What this blog is about:

I am mainly interested here in alternative and renewable energy, hence the name. Fans of "Wallace and Gromit" will recognize it as homage to the scene in The Wrong Trousers (from Ardman Animation / Nick Park) where Gromit is reading Electronics For Dogs. This is certainly not to imply that the readers of this blog are somehow not intelligent, (someone once said "Thou art wise and liberal as a dog", meaning it as a deep compliment) and people familiar with the Wallace and Gromit series will know that Gromit is generally the wiser one of the pair, and often more technically involved in the details.

My particular interest in W&G comes from my lifelong interest in invention and inventors – as a child my hero was "Gyro Gearloose" of the Carl Barks Disney Comics and Stories series and I always wanted to be an inventor, so I became an engineer. (And, an inventor, I guess. I co-hold US patents 4,974,539 and 5,134,954 so it is official, and I would submit that they have a certain whimsical appeal worthy of W&G or Gyro Gearloose.)

In particular, I am a naval architect, the only engineering discipline not having "engineering" in its name, but that’s because it pre-dates use of the term "engineer". (Originally engineers built and operated engines of war, and were soldiers, until "civil" engineers, engaged in similar tasks but for peaceful pursuits, and presumably, more polite, in that they didn’t heave rocks into your castle, came about.) Naval architecture, or more often, naval architecture and marine engineering (NAME), is concerned with all engineering involving ships and boats, so it is a wide field, often referred to as "a mile wide and an inch deep". (I have a license in both mechanical engineering and specifically in naval architecture and marine engineering, so I guess this is probably accurate as well.) More recently, NAMEs have also become involved with other objects in the sea, most notably platforms and vessels for oil exploration and development, which range from more-or-less conventional ships which happen to have oil drilling equipment aboard to bottom founded platforms that only float for a few days while they are being towed into place from shore and installed.

I have had the privilege of working on a variety of marine projects, some of them very unusual, including about five years in the offshore oil industry in the US and the UK. I have also worked on conventional cargo ships, working craft such as research vessels, ferries, tugs and fishing boats, military vessels, marine propulsion systems and most oddly, amphibious vehicles. I am now a senior naval architect supporting various smallish vessels, including military patrol craft, working craft, rescue craft and so on. I am chair of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers Small Craft Technical and Research Committee ("small craft" to SNAME means up to about 200’ long or so, it seems). I am therefore also occasionally involved in a variety of interesting small ship projects on the side.

However, I am also co-chair of a newly formed ad hoc panel on ocean renewable energy, and that brings us back to the main subject. I was originally involved in renewable energy during the Moral Equivalent Of War, (MEOW) as part of a test of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, a method of making power out of the temperature difference between warm surface water and cold deep water. This is, of course, a solar energy system, using the ocean itself as a collector. The project did demonstrate the technical feasibility of OTEC as a means of energy production, but the price of oil plummeted shortly thereafter, so alternative energy was not as interesting. In addition, and this is critical, during MEOW, interest rates were very high – I recall home mortgages above 13%. All renewable energy is paying up front to get something free later, so interest rates are a key element to economic viability, and those rates doomed most renewable schemes.

Since then, though energy has become dear again. We may have passed a peak in oil production, most people are concerned about global warming, which is a consequence of releasing trapped carbon from fossil fuels, and most obviously, energy is expensive, and in the US, oil represents about a billion dollars a day of exported dollars, which I can’t help but believe would improve our economy. Fortunately, there are a lot of opportunities to do something about it.

In 2004, the US used about 88 "quads" (88.5 quadrillion British Thermal Units – 88.5x10^15 Btu – where a Btu is the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit), of fossil fuels, which is a phenomenal amount. On the other hand, this is about the same amount of solar energy that fell on just Fort Dix and White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, and though the solar energy is without efficiency losses, so is the fossil fuel number. This gives us a lot of opportunities. Possibilities for improved efficiency also provide opportunities as well, and a Btu saved is more than a Btu earned, since you don’t incur efficiency losses to convert it (just like after tax savings are more valuable than pre-tax earnings).

I am somewhat disappointed that many of the opportunities for energy generation and conservation, both ocean and shore side, are not well known, though I attribute much of it to the tendency of engineers to only speak to each other, and that is what this blog is mainly about.

There are at least six completely different viable solar-to-electricity technologies, but the public only hears of photovoltaics, and very occasionally Stirling cycle, both of which I would suggest are the top competitors for the least cost effective approaches in the short term.

One major electric load is air-cooling during the summer, which we saw during the recent power crises in Texas and California last summer, as well as the Northeast power blackout. Albert Einstein, in the 30’s, invented absorption cooling, a cooler run by heat, which subsequently became the most common form of home refrigeration for two decades, in the gas heated form, and is still used for recreational vehicles and other applications where electricity is not available. Solar powered absorption chillers were developed some time ago and are literally off-the-shelf, and a good match, since the need for cooling is fairly well correlated to the local availability of solar energy. These systems can also be run by waste heat (like auto exhaust heat), or fuels such as agricultural waste, which might work well in a food processing plant. There are also even simpler and less expensive means of reducing the insolation (solar heat load) on buildings, that reduce the power required for air conditioning.

As an example of a very humble, but simple opportunity, placing a waste heat exchanger in the stove or oven hood in a restaurant or bakery, and using it to heat water could save several kW-hrs per day per installation. A restaurant hood typically costs $10,000 but the heat exchanger alone would probably cost at most $300, so it would be essentially invisible in the cost of a new hood, could be retro-fitted to an old hood and would pay for itself in less than a year. I note that Whole Foods, which has an active commitment to renewable energy, has not fitted these devices to their in-store bakery, but again, I attribute this to ignorance of the possibilities. Admittedly, this is a small thing, as are many energy conservation measures, but from Zechariah, "Who hath despised the day of small things?".

There are also opportunities in the developing world – all of the global warming scenarios I have seen assume the developing world follows a fossil fuel path similar to that of the developed world, but we have to ask why. Fossil fuel is now much more expensive, we have alternatives, and some of those alternatives work better in much of the developing world than in the developed world – solar energy, using thermal processes that don’t require sophisticated manufacturing should be all over Sub-Saharan Africa, since much of the cost of making these systems and running them is labor, and the other factor is how much the sun shines. This might not amount to a whole lot of environmental impact but it would alleviate carbon load, and alleviate poverty. It might even be possible to farm biofuels in these places so the world supply of fuels would be diversified and increased without carbon load, and rural farm incomes could be increased – consider that farming the algae Botryococcus Braunii in ponds covered with plastic sheets might yield 100,000 liters of fuel per hectare – this is 250 barrels per acre, around $5,000 per acre, which is good farming money even in the US, and would mean increasing a small African farmer’s per capita income by a factor of ten.

Hybrid technologies - mixing fossil fuels and alternative energy - may be possible: Electricity from solar power plants can be used to make hydrogen (and oxygen) from water. (In fact, recent developments have shown direct electrolysis of water to hydrogen and oxygen on an appropriate matrix of iron oxide doped with other metals.) We can use the hydrogen with coal to make liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and burn coal in the pure oxygen, giving very high temperature gas. This is salted with metal vapor, ionized and used in magnetohydrodynamic generators (using a conductive fluid passing through a magnetic field). The exhaust from these generators is hot enough to run conventional steam boilers, with the result that the total power plant has very high thermal efficiency due to the high temperature difference, has lower capital costs than exotic gas turbines, and the exhaust is pure carbon dioxide, which can then be sequestered.

Obviously, there are many more such opportunities, most of which I haven’t thought of, but someone has. Many of these are policy changes that modify behavior rather than technology, though technology is sometimes an enabler.

In this blog, I intend to bring out my own crazy ideas and those of others, especially those that combine technologies to achieve a new result. This is especially the case with developments in materials – sometimes new materials enable an old process to be economic or feasible.
I will also try to explain engineering concepts that are important, especially as regards thermodynamics, and more especially "unifying concepts", such as entropy, which ties together temperature, energy and even time, in a concept that Kittel (Thermal Physics, J. Wiley & Sons, 1969) says "This is a definition whose simplicity leaves us breathless." (You might consider this to be homage to another of my heroes, Isaac Asimov, the great science explainer.)

I also reserve the right to deviate into other matters. This includes the purely nautical, as that is my day job, especially where it impacts energy and policy matters such as urban ferries or cases that are just interesting, such as sailing yachts, and super yachts (both of which are under the purview of my SNAME committee) and probably propellers, which I find interesting (feel free to skip this).

Much of my interest in small craft is in small shipyard producibility and especially the impact and implementation of CAD/CAM to improve producibility. This seems a pretty narrow subject, but my point here is that because of the unique problems of shipbuilding, shipyards have been forced to be very clever at exploiting CAD/CAM, and this is a sort of "case study" which might be interesting in other areas.

I probably also will comment on other issues of interest, such as the state of engineering, K-12 science and technology education and other areas that affect engineering. I may also deviate further afield – the SNAME biography I use with my technical papers ends with "His current interests include application of canine evolution and behavior to ship design" – so I will probably work some dog material in, though I do promise, despite my admiration for the late James Quinby, San Francisco admiralty lawyer and poet, not to include any doggerel (my co-author, Paul Kamen, is the author of the response in verse to one of the commentors on our recent SNAME paper on urban ferries – I don’t have his talent for either verse or humor, except for bad puns, I’m afraid).

I hope that this blog is entertaining and enlightening, and better yet, I hope that someone may find a lead to a worthwhile idea in it. I will do my best to be fair and accurate, and give appropriate references and sources for further information. I will also try to keep them short, and much less formal (and less rigorous) than if they were technical papers.

In a sense, this is what I would like to see as "op-ed" pieces if I only I was a decent writer.

Finally, the opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, and do not represent official policy of my employer, or the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, or the host of this blog. I am solely responsible for its contents.