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Eric Hunting proposes that a renewable energy infrastructure must integrate a very vast assortment of technologies and employ a new kind of ‘grid’ more akin to a computer network; bi-direction, variable load, with short term energy buffering and long-term seasonal storage. He also urges for the consideration of how power and architecture can become integrated, both in terms of passive energy characteristics of architecture for sake of energy efficiency but also the integration of active power systems within our built habitat.


The history of energy


An important yet commonly overlooked aspect of the role of energy in our civilization is demonstrated through the physical architecture of our collective habitat and the way it is linked to the logistical characteristics of our energy sources. How and where we live, and thus the footprint and character of civilization, has been largely determined -more so than with any other type of resource- by our dominant forms of energy, their geographical distribution, relative scarcity, energy density, portability, physical handling characteristics, and the nature of their transportation along with the particular transportation technologies they enable. These characteristics produce strategic attractors over the landscape, encouraging concentrations of human activity in certain locations and limiting the convenient or practical range and routes of travel. This, in turn, dictates the relative values of land and the flow of economic and political power relative to that. Thus the nature of our forms of energy effect much of the physical form and underlying structure of our civilization.


We can see how this has played out in the evolving physical footprint of the civilization and the evolving significance of certain geographical locations and transit routes. When animal power and fire were the dominant forms of energy largely natural sources of food, potable water, and fallen timber distribution determined the likely locations of human habitation. The Earth was relatively benign in this respect, with a fairly homogeneous distribution of these resources, though not in particularly great concentrations. We tended to favor transitional habitats; places along the borders between forest and plains or coast biomes where foot travel was easy while access to game and hand-gathered resources was relatively convenient. Humans spread globally on foot, their local transit routes dictated by season and geography, often following migration routes of game animals, with the pace of spread very slow and often driven by larger environmental changes.


With the agrarian revolution, the adoption of stationary settlements, the domestication of animals, and the development of early industry like pottery, ceramics, glass, brick making, and metalworking our energy demands increased radically. We needed to feed both ourselves and our domesticated animals, calling for increasingly intensive agriculture and management of increasingly large spaces. As this stationary lifestyle and new energy-intensive industry quickly depleted local resources like firewood we needed to gather resources over increasingly great distances to meet demand. A growing diversity of new energy sources emerged; charcoal, animal dung, peat (perhaps the first ‘fossil fuel’), coal, animal and vegetable oils, and wax. But most of these new fuels remained specialized in use with firewood, increasingly from felled lumber, and charcoal from firewood remaining the dominant fuels. Firewood is a bulky fuel with low energy density and thus low potential energy per unit mass. Charcoal improved on that -reducing mass by roughly 75%- but it’s production was inefficient. Charcoal production for early industrial uses produced much deforestation in Europe even before the Industrial Revolution. Such fuels were generally inefficient to transport by animal power alone. With the advent rafts and boats to aid bulk transport and the emergence of water wheels and wind mills as yet another new, but stationary, energy source, the spread and footprint of the civilization began to be dictated by the distribution of natural waterways and coastal bays. This remained a dominant factor in the growth patterns of the civilization well into the start of the Industrial Age, the ship or barge remaining the highest ‘bandwidth’/highest efficiency form of transportation even to the present day.


With the advent of canal construction, waterways for bulk transport could be made on demand to provide access to locations much farther from the natural waterways -though these were the largest and most labor-intensive engineering works of the time. Though considered a largely European phenomenon, even Colonial and Post-Colonial America saw use of this technology in its older eastern states, though soon to be obsolesced by rail. Canal development was driven more by the desire to access inland resources -coal in particular as its use grew in prominence as an industrial fuel- to meet demand in existing communities than to spread residential settlement, but did so anyway as it simultaneously produced new roadways (barges were still animal-drawn), opened new potential farm lands, and created new strategic hubs of traffic transfer between wagon and barge traffic. But the massive scale and construction time of canal projects and their limitations by characteristics of geography still strongly limited this pattern and pace of growth -albeit still much faster paced than prior patterns.


The Steam Age, largely dependent upon energy from coal fuel, brought with it increasing demands for energy and other resources along with the technology of railways and steam ships to reach over longer distances and further inland across the globe in search of it. The footprint of civilization thus spread further and wider over the landscape, but still not homogeneously. Railways were far cheaper per mile to construct than canals, could be built with more freedom relative to geography, and offered a far faster means of transport -quickly obsolescing the previous technology except along the largest of waterways where barge size could be maximized and their power mechanized. But one was still largely dependent upon foot and horse transportation off the rail line, largely because coal is still a bulky low-energy-density fuel and steam engines -though potentially made quite small- could not provide the power-to-mass ratio needed to afford a practical personal scale form of transportation competitive to rail using that kind of fuel. Though remarkably light steam powered cars using liquid fuels (with much greater energy density and much less bulk) enjoyed a brief heyday in the first decade of the 20th century, the slow and heavy steam tractor proved the most practical application of steam with off-rail land vehicles. Railways could not build stations at every point along their length. These were built only where the potential for local commerce and industry could justify it -as largely dictated by regional natural resources- and from those points the spread of habitat was limited by foot and animal traffic and so maintained dense urban forms near them even when remarkably small. This is actually what defined the architecture and character of the so-called traditional American ‘mainstreet’, which is a phenomenon of rural rail hub towns associated with their role as intermodal transfer nodes between cart and rail traffic. So rail development tended to follow patterns that linked larger regions of natural resource exploitation to still fairly self-contained urban centers and fairly remote but still similarly self-contained urban ‘town’ satellites.


The latest and most radical expansion in the civilization’s footprint came with the advent of the automobile and crude-oil-derived fuels. These two technologies evolved co-dependently and in concert with key social changes in the early 20th century. Liquid fuels offered very high energy densities compared to previous fuels, allowing a relatively small and easily portable amount of it, in combination with the internal combustion engine, to propel a relatively light vehicle over great distances. However, the oil-derived fuels were not originally ubiquitous, were more expensive than coal, and were technically sophisticated to develop. (sounds just like the complaints we often hear about hydrogen today, doesn’t it?) It would have had a hard time competing with coal energy had it not been for the demand created by the automobile application. Early on gasoline was actually sold in disposable cans from car dealers and general stores! There was no dedicated gasoline distribution infrastructure as we see today. It’s said that, due to the lack of early gasoline production infrastructure, Henry Ford actually ran his initial cars on fuel derived from hemp -which at the time would have made logistical sense because this could be produced anywhere and especially in the farming communities that proved to be the critical early market for the combustion engine auto.


Early in the history of the auto, the electric automobile quickly became the dominant form for this new technology (they even preceded the steam cars) because electric power was, for a time, more readily available than gasoline, the wealthy first adopters of the auto in the early 20th century lived predominantly in the larger quickly ‘electrified’ cities, and they chose to adopt cars for their convenience, safety, quiet, and cleanliness over horses for local transit rather than for range and speed -which rail handled. By that time the health and hygiene problems of the urban environment had come to a peak of cultural concern (consider the typhoid fever and global influenza outbreaks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and all major cities became obsessed with cleaning up their environments as a matter of public safety. This partly drove development of all forms of electric transportation, including trains, trolleys, buses, and cars. That’s right. A key motivation for adoption of early automobiles was that they were more environmentally friendly than horses! And our first popular choices were electric.


But the speed and range limitations of the early electric car -or more importantly the lack of power grid outside of cities- limited the expansion of the auto market. Combustion engine vehicles became necessary for the more utilitarian applications of the technology and its use in rural areas. And the cultivation of ‘motor sports’ and ‘motor camping’ allowed the speed and range advantages of the internal combustion engine to appear more significant. Car developers realized, though, that if they really wanted to make money they needed to tap the market of the growing middle-class. You couldn’t grow a new large industry on a market of rich people. There is never enough of them. However the middle-class of the time also lived predominately in the cities where they relied on public transportation. And so growth of the industry of auto production became keyed to encouraging the middle-class to get out of the city and commute to work by road instead of rail where the constraints of battery technology and the steady increase in ‘routine’ travel distances meant combustion engines would become necessary. And this is where suburbia and the idea of personal property ownership -even if by life-long debt- as the basis of middle-class status came in to influence this evolution.


Another important factor here was the two world wars, which saw a shift toward mechanized warfare and thus a great acceleration of combustion engine and oil fuel production technologies in order to support that and the creation of widespread infrastructures that supported its growth in peacetime. In effect, through war we subsidized the cultivation of a comprehensive oil energy infrastructure that, in peacetime, radically reduced its costs to where oil began supplanting coal even in municipal/stationary power applications and for large scale systems like ships and boats, though ironically during the wars domestic fuel shortages drove a brief flurry of alternative fuel vehicle development which saw the creation of freakish-looking wood and coal gasifier powered cars and trucks.


And so we see this mutually reinforcing dynamic between the rise of the 20th century middle-class, its cultural concepts of property and an emerging consumer culture, suburbia and the real estate and mortgage industries, the technology of the auto and its industry, the oil industry, and the side-effects of war in the evolution toward oil energy dominance in the early 20th century and a resulting transformation of the city as primary habitat to specialized commercial hub and a radical homogenous automobile-enabled spread of the footprint of civilization through suburban development. This is how our civilization got to the form it is in today. Ironically, the environmental movement actually proved an enabler of this evolution by its participation in the demonization of the city and the veneration of rural environments, which only encouraged suburbanization and increased the demand for cars and oil. It’s the single greatest blunder of that movement, and it continues to the present day. (makes one wonder just what was going on in those world famous motor camping trips of ‘the vagabonds’; Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs -a seemingly unlikely group for Burroughs and yet when you look at what those captains of industry, the men largely responsible for the civilization we have now, were saying and writing during those trips they all sound like passionate environmentalists! And then they went home and carried on with the systematic suburbanization of the planet…)


When one grasps this relationship between energy and habitat it becomes quickly apparent why, towards the end of the 20th century, renewable energy faced such difficult obstacles to its development. The logistical characteristics of renewable energy are more consistent with a habitat architecture akin to that of the Steam Age than the Oil Age, where most of the populace is urban, urban habitats are compact, most transit needs local or very long-distance, long-distance transportation handled predominately by rail and ship, and bulk transport of energy off the electric grid is in relatively bulky forms like hydrogen carried by large-bandwidth transport like ship. A world that, fast-forwarded to the present, would look almost exactly like that envisioned by futurist architect Paolo Soleri. In effect renewable energy’s logistical characteristics are very similar to coal. Most so-called ‘modern’ renewable energy technology actually originates in the late Steam Age and early 20th century. Even the most speculative, exotic, and SciFi-sounding renewable energy technologies such as superconducting magnetohydrodynamic exploitation of ocean currents and solar heliostat powered high-temperature plasma generators all trace back to this period. Unfortunately, the Steam Age had already put most of the major urban centers in the wrong geographical places for those technologies to find fertile ground. And the technologies of electric energy packaging -in such forms as liquid hydrogen, redox solutions, and hydrides- lagged far behind that of fractional distillation, thus the critical means for bulk electrical energy transport over truly long distances was a latecomer. (most energy still moves around the world by ship and rail) Renewable energy may be logistically similar to coal, but has an entirely different geographical context based on different optimal production locations (more southerly latitudes) and the limitations of cable distribution/transportation, the result being that the optimal locations and forms of habitation given a reliance on renewable energy are very different from those given coal and oil energy. This has always been the single greatest obstacle for renewable energy development. It’s not the technology. It’s how past energy logistics dictated where we now live and how difficult it is to move electricity long distances to accommodate that.


We have long been snowed into believing that there was a kind of technological inadequacy to renewable energy. It always has to get to some certain level of capability out there on the horizon of the future before it’s ‘practical’. Solar power can’t work if it can’t hit this cost point. Electric cars can’t work if they can’t travel 1000 miles on a 5 minute charge. So-on and so-forth. But that’s never actually been the problem. It’s how and where we live and our inherent reluctance to change that in concert which is determining what’s practical. That one can eliminate the need for the car and alter our energy overhead through the careful design of the habitat is a fact already well demonstrated by countless architects. The ceiling in potential standard of living and quality of life were not lower before the invention of cars and oil energy. As we can see, some rather minor twists in our past environmental and energy history could have seen the Steam Age evolve into the Electric Age and then into a Renewable Energy Age rather than an Oil Age. Maybe all it might have taken was a little bit delayed development of fractional distillation of crude oil, a little faster development of the technologies of refrigeration, and a little better treatment of people like Nikola Tesla who could have given us longer distance power transmission technology sooner. Or maybe all it needed was somehow avoiding one or both of the world wars. But no one ever saw the Big Picture. (except, perhaps, guys like ‘the vagabonds’…)


Defining p2p energy


So what does this exploration of energy history inform us about our renewable energy future and what does this mean for the idea of P2P energy? The basic message is that we cannot consider the development of alternative energy technology and systems independent of the physical characteristics of our habitat and that a transition toward reliance on renewables (or basis on this from scratch for the new community) means an evolution of our habitat in concert with it. We must understand the logistics underlying any energy technology and realize that for it to function practically our habitat and the lifestyles hosted by it must physically conform to its constraints and characteristics. This can be a touchy proposition because what this often boils down to is a change in the value of property -and our cultural perspectives on that value- as it brings with it shifts in the strategic geographical attractors that effect where people can more practically live and thus compels people to move -or resist that compulsion to move through cultural denial, as the case may be. It was easy for the Oil Age to emerge from the Steam Age because expansion toward a homogenous low-density-urban habitat suited tendencies manifesting in the western industrial age culture in general at the time. We have long been in a situation where the car makes all land everywhere potentially high in value because it makes a high standard of living possible almost everywhere. At the same time political mismanagement resulting in urban decay combined with the hyper-veneration of independence, individuality, and property ownership in the western culture, Industrial Age social alienation, systematic destruction of traditional community and family ties, and atrophy of social skills, and the environmental movement’s simultaneous demonization of the city and commoditization of nature (as the unintended consequence of environmental awareness -when people start appreciating things they tend to want to personally own a piece of them…) all helped create a trend of habitat diaspora. These are the forces that drive suburban sprawl today.


In a renewable energy based habitat (a Green Age habitat?) hierarchies in land use re-emerge as dictated by the limitations in electric power storage and distribution as well as a deliberately imposed restriction on the personal mobility once offered by the combustion engine automobile by willful adoption of electric vehicles despite their known limitations, if not an elimination of cars altogether. Functional land use drops rapidly at the periphery of a re-consolidated utility grid more closely tied to the geographical locations of renewable energy production, which itself is more keyed to physical characteristics of geography; solar insolation, wind patterns, etc. This demands we re-evaluate the elements of standard of living and quality of life in order to engineer their alternatives to fit within the new logistical constraints of what we might call a ‘renewable electric lifestyle’ or ’solar lifestyle’. As long as the old technology persists and remains available and governments refuse to impose comprehensive restriction and control over land use to deliberately engineer a solar lifestyle, we cannot force people to adopt this different habitat footprint. Rather, we must see to it that it offers real benefits in standard of living that can mitigate the established compulsion to disperse. Obsolescence is more effective than prohibition. Incentive is more effective than altruistic self-sacrifice.


For instance, let us look at the car in a new way and consider its essential conveniences and inconveniences and the human motivations associated with its use. An internal combustion engine car and an electric car are two different things in terms of functional characteristics. It’s a mistake to assume they should function exactly the same given the differences in the forms of energy they employ, yet for a long time massive engineering effort has been invested in a brute force attempt to make the electric car ‘compete’ with the combustion engine car in performance and thereby ‘prove’ the practicality of alternative energy. But, given the physics-challenging breakthroughs in battery technology necessary to achieve the same energy/mass density as gasoline, that’s folly. (though we’ve been hammering at that nut since the late 19th century and may, at last, be close to this breakthrough) What makes more sense is to ask why and how people use cars and how we can change those needs -or more importantly people’s expectations about what a car is ’supposed’ to do- by changes in our habitat so that they fit within the functional constraints of the electric vehicle. Once -just a few generations ago- most people lived well with no cars. Today there are many people in the US who could quite literally starve to death for lack of a car. Even in a dense urban environment where people’s needs for cars are reduced by perhaps 10-20% of that of suburbanites, people still buy and own cars. So what matters here isn’t how the electric vehicle compares to the combustion engine vehicle in performance. What matters is the transportation characteristics of our lifestyle and how we might change that for sake of a renewable energy powered alternative without a perceived compromise in the standard of living. What is the basis of our need for personal transportation and what are the characteristics of that need, independent of any particular form of vehicle? Maybe the answer isn’t any kind of car but architecture and a set of public services and utilities that precludes the need for personal transportation in the first place while making things more convenient for the individual. Maybe the alternative to the combustion engine car is really just change in the design and location of production of goods! How much of the remaining car use in the urban environment might we eliminate through something as simple as on-demand packet transit? (why do subways not carry cargo?) This is the kind of strategizing that has long been missing in renewable energy advocacy.


In seeking to define the concept of P2P energy we are confronted with these same sorts of issues and questions. Currently very loosely defined, the basic notion of P2P energy is of a system of mutual local energy production that seeks to ‘crowdsource’ a community energy infrastructure that can realize sustainability -ideally through renewable energy technology- while being accessible -in terms of personal capital/labor investment- at a personal and community level. This is a great challenge because physics isn’t on our side in such an endeavor. Most forms of energy production tend to be more efficient at larger scales -which is one of the reasons behind the common centralization of energy production seen today. Some renewable energy technologies are completely useless at small sizes -such as wind turbines. If the suburban housing industry could have turned every house into a self-sufficient island, it would have because it would have accelerated the pace of land development all the more. (in later life Buckminster Fuller, reflecting on his seeming life-long failure to realize his ideal of the Dymaxion House, declared he was not disappointed as he had dodged a bullet. Had the Dymaxion House been realized, its self-sufficiency would have led to the runaway suburbanization of the whole world. This is a commonly overlooked dark side to green technology; its potential to enable suburbanization by making off-grid self-sufficiency increasingly convenient, allowing people to live where they shouldn’t and consume virgin wilderness in the process. Be VERY thankful the flying car never happened…) To make matters worse, performance of renewable energy technology tends to be very geographically dependent. There are few places where it performs optimally and many where it doesn’t work at all.


And yet we have powerful reasons to seek to localize energy production as much as possible; a third of all energy transmitted on long distance power lines is lost to resistance, we don’t, as yet, have a good infrastructure for electric power transport in packaging mediums like liquid hydrogen, and the ‘establishment’ managing traditional energy infrastructure has very plainly demonstrated that it doesn’t have our best interests in mind anymore -if it ever did- and can no longer be trusted with this kind of centralized control over something so critically important to our lives. A P2P energy strategy must therefore seek a balance between systems efficiency and economy of scale within a community context. And given the limitations on performance of any one technology in any one location, a hybrid mix of renewable energy systems is likely in most situations. Ultimately, a renewable energy infrastructure must integrate a very vast assortment of technologies and employ a new kind of ‘grid’ more akin to a computer network; bi-direction, variable load, with short term energy buffering and long-term seasonal storage. Employing such storage calls for development of old fashioned technology like hydropower storage ponds and nascent technologies like phase-change thermal storage banks, large-scale ultracapacitors, liquid hydrogen systems, compressed air storage, vanadium redox, liquid borohydrides, and encapsulated hydrides.


We must also consider the integration of power and architecture, both in terms of passive energy characteristics of architecture for sake of energy efficiency but also the integration of active power systems within our built habitat. Industrial Age energy systems pursued economies of scale that compelled power facilities to be self-contained and set at a distance from the residential habitat. One of the side-effects of this is that the nature of our energy infrastructure has remained obscure to the society at large leading to a general ignorance of what goes on behind the curtains of the energy industry despite the importance to our basic survival. But when energy production is localized, we must learn to live with this hardware. On the up-side this will afford a much greater social awareness of energy in our habitat but with so much of this technology in a nascent form we must cope with aesthetic compromises that, in upper-class communities, have already proven to be a bone of contention. (otherwise ‘green thinking’ wealthy people get up in arms quickly when the wind mills start disrupting their million dollar window views…) Part of this will involve embracing the aesthetics of this technology as much as trying to mitigate it.


A key factor for the physical integration of renewable energy systems into the habitat is their power-to-area ratios. We are used to thinking about these systems in terms of cost-per-kilowatt-hour -which is not unimportant but less critical to the integration of these systems into our habitat. What we need to consider is the physical area of energy systems needed to meet the energy overhead of a given lifestyle. The off-grid power and ‘green’ home movements, as beneficial as they have been to the development of renewable energy, have created misconceptions about the potential self-sufficiency of the individual home. They create the impression of a higher level of self-sufficiency with relatively small energy systems than they actually provide. Most off-grid homes aren’t. Unplugging from the electric grid alone is not a true unplugging from its infrastructure if so much of what your lifestyle is based on still comes out of that ‘fossil fuel grid’ in one way or another. And the net environmental benefits of setting up house on the edge of virgin wilderness just to have the option of being off-grid and using green architecture are dubious at best -especially when you compound this by using it to rationalize SUV use and overly-long commutes! (green architecture has long been stuck with a catch-22; driven to the edge of wilderness and the use of discrete homes just to have the option of using alternative architecture and energy and yet negating most or all of the environmental benefits of that by virtue of the location! The near future will see radical change in what we call ‘green’ housing) So we face a simple but often overlooked question; does your property have enough surface area available to renewable energy systems to actually cover the net energy overhead of its occupants? What is the cost in space for energy production per person based on renewables? Chances are, this is a quite startlingly large figure and larger the more northerly the latitude. So how we find the space for this in our habitat becomes critical -we’re probably going to need so much of it to actually make this work that we might as well design our communities as live-in power systems! Because so much past green architecture has been deployed in the wilderness where space for free-standing systems is no issue, architectural integration of power systems has not been greatly considered. Examples remain few and the products available scarce and of dubious performance -those miniature home wind turbines again come to mind. The simplest solutions will tend to be the most architecturally/aesthetically radical -for instance, whole communities built under a continuous translucent canopy of solar panels and wind turbines using their grid of support poles as primary structural members for habitat structures under it -not a bad strategy in the context of P2P architecture based on spontaneously adaptive plug-in building systems and something already being partly explored in such projects as Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City project, but demanding people accept this notion of living perpetually under a ‘power canopy’. Some negative aspects of such a solar canopy can be mitigated in design. For instance designer Neville Mars’ concept of ’solar forest’ arrays where tree-like structures with large organically shaped solar panel leaves replace the conventional hard rectilinear grid -though how efficient this might be in practice is not clear.



[this author was actually considering just this sort of approach recently when considering the prospects of creating his own modest scale solar farm in New Mexico. Seeking a strategy where the costs of a fallow piece of former farm land and a home on it might be covered by its on-site energy production, I realized that by lofting solar and wind power systems with some translucency to them a couple of storeys above the ground one would still have access to this vast space under it and within a shaded wind-sheltered microclimate retaining a higher level of humidity -which in desert areas most ideal for solar power would be advantageous in reducing the climate control overhead of housing while making the land better for growing. The support poles could then be used as vertical posts for one's own home, to support decking, container gardening, and so on while much of the rest of the 'underspace' could be leased to farmers for cattle or other farming. This seemed a potentially convenient way to automate the finance of a very large piece of property, maximize its renewable productivity, while also covering much of the cost of housing put on it, all while having a minimal physical impact on the natural geography. For the less aesthetically restricted tinkerer/Maker/nerd such a space, with its unlimited adaptive building potential, might be heaven. For others it might seem a colossal eye-sore...]


Another factor to consider is the independent industrial capability for renewable energy, which for things like photovoltaics remains challenging. Just as the typical off-grid home cannot truly be considered ‘off-grid’ when for much of its composition and lifestyle is still dependent upon industrial production from afar, so too does the concept of P2P energy need to consider the manufacture of its energy systems within the context of a community-based P2P industrial capability. Were profit eliminated from the production of renewable energy systems through at-cost local production, a great improvement to their cost-efficiency would be realized. Developers of large remote solar power plants have already come to understand this concept. One of the first of the largest photovoltaic power plants in the US -the Carrizzo Plains Solar Plant- was built with its own solar panel production facility in order to economize on cost of maintaining a very large power array by eliminating the middle-men, so to speak, in their hardware production. As a side benefit, they discovered a market for their discarded solar panels since, though having exhausted their cost-efficiency in the large plant context, they were still useful for home power systems. Here again we face big challenges because of the relative engineering sophistication of many renewable energy systems today and the often exotic materials that they use -and the fact that the less sophisticated the energy system the more difficult it can be to functionally and aesthetically integrate into the habitat environment. What kind of energy systems can a modest scale community produce itself? What are the economies of production scale for different energy technologies? In some situations the overall strategy for energy may depend on the community’s local industrial and engineering capability. For instance, a very small community today -with our western society now composed largely of industrially illiterate people with little functional skills outside white collar corporate environment- may not have much of any industrial capability of its own and may need to more heavily focus on the passive efficiencies of its architecture to compensate for a higher cost for systems bought from elsewhere. But a larger more industrially sophisticated community with a more technically sophisticated society may be capable of a broad diversity of local systems development and production. For instance, such a sophisticated coastal community with the means to build large ocean-going ships by itself at cost might consider a strategy of building and deploying its own OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion) plants at the Equator and linking them by hydrogen or redox-based ‘battery ships’ to the community as a better alternative to turning their town into a giant solar collector.


Altogether, we can see that the proposition of P2P energy must be considered in the combined context of P2P architecture and P2P industry. We much consider the whole community  -not just individual houses- as an integrated system focused -obsessively- on the concept of efficiency in function, thermodynamics, power, and use of space. The ideal green community is a place designed like a volumetric integrated circuit and continually fine-tuned for efficiency by virtue of its adaptive structures. No space should be left with a single function and no space assumed to have a permanent function. If you put a building on a space, you consider if you can garden/farm on the roof. If you garden/farm on a space you consider if renewable power systems can go over that. In some ways the logistics here compare to those of the marine colony which must consider a volumetric organization of a unified structure maximizing the efficiency of space due to the costs of marine platforms. So the logical approach is to vertically layer habitat by function; utility and industrial space at the bottom, commerce above that, residence above that, green space above that, and solar/wind on top. Similar volumetric organizations are already emerging in more modernist eco-village designs.


Strategies and technologies


How then might we begin the development of a P2P energy infrastructure for a new community. Well, given what we know from above the process is likely to be directly linked to the process of P2P architectural design and the logistics of the very specific renewable energy systems we might want to use with consideration for how they integrate with any particular building system and for the P2P industrial capabilities of a target demographic of inhabitants. For the sake of illustration, let’s imagine a very simple model. We will assume our community employs a unified communal structure for the most part as a means of maximizing the passive resource and energy efficiency of its architecture. This is a community based on P2P architecture, where adaptive building methods -plug-in architecture- are employed so as to allow for maximum evolutionary freedom of the community architecture to accommodate the evolving needs of its inhabitants and a process of ’structural learning’ to fine tune the habitat in dynamic response to the larger environment. Nothing is assumed permanent. Even walkways and roads may be moved -and engineered so- on demand. To accommodate this evolutionary freedom, the community uses a very different property model. Something akin to a Kelsonian Community Investment Corporations owns all the property. It, in turn, is owned through stock ownership by all the residents. This allows our adaptive architecture to be employed toward a radical new kind of freedom. All space in the community is ‘free’ for use by ‘vested inhabitants’ on a first-come-basis and in proportion to their stock holdings but at the collective discretion of the community and within restrictions of certain space use as established in a P2P fashion by the community. So basically you can go anywhere in the community that has no established use and build whatever you like but that’s always up for negotiation with the rest of the community who can, as a group (with you as part of that discussion), decide you need to move somewhere else because there’s another functional need for that space. You are always guaranteed a right to space in the community but you have no right to any one particular place except at the community’s discretion -and if that should become inconvenient, you can always sell your stock and go to another community. Now, given today’s primitive building technology such a concept would be a nightmare. But by virtue of plug-in architecture this becomes practical because you can always take apart your home and rebuild it somewhere else quickly, easily, and often by yourself. To accommodate this approach the community may have a two-tier hierarchy of structural systems; a microstructural system that supports things at the personal scale and a macrostructural system that supports thing at the communal scale, hosts freely changing microstructure and a ‘utilities backplane’ for them to plug into, uses larger heavier components, and is evolved at a slower pace. This author has discussed such concepts of P2P architecture in a number of other articles elsewhere.


We’ll assume that this community is composed of a demographic of relatively technically sophisticated people capable of engineering and fabricating at a small scale some relatively sophisticated hardware for their habitat and will seek to rely primarily on solar and wind power, thus integrating systems for this into this architectural system will be key. Previously, we mentioned the notion of a community that is entirely covered by a translucent solar canopy with the grid of support poles for the system serving double-duty as support posts for buildings and the other structures of a habitat. Let’s suppose this solar canopy uses a combination of simple but wide panels based on translucent laminate flex cells on a light frame, more decorative solar trees like those proposed by Neville Mars, solar tension roofs, and the like. Along with this are wind turbines using the same kinds of support poles, but taller with the turbines no smaller than around a 3-5m rotor diameter (horizontal or vertical form factor). Spacing of poles would be generous -a variable grid with spans from 5-10-15m. For supplementary power we might employ bioreactors with fuel cells, though large containerized living machine systems would be employed for most sewerage and graywater. A comprehensive power storage system is based on ultracapacitors short term and vanadium redox systems long term. Using the redox system, the simple fuel cells used with that would allow different voltage power sources to be be integrated by the fuel cell itself and simultaneously charge and discharge all without complex charge controllers. Though bulky and better suited to stationary systems and large vehicles, this technology would allow the community to stockpile seasonal power surpluses, easily manage growth, and transport power off-grid to support field activity or long distance transportation. Working simply like a battery, it allows capacity to be managed simply by bulk storage of a redox solution that can be distributed by pipe, pumped by plastic pumps, and shifted between different storage systems.


Another idea we mentioned earlier was volumetric organization of function through layering. Assuming a relatively small community (a couple thousand people or so) we can apply this approach to our theoretical model in a simple way. The primary ‘macrostructure’ of the community would be defined by solar canopy poles with a utilities backplane linking them at a height of about one storey above the ground. Streets, walkways, and terraces are suspended between the canopy poles creating a gigantic equivalent of a raised floor system in a computer center, the space underneath this ’street level’ being used for bulk and personal storage, garage space for whatever vehicles the community employs,personal packet transit, and freely-adaptive utilities systems based on modular components. Above the street level everything -including the streets/walkways- is freely changeable by inhabitants on demand and fills a space ranging between one to several storeys beneath the solar canopy. Because the community needs no very heavy vehicles traveling through it, its streets and walkways employ relatively light panel systems similar to those employed in homes and buildings and can be freely dismantled as needed. With several storeys under the solar canopy, the habitat would offer much freedom of structural variation. Most roof space would serve double-duty as terrace and garden space and all water drainage would be integrated for water recovery, living machine processing, and reuse. Main residential areas may employ the solar tree canopy style -along with quieter but less efficient vertical wind turbines- for aesthetics while intensive farming areas, composed of large area hydroponic channel arrays, would employ the simpler and more efficient rectilinear solar panel canopy and large open spaces would employ the tension roof canopy. At the outermost periphery would be range for animals, still under the solar canopy and with a concentration of large horizontal with turbines. Light industrial facilities would also be located here -just under the edge of the ’street level’ of the main habitat.


No cars would be used at all in the main areas of the community, electric or otherwise. However, light electric vehicles such as electric bikes, golf carts, Segways, and similar self-balancing two-wheel sit-down vehicles (such as this author’s own proposed ‘Foomobile OScar concept) may be employed along with human powered vehicles. ideally, the community would link to rail or major highways without long conventional secondary roadways. This would allow the community to develop its own long range public transit links based on use of its own power infrastructure -based on bulk redox transport- for it own longer range electric vehicles along the transit routes most important to its inhabitants. With its own internal personal packet transit system -based on simple conveyors or robots deployed under the street level- the community would establish an on-line store/buying club for virtually all shopping for goods not locally produced and linked to the larger package delivery services for added convenience of mail-order trade.


The community structure would be made environmentally self-aware through an IP based network of sensor systems such that throughout its area it monitors temperature, humidity, wind speeds, solar insolation, structural loads, power and water use, traffic, and so on. This would allow a software based model of the habitat to continuously analyze its environmental performance so that the inhabitants can see how their changes impact the environmental performance of the community, thus enabling it to evolve itself in concert with its inhabitants needs to optimally suit its regional environmental conditions. Before the structure would even be built, such a software model may be developed in simulation as a means of preliminary design.


Now, this is just an off-the-cuff vision for what such a P2P energy infrastructure combined with P2P architecture might be like. There are probably countless other ways in which these basic functional principles of systems integration across a unified community structure could be implemented. And, of course, the conversion of existing communities to this model of energy management may take a very different approach. However, at a modest scale this could serve as the basis of designing building experiments to explore and demonstrate these principles and the different technologies employed.

Special issue: p2p energy
Tags: clean-energy, Eric Hunting, p2p

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