We need energy & oil for mobility and our growing numbers of gadgets. The previous post gave an impression of the current energy system powering our society: The energy system is mainly based on fossil fuels coordinated by powerful central companies and governments. It leaves behind unwanted side products like greenhouse gasses or radioactive waste and is in limited supply.

Storage and transportation of energy is also a problem. A lot of it is lost just by transporting it over large powergrids. We also need to constantly generate new energy while adapting it to the needs of the people or else the system collapses. Batteries like in our gadgets as powersources for unregular powerdemand are not practicle on the larger scale.

Hydrogen

Luckily change is nearby because a very well known gas finally becomes save enough to use as an energy storage medium.  This new medium is hydrogen (H2). Hydrogen can be generated by running an electric current through water (H2O) so it is seperated in Oxygen (O2) and Hydrogen (H2). Hydrogen can be stored in gaseous form which by burning can be returned to H2O. No carbon (C) atoms are present so no CO2, the main greenhouse gas, is formed. The energy stored in this form makes it usable for transportation, heating and as a fuel for cars.

We can now store and transport energy savely. No longer are we dependent on the limited supply of millions of years old oil.

Sunshine

But hydrogen is only the transport medium. There would be no change if we kept using fossil fuels to generate the energy to store inside the H2. Luckily sustainable sources are developed throughout the years but none had really gone mainstream.

But one powersource is really nearby to retake its central role. It is already responsible for the energy of all life by feeding the plants which are eaten by animals. And over centuries the remains of the plants and animals create oil and gas with pressure below the surface. But can we also use the sun for our own energy needs as it shines everywhere on the planet. In a half hour enough sunlight reaches the earth to power the entire world for a year!!!

In the past we tried with solarcells but they just were not sufficient. It took 20 years of use to get back its value at purchase. But now solar technology evolves very fast.  Solarcells can repay their creation costs in a few years and still function for decades of energy. With some recent crossover discoveries from the plasma TV sector they can be more easily massproduced. Calculations show that with modern solar cells placed within a part of the sahara we could power the complete planet.

A whole new solar revolution is near and some say it is going to be bigger than the computer revolution.

Power to the People

At the moment everything is centralized by a few powerful institutions and governments.

With sun everybody with a roof can produce energy and distribute it to all neighbours. But also wind and sea/wave power are rapidly evolving as viable choices for poor sunshine locations. And with hydrogen as a way to store the power we have a whole new system.

No big company that runs with money/value of millions of years of nature, no government is needed to tax energy, no polution is generated, everything is simpler and better.

The power is of the people. The power balance will change.

More reading material (sources)

• Wikipedia EN – hydrogen economy
• Tegenlicht: Here comes the sun (Dutch but with english links on the right)
• Tegenlicht: Waterstofrevolutie (Dutch)
•  Apple patent: Solar cells in the screens of gadgets.

Creative Commons photo of Mr Sun and Mini sun by Warm ‘n Fuzzy 

Our whole society would collapse without electric power. We completely rely on our computers, phones, refrigerators, TV, lamps. It has changed our way of living completely. And it is strange to realise it only became mainstream since the mid 20th century…

Growing numbers of power-gadgets

Since the 50s waves and waves of new must-have gadgets began to flood the market. What began as an electric system for simple lamps now powers almost everything in our home. With the coming of the global net, more and more stuff gets chips and ‘needs’ to become intelligent. We ‘need’ our media consoles, smartphones, intelligent cars, plasma TVs, LED lights etc. But now it seems an age of convergence of devices is happening with as prime examples the iPhone, the coming of the online cloud as our information store and the rise of netbooks together with more and more efficient chips.

But the cloud data centers to save our virtual lives already take more energy than all air traffic together. To sustain one Second Life avatar it consumes as much power as one Brazilian in a year. Now add up every social account you have. Maybe you should cancel some…

Constant flow of power

Power reaches us in 2 ways: electrons from a power outlet and gas for mostly heating and cooking. Electric power can be generated from multiple sources and gas comes from huge gasfields formed through the ages below the earths surface from organic remains.

Most electric power these days is generated from coal and natural gas and in some countries from nuclear reactions. It is impractical to store power after production in batteries like in our small gadgets so it needs to be constantly generated. So power companies need to constantly anticipate demand and adjust their generators. On hot airco days and during business hours more is needed. Also a lot of power is used just by empowering all those power networks transporting it.

If one node in the power network fails the whole network can come down because the pressure (voltage) drops. This can cause the power-failures which has happened before in Europe and the USA/Canada.

Powerful companies

Now power comes from a few powerful companies/countries mostly from sources like coal, gas, plutonium or petroleum/oil.  With a growing world population and thus demand these energy sources are depleting. The prices will rise together with the power of influence of the companies and countries behind the energy sources.

Most of the conversions to power have unwanted side-products like CO2 or nuclear waste. These products will stay in our climate for years to centuries. With the deforesting smaller and smaller amounts of CO2 are converted back to Oxygen (O2) and organic carbon  building blocks (C) for the plants. The planet takes a huge hit by our growing energy demands.

Challenges

We need our power for our current way of life. This information age is here to stay. But our current power system is reaching its max. It uses finite sources from centralized powerful companies and countries. We need to use more sustainable ways of generating power. Luckily they are just around the corner!

Read on about the bright future of power: Power everywhere 2.0

Creative Commons photo of power outlet by splorp

House generally refers to a shelter or building that is a dwelling or place for habitation by human beings. The term includes many kinds of dwellings ranging from rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to high-rise apartment buildings. The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, though households can be other social groups, such as single persons, or groups of unrelated individuals. 

Wikipedia EN

We begin our lives at our parents where we share most rooms and have most of the times our own bedroom. As we grow up we tend to rent a room inside some student appartments and scale up along the way to our own house or apartment. At the end of our lives some choose to live in an elderly home, with their children or in their dream house somewhere gone in a nice climate. We are in a constant flow of moving to a new place which is adapted to our needs. This was not always so, a few centuries ago it was normal for many people to pass a house to each new generation of siblings.

Bigger & bigger, quicker

The house became the ultimate status symbol. The larger and the more beautiful, the better. It shows your wealth and also your style.

With the changing needs of people whole neighbourhoods of old buildings need to be demolished or renovated and whole new neighbourhoods need to be built. We live in cities which are constantly changing. Whole neighbourhoods can now be built within a few years. Many homes are built in the same style out of prefab parts. As this industry matured the more rules where formed and the more uniform our homes became. On the maps of our cities the new neighborhoods tend to be the most boring by their regular spacious patterns.

Cocooning

As times progressed technology has created our home as a place where we can do everything: cook, wash, watch, socialize, sleep, work, entertain etc. In earlier days we needed to go out to wash our clothes, watch our movies, play our games and talk to people. Everything is at our home now and people tend to cocoon.  More and more people are alienated from their direct surroundings and only know their own home, workplace, friends places and pub/restaurant in the city. It is not surprising more and more people tend to become conservative and fear anything different even in their own neighbourhood. Gone are the small communities where people kept an eye on each other.

Over the years we also more and more alienate from our elderly. They tend to get lonely in elderly home as their children concentrate more on their own lives. We have huge problems the coming years with the babyboomers becoming a grey wave. Multiple countries can’t pay anymore for this flood of need for healthcare. Were are the times where gramps lived with the family? The same can be said for our criminals with their faulthy social environment and other social outcasts like tramps.

Object of our savings

More and more people tend to buy homes. Houses are expensive and society has made up a nice system of making you able to do so by closing a mortgage. The bank lends you some value many times bigger than you earn and in return they keep the interest on your home. 

You get the home because you promise to pay that interest. Houses are essentially built by future money you are worth to earn. And since a growing number of people does this, better and more expensive houses can be built from this future money. Most of the times people never pay for the real value of the house. This value system seems like one big bubble.

And recently this went haywire with banks giving loans to people who couldn’t afford the interest on the homes. While interest was low on the beginning and the people thought they could afford their new home it was unpayable later on. The banks used this mortgage to sell it to other banks for profits because the buying bank thought it was worth lots of future interest money…

Challenges

We are on a road of alienation of our direct surroundings and on our way to the ultimate cocoon that needs to sustain your own families needs. Having your own palace payed out of a strange system of promising future interest money can’t be sustained. I think we need to rethink our cities and form more shared resources. Then we need much less so they can be built much more diverse. We need to go back a step and be more social, better for our elderly and keep a better eye on our social outcasts. This can’t be sustained indefinitely.

Creative Commons photo of the houses in Ypenburg, The Hague Holland by Michplay

We are all a puzzle piece of a larger whole. A whole that keeps us alive and takes care of us as long as we contribute to it. It adapts to good and bad times as a completely dynamic system. This dynamic system is called society.

A society is a population of humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and/or institutions. More broadly, a society is an economic, social and industrial infrastructure, in which a varied multitude of people are a part of. 

Wikipedia EN

Our society has formed throughout the centuries. With new technologies we can abstract our lives further from simple food-gatherers to a compartmentalized group where everybody contributes to one piece of keeping us alive as a whole. We can live closer together and abstract our food, water, waste and energy production. We can now because of this group effort build huge buildings and go to the moon. What’s next?

The inner workings of this holistic system has kept me fascinated for the past few years. As society grows more complex we begin to loose grip on it. Nobody can have a complete view anymore now it is a global interconnected system. 

Mapping the pieces

But what are all the puzzle pieces? And what are the challenges for each piece? Maybe we can understand better what is happening around us.

In the coming time I want to make a journey through each part that keeps our society standing. I will begin with our direct environment: our homes and all we need to keep alive there like walls, power, water, gas, waste management, furniture etc.
Along the way I want to look at the whole system behind each part like energy, transportation, communication or healthcare and try to find the whole industry that is needed to bring a person this good. I always want to end each post with the coming challenges for that piece of society.

Along the way we will try to find a larger picture. What are the main challenges for the next centuries? What will new influences like a global networked internet do to our society in the long run? To what kind of society will we grow to? I think this awareness is the key to form something better and more stable than we are living in now.