PeakOilDesign

We've moved!

2006-12-21T18:28:00.000-05:00

Come check out the new site at peakoildesign.com! Please update your links to PeakOilDesign if you have a chance.

Forest Soil Managment

2006-12-20T10:06:00.000-05:00

Continuing with the topic of soil management, this article on the importance of forest soil nutrition for carbon sequestration was intriguing. If you hope to help fight global warming by planting trees, make sure you pay attention to soil nutrition or you may end up doing very little to remove carbon dioxide. It’s also something to consider if you want a healthy source of timber after Peak Oil.

Exciting news!

2006-12-19T09:06:00.000-05:00

In the near future, PeakOilDesign will be transferring to a new site with a lot more functionality! I hope to make the switch within a week, so stay tuned for the link to the new site. In the meantime, here's a teaser from the "How to use this site" document:

PeakOilDesign contains several tools to aid in developing post-Peak Oil communities. The front page features the original PeakOilDesign blog, used to present Systems Engineering design strategies for Peak Oil, sustainability news, updates on design projects, and other relevant thoughts. Feel free to write comments in response to the posts or other commenters.

The Community Organization Forums provide an opportunity for people to communicate with one another in an attempt to build communities. Users can provide detailed information about their skills and resources (via their user profile) and look for compatible communities. Established communities can provide information about themselves and run their own forums -- either to discuss internal issues or recruit new members.

The Guilds enable experts within a given field to share their information with the less experienced or discuss advanced topics with one another. Newbies and experts alike can share their experiences, failures, and successes.

Registered users have the option of starting their own blogs on PeakOilDesign. These can be used to share projects, ideas, or concerns. POD Blogs are an ideal place for discussing the design of your house, garden, or community and receive feedback from the POD community.

Newfound sites

2006-12-16T11:33:00.000-05:00

I've come across some sites in the past week with some very encouraging information and strategies. Oil, be Seeing You by author Richard Embleton takes a view remarkably similar to my own regarding the best approaches to mitigating Peak Oil effects. An excerpt:

I am not one who believes that survival, other than for a very few, consists of rugged individual survivalism on an isolated homestead in the midst of the wilderness or in reverting to a hunter-gatherer existence. We are social beings. Long-term survivability after energy decline must center on community, whatever form that community might take. The survivability of communities well past peak-oil, however, is far more than a case of self-sufficiency. It is also a matter of self-reliance, of having within the community the full measure of skills needed for survivability, of being able to produce or locally acquire everything that that community needs to function.

To that end, EcoSherpa has a post on solar panels made from blueberries. The site in general contains a number of excellent posts and really serves as a news source for edge-of-the-envelope sustainability news. They also link to a new site that could be promising, The Better World Homepage. I'd love to see how this one develops.

Global Warming meets Peak Oil Design

2006-12-13T10:34:00.000-05:00

Continuing with the discussion of weather effects from a couple posts ago, there are a lot of other requirements we can define.

Jeff pointed out that we need to more carefully examine how much rain falls during the growing season, rather than just the whole year’s average. I’m looking for the data on that for our selected Iowa location and I’ll get back to you.

In the following draft requirements, the term “withstand” may need some further definition. The understanding of what withstanding something may vary from person to person – some might consider it to mean every part of the structure and farm stays intact, and some might imagine it means only the core structure must survive. Any thoughts on a better way to define this term?

The Homestead shall withstand temperatures of 115 ° F or greater.
The highest recorded temperature in the area is 102 ° F. Although the global warming models predict only modest increases in summer temperatures, I added a buffer to capture any error. If it gets hotter than this, we’ll be in trouble anyway. (See this -- courtesy of BigGav.)

The Homestead shall withstand temperatures of -30 ° F or less.
The lowest temperature recorded in the area is -28 ° F. In my estimation, it’s safe to assume we will not see temperatures lower than that over the course of the Homestead’s lifetime. In fact, we should consider whether -30 ° is too restrictive and could needlessly increase the cost of the design.

The Homestead shall withstand no less than XX lbs. of accumulated snow load.
I need to find the seasonal snow depth maximum.

The Homestead shall withstand sustained winds of no less than XX miles/hour.
This exact number is up for debate. Typical maximum winds top out at about 60 mph over any sustained period of time, but I haven’t found any models of increasing storm intensity due to global warming.

The Homestead shall provide shelter for no less than 4 people from tornadic winds (300 miles/hour).
This does not mean that the house has to be designed to resist tornadoes – that would be near impossible to achieve. Rather, the requirement implies some sort of storm shelter – a room in the basement, a storm cellar, or a standalone reinforced building.

The Homestead shall withstand no less than 50” precipitation per year.
This requirement is designed to capture the maximum expected yearly precipitation in a year at our location.

One thing that occurred to me in developing these weather requirements is that we haven’t specified how long we want the homestead to last. Climate models typically don’t publish results past 2100 – and some research predicts further dramatic warming after than, depending on how the anthropogenic (human-caused) forcings change. Do we want this homestead to survive for our grandchildren? Our great-grandchildren? 200 years? More?

The further out we place our target end-life for the homestead, the more uncertainty we encounter.

How much space do we really need?

2006-12-11T10:58:00.000-05:00

According to some sources, typical work area requirements are 4-12 m^2 (43-130 ft^2) depending on the nature of the work or even desk configuration.

An interesting research paper (pdf) out of the U.K. on current trends showed that households in the “fuel poverty” band had an average of 102 m^2 (1100 ft^2) – which might seem like a mansion to the homesteaders of the pioneer days.

Today, the average living space per person is more than 40 m^2 (430 ft^2), which means about 1700 ft^2 for a family of four. Of course, many people today might find that a bit small.

The problem with defining living space requirements is that it is primarily a psychological, rather than physiological problem. A person can survive in a small cell indefinitely, but for most people this would be uncomfortable. There is the added complication that since our current society places a great deal of emphasis on large living spaces it may be difficult for even Peak Oil-enlightened individuals to transfer from something like a 3000 square foot house to one less than 1000.

The concerns with building too large are not surprising: time, cost, and labor. If you have only one or two persons to build your house, a large one will be prohibitive on a short time scale. Consider the availability of the proper tools – it’s easier (but potentially more expensive) to dig a foundation with a front-end loader rather than a shovel. Also, don’t forget to take into account heating and cooling your dwelling – even a well insulated mansion would use a lot of firewood!

If you can develop a scheme for staging construction that will allow for phased occupancy of the homestead, a large house can be made more feasible given time and cost constraints. More on this later.

Soil Management

2006-12-08T18:06:00.000-05:00

The Energy Bulletin had a fascinating post on modern soil science and management. There is so much we don't understand about how we grow our food, yet so few are willing to question the practices. It sounds eerily like Peak Oil and the way we use energy...

An excerpt:

"Magic" is how humans have customarily described the soil's natural cycles of decay and growth. Without a scientific understanding, our ancestors relied on observation and traditional practices to grow crops.

Modern chemical agriculture has been only marginally better at understanding the soil. Unable to control the natural cycles, it bypasses them with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Despite the outward successes of modern agriculture, its heavy-handed approach brings with it pollution, soil degradation and other ills.

In contrast, organic methods like permaculture have attempted to work with natural cycles. Despite the many insights and successful practices that have emerged, a rigorous scientific model is still lacking. Permaculture and its brethren are accused of being belief systems rather than science. It's hard to make progress without having a common understanding of how things work.

Recently, however, soil ecology has developed to the point where we can open the lid on the black box of underground processes. We can begin to understand how micro-organisms maintain the structure and fertility of the soil. We learn that symbiotic relationships between plants and micro-organisms are not the exception but the rule.

Weather effects on Peak Oil Homestead design

2006-12-07T17:25:00.000-05:00

In the previous post we picked a specific location for our Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem, which enables us to do quite a bit. With these new assumptions we can better see our true requirements. With 34”/year of precipitation, we can modify our water requirements to take advantage of nature’s irrigation. With knowledge of our latitude, we can run calculations on solar incidence.

In the interest of furthering the design, let’s calculate what we need for growing food. Requirement 2.2.2 in the ORD is for 14,000 liters-per-day (lpd) of water. For four people on a vegetarian diet, we can liberally estimate that 1 acre of food would meet their nutritional needs (NOTE: This will be refined to a more exact number as the design progresses – remember Systems Engineering is an iterative process!).

The precipitation volume rate is therefore:
Vp = (34”/yr)*1 acre = 2.83 acre-ft/yr = 3,490,000 liters/yr = 9560 lpd

In this iteration on the design, we see that we can reduce our daily water requirement of 14,000 lpd by 9560 to 4440 lpd! However, remember that the 34”/yr is an average figure, and we should apply some engineering forethought and bump it up a bit.

Before we do so, however, we should consider the predicted effects of global warming on our particular region. Models call for increased precipitation in the Midwest through at least 2050, which can give us more confidence in our decision to rely more on precipitation for crop irrigation.

(The models also predict only moderate local warming for Iowa from global warming through 2050 for the summer seasons, and more significant winter season warming. The winter warming could mean a reduced need for home heating and is a factor to consider when we get to designing those systems.)

Given this analysis, it seems a refined requirement of 5000-6000 lpd for food production is reasonable. However, we have not yet taken into account possible effects of mulching, greenhouses, or other water-saving techniques! That will be taken account during trade studies in the next iteration.

Homestead Updates

2006-12-05T20:57:00.000-05:00

Development of the Peak Oil Homestead Example Project has been really dragging, so I’m going to kick it into high gear to keep things exciting and also more relevant to all types of PeakOilDesign projects.

We need to create more assumptions for the Homestead Example in order to develop the requirements further. This will take the problem from the realm of general application to the specific, so our focus should remain more than ever on the process itself.

New assumptions:
Location: Central Iowa, 5 miles outside small town
Topography: 20 acres former farmland, 20 acres timber, small stream
Weather: 34”/year precipitation; Avg winter temps 10-40 ° F; Avg summer temps 50-85 ° F
Budget: $100K

I’ve also updated the ORD for the project using some previously unassigned requirements. They were assigned as follows:

Objective 1.1: The Homestead will provide enough power for 4 people.

Requirement 4.1.1: The Homestead shall have railings (per Spec XYZ) on all exposed stairways.

Requirement 4.1.2: The Homestead shall provide safety protection for all sharp corners per Spec ABC.

Requirement 4.1.3: The Homestead shall provide safety barriers (per Spec AAA) around all hazardous areas and devices.

Orphan Requirement The electrical system shall provide protection for electrical outlets per Spec AAA.
(This requirement will fit under an as yet undefined higher-level requirement.)

Requirement 2.1.1.1: The water system shall provide potable tap water at 50 ° F – 86 ° F.

Requirement 2.1.1.2: The water system shall provide potable tap water at 112 ° F – 145 ° F.

Requirement 2.1.1.3 The water system shall provide a source shut-off mechanism.

Requirement 2.1.1.4 The water system shall remain above 40 ° F at all points.

Shuttle launch on the horizon

2006-12-03T21:14:00.000-05:00

Discovery is ready to take off Thursday night, and my activity here on the blog should pick back up again once it's launched. If you have a chance to see the launch in person, take advantage of it. Night launches are rare and spectacular, and there aren't many shuttle missions left!

Defining the garden

2006-11-29T07:21:00.000-05:00

As promised, I pulled together a list of unordered requirements for the “Peak Oil Garden Project”. These are intended for general use, rather than a specific size garden in a specific area. We’ll deal with that later.

So, here are what I consider important requirements for an easy-to-maintain, productive organic garden. Feel free to comment on these, as my domain expertise in the field of gardening is very limited.

The garden shall ensure all plants are within X inches of a walking point.
Your value for “X” will vary depending on your own arm reach or if you want it to be accessible for children. A typical value (per Square Foot Gardening) is 24 inches.

The garden shall have walking paths greater than X inches in width.
A good rule of thumb would be about twice the width of your foot at a minimum.

The garden shall be mulched to a depth of X inches. Mulching specifications are found in the document “Mulching Guidelines” [TBD later].
I’ll work on putting together an actual mulching guidelines based on my readings and your comments.

The garden shall reuse all organic waste, excepting diseased plants or soil.
This can be accomplished using a compost pile, turning dead plants back into the soil, or simply using the plants as mulch directly.

The garden shall use only organic pesticides and fertilizers as defined in the document “Specifications for Organic Gardening” [TBD later].
Hard-wiring this idea into your requirements should help keep your hand firm every time you have an urge to reach for a bottle of commercial bug spray. (I’ll try to find a ready-made document to fill this niche – I’m sure some exist.)

The garden shall have no less than X different plant species.
The garden shall have at least 2 varieties.
These requirements help ensure biodiversity in the garden.

The garden shall be enclosed with a barrier per the document “Garden Barrier Specification” [TBD later].
This requirement is for guarding against critters. If something like a fence is impractical (e.g. a large lot), you can rewrite it so that you can use natural barrier strategies such as putting peppers on the garden perimeter. If you don’t have or anticipate such a problem with hungry animals you could probably exclude this requirement.

Engineering beauty

2006-11-28T16:58:00.000-05:00

On the last post, DJEB commented that his aesthetic garden designs may not fit very well with the concept of modularity. I agree that engineering does have the tendency to suck the beauty out of designs or appears at odds with permaculture principles, but this is only when applied in isolation.

In my view, modular gardening techniques such as square foot gardening do not necessarily imply rigid lines and boxes. The key principles behind such methods are to break up the garden into manageable chunks and to identify clear paths for foot traffic.

I see no reason why something like a spiral-shaped (or von Karman trail-shaped) garden wouldn’t meet the requirements for modular gardening. In some ways, such a shape is a better design choice: a spiral shape provides clearly identifiable walking areas and puts plants within easy reach from multiple points.

One of my own gardens is pie-shaped, and it easily meets the goals of modular design. With one board down the center (for walking) and walking paths on the edges, the garden is aesthetically pleasing and functional. So please, don’t let the seemingly rigid nature of engineering ruin your ideas for beautiful designs.

Subsystem design: Garden requirements

2006-11-21T22:57:00.000-05:00

Gardening is an inexact science, which can make for difficulty when trying to apply Systems Engineering. I’m very much a beginner in the realm of gardening, but I’ve gathered a short list of items from various readings that we can develop into requirements. For more in-depth help on permaculture and gardening try DJEB’s, Aaron’s, or Emme’s blogs, or check out Farmgirl Fare.

We may be getting ahead of ourselves here in the design process, but I want to work on some ideas for developing requirements on our gardens. To keep matters simple, we’ll make this a design problem separate and distinct from the Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem.

For now, I’d like to throw out some general concepts I’ve learned about sustainable gardening that we can turn into requirements in a later post.

1) Keep it modular – Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew emphasizes growing plants in an easy-to-manage area grid (as opposed to rows), which really appeals to my engineer’s mind. This way you can work on your garden one square at a time and avoid overwhelming both yourself and your plants.

2) Diversity – A variety of plants is important from a nutritional standpoint and as a method to thwart pests. Diversity becomes even more important when we consider the reports of dwindling pollinator species and climate change affecting growing seasons. A genetically diverse collection of plants could help protect against this and other random devastating factors (e.g. the Potato Famine…)

3) Mulch – A thick layer of mulch (some recommend at least 12”) is essential for a healthy, low-maintenance garden. It keeps the soil moist and soft, and prevents weeds from growing. The No-Work Garden Book by Ruth Stout is a great reference on gardening with mulch.

4) Composting – A constant source of decomposed organic matter enriches your garden and reduces (or eliminates) the need for fertilizer.

5) Raised beds – Raised beds protect against some hungry critters and improve soil drainage.

I’m sure the permaculturists here can offer many more key pointers :) I’ll take a look at how to transform these types of ideas into requirements over the Thanksgiving week. Happy Turkey (or Tofu) Day to all!

Peak Oil Money

2006-11-17T17:55:00.000-05:00

An article at LiveScience today discussed the results of a study showing that even thinking about money can lead to a reduction in selfless behaviors, even when the selfless activity has nothing to do with competition for wealth. It's unfortunate that we're wired this way, but it's something to consider when trying to build community. How can we encourage our neighbors to emphasize cooperation over competition?

The response from some will be "well, just do away with money altogether!", but I would contend that any measure of wealth would elicit the same primal instincts (this is a totally unproven hypothesis, but it seems likely to me). Wealth can be measured in land, trees, gold, energy, goats, or barbie dolls, it all depends on the culture of the social group. Even a small community of sustainble-minded Peak Oilers would not be immune. So given the idea that we can't live without some drive for the acquisition of wealth, how can we manage it to become a positive factor for sustainability and the community at-large?

My personal ideas for solutions to this innate human quality is to instill a sense of community with frequent social gatherings and encouraging daily personal visits to the homes of other community members. Such actions seem so simple, but I think go a long way in distracting from self-enriching behaviors to community-enriching behaviors. I know there are even better ideas out there than this; anyone care to share?

Florida gardening

2006-11-16T21:50:00.000-05:00

The growing season in Florida is just barely underway. I’m brand new to gardening (I haven’t gardened since I was a kid), so I started small with a couple raised beds. One is shown in the pictures below.

We have a sampling of tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, carrots, scallions, pepeprs, spinach, lettuce, and radishes on the left, and strawberries on the right. A good windstorm the other night knocked a dead branch full of precious deciduous leaves from my elderly neighbor’s tree, which I procured in spite of her confused stare at the request. It was a lucky find of free mulch for the strawberries in a place where leaves rarely fall.

If you build it…

2006-11-13T16:43:00.000-05:00

You are a genius. You just designed a 3000 square foot house completely powered by a 100-foot tall windmill and a massive rainwater cistern driving a paddlewheel. The three-story house boasts an intensive green roof, two wood-burning stoves, strawbale insulation, 2x12 framing timbers, and a greenhouse for your banana crop. Cool. Now build it.

If time and money are at your easy disposal, building your design may pose no problems. Of course, non-standard construction such as wide-board framing or green roofs will challenge most contractors, taking longer and costing more than conventional techniques. Plan on building it yourself instead? Anticipate things taking MUCH longer, especially if you have little experience or help. Building after Peak Oil effects have hit? Game over.

These concerns illustrate the reasoning behind including producibility requirements in Systems Engineering. It doesn’t matter how avant garde or functional a design is if it can’t be built with the available resources.

Consider your finances as you’re designing. Can you really afford a 30% efficiency 5 kW solar array with a tracking motor? Can you afford to use solar arrays at all? If not, what are the alternatives you can use to still meet your requirements?

In the context of our discussions, time is perhaps the most critical factor. According to some Peak Oil experts, oil production (and available energy) may already be declining. Can you risk taking five years to build your sustainable dream house? Can you risk even one? Maybe you should rethink your plans to ensure that you have a smaller-scale option available before you start on designing for more comfort.

There is also the matter of physically building your house. One or two non-experts can probably manage well enough to build an 800 square foot one-story house in short order, providing they have adequate tools and ingenuity. But suppose you plan on having a basement in rocky soil – your back will be in severe pain if you don’t have either a backhoe or 50 friends. Can you hand-mix enough concrete for it? Dubious. How about constructing your cistern? Think about what heavy equipment will be available or affordable over the course of your building schedule.

Producibility is just one more idea to keep in the back of your mind as you are designing, along with maintainability and reliability. Spending the time considering such things now could save you from heartache and failure in the future.

Waste of a good woodburning stove

2006-11-10T11:27:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the drop in activity -- I've been out-of-town and my internet connections did not pan out.

The other day we were looking at a house up north with a woodburning stove in the basement. Since the lot was heavily wooded, a woodburning stove was a great addition to aid in the warming of the house and transistion past Peak Oil. Unfortunately, the design of it was less than brilliant -- the stove pipe was routed from the basement to the roof outside of the house. It was such a bizarre thing to do, I could hardly imagine why they had done so. Besides the obvious loss of heat for warming the inside of the house, putting the stovepipe outside drastically increases the rate of creosote buildup. This raises the risk for chimney fires and constricts the air flow within the pipe.

The benefits of the wood stove could be recaptured by enclosing the pipe with brick and busting out the old exterior section, or by simply re-routing the pipe through the interior of the house. Both options are easy enough in concept, but a pain to implement on an already completed house and stove. This is just another prime example of why it's so important to lay out your entire system before you build it in order to save loads of work later on.

Bug Boom

2006-11-06T16:48:00.000-05:00

LiveScience had an article discussing the implications of an insect population boom in response to global warming. One sentence that stuck out at me was: “If they’re crop species, we could count on needing to use more pesticides and it could be very costly...” What are the implications for the organic gardener without access to (or desire for) pesticides? Over the coming years, it might not be a bad idea to study up on what type of pests munch on your crops in warmer latitutes, so you have an idea of how to fight them should they appear in your area. And, as always, ensure you plan out multitudes of crop diversity for your garden.

Child Safety Requirements

2006-11-03T06:36:00.000-05:00

There are important differences between requirements and specifications. Requirements give specific information about the project (or sub-project) at hand whereas specification give general guidelines to follow. I’ll try to illustrate the distinctions using one of the underdeveloped topics in the Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem: making the Homestead safe for children.

Notice that all ambiguous terms in a requirement must be defined explicitly or by referencing a specification. Also note that not all values are defined in these requirements and specs; there are placeholders that we will fill in with later research.

The Homestead shall have railings (per Spec XYZ) on all exposed stairways.

The Homestead shall provide safety protection for all sharp corners per Spec ABC.

The Homestead shall provide safety barriers (per Spec AAA) around all hazardous areas and devices.

The electrical system shall provide protection for electrical outlets per Spec AAA.

Spec XYZ:
Railings must be X feet high above the stairway. Railings with slats must have a slat spacing of less than Y inches.

Spec ABC:
Corners can be deemed “rounded” or “sharp” by inspection. If pressing your palm on the corner leaves an indent, it requires protection. Protection can consist of foam, sponge, or cloth securely attached to the fixture.

Spec AAA:
A safety barrier near any hot object such as a wood stove or water heater should be at least X feet away and composed of non-flammable materials.
Electrical outlets may be capped with plastic inserts or an external cover.

These specifications are not complete, but hopefully demonstrate what specs should contain.

Sustainable Power Resources

2006-11-01T22:13:00.000-05:00

For the vast majority of us working to transition to a comfortable post-Peak Oil life, our resources are seriously limited. We’re short of available time, money, land, and skills, and our windows of opportunity for acquiring all of these are rapidly shrinking. So, the more help we can get to build our future efficiently and cheaply, the better.

OtherPower has great information and products for building your own power, water, and heating systems from scratch. Done correctly, you can save quite a bit of money by building up your own systems.

Greener Shelter discusses a number of sustainable house design strategies. While they don’t have detailed plans, it might get you thinking in new directions for further research.

Sketchup is a free Google tool you can use to quickly visualize your design plans. It can really help bring your dream home to life.

I’ve only just started exploring Hammer Zone, but it has a lot of information on general home repair projects, much of which is still useful for sustainable design projects.

Why not blow away Peak Oil?

2006-10-27T10:36:00.000-05:00

RobTzu called me in to an interesting thread on LATOC discussing challenges to the notion that we can't save the world from energy decline after Peak Oil. In the thread, we calculated the required cost to replace the current world power usage fully with wind energy. Here was my contribution:

Well, my good calculator went missing at work a few months back, but I'll give it a try anyway :)

Actually, I get slightly different numbers, but your methods are essentially sound:

387.21*10^15 BTU = 4.09*10^20 J = 4.09*10^17 kJ
(reference #4 has an error: it cites 1054 for BTU -> kJ when it should be 1055 for BTU -> J)

For world power consumption for one year:
4.09*10^17 kJ /[(365.25 d)*(24 h/d)*(3600 s/h)] = 1.3*10^10 kW
(I'm not sure what number you used for the total time in the denominator -- perhaps I've made an incorrect assumption here on what you wanted to calculate)

Number of solar arrays = (1.3*10^10 kW)/(20 kW) = 6.5*10^8

Cost = (6.5*10^8)*$6000 = $3.9*10^12 ($3.9 Trillion)
However, I see a problem with using reference 2 for the price: it says that units from 2 kW to 20 kW start at $6000 -- so I think the lower number is for the 2 kW unit. We can either find a different source or use the 2 kW for $6000 (still low, I think), which gives us:
Cost = $39 Trillion

One more factor we're missing: In the first line of your post, Rob, it says that wind turbine power is really half the equivalent coal power effectiveness over the course of a year. So, multiply by 2:
Cost = $78 Trillion

Although this is significantly smaller than the numbers you calculated, the main point is still the same: It is incredibly difficult and expensive to replace the entire world electrical grid with wind energy. Even though the number I calculated is near world GDP, it would take at least a decade to scale up production to produce the required number of wind generators. This is if we commit all our economic resources to the project, including food (as Rob pointed out). And, this still doesn't account for what is required to meet current growth in demand.

Solutions for saving the entire world from living with reduced energy is not possible, even with massive conservation, and even if we develop commercial fusion tomorrow. That said, we can save a lot of people from hardship by a massive redirection of efforts if we start now. However, this won't happen anytime soon -- and the longer we wait, the less we can achive. For now, we need to focus on who each of us can protect with our given resources, and design accordingly.

Peak Oil Homestead Helpers

2006-10-25T13:09:00.000-05:00

Adjusting to life without TV

Trained farm dogs were essential in the past and will be so again in the future. Dogs help with herding livestock, fighting off predators, warning against intruders, and (of course) entertaining the children.

Our dog is a Catahoula (at least in part), although we didn’t know that when we got him from the animal shelter in Florida. Catahoulas are dogs typically trained for herding cattle and wrangling wild boar, and make fabulous hunting and guard dogs. We need to learn how to train him for these sort of activities eventually, but for now our main problem is trying to get him enough exercise with on our small suburban lot – they typically need 1 hour of free running time every day! And when he tries going over the fence at every squirrel and small dog, it’s tough to keep him contained. :)

So, my message today is to look into what sort of critters might help you out in your post-Peak Oil future, and make sure to include in your plans how you can best ensure you can keep them healthy and well-fed when the pet food factories disappear…

Water Requirements Throwdown

2006-10-23T08:39:00.000-05:00

Once you’ve reasonably developed the high-level requirements for your design, it’s time to whip out as many requirements as you can. As one of the major concerns following Peak Oil is adequate water supplies, we can start by focusing on water requirements. We’ll also explore a few examples of effective requirements writing.

Let’s start with the following test requirement:
The water system shall provide potable tap water at a temperature suitable for drinking.

This requirement has the right idea, but how do we define what temperature is suitable for drinking? We could say it will provide “cool” water, but there’s no solid definition for this. According to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers cold tap water (for appliance purposes) is less than 86 ° F. There aren’t many solid references on “comfortable” cold tap water, so for now let’s choose (by intuition) 50 ° F for the lower end of cold tap water temperature range.

Similarly, we need a requirement for hot tap water. We can use guidance from the reference above:
The water system shall provide potable tap water at 112 ° F – 145 ° F.

Since one of our driving objectives is that the homestead will be safe for children, we need to ensure that the hot tap water isn’t too hot. However, there is a risk of Legionnaire’s Disease if they are allowed to incubate in hot water.
So we need a balance between water that reduces the risk of Legionnaire’s Disease yet doesn’t scald children. You can weight the competing concerns yourself, but remember that you don’t have to have a hot water heater – you could use a tankless heater or go old fashioned and boil water on the stove yourself. So there are design solutions that could meet the competing requirements.

With an eye toward maintainability, we can write:
The water system shall provide a source shut-off mechanism.
This function will enable practical servicing of the water system.

The water system shall remain above 40 ° F at all points.
This is to ensure the pipes won’t freeze in winter. It’s unlikely you would need a similar requirement on the high end – but worth considering if there’s a chance you could approach boiling (maybe a design-specific requirement when the time comes).

Peak Oil dividing lines

2006-10-19T07:39:00.000-05:00

The Peak Oil community is divided into three main camps: “doomers”, who anticipate devastating and total collapse; “optimists”, who believe technological breakthroughs will mitigate most of the crisis; and “cornucopians”, who believe any potential peak is decades or centuries away (or non-existent altogether).

Personally, I would fall somewhere between doomer and optimist. After analyzing production and usage data for energy, getting a good grasp of the physics of energy usage, and obtaining a limited education in the world’s complex economics, I’ve concluded that a major energy and economic collapse is inevitable in our near future. (This is even with excluding the converging crises of water, global warming, and pollution from the discussion.) I have no confidence that an energy alternative capable of approaching our increasing demand will magically appear.
However, consider these excerpts from this article in Counter Currents yesterday:

A community may not have enough foresight, labour, tools, or funds to create alternatives to whatever their members use now for heating, lighting, cooking, refrigeration, water collection, water pumping, and disposal utilization of gray water and human waste.
…
There may be pockets of survivors who will be able to harness wind, water and sun using civilized technology for a while, but eventually the machines will wear out.
Where do you buy replacement parts, how do you make parts without plastic or wires?
How do you refine the metals needed to make circuits and transistors?
Those who know, no longer do; those who do, no longer know. How much knowledge will manage to survive the post collapse period, for the time that comes after when it may become useful again?
…

The author paints a dreary doomerish prospect for the future, but for me it reinforces my belief in careful engineering design. I have no illusions that life for isolated communities will be difficult. I do have faith, however, that we will have the capacity to engineer novel methods to capture solar, wind, and water energy, if not sustain our existing equipment. Yes, manufacturing wires and silicon panels is difficult without an industrial infrastructure, but I believe we can find alternative (if less efficient) processes to do so.

Such is my faith in the power of technology – innovation won’t allow us to live beyond our available energy, but it will enable us to find sustainable solutions to continue a reasonably energized life.

Homestead Example Problem Update

2006-10-18T17:02:00.000-05:00

The link to the Objectives and Requirements Document for the Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem on the right sidebar now links to an updated document. The free site I'm temporarily using doesn't allow hot-linking, so there's an intermediate click required. This is just a temporary fix until I get a new site up and running.