Zero Carbon Solutions, LLC

07/09/2013

Flux Capacitor, Part II – Revenge of the North Atlantic Gyre
Ed Paslawski at the beach

I’m afraid of my food.
“Consumption Guidelines for Ocean Fish and Shellfish from New Hampshire Fish and Game”: “Fish can be an important part of a healthy diet, but some ocean fish and shellfish contain varying levels of pollutants like mercury, PCBs and dioxins and may pose a potential health risk. Because of this, the N.H. Department of Environmental Services recommends the following guidelines for eating Saltwater Fish, Shellfish and Commercially Available Fish:”
I’ll stop there. The list they provide implies that the bigger the fish the less you should eat and the less often you should eat it. This brings me to the:

Name the North Atlantic Garbage Patch contest.

Yes, I know it has a name already, “the North Atlantic Garbage Patch” but I think we could put our heads together and come up with something a whole lot better. As a people we own it, after all it is mostly our trash that it is composed of, given the operation of the Jet Stream and Gulf Stream. The winner will receive a one-way trip to the patch.

From our friendly Wikipedia page: “The North Atlantic garbage patch is an area of man-made marine debris found floating within the North Atlantic Gyre, originally documented in 1972. The patch is estimated to be hundreds of kilometers across in size, with a density of over 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer.”

According to Richard A. Lovett writing for National Geographic News on March 2, 2010:
“Tiny pieces of trash, each less than a tenth the weight of a paper clip, make up most of the debris, Law said February 23 at the American Geophysical Union's 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon. In some places the students (7,000 of them over time sampling the water) found more than 200,000 bits of trash per square kilometer (520,000 bits per square mile). The vast majority of these fragments come from consumer products that were blown out of open landfills or were tossed out by litterbugs.”
So what’s so bad about that?
In another article in the National Geographic news by Carolyn Barry in August 20, 2009:
“Though ocean-borne plastic trash has a reputation as an indestructible, immortal environmental villain, scientists announced yesterday that some plastics actually decompose rapidly in the ocean. And, the researchers say, that's not a good thing. The team's new study is the first to show that degrading plastics are leaching potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A (BPA to you, remember why you got rid of your old Nalgene and baby bottles?) into the seas, possibly threatening ocean animals, and us.”
Ok, I get it. The plastic gets smaller and smaller and the fish eat it and then big fish eat little fish and then we eat fish (probably because we are afraid of antibiotic fed meat and chicken) that are full of bisphenol A, PCBs, dioxin and mercury from batteries and CFL light bulbs that went into our landfills and ended up in groundwater that made it to our lakes, rivers and oceans which we then personally recycle by eating. It actually shows up in X rays, I’m not kidding.
This, of course, brings me back to the Flux Capacitor (see previous newsletter). Don’t bury trash, recycle it intensely, gasify and incinerate the remainder for power and heat. If we use it we can close polluting coal power plants and deal with our waste problem head on. No more plastic bottles blowing into the water from the thousands of coastal landfills. We simply cannot ignore it, because the fish eat it and we eat the fish. Try the $40 swordfish PCB special entree.
To finish the fish story the following quote is from an article titled “The Pollution Within - Toxic People” published in October 2006 by David Ewing Duncan:

“I don't eat much fish, and the levels of mercury in my blood were modest. But I wondered what would happen if I gorged on large fish for a meal or two.” “That night I ate the halibut with basil and a dash of soy sauce; I downed the swordfish for breakfast with eggs (cooked in my nonstick pan). Twenty-four hours later I had my blood drawn and retested. My level of mercury had more than doubled, from 5 micrograms per liter to a higher-than-recommended 12. Mercury at 70 or 80 micrograms per liter is dangerous for adults, says Leo Trasande, and much lower levels can affect children. "Children have suffered losses in IQ at 5.8 micrograms." He advises me to avoid repeating the gorge experiment.”

I like fish almost as much as I like beef. Although I will say that I’m grinding my own hamburger ever since I read the New York Times article about the girl who became a paraplegic after eating a slightly undercooked frozen hamburger. So what’s left, tofu and green beans?

Where do we go from here?

1) Recycle like your life depended on it, it does.
2) Put the unrecyclable trash in our Flux Capacitor by gasifying the biodegradables and incinerating the remainder for heat and power.

It’s better than burning coal, oil and gas. We are stuck with the trash so let’s just use it because if we landfill trash it makes methane. Ok, natural gas (assuming there is anything natural about fracking) burns cleaner but the upstream generation of methane in the process of collecting natural gas makes it every bit as dirty as coal.

Oh, and don’t forget to submit your name for the humongous pile of trash floating in the Atlantic Ocean. You can tell your friends you are vacationing in the Saragossa Sea if you win.


A few words about ZCS:

Zero Carbon Solutions’ mission is to accelerate conversion to energy efficiency and locally produced renewable energy by presenting clients with a sole source solution. ZCS takes a complicated process and reduces it to a single decision point. We do the research, create the solution, manage the installation and find the funding to pay for the upgrades for commercial property owners and homeowners. ZCS eliminates the confusion over what you need, what to buy, how much you will save and what rebates, credits, grants and loans you can use for funding.

Please do not hesitate to call or contact us through our website.

www.zerocarbonsys.com

Your single source energy efficiency solution provider

Zero Carbon Solutions is a project management company that provides energy efficient solutions to increase your property's cash flow and reduce your green house gas emissions. The Company serves as your single source turnkey provider to enable you to take

06/18/2013

A few more steps toward a renewably powered grid
Ed Paslawski
June 15, 2013

And, on occasion, there is good news in the morning paper. On June 4, 2013 the New York Times delivered this to read along with my morning coffee:

“WASHINGTON — The federal government will hold the first lease sale for commercial offshore wind energy projects at the end of July, the Interior Department announced on Tuesday. The sale will offer 164,750 acres of federal waters off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. If that is fully developed, officials said, it could produce as much as 3,400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than one million homes.”
Harvesting offshore wind power has the additional benefit of providing a more predictable wind regime than onshore installations. Capacity factors for offshore wind can be 50% or as much as 5o% to 150% greater than onshore wind farms that have 20% to 35% capacity ratings. Atlantic Wind Connection estimates the Mid Atlantic has the potential for a future installed resource of 7,000 megawatts or enough to power 1.9 million power hungry US homes.

The offshore wind, wave and tidal resource may be closer to realization than we think. Atlantic Wind Connection is in the process of planning the first 189 miles of offshore HVDC cable to serve the offshore wind industry off the mid-Atlantic coast. The line will eventually span the coast from New York City to Washington DC.

So, since they are setting aside 165,000 ocean acres for wind power, why not fill the gaps in between towers with wave and tidal energy generation. Just think, 24-hour power with no intermittent power problems for the grid. It should be a natural and it can piggyback on the transmission lines serving the offshore wind farms. Scotland thinks so. The Scots are in the process of installing a 10 megawatt tidal energy farm and a 40 megawatt wave energy farm to add to their existing base of on and offshore wind farms. Interesting that a country with only 5.2 million people could be so far ahead of the US in renewable power generation. Scotland currently generates 35% of its power from wind, tide, waves and hydro. The US contribution from renewable sources is currently at 13% of which 60% is from hydro.

The US, with over 12,000 miles of coastline, multitudes of tidal inlets, sun-drenched uninhabited deserts, 120 million rooftops and on and offshore wind alleys, need never import another drop of oil or gas or burn another ton of coal if our government would simply address the issue.

Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts understands both the problem and the solution:

“To address that (securing Massachusetts’ energy future), Patrick pushed for three pieces of legislation, he said: “First, the Green Communities Act enabled us to set ambitious goals for renewable energy: 250 megawatts of solar by 2017 and 2,000 megawatts of wind by 2020.” (The commonwealth had previously produced only 3 megawatts each of solar and wind energy, he said.)”
“The second piece of legislation, called the Global Warming Solutions Act, set a series of goals for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, calling for a reduction of 25 percent (from 1990 levels) by 2020, and a cut of 80 percent by 2050.”

To meet the Governor’s goals continued greening of the grid and switching from oil heating and electric resistance heating to a VRF air source heat pump would meet the 2050 requirement today.

After a grueling quest and adding 468 MW to Governor Patrick’s goal, Cape Wind is expected to start construction by the end of this year on a 130-turbine offshore wind farm that will reduce GHG emissions by 734,000 tons and power more than 100,000 homes and businesses. Let’s hope the next Massachusetts offshore wind farm doesn’t take over 12 years to permit.

According to a June 2012 study by the National Renewable Energy Lab the technical potential of rooftop PV in the US is 664 gigawatts, more than enough to supply the power needs of every home in the United States. Offshore wind potential, according to the same report, is 4,200 gigawatts. So we just need a fraction of the technically achievable to alter our current dependence on fossil fuel.

A greener grid combined with high efficiency electric heat pumps can replace fossil fuel heating in our homes and businesses and significantly decrease GHG emissions.

Cost effective wind and solar energy storage remains the missing link. On site storage of renewable energy can double the effectiveness of a local renewable energy system. Simply eliminating grid line losses, which can be as high as 60% of the carried load, would take us a long way to eliminating the burning of fossil fuel for heat and power. We desperately need a Manhattan project for the production of cost efficient, long life storage batteries.

The point of this ramble is that current technology is sufficient to replace oil heating and electric resistance heating in the Northeast and reduce the dependence on oil and gas for heating thus putting an end to all of this fracking and importing. A greener grid combined with local and on site electric power generation tied to electric inverter driven VRF heat pumps can significantly reduce our energy costs and greatly reduce harmful GHG emissions. At the same time the process of conversion will create an abundance of new, high quality jobs and put a lot of spending money back into people’s pockets to further stimulate our lagging economy.



A few words about ZCS:

Zero Carbon Solutions’ mission is to accelerate conversion to energy efficiency and locally produced renewable energy by presenting clients with a sole source solution. ZCS takes a complicated process and reduces it to a single decision point. We do the research, create the solution, manage the installation and find the funding to pay for the upgrades for commercial property owners and homeowners. ZCS eliminates the confusion over what you need, what to buy, how much you will save and what rebates, credits, grants and loans you can use for funding.

Please do not hesitate to call or contact us through our website.

www.zerocarbonsys.com

Your single source energy efficiency solution

05/09/2013

We have ideas on how to increase your energy efficiency and stop wasting money. Tell us about your property and we'll see how we can help!

05/07/2013

Tired of throwing money away? We have energy efficient solutions to increase your property's cash flow and reduce your green house gas emissions! Get in touch to hear how we can help you save money and go green.

05/07/2013

Hello, Facebook world! We are here to discuss renewable energy with you!