05 Energy – Page 55 – Public Intelligence Blog

Stefan Hartmann of Overunity.com has posted two videos of a Russian group (friends of Tariel Kapanadze) apparently powering a stand-alone engine on water. They drink from a bottle of water (of course, it could be Vodka), then pour the liquid into what appears to be a fuel tank. Then they start up the engine.

As it's running, they show the exhaust being clean. As they hold a cup at the exhaust, it collects liquid (assumed to be water), which they then drink.

Reference Page 2 Videos Many Links

Phi Beta Iota: Imagine the good we could have done if the banks and energy, health, military, prison consortiums did not own our crooked politicians. Open Source Everything is leading toward an Autonomous Internet, an end to mega-corporations, and Panarchy. Slowly. These things have come up before, but in the prior era the powers could kill the inventor and steal the idea in order to lock it up. Now there are too many of us, ideas are moving fast and replicating, we are in for an agonizing transition period, but absent the deliberate unleashing of plagues and the deliberate poisoning of food such as may have been tested on the European cucumbers, in the end a new era will begin. The real challenge now is to keep the 1% from freaking out and lashing out — they need to understand a commitment to non-violent change and to truth & reconciliation rather than revenge. They remain the biggest threat to all of us.

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust

2011/12/05

Mini-Me: US Gasoline Exports–Reason for Tar Sands Fraud

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Gasoline: The new big U.S. export

Steve Hargreaves

CNN Money, 5 December 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The United States is awash in gasoline. So much so, in fact, that the country is exporting a record amount of it.

The country exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is about twice the amount at the start of the year, and experts and industry insiders say the trend is here to stay.

The United States began exporting gas in late 2008. For decades prior, starting in 1960, the country used all the gas it produced here plus had to import gas from places in Europe.

But demand for gas has dropped nearly 10% in recent years. It went from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day in 2007 to 8.8 million barrels today, according to the EIA.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The entire Tar Sands scheme is a scam on the US public, and atrocity against the Canadian public. In Canada, they are proposing to use precious water they do not have to spare, to flush tar we do not need out of the sands; in the US, there is no need for the tar sands as the sleazy campaigns suggest, the oil companies want the tar sands so they can externalize the costs to the US public and privatize the profits of exporting the gasoline.

2011/11/17

John Robb: Solar Farming, Localized Power Resilience

05 Energy, Blog Wisdom

SOLAR FARMING

Photovoltaic (PV) technology (aka solar panels) is advancing steadily. That advance will occur regardless of whether we have an economic depression or booming prosperity. This advance means that price of PV modules are dropping at a rate of 7% per year (as it has been doing that for decades). This means that by 2020, the price of a PV module (with micoconverters etc. included) will likely be close to $1 a watt (not including installation, which is also falling). That puts PV tech within the range of being cost competitive with today's alternatives. As an added benefit, it's possible that modules that approach this level of cost efficiency might also be locally printable (as in: they could be made in a 3D fab or grown in a bio-lab).

The implication: for those communities able to deploy it in quantity, it will mean increasingly inexpensive energy for as many years into the future as you want to project. For those that don't, you will increasingly fall behind.

There is a caveat though. The real potential for this technology isn't going to be found in a large number of big, commercial solar complexes. Why? The infrastructure and investment necessary to make this happen on a scale that really matters doesn't exist in the US or EU anymore. We are broke (and even if we weren't, NIMBY is nearly impossible to overcome as the record of new power line construction over the last 30 years attests to). So, it should be easy for us to conclude that it won't get built at national/regional level (if you think otherwise, I have a planet I'd like to sell you).

Fortunately, there is a ray of hope. For those of us building resilient communities, we WILL see this infrastructure deployed. How? Through the hard word and dedication of a resilient entrepreneur: the solar farmer. The solar producer that keeps his/her entire community fed with increasingly inexpensive and bountiful solar energy, 24x7x365 (via energy storage for round the clock production).

A Platform For Local Solar Farming

Continue reading “John Robb: Solar Farming, Localized Power Resilience”

2011/11/152011/11/15

John Robb: Radical Energy Innovation Here Now

05 Energy, Blog Wisdom

RC ENERGY TIDBIT: Leveraging the Earth for Heat/Cooling

Resilient energy leverages the terrain.

Resilient guerrillas/warriors leverage the terrain they are fighting on to the max. In our case, we want:

plentiful, low cost (hyper efficient) energy that
uses a process that's inexpensive to maintain and is
under our control (not subject global supply chain factors and limited to locally available labor).

The way to do that is through the installation of geo-exchange systems. These systems run water through plastic pipes buried in the ground. Since the ground (below six feet or so) remains at a constant temperature (50-65 degrees) year round (it's a heat sink), this circulation process will heat or cool water to the ground's temperature. This allows heat pumps that run 2-3 times more efficiently and cooling that is dirt cheap. For example:

Here's a note from Australia on a recently built hospital. Lithgow hospital uses 1/3 less energy as any other hospital in the state and it's heating/cooling system requires less maintenance. It also eliminates noise and the risk of Legionnaires disease (an added bonus).

See Also from John Robb:

“Reinventing Fire maps pathways for running a 158%-bigger U.S. economy in 2050 but needing no oil, no coal, and no nuclear energy.”

Virtual power plant market set to zoom.

International Academy of Astronautics says we need to start building an orbital solar power system.

2011/11/122011/11/12

Mini-Me: Japan’s Lies to the World on Fukushima

05 Energy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Corruption, Government, Misinformation & Propaganda

New international report shreds Japan’s carefully constructed Fukushima scenario

John C. Daly

Arab News. com, 13 November 2011

EXTRACT

Needless to say, in the aftermath of the disaster, both TEPCO and the Japanese government were at pains to minimize the disaster’s consequences, hardly surprising given the country’s densely populated regions.

But now, an independent study has effectively demolished TEPCO and the Japanese government’s carefully constructed minimalist scenario. Mainichi news agency reported that France’s l’Institut de Radioprotection et de Surete Nucleaire (Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, or IRSN) has issued a recent report stating that the amount of radioactive cesium-137 that entered the Pacific after 11 March was probably nearly 30 times the amount stated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. in May.

Read full story.

Phi Beta Iota: Governments lie. Corporations lie. Non-Governmental organizations lie. They all lack integrity, and in lacking integrity, they are a cancer within the human body.

2011/11/08

John Robb: Occupy Resilience – Condemn the Regional Power Companies and Then Municipalize Them

03 Economy, 05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Resilient Energy: Municipalization of Power

How can you help your community build a resilient energy system? One of the first steps is to buy back the energy system from the regional power company by condemning it and then municipalizing it (it can be run as a power co-op or as a standard company … The structure really depends on the community.). This moves provides you with the control of the local grid so that your community can:

Ensure higher levels of maintenance (tree trimming, etc.) and faster response to failure. During the two big power outages on the east coast this summer/fall, power was out for much of the region for nearly a week. In many cases, the municipal power companies get power back on to all of their customers in 1/2 the time of the big regional companies.
Cut rates and change energy mix. As a municipal company, you can select the different types of energy you will use locally.
Add advanced micro-grid features. Everything from community energy markets to local energy backup to power smoothing. Extra benefit of this approach: it will prevent the regional power company from using smart grid tech to snoop on everyone in the community by micro-analyzing energy use (which they will then resell to marketing companies or provide to the government w/o warrant for “signature” sniffing).

All of the benefits listed above will double or treble in importance as the global economy nose dives into depression over the next couple of years. So, it's better to get started early than later.

Here's a few links from the Boulder Colorado effort to condemn and municipalize it's power. A combo of bad service and a low level of renewables use prompted the effort (use whatever hooks you need to get it done, but get it done):

Renewablesyes.org The site of the citizens coalition. The astroturf site of the national power company.
Citizen groups do the hard work. A technical group does the modelling and analysis for a municipal grid. They compare rates, costs, and energy mix Here's an amazingly video of a member of that team, Sam Weaver.
Homer software. The software you need to model a municipal grid from rate analysis to energy mix. The numbers.

NOTE: Great article in the NYTimes today on how the big regional companies are so focused on acquisitions, regulatory gaming, and extractative finance; they are delivering terrible service.

NOTE: Great pushback in the comments on how tough it is to do this. Basically, crony capitalism (revolving door, bribes, etc.) + regulatory capture (same mindset) + gov't granted monopoly = lots of opposition.

2011/10/142011/10/14

Mini-Me: Saudis Earmark $130 Billion for Shale Gas

05 Energy

Below is a SALES PITCH. However, it offers a useful view.

Standberry Research on Saudi Oil

Phi Beta Iota: A real conspirary theorist would wonder if the “Iranian plot” was actually a half-assed Exxon plot. The sales pitch is annoying, finally getting to the point, shale gas, but along the way, does itemize the level of commitment. This is not a paradigm shift–it still assume centralized development, it uses water we cannot afford to give up to push the gas, and it adds chemicals to do the fracking. In other words, it externalizes all risks and costs to the future public, while privatizing a dubious resource.

The real paradigm shift is decentralized energy and shared energy, as Buckminster Fuller envisioned. The Saudis would be much better off creating new models of integrating housing and commercial that generate their own energy, capture all water, process their own waste, and generally leverage solar, wind, human, and other forms of energy in place.

See Also:

Wikipedia/Shale Gas

Category: 05 Energy

Sepp Hasslberger: Russian Team Water-Fueled Engine