boulder Archives - Page 7 of 9

When do fuel costs actually matter?

Kim Stanley Robinson gave a fun talk at Google a couple of years ago in which he brought up the possibility of large, slow, wind powered live-aboard bulk freighters, among other ideas. I was reminded of it by this post from Alex Steffen. Especially for commodities like coal, grains and ore — non-perishable goods that get carried in bulk carriers — what matters is the net flux of materials and the predictability of supply. More (or larger) slow ships can deliver the same flux as fewer high speed ones. International contracts for these goods can span decades. If fuel prices became a significant portion of their overall cost, it would be worthwhile to make this kind of ships-for-fuel substitution. However, it turns out that fuel is a vanishingly small proportion of the overall cost of most internationally traded goods.

Our neighbors in Pasadena moved back to Thailand, and packed their entire household into a single half-sized shipping container. The cost to get it from their home in SoCal to their home outside Bangkok was $2000. Their combined airfare was probably a larger fraction of the cost of moving across the Pacific. You can get a full-sized shipping container moved from point A to point B, anywhere within the global shipping network, for several thousand dollars. If your cargo is worth significantly more than that, then you don’t have to worry about Peak Oil destroying your business. For a typical container carrying $500,000 worth of goods, the shipping costs (not all of which are related to fuel!) represent about 1% of the final costs of the goods. If fuel prices were to go up by a factor of ten, the shipping costs would still only represent 10% of the overall cost. This would have an effect on business, to be sure, but it would not cause global trade to collapse.

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Goss-Grove neighborhood to be re-zoned for lower density

The Goss-Grove Neighborhood is slated to be re-zoned for lower density (PDF) as part of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan update. Goss-Grove is right in the very core of Boulder, next to downtown and CU, intrinsically walkable and bikeable. It should be dense! Residents are unhappy with the low-quality student slumlord apartments. Small, affordable, high quality condos that blend in with 100 year old homes could increase density, without destroying the neighborhood’s feel. Vancouver, BC has done this well.

Project Thirty Days mostly Car-Free

Someone from Bike Radar decided to give up their car for a month, right here in Boulder and midwinter no less. They’ve got a sweet longtail from Trek that looks like it’s served them well. Even with temperatures plunging below -20°C, it ended up being easier than he thought, and easier with time. Boulder’s infrastructure made it pleasant, not just doable. Here’s hoping more people will give it a try!

Energy Efficiency and Economics at Walnut Mews

Our condo HOA had a meeting last fall, and somebody brought up selling the flat plate collectors on the roof that are part of our defunct solar thermal hot water system. The 750 gallon cylindrical storage tank rusted out in 2003 after 20 years of service. The outbuilding that houses it was basically built over the tank, so swapping it out for a new one would have meant either chopping the thing up in place with a cutting torch and building a new one on site, or removing the roof, which nobody was keen on. Some plumbing got re-routed and the tank sits there still, derelict. It was also mentioned that the main boiler for our hydronic district heating might be nearing the end of its days. I volunteered to look into whether it would make economic sense to repair the solar thermal system, and what the options were for the boiler.

Given that flat plate solar thermal collectors generate an average of about 1kBTU worth of heat per day per square foot (according to the US EIA), and given that we have about 250 square feet of collecting area (nine 28 square foot panels), the current system ought to collect something like 250kBTU/day. Our current boiler consumes 520kBTU/hr worth of gas, meaning that the solar thermal system could at best displace a half hour’s worth of operation each day. Gas costs about $8/million BTUs, so the boiler costs about $4/hr to run. If we assume optimistically that system losses are negligible, and that the boiler runs at least half an hour a day 250 days a year (it was only hooked up to the baseboard heating, not the domestic hot water) then the solar thermal system is capable of displacing something like $500 worth of gas each year. This is a best case scenario though, since the hydronic system needs water that’s hotter than the flat plate collectors can make it (so the boiler will have to do some work to boost the temperature) and because the system losses are almost certainly non-negligible.

Still, $500/year might be a significant savings. To know whether it’s really worthwhile, we need to know how much it will cost up front to get this savings, and how long we ought to expect to be able to collect it (i.e. what’s the system’s expected lifetime). I got wildly varying estimates of the cost to get the system up and running again. At the low end it was $5000, to leave the rusty tank where it is and put a collapsible storage bladder in the crawlspace. At the high end it was $20,000 to remove the old tank and build a new spray-foam insulated stainless steel one in its place. I used this calculator to sanity check my energy numbers above (which don’t seem crazy), as well as the estimates. It suggests that all in, the total system cost including installation would be something like $28,000. I suspect that a plastic bladder in the crawlspace wouldn’t be as efficient or as durable as the new stainless tank. For the sake of argument, let’s say the cheap option will only last 5 years, and the expensive one will last 30 years. The original tank lasted about 20 years. Here’s what it looks like today:

Continue reading Energy Efficiency and Economics at Walnut Mews

Sprawl at the Gates

Boulder County is slowly being invaded from the southeast and it’s not clear what we can do about it. Sprawling development is (still) the order of the day in Broomfield, Weld, and Jefferson Counties, and it looks set to generate a lot more trips through Boulder County in the coming decades. Personally, I’m praying for $8 gasoline.

Boulder’s Passive Aggressive Building Standards

Usually when people say that “better is the enemy of good enough”, they’re pointing out that striving for perfection can be a distraction from just getting the job at hand done. There are other dynamics that involve these concepts too. As social animals, we tend to judge ourselves against those around us. Once our basic needs have been satisfied, our relative wealth or deprivation often becomes more important to us than our absolute level of well being. We have little concept of how much is enough. This can lead to the familiar runaway acquisitiveness (keeping up with the Joneses) when there is a well established (or constructed…) social norm favoring consumption. Less obviously, it can also lead to an inappropriate lack of ambition when faced with an objective task that is not supported by widespread social norms.

Over the last couple of years Boulder has upped its building energy efficiency standards. The new permitting regime requires buildings to perform better — net of on-site generation like photovoltaics — than the 2006 international building codes (IBC). Smaller dwellings (< 3000 square feet) have to use 30% less energy than the baseline. Medium homes (3000-5000 sq ft) need to do 50% better, and large ones (> 5000 sq ft) have to beat it by 75%. Obviously this is an improvement over the previous situation, but in comparison to what is possible, and what is necessary to combat climate change, it’s actually pretty unimpressive. Homes of all sizes built to the Passive House standard use 80-90% less energy than the baseline code, and they do it without counting any on-site power generation against the building’s energy consumption, whereas the HERS index that is used in the Boulder code does count on-site generation. This is an important distinction, because the atmosphere doesn’t cancel out your nighttime coal-fired emissions with the solar electricity that you sell onto the grid during the day. All it cares about is the total amount of CO2 released.

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Links for the week of November 26th, 2010

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of November 26th, 2010

A Thousand Splendid Power Plants

Xcel Energy’s Valmont East Terraforming Station in Boulder, CO. As a side effect, it powers all the lights you see in the background.

James Watt’s industrial revolution was fired by coal, is fired by coal, and shall be fired by coal under the current plan, until death do us part. Anthracite, lignite and bituminous — it is all nearly pure carbon, sequestered in the shallow inland seas of the Carboniferous, scavenged from a powerful greenhouse atmosphere by the first macroscopic life to colonize the land, 350 million years ago. It was into these scaly fern tree forests, club mosses, cycads, and giant horsetails that we tetrapods laboriously crawled so long ago, to gasp our first desperate breaths.

Industrial power, carbon and coal are deeply synonymous. The SI unit of power is named for Watt, and the word “carbon” is derived from the Latin carbo, which means coal. Many of the super-human abilities we are accustomed to wielding today are intimately bound up with this strange rock that burns. Our purpose in burning it is to release usable heat, and we consider the release of carbon dioxide and other pollutants to be a side-effect of that process. In the fullness of time I suspect we will come to see that relationship reversed. When we look back at today’s coal fired power plants a few centuries from now, we won’t see them as electricity generators. We will instead see them as components of a massive, coordinated and yet unintended climatic engineering project. We are effectively terraforming the Earth, participating in the transformation of our planet as a new force of nature. It’s not the first time life has done something like this. The cyanobacteria began pumping oxygen into the atmosphere 2.5 billion years ago, incidentally making both fire and macroscopic organisms possible for the first time. And also incidentally oxidizing away a lot of previously stable atmospheric methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, plunging the Earth into the deep freeze for three hundred million years. I hope that we can be more mindful of the consequences of our actions than the blue-green algae were, but honestly I’ve got my doubts.

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Being Car Free in Boulder

Of the places I’ve lived in the US, Boulder makes car-free living the easiest and most enjoyable. For me, that means riding my bike. Yes, there’s a little snow, and a few times each winter bitter cold will slide down from Canada, and yes there’s a bit of topography coming out of the Boulder Creek floodplain. However, on balance the weather is very manageable with 300+ sunny days a year, and the terrain is varied enough to be interesting without daunting a healthy though unathletic cyclist. The city’s scale is also very accessible, with the longest possible trip taking about 45 minutes, between the northern and southern extrema. Most trips are 15 minutes or less. However, what really sets the city apart is the infrastructure and the burgeoning bicycle culture. Just watch Boulder Goes Bike Platinum from Streetfilms, and A Day in the Life of Community Cycles from Ryan Van Duzer.

I’m not saying it’s perfect, but whereas being a dedicated cyclist in Southern California felt like a heroic or sometimes Sisyphean labor, and often felt lonely, using my bike to get around here mostly just feels wonderful. It’s convenient, fast, cheap, and feels relatively safe. They plow the bike paths when it snows. Something like 10% of commute trips are done by bike. We have climbing lanes paired with downhill sharrows. The separated 13th St. contra-flow bike lane is blissful. There are sometimes (gasp!) signs specifically for bikes, telling you where the path you’re on will take you. This fall we got a couple of bike corrals on Pearl. Our cycling infrastructure can and should continue to be improved, but I think it might actually be more important right now to get more people familiar with using it.

I’ve also talked to people who don’t currently bike for transportation, but would like to. These folks are often outside the usual American cycling subculture demographic, which tends to be skewed toward young to middle-aged athletic and/or rebellious spandex-clad and/or tattooed males without families. In Los Angeles, I never felt I could recommend living car-free without reservations. It was clearly possible — I did it for 11 years — but it wasn’t always enjoyable, at least not in the way I knew it could be from living in Japan and bike touring in Europe. In SoCal, we were happy if we could just get the Powers That Be to recognize bikes ought to be considered transportation instead of (or in addition to) recreation, never mind getting them to make investments of money and space. Here, the City has been making those investments slowly over the past few decades. There, I was only really comfortable advocating the car-free life and its many benefits to people I knew, and who had a temperament to deal with the associated trials and tribulations. Here, I feel like I can unabashedly recommend utilitarian cycling to just about anyone. Here the personal costs are much lower, and the benefits — economic, bodily, environmental, etc. — are as great as ever.

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Thoughts on the TVAP and Junction Place Village

Boulder has about 100,000 citizens, and about 100,000 jobs. Of course, a lot of us aren’t working. Some of us are climbing bums; some of us are four years old; and some of us are climbing bums staying home to take care of four year olds. 50,000 people commute into Boulder every day to work, and about 10,000 leave the city to go work somewhere else, for a net influx of roughly 40,000 workers, making up for those of us too old, young, lazy, or busy to have a so-called “real job.” (The kind you tell the IRS about). That’s a lot of people moving around, and a lot of lonely driving, since around 2/3 of those commuters are in single occupancy vehicles. If only there were more places to live in Boulder, especially more places that service employees could afford, maybe so many people wouldn’t need to move around. This is how the story goes anyway, and while it’s not quite that simple, I think it’s close to true given the 5:1 ratio of in vs. out commuters.

One of the few remaining large tracts of low-density land within Boulder’s borders is the light industrial area between 30th St. and Parkway, straddling the Pearl Parkway, between Valmont and Arapahoe. The northern portion of that area is now slated for redevelopment, following the 2007 Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP). The general idea of the plan seems to be to create an eastern downtown locus, and to eventually have an urban spine running through central Boulder along Pearl St. and Pearl Parkway, from 9th St. all the way out to Foothills Parkway, and to ensure that transportation within this urban core is functional by de-emphasizing the use of private cars and providing excellent connectivity to the rest of the city via transit, foot, and bike. Additional regional mass transit connections are also planned to this eastern core, including both BRT and rail. As a human powered urbanist, this idea sounds great to me, and much better than the ocean of asphalt and big boxes that 29th St. unfortunately turned into. I’d love for Boulder to accept the role of being a small city rather than a big town, while aggressively enforcing the existing well-defined geographical boundaries, and avoiding high-rise buildings. If we can pull that off, then we will have an interesting, beautiful city of intrinsically human scale, and I can’t think of a nicer kind of place to live. I haven’t been around for the years of debate leading up to the present situation, instead being preoccupied with graduate school, and unsure whether I would be staying long enough to actually see anything actually get built. But now I plan to be here, have the time to pay attention, and am interested to see what happens.

Continue reading Thoughts on the TVAP and Junction Place Village