 Imagine a world where fossil fuels no longer drive everything. Could we just keep electrifying everything we use and keep on living the same way as back in 2023? Just with more? Better? Faster? Cleaner? Everything? How are you getting to work? What type of work are you doing? What's changed the most? What's the same? Let's get into it. This is the LowTech Podcast. Hello and welcome to the third episode of our new season. I'm Scott Johnson of the Low Technology Institute. Your host for podcast number 73 on December 22nd, 2023, coming to you from the LowTech recording booth. Thank you for joining us today. We're jumping right into our DeLorean time machine and heading to Cooksville in the year 2100 where we'll spend the rest of our season. Today we're starting with the thing that has changed the most in the last 80 years and that of course is energy. You can still follow us on Twitter, X or whatever it is. Our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook. 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If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch again through our website or email. How we use energy today in 2100 is drastically different than a century ago. Spoiler alert, back then fossil fuels ran everything, especially out here in the country where we live in Cooksville. From motors on lawn care equipment to chainsaws, farm equipment and generators, cooking food, heating, cooling houses, getting from place to place, every single thing was dependent on fossil fuels. Even when we used electric appliances and motors, a lot of that power was coming from fossil fuel generation. Together, natural gas and coal provided about 70% of electric generation in Wisconsin right now. That world is gone, but we still have to deal with the remaining infrastructure and we have to rethink how we use power today. So we'll go into specific technologies later on, but the first thing we have to cover is how our entire outlook had to change. This mindset shift can be summed up in five key adaptations. Our use, convert legacy systems, replace defunct systems, use power directly, and stack and close loop systems. And while today in 2100 these are all self-explanatory, I think a little dive in each one of these will be helpful for you visitors from the past. So the first thing that you owe dinosaur from 80 years ago will notice is how much energy or how much less energy we use. This is what we mean by reduced use. Back in 2020 the US produced about 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy and you could divide that energy into about one quarter for transport, one quarter for industrial uses, a tenth for residential, a tenth for commercial, and then an entire quarter for energy lost in the production and transmission of that power. Today we use less than 25 quadrillion BTUs across the US and although each sector that uses power has seen reductions, transportation, commercial use, and production and transmission losses have been cut the most dramatically. Even industrial and residential energy use have been adapted to function with renewable on-site energy and this doesn't mean that everything runs on wind or solar as the term renewable energy used to mean. Today we consider any energy source that is quickly regenerate itself quickly to be renewable. The second adaptation was converting legacy systems. In some cases fossil fuel machines could be converted to run with new energy sources. The easiest examples were those where engines could be replaced by electric motors or compressed air motors or even direct drive from wind or water turbines. In other cases like gas stoves, fuel sources like methane from biodigesters could be used. Even a limited number of diesel engines have been kept running using pure biodiesel made from algae and other sources but these are kind of old school curiosities. This is no real replacement for gasoline was available. We come to strategy number three which is the outright replacement of antiquated systems. One of the most popular and innovative directions we've taken is adopting pedal power and so this doesn't mean just bicycles for a short or even medium distance transportation. A whole series of petty machines as a peddling machine has been invented such as the pedicultivator for agricultural work and the pedibaro for moving loads basically a wheelbarrow on a bike. Another change is getting rid of the middle man that is trying to reduce how much fuel we need by using a direct drive power instead of storing energy in one form for example electrons in a battery or combustion power in methane. We use the source of the energy directly. This can be as simple as a solar oven for cooking or a windmill to pump in pressurized household water. It can be a throwback to historical machines like water wheels to drive mills for sawing or grinding grain but many systems use self-regulating direct drive power like fans running DC motors connected to a small solar panel to cool greenhouses or to pump air through earth tubes. As the sunnier it is the faster the fan runs and no electronic regulating system is necessary. The fifth adaptation is probably the one least understandable to someone from 80 years ago. As energy from the old way of doing things was drawing down and we started having to figure out how to live with less energy people started competing to see how many stacks and closed loops they could create. These are kind of related ideas but they're slightly different. Stacking is using an already running or existing process and then adding on to it. So if you were baking pizza in an oven and then you turn off the oven and you stuck fruit in there to dry as the oven cooled off or because you already had a wood stove going you hung your wet laundry in front of it to dry. This is stacking. More functionality is stacked on top of an already running system. Those loop systems on the other hand use the waste or the excess of one system to run another and then they make a circle. For example some of us heat here in Cooksville, heat our greenhouses with large compost piles. As we build up the piles garden hoses are circulated through the riding organic matter. A pump moves water from the 150 degree compost pile into the greenhouse where the hoses are buried in the beds and they help keep the beds warm through winter. Because heat is such a common byproduct of other systems we have many ways to capture heat off of machines, motors and others to heat spaces or water or even generate electricity. It wasn't just for mechanical applications. The idea of closing the loop on systems became popular as people tried to reduce the amount of resources to run anything. It also reduced the amount going into the waste stream. For example chickens have become ubiquitous and many people use closed loop feeding and waste management systems for their chickens. It's a little fancy term but it's really simple. Depending on their ecological zone anyone could do this. In Cooksville chickens are moved around to manage the vegetation growth in the summer while silage is collected to feed them through the winter. Their manure then goes back to fertilize the plants which they eat which then closes the loop. So as you can imagine as we shifted from a system dependent on fossil fuels to one that made careful use of renewable energy resources we had to redesign every system that we could rely on to power heat and cool our lives. These five adaptations which often overlap have helped us usher in a new way of life that is not wholly dependent on any one single source of energy as the danger of that was recognized after the shift away from fossil fuels but unfortunately as we'll discuss now we had to learn the same lesson about electricity. So electricity. If I were to ask even the most ardent supporters of fossil fuels back in 2023 they would recognize that in 50 years we probably would be using electricity more than coal natural gas or even gasoline. It would have been it would have seemed that the shift to electric everything was inevitable but by 2050 this dream had collapsed. Instead of using the transition to an all-electric world to weed out waste in the system people wanted to continue living in the same power hungry way that they had been when using fossil fuels. Unfortunately the electrical infrastructure was not able to cope with the strain. Think about it this way in order to electrify the entire power system in the US we would have to replace about 75% of our energy production that used to come from fossil fuels with new electric generation or to put it another way the US would have to figure out a way to produce three times more electricity than it already is doing in 2023. But what makes that even harder is that 60% of the electricity produced in 2023 is generated by fossil fuels so really in 2020 renewable energy and solar nuclear provided about 20% of all the power needed for the 100 quadrillion BTUs produced. It was unreasonable to think that those two sources could be scaled up to cover 100% of an all-electric future meaning if we kept power usage the same. The government did try though they dumped trillions of dollars into bringing renewable wind and solar from 12% of total power generation to nearly 75% by 2050. Looking back it was clear this was never going to happen. Similarly scaling nuclear generation from 8% of the energy market to 25% would have meant building 300 new reactors on top of the 93 existing ones and because of the widespread protest not to mention the engineering and supply change issues this didn't happen. By the middle of the century the country had come to grips with two realities. First people could not use 100% of the power they had been accustomed to using with fossil fuels. Second electricity alone could not even meet their now reduced energy appetite. While electricity is still invaluable for some systems electricity was de-emphasized as the primary power source for everything. Additionally the electrical grid underwent an overhaul during this time to create micro grids and use more power at the source of generation. In a sort of technical judo engineers went around the storage problem of the early 21st century by thinking out new ways to use electricity immediately and directly without resorting to chemical batteries. Even though the supply side of electricity wouldn't meet all of our needs we are still able to electrify most processes. Today things that use electricity are those that are best accomplished by moving electrons around. For example the typical residential kitchen has experienced fads of technological innovation including the electrification of cooking cooling and ingredient preparation and even though the induction cooktops that are 75% more efficient and were all the rave in the 2030s and 40s a solar oven is effective the efficiency is effectively irrelevant because sunlight is free. Cooking in the oven compartment of a masonry mass heater for another example taps into a heat that is already being generated. Another example of stacking and even though a small refrigerator with an exact temperature is very convenient large amounts of food can be stored in root cellars or Rubin coolers through the time of year that requires the most storage with almost no energy use. Electricity though does remain the best solution for some things. Electronic lighting is better just period better than flames for any reason other than romantic ones or making s'mores. Long distance communication is only possible through electric means. Many mobile power applications are easier through stored electricity whether it's a battery powered tool or a hydrogen fuel cell producing electricity to drive tram motors. Even though electricity remains indispensable for some applications it's no longer thought of as a primary solution for all of our energy needs. Nothing is the name of the game today is energy diversity which leads to a more robust and resilient way of living. Now let's talk about localized generation. Since its inception electricity has been almost always generated at large disempower plants and installations. Even though coal peaked around 100 years ago with almost 1500 plants that range from a few megawatts to a couple gigawatts. The natural gas boom of the early 2000s fueled electricity generation for the next few decades with 6 or 700 plants ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand megawatts of capacity. From the mid 1900s through the mid 2000s nuclear plants provided about 15 to 20 percent of the grid's power. But as natural gas was drawn down in the 2030s the debate raged about whether or not to maintain the almost 100 existing reactors through mid-century. Each reactor averaged about a thousand megawatts. Although a small number of radio isotope power stations are now used in extremely specialized environments and circumstances large centralized nuclear facilities are only in operation outside of a few cities like Chicago and New York. And even these have been converted to sodium cooled fasc reactors as you all imagine in order to run on existing stocks of spent fuel from the nuclear legacy of the previous century. From today's local a localist point of view one major problem with nuclear and fossil fuel facilities is that they require a steady influx of fuel from outside the surrounding area. This leaves communities vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. As the old model of central generating stations distributing power over great distances wasted approximately 15 percent of the power in generation mostly through heat losses and steam turbines and another 10 percent through transmission losses. This system was scrapped in favor of a point of use generation and micro grids as the name implies most electricity is now used where it's generated. So if a workshop needs power it can use solar panels and on-site storage which we'll discuss in a bit more detail later. The solar panels of today are pretty different from the legacy ones built last century. Instead of a flat panel mounted on a roof or a rack we use modular stacks of photovoltaic cells. Imagine a large wall of Lego bricks large Lego bricks where each piece is a self-contained PV cell. Circuits are built by connecting the bricks by stacking the bricks and setting patterns and creating parallel and series circuits so any voltage or amperage can be met. Because these bricks are about the same size as a standard construction red brick they can be put together in any shape and installed over any exterior south facing surface. They're even strong enough to bear some load. And because they're standardized they can be disassembled and used elsewhere. Like everything today they're built in specialized factories which we'll talk about more in a few weeks. But as much of our energy needs are stable we only need to make replacement units now. A few generations ago when this started coming online this production was much higher. But these small standardized bricks are so commonplace now. We've also created a huge variety of generators. Wind turbines are still popular in exposed locations but instead of the giant versions used in the early 2000s which required significant fossil fuel inputs to produce, transport and install. Today's turbines are numerous and they're small. They're made of uniform parts and the turbines can be easily repaired by a regular person. They're mounted on dedicated poles or even at the top of truncated pine trees. Vertical axis windmills are popular in more urban areas and water also provides a significant power but without large dams. The ecological problems that came with completely blocking a waterway pushed engineers to create less invasive although admittedly less energetic generating systems. One of them uses a sluice gate to draw water off a small percentage of a stream running down running it parallel to the waterway but with less slope gaining a few feet of height before dropping over a water wheel. A new type of vertical shaft turbine was created and is installed between bends in a river. Intake on the upper river side runs water through the turbine before beating deposited in the down river bend even simpler systems like fluted floating barrels that rotate in the stream and inverted turbines that are inserted in the water are used when only a little constant energy is needed. These systems draw a portion of the kinetic energy of rivers without stopping their flow or disrupting the local ecology. A final source of energy is thermocouples. A thermocouple depends on the C-beck effect which creates a small electric charge between two conductive materials held at different temperatures. In practice these are small squares of metal with electrical leads or wires that can be linked together to build up a charge when applied to a heat source. In places where excess heat is generated and not needed these thermocouple blocks can be attached to draw out the unwanted heat and convert it to electricity. This is a small trickle of energy that was formerly used by NASA on projects to provide energy to spacecraft in deep space. Using decaying nuclear reactions to provide the heat and electricity it provided electricity for decades with no moving parts. So we're trying to sip little bits of energy from all these different small sources and together that creates a lot of power. All right, let's talk about storage. So as the dream of an all electric future was collapsing engineers recognized that chemical batteries weren't needed to store electricity. Nobody needs electricity itself, except maybe Uncle Fester. What we need is a flow of electrons to do work for us. If we can get the work done directly then storage is not needed. Instead of banks of batteries to provide power every second of the day for any need that arises most electricity is used as it's generated or if it's stored it isn't held in batteries. Today most excess electricity is immediately converted into another type of energy and stored without batteries. The storage depends on the type of work. Before the US transitioned away from fossil fuels domestic energy use went towards space heating, hot water, cooling, lighting, laundry, cooking and everything else in descending order and that's in descending order. Most of these are now powered by systems that don't require electric storage. And we'll talk more about heating and cooling in another episode so we'll just put a pin in that for now. Water, for one example. Water's now heated by a solar system. Solar hot water systems by and large every house in Cooksville has one. They have a heated reservoir in their basement where hundreds of gallons are stored in insulated tanks. Each sunny day the stored water is heated with panels full of tubes to absorb the sun's energy and some of the house excess electricity could also be routed to heating elements in these reservoirs to store surplus electricity as heated water. Houses in Cooksville are also on well water. Years ago these were driven by electric pumps and a few of the houses still have these electric pumps but most have converted to wind driven systems. Those even those with electric systems do have a few small dedicated solar blocks for running the pump during the day when needed. In both cases though the pumped water is stored in large tanks with a bladder of air which is compressed as the water is pumped in. Instead of needing a water tower to pressurize their system like most municipalities used to have the compression of the tank and the air in the tank takes care of that pressure need. This stores the day's solar and wind power as pumped water for the household. In a later episode we'll talk about how similar systems compress air for use in workshops. We also do some limited cold storage using electricity. Although we've largely gotten away from relying on freezers and refrigerators in most houses, most houses do have a small fridge for keeping leftovers and foods ready for immediate use, very small like dorm fridges you'd call them. We'll talk more about this when we get to discuss food but these hybrid coolers combine the compressor refrigerator of the early 2000s with the ice box of the 1900s. During the day a square tub of water or other material is frozen at the top of the unit using solar electricity. By the end of the day it's a big block of ice which thaws throughout the night keeping everything cool. But it's true for a few tasks, nothing beats a battery. In most houses lighting is on its own independent circuit where dedicated solar panel blocks recharge a battery that is just for lighting. It's designed so that a single day of sunny weather provides enough light for three or four nights. An emergency, in an emergency a breaker can be flipped and it can charge the lighting system from the micro grid or other sources if necessary. But even when we do use batteries, they're not made with rare or even not so rare earth metals like lithium and cobalt. We store electricity in three types of chemical systems but they're built similarly to the modular solar panel brick system. These batteries were manufactured under something called a unified battery system which we call the UBS. It mandated sizes and connections and other characteristics to make battery cells which are essentially like car batteries with easy plugs that can be linked together in a variety of ways to provide the right voltage and power need in each installation by having uniform materials. It makes a plug and play and swappable a daily occurrence. So if your battery cell starts to die you can just swap it out. It is not a problem. It isn't a huge installation nightmare like it might be back in 2023. I'm only saying that from personal experience. So let's take one quick step back though in case you don't happen to have a degree in electrochemical engineering. Batteries create energy when one metal loses electrons or is oxidized in other words to another metal which is absorbing electrons which is being reduced. This flow of electrons from one to the other can be routed through an LED light bulb to power a flashlight or your kid's favorite toy. The positive metal in this equation is called the cathode and the negative is called the anode. I can still hear my high school chemistry teacher Mrs. Lund reminding me to think positively about cats to remember which is the cathode and which is the anode. So when the first metal is fully oxidized the battery is dead. Rechargeable batteries reverse this process when they are plugged in. In this case the first metal reabsorbed the electrons as the second one loses them. The two metals are separated by a membrane and an electrolyte allows for the movement of charged particles called ions. And depending on the metals used in the electrolytes they degrade each other and each time it's charged and recharged there's some degradation that's why your laptop battery dies after a while. It can only charge and recharge so many times depending on the battery type. For small applications dry electrolytes are preferred so that battery acid doesn't spill out in your pocket if you put down your comms you'll put your comms in your pocket upside down. Our communicators or comms are short for the descendants of what you would call smartphones that's what we call them today comms. These dry cell batteries are closed systems which are difficult to repair and have a finite lifespan but they're swappable so we can just replace them. Stationary systems can use wet cell batteries with free flowing liquid electrolytes in a solution. Small to medium sized systems use nickel iron batteries. While these are practically antiques in terms of technology they are so simple to build and maintain as well as being reliable and robust they use nickel oxide hydroxide oxidizing to nickel hydroxide on the positive plate of course with iron reducing to iron hydroxide on the negative plate as if I didn't need to tell you all that everybody knows that. Because the former has low solubility it doesn't degrade into potassium hydroxide liquid electrolyte. If the battery is becoming overcharged they can off gas hydrogen which used to be seen as a danger but is now built into some batteries and this new type of battery that also produces hydrogen on purpose is called a battle iser but we'll talk about those when we discuss hydrogen in the next episode. Instead of large batteries systems that need a lot of electricity often use hydrogen fuel cells but again we'll discuss that next episode. When a large battery is called for it's almost always an iron flow battery. An iron flow battery needs iron, salt, water and a pump to store vast amounts of energy. Unlike traditional solid state batteries where the positively and negatively charged materials are separated on thin layers surrounded by an electrolyte flow, electrolyte flow batteries pump the electrolyte through the system to create the charge. It's kind of a backwards battery. The capacity of the previously described batteries are limited by their solid cathode and anode materials. Iron flow batteries, storage is only defined by the amount of electrolyte. So by pumping charged electrolyte through a system from one storage tank to another power can be generated as long as a charged electrolyte is available. The bigger the storage tank the more electricity can be stored. As the materials are essentially water, iron salts, rust and iron the systems are only limited by tank size so you can store a huge amount of electricity reasonably efficiently. So let's talk about how we use electricity and this will be a little short. So instead of using long distance transmission lines crisscrossing our country today we try and use electricity and really all energy is close to its generation as possible. Many systems aren't even grid connected. Most households for example have independent lighting systems like I mentioned with a small chemical battery that provides for the modest amount of energy needed by LED bulbs. Factories are required to generate their own operating power. Cooling systems use dedicated solar panels to power them during sunny days which are obviously the warmer ones. Few systems are dependent on the local microgrid although many of them can be connected if needed on a temporary basis. Each community has its own independent grid system. Cooksville for example connects all the houses and workshops and factories and other many outbuildings in the village altogether. A central control unit usually keeps the Cooksville grid isolated from its neighbors but in the event of a system breakdown here it could draw emergency power from the grids in Stoughton, Evansville or Edgerton and vice versa. External power is only used to drive essentials in times of emergency. Outlying farms run largely independently from day to day but could tap into the nearest microgrid if needed. Because municipalities use much less energy and are therefore largely independent, long distance centralized power production from solar farms or other large scale generation stations is available but only treated as a backup or an emergency use. The few remaining centralized power sources are used to drive especially power hunger uses like medical or excuse me, metal and chemical factories. We'll talk more about electricity as we discuss hydrogen next time too. The thing about electricity is that when it comes down to it people don't really need electrons moving from one place to another as I said before. Other forms of energy provide things we do need like heat or light. To use electricity in this way it has to be run through some sort of intermediary like a heater or a light bulb. This builds in a reasonable amount of inefficiency. For that reason electricity isn't as big a deal as somebody from 2023 might have originally thought for 2021, excuse me, 2100. Next episode we're gonna delve into an energy source that few people from 2023 would have expected to be one of our most important sources of power today namely hydrogen. It's like one famous airship disaster caused a century of stagnation and in hydrogen power study and adoption. But more on that later and just a note that episode probably won't be out until the new year because of the holidays kind of putting a cramp in our production schedule. So see you in January. That's it for this week. The low-tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and produced by me, Scott Johnson. This episode was recorded in the low-tech recording booth in Cokesville, Wisconsin. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Play YouTube and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. Thank you to our forester and land steward-level members, Marilyn Skirpon and the Hamvises for their support. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org. You can also find us on social media, of course. Reach me directly. I'm Scott at lowtechhorns, excuse me. I'm Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Our intro music today was happy dance off the album Power Pop from Halizna. That song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the Creative Commons attribution and share lag license as always meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Okay, thanks. Take care and happy New Year.