Earth at Night

A Symbolic Map of Human Brain Dysfunction

The lightest areas represent places where energy is cast into space for no reason. Also, notice the difference between the visible light reflective quality of the Sahara Desert compared to the African Rain Forest and the Amazon Rain Forest.
HUMAN BRAIN--MARVEL OR MONKEY WRENCH

For all that the human brain has done in the particular accident of evolution, it has not been able to yet focus upon all of its own driven activity as a planetary force. The careless use of electricity is one activity demonstrated here showing what a brain does when it derives its motive from cultural identity such as individual permission from the collective to waste electricity.

TRIBAL BRAIN--THE HIDDEN PERSUADER

The city or nation unit as patterned above provides an identity that embeds in the formative areas of the brain coded as pre-conscious drives coming from primitive tribal association. This brain function contrasts with areas that are highly active and are consciously ego driven and are pathetically part of the brain's story of itself as an individualistic and independent agent which is the particular story placed by Western and American culture.

As an indication of how hidden, embedded and emotionally attached early cultural learning usually is, note how many humans name their identity by a religion taught to them as a child. Many highly intelligent people accepting this arbitrary identity as immutable, is an alarming reminder about how such early cultural learning such practicing electricity wasting and its concomitant carbon issues, as unwaveringly normal, when such learning is, in the vane of rational and scientific evidence, the most massively destructive geophysical event to have happened to the planet in millions of years. It is as if a roaring freight train approaches from the side at 100 K/Hr and the self-confident pedestrian stands on the tracks with his unfortunate tunnel vision while gazing intently at the vista beyond.

NEW BRAIN--UNFETTERED DYNAMO

One of the factors acting toward our specie's dominance on this planet is cultural cooperation and learning. Yet, this run-away change mechanism can only be successful in the long term if the same brain is able to know all of its own sublimated learned motives that might happen to be contrary to long term success. The rate of change of intentional primary motive human created environment is faster than the ability of the human brain to synchronize its own awareness of its other self-sourced motives about the same environment.

BRAIN MOTIVES--UNFORTUNATE COUNTERMANDING FORCES

Not all brain tissue is equally consciousable. Thus, the rational ego brain tissue with its short term strategic motive and also with different and more convenient seated cultural baggage drowns out awareness of the drives emanating from primitive tribal association. The tribal brain may express its impulse from cultural learning, but this cultural learning is presumptive and sublimated and forms during the earliest stages of child development with imitation and synchronized behavioral patterning. Not only does the human brain sublimate early learning, it most often forms an emotional fondness for this learning. Taken together, the lack of awareness and the emotional fondness for early sublimated learning form strong resistance to unlearning and re-adaptation.

OLD DOG BRAIN MUST UNLEARN AND RELEARN--FAST

The old dog brain remains for a lifetime, if so driven, dutifully guides behavior away from the bright spotlight of primary conscious awareness. While the cultural learning stamped into the old dog brain may have been adaptive and appropriate at the time when it was attached, the rapid technological background of culture can make the earlier sublimated learning now maladaptive.

BEHAVIOR DRIVEN FROM ALL CULTURAL LEARNING MUST BE WEIGHED--EQUALLY AND IN BALANCE

Because of the brain's hierarchy of consciousable tissue, tribal brain impulses tunnel beneath and are masked by the primary ego brain. Because the expression of countermanding sets of cultural learning are driven by different functional tissue with different pre-eminence, they function together in the same brain with the conundrum of one force creating error, but unnoticed, while the other has free expression. A symbol of the dysfunctional brain functioning in error when new cultural information does not access and overwrite old sublimated learning is shown as the brightest areas in the global map above. We don't just happen to prefer wasting electricity, we learned and habituated the behavior, and we can unlearn it.

After unlearning the brain's automated response pattern, the beginning of re-purposing technology, altering the position of cost containment at a macroeconomic level, re-fashioning the cultural meme about what electricity represents and creating incentives to create a new industry of electricity demand displacement through inventive management that gains profit from the lowest cost methods of providing services enabled by electricity that are of acceptable quality and reach.

The planet's six thousand plus coal fired power plants must begin the process of shutting down within an urgently short time frame. To accomplish this goal, all of the non-draconian and lifestyle maintaining precursors to must take root, starting with each mind that needs to unlearn the electricity wasting pattern from early childhood, then go to work on adaptive cultural change to accomplish the ultimate goal. Reducing demand is so much more cost effective at reducing carbon emissions than the knee-jerk action of increasing renewable supply, every effort should be made to take action on the demand side. It is going to happen eventually in the West, and will automatically happen in the East as the growing middle classes demand amenity, but the changing cultures will easily recognize the efficacy of electricity demand management over the capital intensive burden of the build-out of renewable supply. Forestalling the smokestack industrialization model and its come-lately soft industry cousins, in the new, high-growth economies will itself be easier as the tendency to imitate the American model of Twentieth Century growth wanes as the U.S. looses respect over time.

RE-SYNCHRONIZE THE BRAIN'S HIERARCHIES WITH THE RATE OF CHANGE CULTURE BRINGS UPON THE BIOSPHERE

The first step in stopping the present run-away climate change is insight into what we are as an entity. As an actor and carrier of evolution's marvelous mistake, knowing and understanding this failure of success, the antithetical unconscious force of tribal mind moves from the inner unconscious to the outer conscious. Once known and understood, choice about the responsibility for destruction is present. If then the entity knows it is setting alight a fire under its own feet, the probability of making different decisions seems more likely than not. Having experienced the catharsis, the energy cast off into space for accidental reasons, stops, because the prevailing cultural story about the meaning of electricity is no longer felt as true. ("energy cast off into space" is meant as representative, rather than an actual proportional significance of all electricity waste)

TOSS OUT THE MONKEY WRENCH

Once the monkey wrench is tossed out of the biosphere machine there is a much greater chance system collapse will slow down considerably.

WHEN FULLY CONSIDERED, MASSIVE FORCES AND DRASTIC OUTCOMES ARE AT STAKE

Unfortunately, when seismic forces collide, such as when the forces are the result of brain dysfunction within a specie with seven billion population, the easy button doesn't work. Given the massive technological prowess at the service of the primary ego decision-making brain function, the forces released are indeed of seismic proportion and actually greater than literal seismic forces per unit of geological time. Still, history is full of examples where major shifts of belief brought a new balance of motive forces on our brains. Let's hope this one will yield and give up its grasp on the cultural meme of electricity as a commodity, necessarily cheap and abundant.

Human history is not always going from hard to easy continuously in perpetuity. There is no natural law guaranteeing this kind of progress. Our future can, as likely move from easy to hard, especially if we are not watching the signposts--learning and changing. Within the miracle of our adaptability, we would do well to be alert to traps of our own making.

THE FORCES ARE US AND WITHIN US. ELSE, WE AWAKEN AT NIGHT IN A BAD DREAM, TO FIND OUR FEET ARE LITERALLY BURNING, THE AGONY IS REAL AND FROM A FIRE SET WHILE WE WERE ASLEEP AND DREAMING

A Strange Footprint

"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own."

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944)

Read more: http://www.gaia.com/quotes/Sir_Arthur_Stanley_Eddington#ixzz0e8F4OGpV

Energy Demand and Pricing Are Improving

Regarding Royal Dutch Shell, the company has cut its operating costs by around $1 billion over the last year, and plans to slash 5,000 jobs. Still, chief executive Peter Voser issued a cautious statement, saying that although energy demand and pricing are improving “we are not expecting a quick recovery.”

When any carbon emitting enterprise is operating in an environment where higher emissions are referred to as "improving," it is clear that society has not set up correct incentives. If market economy is a tool used by society to optimize effects for the benefit of that society, then units and packaging of markets must be newly fashioned and calibrated for the comprehensive, full effects of enterprise.

Bottom Up Carbon is about how to adjust and re-package market incentives into products and industries that reflect changing interactions of people, resources and the environment at all levels. In all likelihood, services will need to be integrated with products. Market offerings should roll together resources with life-cycle and re-purposing or recycling so that the methods used force internalizations into markets that previously permitted externalizing and neglecting of real costs as they accumulate into future habitability, or what has now become a wooden nickle cliche, sustainability.

In 2109, Humans Will Be Dismayed At How Casually We Did This

“I think we can assume there will be some control of carbon emissions,” he said. This is a quote from a Northwest United States energy official in late October of 2009. The lack of urgency hosts an ignorance about what today the Bangladeshi people are suffering from carbon emissions created over here.

Secretary Chu Wants to Make it Easy to Save Energy

When the central key to the information age is access to and attention to a subject or topic so that behavior may be changed, primarily in purchasing a good or service, the clamor for brain time is enormously competitive. The structure of the way we consume electricity is simply not within the scope of possible attention of many American people to perform manually. Manually controlling electricity usage is more than impractical, it is impossible. Yet, we add, and plug in new devices by the thousands every day. When will we get it, that the model of electricity consumption and the services it enables must radically change?

Energy Secretary Chu says, "Price signals do matter, but you can't just simply use a price signal," Chu said. "You really have to make it very easy to save energy."

He's halfway there. The answer is that saving energy should be an inherent, built-in, automatic function of using the services electricity enables. When I enter a room in my house with no motion sensor where there is more than one switch for lights, I am annoyed by attending to which switch to use. My mind is always on the search, solving problems, synthesizing information, planning my future, etc. It is simply impractical to waste two seconds to stop for processing my personal function for lighting when entering a room.

There are currently fifteen or twenty million people out of work in the United States (9/22/2009). The most preposterous cultural function is to fail in using the talents of these many capable people. The waste of human mind is one of the most aggregous offenses against a better world, especially when a deteriorating world is impending with the coming climate change. At least five million of the currently unemployed are fully capable of performing energy audits and designing and installing electricity demand management systems in electricity power sinks that are largely pushing us into massive climate change.

Attacking climate change with "price signals" or household LED displays is like emptying the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon. Of course, political expedience does give Secretary Chu a job, herding snails.

Electricity Still a Commodity // Addendum 2

Read this Bloomburg article as we watch the change crawl along. The year--2009
Source Article

EnerNOC Returns 260% From Lowering Lights in 2009’s Power Grid

Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Donn Dresselhuys used to shake his head in disbelief every time he saw a utility’s meter reader trudge from house to house to record how much electricity people had used. The ritual demonstrated how the power industry had shunned innovation and changed little since the 1950s.

Dresselhuys, a retired executive who had spent 30 years running a water purification company in Milwaukee, set out in 1995 to build a device that would enable meters to transmit data to utilities every hour, sending signals through the air much like mobile phones do. His tiny company soon confronted the realities of changing an industry in which old habits die hard.

“If we knew what we were going up against, we wouldn’t have done it,” says Dresselhuys’s son Eric, 43, a former Procter & Gamble Co. marketing executive who joined his father’s enterprise in 1996. “We were chronically underfunded, there was tons of engineering and testing and we underestimated how long it would take to get contracts with big-name utilities.”

The Dresselhuyses persevered and, 13 years later, their company, Silver Spring Networks Inc. of Redwood City, California, has become a front-runner in the race to build the so-called smart grid, the effort to remake America’s antiquated electrical system with the Internet technology that’s revolutionized telecommunications since the 1990s. The biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Cisco Systems Inc., Google Inc. and Intel Corp. are also investing in chips and software to upgrade the grid.

President Obama

The global market for these products will soar to $65 billion by 2013, according to a 2008 report by Lux Research Inc., a Boston-based consulting firm. And Silver Spring may hold an initial public offering in the next year or two as utilities serving 8 million customers in nine states install meters equipped with its networking technology.

The U.S. government is doing its part to make the grid smarter. The administration of President Barack Obama is planning to spend $4.5 billion this year to finance the installation of 40 million digital meters -- about a quarter of the U.S. market -- and other technology. The government’s immediate goal is to keep the creaky electrical grid from breaking down when Americans crank up their air conditioners in the summer. Beyond that, Obama envisions a more efficient system that will help curb global warming by accommodating large-scale renewable-energy plants.

Federal Stimulus

“Energy efficiency isn’t very sexy, so it doesn’t get the attention that building solar panels does,” says Philippe de Weck, manager of the $600 million Pictet Clean Energy fund, a Luxembourg-based mutual fund run by Swiss private bank Pictet & Cie. “Efficiency is the easiest and most elegant way to reduce carbon emissions, and we think there’s going to be immense investment activity in what should grow into a large, profitable industry.”

The grid is in effect one of the largest machines ever built, a network of power plants, towers, wires and equipment reaching into every corner of the U.S., from factory assembly lines to public buildings to living rooms. Utilities and state regulators are loath to make sweeping changes to this system, especially after California’s disastrous experiment in deregulation that enabled Enron Corp. energy traders to create artificial shortages and rolling blackouts in 2000 and 2001.

While Obama’s stimulus cash may spur some power providers to embrace the smart grid, it’s only a fraction of the total amount needed to produce a systemwide transformation, says Erich Gunther, chairman of EnerNex Corp., a Knoxville, Tennessee-based energy industry consulting firm.

Smart-Grid Investing

State regulators govern the power industry with rules that were established 50 years ago to fuel the surging postwar economy. The regime, largely unchanged, rewards utilities for building fossil-fuel-burning power plants rather than introducing energy-saving technology. Power providers in almost every state earn profits by convincing public utility commissions to raise rates on customers to cover the cost of putting up new plants, transmission lines and substations. Since power companies can’t make the same case for a rate hike to save energy, they have little reason to spend money on innovations such as smart meters.

“It’s much more complex and challenging than investing in solar or bio­fuels, where you just have to make products and sell them to customers,” says Josh Green, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures who backs clean-technology startups. “Here you have to navigate between regulators driven by politics and consumers wanting to keep rates low and utilities. None of this is going to happen overnight.”

Saving Energy

A few investors are cashing in on smart-grid companies that cater to corporations rather than utilities. In 2005, Foundation Capital, a Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm, funded a startup called EnerNOC Inc. with $21 million. The Boston-based company makes software that helps Marriott International Inc. and other customers reduce power consumption and reap savings by shutting down lighting, air conditioning and even water fountains when they’re not in use or when electricity prices are high. And energy system operators pay EnerNOC to dial back its customers’ usage during heat waves or outages, lessening the need to tap carbon-spewing “peaker plants” for emergency juice.

“They add new supply into the market while we take demand off the grid,” says Chief Executive Officer Tim Healy, 40, who co-founded EnerNOC in 2002 with President David Brewster when they were business students at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

EnerNOC Shares

EnerNOC went public in May 2007, and its shares jumped 260 percent this year, closing at $26.75 on Aug. 9. Foundation’s stake has more than tripled to $77 million.

Nothing exposed the grid’s dire shape more than the blackout in August 2003. Overgrown trees short-circuited power lines in Ohio and triggered a chain reaction that left 50 million people in eight Northeastern states and parts of Canada without electricity for up to two days in some cases. Six years later, most utilities still can’t detect outages remotely because they haven’t upgraded residential meters that date back to the 1970s.

The glass-encased devices attached to the sides of houses tick off the electricity used but can’t transmit data back to utilities. Power providers must rely on customers to tell them when the lights go off. Even when the grid is functioning, it’s not very efficient: 14 percent of the energy generated at plants is lost through leakage by the time it reaches household sockets, according to the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California.

Eric Schmidt

“We’re powering today’s digital economy with a grid that uses 1950s technology,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt says in an e- mail. “It’s a challenging undertaking, but our future depends on building a smarter system with better information for consumers and utilities.”

With the digital grid, high-tech meters will send consumption data from homes to utilities every hour, automatically alerting officials of outages. People will be able to monitor via Web sites how much power each of their appliances uses and the best time of day to operate them to save energy and cut costs, says Andrew Tang, senior director of San Francisco- based Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s smart-energy program.

Utilities will have sensors on transmission lines to spot and reduce leakages. Software and data management programs will help utilities accommodate hundreds of thousands of electric cars that may hit the roads in the next decade. Technology will also unite the thousands of different power jurisdictions in the U.S., so wind energy generated in Wyoming can be delivered instantly to auto plants in Tennessee -- a virtual impossibility with today’s patchwork system.

Kleiner Perkins

“Modernizing our electrical grid is an urgent national priority,” U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu says in an e-mail. “We need a grid that can move clean energy from the places it can be produced to the places where it can be used.”

The entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who transformed the telecommunications industry are now trying to do the same with the grid, says Adam Grosser, a partner at Foundation Capital, one of the first venture capital firms to invest in energy-efficiency technology. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which funded Amazon.com Inc. and Google, led a $75 million investment in Silver Spring in October. John Doerr, a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins, and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his crusade against global warming, both joined Silver Spring’s advisory board that month.

Meter Battle

Companies developing different wireless technologies to connect utilities and households are competing for a huge prize: There are 144 million residential meters in the U.S.

“The battle for the meter is raging,” says Alain Harrus, a partner at Crosslink Capital, a VC firm in San Francisco.

Silver Spring’s networking technology uses radio waves to transmit data from meters to utilities. Its archrival, Grid Net Inc. in San Francisco, has opted for WiMax, a broadband wireless technology. Still another startup, SmartSynch Inc. in Jackson, Mississippi, has joined forces with AT&T Inc. to shoot data across that carrier’s cellular telephone network.

These companies aren’t above a little trash talk.

“No one is going to build a smart grid on Silver Spring’s radio,” Grid Net CEO Ray Bell says.

“We’ll let customers vote with their wallets and see who wins,” counters Warren Weiss, 53, a partner at Foundation Capital, which has poured $52.5 million into Silver Spring.

‘I Was Crazy’

The company has overcome technical and marketing hurdles since Donn Dresselhuys, 79, first started tinkering with a gadget for transmitting electricity use data. For almost a decade, the enterprise, then called Innovatec Inc., struggled to perfect its networking gear and draw commitments from utilities, which had long-standing relationships with General Electric Co. and other equipment suppliers.

Eric Dresselhuys, who marketed air fresheners at P&G in Cincinnati, kept tabs on his dad’s pet project. As the dot-com boom took off in 1996, he grew convinced that utilities would eventually have to adopt new digital technologies, prompting him to abandon corporate America and move back to Milwaukee and join his father.

“I left a perfectly good job, and all my friends said I was crazy,” he says. “But if you followed the logic, you knew that this wasn’t going to be just about reading meters; it was about improving the efficiency of the entire electricity grid.”

Foundation Capital

By 2002, the Dresselhuyses’ dreams were in tatters as Innovatec ran out of cash and shut down. There was one bright spot: San Diego Gas & Electric Co. had agreed to buy their product if the device passed performance tests. So Jack Thompson, a retired software executive and angel investor in Denver, agreed to bankroll the father-and-son duo in a new company, Silver Spring Networks, which was named after a neighborhood in Milwaukee.

Then, in late 2003, Foundation Capital invested $8 million and moved Silver Spring’s operations from Wisconsin to Redwood City to hire local software and networking engineers. Ray Bell, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Foundation, joined Silver Spring as interim CEO and chief technology officer.

Within a year, Bell was clashing with the new CEO, Scott Lang, and other senior executives over the company’s technology and strategy. Bell, 53, a former senior manager at Oracle Corp. and Cisco Systems, argued that Silver Spring should question the purpose of the meter.

Competing Visions

He believed the company’s reliance on radio technology would limit the ability of utilities to deliver on the smart grid’s promise. Instead, Bell pushed for embracing broadband technologies that would turn meters into digital gateways and allow power providers to offer everything from energy efficiency programs to Internet access.

The company rejected Bell’s vision as too ambitious a change for the utilities. So Bell quit in 2005 and founded Grid Net. He’s betting that WiMax, which could emerge as the successor to the so-called 3G network used for smart phones and other devices, will become the conduit of choice for utilities. He says its massive bandwidth and secure, standardized spectrum will enable utilities to cope with the possible huge flows of data from electric vehicles, rooftop solar panels and other green-energy technologies in the next decade.

“The moral of this story is cable,” says Bell, sitting in a Spartan office adorned with a desk, a computer and a whiteboard covered in mathematical scribbles. “You saw an evolving market in broadband there, and the same thing is happening here.”

‘It Was Horrible’

Silver Spring’s radio technology almost sank the company shortly after Bell’s departure. In April 2006, SDG&E informed Silver Spring that it wasn’t going to move ahead with its order. The company’s networking card, a component inserted into digital meters that transmits the data, had failed the utility’s tests due to a variety of technical glitches.

“It was horrible,” says Grosser, 48, a Silver Spring director. “We lost our flagship customer, which was the basis of our investment.”

Foundation, wagering that Silver Spring’s setback wasn’t fatal, invested another $44.5 million to keep the company afloat. The company turned to George Flammer, an electrical engineer who’d developed a precursor to Wi-Fi, the technology that uses radio waves to deliver wireless broadband connections for computers. Flammer redesigned the radio components to boost the strength of the signal sent by the meters. The fix worked.

Utility Rollout

In October 2006, Juno Beach-based Florida Power & Light Co. deployed 100,000 meters equipped with Silver Spring technology as part of a pilot program. In July 2008, PG&E agreed to replace meters for more than 5 million customers in California with Silver Spring’s gear by mid-2012.

On a balmy day in April, Tirso Ortega, a PG&E meter installer, entered the backyard of a suburban house south of San Francisco. He gently removed a 40-year-old Westinghouse meter encased in thick glass and swapped in a new one built by GE featuring Silver Spring’s technology. Within seconds, a digital readout blinked on and the meter started transmitting data wirelessly via the Internet to a control room miles away.

Utilities in Illinois, Maryland and Oklahoma are also installing and testing digital meters that use Silver Spring technology. CEO Lang says the company will make its first profit in the third quarter, with revenues expected to more than double to $200 million in 2010. Its publicly traded rival, Itron Inc. in Liberty Lake, Washington, is selling smart metering and networking technology to Southern California Edison Co. and SDG&E. Xcel Energy Inc. is converting Boulder, Colorado, into a “smart-grid city,” installing digital meters in about half of its homes.

Home Area Network

“We are seeing signs of progress by some utilities, but we clearly have a long way to go,” says Russell Read, former chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the No. 1 public pension fund in the U.S., with $176 billion in assets. Read now manages Cambridge, Massachusetts-based C Change Investments LLC, which serves institutions and wealthy individuals and invests in clean-energy projects.

Google and several startups are working on the next phase of the planned smart-grid buildout: the creation of so-called home area networks to save energy. The companies are trying to change the behavior of consumers who have shown an almost insatiable appetite for power-hungry flat-screen televisions and other appliances.

Google’s PowerMeter

The home area networks will allow consumers to use the data collected by meters to monitor and reduce their energy use. Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic arm, is developing an Internet service called PowerMeter that aims to provide consumers with a daily or hourly readout of their electricity use. Kirsten Olsen Cahill, PowerMeter’s program manager, says the service may help consumers cut power use by making them more aware of wasteful habits. In a 2006 study by the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford in England, consumers who were shown their daily energy use shaved 5 percent to 15 percent off their monthly bills.

Today, most utilities send customers bills that show only the total amount of electricity used in the prior month and the charge. Cahill says that’s like going to a store with no prices, filling up the shopping cart and then receiving a bill four weeks later.

“We are purchasing electricity every day but we have no idea how much it costs, so how can you expect users to make good decisions?” she says.

Programming Appliances

Control4 Inc., a Salt Lake City-based startup, and other small companies are creating technology to help measure how much juice each appliance consumes and at what price on a kilowatt- hour basis. Control4 is working on software that would link all electrical devices -- including refrigerators and clothes dryers -- into a network that’s managed via a Web site or a dedicated monitor.

Homeowners would be able to set preferences so that dishwashers or air conditioners would turn on or shut down in line with low and high electricity prices. If enough residences cut power consumption when prices are high, that would lessen demand for more peaker plants, PG&E’s Tang says.

A home area network could also tell a utility that either the electric car in the house’s garage or the rooftop solar panel has surplus juice. The utility could then pull the electricity from the car or panel, distribute it to the grid and reward the customer on the next bill.

“This is the utopian vision,” says Tod Francis, a venture capitalist at Shasta Ventures in Menlo Park.

Silver Spring IPO

Smart-grid investors will profit only if consumers embrace the technology and become active managers of a commodity they now take for granted. Americans haven’t curbed their power consumption even as prices have soared 38 percent from the start of 1999 to April 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

“Are consumers going to be interested for a week and then go back to their regular lives?” says Lorie Wigle, general manager of Intel’s ecotechnology product development unit in Portland, Oregon, which is designing chips for the smart grid. “That’s the critical question.”

A Silver Spring IPO would show that the smart grid is taking root and paying off for investors. Even so, the fortunes of Silver Spring and its rivals will continue to hinge on more handouts from Washington to utilities for the adoption of new technologies. With the federal government facing a projected $1.4 trillion budget deficit in 2010 and a possible costly overhaul of health care, lawmakers may choose to shut down support for the digital grid and kill its momentum.

“Hopefully the political will is stalwart,” Mohr Davidow’s Green says. “But that’s a nerve-racking thing to rely on.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Edward Robinson in San Francisco at edrobinson@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: August 14, 2009 00:00 ED

Renminbi Power // Addendum 1

Noriel Roubini from New York University writes in the New York Times on May 13, 2009,

"Now that the dollar’s position is no longer so secure, we need to shift our priorities. This will entail investing in our crumbling infrastructure, alternative and renewable resources and productive human capital — rather than in unnecessary housing and toxic financial innovation. This will be the only way to slow down the decline of the dollar, and sustain our influence in global affairs."

Although Roubini believes the "crumbling" infrastructure to be the problem, he has the basic synopsis nailed. Roubini is only an economist. He, like so many others, doesn't seem to be aware that infrastructure is an evolutionary process, that needs to match a resource dynamic that is just as pliable, adaptive and changing in a fully globalized, anthro-centric planet as is dominance and convenience of reserve currency and is just as fundamental. The resource dynamic is also the innovative, adaptive, and creative nature of "human capital," that drives infrastructure revolution that is fostered by the full use of the technical capabilities that are economic multipliers and wealth builders that are far more grounded than the financial chicanery that have stood in place of real economics.

Final Word // No. 42

Neither the economic conditions or the leadership in the U.S. is capable of doing much with either the demand side or the supply side of electricity waste, its carbon sewerage into the atmosphere, or anything else. I have surveyed the wide range of babble about smart grids that I am sick of the utter chaos. I don't think leadership is coming. What is the point of some piecemeal smart grid with endlessly growing renewable infrastructure feeding dumb buildings and even dumber building operators and owners, all of which don't stand a chance of getting capitalized, because our government wants us to be dutiful happy consumers of even more Chinese manufactured gadgets, to jump start the economy so we may drive over the cliff with endlessly growing debt.

Supply side or demand side--who cares anyhow. The problem is best stated by Patrick Meyer in ieee-USA Today's Engineer, 10.08.

"But before we can go any further, we need a definition of the concept of smart grid.

Inconsistency abounds among definitions of smart grid. Further, existing definitions are often biased towards certain sectors of the electric industry, depending on what type of organization is providing the definition. Some definitions are oriented towards the end-use consumer of electricity and the specific technologies which could be made available to them through smart grid programs. Other definitions neglect the end-user and are focused on technical aspects of generation, transmission, and distribution technologies. Some definitions can be very precise, focusing on one specific area, while others are broad, focusing on sweeping changes of the entire electric industry."
How is it that complexity came to smother us in quicksand, and there is not a sober helping hand to stand up and say, "just grab the rope?"

Reluctant Green Product Consumers Face Commercial Barriers to Be Adopters // No. 41

I bought and used an LED lamp last year. It lasted about four months and maybe a hundred hours. So, I question if the lamp lifetime is theoretical (50,000-100,00 hrs.) or may be different empirically and is reflected in the commercial product actually offered for sale. It is only as good as the manufacturer and its willingness to back a warranty. So, when a consumer shovels out the significant money for an LED lamp, one unsupported failed product puts the buyer in a big hole and the payout will probably never materialize, even if a number of good product purchases follow the bad. An exception might be that early technology adopters can consider their money a contribution to the evolution and the maturity of product commercialization.

This is also true for CFL's, from my personal experience. The failure rate is extremely high, and at this point, General Electric is not responding to warranty requests for several weeks now.

Also, I have experienced a 33% failure rate for new T-5 fluorescent fixtures.

With so many personal finances in hard times, it doesn't take much to seem like a cut back on the payout window, when $10 - $40 purchases start to seem like a significant dent in the household budget. I am certain that my experiences in tooling up my building for carbon footprint has resulted in proportionally significant financial loss. This is especially true, given the energy consumed in manufacturing and transporting the energy efficient product.

Recognizing that probability distributions may have me falling at the tail end of product failure, with the number of (small sample size) bad experiences at my level of consumption, still, it's starting to seem a lot like something systematic.

By analogy, imagine you purchase automobiles and, as might be the norm, occasionally, one doesn't work. It is reasonable to assume automobile purchase strategy would be quite a bit different than it is now. The purchase price level is a factor in overall risk, so perceived marginal level of disposable income and costs perceived as fixed, shift under different economic conditions, as well. Tolerance of failure and the willingness and ability to hold the manufacturer's or supplier's feet to the fire would affect the whole transportation system.

Times are changing. My first CFL purchase from Panasonic back in 1991 lasted for seventeen years and many thousands of operation time hours. This purchase as an investment was a significant net gain, in spite of the $22 cost seeming like a fortune.

Probing the tolerable bad product proportion is actually a marketing strategy, testing that customers will not keep track of, or bother with purchases with receipts, date of purchase, etc., and that on average, selling a certain percentage of junk product is a profit winner, when the low cost manufacturer is in Asia and quality control is in the maybe department.

In order to intice the environmentally apathetic and budget-conscious consumer to adopt energy efficient products, convenient, reliable, trouble-free, and up-front cost, need to fall in line with reasonable expectations from past consumer experiences. I now know why people are still buying the tank water heaters. A few years ago, I bought an $800 on-demand water heater. The efficiency level is marvelous, but ownership requires an ability to troubleshoot problems occasionally. It is a major European brand, but it takes some learning to fix little problems and keep it maintained. From this experience, I can understand why plumbers and retailers might not encourage buyers because of several criteria.

In order to get where we need to be in the coming decades, American consumer expectations need to be ameliorated. I see this as a major undertaking, to be done for the sake of what we know is essential to modulate climate change by dealing with all of the little things, and backing off of the dream of magic bullet solutions. As was the case in the post-war nuclear power industry, it was widely promoted and believed that nuclear power would be too cheap to bother with metering. The idea of progress was so culturally heightened in that era, people were ready and willing to believe such cooked up utility ideas.

If the pattern I am observing is widespread for energy efficient commercial products, the argument might be legitimately posed, that it really is cheaper and just as efficient to scrape off those mountain tops for coal to shovel into the boiler at the Con Edison, because the con is actually on the other side of the supply/demand market. Experiences could sufficiently drive the risk of demand side micro-investments to spook the whole market.

A network of green product consumers might want to endeavor to develop quality monitoring, surveying, registration and even certification programs to attack this problem. As we now observe in contentious appropriations arguments, the government is fast loosing its ability to fund such efforts as consumer rights and product safety. Marginalizing social effects that keep a civil society in place is a problem where grass roots efforts should place attention. 911 didn't especially change everything, but the essential failure of the financial system and its long term effects, does.

No Human—Zero Power // No.40

If a tree falls in the forest with no people to witness the event, does the crash sound of the collision with the ground happen at all? What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is out of sight, is out of mind. We hear astrophysicists talk about the light now seen from a distant galaxy as having projected from that place so many billions of years ago, as though there were a now anywhere but here. If no human is present, does the electric meter advance?

The habit of anthropocentricism may be more than a habit. It may be built into our brains. That may be why we waste so much electric power. The artifacts of the way consciousness is projected from the machine of the brain is central to why we are hell bent on destroying the biosphere. Climate change and its effects to come, are an insidious irony and a statement to any god, about who we are and have always been.

So, even in our own economics, we suffer from our own nature. The extremes of fear and greed are often referenced as the drivers of markets and at once their demise, driving such extremes, that the pendulum can get stuck in the clock’s enclosure wall. We know the suffering is our own making, yet seldom do we hear in the profuse coverage of financial and economic news, any examination of our own human nature and that we should be making an effort to advance, seems to be out of the thought space of current public dialogue. How is it the very smartest among us refer to this economic downturn as some other thing, some IT, not seeing our fingerprints all over IT? Listening in on Davos, no trumpets of war are sounding over the contention of loss--just sniping and dumbfounded stupor.

Back home here, in the prospect of shutting down some of the over seven thousand coal fired power plants on this planet, we do almost nothing to curtail the electricity waste that is so prevalent. Given the externalized cost of electricity, why is it we have the technology to automatically turn off all electricity consuming devices when no human is present to use the services, or are legitimately left in preparation of a human being present at a later time, yet we do nothing?

Ubiquitous computing with networks of sensors should be able to shut down all electricity consuming devices, except when needed and used. Americans think electricity is something like air. Breathing is an autonomic process that happens without need of our conscious attention and the air is always there. The cultural habit of electricity being a handy plug ‘n play commodity must change.

“No human, zero power” need not be a lavish, complex and expensive technology. With some effort in producing nano-tech sensors that work for several decades on a watch button battery should be within reach. Occupancy sensing can work on several levels. It can sense/learn by sniffing protein molecules broadcast from the movement of people in the room that are specific to individuals who are expected to occupy a given space. Infrared, ultrasonic, or wearing RF devices can also provide information for computers to learn habits, patterns, and anticipate activity. There is nothing wow about this. It is ordinary technology, or can easily be developed. The less than 100 KWH/month household should be typical.

Since technology in the form of PC’s and even an A to D TV signal converter box seem to be a challenge for many, how can we imagine the added complexity of a sensing and responding environment as a possibility? The answer is that we already spend our lives amongst technologies of immense complexity, and we can handle it. The use and control of technology does not necessarily come quickly or easily, but when the benefits are so compelling, people always find a way.

The harder part is to is to envision this indigenous infrastructure, free of damage to the current account balance, while spinning out so many new efficiencies. The first culture to embrace this Twenty-First Century technology, a technology that feeds on the wide-open, the freedom, the adventurousness, and most of all, the inclusiveness that is unique to America. These are our real assets, and these are the best assets to thrive in a small world. Forgive me if I have over sold the case here, but I also believe NHZP can also sell itself. Imagine.

The Twentieth Century was the America’s century because she had muscle. The Twenty-First Century will be the American century because we master and invent the possible. The pain of what we think is just another economic cycle is also the pain of binding chains of modernity, industrialism, and top down capitalism. Culture must always fight its way through major change. Historically, this has always been true. It is hard work. It is risky. It is dangerous. And it requires insight and digging into the raw core of what restrains us.

We may be irrevocably entwined with the digital. It may be difficult to pull apart the meanings of all things digital. There is a gateway within it that makes us more human, more satisfied with participation, more purposeful and more secure. Finding this gateway is not a bridge between two networks, it is a bridge between us and our collective potential.

Build Out--
Twentieth
Century
Answers

This photo is symbolic of an open-ended solution to power needs that don't necessarily reduce the dependence upon existing carbon-emitting plants, because the assumption is that demand for power is going to increase. The assumption seems to be to use renewables to supplement the existing carbon intensive base load into an unplanned demand-intense future.