Back to Earth: Rebuilding Puerto Rico

I like talking about space and the future but real life and present day immediate problems beg to lower my gaze back to sinful Earth.

From the special IEEE Spectrum report.
------------------------------------------------

On September 19 2017 as Hurricane Maria started churning through Puerto Rico, engineers of Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) helplessly stared at the computer monitors that displayed real-time conditions on the grid. One after another, transmission lines were failing, and the team hastily debated their course of action. In this fragile state, the network wouldn’t be able to absorb an oversupply of power, excess voltages, or swings in frequency. They could inject test currents into the downed lines, to see which ones could be restored, or else reduce the level of electricity being put on the grid, to protect the remaining transmission system. Hour after hour, the urgency was rising.
By nightfall on the 19th, the crew knew their efforts were futile. Winds topping 280 kilometers per hour had begun toppling transmission towers, snapping concrete power poles, entangling lines, and battering power plants. The PREPA engineers at their workstations watched in dismay as small outages spread and bloomed like a virus. Finally, at 2 a.m. on 20 September, all went into total blackout. All of Puerto Rico was now in the dark.
Four hours later, Maria barreled into the island as a Category 4 hurricane. The storm tore a diagonal 160-km-long path from the island’s southeast to its northwest, demolishing tens of thousands of homes, washing away roads and bridges, stripping the limbs from lush green palms, and leaving in its wake a littered and jarringly lifeless landscape. Unofficial tallies after the storm suggest that about 1,000 people lost their lives.
In the months to come, Puerto Ricans—who are, after all, citizens of the United States, a country of unquestioned technological preeminence—would discover how breakable their modern society actually was.

Water treatment facilities couldn’t provide drinking water, markets and restaurants couldn’t refrigerate food, banks couldn’t operate ATMs or conduct transactions. Cellular and Internet access was gone. Street lights and traffic lights stopped working. Schools, hospitals, and stores closed indefinitely, factories and businesses shut down.

After the storm cleared step one was to figure out the exact scale of what had happened, all over the island. The control center was running on a diesel generator, but island-wide communications were down. That meant the usual way of gauging conditions on the grid—using automated remote terminal units at substations to collect and send data to the central supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system—didn’t work. PREPA’s grid reaches nearly every home, business, school, and hospital on the main island, as well as on the smaller islands. For months, the utility was unable to say just which customers were still in the dark. At first they relied on outage reports coming in via satellite phone and from amateur radio operators. 

Under normal conditions, Puerto Rico’s generating capacity exceeds 5,800 megawatts, but peak demand is only around 3,000 MW. About half of the electricity comes from PREPA’s 10 oil-fired power plants. Much of the rest is produced by a pair of natural-gas power plants and a coal plant. Renewables—including seven solar farms, two wind farms, and seven hydropower sites—supply just 2.4 percent of generation.
Puerto Rico's grid is lopsided: seventy percent of its power generation is in the south, while 70 percent of power demand is in the north. This is the biggest problem for PREPA. Hurricane Maria sliced straight through the middle of the vital connections between North and South. 
The transmission system consists of 4,000 km of line divided among three voltages. The backbone is a 230-kilovolt ring around the island, with two South-North corridors dividing the island into western, central, and eastern loops. This feeds an extensive 115-kV network that delivers power to population centers. Finally, a 38-kilovolt “subtransmission” network serves remote areas, as well as islands via underwater cable; it also supplies power to PREPA’s 51,000 km of distribution line.
Even four months since the hurricane the scenes of destruction were still evident. Steel lattice transmission towers lied in broken piles. High-voltage wires wraped around treetops. Where there was a wind farm, only the masts of turbines are sticking out, their blades shorn off, stuck up like fat white flagpoles. Near the beach town of Humacao, a large solar farm has been reduced to fields of broken glass and twisted metal.

Blue square tarps dot the landscape; these temporary roofs are all that shield the buildings’ occupants from the elements. After the storm, 200,000 Puerto Ricans decamped for the mainland United States in search of jobs, medical care, simply for normal life.

As of late February, the US Army Corps had brought in nearly 1,000 emergency generators. Truck-size 1-MW units went to hospitals and other critical facilities, while 25-MW units went to damaged power plants. The unit also received nearly 4,500 km of wire and more than 37,000 wood, concrete, and galvanized steel poles; another 13,000 poles were slated to arrive this spring. At first, supplies barely trickled onto the island, in part because inventories across the United States had been depleted by the disastrous 2017 hurricane season and wildfires in California.

Back in January PREPA announced a milestone: One million customers—roughly two-thirds of its residential, commercial, and industrial users—had their lights back on. The utility continues to boost generation. Most of that power however is coming from oil-fired units and a natural-gas fired plant. Other sites, though, sit idle.

If  Puerto Rico's grid recovery has been slow and contentious, modernizing the island’s electric system will likely take many years, billions of dollars, and a lot of creative thinking.

The restoration of Puerto Rico’s power grid is a timely object lesson on the vulnerabilities of modern electrical networks and on the emerging technological options for minimizing those vulnerabilities. Power experts are now not just repairing Puerto Rico’s grid but doing so with an eye toward a future that portends storms of increasing intensity and frequency. Grid operators around the world are considering the merits of microgrids, utility-scale energy storage, and distributed and renewable generation. But for Puerto Rican officials trying to rebuild their shattered electrical infrastructure, these possibilities are of much more than abstract interest.

There are a number of new ideas, and most share a common theme: a shift away from traditional centralized power plants and toward more distributed systems. For that to happen, government agencies have to agree on the plan. Microgrids, for example, still can’t connect to the main grid. The Puerto Rico Energy Commission is only now finalizing the rules to allow that to happen. But even the micro-grids are prone to disasters, although damage would be limited.

Here is the solution which could limit the scale of any disaster virtually to a point. Autonomous Mobile Energy System (AMES) can be delivered to any place which urgently needs energy, rapidly deployed and provide an uninterrupted source of clean energy regardless of external conditions 24/7.  

In case of disaster the module can be folded back into the transport configuration and withstand hurricane of category 4 and maintain its power ready to start generation again the moment the storm subsides. Ten thousand modules deployed each at the place of energy consumption would not require transmission lines therefore would not be affected by the grid being out. Moreover failure of any one module would not affect any others therefore the damage is minimized to negligible amount.

Such approach is also practically hacker- and terrorist attack-proof - a single module is not an attractive target comparing to the centralized grid or a pipeline.

And additional bonus - it does not require huge investment to start incrementally generate energy and contribute to the global problem.

Sustainable future is in distributed on-site clean energy generation.

QUEST 2014

Back from Vancouver where attended QUEST 2014 Conference and Trade Show. I will share more when process all the information which was a lot. Here are some of the impressions from the conference.  

Wake up Canada

Canada under pressure after U.D., China agree to curb greenhouse gases

I keep saying that nobody will need Canadian gas and oil by the time they build those pipelines...

There is a better alternative.

Wake up call for Canada

Dear Gerald,

I read with interest your article in the SPIN. May I offer my two cents of opinion on the subject?   

First I must admit I agree with many points you made. For example, there is no need in 21st century to fly over the world to demonstrate support for climate change action. I totally agree that televised video-conference would be not only more efficient but also more effective. A great example of this approach I witnessed at the Green Buildings Council Conference in Vancouver last year where Cisco technology (which was one of the sponsors of the Conference) allowed to connect live audiences from Portland Oregon, Germany (forgot the city) and Shanghai China with Vancouver over the gigantic wall screens. 
  

I would leave the discussion of the level of urgency on the climate change aside for time being – but I hope we agree that both so called “green” side and its opponents (should we call it “black” for oil?) have their agenda and political lobbies. Either side is supported and promoted by various sectors of industry and because of that they have more in common than different. They all want to build mega-gigantic projects – economy of scale of course – be it a wind farm, a solar power plant the kind you mention in your article, a hydroelectric dam nuclear power plant or any other. 
   

Any technology has its hurdles. And any large-scale projects create large-scale problems. Wind turbines kill birds and bats (by the way, encasing them in the “housing” will significantly reduce turbine's efficiency so this is not a good option). Solar plants expropriate large areas of land and contribute to the grid instability. Hydro dams flood huge areas and disturb regional ecosystems (Site C comes to mind). Fukushima disaster reminded again of potential dangers of nuclear meltdown. 
   

But keep being reliant on fossil fuels – be it oil or natural gas - is not an alternative. “Business as usual” is an equivalent of stagnation at best, and in a world moving forward with a fast pace it is a guarantee to be left behind. The statement that fossil fuels are “wonderfully efficient, abundant throughout the world’s crust and will not go away” is extremely misleading. If a definition of efficiency is simply "being cheap” in a short run, then I want to know a long-term cost. "Abundance" is a very relative notion. Distribution of fossil fuels around the planet is very uneven – this is why some parts of it have to bring them from the other side of the globe spending lots of the same fossil fuel on the way. “Will not go away” doesn’t even fit common sense. All natural resources are finite, and in the case of fossil fuels the rate of their extraction exceeds the rate of their natural generation by thousands times - this is the fact which will not go away. Don’t forget oil is used not only for fuel – all plastics, paints, a lot of cosmetics and number of other products are derived from oil. While we may change our estimates of when the so called “oil peak” occurs, new methods of the natural resources extraction can only accelerate the rate of their depletion. They are also becoming more costly, which eats into the so called “efficiency” of fossil fuels. Alternative technologies, particularly solar PV and solar thermal, at the same time are becoming less expensive and more efficient in terms of their performance. 
  

Cost of one alternative versus another deserves more discussion. Even if one would wave away an indirect cost of a long-term consequences of a greenhouse effect and global warming - which although would be not wise but it is in the human nature to think what would happen later - he or she can hardly do the same about the health affecting air, ground and water pollution. And what about after-cost of unavoidable equipment failures and human errors? Shall we recount events like oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, derailment in Lac-Megantic, an explosion at pump station in Saskatchewan and barely avoided another disaster with the Russian cargo ship which lost power near the British Columbia coast? 

Risking of falling victim of the overused (and may be over-politicized) term “sustainability” I need to say few words about it. Any system – technical, economical, biological or social – consists of a number of components. In very general terms, sustainability is a system’s ability to remain in balance over extended period of time without need for external resources or energy. In other word’s it is a measure of a system’s stability. It is a lesson of generations of engineers that the more complex system is – i.e. consisting of a larger number of components – the less stable it is.

One of the most familiar and relevant examples of a complex system is a power grid, consisting of a large number of energy producers (typically power plants), even a bigger number of all sorts and sizes energy consumers (from residential homes to institutions and industry) and an extremely tight and interconnected energy transmission and distribution network including under and above ground power lines, substations and many other. In a centralized grid all components are highly inter-dependent, which on numerous occasions was demonstrated by big blackouts, recently in Calgary. Residents of Sun Peaks are very well familiar with the consequences of a drunk driver hitting a power pole. Several hours in darkness, and often in cold during the winter is not fun to say the least!

Take another example, from a subject which became touchy recently – distribution of oil and natural gas over pipelines. Complex, expensive, subject of environmental concerns and political disagreements, their short-term benefits are unstable. As with any resources, demand for Canadian oil is highly dependent on an unpredictable international business and political environment. Pipeline like the Northern Gateway is an easy target for terrorists’ attacks and political manipulation. Take example of Russia using its natural gas supply as a tool for political pressure on Ukraine and not too subtly - on Western Europe. Bet on China is a very risky gamble. For one, Russia will easily and happily overflow it with much cheaper oil and gas than Canada can ever afford to offer. US is already resisting Canadian oil – not only they have enough of its own but they are steadily moving away from oil dependency. 
     

I hear you asking - what is the alternative? Glad to oblige. I am not a supporter of government mandated or subsidized technologies, but I strongly think we need a long-term sustainable national energy strategy based on the System Approach and Real Options methodology.

Decentralized energy system should be very seriously considered. Continuous progress in solar, particularly solar thermal technologies in combination with air and ground source active heat exchange, as well as in in energy storage technologies including fuel cells and phase-change thermal accumulators, makes a self-sufficient house or a building a real possibility. We are talking about more than “net-zero” building where more energy produced than consumed at some periods of time but it needs to draw energy from the grid at other times averaging to about zero over the year. We are talking about a building as a self-sufficient system. Passive design, energy conservation measures and new highly thermoresistant materials in combination with ultra-efficient lights, appliances and electronic equipment significantly lower energy demand. Equipped with on-site renewable energy generation, heat recovery, water recycling. No more blackouts or freezing while waiting for a power to be restored. Individual houses are connected in an “intelligent network”. A further evolution of a “smart grid”, it is a sort of an “energy cloud” in which all nodes are independent from each other but can combine the power when needed.  
     

The projects like Northern Gateway and alike take an enormous amount of financial and intellectual resources which could not be used elsewhere. The more we invested in these the more difficult it will be to change the course later. It is more than likely that much higher return on investment in 30 to 50 years of projected lifetime would be achieved if invested in the research of new technologies. This would have more than economical and environmental benefits but also decide on which way Canada would be moving in the future – slide to a backward resource dependent state or move toward the advanced technological society. And if the government still wants to build something large across the country I have a proposal - high-speed train connecting Canadian West and East Coast. It works for Japan, Taiwan and Korea - why it shouldn't in Canada? 
  

Saskatchewan - More Lessons To Learn

I hate to sound negative and say "I told you so" but in fact I did. The fire at the pump station in Prud'homme Saskatchewan showed that not only electrical power grid is susceptible to failure with wide and costly impact, but the same with potentially more dangerous consequences applies to a gas and other pipeline grids.

And we still want to build more pipelines ... 

Calgary - Lessons To Learn

In one of the previous posts I made a point which I have been trying to emphasize for quite some time already. We do not need gigantic power grids with all their complexity and stability problems. Another confirmation of it was the latest incident in Calgary where underground fire left thousands of people struggling without a power for several days, disrupting traffic and businesses and will be certainly costing many millions for the city.

What if each building had its own power generated in sufficient volume on-site? This would give each individual unit (building, facility, business operation etc.) an independence from the grid preventing such blackout incidents. It would also remove a problem of power fluctuations in the grid which is a subject of such a many problems. There is technology which makes it possible today. Note that examples of the so-called "net-zero" or even "net-positive" buildings although a move in the right direction are not totally autonomous self-sufficient systems. They are still dependent on the grid in that they draw from it when there is not enough energy produced on-site to satisfy the building's demand, while sending energy to the grid when they have excess of it (e.g. solar PV in the middle of the day during summer).

Fully autonomous building would not depend on the grid at any time! It however does not have to be completely "off-grid". On the contrary, all independent on-site generation systems should be connected in the "intelligent network" which would utilize its resources most efficiently, while never leaving any of the nodes starving without energy. Intelligent energy network built on the Systems Architecture principles of modularity, re-usability and scalability, is actually much more than what is usually known as a "smart grid" although it can certainly be considered its evolution.   

Bullitt Centre - Connecting technologies and 90 percent rule

 
Another example of connecting technologies - Bullitt Centre in Seattle - has been called the world’s greenest office building.

The 52,000-square-foot building outfitted with cutting-edge environmental technologies, such as insulation and energy-saving heating and cooling systems, aims at meeting the rigorous standards of the Living Building Challenge. It is supposed to be completely powered by the 575 photovoltaic solar panels on the over sized roof. Completed in 2013 (a year behind the schedule), the US$18.5 million, 6-storey building, designed by Miller Hull Partnerships, is built to be “zero-energy”.

To make enough room for 14,000 square feet array of solar panels the roof had to be made projected as much as 20 feet beyond the building's perimeter. According to the designers, the solar array delivers 242 kilowatts of power in total. In the summer, it will produce more electricity than it uses, and in the winter it will produce less. The surplus power will be sold into the Seattle electric grid. The building then draws electricity from the grid in the winter months when production is low. To achieve its “net zero energy” goal, the summer production surplus must meet or exceed the winter production deficit. While strictly speaking it is not a 100% efficiency, this is a way around the 90 percent barrier.

Underwater Energy Storage

Browsing recently through the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum - my favorite nighttime reading  - I came across of one interesting idea - underwater energy storage, developed and currently being deployed in a pilot project by a Canadian company Hydrostor. Having recently considered a pump back hydro storage for one of our clients, we came to a conclusion that the potential and difficult to accurately estimate  environmental impact of a large scale project (it would not be economically viable on a small scale), its high cost and other limitations make such a project hard to justify.
An underwater energy storage on another hand largely mitigates these problems. One version is a flexible underwater balloon, looking not unlike high-flying air balloon, is convenient for small-to-medium size applications, can be deployed temporary and re-deployed with little disturbance to the fauna and environment at large.

An underwater energy storage implemented as permanent installation is more suited for medium-to-large size applications and can actually benefit underwater fauna by providing with the structure to build an ecosystem not unlike the coral reefs.          
 

Choices We Make - Part 3

In one of my recent posts I mentioned an idea of the common energy policy for North America and promised to continue on it. I want to make clear - my view is quite different, if not opposite - to what is often promoted as the  North American Energy Strategy.

Here is my two cents on it:

1. You cannot reduce greenhouse gas emissions while increasing oil and gas production - it is like eating a cake and having it too.

You cannot reduce greenhouse gas emissions while increasing oil and gas production – it is like eating a cake and having it too. - See more at: http://common-resources.org/2014/resources-magazine-toward-a-north-american-energy-strategy/#sthash.R5EzSLUo.dpuf

You cannot reduce greenhouse gas emissions while increasing oil and gas production – it is like eating a cake and having it too. - See more at: http://common-resources.org/2014/resources-magazine-toward-a-north-american-energy-strategy/#sthash.R5EzSLUo.dpuf

2. While coordinated policy is desirable and important, it should be directed not to tying all North America energy resources in one gigantic web with a monster "spider" in the middle pulling the strings, but to creating a distributed array of loosely connected intelligent mini- and micro-systems allowing more flexibility, reliability (preventing massive blackouts and large-scale consequences of natural or human-induced disasters), extensibility and ability of non-disruptive evolution to new technologies.

While coordinated policy is important and desirable, - See more at: http://common-resources.org/2014/resources-magazine-toward-a-north-american-energy-strategy/#sthash.R5EzSLUo.dpuf

Choices We Make, Part 2

Another Mega-project has been approved by the Government of Canada. The Northern Gateway is a proposed 1,200 kilometer twin pipeline that would carry bitumen from the oil sands in Alberta to the coast of British Columbia. From there, the crude would be shipped to Asian markets.

The $7-billion pipeline would be developed by Enbridge, a major Canadian energy delivery company based in Calgary. The application to the National Energy Board was submitted in 2010. Since then, a review panel hosted consultations and heard from residents of the affected communities. The panel eventually approved the project, but with 209 conditions to be met. It is not a surprise that many still disagree to say the least.

Former Conservative MP Stockwell Day says: There are already thousands of pipelines running across North America, and the Northern Gateway pipeline, if approved, will be one of the "safest and most sophisticated." 

Dear Mr. Day. Perhaps you remember we met with you some time ago and I told you about my aerospace background. As someone who spent more than 30 years building complex systems in various areas I know not only in theory but in practice as well, that any technical system, as "safe" as it might seem, will fail sooner or later. And in most cases the reason for it would be not a natural disaster or even a terrorist attack, which are always a possibility, but a basic human error. (Just remember Lac-Megantic derailment, or the South Korean ferry accident). When failure happens, we would look back and ask ourselves: "Why?"  
Why all the discussion is around how to move oil - one way or another? Why do we need to move it at all? Why not consider refining it on-site (or as close as possible)? Selling oil to the Asian market has very  questionable economic prospects - Russia will easily undercut Canadian prices. And because Europe is transitioning to alternative sources, in 20 years (this is probably an optimistic time frame for the Northern Gateway to start its operation) Russia will flood all the oversupply to China pushing Canadian oil out.
There are different alternatives completely. If the government's argument is exclusively about money, why not compare the pipeline with other possible ways of investing $7 billion and see what return can be obtained from investing in technical innovation, energy conservation, renewable energy, distributed systems etc. On the scale 20 years many alternatives will show at least the same, but likely a bigger economic potential than pipeline ,with much less environmental risks and they would have much more public support. On a global scale, it would show our commitment to contributing into resolving global pollution problem rather than contributing into the problem. Most importantly, instead of remaining a backward resource-based economy, it would create a path for Canada to become a nation with a modern future-oriented economy, which we all would be proud of and our children and grand-grandchildren would be grateful for.   

There are choices we make, but there is at least one choice - between Future and No Future - we should not be making...

Choices We Make: Part 1

More than a year ago I wrote about system approach which is a must for Sustainable Development.

A lot has happened in the world since then. Syria conflict, Iraq insurgency, Putin's invasion into Ukraine, Obama's announcement of the new GHG targets.
World can go upside down, but nothing seems to shift Canadian national "energy policy", still counting on oil, gas and pipelines to deliver them.

Not being a particular fan of Hillary Clinton, must say I very much agree with what she said in the interview with CBC Peter Mansbridge about climate and energy policy: "Why not to create a common energy policy for North America, including Canada, USA and Mexico based on the plan of transition from fossil fuels to renewables?".  Indeed - why not? In global issues such as climate and energy going beyond national orders is much more effective than trying to do something in isolation. After all, there is NORAD, there is NAFTA, why can't there be NAES (North American Energy and Sustainability) ?

To be continued...

Students Present Designs of the Mountain Health Centre

On April 28 students of the Thompson Rivers University (TRU) presented their designs of the Health care and Community building to the Sun Peaks Mayor and Council. While varying in architectural style, from traditional Thyrolean to distinct modern, all designs carried energy efficiency and "green" features - from optimal building orientation for better use of natural sunlight and enhanced thermal insulation to incorporating solar panels and accommodating other onsite energy generation capabilities. The project was a collaboration between Architecture & Technology Department of TRU and Ascent Systems Technologies.

AST begins work on the Integrated Thermal Hydronic Module

Ascent Systems Technologies (AST) received an Engage grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to work on the collaborative project with the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver with the purpose of developing an adaptive control system for Integrated Thermal Hydronic Module (ITHM). The project includes setting up a pilot system configuration at the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) at UBC.

The architecture of the system utilizes principles of modularity and scalability, and it is optimized using the ASPA predictive algorithm developed by AST with support from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).
The system automatically maintains its parameters within the predetermined range while responding to the actual demand of energy by implementing an adaptive control algorithm with the real-time feedback loop. Some of the distinct features of ITHM are:
- The system needs very little power to operate, making it a perfect candidate for off-grid applications. 
- The system can be configured in a compact package such that it can be implemented on a mobile platform.
- The system can be scaled up for increased capacity by combining several modules in an array. 
- The system is digitally controlled with embedded network capability allowing for remote monitoring and data processing.