but me being a techman sees the issues from a technological viewpoint).

• Heavy work (like ploughing, digging ditches)
  
• Repetitive work (like weeding, planting)

When I have been going through the different kinds of workload in the farm, ploughing turned up to be hardest problem to see a non-carbon solution to.
There is work going on in the area, but it clear that there is a long way to go before agro-robots is rolling around a field near you.
The challenge of a sustainable agriculture in a carbon starved future is the same as for the rest of society, but food is a basic need and needs special attention.
The degree of complexity that will be sustainable is also a major challenge. How much outside dependency can there be to rely on? Spare-parts? What will the trade value of produce be? How is a transition to be accomplished from city to the country-side? (be sure there is to be a transition). Another strange problem we could be facing is that the current system is "to" effective - meaning that "to" few can provide to much food and that this hampers the transition (back to farming) at the same time that those not working cant afford the food produced. This "problem of efficiency" can be seen today in the way China can manufacture nearly everything needed for the rest of the world. That this is not a sustainable way of organizing a society is becoming blatantly obvious - Term like; "The information society", "The service sector", "The new economy" is VOID. Trading is a 2 way transaction, just as the relation between city and country side is.
Why Permaculture then? The basic philosophy of Permaculture is "most food for least amount of work" but with a twist - Its "most food" for you living at the farm or close to the farm. Permaculture tries to have a huge biodiversity - not a kind of farming thats suited for export or the supermarket chain. A central power might not like Permaculture because its not suited for central control and taxation, but it has the promise of being a way of farming that frees up labor AT THE FARM, locally thereby making it possible to think about and make something else than food (eg. how to build your DIY electric car).

More about Permaculture in a cold climate.

Toolbox for a future - 1 - Electricity and transport

As I stated before I'm not a strong believer in the unknown God. The future is going to be made up of things we know now, known tools, known solutions and known limits. It's going to be a real cold turkey getting out of the carbon addiction to paraphrase late president Bush. But the important thing to remember is that there IS solutions, there is a way.
The way may not the smooth and easy way we want it to be - but there IS a way.

What is the toolbox of the future?

• Electricity and electric transport.
  
• Permaculture
• Electronics (Open hardware and DIY)
• Open communication technology
  
• Community

These tool can be made sustainable - that mean they can earn back there investment. As a plus these tools are also good for the environment.
Each of the points are major undertaking. And we are to undertake these big, costly projects when resources becomes less available.
Lets take them from the top.

Why electricity?
I have read A LOT about alternatives to oil. Hydrogen, palm-oil, ethanol (1st and second generation technology) and biogas to name some. One of the true wonders of oil is that it is highly compact and storable - meaning it can be put in a car. It sits there for 6 month until you decide to drive 500 km - that i truly amazing. And furthermore oil has the highest energy density next to uranium. Then we just have to make some more oil now don't we.. and sure sure we can "make" oil - the easiest way is to let plants do it (killing whales is another great way since whales are mostly fat) there is just a little catch there. Making food takes up farmland where we other-ways could grow food and modern agriculture has become VERY oil-consuming (1 cal food uses ~ 10 cal oil to produce). Neither does it produce very much oil for the work - In fact if you are to produce oil in the most part of world the you would need more oil for machinery and tools and pesticide and fertilizer than oil produced - the same goes for ethanol except some contryies like Brazil that have LOTS of sun and water and cheap labor, then you can make it work (ERoEI > 1). USA is in fact starving the 3. world by subsidizing Ethanol production with ERoEI less than 1 (and that just plain stupid and horrendous).
Hydrogen isnt better - the only reasonable way to make (in terms of ERoEI) is to convert oil to hydrogen..
Palmoil isn't a silver bullet either...
Biogas has also some problems in terms of scalability that does it very hard to see as an alternative to oil - but small scale biogas is here to stay - as it has been around for 2000 years. But from idea to powering all cars in eg. the UK or Sweden there is a long way to go. And to produce the amount of biogas needed to power all road transportation is doubtful, but trucks and buses seems feasible... but what about me and my car? What is that gonna run on?? Electricity!
The only real alternative to oil in terms of transportation is electricity. The only ones that have a problem of seeing that is the special interest groups. When you get down to the numbers - the electric car is realy a thing of the future.

To sum it up.
Cars - electricity
Trains - electricity
Trucks - biogas
Ships - ships has been sailing before - they can do it again.
Planes - no. There is no real future for transport by air unless some enormous scientific breakthrough.
Then there is all the wonderful thing you can do if you have electricity, like living in 21. century. The electric grid is one of the great wonder of our time that will live on in the post carbon world, the product of a true genius who all to few knows about - Nikola Tesla.
With the grid (we already have) we can power our (electric) cars. We can power machines and electronics. Electricity is THE game-changer making a modern future possible. Its either that or back to 1850 (after some adjustments).

More about permaculture next.

Grid 2.0 (smart grid) - why we need a new power grid.

How the power-grid works today (in principle).

• The grid operator provide power to the grid - with a steady output of 220 volts and 50Hz in EU (110 volt 60Hz USA).
• You turn on eg. a washing machine and draws power from the grid. The onset in power-consumption make the Volt level drop on the grid (very little, but still).
• The grid operator monitors the Volt-drop and orders more output. That increases the voltage to 50Hz again.
• When you turn off the washing machine, the grid voltage rises (very little) and the grid operator adjust the power-output a little down to get 50Hz again.

Thats the way it works very basically and how it have worked since the grid was invented. This way of regulating the grid is working but is really not very efficient. The grid is always counter-reacting to a changes in the grid. The grid is NOT adjusting to the current power-output. That wouldn't be a problem if power-production had a flat-rate cost regardless of the production level or how fast it has to react to changes. But power-production is organized into different categories dependent on how fast it have to (and can) contribute to regulation of grid.

• Basepower output - Do not change output.
• Medium changing power output - Changes output within minutes.
• Eminently changing power output - Changes output within seconds.

Reacting power-production can cost a 100 times more than base power production, so grid-operators go to great length in trying to predict what to power-consumption in the near future in order to be able to count in the biggest changes in power-demand, thereby save money. They look at past statistic, look at the weather forecast, read the TV schedule and predicts the coming need of power to a hight degree - but the are still reacting to changes. That is called regulating by swing-producer.
Power consumption is not ever over the day. Very little power is used nighttime and then BANG - 7.00 - we get up and turn on every kind of electronics we have and use a lot of power. Then it wobbles a bit during the day until we starts preparing dinner in the afternoon (putting on the stove and oven and dishing-machine and washing-machine all within minutes), then turns it all of and goes to sleep.
That means that most of the power-production is idling a large part of the day and that is not very efficient. It also means that grid operator have to be able to call in power supplies to meet demand - something that is not possible with eg. wind power (therefore there is put a cap on how much wind power that grid operators will accept in the total power production). A novel idea is to get demand to react to production - that is called Grid 2.0 or Smart grid.

In a grid 2.0 the grid-operators communicates to the consumer that now is a really good or really bad idea to turn on electronics. The electronics can be made to automatically react to power output or tell the the consumer how the situation are on the grid. A monetary incitement can be given to the consumer to adjust power consumption - cheaper electricity when there is low demand and high when there is high demand. To make this possible communication capabilities has to be build into the washing machine, the freeze, the heating system and so on.

Grid 2.0 will make it possible to produce electricity in a more efficient way. It also make it possible to include more wind power in the total power production.
Denmark is the country with the highest degree of wind power in the power production - 30% of Denmark's electricity is produced with wind power, but Denmark is unlikely to expand that number until a new way or regulating the grid is deployed. 30% - thats it - stop. The rest of the danish electricity is produced by gas and coal power-stations and this a problem Denmark shares with the majority of countries in the world. A sustainable electricity is not possible until the problem of regulation of the grid is solved. Grid 2.0 is one of the solutions and the technology has been there for several years now. Its a question of communication capabilities and (cheap) microcomputers. Communication can be via; GPRS, 3G, Broadband, VHF and direct via the electric cables. And then there has to be a standard and will to implement the technology. I'm pretty sure the biggest problem is the later. Power production has been privatized in most of EU and the Enron case showed clearly that more money can be made from chaos than order. Now Enron did create disorder in order to make money - the private electricity marked is only benefiting from the current faulty market model and statuesque. A Grid 2.0 is a smaller marked - fewer can do the same amount of power with the less disorder in the grid. To let it up to the market to solve this structural problem is irresponsible of the state. A stable and working power-grid for the future is a question of national security not to be taken lightly and left to (friends in) the big companies.
This transition to 2.0 is big and will take many years - it's a huge investment and we should get it started today rather than tomorrow.

Read more about Grid 2.0

PO -& Global warming (or why not just make it easy for your self?)

Why all this talk about Peak oil? Why not say Global warming? - then everybody knows what we talk about.
The cure is the same for PO (Peak Oil) and GW (Global Warming) - use less energy.
So what is the problem (why do you always have to be so difficult (and gloomy))?
My view on GW is this: First things first - Its like triage. Solve the most pressing problems first and GW isn't the most pressing global problem. For me it is not a question about for or against GW. It is not about if GW is real or not. GW is just not the most pressing problem - PO is. The consequences of GW is maybe 50 years away - PO is here and will have severe consequences within 20 years. That makes it easy to prioritize.
And if we solve PO, we have solved GW - even better.

Again if you don't believe me - fine, okay, sure - please prove me wrong.
More info on Peak oil:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
http://www.peakoil.net/
http://www.theoildrum.com/