Off-grid priority

[jacob]

I would prefer off-grid water and sewage.
WRT to electricity, I'd go for reduction before installing a big PV system. The only thing I'd really want PV for it computing and lighting (and maybe not even the latter).
Needless to say---but I'm going to anyway---it is very important to get off the need to heat one's home as soon as possible. The problem with current housing is that many have been built to be air tight with little insulation intended to be regulated with HVAC. Switching off the heat on one of those will result in bad condensation. This is one of the stupidest moves in modern construction. Seeing that I'm aiming to move north, the choice would be to go for an older house.

[JustChristine]

I've read a number of articles about zero-energy homes in the past year and the concept absolutely fascinates me. I have a love/hate relationship with my utility company and would LOVE to tell them how much I HATE them and where they can stick there yearly billing screw ups.
Most of the houses in the articles I've read used a combination of passive solar heating, loads of insulation and a small heat source (pellet stove or fireplace). Of course, all these homes were newly built and most were way larger and more expensive than anything I would ever want. I've often wondered feasible it would be financially & practically to convert an existing home to a zero energy home.

[Concojones]

@Jacob: have you never thought of building your own house? I'm not the handyman you are, but designing & building my own small house is something I'd like to do (and am going to).

Also, you mentioned lighting and computering, but what about heating, up north? Remember the moist European Winter ...and Fall ...and Spring ...and half of Summer

[jacob]

I've thought about it. I'm not about to contract a normal house sized project though. I think I need to start small (to remain confident). I'm not really that much of a handyman. I've been quite professionalized in my former life, but I'm working my way out of it. I wonder how long it takes to become one's own contractor.
The problem with heating up north is the source of the heating. It's peaking. Northern Europe is already importing. How long can it keep importing a finite resource? Well, it depends on the military strength of Europe vs the exporter. A lot of nations are doing this math these days.

[Steve Austin]

I share strong interest in zero-energy / Passivhaus structures, but would want a DIY gig, starting small like ERE says, and then expanding when/if needed. I love tinkering with systems, so my ideal toy/tinker/starter project would involve the following overlapping, mutually supporting sub-systems (rough sketch, not yet to the point of quantifying costs and energy needs is given under the Nullhof topic)....

[KevinW]

I am a big fan of passive solar design. It is actually a rather mature technology and I'm surprised I don't see more houses built along those lines. From what I've read a cohesive design with a solar mass, earth sheltering, proper exposure and overhangs, deciduous tree cover, and passive ventilation can maintain a comfortable temperature year round without any mechanical HVAC equipment or energy inputs.
I've looked for a building approach that is DIY-friendly and passive solar-compatible, and what I found was

- Earthships

- slipform stone

- dry stacked concrete blocks
Building codes and city ordinances are a huge practical obstacle to any of these alternative approaches. Usually it is easier to move to the country where these rules don't exist, but then you need to spend a more money and energy on transportation, which ends up being a catch-22.
After HVAC, I think the next-lowest-hanging fruit is food storage. We are phasing in traditional storage methods such as canning, fermenting, dehydrating, and root cellaring for this reason.
For water I'd love to have something like an Aeromotor windmill ( http://www.aermotorwindmill.com ). However again there's the problem of codes.

[Steve Austin]

Don't know much about windmills (thanks for the link, reading now), but if you imagine needing to generate electricity for household appliances or charging vehicle batteries, better to have two systems (wind turbine + electric water pump; or just a windmill) or just one? Will have to run some numbers on this.
On rural living and transportation, if not too far out from a town:

* electric vehicles charged with excess energy generation

* an ERE waystation, little sleeper shed where bicycling ERErs could book an overnight and then hit another leg to "town" the next day? what's a good one-day ERE bicycling range? 40 mi? 60 mi?

[Q]

Thus, ERE REIT. Like Godfather III or something - I mean like the secret society owning lots of land...

[jacob]

Windmill + water pump + reservoir + gravity feed electric turbine or filter to fresh water.
If you were a serious-serious bicyclist, 100+ is not undoable. Road racers don't call 100 miles a century. They call it "a long ride".
The human body can do much more than what we usually ask of it. We have gone soft.

[Concojones]

I think off-grid is cool, but personally, I'd just use whatever energy source is currently cheapest and most practical. Right now, it's typically fossil fuels, but as they get more expensive, society will switch to alternatives, which will then become cheaper (economies of scale) and I'll follow.
I'd prefer the world to ditch fossil fuels much sooner, but I'm convinced it's not going to happen. I'm just being pragmatical, focusing my efforts where I think they'll pay off.

[jacob]

@Concojones - The problem with that approach is that alternatives are subsidized by the high "energy returned on energy invested" (EROEI) of fossil fuels. When fossil fuels become scarcer and prices go up, prices for alternatives will go up as well. The idea is, therefore, to buy the assets to run the alternatives before fossil fuels get too expensive.

[Concojones]

@Jacob: thought-provoking what you're saying there about EROEI and prices. Any idea what the difference in EROEI (between fossil fuels and alternatives) is like? I can see how more demand for alternative energy can drive up production costs ... temporarily, until supply catches up. Or do you see any limiting factors in increasing supply? Isn't there plenty of silicium around to produce solar panels?

[jacob]

EROEI for early oil fields were 100-200. EROEI for contemporary oil fields is somewhat lower with numbers ranging between 5 and higher. Wind is often quoted as having a value of 20. Corn ethanol is like to have a value under 1 which is why it failed miserably as a fuel source. The EROEI for PV is debated. It is generally believed that it is over but close to 1. The fact that it takes a couple of decades to recover the money cost should be a hint that this figure is approximately correct. You can therefore think of silicon PV panels as a big battery storing fossil fuels for the next few decades. Therein like the speculative investment potential.
It's pretty hard to evaluate these numbers as they are part of a complex system of supply chains. For example, wind mills are built using large amounts of iron and steel which is currently being mined with fossil fuels. It would stand to reason that if wind energy were to be used to mine the resources used to build the wind mills, it would not score as well.
It is practically impossible to disentangle these numbers from each other. Where do you stop? What about the fuel burned to drive the windmill workers to and fro their jobs, etc.
There's plenty of silicon around much as there is plenty of hydrogen around. They just don't exist in a useful form but like sand (Si02) and water (H20) respectively. It requires large amounts of energy to refine them. Energy is a limiting factor. As much as 40% of the cost of a solar panel is in the electricity used to make the silicon wafers.
What is important to realize though is that these relations are important beyond the field of economics. Economics presume there is a market. Physics dictates whether that market actually exists.

[Concojones]

Thanks for clarifying! I looked up EROEI on wikipedia and it said something similar about oil.
If indeed solar has an EROEI of close to 1 (plausible!) then it seems like we have a problem, Houston. We need an energy source with EROEI > 1, so that we can tap its energy to produce more of it (EROEI^2). Wind probably has capacity limits. But there have to be more options than wind, not? Also, why the f*** are certain renewables promoted by governments around the world if their EROEI is around 1!!?? Yes, we aren't always being sensible, but this would be plain stupidity.

[jacob]

So you're asking "why aren't humans rational?"
I wouldn't underestimate plain stupidity It is a widely held belief that "they" will think of something if we simply write them a big enough check. After all, this is what has happened in the past. (Also, isn't this how most consumers think ... any problem can be fixed with a phone call and a credit card.) Indeed, the belief in human ingenuity is strong --- particularly in those who do not seem to posses any. (Sorry for being very cynical about this ).
The reason corn based ethanol was promoted is that corn farming in the US is heavily subsidized with tax payer money. There is a strong lobbying effort and this is why the American people are fed a diet of corn syrup and other junk. It would seem like a natural step to increase market share by feeding the stuff to the cars as well. And since the tax payer economy runs on oil and not ethanol, they had the energy to spare for this folly. Meanwhile, people in the ethanol business got temporarily rich.
Wind is likely the best option. Other solutions are breeder reactors (think plutonium ... these haven't done too well in the past), wave power (talked about at length with several test stations but as far as I'm aware, little/no commercial operations), coal (that would be really bad), better PV, and better ethanol (like sugar cane).

[oCoCarbon]

As regards the EROEI of various electricity sources, wind does seem to be one of the best, barring large-scale hydroelectricity [1]. But that also depends on scale. You need a pretty decent sized turbine and a pretty decent wind speed before it's worthwhile.
For grid-scale applications though, there's not much better.
Jacob: "It would stand to reason that if wind energy were to be used to mine the resources used to build the wind mills, it would not score as well."
I'm not sure why that stands to reason. It is certainly debatable whether the life-cycle embodied energy of battery-powered plant is higher than that of fossil-fuelled plant. This is mainly because internal combustion engines are much less efficient than electric motors.
In fact, as most batteries have a life cycle efficiency of more than 0.5 - 0.6, that should only bring the EROEI down by at most half [2].
[1] http://ococarbon.wordpress.com/2010/05/ ... balancing/

[2] http://ococarbon.wordpress.com/2010/05/ ... eneration/

[jacob]

It would stand to reason because in an EROEI calculation it is hard to account for all the energy input in steel, mining, worker life support, ... and because these costs are current primarily paid for with energy sources (fossils) that very likely have better EROEIs. This rubs off on the wind power EREOI calculation.
The argument is similar to trying to track who pays the taxes and where are the taxes going. Most taxes are paid be a very smaller number of high income people (the oil analog) and thus received by a large number of people. The question then ... would taxes for everybody go up if all the rich stopped paying taxes. Answer yes.

[oCoCarbon]

Jacob: "... and because these costs are current primarily paid for with energy sources (fossils) that very likely have better EROEIs."
That's also very much debatable. Do you count the long-term energy costs of adapting to climate change, acid rain, etc as part of the fossil fuel EROEI? What about of cleaning up oil spills?

[jacob]

No, I definitely do not count those. My main concern in these calculations is that we don't pick something which turns out to have an EROEI close to 1 (like corn ethanol and probably silicon based PV). Fossils are tricky and you make a good point about the EROEI not being a number fixed in time in that there may be more costs later. It would indeed be catastrophic if we've been using a energy source with an ultimate EROEI of less than 1 for a few hundred years.
The climate change adaption would be on the order of a few percent though (economically speaking from the current perspective --- species loss may in retrospect turn out to be priceless). I don't think it would significantly alter EROEI calculations.

[oCoCarbon]

I could hardly try to put a number on the energy cost of adaptation. It depends to what degree we try and adapt to - and to what extent we try to avoid the worst effects by moving away from oil, coal and gas. I bring this up as a follow-up to something Gail the Actuary posted recently on The Oil Drum. The post had a graphic showing the cost of cleaning up a tonne of oil in various places around the world. The cost in the USA was hugely more than in the rest of the world, mainly to do with the level of clean-up expected.
In any cost-benefit analysis you try and bring all the externalities - the same applies to in EROEI.
But the cost of externalities depends on the policies in place. If you are willing to spend huge amounts to clean up an oil spill that will inevitably use more energy than letting nature take its course, at least in the short run.
And building on that, I guess in some sense you could even count the energy invested in low-carbon energy, geo-engineering, carbon scrubbing from the air or whatever else we come up with as part of the energy invested in making up for the effects of a few hundred years of low upfront EROEI energy.
But coming back to the original point, even before any longer term energy costs the EROEI of coal-fired electricity isn't as great as it's often made out to be. Once it's been transported to the power station, lost energy through thermal inefficiency, had the sulphur scrubbed from the flue gases, and potentially had the CO2 captured and sequestered you're left with an EROEI that's nothing like that of a large wind turbine (or solar or nuclear for that matter). And with fossil fuels, that will only get worse as they get harder to get hold of.
http://ococarbon.wordpress.com/2010/08/ ... and-eroei/