Toolbox for a future - 4 - Community

I think it went down like this, for centuries where we forced to live together, we needed one-another to make do especially in the daily live. Needed not in an emotional sense, but in a very concrete and physical way - it was a question of survival. Marriage was a lot more than love - more like a cooperative (thats not best foundation for a happy marriage). Houses where small and people where cramped together with no private space and labor was hard. That we dreamed of freedom and private space and independence is no mystery. Then came the possibility to become more independent. First we got free from the large extended family, then later from the the closer family itself. We cut away connections because we could, because they where not needed anymore (this only the story of the western people, most people of the 3rd world still regard the extended family as close family).

The transition to a sustainable future will bring us closer together - for better and for worse. The current state of affairs is mostly characterized by fragmentation. We can (could) live a whole life not knowing or talking to the next door neighbor and we let the state and firms take care of everyday needs. I am pretty sure we are seeing the beginning of a smaller state and fever companies - not because I want to see it, but as a consequence of less resources. That will put the local community and family back in the center and that will be a huge transition. Being forced together (again) will create conflicts and it will take time to realize the need for a closer local community.

The energy matrix.
There is some very clear connections between how much energy a we use and what the society looks like.

Less energy <-----------------------------------> More energy
Simple structure <-----------------------------> Complex structure
Local foundation <----------------------------> Global foundation
All rounders <------------------------------------> Specialists
Shorter connections <-----------------------> Longer connections
Harsher justice <-------------------------------> Mercy justice
Long term investments <-------------------> Short term investments
Small government <--------------------------> Big government
Big family <---------------------------------------> No family
Less taxfunded social security <---------> Taxfunded social security
Very little private loans <------------------> Bloated private loans 

I'm not very optimistic in believing that the state or government is going to "do the right thing" and begin the transition to a more stable and sustainable society in a timely and thorough fashion. The state and government IS going to loose power in this transition and people ARE going to be very critical to the role of the state and government. Since WW2 has the state been able to get involved in every thinkably aspect of the citizens life. I don't have an opinion about the size or role of the state, that is beyond the point, the point is that the state have no possibility to maintain this omnipresence it have now. What should be a natural way of scaling back the state (and commune) by looking at the path of expansion, can very likely be that the state (and commune) abandons its primary services (schools, hospitals, collective transportation..) to be able to keep the prestiges areas (diplomacy, universities, trades agreements, EU..), resulting in a distant top heavy organization not delivering the demanded services and that will deepens the split between the citizens and its state.
Local community is going to be the tool that will make everyday life function - I don't believe someone is not going to come to the rescue.

Toolbox for a future - 3 - Open communication technology

Is a telephone-company natural? Where does it say that there always will be overblown telephone companies with a near monopoly on electric communication? Do these companies do there best to provide us with the best and cheapest product possible? My opinion is that telecom companies has been hampering a lot of natural development and that if they could, they would turn back the clock to before the Internet. Remember the Internet was an ACCIDENT! CCmail and Microsoft tried to build an commercial Internet 1994-95 but couldn't agree on a common standard for exchanging emails. Companies grew tired and turned to the "Internet" awaiting a standard - THAT was the beginning of the Internet. Before 1994 the Universities had failed to see that anyone beside them and the US military (for launching nuclear weapons) could have any use of the technology - They sat on the technology from 1968 to 1993.. Let there be another wireless "accident".
I you google Radio spectrum and take a closer look you will find that "common" people are left with scraps of the spectrum. The radio spectrum is a state owned commodity sold to the highest bidder. And the frequencies we can use without a permit or payment is heavily regulated (max 100mv). A normal GSM phone is from 1 to 2.5 watt and this is a transceiver put directly to the head - Therefore we can conclude that the 100mw limit put on WLAN is not to spare our health. But do not despair - the WW record of WLAN transmission is over 200 km with only 100mw.

Several years ago I began thinking about how I could use my knowledge of the Internet to a better use than pushing more product to the already besieged consumer.
The conclusion became the idea of the SU.I.S. - SUstainable Internet Solution. The idea was a self-configuring self-healing digital communication center-less mesh network. This is over 10 years ago. The idea was not novel - I take no credit. Since then there has been some progress in the area of mesh networking, but no consumer or open source application is ready. The military is using mesh networking since long, but the technology don't seem to trickle-down to the rest of us and thats a pity.
A mesh network could bring much relive in disaster areas and 3. world countries where a central government is either non existing or corrupt. Centralized systems are prone to corruption and easy to disrupt.
Do we need this? Here? We got ADSL and 3G and mobile phones and wired phones, why another (slower) communication network? I regard this as an insurance, just like the fire-department. There is also the question of cost - the common European spends over 100 Eur a month on communication, paying private companies an absurd overprice for eg. SMS. In an economic crises many people will scale back on their communication capability, when we might need I most. I don't like the idea of depending on big companies when trying to (re)organize society. Local communication (witch is most of communication) should not cost full rate mobile phone rates and local Internet traffic should not go across the Atlantic ocean. A wireless mesh network using existing WLAN technology would be a good beginning to liberating communication.
Remember its not the bandwidth you miss when you are off-line - Its the connection, regardless of how slow it might be. A wireless mesh is not going to be fast, but it could be a stable and reliable line of communication.

Several open source mesh system is under development, but it will take some time before we see an application that can be installed on every kind of platform and operating system. Here is also some promising developments.

If you come upon interesting news about open source wireless network mesh'es please make a comment!
(I have decided to have ads on the blog - I suspect that it will give me a better google rating for some strange reason..)

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