Owen, The Redfish initiatives were unknown to me and I am curious. I have been involved with Windpower issues for some 15 years now and can give some insights why Local initiatives appear easily thwarted.
You cannot escape the Hierarchy that is its purpose to simply prevent anyone from escaping. The hierarchy is now trying to understand creativity and control it directly. So you either capitulate or go to ground stay small and build up credibily beyond its reach. The one good thing about Hierarchies is that they are very dim witted and react only to large objects moving above a minimum velocity. They have huge blind spots. You are very ambitious, having seen some of your ideas already implemented in many areas. This is social engineering as much as environmental. I have been involved with Wind energy for nearly 15 years with no real success. I have worked on innovative housing and sewage handling projects for the High Arctic again no lasting success. Technology is not the problem it is social attitudes and local politicians. They will adapt only if they perceive some kind of immenent threat, that is your challenge and I hope you are better equipped as a social psychologist than I was. There are many lessons I have learned but nothing frightens a politician into action faster than journalists. And most jopurnalists need a corpse or sex scandals before they go on the hunt. So you wil have to work a sex scandel into CoGenerated Local Electric Power. This requires the imagination of a creative fiction writer. North Dakota and Minnesota seem to have developed early with the cooperative approach and grew to actually bringing in local manufacturing. This has not happened across te border in Manitoba but I have been watching it closely. Nowadays I spend more time on High Temperature Flameless combustion technology for the disposal of Municipal Wastes and Human sewage.. We are able to burn materials with very high 65% water content and extremely low emissions, to produce usefull electric energy. Ultimately this would dramatically reduce the garbage issues of your Green LocalInitiative. We have never looked at a system as small as what you seem to desire. But then anything is possible. We are preparing to build a unit to be delivered in pieces by transport truck several thousand kms distant. We also are developing a system to gasify MSW and extract significant energy before disposing of waste. Our technology is self fuelled, we start the system and it runs on the energy from the waste materials. So by gasifying some waste we always have start up fuel ready for shut downs. In the past we designed flexible sewage cotainment systems that collected Methane from human and animal waste but again we were unable to promote such systems in a world of cheap energy. Some of my colleagues are also working on C02 sequestration in oil fields but these Technologies are never coupled in a scenario as you propose due to political indifference. We have some small religious communities across the prairies which incorporate some of your ideas but generally they are economically motivated and often flagrantly violate environmental directives. We see an upsurge in coal fired plants after nearly half a century of absence. What people will do to save a dollar? In fact I believe the Coal is being imported from the USA as most of our mines are long abandoned. Dr.Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky Ph.D.(Civil Eng.), M.Sc.(Mech.Eng.), M.Sc.(Biology) 120-1053 Beaverhill Blvd. Winnipeg, Manitoba CANADA R2J 3R2 (204) 2548321 Phone/Fax vbur...@shaw.ca -----Original Message----- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: April 29, 2010 1:10 PM To: SFx Discuss; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Offshore Wind vs Local Green Listening to a discussion to the Cape Cod offshore wind project: http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp100428a_boost_for_clean_en .. it reminded me of a conversation with Kim Sorvig who made the observation that "Local Green" made much more sense rather than these huge wind farms and other large green installations. The idea is that we would be far better off working on small green energy, and diverse multiple sources (wind *and* solar, say) that could be less intrusive in the long run. Thus developing small solar (panels, water heating, windows/blinds controlling solar input ..) and wind (roof top devices). Redfish has been working on the UK "Merton Rule" and the later "Code For Sustainable Homes" on monitoring the use of such devices. It appears that an interesting percentage (easily 25%) of family energy could be locally generated. Do any of us have experiences with Local Green approaches .. where a family or neighborhood could develop its own energy? Obviously both conservation and generation applied together would be required to get to a large percentage. I'd hate to see the Large Green start to spoil views, disrupt fishing, and have dangerous side effects. It seems we have a hard time thinking "outside the hierarchy". -- Owen -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
