Time reconstrained, part 2

In the previous post we got onto the topic of time and energy. We pointed out that in this relatively blink-of-an-eye moment we’re living in—say the last hundred years—some of us enjoy the kind of energy abundance and comfort that no one before us had ever enjoyed and that, at this rate of simultaneous rapid consumption and spiralling environmental degradation, no one after us will either. We also described how, when time is factored in, fossil fuels are actually inefficient and low yield in terms of a time-energy ratio. Now let’s go a bit deeper into that thought: what if we took time seriously in our calculations of energy value and efficiency?

Time is a crucial factor that is often left out of discussions around energy. Traditional fossil fuels, as everyone knows, take millions of years to form and only brief moments to consume. So while they have very high energy densities (i.e. calorific values), drawing a direct comparison between fossil fuels and renewable energy sources can be misleading. Renewable energy sources have much lower energy densities—but they do not deplete in real time, and their formation timescale can be taken as virtually instantaneous.

The table and graphs below compare renewable energy sources and traditional fossil fuels in terms of energy per mass of fuel as well as energy fuel created per kilogram per million years. Figure 2 for example shows that if only approximate energy per mass is considered, the energy storage value of a gravity battery using a renewable energy source is negligible compared with the storage value of fossil fuel. However, if the time taken to form energy sources is taken into account, the situation is suddenly reversed: fossil fuel sources become negligible compared to a renewable energy source like the gravity battery (Figure 3). (Thanks to our postdoctoral researcher, Parakram Pyakurel, for crunching the numbers used in these diagrams.)

Fig.1: Comparison between timescale of formation and energy stored

Fig.2: Approximate energy per mass of fuel (kWh/kg) vs. fuel

Fig.3: Energy fuel created per kg per million years (kWh/kg/million years) vs. fuel

Images: James Auger

Time reconstrained, part 1

We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of ‘raw materials’, and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technological means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining.

- Wendell Berry, ‘The Total Economy’ (2000)

The condition in which some of us now live—and have lived for decades—is undeniably a luxurious one, energy-wise, comfort-wise. No one in human history has had what some of us now have; but equally there is a growing sense that if things don’t change neither will anyone have it again—we are rapidly depriving future generations of energy resources and a clean, stable environment, both of which have too long been taken for granted.

A piece of coal provides roughly eight kilowatt hours of energy per kilogram, which in one sense is extremely efficient. But the coal takes hundreds of millions of years to form. This almost unimaginable quantity of time is consumed with the flick of a switch, or at the press of a button—all dissipated, all devoured in an instant, to light a room or power a computer. When time is factored in, therefore, fossil fuels actually provide surprisingly low efficiency, low yield in terms of a time-energy ratio. A gravity battery, while seemingly of negligible energy storage value compared to fossil fuels, becomes much more powerful when time is factored into the equation.

The ideas underpinning our current exhibition (as the Reconstrained Design Group, until 15 April) at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) represent a radically different philosophy of energy storage and consumption. They indicate a shift away from quick, thoughtless consumption of ancient resources, towards visible, tangible, real-time consumption. Of course, at this stage the Newton Machine is more of an intervention than a practical solution—it is not designed to be an instant fix for the world’s energy problems, which are complex and multifaceted.

But before our prototypes and the thinking behind them are dismissed on grounds of impracticality, it is worth noting that our everyday relationship with energy is also a dream, an illusion of through-the-wall magic. It is unsustainable, based on a fantasy of unlimited supply, when in fact it has long been operating on a system of sleight of hand and perpetual deferral. When oil supplies are dwindling, the short-term answer is new technologies of extraction or batteries made from lithium and other non-renewable materials. What the Newton Machine offers is a new way of thinking about energy—a gesture, however rough, towards the seismic paradigm shift that is urgently needed to bring about a more responsible future.

Time is at the centre of this proposed shift in thinking. So is our relationship with nature, which must become balanced rather than extractive and exploitative. Even the generic and ubiquitous electrical sockets in our homes are anything but harmless. The apparent banality of the plug and socket has masked a century of unprecedented environmental destruction. By hiding energy, we have made it seem free of both limitations and consequences. A temporal convenience such as a hot bath or a flash of light releases potential (stored) energy irreversibly. Buttons, switches and plugs conceal enormous infrastructures and exploitation of existing resources on a truly sublime scale.

Design influences desire. If in the past design has been used to encourage consumption, to make consumer goods desirable, then in the future we must enlist design in the fight to bring our desires more closely in line with our needs. A shift is required to preserve what has taken millions or billions of years to form in the past, and to avoid a legacy of waste stretching forward into the future. We have to adjust the scope of our consumption. Reconstraining time means shifting away from the behaviours that brought us into the nightmare of the Anthropocene, and living sustainably within our own modest scale as an animal species on Earth.

Images:

James Auger (top): Gathering black sand for casting at Praia Formosa, Madeira; Miguel Taverna: Images from CCCB exhibition

Et in Orcadia ego

In a recent post (‘scrap futures’) we mentioned a project we’re doing with Laura Watts from ITU Copenhagen and partners in Scotland that involves building a gravity battery on the small island of Eday in Orkney.

We’ve just returned from that island-to-island journey. It was quite a trip, a proper eye opener. We arrived on Sunday evening with nothing - no tools or materials of any kind - and by Thursday we were running a public demo of a gravity-powered Casio keyboard playing Ode to Joy. Here is a brief (and highly subjective) travelogue and technical account of the process, which was not unlike a 72-hour Scrapheap Challenge, but involving the whole community.

The northward trek

Three of us left Madeira early on the Friday, bidding farewell to sunshine and flower blossoms. The fourth in our party, Mohammed, coming from rural Sweden, met us that night in Inverness. By Saturday morning we had reached Kirkwall, on the Orkney Mainland. Laura arrived on the next flight, and over a lunch of fish and chips we shared our thoughts about the gravity battery, including what sort of scrap we might use to make it - an old motorcycle, a car or tractor, even a crashed Vespa someone had mentioned. There was also the question of what we should do with the energy it released. Previously we had powered a record player; this time we had in mind a lamp, or an old radio playing The Shipping Forecast. None of us had ever been to Eday, an island of ten square miles with a population of just 130 people.

The wind picked up and the afternoon ferry was cancelled, so we headed over to Stromness on the other side of the Mainland to spend the night in the atmospheric Stromness Hotel. Enrique waxed poetic on the irony of Silicon Valley’s dreams of colonising Mars, when we were stranded ten miles from our destination by a bit of wind. But we made the best of it, and after a full Scottish breakfast with haggis on Sunday morning we drove back to Kirkwall and caught the afternoon ferry. We arrived after dark, windswept and seasalted, and followed the island’s only road to the only year-round accommodation, the hostel, where we met our documentary filmmaker, Aaron Watson. The trip north had taken three days, leaving only three days to build for the demonstration.

Build Day 1

We woke Monday morning to the sound of a large wind turbine spinning fast outside the hostel, telling us the weather conditions. In fact the island grid is powered entirely by renewable energy - Eday’s experimental and community-driven use of renewables, including wind, tidal, and solar, as well as storage in hydrogen fuel cells, is the main reason we were keen to visit. Even the electric heaters in the hostel are powered at certain times by energy overflow from the wind turbine outside. Everyone we met on Eday was extremely well versed in energy generation and storage, including the seven children of the local primary school who spoke knowledgeably about electrolysers and curtailment.

We met Clive, our local fixer and project partner with Eday Renewable Energy Ltd., after a solid breakfast of porridge and bacon butties. Before we set out to gather scrap materials and tools, he gave us a pep talk of sorts: ‘This may look like chaos. But I assure you the machine will be built, it will be demonstrated, and you will leave happy on the ferry Friday morning.’ In the car he pointed out the island’s landmarks and mentioned some of the people we would likely meet that day. As far as we could tell you were not allowed to have the same name as anyone else on the island - when a second Kate arrived she was renamed Katie, and the second Mike became Mick. This we decided was as good a definition of a small island as any we’d heard. Clive warned us that the community would need some convincing before they got involved. We should expect questions like: What’s in it for Eday?

The first stop of the morning was the Old Church, which had been bought by a woman from London with big plans in the 1980s and has sat derelict ever since. Here we found an old motorcycle, a red Kawasaki, parked in the middle of the church amongst other scrap (a Super 8 camera, a record player, a typewriter). The bike had only 12,000 miles on the odometer, but it was buried under a thick blanket of corrosive pigeon shit, and all of its insides were seized beyond reasonable use. We took a lot of photographs. At the second stop, the New Church a minute down the road, we found a large brass bell salvaged from a sunken steamship. We thought we might use it as a weight for the gravity battery. Permission would have to be sought, Clive said. The third stop was an old mechanic’s back garden, full of rusted cars and a jumble of engine parts. ‘Did he die?’ someone asked. ‘No, just left the island’, Clive replied. James opened the hood of an old BMW and found a live rabbit inside.

We checked out the building site next, a shed by the pier used mostly for deliveries. It had a forklift and plenty of room - the first real success of the day. We would have to clear out twice a day when the ferry docked, but aside from that it was ours. We agreed it would do very nicely. Our other Eday contact, Andy, who works with Clive, met us at the shed. From there we drove to an old quarry on the far side of the island, a five-minute journey. As we walked around the site, staring up at the sheer sides from the quarry base, someone had an epiphany about making a gravity-powered keyboard. Andy, it turned out, not only knew how to play (he was currently the church organist), he had also been the keyboardist in an eighties band called Freeez, who had a number one single in the US dance charts (‘IOU’). We all agreed that if we could get hold of a scrap keyboard the issue of what to do with the energy released by the gravity battery was solved.

After lunch at the hostel we met some people from the community in a building next to the island shop. The key moment in this meeting was the suggestion that Mick, who was spotted leaving the shop outside, had an old motorcycle in his barn; someone ran out to talk to Mick and he kindly agreed to let us follow him home. He was a large man in a CCCP shirt, who told us in a Liverpool accent to mind the ducks and sheep. He opened the barn and dragged out an old dirt bike, its wheels clogged with hay; he used an axe to free up the front wheel, and four of us rolled it up the driveway in the rain and waited as someone found a van to bring it back to the pier shed. We were cold and wet, and the light was fading on our first day, but we had a motorcycle and a rough plan. We ate a hearty dinner at Roadside, the island’s former pub turned occasional restaurant (actually just a dining room in a private house), and then returned to the hostel to drink whisky and sleep.

Build Day 2

We arrived at the shed Tuesday morning at 9.05am to find several islanders already waiting in boilersuits, ready to work. We introduced ourselves, made some tea, and set up to start cutting into the bike, while Clive got on the phone to order a new chain from the Mainland - the only part the bike was missing. We quickly sourced some necessary tools from generous community members, including an angle grinder (Aaron the filmmaker’s favourite, because it made a photogenic shower of sparks), a lathe, and a socket set, and got to work. By lunch the bike was stripped, leaving only the parts necessary for the gravity battery - the frame, engine, and rear axle. In the afternoon two of us went to the school to give a workshop while the others stayed back at the shed. The wind blew and the rain poured down. Countless cups of tea were consumed. Soon the day was over, the children went home, the shed was locked up, and at the hostel Mohammed made his special dhal. It was Halloween night on a remote Scottish island, so obviously we watched The Wicker Man. More whisky was consumed.

Build Day 3

The challenge now was how to get the gravity battery over the fence and down into the quarry, our chosen site for Thursday’s demo. We noticed a large tractor - who did it belong to? Could somebody drive it there? Health and safety was still a headache that Andy was dealing with, negotiating with the property owners in England and the insurance company. It was blowing a gale all the previous night and all morning; the rain beat down on the corrugated iron roof of the shed, making it hard to hear anyone speak.

On the positive side, people from the community were beginning to get excited about working together on this strange and unexpected project. Old habits were shifting as people from different parts of the island who rarely spoke to each other met and pitched in as a team. Hamish and Mel, native Orcadians, came to join in and brought their son Robbie, an apprentice engineer. An old Casio keyboard was found, and after some minor tinkering was brought back to life. The chain arrived by afternoon ferry. Calculations were underway for rigging a pulley over the quarry edge. More people showed up, to work or to watch. Clive told us stories of moving to London in the late sixties, working in Carnaby Street, seeing the Stones in Hyde Park. ‘What brought you up to Eday?’ we asked. ‘Cheap innit’, he said with a smile. We met other southerners who said the same thing. But their attachment to the place had obviously gone very deep.

On Wednesday afternoon we went to use the lathe in the shed of a friendly guy named Mike, another Englishman and ex-submariner who lived in the old schoolhouse. Mike left a note in the shed telling us what to do if a blackbird showed up at the door - he had trained the bird to come in and ask for food when it was hungry. Sure enough the bird showed up, looking at us expectantly until we passed it some raisins and a biscuit. When we finished our machining Mike invited us into the main house. In what turned out to be one of the highlights of our week in Eday, Mike showed us not only a display he’d made on the history of the school, but also - leading us through a hole in the wall - no less than a full-sized model of the inside of a submarine, complete with salvaged periscope, control panels, and torpedo launchers. We walked through room after room, through sleeping quarters with life-sized mannequin sailors, until we reached the end and emerged back into the schoolhouse. We shook hands with Mike, somewhat unsettled by what we’d just seen, and returned to the pier shed.

That night at dinner we discussed our visit to Eday as a three-act play. The first two acts, we decided, had established the principal characters and their relationship to the world they lived in. The inciting incident of Act One was our arrival on the island, with a mad plan to build a gravity battery from scrap. The rising action of Act Two was the first three days of building, where we pitched in with the community to make the thing we’d set out to make - the spectre of public humiliation creating tension and driving us forward. The character arcs of ourselves and everyone in the community developed under this pressure; Andy and Clive even told us that relationships between community members had been altered - for the good - by our presence. People who hadn’t spoken to each other in years exchanged words; old feuds were put to rest or laid aside. For our part we gained insights about ourselves, our roles, and the nature of our work.

Every story needs a climax, and it usually involves collectively overcoming a crisis. So it was not unexpected that we should receive a phone call at dinner that night, the night before the public demo, telling us that the absentee landowner would not allow access to our chosen site, the quarry, without insurance - and negotiations with the insurance company had reached an impasse. Andy was trying his best to provide evidence of due diligence to both parties; but insurance is about predictability, and is naturally risk-averse. Testing a gravity battery made from scrap in an abandoned quarry with children present is not an ideal scenario from the insurer’s perspective. How could we bridge the gap between health and safety, on one hand, and daring innovation and experimentation, on the other? How could we achieve a satisfying resolution and leave happy, as Clive promised, on Friday morning?

Demo Day

Andy, as we mentioned above, was a professional musician in his previous life - he had played on Top of the Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test. So when he sat down to rehearse for the demo on Thursday morning, perched on a wooden crate in shorts and hiking boots and a down jacket, tapping at the keys of a salvaged Casio, the other islanders laughed and jibed goodnaturedly: ‘You’ve come a long way, Andy!’ The crisis at the quarry had been overcome, or rather bypassed completely, by ten o’clock: just as the insurance problem was solved, we decided it would be easier to stage the demo at the pier near the shed, so that no major moving of equipment would be involved. Now momentum was gathering towards the final event and resolution.

The demo was scheduled for after lunch. Word spread and by late morning a small crowd started to gather. We were busy with small jobs: like untangling rope for the pulley to suspend the mass, a 25-litre water container, from a long metal pole extending off the fork of a tractor Hamish had driven over from his farm. The motorcycle chassis that formed the heart of the machine was strapped to a wooden pallet. We only had to figure out how to lift the weight into the air - in Madeira we had used a solar panel, but that was not an option in Orkney. Various attempts were made, including hooking up the battery from Mike’s car, but with no success.

The school bus pulled into the parking lot in front of the pier shed and the children got out. They lined up in front of the crowd and showed drawings of the gravity batteries they had designed earlier in the week. One child broke down under the pressure and sobbed loudly, but eventually held up his drawing between shaking hands. The weather was calm and dry. We handed out Madeiran sweets to the kids, who wore reflective vests for safety. Everyone stood facing us in a semicircle and waited for the show to begin. At the last moment a solution was found: James improvised an attachment to a rechargeable electric drill and used it to drive a super low-gear winch, slowly raising the water container. It seemed a bit of a cheat - though in fact it wasn’t, since the island’s grid is powered by renewables - but the mass was now suspended, the energy was stored until needed, and that was the main point. We called for everyone’s attention; released the mass; wires were connected and the keyboard came to life. Andy played ‘Ode to Joy’, followed by ‘The Flintstones’ for the children. The performance lasted several minutes, then the keyboard fell silent at the instant the water container touched the ground. The crowd went wild. We did it again, and then again - the last time letting the kids take turns banging out some noise. It was a success. We cleaned up as dusk fell.

That evening there was a gathering at the community centre. Andy led a discussion with ourselves and some of the islanders, including Hamish and Mel and their children, ‘Submarine’ Mike, Ivan and his son Jordan, and many others, that felt productive. It verged at times on emotional, as people discussed past achievements like the installation of the massive community-owned wind turbine, along with possible futures of the community and the island itself. We tried to impress the point that, given enough time and ideal conditions, their energy storage solution (or ‘Newton Machine’) would not be a gravity battery - which was something we had created out of the particular materials and terrain of Madeira - but rather a bespoke solution for Eday, built not from Madeiran sucata but from Orcadian bruck, taking advantage of local conditions, like a flow battery made with seawater. But we had three days to produce something spectacular with the community, so we decided to make an Eday version of a gravity battery - and according to those terms, we succeeded. As we sat around talking into the night, surrounded by absolute darkness except for the lights of neighbouring islands and the hostel in the distance, we also agreed that the machine we built was, in some real sense, a social machine.

We hoped that our strange event on Eday, our intervention of sorts, had made an impact on the community. We received a positive sign from Andy the day after we returned, in the form of a message that read: ‘I’m about to order my very first angle grinder, just so I can make my own sparks, just for the sheer fun of it.’ He said he’d been inspired to ‘have a go’. Between Andy’s words (and music), Clive’s stories, Mike’s submarine, Mick’s motorcycle, Ivan’s joyful exclamations of ‘happy days!’, the schoolchildren’s imaginative designs, and Hamish’s son Robbie melting aluminium in a kitchen pot with a blowtorch to cast parts for the gravity battery, we concluded that some good had come of the trip. Still ahead, Laura will write up our experiences on Eday from an ethnographer’s perspective, and Aaron will make a short film to present at our exhibition in Barcelona early next year. The gravity battery itself, meanwhile, remains on the island - being too heavy to transport - and will hopefully power Andy’s reconfigured Casio keyboard through the winter months.

Images:

Julian Hanna and James Auger.

Scrap futures

We’ve noticed a lot of detritus, scrap, and abandoned infrastructure on our island of Madeira (as in most places) - from rusty Christmas light scaffolding, to useless TV antennas that dot the skyline over Funchal, to automated turnstiles that don’t scan your ticket, to those free bag dispensers for dog walkers (a noble initiative, probably refilled once at most and still stuck to every pole) - remnants of old ideas, broken futures, and faded technological dreams.

Then there is e-waste (or WEEE). This again is a universal problem, but like all problems of material waste it becomes more obvious and more acute in a small island context. Where do you put all those old monitors, keyboards, phones, game consoles, smart fridges, and Juicero juicers? Our collaborator and resident scrap wizard Enrique has forged a relationship with the organisation that handles e-waste in Madeira. He brings old printers and other objects back to the institute for deconstructing; their guts can be seen spilling out of the workshop most days. Enrique tells us that two or three shipments of e-waste are sent to the mainland every week - that’s a lot of waste for an island that doesn’t particularly care about keeping up with the Joneses.

Motorcycles are a particular obsession of Crap Futures, which is one reason why some of our gravity battery prototypes (like the one pictured above) use gear boxes and other bike parts from the local breaker’s yard. But the other thing about motorcycles, and scrap motorcycle parts, is that they can be found all over the world - they are almost universal as readily available local materials. This fact makes them especially attractive to us for our energy experiments, because we try to make use of local materials, terrain and knowledge as much as possible.

In case we haven’t mentioned it on the blog yet, we won an award. James went to Barcelona in June and came back with the CCCB Cultural Innovation International Prize for a project, The Newton Machine, that we’re doing in collaboration with Laura Watts at ITU Copenhagen and our partners in Orkney. The prize came with some money, which was nice, but also some strings: next January we will be installing an exhibition of the Newton Machine (or machines) at the CCCB, including prototypes, a documentary film, some photographs, ethnographic notes, a manifesto, catalogue, and other material we collect in the meantime. The installation will join the larger exhibition After the End of the World which opens next month and continues through April 2018.

The CCCB prize also means some upcoming opportunities for doing and making. First we’ll be hosting Laura and the Orkney partners in Madeira at the beginning of October, then we’ll pay a visit to the small island of Eday in Orkney one month later to build some prototypes and meet the local community there. With its cutting-edge energy schemes, Scotland, Orkney, and especially little Eday seemed like the ideal place to test our plans in the wild (to use that hated phrase). From what we’ve heard Orkney will be fairly wild in November.

Where Madeira has sucata or lixo (scrap or waste), Orkney has something very particular to remote islands: bruck. Bruck, so we’re told, is the kind of rubbish that washes up on the beaches, or the kind of rubbish you talk in the pub - but it’s also the kind you might find in your shed, or swap with your neighbour. People in Orkney try to make sensible use of their bruck, material resources being relatively scarce. (We’ve already heard the story of a local man who made a hovercraft out of a washing machine - ‘and it worked, too’.) We’re hoping to use some of Eday’s bruck, along with its unique terrain and local knowledge, for our Newton Machine prototypes.

Back to our scrapheap challenge. Next up: domestication.

Images:

Gravity Battery (Rotterdam) by James Auger; CCCB; Creative Commons CC0.

Back to nature

We live on a remote island - mountainous, mid-Atlantic, still heavily forested and pretty wild - and for that reason nature sometimes sneaks into our otherwise technology-centred work. It is hard not to think local when you live in a place like this. We’re neither farmers nor pioneers - except in the sense that resident aliens on this island are few - but lately our reading has got us thinking about ancient paths and rural places. We’ll discuss the paths today and save most of the farm talk for a future post.

Paths v roads

In his 1969 essay ‘A Native Hill’, Wendell Berry - the American writer, farmer, activist, and ‘modern Thoreau’ - makes a useful distinction between paths and roads:

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand … embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape. … It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.

Aside from conversation as usual, the reason we are talking about Berry is the arrival of a new film, Look & See, and a new collection of his writing, The World-Ending Fire, edited by Paul Kingsnorth of Dark Mountain Project fame. Berry and Kingsnorth, along with the economist Kate Raworth, were on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week recently chatting about the coming apocalypse and how it might best be avoided. It is a fascinating interview: you can actually hear Berry’s rocking chair creaking and the crows cawing outside the window of his house in Port Royal, Kentucky.

The normally optimistic Berry agrees somewhat crankily to read ‘the poem that you asked me to read’ on the programme. ‘Sabbaths 1989’ describes roads to the future as going nowhere: ‘roads strung everywhere with humming wire. / Nowhere is there an end except in smoke. / This is the world that we have set on fire.’ Berry admits that this poem is about as gloomy as he gets (‘blessed are / The dead who died before this time began’). For the most part his writing is constructive: forming a sensual response to cold, atomised modernity; advocating for conviviality, community, the commonweal.

Paul Kingsnorth talks compellingly in the same programme about transforming protest into action, although in truth no one walks the walk like Berry. Kingsnorth says: ‘We’re all complicit in the things we oppose’ - and never were truer words spoken, from our iPhones to our energy use. In terms of design practice, there are worse goals than reducing our level of complicity in environmental harm and empty consumerism. Like Berry, Kingsnorth talks about paths and roads. He asks: ‘Why should we destroy an ancient forest to cut twelve minutes off a car journey from London to Southampton? Is that a good deal?’

It’s a fair question. It also illustrates perfectly what Berry was describing in the passage that started this post: the difference between paths that blend and coexist with the local landscape, preserving the knowledge and history of the land, and roads that cut straight through it. These roads are like a destructive and ill-fitting grid imposed from the centre onto the periphery, without attention to the local terrain or ecology or ways of doing things - both literally (in the case of energy) and figuratively.

Another book we read recently, Holloway, describes ancient paths - specifically the ‘holloways’ of South Dorset - in similar terms:

They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddenness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to other old paths & tracks in the landscape - ways that still connect place to place & person to person.

Holloways are paths sunk deep into the landscape and into the local history. Roads, in contrast, skip over the local - collapsing time as they move us from one place to the next without, as it were, touching the ground. They alienate us in our comfort.

Here in Madeira there are endless footpaths broken through the woods. Still more unique are the levadas, the irrigation channels that run for more than two thousand kilometres back and forth across the island, having been brought to Portugal from antecedents in Moorish aqueduct systems and adapted to the specific terrain and agricultural needs of Madeira starting in the sixteenth century.

Both the pathways through the ancient laurel forests and the centuries-old levadas (which, though engineered, were cut by hand and still follow the contours and logic of the landscape) contrast with the highways and tunnels that represent a newer feat of human engineering since the 1970s. During his controversial though undeniably successful reign from 1978 to 2015 - he was elected President of Madeira a remarkable ten times - Alberto João Jardim oversaw a massive infrastructure program that completely transformed the island. Places that used to be virtually unreachable became accessible by a short drive. His legacy, in part, is a culture of automobile dependency that is second to none. The American highway system inspired by Norman Bel Geddes’ (and General Motors’) Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair almost pales in comparison to Jardim’s vision for the rapid modernisation of Madeira.

But when you walk the diesel-scented streets of the capital, or you drive through the holes bored deep into and out of towering volcanic mountains to reach the airport - and even when you think back in history and imagine those first settlers sitting in their ships as half the island’s forest burned, watching the dense smoke of the fires they lit to make Madeira favourable to human habitation - it’s hard not to think what a catastrophically invasive species are human beings.

Bespoke is a word we use a lot. In our vocabulary bespoke is not about luxury or excess - as it has been co-opted by consumer capitalism to suggest. Instead it is about tailored solutions, fitted to the contours of a particular body or landscape. Wendell Berry insists on the role of aesthetics and proportionality in his approach to environmentalism: the goal is not hillsides covered in rows of ugly solar panels, but an integrated and deep and loving relationship with the land. This insistence on aesthetics relates to the ‘reconfiguring’ principles that inform our newest work. The gravity batteries we’ve been building are an alternative not only to the imposed, top-down infrastructure of the grid, but also to the massive scale of such solutions and our desire to work with the terrain rather than against it.

Naomi Klein talked about renewable energy in these terms in an interview a couple of years ago:

If you go back and look at the way fossil fuels were marketed in the 1700s, when coal was first commercialized with the Watt steam engine, the great promise of coal was that it liberated humans from nature … And that was, it turns out, a lie. We never transcended nature, and that I think is what is so challenging about climate change, not just to capitalism but to our core civilizational myth. Because this is nature going, ‘You thought you were in charge? Actually all that coal you’ve been burning all these years has been building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat, and now comes the response.’ … Renewable energy puts us back in dialog with nature. We have to think about when the wind blows, we have to think about where the sun shines, we cannot pretend that place and space don’t matter. We are back in the world.

In a future post we will talk about the related subject of sustainable agriculture. But speaking of food - the time has come for our toast and coffee.

Images: Wendell Berry courtesy of Look & See; all others via Wikimedia Commons

Cash in the café

A little while back we mentioned a gravity battery we’re developing to solve issues stemming from grid control of energy. The battery, like other designs we’re exploring, works by exploiting our island’s vertical terrain, local materials, and expertise.

Energy, especially renewable energy, is topical at the moment. Last year was the hottest year on record. The effects of global warming, including melting sea ice, rising sea levels, and changing weather patterns, are increasing - as we are constantly being told - at an alarming rate. Faced with the impact of air pollution and climate change on daily life, China and India are making huge investments in renewable energy initiatives. Meanwhile, on the very day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, references to climate change were quietly purged from the official White House website. In the first week of his presidency, Trump introduced a dangerously retrograde ‘America first energy plan’ focused on promoting fossil fuels, and signed executive orders allowing renewed construction on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. And this is just the tip of the (Titanic?) iceberg.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Tory government and move towards Brexit also have strong negative implications for energy. As we wrote in a blog post last summer: ‘Constraints express a lack of control; they are basically the opposite of control. So taking back control means finding ways to remove constraints.’ But what does the much abused dream of freedom from constraints look like in 2017? Six months ago we saw Brexit as ‘a meticulously planned political remake of The Italian Job - a magnificent heist orchestrated to turn Britain into a libertarian super-state, Seasteading’s head office.’ That judgement seems more relevant than ever, perhaps even a bit optimistic. Such plans are now in the open - just look at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sinister proposal to copy the lower safety and emission standards of the US or even India (‘We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that.’). The UK’s global renewable energy standing has already fallen as a result of Brexit.

In the midst of increasingly disturbing global events we have quietly been making progress with our prototyping - with the view that action, however limited, is preferable to helpless hand-wringing and endless news scrolling. This has comprised several visits to our local motorcycle breaker, familiarising ourselves with local hardware stores, receiving an ancient lathe from the mainland and giving it a major service, and exploring local landscapes for suitable testing locations. We also had to learn to fly a drone for documentary footage.

To provide a simple explanation of the concept: the gravity battery is a storage device designed to be used with a variety of renewable energy generation methods. In our case, energy (provided by the abundant Madeiran sunshine) is captured by solar photovoltaics. This energy powers a motor, and with the help of a homemade gearbox is used to lift a fixed weight into the sky. (The real-life context could be, for example, one of the local homes we see built on the cliffsides of the island.) When it is needed the energy is released by dropping the weight, which in turn rotates the motor - now a generator - to produce electrical energy. The power available is determined by the size of the dropping mass, the speed at which it drops, the gearbox ratio, and the drop distance.

First iteration:

Based on an initial design by M-ITI Design PhD candidate Mohammed J. Ali, the first gravity battery used lathe gears and an off-the-shelf DC motor. In early testing we discovered that building a gearbox is relatively difficult, and that efficiency is largely dependent on very tight tolerances and hugely affected by the choice of drive train.* While the first iteration showed promise, it required too much mass to turn the gears - in excess of 30kg. We removed one gear train and managed to generate a steady 40W with a mass of 20kg, but it still descended too quickly. (Some investigation showed that the pulley belt final drive was very inefficient.)

The prototype was updated with CNC-machined aluminium side plates to ensure alignment of lathe-turned bearing holders and a motorcycle timing chain final drive to the DC motor. This last piece was rescued from a scrap Honda VF500, donated by our local bike breaker. We also experimented with bicycle gears, but these were less efficient than the timing chain and gears, which were designed for higher motorcycle speeds. With exactly the same gear ratios as the first iteration, this version comfortably descended with a mass of 10kg.

To communicate the concept of the prototype we recorded a short video. We had to think of a use for the generated energy, so we decided it would power a self-contained vinyl record player - the kind dads everywhere have been buying up recently with the aim of inflicting albums by the Pixies or the Smiths on their children. They’ve become so ubiquitous you can even buy them on our little island, which meant we could happily sidestep Amazon.

Here’s a video of this updated first iteration, filmed on the balcony of our local cafe. 

This set of experiments was incredibly insightful. The balcony has a drop of approximately 9 metres. The record player normally uses an adaptor to convert 220 volts of AC power to 9 volts DC. We built a regulator to limit developed energy. In the first test we dropped 20kg of water held in a typical water cooler container. It played the music perfectly but the drop time was only 1 minute 25 seconds, which was too short for any song on the album. In the second test we used 10kg of water, but it only generated 6 volts, which was not enough to power the record player.

If you know the story of the three bears, you’ll anticipate that the third test was just right. We borrowed the water jug from the cafe and added 5kg to the container, bringing the total to 15kg. Not only did it generate enough power to start the record player, the drop time was just short of 9 minutes; we managed to play the better part of Side 1 of the Johnny Cash album At Folsom Prison (1968). Success! We attached an electrical tester and observed that the output power varied significantly. This was related to the music: the louder we turned up ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, the faster the weight dropped. This was surprising and instructive in itself.

Second iteration:

The next iteration aims to solve an important problem. Finding lathe gears and having access to a lathe limits the potential of easy access, so we had the idea of modifying a basic motorcycle for our experiments (ideally something around 125cc single cylinder). The main premise of this iteration is to reverse the purpose of the bike. Apologies for all the technical details, but in the interest of open knowledge here is a brief explanation:

• Normally the bike engine burns fossil fuel (petrol) to move the piston down, which is converted to rotary motion with the crankshaft (every 4th stroke in our case)
  
• Rotary motion (or RPM) is modified by the gearbox and ultimately rotates the rear wheel via a chain drive providing forward linear motion to the bike (and rider)
• We reverse this situation: instead of fossil fuel, gravity spins the rear wheel using it as a pulley attached to the falling mass
• This spins the drive sprocket, increasing RPM in the gearbox and finally driving the crankshaft at a speed determined by the selected gear, the diameter of the pulley, and the falling mass.

Motorcycles commonly generate electrical power (for the starter motor, lights, ignition, etc.) using a generator spinning on the end of the crankshaft. Unfortunately, in our case, the breaker had already sold on this key component before we received the donated bike. So we will test this ideal solution as soon as a complete scrap bike is found. For this iteration we use the same DC motor used in the first prototype.

Analysing the engine we noticed that the starter motor gears spin much faster than the crank - these operate in one direction to start the bike. With a bit of welding we solved this problem. We hacked into the engine cover to allow access for an output chain drive, and with some simple machining we converted the output drive to a timing gear. Next step - boil a kettle from the same balcony… 

Once the second iteration is complete, the gravity battery will be ready to progress to another major phase: adapting it to new terrains, materials, and expertise in other locations, and testing the concept in the wild (although our local cafe, it must be said, is pretty wild).

Designing things is always a political act. In our work we are reusing available materials, basing designs on local needs and local terrain, and developing environmentally responsible off-grid energy solutions that empower local communities. How important is this approach given the current state of things? Well, although practically speaking it might be a drop in the proverbial bucket, at the moment it seems very important.

When the sun shines

It’s time to reveal a bit of what we’ve been doing outside the cafe. Crap Futures is keen to move beyond words (much as we like words) and put our ideas into practice.

We’ve been writing a lot lately about constraints of infrastructure and history, especially on energy. We also highlighted the merits of living slightly outside of established systems - things are more exposed here, less complex, easier to understand. And so at the end of last year we began a project aimed at exploring and addressing the issues of energy infrastructure on our island of Madeira.

As a place with ample sun, wind, rain, and sea it would be easy to assume that renewable approaches to energy would be thriving. What you see when you fly into Madeira supports that notion: vast banks of solar photovoltaic panels (PVs) line several of the exposed hillsides; smaller PVs cover rooftops on many of the island’s houses and wind farms line up across the higher hilltops where they are exposed to the full force of the gales blowing in from the Atlantic.

Investment in renewables rightly receives favourable press. However, beneath the optimistic surface lies a darker reality. The big players, whose empires were built on the burning of fossil fuels, are not standing idly by as their fires go out. They are desperately finding ways to retain their control - the classic constraint of established infrastructure.

The (oversimplified) problem is this:

Solar PVs only generate energy while the sun shines. Wind farms generate energy when the wind blows. The wind is unpredictable and the sun shines during the day when most people are out at work, meaning that energy cannot realistically be consumed in real time.

This leaves 3 basic options:

1. Sell unused energy back to the grid through feed-in tariffs.
   
2. Change behaviour to use energy in sync with its generation.
   
3. Find methods to store energy off the grid.
   

The key problem with option 1 is examined in this Quartz article from 2013: ‘Why US power companies don’t want you putting a solar panel on your roof’. The short answer is that it will destroy their business model. So while incentives seem to abound, the reality is that these incentives are diminishing year on year - a fact highlighted by our colleague Morgado Dias in this paper:

Portugal practices an instantaneous net-metering scheme, meaning that the energy generated by the PV system has to be consumed at the same instant as it is produced to be considered self-consumption. The grid injection tariff is four times lower than the consumption tariff, forcing the solar producers to self-consume and not inject any solar power into the grid.

The issue is not clear cut. As things stand users of renewables still rely on the grid during dark or windless periods, and therefore utility owners argue they should be paying for the grid’s upkeep. This point is made by Edison Electric Institute’s David K. Owens in the Washington Post:

It’s not about profits; it’s about protecting customers. There are unreasonable cost shifts that do occur [with solar]. There is a grid that everyone relies on, and you have to pay for that grid and pay for that infrastructure.

So while the infrastructure battle rages on, what else can be done? 

Option 2 would make a good design fiction project - a hypothetical redesign of society where everything that requires the assistance of energy is performed during sunny or windy periods. Products stop and start randomly and the world returns to nights of genuine darkness and wood burning stoves.

But with this project (unusually) we’re not interested in fiction.

Option 3 provides the clearest opportunity for rethinking energy problems in the real world. Obviously there have been steps in this direction by some of the more radical disruptors: Tesla, for example, released the Powerwall, a rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack for domestic use. The Powerwall also follows Tesla’s recent tradition of open-sourcing some of its key patents. Elon Musk’s rhetoric is powerful and, to some extent, hard to resist - even skeptics like us find ourselves perched on the fence. (After all, he’s part Canadian.)

We have previously explored our fears and suspicions of the Californian ideology, asking questions about how ‘shared’ or democratic the described utopia is likely to be. Universal Powerwalls hooked up to renewables would be ideal but the reality is that only the relatively wealthy can afford them, meaning that the rest of us potentially suffer ever degrading provision as the grid dies from lack of investment.

Borgmann’s device paradigm also come to mind: as with the majority of systems-based technologies emerging from disruptive innovations, the means become invisible and our control over the system is reduced. With a Powerwall the consumer is once again locked into a constraining infrastructure. 

Then there is the environmental impact of lithium-ion batteries, as detailed here.

The key aim of our project is to provide similar practical ends to Tesla’s Powerwall but through different means - exposed and interactive means that return genuine control to people and communities. We are challenging not only historical infrastructure but also the generic approach to its implementation; the thinking that denies the possibility of bespoke alternatives based on unique landscapes or contexts, of which our island has plenty. Madeira’s vertiginous topography and numerous microclimates provide an ideal canvas, and this project recasts the island as a site for multi-scale energy experiments.

As a starting point we have begun prototyping a gravity battery as storage device. Many Madeiran communities are built on cliff-sides with drops ranging from a common 7-8 metres in the centre of Funchal to the 780 metre Cabo Girão (pictured above) located along the southern coast of the island. These provide an easy solution to the storage issues that problematise the use of solar panels. The aim is to use locally sourced and inexpensive parts with minimal complex making, and all progress will be documented on a wiki (soon to be launched).

For this project we are working with a fellow cafe habitué, Mohammed Ali (interviewed here about an earlier energy project based in Scotland that was the inspiration for this concept). Mo will be working on the project as M-ITI’s first PhD in design (more on this later).

What’s next for our island? Can we overcome local politics and get the gravity batteries moving up and down Madeira’s cliffs? We’re hoping that either way our interventions will start discussions in the real world and make our paradise more sustainable.

Images: 

Wind farms viewed from Paul da Serra, Madeira: James Auger

Cabo Girão: Mathiasrex Maciej Szczepańczyk - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6256506 

Gravity battery prototype: Mohammed J. Ali