De Lange Conferece: Day Three

Highlights again from a fine set of presentations, and we’ll dig into some of the meat of this in the upcoming days.

We started the morning off with a really mind-blowing presentation by William Mitchell from the MIT Smart Cities Research Group. Mitchell highlighted some of the work of his group, including what they call the City Car.

Now, this thing is cool. The idea is an electric 2-seater car that can fold itself up so that you can fit about 5 in a normal parallel parking stall. Pair this with some smart navigational systems and transportation demand management systems, and you’ve got a car that fits well even in a highly urban context. Not bad!

Personally, I thought the scooter concept was even cooler. Weighing in at only 150 lbs and folding up nearly to fit in a bike rack, the robo-scooter also has a removable battery pack that could be swapped out at ‘electric vending machines’ all over the city. Thus you get an electric system without having to charge it at home, a real challenge for large numbers of people who don’t have a garage to park their vehicle in (and therefore an outlet to charge it from).

There’s tons more information at the project web site, well worth a look.

We then heard from Volker Hartkopf, the Director of the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University. He shared a pretty interesting perspective on electric generation in the United States and some of the major challenges we’re facing. He offered a couple critical stats:

• Buildings use over one third of all electricity, and by implementing passive energy retrofits we could reduce the amount of electricity buildings require by 80%.
• Power plants currently consume about 40% of the nation’s water supply for cooling.
• We lose around 60% of the energy that goes into a power plant in waste heat and transmission losses. Therefore, distributing power generation to where it is needed most could result in tremendous energy savings.
• Redeveloping inner city areas on average results in about 1/2 the energy cost of greenfield development over a 10 year span.

Following Hartkopf’s information on power generation and use throughout the nation, we heard from Alexander Zehnder about water and food supplies around the world. One of the things I appreciated most about Zehnder’s presentation was that he omitted global warming from his 2025 outlook. Why do I like that? Because people love to argue about global warming, but nobody really knows enough climate science to accurately model or predict it, and therefore people are usually somewhat dismissive of projections that are attributed to global warming.

So, again, Zehnder’s commentary on water and food supply was not linked to global warming, at all.

The most interesting part he shared was the idea of human water needs. Basically, drinking water is a minor part, sanitation and hygiene are much greater needs, and food supply is by far the largest requirement. If you add these requirements up, people need between 1000 and 1500 metric tons (or cubic meters) of water per year.

This last piece was the most interesting, I thought. He offered the concept of virtual water, ie how much water it took to grow a kilogram of dry food. In a dry country like Israel they found that people used on average only about 500 metric tons of water per year. However, they import a significant percentage of their food, and if you count the amount of water that was used (in another country) to grow the imported food, the average Israeli consumed about 1250 metric tons of water in a year. Thus, the consumption is fairly constant no matter how dry or wet your climate is.

Now, here was the even more interesting part. He listed off the nations of the world that are net food exporters and importers, and while I had some idea of this information I was truly surprised to see how dramatic the spread is!

The world’s two leading agricultural exporters are the US and Argentina. These two nations literally feed the world, and no other countries even come close to matching their agricultural output.

There are other net exporters, but not many. The other notable net exporters are Canada, Brazil, France, and Germany, followed by Britain, Ukraine, and Khazakstan.

The net import list includes almost all the other countries on the planet. The biggest importer is China, and other major importers include Russia, Mexico, India,and  Iran, as well as all the nations in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

The shocking thing was the forecast for 2025. Due to increasing over-farming, urbanization destroying farmland, some prolonged droughts and desertification (especially in China), and a long list of other minor factors, there is projected to be a dramatic increase in food importation over the next 16 years.

16 years out, the entire East Coast of Africa will become net importers, as well as much more of Southeast and Central Asia, and more of Central America.

This increase in importation of food has more to do with the lack of water for irrigation than any other single factor. There are plenty of places on the Earth that would be fertile if they had sufficient water for growing crops, but they do not. When you try to create new water via rainwater capture, damming rivers, or desalinization, you have significant trade-offs. Rainwater capture only helps areas that already get enough water, just not evenly distributed enough. Damming rivers has major environmental impacts and high capital costs, and desalinization is extraordinarily expensive.

In the end, though, I can’t picture a future when desalinization doesn’t become a major part of life for many. The associated high cost of water will probably be something of a damper on the local economies dependent on this kind of water for a while, but eventually the technology has to improve to a point that it becomes more cost-effective. There’s simply too much demand in the world for water, and there’s no source remotely as plentiful as the ocean, if only it wasn’t salty.

The last segment involved two pastors sharing examples of how their churches had played crucial roles in bringing a community together and turning it around. It was very interesting and very uplifting. That one will be worth looking into in more detail later on.

So, as with the past few days, I’ll stop with a recap today, and we’ll take a deeper look at several of the topics discussed at the conference in the days to come!