It does sound like a lovely day. How about metanoia for today’s word? It means a profound transformation of heart or change in one’s way of life, often associated with spiritual or personal growth. It feels like a fitting word for the theme of transformation we’re all working on for the WLBOTT vision.
Elder G
Nobelity
Nobelity is a film that looks at the world through the eyes of nine Nobel Laureates. The film follows filmmaker Turk Pipkin’s personal journey to find enlightening answers about the kind of world our children and grandchildren will know. Filmed across the U.S. and in France, England, India and Africa, Nobelity combines the insights of nine distinguished Nobel winners with a first-person view of world problems and the children who are most challenged by them. The film features Steven Weinberg, Jody Williams, Ahmed Zewail, Rick Smalley, Wangari Maathai, Sir Joseph Rotblat, Dr. Harold Varmus, Desmond Tutu, and Amartya Sen. It was premiered at the SXSW film festival in Austin in 2006.
[….]
Dr. Richard E. Smalley was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the Buckministerfullerene or Buckyball, a unique molecular structure of 60 carbon atoms. Some of the strongest materials ever discovered, carbon nanostructures are currently being used in numerous practical applications.
If you moved it [energy] to the top of the list, and you imagined a world where that problem was now solved, just totally solved, gone, if you could imagine that, you would find that at least five of the remaining nine problems on the list now had a path to a reasonable answer.
[…]
Right now, the world runs on 14.4 trillion watts. By mid-century, most estimates for the requirements for energy are at least twice that amount.
Nobelity
If you need some a respite from the day-to-day tedium, the feeling of hopelessness, check out Nobelity. It offers a plausible optimism for the woes of our planet.
A chemistry professor at Rice University, the late Rick Smalley, made that sobering statement not long ago to Austin filmmaker Turk Pipkin. Smalley’s prescription for the looming problem is vast solar farms. Why should we pay attention to him? Why do his ideas carry weight? Well, he was the recipient of the 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry, that’s why.
Smalley is one of nine Nobel laureates who appear in Pipkin’s strange and remarkable new film, Nobelity. To answer the sizable question “Are we going to leave a better world?” Pipkin… decided to consult a posse of seers and experts the world over who have all gotten the call from Stockholm for one reason or another (four peace, two chemistry, and one each in physics, medicine, and economics).
A terawatt is a trillion watts. It’s a 1,000 gigawatts. A gigawatt is a 1,000 megawatts. A thousand megawatts is about the size of a big electrical power plant (a nuclear plant or a coal plant). So we need by middle of the century at minimum 10 terawatts from some new carbon-free energy source to be installed.
If I knew how to build such a plant, now I’ve gone out and I’ve got the investors and we built the plant and tomorrow I open the door and we turn the power on, I would have to do that the next day, and the next day, and next week, and every day I open a new plant, a billion dollar, five billion dollar investment, every day for 27 years to get 10 terawatts of new power.
– Prof. Rick Smalley / Nobelity
Free Electricity?
Let’s imagine a world where electricity is almost free. Let’s say you can get a personal 1 MW generator (the size of a large ice chest) from Home Depot for $399 (US), and a 10 MW generator (the size of a front-load washing machine) for $1,999 (US).
For reference purposes, currently 10 MW would supply 8,000 homes. (Average power consumption per household in the USA is 877 kWh/month)
Crazy idea? Perhaps. And perhaps not. I was working for a large three-initial company in the mid-80’s when the first IBM PC with a hard drive was introduced (the IBM PC XT). This 10MB hard drive added about $1000 ($2,925.61 today) to the cost of the system.
At work, only management had this expensive upgrade, and the average manager used their monitor as a convenient surface to place post-it notes. Most had no concept of sub-folders, so they had ALL of their files in C:.
Anyhow, we’ve gone from 10MB/$1,000 to 12TB/$85
Very roughly, the original PC XT’s hard drive is worth about $0.00008.
So let’s imagine just one scenario with free electricity
WLBOTT Goes Shopping
WLBOTT has decided to purchase four $399 1MW generators to set up a desalination plant in Baja California.
We were initially turned off by the upscale hardware stores.
Instead, we turned to some of our trusted twine suppliers and mom-and-pop hardware stores.
The WLBOTT Purchasing Department
Meet the good folks at corporate purchasing….
The Desalination Project
Let’s use all of this free electricity to make the deserts of Baja California bloom.
So, it turns out that reverse osmosis is about 25x more energy efficient for desalinating water as the thermal evaporation/condensation method.
Unfortunately, WLBOTT doesn’t have the necessary funds to invest in the equipment needed for reverse osmosis. However, we do have extensive experience building and operating stills, which is basically the same technology as the thermal evaporation method.
According to Elder G, our 1MW generator could desalinate 10 cubic meters (10,000 liters) of fresh water per hour using the traditional boiling and condensing method.
One acre-inch of irrigation is approximately 102.79 cubic meters of water.
Based on a sample size of four sweet potatoes we’re growing in the WLBOTT Serenity Garden, these fellows need quite a bit of water. Elder G estimates our Baja sweet potato fields will need 10 to 20 acre inches of water over the course of the growing season. The growing season is between 90 and 150 days. Let’s bump that up a bit and plan on 30 acre inches spread out over 120 days (or 1/4″ per day).
WLBOTT Serenity Garden
Let’s say that WLBOTT can come up with enough money to cover 4 1MW generator ($1,600). Some back-of-the-envelope shows that, using the inefficient thermal evaporation method, we could provide a daily 1/4″ of irrigation to almost 40 acres.
Cover Crops
But first, we will spend a few years growing cover crops to improve the soil fertility and reduce compaction. The cover crops need less irrigation that our later crops, so we can plant extra acreage and try out different strategies.
We want cover crops that have good drought and salinity tolerance, deep root systems, and tastes yummy to the goats.
Cover crop properties are from this helpful USDA document.
Triticale
We selected this variety of wheat/rye hybrid as a cover crop because it was featured in an episode of Star Trek (actually Quadrotriticale, from The Trouble with Tribbles). Almost all of WLBOTT’s farming knowledge comes from television, especially Green Acres, Little House on the Prairie, Wagon Train, etc.
The WLBOTT Triticale Cover Crop (Desalination plant in the background).
Crimson Clover
An over-winter legume, crimson clover adds 70 to 150 pounds of nitrogen to the soil per acre.
Our main reason for choosing this hardy cool season cover crop was so that we could crank up Joan Jett’s Crimson and Clover.
One reply on “Nobelity / Free Electricity?”
Being one of the early graduates in Computing Science I have seen the incredible changes in memory density and computer speed first-hand. If power generation can follow the same path, that would fantastic!
Thanks for bringing “Nobelity” to my attention.
One reply on “Nobelity / Free Electricity?”
Being one of the early graduates in Computing Science I have seen the incredible changes in memory density and computer speed first-hand. If power generation can follow the same path, that would fantastic!
Thanks for bringing “Nobelity” to my attention.