Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 18:03:09
I wrote a longer reply and then my machine crashed so I'll be
briefer. I do agree with energy being the ultimate fungible commodity
and the value of being able to mix and match is high enough to make up
for some of the inefficiencies in electricity. Having watched some of
the DSM (Demand Side Management) issues and the post-deregulation
utility confusion I don't think that the naive first attempts to turn
off your dishwasher will work. What intelligent appliances (what
intelligent means is a longer discussion) will allow is a marketplace
for energy management policies embodied in software. There will be
simple choices like economy on/off as whether to wash the dishes now or
do deadline scheduling against the need to have them for breakfast. The
rate structure will have to be much simpler the millisecond to
millisecond billing if the system is to be at all reliable. Cogeneration
might very well work in this environment though there will have some
sort of market-maker to keep the complexity in hand. Have I become too
much of a capitalist? On the other hand, I'm too lazy and bored to do
any real financial management of my own -- better to put the effort into
activities that earn new cash so I don't need to be so careful. But, the
analogy with financial management is probably a good one as energy
management will be another buyable service. In fact, PG&E is an example
of a post-deregulatory company that is more like a mutual fund for
energy than a producer.
Sept. 03, 1997
George Kamburoff
Jock, I can’t reply to the 1000-year scenario, nor to even one of 100-years.
I think the acceleration of technology simply makes it impossible, so I’ll
stick to about 20 years or so. I don’t believe we can accurately
foretell what technologies will be developed after that time. I do,
of course, have my own view of things directly ahead.
Housing units of the future (let’s call them "pods"), will be a set
of integrated systems to provide life-support for the occupants. They will
interconnect for the benefits of collective communications, power, resource-sharing,
and waste sinks, and will have the ability to:
The pod will be essentially act as placenta for our family groups, surrounding
and responding to the occupants. The structures will include materials
already available, such as photovoltaic building materials, superinsulations
and transparent insulation, as well as thermochromic and electrochromic
glazing, providing the ability to collect, store, redirect, and convert
light and heat at will or automatic control.
Distributed power will come from a locally-advantageous mix of electrochemical
(fuel cells), solar thermal, photovoltaic, wind, and biological digestion.
Most of these systems will be centralized into housing clusters, will use
thermal storage systems, cognitive control systems (advanced fuzzy logic),
and have connections to grids. With hydrogen used as the primary
fuel, an electrolyzer/storage/fuel cell/water system would generate power
without emissions of carbon dioxide, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, particulates
or significant heat. Hydrogen storage and the use of ultracapacitors
will handle long and short-term power needs.
Biological systems will be employed locally for food production, probably
in hydroponic greenhouses. Other biological systems would include
algae for food (and perhaps hydrogen), digester for waste conversion to
energy and resources, and the biological treatment of toxins.
Distributed communications will be multimode I/O, and will use satellites,
bounce, fiber, and other systems for close interlink, providing our face
to the world.
The most important aspect of this housing revolution is that we will
expand into marginal areas, having the ability to live almost anywhere
with energy self-sufficiency and low environmental impact. The Arctic,
mountaintops, savannas, jungle clearings, deserts, floating cities, are
all possible sites for habitation with little significant adverse effect.
Subject: Intelligent House
Jock,
Just a couple of thoughts on your Intelligent House essay.
How do we get there from here?
Assuming co-generation can be perfected for use in a home, how do you
build up enough of a market to make it financially feasible. Manufactured
housing is currently "low end" and not a likely place to nurture a new
unproved and initially expensive technology. It will be reasonably
wealthy, well educated, professionals, who feel comfortable with
technology who will pioneer it in their own homes. They will turn to
"high end" custom home builders in their region to build for them. The
economics won't make sense initially but these people will be willing to
spend more on the technology to make a personal statement, or gain peer
status, or what ever. At some point a critical mass of homes will be
built, and a real market for products will emerge. The competition among
producers in this new market will bring prices down. The general public
will become aware of the technology and new demand from other segments of
the housing market will encourage speculative builder and manufactured
housing producers to add the Intelligent House to their product offerings.
This is roughly what happened with home energy efficiency technology
products over the last 20 years. A darker scenario is that the technology
will be over hyped. Incompetent, but well meaning builders will cobble
together poorly thought out systems and the whole industry will get a
black eye in the publics perception. This is what happened to active
solar homes.
You mentioned the uninsurability of some homes today (hurricanes in South
Florida?). I see the real problem as the inability to secure mortgage
money for these homes initially. Mortgages, weather written by local
banks or mortgage companies, are "securitized". This means they are
packaged together with similar mortgages and "sold" as a security with a
predictable income stream on the capital markets. The key word is
"similar", mortgage underwriters must abide by strict standards to insure
that all the homes are of a similar "risk". Initially Intelligent Houses
will probably not be underwritten until a track record for their
performance is established. This is Catch 22; if you can't get a track
record, you can't get a mortgage; if you can't get a mortgage, you can't
get it built; if you can't get it built, you can't get a track record.
Wait a minute, if I am a valued bank customer, or a builder with an
established relationship with a local bank why won't they give me a
mortgage and keep it in their portfolio rather than sell it. Its the
banker's dilemma: borrow short and lend long. Making long term loans(
like mortgages) with short term and volatile funds (like savings
accounts). The risk is that interest rates rise and the bank is stuck
with a 20 year loan on its books at an uncompetitive low interest rate.
The banker's solution is "securitization", pass the risk on to investors.
There is another solution available to the local bank. Most banks belong
to the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB), a depression era institution that
provides liquidity to its member banks. The FHLB has a blanket lien on
all the member bank's assets and with this as security it is able to raise
funds on international capital markets at very competitive rates (it is
the worlds second largest issuer of debt, after the U.S Treasury). This
allows the FHLB to offer long term money without the risk of interest rate
shock. Using this FHLB money local banks can issue mortgages, keep them in
their own loan portfolio, and not take an interest rate risk. You still
have to convince your lending officer that the technology is a good
investment but, that is a lot easier than trying to convince huge capital
market underwriters to change their rules.
Finally, the idea of selling electricity back to "the grid" at ever
changing market rates is about to become reality with the decoupling of
electric generation from transmission. Previously long term contracts, at
rates favorable to the power utility, were the only way to get on to "the
grid". Decoupling will lower the cost of entry to electricity suppliers(
conceivably you don't have to own any generating equipment, you can make
your money arbitraging power costs). This means that even the most
minuscule electric producer (an Intelligent House) should be marketable.
Subject: Comments and Suggestions response
COMMENTS:
It may not be inevitable, but as you suggest, it is probable that old
industrial societies, with paid-for infrastructure to "protect" will
be late-comers to this type of change. We see some evidence in the
more rapid transition to satellite communications in poor countries,
bypassing the capital-intensive installation of poles and copper wire.
I anticipate similar resistance to junking large central power plants
and concomitant webs of copper wire. Likely and impossible to
prevent terrorist attacks would cause realistic appraisal of their
vulnerability and inherently poor economics.
LIKES:
I dunno---seemed well-balanced to me, unless insufficient
attention was given to non-technological (social) factors--
see following "least well".
DISLIKES:
The structure of post gatherer-hunter society, which served
exceedingly well until the mid-1940's, has been demolished
by automobiles, zoning separating workers from employment,
building codes which effectively stopped owner-builder
construction of locally available materials as they
accumulate tools, materials and money, reinstatement of
serfdom by legislative fiat, forcing 20 years payment to
architects, engineers, attorneys, accountants, banks,
insurance companies, all for a house that is really rented
from several levels of government. If a "homeowner" ceases
to pay real estate taxes, sewer taxes, or income taxes the
real owner quickly takes possession (The Bahamas are an
exception).
Putting Humpty Dumpty back again may not be possible. The
individual automobile, (gas, diesel, electric) isn't going
go away, and electric doesn't eliminate pollution, simply
moves it to the point of electric generation and beyond to
facilities producing fuel, and to the factories producing
photovoltaic components, fuel cell components, battery
components, ad infinitum. It is unlikely that major change
will occur until fossil fuels are exhausted. That will not
happen for centuries---the reserves of coal, heavy oil, gas,
methane hydrate are so huge. I would like to be more
optimistic about employment of Lovins' principles in my
lifetime or the lifetime of my children, but I am not.
Change is inevitable, likely to be violent and painful, but
quite far in the future, except for small and isolated oases.
The art of the possible dictates attention be concentrated on
these as examples to larger society, bearing in mind that
an intelligent house is encumbered a great deal more by
sociolegal hardening of the arteries (consequences of
population-pressure) than by the purely technological
deficiencies of present housing design.
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 1997
Hi Jock,
Thanks as always for stimulating a few of my brain cells. Thanks also for
alerting me to the link to Rocky Mountain Institute. Back in the late
seventies I spent a year publishing Solar Age Magazine and it is good to
see folks like yourselves reawakening the national conversation of these
issues which has seemed somewhat dormant on the topic these last two
decades.
Your page is good. One typo--do you mean to say "smart hous" in the
altavista search reference. As most folks ideas of future houses are
conditioned by what Bill Gates is doing, you might want to
compare/contrast respective visions. How much insulation--Saskatchewan
house experiment late 70's with three foot thick walls and almost no
windows? More on size of houses and owner's lifestyles?
Cheers,
--Terry
Subject: Intelligent Houses
Hi Jock,
My basic response is that all of the "optimized systems" you describe
assume that the whole system impact is quantified somehow and that
rational economic actors will act to help the whole system. This is
obviously not true today; both the development cost of centuries of oil
creation under the ground, and the eventual cleanup cost of heat and
pollution, are not charged to the oil companies at all. I guess they will
be charged to my children.
Similarly, a household in China wants a refrigerator and doesn't really
care about penguins. The variable cost of the power again does not
include the whole system cost at the level of the individual rationale
economic actor.
Consideration of the whole system cost at this point in time will require
developing economies to stay undeveloped. Not a flyer for them.
I suppose a free-market solution might be to develop and market "green"
items to the developing world, where the seller would either see the scale
in supporting a green economy, would subsidize this responsible behavior,
or would find some other market-viable way to get individual consumers to
select this behavior.
This is similar to how Collaborative Structures is trying to bring
whole-system thinking to the construction industry: on a one at at time,
market supportable, free enterprise model, not by committees and
consortia.
Maybe we can continue to collaborate on how to get from the future to the
now through free market forces.
Tue, 05 Aug 1997
Jock, you asked for ideas on proceeding briskly toward the Smart House/SH
vision. As Yasmin and I develop some specific proposals, Ii might be
useful to understand a bit more of that vision.
From our own applied strategy work on various facets of the challenges of
peacebuilding and crisis avoidance, your insight about housing and power
makes a lot of sense of course. A few thoughts/queries:
It would seem, therefore, that we a) need to be the source
of the solution, and b) that we need to demonstrate that it not only works
here, but that we embrace this as our own future, too -- that the e-Green
Revolution is actually a preferred strategy for us in the prosperous West.
So would not it be appropriate to have both U.S. and a developing world
demonstration projects?
As the "do tank" moniker suggests, I am strongly of the belief that the
best policy and strategy innovations grow out of solving a specific,
real-world problem -- tackling a compelling, must-do-or-we'll-get-run-over
issue. There are several such "opportune crises" at hand: Jordan, for
example, has no fossil or hydro energy supplies of its own. Anything that
could help them work around that problem would address an urgent need.
Kyrgyzstan is a case where, if developed, mega-hydro plants might even
allow power export.
But the country is a decade or two at least away from being able to
bootstrap themselves up to that level. Mexico and many African countries
would also be on a list of candidates.
Could we find a U.S. analog -- a county or region eager to develop
with a power'nhousing problem to engage the domestic energies? (Americans,
it seems, are feeling prosperous and efficient these days. This might be
a new challenge -- a new "race" to be won.)
And should not those test communities generally be rural? I.e., is not
your general interest in countering the rural-to-urban migration which is
kicking up these new mega-cities with enormous, youthful populations
unserved by basic educational, social, and sanitation infrastructures?
By the way, in Milton-Freewater, Oregon is an engineer running a
small company who has some very interesting ideas about the counterpart
generation of water at the individual house level. He would use solar
power (or cheap gas/oil if available) to condense water out of the air in
a classic vacuum distiller. One unit could serve both the power and water
needs for a house and attached garden/business, he calculates. He is
ready to build a demo unit for something on the order of $200k as I
recall. Likely, you know of many such innovators and technologies which
could dovetail.
In the UN system, among those who clustered around last year's
habitat conference (in Istanbul?) ought to be some interesting individuals
and organizations. That conference had an impact internationally.
Is it not that "going green" (or maybe "info-green") is at the
core of the grand strategy necessary for the next era of peace and
security? Holding on our traditional-modern course is clearly carrying us
into a period of protracted violence, disorder, and angry have-nots where
traditional great power leverage has little deterrent or ameliorating
effect. Needed now is a new, post-Cold War approach that finds pervasive
human security in intelligent development, crystallized in the smart house
and its networked interconnections with the community.
That is a "new security" vision that would be worthy of the heavy-
weight political thinkers you are looking for, is it not?
More to follow.
August 04, 1997
Well, Jock, I'd say it would help if you read some science fiction and/or
books on futurism. Speaking as a one-time science-fiction writer and
sometime futurist (who has been paid, on rare occasions, to think about
the future) I would find it very surprising if any kind of housing were
deemed necessary 1,000 years from now.
I would expect that by 50 to 75 years from now, nanotechnology will be
capable of fabricating simple structures, including housing, which will be
"grown" in much the same way that we currently grow yeast cultures. This,
however, is the least of it. By 100 years from now nanotechnology should
advance to the point where immortality is attainable (by repairing DNA
damage and other symptoms of aging on a cell-by-cell basis). By 150 years
from now, at the very latest, we should have artificial intelligence equal
to our own, which will quickly become greater than our own.
This represents the "singularity" that mathematician, computer scientist,
and award-winning novelist Vernor Vinge first identified 15 years ago as a
barrier to predictive extrapolation. Beyond that point, almost all
predictions are equally likely (hence the accuracy of the "singularity"
metaphor) because we cannot imagine the actions and motives of
intelligences greater than our own. Hans Moravec (roboticist at
Carnegie-Mellon and author of the brilliant book MIND CHILDREN) believes
hyper-intelligent AI entities will displace us and ultimately RECREATE us,
down to the subatomic level, for idle nostalgic reasons; Moravec believes
that our "reality" may in fact be an artificially constructed
recapitulation of the "real" world. See my article about Moravec in Wired
magazine, about 2 years ago.
Regardless of how seriously you take this kind of thing, it's certainly
clear that downloaded human intelligence should be possible 150 years from
now, regardless of whether the structure of the brain is understood. You
don't need to know the bit sequence on a floppy in order to make an
accurate copy. I have discussed the prospect of downloaded intelligence in
my own book, The Silicon Man, first published by Bantam, new edition
forthcoming from Wired Books.
Once the virtualization of human intelligence is possible, there is no
further need for the physical world, except as source of power and
hardware to maintain the virtual people. All sensory inputs will be
emulated so that no informorph (my term for an information entity)
will know the difference between reality and artificial reality.
Remote-linked robot rovers can provide sensory input from the real world
if it is deemed necessary.
All in all, by 1,000 years from now I assume the human race will no longer
exist in physical form, because the physical form of our species was only
developed originally as a way for our DNA to replicate itself more
effectively than other species' DNA, and this concept is already an
anachronism even now. Thus, housing will seem a very primitive concept;
and I can't imagine why anyone would want to think in those terms.
From: "Bob Frankston"
Subject: Re: Intelligent house
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 11:42:57 -0400
From: Nickersons
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 1997 14:58:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: tvoivozd@infi.net.com
A common-sense, pragmatic approach, devoid of hysteria and reductio
ad absurdums. Barring a two-mile wide comet on the horizon, this is
the way it will go, driven by economics if logic is to no avail. The
only unknowns are how (not whether) population is reduced or the
ominous though remote possibility of relatively unlimited, and even
cheaper energy---energy which translates directly to humans at the
energy equivalent of 12000 bbls of oil each.
From: Terry_Dwyer@pegasus.putney.com
Subject: Re: Intelligent Houses & Co-generation
Date: Wed, 06 Aug 1997 11:10:58 -0400
From: "John D. Macomber"
From: Larry Seaquist
Subject: New strategies
Very best wishes,
Larry Seaquist
Chairman & CEO
The Strategy Group
an independent, international "do tank"
From: Charles Platt
Subject: Intelligent Nano Technology
Updated: 11 Sep 97