Special Report: 4.23.2009

Posted by Web Master on Thursday, April 23, 2009

Edison's Revenge

By Joe Salimando

Sometimes, it hits me between the eyes: Thomas Alva Edison was right! Here’s where he didn’t win:

1. He advocated DC power.
   
   
2. He favored small, local power plants (operating near where people would consume the power).
   
   
3. Electricity would be clean power.

George Westinghouse came along (with Nikola Tesla’s idea) and tossed all that out the window. He “proved” that AC power was preferable. George liked big power plants, not little ones. His gigantic AC power stations would push electrons over long distances (via transmission lines) to where power was needed. When it got there, it would be stepped down and distributed (via distribution lines) to homes and industrial facilities.

That’s what we have now. It’s not great.

DC Power Distribution

Start with DC power. Some folks are talking about putting AC and DC power distribution in new buildings. Dual distribution. Here’s why:

1. You’ve heard of solar photovoltaics? They generate electricity, right? When the sun hits PV cells, you get DC power, which we convert to AC. That has a cost.
   
   
2. You have a portable computer? That black-brick thingy that came with it is a converter. Westinghouse’s AC flows from the outlet; the computer wants DC.
   
   
3. Then there are these other things: servers (nonportable computers)—zillions of them. They like DC power, too. Check out “DC Power Distribution Cuts Data Center Energy Use,” a two-page PDF.
   
   
4. As an electrical distributor, you sell fluorescent lighting systems. They come with black-brick thingies (ballasts) don’t they? More conversion, so the tubes get the DC they crave.
   
   
5. How about LEDs? They like DC power, too!

Had the world listened to Edison, we’d be distributing and using DC power. Black bricks wouldn’t be ubiquitous. Our servers would, at a minimum, cost less.

And we wouldn’t have to go through gyrations to get the stuff that comes out of a solar PV array to work in our building. Here’s our current situation in a nutshell:

Stick a solar PV array on a building’s roof, you get DC power.

Convert it to AC to make it work in the building.

But when those electrons get to the fluorescent lighting or the computers, they’ve got to be converted AGAIN…

…back to the original form in which they were generated.

AND: Ditto for every computer in the building!

There’s more conversion going on here than went on in Central & South America after the arrival of the Spanish!

Does any of this DC-AC-DC stuff make sense? Only if your surname is Westinghouse. These arrangements have a cost, in dollars and loss of energy efficiency. Bottom line: We as a society now pay heavily for choosing George’s ideas over Tom’s.

Small, Local Power Plants

Edison’s idea of smaller “neighborhood” power plants was flattened by the Westinghouse steamroller. Power plants of the 1890s were dirty. They were inefficient coal-burners. They made the neighborhood sooty.

Send them to the countryside!

Grossly enlarged AC-producing power plants were sent where few could see them or inhale their exhaust. Heaven only knows how many steers, cows, pigs, and chickens died from mainlining those emissions. And: Don’t think about the ultimate impact on humans (then and now) who ate/eat the output of those chemically-tainted cows and chickens (and ingested the meat of these animals).

(There’s more. Had we as a society stuck with Edison’s idea we might have figured out—a long time ago—how to make “clean coal” work. It would have been a priority! As of 2009, we still haven’t done that. Sounds crazy? OK, let’s put that one aside.)

There is a “movement” afoot for CHP (combined heat & power, also called “district heating” in some places), seeking to recreate what we abandoned when we located the plants out of town.

Here’s the gist:

As those distant power plants generate AC power, they boil water. The steam turns the turbines. But: We ventilate most of the energy used. Due to the loss at the plant (steam sent into the atmosphere) and loss in the power lines, what you get out of an outlet equals 31% to 37% of the energy input at the power plant.

In plain English: Electricity is horribly inefficient!

CHP plants are 60% to 70% efficient. How’s that? They are built in cities and towns, near places (businesses and homes) that can put the heat to work in one way or another.

Clean vs. Dirty

Recently, at a conference I attended, a speaker (from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) said emissions from U.S. commercial buildings equal 4% of the world’s annual output of greenhouse gases.

That’s right: Just commercial buildings, in a country with not quite 5% of the world’s people, cause 4% of GHG emissions. This is mostly about electricity.

Does that sound clean to you?

That equals, he said, India’s total GHG output. In other words, GHG produced as a “cost” of doing business by U.S. commercial buildings = all GHG emissions output of a nation of 1.1 billion people.

Have you previously pigeonholed your country as a dirty, polluting place? Before thinking about this remark, I had not. In fact, you might have seen India as a less than totally sanitary place.

As it turns out, we are the filthy polluting people. Surprise!

What would have happened had we adopted Edison’s approach? Small, local power plants, converting 60% or more of the energy they used into saleable, useful power and heat (plus, they wouldn’t lose so many electrons with short-distance distribution vs. our current long-distance transmission).

Sure, we’d have a lot more plants. But we’d be more efficient. We’d still have polluting power plants, but perhaps they would operate so efficiently that our commercial buildings would account for a bit smaller percentage of the globe’s GHG problem.

A Lesson We Should Have Learned

Our problem is simple: We want electricity to be cheap. It’s one big reason the Westinghouse/Tesla concept bopped Edison’s ideas.

In reality, “cheap electricity” isn’t considered a right. Power companies still issue shut-off notices if you don’t pay. Many utilities are installing “smart meters,” ostensibly part of The Smart Grid. But the advantage to the utilities is the ability to turn off someone’s power with the snap of a fingers (instead of the dispatch of a crew).

Energy efficiency is our main challenge. Certainly, it doesn’t take a TedMag Special Report to tell electrical distributors (and their contractor customers) that retrofits that make a building more energy efficient just do not sell themselves.

Lighting wastes money, big-time, yet lighting controls go unsold (and unmanufactured). NEMA Premium Motors aren’t selling like hotcakes (or cold cupcakes, even). You can still walk into local grocery stores and see T-12s. And so on.

Raise The #$#*$#$-ing Price, Already!

People in business (and in the green movement) say we should “think outside the box.” Go outside the box on energy efficiency, and you’ll find Edison sitting there, waiting. And he’s laughing his butt off.

Here’s a “thought experiment” for 2009 and beyond.

What if electricity became expensive? Yes, government would have to protect the poor and the elderly from shut-offs. Let’s say that was doable.

Additionally, we would have to stop worrying about whether MUCH higher power prices end up enriching the power companies (and their owners). This means gagging the state regulators who have been so good at keeping electricity prices down.

Here’s the good part: End cheap electricity and you put a stop to the wastefulness (and, on a global scale, the filthiness) of U.S. citizens.

Think about $.39 per kilowatt hour, instead of a dime (see 2007 state power costs here). After a lot of screaming, a few things would follow a stupendous, overnight rate hike:

1. Turn off the damn lights!
   
   
2. We have to save energy. Let’s weatherize this old house!
   
   
3. Don’t buy it unless it says ENERGY STAR.
   
   
4. I’m buying CFLs for every high-hat ceiling fixture in this hotel, doggone it, and I’m doing it today!
   
   
5. Commercial building owners would hire contractors to make their buildings much more energy-smart.
   
   
6. Your local convenience store would no longer sport T-12 fluorescents.
   
   
7. Las Vegas would initiate daytime-only operations. Broadway would go to 100% matinees.
   
   
8. The trendy would sport flashlights (instead of cell phones, etc.) on their belt holsters.
   
   
9. Who has the lowest electric bill? That would be the talk at a picnic or holiday party.

Note: I thought that I had created the two-word title of this screed, but it turns out that I read a sidebar with the same headline in an October 2008 issue of New Scientist magazine. Also: See this Wikipedia entry for more on George vs. Tom.

	Joe Salimando of EFJ Enterprises is a consultant, web content provider, and wordsmith based in Oakton, Va. To contact him, call 703-255-1428. See also The EleBlog.
Personal Disclaimer: The appearance of the ambling pachyderm is indicative of the writer’s obsession with elephants, not his political leanings.
IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS COLUMN REFLECTS ONLY THE OPINIONS OF ITS AUTHOR AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE OPINIONS OR POLICIES OF NAED, TED MAGAZINE, OR THE ADVERTISERS ON THE TEDMAG WEB SITE.