Can water teach us about power?

This is question that has been on my mind recently – put to the forefront by the current water situation in the city I live – Brisbane, Australia.  Water has become something of a crisis issue, it’s always in the headlines, and people are paying attention.  We are now amongst Australia’s lowest users of water, thanks to serious advertising, incentives to reduce consumption and peoples understanding that it is a real issue.

To tackle the problem of residential water the government has begun work on desalination and water recycling projects, and focused heavily on consumption – the current target for each resident of the city being 140 litres per day (now shifted to 170 due to savings made).  Currently the public have met the target.  Furthermore the heavy investment in water saving, recycling and desalination currently underway looks like it will give Australia world’s best practice and a competitive advantage in these technologies.

So this leads to the initial premise – to me it’s almost blindingly obvious.  Changing our water use did not ruin the country, if fact some of the practices garnered through our experience may lead to new opportunities, wouldn’t this same philosophy carry for our power industry?  With enough motivation the public could easily reduce their consumption dramatically – just as we have with water.  This would create a suitable environment for the gradual replacement of fossil fuel power with renewables.  Government incentives & projects focused on renewable could help Australia become a world leader in “clean power”.  It has driven new jobs ranging from large joint venture projects like the Gold Coast Desalination plant to household water tanks and grey water systems.

The water situation has almost cut a template for how we can tackle these problems, and achieve a lot with a little public education and awareness.  Awareness has to be complemented by government legislation and in the case of water – fines and monitoring have proved effective in changing behavior and attitudes.

With a little forward thinking the same approach could work now to help reduce our demand on power resources and help an effective and positive change to future power alternatives.

The Right Price for Public Transport

I recently read an article* discussing the costs of public transport and encouraging the public to use buses and trains more often. They suggested making public transport free – and had a 17 reasons why it should be so [note this is focusing on BC, Canada, however the points could be easily translated to any developed city around the world.]

Fare-free transit brings many benefits, some of which include:
1. A barrier-free transportation option to every member of the community (no more worries about exact change, expiring transfers, or embarrassment about how to pay)
2. Eliminating a “toll” from a mode of transportation that we as a society want to be used (transit is often the only way of getting around that charges a toll)
3. Reducing the inequity between the subsidies given to private motorized vehicle users and public transport users
4. Reducing, and in some cases eliminating, the need for private motorized vehicle parking
5. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, other air pollutants, noise pollution (especially with electric trolleys), and run-off of toxic chemicals into fresh water supplies and ocean environments
6. Reducing overall consumption of oil and gasoline
7. Eliminating the perceived need to spend billions on roads and highways (now up to $7 billion for the proposed Gateway Project in Vancouver)
8. Eliminating the perceived need to spend billions on bigger car-carrying ferries ($2.5 billion for BC Ferries’ new super-sized boats and ramps)
9. Contributing significantly to the local economy by keeping our money in our communities
10. Reducing litter (in Vancouver, the newer transfers/receipts have overtaken fast food packaging for most common garbage found on our streets)
11. Saving trees by eliminating the need to print transfers and tickets
12. Allowing all bus doors to be used to load passengers, making service faster and more efficient
13. Allowing operators (drivers) to focus on driving safely
14. Giving operators more time to answer questions
15. Providing operators a safer work environment since fare disputes are eliminated
16. Eliminating fare evasion and the criminalization of transit-using citizens
17. Fostering more public pride in shared, community resources.

The idea is interesting, and no doubt has been suggested in the past. With climate change upon us they say that now, more than ever, is the time to make public transport free. To me it’s missed the point – the issue of emissions is well understood, so yes encourage patronage, stop subsidising car use and services for cars such as free inner city parking and ongoing increase to road infrastructure, but I feel it needs to be thought out a little more broadly.I’m a public transport user, and as a non car owner it is my sole mode of transport week to week and personally I disagree with free public transport and with several points made.

As a user of public transport the cost isn’t the problem, it’s the service. People want their transportation to be rapid, reliable, clean, safe and at a regularity such that time spent waiting for the next service isn’t excessive – eliminating the ticket price addresses NONE of these issues. You’ll find that most often people on public transport are often of low income, the youth & elderly – those that cannot afford or are unable to use a car, so it’s the car users with money we need to convert. Making it dirt cheap or free will not achieve this.

Commuter Apartments

I used to work in the UK in Redhill, a town just south of London and caught the train to work most days. Every day I used to walk through this big carpark on the way to the office and one day a colleague suggested that turning that space into living area could replace each of the cars with a resident who would use the station instead.

So I decided to do some calculations and see if it would work!

According to National Rail, the station operating company, the carpark (map) has 254 car parking spaces. So, assuming that each car has one commuter, can we create enough accomodation on site for 254 people?

I used Google Earth to mock up some 4 storey (12 metre tall) apartment blocks to fit on-site. I’m no architect, but I tried to create large south facing areas, while keeping the buildings narrow enough to allow double aspect (windows on two sides) apartments. Here is what I came up with:

Proposed Redhill Station Apartments

I then used GEPath to measure the land area covered by the buildings

Station Apartment Areas.

In keeping with the practice suggested by J. Crawford I’ve assumed mixed use development (ground floor is for commercial space, and the other floors for residential), and that 20% of all floor space is overhead space (corridors, stairs etc). This gives:

Shop Area: 3074 m2

Residential Area: 9223 m2

This is enough for 92 apartments, with each apartment covering 100 m2 (a generous 2 bed or a small 3 bed apartment). I then used Ireland’s DEAP Building Energy Rating worksheet (available here) to estimate occupancy, graphed for ease of reading:

In our case 2.94 people would fit in a 100 m2 apartment (I would love to see 2.94 people all together!), giving a grand housing total of 270 people.

So, building apartments on the Redhill train station carpark could provide housing for 270 residents AND over 3000 m2 of ground floor commercial space! I think this would be more useful than 254 carpark spaces. The train station has as many customers as it did before, they just live on the doorstep instead of driving from a near town.

Of course there is the problem of where existing customers would park. To those people, I would strongly urge you to move into one of these great new apartments, they’re five minutes walk from the shops and a one minute walk to a train station convenient for London and Brighton!

Try it for yourself in your area and post your results!

Biofuels Corporation goes belly up

The management of Biofuels Corporation have recommended the company be restructured to avoid going into insolvency.

It is currently list on the UK’s AIM stockmarket but should be delisted by 2 August. Until then you can check out the price on the stockmarket which the last time I checked, was 5.54 pence/share (AIM BFC listing). At one stage, they had reached peaks of around 300 p/share.

This is significant, being a major failure of a biofuels company. Biofuels Corp had recently completed building its first 250,000 million tonne/year biodiesel plant, which makes biodiesel from vegetable oil near Middlesbrough in the UK.

Biofuels Corp in their preliminary results, posted a loss of £32.0 million in the year to 31 March 2007. This includes a loss of £54.6 million to get £51.0 million in sales so it seems there have been some pretty rough deals made along the way. They have a total debt of £97.1 million, which has been taken by Barclay’s Bank, who will own 94% of the company.

Biofuels Corp are blaming their troubles on the high price of vegetables oils combined with the low price of biodiesel. They attribute the low price of biodiesel to cheap imports from the USA, which benefits from production subsidies and a high $/£ exchange rate.

Frankly, I’m wiping my brow because I bought shares in these guys in 2004 at 70p a share and sold shortly afterwards, having lost faith in the potential for conventional biofuels to cost effectively reduce carbon emissions. Lucky me, I’m sure there are plenty of others who may not have been as fortunate!

It just goes to show that government support doesn’t guarantee a technology will make it!

Things We Hate

Well hate is a strong word but here’s a list of things that are hard to justify when you’re trying to cost effectively reduce your carbon footprint. And it’s a great way to follow up ‘Things We Love‘

Domestic wind turbines – They sound great in concept but due to city location, obstacles like buildings and trees and the low turbine tower heights the wind speed they encounter is low (around 2 m/s). This matters because the power from a wind turbine varies with the 3rd power of wind (halving wind speed reduces the energy out by 8 times!), these are unlikely to live up to expectations. Buying green electricity from the grid is easier than shelling out for a turbine, and you’ll probably have enough dosh left over to buy some for your neighbour too!

Domestic wind turbines: token gesture?

Solar PV panels – At current costs, solar photovoltaic (PV) panels which make electricity from the sun take around 60 years to pay back. Even with a government subsidy, payback times go into the decades. And who knows where you’ll be living then!

Driving the car to shops and work – If you live in a city (as 80% of Australians do) then you should not need a car to do the things you do every day. The greatest car distances are clocked up in commuting and trips to the shops. Car commuting alone, accounts for 36 151 million km driven to and from work in Australia, 25% of all passenger vehicle journeys in 2002.

The best way to give your car the old heave ho is to live within cycling or walking distance from your work, or within 5 minutes walk of a train or bus stop that will get you there. Of course there are those chores where only the car will do (like going to the garden store) but replacing your car for trips to work and shops will have cut the biggest chunk of your driving out!

Disposable food containers & packaging ­– Apparently we spend a sixth of our food budget on food packaging. Packaging helps to make products more attractive to us, but they also create a new waste stream. If your local supermarket has them, go for the loose vegetables, not the pre-packaged stuff. If your local supermarket doesn’t have them, then please ask why!

Strip Shopping/Shopping Centres – Sure they have all the shops in the world, but they probably aren’t anywhere near you, right? Shopping centres are based to make you come to them, usually by car and tend to be over cooled, over heated, over lit, and well, a bit samey.

Humungous Homes – We’re talking about houses that take over 300 m² (3200 ft²), the value of the space drops off as they get larger, but you still have to heat and cool all those empty rooms! Compact housing can offer comfort along with manageable, affordable living.

Excess printing in the office – Considering our paperless offices, we sure use a lot of paper! Here are a few tips to reduce our paper impacts on society.

1. Reduce the number of prints, by marking up corrections in your word processor or on PDFs, achive your files to hard drive (makes them easier to search for as well). Don’t print out PDF catalogues unless you absolutely have to!

2. If you have to, duplex (double sided) printing will halve your paper output instantly! Most office printers will be able to do this as but you’ll need to change your printer driver settings.

3. Print to recycled paper for those copies that don’t leave the office. You can do this by filling the main tray (Tray 1?) with recycled paper. Fill the other trays with the white and letterhead paper to easily print the special outside release copies.

4. Recycle your waste paper, by getting your company involved in a closed loop recycling system. This means the paper that you make, comes back to you. Around London, BioRegional have a scheme called ‘Local Paper for London’.

The environment and the role of the designer.

My standpoint on environmentalism largely comes from two angles – government policy and the day to day lifestyle of individuals.  I happen to work in the design field often dealing with large structures with large quantities of material, energy and power.  I’ve often thought about minimizing the impact, but up till now never quantified it.

At the moment I’m simply looking at material use, not taking into account manufacturing processes or any other factors other than the embodied energy – the energy used to make the material.

Here’s a small sample

Material	MJ/kg
Aluminium	200
Steel	32
Concrete	1

So – what does this mean? As a guide, 1kg of coal will make 7MJ of energy. If you can reduce the steel in a structure by 1000kg of steel – you’ve just saved 4500kg of coal, around 8,400kg of CO2. Given that the average Australian will generate, by way of household electricity, driving and flying, some 4~8 tonnes of CO2 a year – as a designer you can make a significant difference to the total impact, much more than you’ll ever do at home.

Things We Love

So… we’ve been sitting about thinking about technologies that we like and hate and for fear of being thought stingy we thought we’d share them with you!

Things We Love

Herb gardens - Perfect for the meals you cook everyday. Especially useful for those exotic asian spices that you can’t find in your local supermarket! Learn how to grow your most common herbs and spices here.

Worm farm composters - Apart from helping to keep your bin smelling fresh and giving you compost for the garden, worm farms are a great way to teach kids (of all ages) about natural cycles. Just remember you can’t put lemons, onions and meat into them! These are just some of the products in the field, but I’ll link to the Can-O-Worms because that’s what I had and it survived my attempts to kill it. Other non-worm composters can deal with meat like the Little Pig Jora Composter of which I’ve heard good things.

Roof gardens - give you a wonderful private outdoor space, a place to put your herb garden and adds 10% to the value of your flat and apartment.

Insulation ­­- There are houses now that are so well insulated that they get all their heating needs from the people and equipment that live inside! This movement is generally known as PassiveHaus.

Solar Hot Water - Simple, effective and appropriate. Paybacks are around 7 years. Two types, evacuated tubes and flat panels. Evacuated tubes may be more appropriate for smaller areas (< 20 m²) but I think flat panels look nicer. But hot water avoided is cheaper and better than getting renewable hot water so insulate your hot water tank, and install low flow taps and showers first! And while you’re at it, chuck a hippo in the loo.

Bicycles - Truly a blend of human and machine. Far from being toys, those things we ride up and down boulevards, the bicycle can set you free. Combine them with waterproof panniers to add carrying capacity. Other attachments like the Xtracycle can turn that old mountain bike in the back shed into a truly utilitarian beast, suitable for carrying surfboards (and freeloading friends).

Frame Locks - Forget fumbling with bike lock cables, a frame lock lives with your bike and is perfect for that quick nip into the bakery. If you’re looking to leave your baby a bit longer then combine it with a cable or similar lock.

For a utility bike, you don’t want to be messing around with it, so guys, consider getting a bike with a step through frame (you will save ‘the boys’, and your hip joints will love you), hub gears last for ever on a drop of oil and mean you won’t have to worry about your chain jumping off. Fitting a dynamo hub means you’ll never have to worry about batteries for your lights.

And if you are worried about dying in a car accident, don’t! Bicycling is not risk free but the health benefits you get from cycling are greater than the risks of an accident. However, the way you ride can help make it safer. Have a look at this book for yourself and your kids, it clearly shows how to ride in most situations and explains why.

Efficient Gas Boilers - Condensing gas boilers are around 92% efficient and replacing this is a great way to reduce your energy bills. They can take around 7 years or more to pay themselves off though, so save it for a big renovation, and after you’re insulated to the hilt.

Wow, this stuff is tiring! I’ll save all the hate for tomorrow (Edit: Done! Things We Hate)

What generation will finally take responsibility for our way of life?

This was a thought that came to mind from a discussion regarding the way we live and the potential changes required to make our existence sustainable. The crux of the mater is – first world nations need to start using less of everything. If we plan to change to renewable energy sources and demand less from our natural resources, it’s a necessity. I was questioned as to how a life in built up urban environs – sans back yard, limited use of a car for daily needs was “good for our kids”. Can we justify this life when this very existence levies a tax on infants and generations not yet born? The tax being the wholesale destruction of the biosphere and reckless burning of foils fuels, how will the quality of life be when we’ve had our fill of oil and coal? Our trivial luxuries at the expense of clean air, stable seasons and the beautiful diverse flora and fauna we can witness now.

I remember, as a child, hearing about how reckless and naive the previous generations had been with pesticides and chemicals – ruining the world, we would be the ones to fix it. Sadly it seems nothing has changed, we’ve grown into the generation that doesn’t know what to do, or when push comes to shove are happy to continue with the status quo. All the while – things get worse.

Despite the talk and green wash thrown about today, all indicators of fossil fuels consumption, globally, point up. Even if you feel that the effect of one has little consequence, decouple yourself from the glut of power westerners consume, and at the very least you will act as a role model to future generations.

The Australian dream

Vast quantities of CO2 go up in smoke as Australians hop in their car, usually with no one in the passenger seat, each morning as they set off for work. This habit, way of life, addiction – call it what you will has drastically steered the shape of our country since the inception of the common automobile.

One of outcomes of this auto-based lifestyle is an extremely low population density – sprawling cities.  Bench-marked against London our biggest city, Sydney, has a 10th of the population density – we use 10 times more land for every person living there.  Our other capitals are much the same.  People dream of a house to themselves and a backyard, which in most capital cities, we can no longer keep green.  In this struggle for our own patch we’ve really lost a lot.  Slow modes of transport, walking and cycling, are an anomaly in our daily lives – public transport is, by nature of the urban design, expensive and inefficient.  Neighborhood shopping is limited to convenience stores and liquor outlets, shops a clumped in large centers with as much floor space devoted to parking as the shops themselves. We have ended up with a society, an expectation, that the car is needed for the most basic daily activities.

Figures show that sprawling cities requiring higher speed modes of transport – the car, are both costly and the most resource intensive.  And inevitably they slow with congestion requiring further road infrastructure, an ongoing process, a process that consumes green space and valuable resources. To achieve sensible densities for walkable communities and effective public transport we needn’t move to skyscraper (+10 level) models of living. Densities of 40 people/acre ~ around 10×10 metres each, allows for slow and public transport systems to function effectively. Mixed use (commercial, retail & residential) layouts at this density make day to day needs easy to find and leaves more space for natual habitat.

The picture of medium density living (3-4 story developments) conjures up images of crime and poverty – this is based on a false reality. Common green space and slow modes of transport, increase the sense of community as you interact with it in a much more personal and human level. It’s better for ones health, less stressful, costs less, and breaks you from the hectic pace which has become life as we know it.  Try it – you might enjoy the change.

Will the day come “when plundering is not allowed”?

Ray Anderson on Sustainablity – an exerpt from “The Corporation”

Ray Anderson is founder and chairman of Interface, Inc, the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet for commercial and residential applications. He has taken a progressive stance on industrial ecology and sustainability.  Since 1995, he has reduced Interface’s waste by a third, and aims to make the company sustainable by 2020.