Sensemakers + Distributed Energy Infrastructure
Ed Borden
I am sending this email to both the NYC and Amsterdam Sensemakers
communities. I want to let you all know about a project that is
forming, still in the conceptual stages, that we'd love for you to be
a part of:
What we are envisioning is the complete redefinition of our energy
infrastructure. We currently live in a world where power is generated
by a big company via various methods that are many times hugely
inefficient and then transferred to us via wires and methods that
introduce many more inefficiencies. Tons of resources are expended
building infrastructure. The environment is affected and health
concerns are created. The narratives that one can build that explain
the effort required to enable me to provide 5V DC to charge my phone
can be borderline comical.
Maybe today the idea of a centralized power system makes a whole lot
of sense. Maybe tomorrow it will seem a ludicrous remnant of a
technologically inferior world. Maybe hybrid energy systems +
internet is what we were waiting for. Instead of viewing the power
system of the city being juiced from the outside by a big fat wire,
imagine a city blanketed in tiny, small, person-scale wind turbines,
solar panels, hydro turbines, etc. Imagine that this power system was
able to make connections between each person in an energy web where
sharing could occur. So, if my solar array wasn't generating enough
power today, but my neighbor's wind turbine was really rocking, I
could share that output, and vice versa.
This is completely different from the top-down agenda of the power
companies, whose "green" messages are "CONSUME LESS! SAVE POWER!".
This message directly contributes to their bottom lines, as the smart
grid is designed to eventually lead to load balancing in real-time to
curb demand at moments of peak capacity. Those are the times when the
power companies have to spin up extremely expensive reserve energy
generators. They don't want that, and frankly, we don't want that
either. But the problem is that the energy industry hasn't had a
major market-upending innovation....ever? It's time.
To get way more specific, we are going to frame the pilot location for
this project in Long Island City, Queens, NYC. Under the shadow of
coal-burning, pollution spewing Big Allis
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Allis), this area is known as
"Asthma Alley". As a community, how do you deal with something like
this? Does a project like the Air Quality Egg really matter if
there's a cloud of black smoke billowing into your face? The source is
clear. Maybe we need to be really bold here and say that the way
forward to cleaner air and better health is to obsolete that monster!
The shape of NYC has changed many times over the course of its life,
maybe this is another phase of its natural evolution.
To start to explore this concept, we are going to start with a pilot.
We want to see if we can power what we are at this point calling one
residential building's "digital lifestyle" with this new approach.
That means their phones and computers. There are a few basic ideas
that we are thinking about:
- The energy generation components need to be inexpensive and
accessible, ie. small, cheap, and easy to build or buy.
- As far as the energy generation components themselves, so much work
already exists (instructables.com, Natalie Jeremijenko's work). We
need to be really looking at these sources instead of reinventing the
wheel, so to speak.
- The place where we are going to innovate is getting relevant data
out to the internet, producing out of that data a system whereby
people can share energy. Joe has some thoughts around an
internet-connected charge controller.
- We want to focus on DC power for higher efficiency from these microgenerators.
- How might we utilize the infrastructure of a building that already
exists to distribute the power among dwellings?
- We also thought about the fact that is we took just the phone,
laptop, and desktop that every person in the city probably owns,
multiply that by 9M, that's a lot of energy. How much, though? Can
we figure out actually how much of the power grid we are looking at
replacing, assuming we could power those devices in entirety with our
system?
This was a super-long email. Sorry for that. If you have input, do
not respond to the meetup lists, but JOIN THIS GOOGLE GROUP:
http://groups.google.com/group/sensemakersenergy
We will be discussing this project at the Sensemakers Summit.
@edborden