Subject: New energy newsgroup: sci.energy.renewable?

From: [email-masked] (Nick Pine)
Date: 17 Sep 1995 05:32:47 -0400

Now that our site has stopped getting all alt groups, for reasons
related to volume, I realize that a lot of other sites are in this
boat. And now that alt.energy.renewable has grown from a mailing list
to a well-distributed alt group with a largish volume, and since
sci.energy still seems to be full of political discussions, etc,
it seems to me that it may be time to create a new mainstream group,
SCI.ENERGY.RENEWABLE, which being a sci.group, would be better distributed
than the alt.group, and perhaps have a little more scientific flavour.

Would someone please send me a copy of the original charter for
alt.energy.renewable, so I can try to get this ball rolling?

Thanks,

Nick

---

From: [email-masked] (Nick Pine)
Date: 24 Sep 1995 07:47:17 -0400

Douglas S. Gonder <[email-masked]> wrote:

>>>SCI.ENERGY.RENEWABLE, which being a sci.group, would be better
>>>distributed than the alt.group, and perhaps have a little more
>>>scientific flavour.
>>
>>I support this idea.  Let's make it happen.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>
>>Will Stewart
>>
>I support this idea.  Let's make it happen.
>>How?

There's a whole process described in places like news.announce.newsgroups,
with a posting name like create.FAQ, that involves posting a call for
discussion, then voting, etc. Would you like to create the group? 

You might edit this, to make a charter for sci.energy.renewable:

The AE Alternative Energy Discussion Mailing List is intended  to 
provide  a  forum  to discuss the current state of  the  art  and 
future direction of alternative energy sources that are renewable 
and  sustainable.   It  is *not* intended to  discuss  either  AE 
appropriateness  or comparisons with conventional energy  sources 
such  as fossil or nuclear fuels.  Those "discussions"  are  best 
relegated to the appropriate usenet newsgroup.

An  alternative  energy source is taken to include  solar,  wind, 
geothermal,  tidal,  electro-chemical,  hydro-electric,  or   any 
renewable  and sustainable energy source.  It is also assumed  to 
exclude  fuels such as fossil and nuclear since  these  literally 
take an act of God to create.

Nick

A recent posting of mine to the above list:

I would like to respond to Gary's message by posting some of my own
words (only) to him in some recent email we traded:

Hi Gary,

I didn't see Marge's original message, because I just started getting
this list again, since our site dropped alt.energy.renewable. 

What do you do at Real Goods? I guess you know Doug Pratt and Douglas Bath?
John Schaeffer suggested I visit them a month ago, when I drove down the
coast from Vancouver to Albuquerque. I spent several days talking with
Steve Baer in Albuquerque. I am even learning how to spell Albuquerque :-)

I showed up in Ukiah early Friday afternoon, just before the Real Goods
shareholder's meeting began, and there were few people left in the office.
I sent John and Doug quite a bit of the passive solar work that I've done
on paper, and got back a half-page letter from John, and nothing at all
from Doug or Douglas, not even a returned phone call. So I conclude that
solar space heating is not a big priority at Real Goods. Perhaps the new
Wisconsin division will do more of this, as the latest mailing suggests.

I was thinking about all this when RG had its stock offering, and almost
invested in that, but I got to thinking that RG is not a "pure play" in
alternate energy or energy conservation, as the people on Wall Street say. 

I have the impression that Jade Mountain is a more perfect alternate energy
company, a purer play, having spent a day in Boulder talking with Steve Troy.
It seems to me that he is seriously interested in saving energy and helping
backwoods and third world people, coming from his Peace Corps kind of
background, and most of their products do that, altho they sell a
few toys too. And while Steve's heart is in the right place, he's not
an engineer. But he knows that, and he doesn't pretend that he is.

A lot of people think they know all about how to design high-performance
passive solar houses, but very few do. A pity, since it isn't that difficult.
This has been complicated by government tax subsidies and research labs.
One might ask "if designing high-performance passive solar houses is easy,
why haven't all the government labs figured out how to do that, and why
aren't we doing that more?" Part of the answer lies in greed and politics.
Who is going to change this picture?

Howard Reichmuth, Professional Engineer: "To do good solar work, you have
to understand the flow of money (meaning large scale flows) as well as the
flow of heat." Howard used to work for Ecotope, where he designed a parabolic
concentrating solar greenhouse, 20 years ago ("Don't stand in the focus--
I almost melted a pair of boots") and he helped invent the Copper Cricket,
another dazzling design. Howard knows calculus, but he doesn't use it much.

For many people, "high-performance" means a 30 or 40% savings on an oil bill.
I just got the Passive Solar Industry Council's Guidelines for solar designs
in the Philadelphia area, and their target is something like that. But
I am beginning to agree with the Baers that if a house has any non-renewable
backup system, it should not be called a solar house. And a house that uses
more than a half-cord of wood for winter heat shouldn't be called a solar
house either. But here's an exception: my friends who live nearby in an 
underground solar house, who use $58 worth of electric resistance backup
heating per year. (For me, the challenge is to do that above ground.) Ditto
the non-underground, inexpensive New England houses of Norman Saunders, P. E.,
which have electric backup heaters that are almost never turned on. Norman
calculates that backup heat will be needed every 40 years, and his houses
have long track records from electronic data loggers to prove it. THAT
is serious solar engineering, not hype, not talk, not toys. But Norman's
work is largely unknown, partly because his writing is hard to understand.

The "solar builder" in my town is quite fond of Real Goods. I would say
that he is conspicuously wealthy, and intends to stay that way. He wears
Real Goods T-shirts. He tells people he is a solar builder, but he seems
to charge very high prices for his work, and his "solar houses" tend to
use almost as much energy as any other new houses. He thinks he knows all
about passive solar houses and how they work, but he hardly builds any
of them anymore, because in his heart and his experience, he knows they
don't work well. He did just send someone a proposal that included some
solar design work by me, but it was sort of a token thing, some window
dressing on an ordinary house, like a black person who sits near the door,
that might have reduced the oil consumed by the house by 10%. The customer
declined that option. He could build a 100% solar house, with no backup
heating system, but he does not do that. Why not, if he's a "solar builder"?

I think this builder is beginning to realize that he is ignorant, or worse,
that a lot of what he "knows" is not true. But he remains fairly arrogant...
I'd have to call him a yuppie. He seems very fond of money, and he seems
to be more into the form and hype of energy conservation and solar heating
than the substance. I don't think there is anything wrong with being young,
urban, and professional. OTOH, I am not fond of greedy, materialistic,
and superficial people who lie to themselves or others.
 
Both Real Goods and Jade Mountain seem to have guaranteed lowest prices
on PV stuff. Now if they would each guarantee to undercut the other by 10%,
like Home Depot, the stuff would eventually end up being free, right? :-)

I wasn't exactly aware that there were several Real Goods catalogs, altho
I seem to get a LOT of stuff from Real Goods in the mail, perhaps 5 pounds
of paper per year, which makes me suspicious of company motives, hype, etc.
When I paid to be a lifetime charter member of the energy club, or whatever
that's called, I got a lot more paper in the mail, for a little while.

I find the yuppie toy catalog amusing :-) Maddening too, of course.

Re this photovoltaic bias and blind spots, I've thought a lot about the
fact that solar space heating is not something you can ordinarily put on
a shelf in a box. It's too bad that you can't sell solar space heating
exactly that way, because it is so easy to do and economical, compared to
PVs and water heaters. So the fact that it's hard to put in a box as a
product limits its use, but it makes a lot of sense to DO, and to do first,
for many homeowners. This is some dilemma, isn't it? This is a product that
needs to be carefully packaged...

I try to sell my engineering consulting services on solar space heating,
but there is not much leverage in that, in designing one-of-a-kind things
for individual houses. Not much call for it either :-)

Real Goods CAN sell solar space heating books or plans, or perhaps kits, or
partial kits, with everything you need to build a space heating system
except some lumber... RG can also sell more components, like 3M SA-85 outdoor
aluminized mylar film or Dupont Tedlar (poly vinyl flouride) glazing, both
of which are sold by the manufacturers in large minimum orders of $3000 or so.
It is very nice that RG is selling radiant barrier insulation. That stuff
would probably make a nice solar oven, if you sprayed the weather side with
some sort of clear protective coating. The spray coating destroys the
insulation value of the foil, but it doesn't affect the reflectivity much. 

Jade Mountain has a solar air heater kit in their catalog, a $595 4' x 8'
Solar Airheater, item #SH451 on page 5, "The most practical, cost effective
and efficient way to reduce heating bills," which includes "everything except
labor and wire." It weighs 64 pounds. It has a thermostat and a fan and a
blower and an aluminum absorber plate and a 77% transmission Sun-Lite cover.
Steve Troy says he has never sold a single one. What is wrong here? 

It's not very cost-effective. $595 is a lot for a 32 ft^2 solar air heater.

It weighs a lot. We need to do more with less, as Bucky said. 

For $595 you can buy all the material for a 600 ft^2 sunspace from a
commercial greenhouse supplier like Stuppy: some curved steel pipes and poly
film that you can turn into a lean-to sunspace in a day or so. This sort
of arched lean-to structure is nicely described on pages 34-36 of William
Shurcliff's 1978 Brick House book, _New Inventions in Low-Cost Solar Heating--
100 Daring Schemes Tried and Untried_. (It would be very nice to see Real
Goods reprinting and selling this book.)

Dr. Shurcliff says "Here we discuss a scheme that may be ideally suited to
retrofit application to existing houses the south vertical faces of which
receive much solar radiation even in winter. The scheme is much like that
pioneered by S. R. Kenin and others of Solar Room Co./Box 1377/Taos, NM 87571.
There are already several buildings that use his scheme, or schemes reasonably
similar to it. An example is Egri House in Taos, NM. This house is described
in detail in my book _Solar Heated Homes of North America: 120 Outstanding
Examples_... ***It is hard to think of any other system that supplies so much
heat (to an existing house) at such a low cost***." He goes on to explain how
to make this a low-thermal-mass sunspace, eg by hanging a piece of greenhouse
shadecloth inside, which costs about 15 cents per square foot and comes in
rolls up to 30' wide and 300' long. (Yes, Marge, it comes in green too.)

In the summer, you could hang the greenhouse shadecloth over the poly film,
on the outside. This would prevent overheating and provide shade and make
the poly film last longer.

Dr. Shurcliff talks about using a thin layer of insulation on the north wall,
and says "Then, practically no heat is delivered to the massive components
of floor or wall; practically all of the heat is promptly transferred to
the air. And since the thermal capacity of the 100-200 lb. of air in the room 
is equal to that of one fourth as great a mass of water (about 25 to 50 lb.
of water), the air will heat up very rapidly. I estimate that its temperature
will rise about 40 F degrees in about two minutes, after the sun comes out
from behind a heavy cloud cover [unlike most solar collectors,] At the end
of the day, little heat will be "left on base" in the collector floor or
north wall and accordingly, the enclosure will cool off very rapidly [and
very little of that captured solar heat will be lost at night, unlike, say,
a Trombe wall.] 

This is more like a transparent tent than a structure, but the galvanized
steel pipes last at least 40 years, I'm told. Sounds great, doesn't it?
Whatever happened to this idea? Why aren't more people using it? Why
isn't real Goods selling it, somehow, or at least selling the book, or
at least talking about this very special kind of solar heating?

Each square foot of south glazing will capture the heat-equivalent of about
a gallon of oil per year, so 32 ft^2 will save you about 32 gallons of oil
per year. You can buy home heating oil where I live for 63 cents a gallon,
so this 32 ft^2 $595 Solar Airheater kit saves about $20 a year in oil, and
the cost of electricity to run it is $8/year, if it has a 50 watt blower
running 8 hours a day for 200 days, and electricity costs 10 cents/kWh. So
the net money saved is $12/year, so the simple payback period is $595/$12/year
= 50 years, not counting inflation or maintenance or shipping or sales taxes
or labor or the fact that the Sun-Lite panel will probably get all fuzzy and
wear out in 5 or 10 years. You would do better to put the $595 in the bank.

It is sad that this is billed as the "most practical, cost effective and
efficient way to reduce heating bills." That gives solar heating a bad name. 

I'm not a passive purist: I would probably put a $12 20" box fan in a second
floor window looking out into that sunspace, with a thermostat, and a plastic
film damper of course. This would make it work better, and it would be
cost-effective. (Fans move more air per watt than blowers, and larger fans
are more efficient than smaller ones. Norman Saunders says that the
efficiency of a fan is about the same as the blade diameter in inches.)

It is nice that Real Goods offers a variety of books on passive solar,
and encourages people to read, learn, and use the techniques. But you could
do a lot more. How about selling some sort of modular solar air heating kit?
A well-thought-out, lightweight, large, inexpensive version that could be
shipped UPS? Plastic film, shadecloth, etc. No blower. I just got a 10 pound
UPS package with an 16' x 32' piece of 80% black shadecloth, with hems and
grommets on all four edges, a part of a 500 square foot solar air heater,
(that's about 50 kW, for all you PV people) from PAK Unlimited in Norcross,
Georgia at (404) 448-1917. The cost was $71.25, including shipping. 

Does the Real Goods Sourcebook talk about low-thermal-mass sunspaces these
days? And the warmstores of Norman Saunders or my solar closets, ie insulated
boxes with containers of water inside them, heated by sun-warmed air?
With a fin tube just under the closet ceiling and a natural warm water
convection loop to a water heater upstairs that provides close to 100%
of the hot water for the house, even after a week or two of cloudy days,
while the solar closet provides 100% of the space heating? I'd be happy
to send you a paper I wrote about that, for a conference in Australia.
Does Real Goods sell Norman Saunders' book _Solar Basics_, 1974, 4th
edition, or William Shurcliff's book _Super Solar Houses_, a whole
book devoted to Norman's houses? I guess all I see these days from
Real Goods is the yuppie toy stuff.

BTW, I also noticed this very strong bias in the Independent Living book
that Marge lent me. Some of it is subtle and linguistic, like talking about
solar power over and over, without saying that what one is really talking
about is solar PHOTOVOLTAIC ELECTRICAL power, and ignoring the oil burner
in the basement, or the work and mess and smell and dangers and insult
to nature of heating a house with wood. That kind of talk is understandable
in context, but one forgets that it is a very limited context, and talking
that way seems to create an unfortunate narrow and overwhelming solar mindset.

I would say this discussion list is supposed to be about actually building
things that save energy, not just educating people on renewable energy issues. 
We can educate people till the cows come home, and there may still be another
Gulf war, because of the way we use oil in this country. We need to change.
For one thing, the oil will run out.

When I mention a company's telephone number here, I don't work for them and
I don't get a penny from them. In fact, this whole net thing is a net loss
for me :-) I spend considerable time and money looking into AE products
and companies, and there is no return from that, via the net. I do try to
share what I find out, though, because to me it isn't enough to just 
TALK about saving energy or to wear pith helmets with PV-powered fans, it's
more important to save significant energy, especially oil, in reasonable,
cost-effective ways, without depending on government subsidies... One
company did actually suggest giving me a 5% commission for any net.sales,
and I thought that was interesting, and it is against my religion to
turn down money, but I would "advertise" them anyway. And so far, not
a penny from them, so I still feel pure :-)

For some reason, this group and the sci.energy and alt.energy.renewable
groups bring to mind some words of the physicist Richard Feynman, the guy
who exposed the space shuttle O-ring design problem that caused the
Challenger disaster, as well as winning a Nobel Prize for his other work.
He used to say "Mathematics is to physics as masturbation is to sex."

It is wrong to think we are part of the solution to the energy problem
if we are merely talking about it, or buying toys, vs actually doing
something large and effective to solve it. 

Nick

---

From: [email-masked] (Nick Pine)
Date: 26 Sep 1995 01:02:02 -0400

Joseph Edward Bodden <[email-masked]> wrote:

>	how about an alt.energy.solutions.collaborative.coop for exchange
>of how to, what not to, when not to, why it does, where do i get, 
>why didnt it, i need help, 

Sounds great, but I won't be able to get it if it's an alt group...

Nick

---

From: [email-masked] (Nick Pine)
Date: 26 Sep 1995 08:56:59 -0400

Douglas S. Gonder <[email-masked]> wrote:
>[email-masked] says...

>>        how about an alt.energy.solutions.collaborative.coop
>>for exchange of how to, what not to, when not to, why it does, where do i 
>get, why didnt it, i need help, 
>>        ie, any and all comers working on solutions get together and trade 
>>assistance and data.

>          sci.energy.renewable.coop.graphics  (just a suggestion)

That would seem to indicate that it should only include graphics...

>prefix  "sci" will reach more people I understand... comments?

This is true. It would even reach our site, until our Evil Mother Of
All Campus News decided to cancel it some afternoon, in a fit of pique.

>Who started all this anyway?

God. ("Let there be light.")
 
>Who's the leader of the band..

We don't seem to have much of a leader, but I did suggest a while ago that
someone might edit the text below into a sci.energy.renewable charter and
post a call for discussion in the appropriate news newsgroup...  Perhaps our 
EMOACN would do that.

Nick