Energy Redoubts/Anchor Institutions

Terraformer · 2023-12-06 04:42:49

In the green energy transition (won't happen) thread, Calliban has talked about creating buildings where core energy services -- cooking, heating, washing -- can be provided even if the countries infrastructure is failing/too expensive to run.

But a town can be provided with a heated sitting room, that also functions as a library, with a cafe. This would be attached to an interseasonal heat store. In winter, most people would spend a lot of time here, as most houses will not be heated. The town cook house would be served by a large underground freezer, with a heat pump directly powered by a mechanical wind turbine. Clothes washing would be served by a laundrette, which is built close to the town heat store and is provided with mechanical power from the wind.

Building an interseasonal heat store with some buildings clustered around it is a far more modest project. It can be done without state level resources. Which is why I propose it here. This is a fall back plan of sorts. How to keep life tolerable if the government is as useless as I think it is.

"Anchor institutions" are large bodies that by their nature are tied to their area and wield considerable resources. Unfortunately in a British context the term has been taken over by the NHS, with some mention of local councils. But universities and churches also count, and are likely to be significantly more functional and easier to persuade since they're not government bodies. Can we flip these and persuade them to invest in interseasonal heating, working towards the creation of redoubts that can continue to provide services without relying on the grid? Which other institutions would be possible targets in this respect -- parish councils?

Longer term I'd of course like to extend district heating out from their heat stores, but we have to start somewhere....

tahanson43206 · 2023-12-06 07:14:36

For Terraformer re new topic ....

Best wishes for success.

This topic lends itself to immediate action.

It provides an opportunity for forum members and readers alike to visit with leaders of anchor institutions to talk to them about becoming energy independent.

There are multiple ways this might be done, but all of them will require investment by the supporters of the institution.

The forum member or reader who takes this on will be serving as a sales person, with a side service as a reporter of results back to the forum.

Calliban has provided some suggestions for how energy independence might be achieved, and there are other ideas recorded in the forum archives.

This topic has the potential to become an inspiration to members, to "Act Locally" while "Thinking Globally".

Update: I'd like to offer a target capability for this topic: 1 megawatt of power for 20 years

All alternative systems will require investment. The initial investment will be massive, regardless of the technology chosen.

The maintenance costs will vary depending upon the technology, as Calliban has shown in numerous posts.

Most power producing systems will produce waste of some kind, so that must be accounted for.

All power producing systems have risks, but the risks vary widely. These must be accounted for.

The situation is the same on Mars as it is on Earth, with the disadvantage for Mars of distance from the Sun and distance from Earth.

Residents of Mars ** must ** have reliable 24*7 power, and lots of it.

Residents of Earth might as well aim for the same.

(th)

Calliban · 2023-12-06 16:45:12

Terraformer, well done for starting this discussion. I think so far as district heating is concerned, there is an overall better chance of success if it can be carried out incrementally, on a street by street basis. It will undoubtedly take many decades to construct a system covering an entire town or city, even in the densely populated urban areas of the UK.

A centralised seasonal heat store, with heat consuming functions clustered around it, is an easier proposition from a capital cost viewpoint. If a country gets to the point where gas supply is no longer sufficient to rely upon for heating and electricity supply is intermittent, a centralised heat store gives the community something to fall back on. I will give this more thought over the next couple of days.

Terraformer · 2023-12-07 03:45:38

Just as malls have anchor tenants, I'm imagining small district (neighbourhood) heating networks being built out from these redoubts over time, with the institution serving as the primary customers/provider that gets the initial system built. Which would perhaps mean overbuilding them, but if it's designed to incrementally add solar heating in summer, a regular ground source heat pump system may be overbuilt if we start using it for heat storage.

tahanson43206 · 2023-12-07 07:26:38

For Terraformer re #4

Is there a candidate institution near you whose leaders might be willing to consider your vision?

What is happening with the government you contacted about a similar concept earlier this Earth year?

Transformative change such as you are advocating does NOT originate with leaders of established institutions. Their charter and mission is to try to maintain what exists. They are NOT looking for ways to impose new responsibilities on themselves, or to find ways to disturb the status quo.

The only way massive change is likely is if external forces drive change, or if single voices such as yours, arise within the population, and persistently advance new ideas. External forces are at work, so there may be an opportunity to shape the response.

(th)

Calliban · 2023-12-07 17:26:50

We should start by defining the scope of what we intend to develop. European countries are almost entirely dependant on fossil fuel imports to meet their energy needs. As globalisation breaks down, access to coal, oil and gas becomes increasingly uncertain. Without those inputs, electricity supply will also falter. Could we end up in a situation where houses in the UK and other European countries, no longer have gas for heating or reliable electric power?

If so, having a community asset, where people can wash their clothes, get hot food, have a bather or showever and find a warm place to sit, could be extremely valuable. Some thoughts on how to achieve that:

1) Build a thickly insulated, interseasonal hot water storage tank. This would have solar heat panels on top of it, allowing summer heat to be stored until needed for heating. The water in the tank would also preheat water entering the wash water hot tank.

2) Warm water from the interseasonal store would flow into the hot tank. The hot tank would contain banks of heating elements. These would heat water to temperatures up to 80°C, prior to its use for washwater. The community centre will be equipped with a wind turbine. When power output exceeds demand, switches are activated and the water in the hot tank absorbs excess electricity through heating elements.

3) Cooking equipment will be designed to absorb exess electricity as heat.

More later.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-12-07 17:48:33)

Calliban · 2023-12-10 16:16:56

If we needed to cook for a whole town of a thousand or more people, probably the easiest way of doing that is using roasting pits. For this we need a place where the water table is a long way down. We excavate down to a depth of 1m, and further sink shafts about 1m wide and 2m deep beneath the excavated floor. We line the pits with brick and build the brick 1m above the excavated floor level. In some of these pits, we put 55-gallon drums filled with water, along with immersion heaters and thermostats. We fill the excavated floor with sand to a depth of 1m.

Meats, vegetable and stews, are cooked within the pits in stainless steel barrels that we lower into them.

We would need some sort of insulating cover that plugs the pit whilst the food is cooking, which may take at least 1 day. The food barrel could be preheated to 80°C by putting hot stones into it.

Dry sand has a thermal conductivity of 0.15 - 0.25W/m.K. So a layer 1m thick, will leak about 20W/m2. A 100 litre drum has sufficient volume to cook an evening meal for 100 people. Cooking this food would require 10kWh of heat over 24 hours, which amounts to 0.1kWh per person per day. But what makes this most useful is that the barrels, soil and sand, will store huge amounts of heat which they will leak only slowly. The pit cooker would remain hot enough to continue operating even if a week or more had passed since the immersion heater had activated. So this cokkihg method can be powered using a highly intermittent electricity source, such as excess wind power. The cooker can function as a kind of dump load for a wind powered electricity source.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-12-10 16:48:24)

kbd512 · 2023-12-10 18:31:39

Calliban,

Would using pressure cookers allow the food to cook appreciably faster, so that it didn't need to be prepared a day in advance?

Calliban · 2023-12-11 03:24:39

kbd512 wrote:

Calliban,
Would using pressure cookers allow the food to cook appreciably faster, so that it didn't need to be prepared a day in advance?

Undoutedly. Looking at the Sous Vide cooking guide, the very long cooking times only seem to be required if cooking at very low temperatures.
https://www.greatbritishchefs.com/featu … imes-guide

Cooking meat at temperatures as low as 55°C seems a bit dicey to me. Temperature needs to rise to 78°C to reliably kill hardy bacteria. Fibrous vegetables do not soften properly if cooked at temperatures much lower than 85°C. A temperature of 90°C reliably cooks everything quite quickly. It is only if temperature drops beneath this that we would have to worry about cooking things much more slowly. I think this explains why most people don't bother with low temperature cooking. But this is something that would work with intermittent energy. If we have a couple of weeks without wind energy and pit temperature drops, we adjust cooking times upward.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-12-11 04:01:30)

Calliban · 2023-12-11 04:29:11

The next question is, can we run this cooker without electricity? As things stand, it isn't difficult to source componants like immersion heaters. And we can buy electricity generating wind turbines as commercial products. What if that ceases to be the case? How do we then provide the modest amounts of thermal energy needed to run our pit cooker?

The obvious solution would be to use a stove burning biomass of some kind. But is there an option that avoids having to burn stuff? In summer, we could also use concentrated solar heat. But in northern European countries, that will only be a workable solution for one third of the year. If we dug the pits deep enough, we coukd store concentrated summer heat, year round. But that involves a lot of digging and a long thermal soak time to build up the required temperature gradient.

We could use wind power to provide non-electric heating to the pit cooker. We would do this by using wind power to drive a piston compressor, compressing a volume of air to several bars of pressure. If that is done without intercooling, the air charge will heat to over 100°C. We then run it through pipes in the pit cooker, before cooling it in a water jacket. The warm water is then used to heat the restaurant. This affords us with an additional opportunity. When compressed air that is cooled to ambient temperature expands, the expansion energy is created by converting internal energy into kinetic energy. This produces a cooling effect. We can use the resultant cold air to refrigerate a root cellar, which would store large volumes of food for months or years.

Below is an online calculator that can be used to quantify the effect. Air that expands from 5bar(a) to 1bar(a) from a starting temperature of 20°C, will finish at -90°C. The dirt walls of the root cellar would have enough heat capacity to keep things frozen, even if weeks go by without any wind power.
https://tribology-abc.com/abc/thermodynamics.htm

Last edited by Calliban (2023-12-11 04:37:57)

Terraformer · 2023-12-12 06:28:58

The technological and resource feasability of this does not appear to be in doubt.

My question is, *who* has the resources to implement something like this, *and* the will to do it? The first place to look is probably the Church (of England). Well established, some parishes and churches are quite wealthy, a long history of doing things like feeding the poor. In certain areas, like the provision of washing facilities, parish councils might be a viable target as well.

I'm keen to build out universal basic infrastructure. Showers, toilets, laundrettes, cafeterias, wifi, cyclepaths. Cheap, but they provide the major part of our quality of life being so high. My hope for the world.

tahanson43206 · 2023-12-12 07:21:06

For Terraformer re topic ....

This post will attempt to pick up on the concept of churches as anchor institutions ...

Religions (appear to) depend upon a shared myth structure (a) and (b) a mutually reinforcing friendship system.

I asked Google if the Church of England is growing or declining, and found the question has been studied in some depth.

I'll post a link to one such study shortly. It is on a different computer.

What the study shows is that a church depends upon conversions and reproduction to maintain itself.

The concept I'd like to offer to you in support of your topic, is that a mission of service to the population (as you have been describing) might be a 21st Century alternative to the myth systems that have been carrying the load for hundreds of years.

If my theory is right, a church that is on the cusp of transition from growth to decline might still have enough energy to be willing to consider your ideas for a new mission.

You might be able to transform yourself into a sales person for this new mission.

Saint Terraformer! Has a nice ring!

Here is a link to an in-depth study:
https://anglican.ink/2022/05/21/growth- … -churches/

(th)

tahanson43206 · 2023-12-12 07:41:13

For Terraformer re topic ...

The paper at the link below attempts to provide an overview of the growth/decline patterns for a selection of Christian churches in England.

It makes the point that evangelical churches appear to be growing, especially in the United States, where liberal ones are declining.

The aging of the population is factor that drives the need for effort to sustain the group. However, enthusiasm is a major factor as well.

A mission of service has sustained some Christian groups for centuries. Something like that might happen again.

Church growth decline
https://anglican.ink/2022/05/21/growth- … -churches/

Sadly, the immediate future looks bleak for the Church in Wales, Church of Scotland, Episcopalians, Methodists, and older Welsh nonconformists. They need to seriously ask themselves how they have gotten themselves into a situation where extinction is less than 30 years away. What is wrong with their beliefs and practices that are stopping them from making converts? A quick about-turn is needed.
Growth & Decline by Churchmanship
I could provide some pointers to the causes of decline by revisiting the growth & loss rates in figure 1. These rates suggested that decline and extinction are more likely in the older denominations. Maybe they are coming to the end of a lifecycle. But why?
In figure 6, I give the same change rates indicating the churchmanship of the denominations. Specifically, I am thinking of the balance of congregations with evangelical beliefs and those who are liberal[14]. All the evangelical denominations are growing, except for the Brethren. By contrast, all the mixed denominations are declining, with the liberal ones declining the most. Is this because evangelical beliefs on judgement, salvation and Jesus as the only way drive their members to seek converts? Do liberal Christians have insufficient theological reasons to want to spread their faith?

(th)

Calliban · 2023-12-12 10:51:55

A lot of towns in the UK, already have at least some of these facilities. Every town with a Wetherspoons, has a community pub that is heated, has seating and has a kitchen capable of producing a lot of food in bulk. A town with a swimming bath, has showers that everyone can use for a modest fee. Most towns has laundrettes until not so long ago. Some still do. What we are propising here is: (1) Scaling up these facilities, such that they have sufficient capacity to serve most of the population on a semi-continuous level; (2) Redesigning these facilities to allow them to function independently from the grid, using stored heat, direct mechanical power and small amounts of electric power harvested from local renewable energy sources.

Storing energy, in large quantities and for long periods of time, is difficult and there are few technologies available that can do it cost effectively. One of the few methods available is thermal energy storage in low cost, bulk materials, like water, sand and stone. But for this to work effectively, the systems need to be scaled up. Heat storage within a material scales with volume, whereas heat loss scales with surface area. Storing heat interseasonally for a single house would require infeasible volumes of thermal insulation. But storing a few months of washwater for an entire town is technically easier, because a huge tank requires less insulation per unit volume and has less surface area per unit volume.

Likewise, a town laundry can be served by a wind turbine, capturing mechanical energy and driving washing machines using pressurised water. A larger wind turbine is more efficient, because wind speed increases with height. A small house sized machine would not be able to get above the boundary layer and would deliver poor energy return. The cost of the larger machine can also be spread across a large number of users. Hence thelarger machine benefits from both superior net energy return and economy of scale.

The implications are that for renewable energy to provide a satisfactory living standard, many functions that are presently carried out at household level, must be collectivised to the town level. We should look to avoid unnecessary complexity. It is possible for any town with builders, wood workers and plumbers, to build a mechanical wind turbine that generates hydraulic power for direct use in purely mechanical devices. This is technology that could have been built in Victorian times and probably even in Roman times.

On the subject of who might fund the development and running of such facilities. In my old town, a community group set up by the local rotary club collected donations from the public in the town for several years. When they had enough, they built the local swimming baths. The day to day running and maintenance is financed by the fees that people pay to use the facility. A similar arrangement would work for building bath houses, laundries, cook houses, etc. It would obviously work best if these facilities could be built reasonably central to each town, so that anyone needing to can walk there.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-12-12 11:11:27)

Calliban · 2023-12-12 11:19:17

For small towns and villages, a bath house wouldn't be much more than the name suggests. You would pay a few pounds and get a small bathroom for a couple of hours and have a bath with hot water. For larger towns, where more resources can be concentrated, the bath house would be a place more akin to Roman baths. You would go there and wash, before entering the public pool and enjoying facilities like a sauna, steam room, gym and massage.

Most towns already have something like this. The difference is we would be building facilities that make use of stored thermal energy and would be designed for minimal reliance on electricity. One of the features of the past century is that reliable electricity and abundant fossil fuels and the wealth they brought with them, have allowed most people to concentrate resources into private home facilities, allowing public spaces to dwindle. In a world where most energy inputs are renewable and intermittent, that will be turned on its head. Home will be a place where you sleep. Far more of your life will be invested in public places. Life will become more social. So whilst home life becomes less luxurious, public infrastructure will get better. The local library could be as luxurious as the old gentlemen clubs of London, because these places will have a more dominant role in people's lives and investment in them will be proportionately greater.

Most green-tech obsessives tend to assume that the future they offer will function in more or less the same way as present day society. Diesel and petrol cars are replaced by electric cars. Kerosene powered planes are replaced by electric and hydrogen versions doing the same thing. Fossil and nuclear powerplants are replaced by wind and solar PV, using the same grid for distribution and very similar end use applications. Everything we have discussed here over the past several years suggests that this vision is fundamentally flawed. Producing baseload electric power using unpredictably intermittent energy, is not practical. The required energy and material investments in energy storage are extreme. Electric cars are another example of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole, trying to use a diffuse and intermittent energy source for an application that is fossil fuel optimised.

Few people are prepared to face up to the fact that switching to a completely different energy source implies an entirely different way of life. It implies different ways of working around intermittent energy. It means using energy when it is available and doing something else when it is not. It implies entirely different transportation modes. Different cultural institutions and a different social contract. Different relationships with your neighbours. A town based around shared community assets is likely to be a place where everyone knows each other. By the same virtue, expect it to be insular and suspicious of outsiders. Transportation will be slower. An electric car that does everything a petrol car can do is an expensive luxury, that only wealthy people can afford. But a bicycle or a small velocar is something most people can afford, regardless of how expensive petrol becomes. We have discussed options for freight that use directly harvested mechanical wind power to push capsules through pipelines, by pumping water down them. These could replace diesel trucks in most places, but would be substantially slower. But inmthe future it may be much easier to transport goods than people. Most towns have the expertise to build mechanical wind mills that can power factories using hydraulics. But storing that power isn't practical on any serious scale. So people will have to work with the weather.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-12-12 12:04:14)

Calliban · 2023-12-13 05:08:06

This is interesting.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windmills-Nort … 1840336633

In the 19th century, there were several windmills around the town where I grew up. Almost all of them are gone now. Some were used for grinding corn, but many were used for milling gun powder.

The traditional windmill is a technology that is poised to return. Modern technology allows us to improve upon the idea by using blades that are better optimised to capture the wind. This will greatly improve the efficiency of the device. The mechanical windmill is well suited to serve a small family run manufacturing business. By their very nature, these devices produce modest mechanical power measured in 10-100kW. Ideal to support mechanical applications. But the variability of the wind requires that the mill operator and users of the power live close by on site, allowing them to respond to changing wind conditions.

tahanson43206 · 2023-12-13 07:17:43

For Calliban re #16...

It is good to see a possible benefit of advances in design of wind energy capture machinery, beyond the delivery of electricity.

I have not seen any projections of increased air flows due to climate change, but certainly the destructive end of the spectrum is documented. The question I am offering for consideration by forum members is: Will climate change increase the flow of air that might be captured by wind energy capture devices?

Also for Calliban .... Someone will own or be responsible for a wind energy capture device. That person will (most likely) want to maximize profit from the machine.

Such a machine could make electricity as is the common practice today, or it could be harnessed directly to drive mechanical processes, as you suggest.

It seems to me electricity can be sold to a wider market, while the mechanical energy would be a more efficient use of the resource, so it might be more profitable.

Also for Calliban ... location of wind energy capture equipment would be a factor in how it is used ... Such equipment located in desolate regions with no human habitation could produce storable chemicals, and these could be collected periodically by slow transports.

Such opportunities exist already, for entrepreneurs with deep pockets and patience.

(th)

Calliban · 2024-01-29 07:48:59

A public wash house in Liverpool in the 1950s.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cxpAVCan4CQ

This sort of innovation needs to restart in a hurry given the hard times ahead.

A very similar arrangement in London, around 1970.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQqEqyrVshQ

In this case, the machines are driven from a belt drive, presumably from a steam engine. Mechanically powered machines couod be wind driven as well. A more modern system would use hydraulics instead of belts and pulleys.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-01-29 09:11:57)

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#1 2023-12-06 04:42:49

Energy Redoubts/Anchor Institutions

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