Jim MacInnes

#1 – Energy, Money and the Economy

#2 – The Second Half of the Age of Oil

#3 – Energy Return on Energy Invested and Net Energy

#4 – Energy Conservation and the First Law of Thermodynamics

#5 – Energy, Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

#6 – Energy – Prosperity, Security and the Environment

#7 – Is Oil Based Economic Growth Really Sustainable

#8 – Greening the electric power supply 9 21 11 doc

#9 – A Case for Large Wind in Michigan

#2 – The Second Half of the Age of Oil

#3 – Energy Return on Energy Invested and Net Energy

#4 – Energy Conservation and the First Law of Thermodynamics

#5 – Energy, Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

#6 – Energy – Prosperity, Security and the Environment

#7 – Is Oil Based Economic Growth Really Sustainable

#8 – Greening the electric power supply 9 21 11 doc

#9 – A Case for Large Wind in Michigan

Designed for the student who wishes to explore renewable and alternative energy sources, this class uses technology by including Internet research for current, cutting edge information. Alternative Energies for the Future (AEF) also requires a technology based project. The student will propose, design and present a device that my impact the economy of Michigan and the state of our global natural resources. This device will be shared at an energy fair and the student may receive a cash prize for his or her ingenuity. This class incorporates site-based experiences (out of class, field trips) and visits by and with professionals in the field. AEF is a trimester long class which approaches the science systematically. Following a unit of introductory (& review) science, we examine the main areas of energy and test their viability for our market and use today. These include but are not limited to; solar, wind, green building and geothermal energy. We assess personal and school energy use and evaluate ways to improve it. Alternative energies for the future is recommended for students who might be considering a career in energy, the environment, policy or who may be interested in the future of technology in Michigan.

The course content

Textbook:

• Much work will use online resources weekly in the media center (Thursdays,) and readings will be taken from Economicology, by Peter Wege.

Semester Grading is made up of:

• Weekly quizzes
• Online research
• Tests
• Final project

When I looked at energy-101, I was amazed at how sophisticated some of the discussions were and it struck me that having a primer where I looked at WORK and ENERGY and POWER again might just be the ticket.

Well let’s start with work. Physicists define work as a force applied over a distance. If you take an object, say a toolbox and apply a force, 22 pounds of force and you move it two feet, you’ve done 44 foot pounds of work. In metric those units convert to 100 newtons of force, and let’s say we moved it 0.60 of a meter. So we’ve done 60 newton-meters of work. In the metric system that’s referred to as a joule, 1 newton-meter is 1 joule.

Again, work is a force acting over a distance and energy is the capacity to do that work. Or another way to look at it, in a perfect world, the amount of work done is equal to the amount of energy expended. As it turns out work and energy are measured in the same units. And in the metric system that’s a joule.

Energy as it turns out is an inherent property of any object. It’s the stored capacity to do work. When it comes to electrical energy the battery is a great example. There are other forms of energy generally connected with producing heat, like a chord of wood, a ton of coal, maybe a gallon of gasoline or our sun. We’ve got energy and work down now lets see how power relates to them.

Power is the rate at which work is performed so let’s take a look at that toolbox again. If we put a stopwatch to it and we do 60 joules of work in 3 seconds and divide it, we’ve done 20 joules per second that’s the rate at which power has been applied in order to accomplish that work. The basic unit of power, joules per second is a watt and the power that was applied to accomplish that work turns out to be 20 watts.

Watts are pretty common units of measure it’s what we use when we buy a light bulb, we see it on our toasters, or it was that 20 watts that I used to move that toolbox.

Many hands make for light work. Or another way to say that is the power that’s supplied the less work each individual device ends up doing or the quicker the work gets done. Power is also the rate at which stored energy gets converted. For example, you are driving along and you want to get around that slow car in front of you. You push the peddle to the metal. In essence what you are doing is increasing the amount of power that the engine delivers to the wheels and also you are converting the stored energy of the gasoline at a lot faster rate.

So to recap. Work is a force applied across a distance also, that relates to the energy consumed in accomplishing that work and they are measured in the same units. Power is the rate at which that work is produced or the rate at which we expend energy to accomplish it. This interrelationship between WORK and ENERGY and POWER are things once you are aware of it we see all the time in everything we do.

When you look at the discussions in ENERGY-101 you realize that an understanding of the fundamentals of what electricity is all about really is helpful and may even give you some insights as to what it’s all about.

Well the history of electricity starts with discoveries that were made in the 18th and 19th centuries. One form of electricity that was most apparent to everybody was static electricity, which, is an inherent property of nearly every object. The lose electrons, atoms and molecules tend to migrate to the surface and collect. Often times they’ll be found on a point such as your finger or Harry Potters wand
if you will.

We build those charges up when we pull our sweater off and our hair goes sprong. But inherently it was very difficult to capture and put to use that static electricity. Lightning is probably the most spectacular form of static electricity. We probably all have that image of Ben Franklin with his kite standing in a thunderstorm trying to capture that energy. The truth of the matter is he and most of the other scientist at that point were struggling with that. He fortunately developed the lightning rod which got it to ground…saved a lot of barns and church steeples from destruction but it wasn’t until two Italian’s developed the first battery.

A battery is generally dissimilar metals, let’s say copper and zinc that a separated with an electrolyte. The earliest ones used a brine or pickle juice. The ions migrated; they naturally want to migrate from one metal to the other, from the copper to the zinc. When you put them together in a battery then you have two poles at either end. If you interconnect those with a light bulb in between it, you have the first flow or direct current.

Once we have the battery hooked into a circuit we can look at how we measure what’s going on.

Two primary components are voltage and amperage. Voltage is how exited those electrons are that want to get through the circuit. Amperage is a measure of the flow of those electrons past any given point per unit of time.

One way to think about it is the number of electrons that are flowing down the wire. This is analogous to the way they looked at it back in the days when water was a significant source of power, the waterfall is a great example. The height of the waterfall is analogous to the voltage, how excited are the electrons? The amount of water going over the edge is equivalent to the amperage, the number of electrons that go past a point at any given unit of time. The product of those two, the voltage times the amperage, is power and the unit of measure is a watt.

A watt is a very small unit of power and when we use it in our house we generally measure it in thousands of watts or kilowatt. That particular watt or kilowatt, that power, is the same that we get when we perform work at a given rate or when we consume energy at a given rate. There is a connection not only between the electricity but also to what going on in production and consumption of energy and other mechanical items such as your car or even physically what you are doing.

In recap, voltage is the charge and its desire to get to and balance out with an other charge or an other body. So from this battery, what is the likelihood that the electrons want to go from post to post? Amperage, if you put this in a circuit with like a light bulb or a motor, is want is the rate those electrons are moving across there. And the product of those two, how excited they are and how many are moving at a given rate of time is power and again that’s measured in watts.

Typically, when we buy for our house and plug it into the wall we measure in kilowatts which is just a thousand watts. That same production of power, that use of energy is the same units and concepts that we have when we use mechanical equipment such as our lawnmower, drive our cars or even eat food curiously enough.

energy-101.org : Before we even relate it to energy, do people in groups always act in their own best self interest, and why not?

Jim : Well, I think a lot of people don’t act in their own best interest, and they think too short term. They don’t consider the long-term consequences. And they get themselves involved in what are called social traps. Basically a social trap is a negative situation where people and organizations, or even societies, get caught in a direction or a relationship that may later prove to be unpleasant or lethal. And they really see no way to get out or avoid it.

energy-101.org : What’s the basic setup here? Why don’t they? You’ve defined it. What are some of the ways they act otherwise?

Jim : Well, here’s an example: smoking. I mean I think there’s an awful lot of information out there that smoking causes death over time and causes a lot of pain to your body, and it gets expensive and all that. But yet some people still choose to smoke because they enjoy the short term benefits of smoking, and also there’s an addiction factor. But they keep doing it still knowing that in the long run, it could take years off their life.

energy-101.org : Give me an example of, you know, let’s relate this to energy. Let’s try to relate to this whole idea of long term versus short term.

Jim : I think a good example, as it relates to energy, is our country’s addiction to oil. We have, for many years, tried to wean ourselves off of oil and switch to other energy sources, but we’ve been unable to do that. We keep focusing on the short-term lower cost of oil, recognizing to switch to other energy sources is going to be a bit more expensive but better for us in the long run. We’re unwilling to spend the extra money now to make us better off in the future and less dependent on foreign oil.

energy-101.org : You, as a business person, how do you try to avoid this trap of short term versus long term thing?

Jim : Yes, as a business person, I always try to avoid that trap of short-term and long term thinking, short term versus long-term thinking. One way we’ve done that is we recognize that we have finite resources of land here at Crystal Mountain. As we’ve developed that land, we’ve taken the profits from that land development and put it into our operations to help fund an annuity stream of operational profits that will last us over time and be sustainable. When you think about energy and oil, we have finite fossil fuel resources that we ought to be taking the profits of those and investing those in renewable resources so that as we burn through the fossil fuels, we’ll have a sustainable energy supply.

energy-101.org : What is full cost accounting?

Jim : Full cost accounting is really a total accounting, much more than the actual outlays that one might make. It’s the hidden cost. It would be the externalities. It could be overhead and indirect costs. It could be past and future costs. And really what I would call a life cycle cost of a project or a product.

energy-101.org : Is my electric bill an accurate reflection of the cost of energy?

Jim : Well, all the costs of electricity are not really included in the electric bill because there are a lot of social costs, health costs, lost work-day costs. We have costs relating to climate change, which can be increased insurance costs or damage to property costs. And then you have the costs of all the subsidies for fossil fuels that power a lot of our energy production. So those costs are really spread throughout society through our taxes. So you don’t see those costs in our day-to-day electric bill.

energy-101.org : Tell me a little bit more about this idea of not accounting for the idea of carbon in the transaction.

Jim : Well, as I think most people know, when you burn carbon, you put that carbon into the atmosphere and into the carbon cycle, and it stays there for hundreds of years. So that actually helps to make global climate change even worse. The result of that is that the atmosphere contains a lot more energy, a lot more heat, and the heat causes a lot more volatility in the climate. For example, you’ll have more snow events and heavy rain and severe weather events, which can cause a lot of damage to buildings and that sort of thing. So the insurance industry is watching this very closely, because they’re the ones that have to pay for damage due to weather. They’re going to have to actually increase their rates over time to be able to pay for these damages.

The other problem with climate change and warming the atmosphere is it’s causing the glaciers to melt and raising the level of the water of the ocean. Over time that’s going to cause a lot of problems because we have a lot of buildings and commercial structures and residential structures on the coasts, and those are going to become unusable basically. So there’s going to be a tremendous loss, economic loss there.

So really climate change has several severe economic penalties that we’ll all be paying.

energy-101.org : What’s a subsidy, and how are they used for the energy industry?

Jim : The fossil fuel industry is very heavily subsidized as identified by the International Energy Agency. And this is a result of tax breaks that the fossil fuel industry gets for drilling for oil or for natural gas, exploration, taking coal out of the ground. And really those subsidies are funded by all of us as tax payers.

energy-101.org : Can you give me a really brief example of an externality that affects you right here where you live?

Jim : Well, I live in rural Northern Michigan where we don’t have a lot of industry. And I can tell you what happens in Gary, Indiana or Chicago, Illinois impacts the health of our people living in this community. According to the EPA, Benzie County is a non-attainment area for ozone. And that’s caused by nitrous oxide and volatile organic chemicals being at the ground level. Ozone is a very good thing to have in the atmosphere. It’s not good to have it ground level. So when you’re bicycling or running or swimming, you can feel the smog in your lungs; you can feel it in your eyes. Obviously those kinds of things, particularly for people that might not be as healthy, they can affect their health and cause them to have to go to the hospital and deal with asthma and problems. So that’s an example or an externality. An externality is really a spill-over cost or benefit that’s not really included in the price of something. It would be incurred by someone who is really not involved by the transaction of something. Like for example, if you were to buy electricity, it would be another person who would be impacted, who is maybe not involved in the electricity transaction. It could be a positive externality or a negative externality.

I think a good example of a positive externality might be if you lived next door to someone, and they fix up their house, and they create gardens in their yard, and you’re the next door neighbor. They create a beautiful place, and it positively affects the neighborhood. So you’re the next door person, and that could affect the value of your property.

But the externalities that we really need to focus on in terms of energy would be the negative externalities. An idea of the negative externalities could be, for example, the health costs that are incurred by burning coal. Actually from a coal plant, there are a lot of externalities and impacts. They could include hospital admissions. They could include lost work days, heart attacks, that sort of thing. And actually there’s a study called the Toll from Coal, which identifies that existing coal plants have caused probably about 100 billion dollars a year in externalities. And these would be, for example, 20,400 heart attacks, 1.6 million lost work days each year, 9,700 hospital admissions. Of course you could put a value on each of those. I was reading a study recently where they tested 265 streams in the US. They tested the fish in the stream for mercury, and 100% of the fish tested showed that they had mercury, 66% of which were over the EPA limits. And this would be caused primarily from the burning of coal and the mercury that gets into the streams and lakes of our country.

energy-101.org : Why don’t we have the coal plant pay for all of these costs? We charge people… We’re paying for the electricity, and they’re running the coal plant. Why doesn’t the coal plant pay for all these things?

Jim : Well, the way that our pricing mechanism is set up, the price of these externalities is really not included in the cost of electricity. And I think a lot of people don’t want to see their costs, their direct costs go up, because those are paid directly by the energy user. Where these other costs are more socialized, and they’re paid by all of us. They’re kind of hidden costs.