Ink Tarsia: word mosaic

Word problem:  To date, our solar panels have produced 2831 kilowatt hours of electricity.  We have drawn 2525 kilowatt hours of electricity from the utility grid.  Question:  How much of our electrical needs have we met from our solar panels? 

I’ve learned to leave this in the hands of the professionals.  Here is an answer from Polly, a mathematician:  

“You have produced more solar electricity than you have used from the city.  The question (unanswerable) is how much of that solar electricity did you use, and how much did you send back through the grid?

If you used it all, then you have produced 2831 / (2831 + 2525) = 53% of your energy.  If you used none of it, then you produced 2831 / 2525 = 112% of your energy consumption. All the way around, impressive numbers.”

Saw this at a Green City Summit event last night.  I’d like to see our city enroll in ICLEI (or something similar), but to date, the mayor has declined to sign on. 

On Saturday, I bought a new bicycle, a Breezer.  The decision took several years.  She’s a beauty, with old-fashioned black fenders and a candy-apple red frame.  Shimano gears and a nifty hub dynamo in the front wheel that generates power for the lights.  Handy panniers to hold grocery bags.

I’d been researching electric-assist bikes, something to ensure that asthmatic, out-of-shape me could ride to the library or market or pet store, and return up steep hills while burdened with books, groceries, Scooby snacks.  A bike’s gotta be fun & easy, or I won’t use it.  

Found just what I wanted online—a larkspur blue Urban Mover step-through bike with a lithium-ion battery—only one dealer in the country carried it.   The holdback was fit.   I’m too tall for most women’s bicycles.  I’ve always hated men’s bike frames and the unladylike movement required for mounting them.  I worried the expensive bike would be too small, and make my wrists and legs burn, like the ill-fitting lilac Huffy in the garage.  It was too much money to risk on something that might not work. 

I wandered into Old Town Bike Shop on Saturday, expecting the kind, fit salesfolk to dismiss me with vague answers so they could focus on “real” customers.  I’m clearly not the cycling type, and they don’t carry electric bikes.  But they worked hard to find just what I wanted in the shop, answered questions on fit & function, and rolled the bike outside for me to try in the parking lot (a daunting thought for someone who hasn’t ridden a bike much in 20 years and worries about balance issues).  While I waited for the bike to be checked over before taking it home, a guy wearing a black bolt in his ear told me how thrilled he was when someone bought a town bike like mine, because it meant that many less cars on the road to run errands.  Felt I’d earned a little green star from Generation Y. 

Riding with my boys in the neighborhood (short trips first – I don’t have calluses in the right places yet), I remembered what a joy it was to ride a bike.  To coast down a hill and feel the rush of wind blow past, after earning that hill with breathless pumping to reach the yellow house.  Perhaps this week I’ll get to the school without triggering a full wheeze. 

As a teenager, I earned my 10-speed bike by babysitting the neighbors’ quarreling children at 50 cents an hour.  For a year I studied the Sears and Wards catalogs, deciding I wanted a bright yellow frame.  After finally saving enough, I bought a bike for $86.  The bike was cherry red—which I did not like—but summer had come, and I didn’t want to wait for a prettier color. 

I rode the cherry-bomb bike to Jenny’s house, mindful of catchy brakes. I loved the smooth shift of gears, the impossibly thin tires, the lightness of the frame.  I loved the delicate ticking of wheels that increased with speed, like the childhood sound of a playing card clipped to my bike spokes with a wooden clothespin for a July 4 bike parade.  It had been worth a year of boring babysitting to earn that purring sound, rather than to pedal the heavy tuck-tuck-tuck of the clunky used 3-speed Schwinn in the garage.  Sometimes I rode past Jenny’s house to the end of the block, where a popular boy lived, hoping he saw me zip past.  The road was level there, and with the momentum, I could sit up straight in the seat, no hands, and pretend I was cool.  

 “I seem to be doomed to red bicycles,” I told the Old Town guy.  The model I preferred didn’t come in periwinkle blue.  But riding the Breezer at home, I knew I’d picked the right bike.  I could feel the smooth operation of engineering at work, simple and elegant, and I could pedal uphill to the yellow house with relative ease.  This is halfway to the post office and gelato shop.  My wrists didn’t hurt, and I could imagine a day when I can return down the hill with a straight back, no hands, like when I was 15.  I miss being lithe and strong–dread getting back into shape–but choosing a top-of-the-line machine almost makes up for it.  Almost.

I’ve been fascinated with solar power since I was a girl, when my mother attended classes to calculate what it would take to install photovoltaic (PV) panels on the roof of our middle-class, suburban home.  At that time, there was no option for grid inter-tie.  The decision to go solar meant batteries for electrical storage, and full disconnection from the power grid.  My mother decided the costs and hassles of maintaining the system weren’t feasible.   

Times have changed.  Passage of Amendment 37 in Colorado required local utilities to provide grid-tie options, so that people could install PV panels to produce solar electricity during the day, and draw from the electrical grid at night.  No batteries, no mess.  Just good, clean power.  And no need to install 100% of a building’s electrical demand – a partial solution would work, too.   

I’ve followed the solar industry for about 15 years as an outsider.  Not much a technological type, I’ve simply thought that solar made a lot of sense for where I lived.  In 2006 I attended  the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) national conference in Denver.  Plenaries focused on several aspects of climate change, including a moving presentation by Dr. Jim Hanson of NASA.  This was probably my “come to Jesus” moment for renewables.  Hanson said we had 9 years to make significant changes in order to offset serious and catastrophic effects due to global warming.  I staggered out of Hanson’s lecture, wondering how I was going to prepare my young boys for what might be coming.  If Hanson was right, this might be the dominant issue of their generation. 

 Chuck Kutscher, of NREL, chaired the Solar 2006 ASES conference, and edited a report compiled from the plenaries, called Tackling Climate Change.  This free report has had 500,000 hits since publication, and represents a serious, balanced, solution-charged approach.  It’s possible, if we are aggressive with renewable and conservation solutions, to fill the gap between our current trajectory (what Hanson calls BAU, Business As Usual), and what would be required to lower carbon emissions.   It will be hard work, expensive.  But much less expensive if we act now, rather than wait. 

 On July 7, 2006, I decided the time had come to do our part by installing solar panels, to offset our need for electricity from our city’s coal-burning plant.  We could not install a 100% solution due to roof configuration, but we did what we could.   Last month (April), we were billed for only 107 kilowatt hours of electricity.  BSP (Before Solar Panels), we averaged 400-500 kwh a month on our bills. 

 The new EIRP plan by our local utility studies and predicts energy demand for our community over the next decade and more.  When the first version was released, several people noticed hints about the need to build a new coal-burning power plant.  Community response was small but powerful.  Climate change data was rolling in, and people were understanding that emissions from coal plants were a huge part of the problem. Architect Ed Mazria cites that 80% of global warming is caused by coal-burning plants.   The new EIRP is under revision, but now renewables will have a bigger part of the future energy mix for our community.

 Our family cut our home’s need for coal-burned electricity nearly in half, a teeny investment against building a new coal-burning plant.   Solar panels are expensive, and out of the reach of many families.  The solar industry is working hard to cut costs for solar energy, and bring new technology to the market, to make solar power available to more and more people. 

 We often see long trains carrying coal to the city power plant.  I ask my kids, “What’s on that train?”  Coal.  (hear the bored voices)  “What’s it used for?”  Making our electricity.   My son now says, “Making way LESS of our electricity.” 

I recently attended two very different conferences, back to back.  The first featured Dr. Walter Brueggemann, a prolific and well-known Bible scholar, as guest lecturer at our church.  The second was the annual conference for the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) in San Diego.  These conferences were two sides of the same coin for me.  One identified the problem; the other imagined a new answer.   

Brueggemann focused on Isaiah in his workshop.  The weave of prophetic tradition that forms the Book of Isaiah reflects on the fate of Jerusalem in roughly 700-500 BCE.  Jerusalem was symbol for the national Israel.  The prophet Isaiah ben Amoz (“first Isaiah”) warned Jerusalem against aligning with Babylon, the dominant military industrial complex of the time.  Jerusalem’s leadership could choose strengthen the societal fabric by caring for the poor and disadvantaged, or pour resources into military assets and tribute for foreign rulers.   

The prophet Isaiah says “it’s time to withdraw your attachments to the Babylonian definition of reality,” according to Brueggemann.  It’s time to imagine a completely different reality.  Then Brueggemann said something that made us wiggle in our seats: We are now babylon.  The U.S. is the last superpower.  We are, metaphorically, modern babylon.   

As he spoke, I thought about Babylon (big B) and babylon (little b).  After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US built a heli-pad on ancient Babylonian ruins, damaging part of the remaining Ishtar gate of Babilu (Akkadian, “Gate of gods”).   

In 2006, I saw a piece of the Ishtar gate (built ca. 575 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar II) at the Louvre.  Even as I had marveled at a splendid glazed lion from the Ishtar gate, backed with bricks of sea-glass greens and blues, the pavement of ancient Babylon in Iraq was being crushed by the military might of Halliburton and the new babylon.  Biblical scholars would call this a “symbolic action report,” a prophetic act designed to send a message.  

In the midst of war and utter destruction, the poetry of Isaiah 11:6 imagines a new vision of peace.  “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” (NRSV)  The imagined future subverts images of predator/prey and conqueror/conquered. Instead, there is a peaceable kingdom where the innocent are no longer victimized. 

In the workshop, Brueggemann pushed further.  If we want peace as imagined by the many voices of Isaiah, we must understand what is at stake. Disarmament and peace depends on a lower standard of living among the “haves.”   The problem is oil.  Brueggemann said, “Peace will require we use less oil.  This is a high price to pay for peace, but until then, we will have to use muscle to keep our own access to oil.” 

This is the hard task:  to connect what we consume in our peace-loving, everyday lives with what we’re willing to subsidize and sacrifice, in order to have the fossil fuels that are the foundation of our economy.  Isaiah asks, “Will the real Babylon please stand up?”  Dang—it’s me.  Time to withdraw my attachment to a Babylonian definition of reality. 

Brueggeman writes, “Do not deliver us from the clashing poems which are your word to us.”

The Louvre currently has an exhibit called Babylon.  It is co-sponsored by the British Museum, which issued a report in 2005 regarding recent damage to ancient Babylonian archaeological sites. 

Makes me happy – our new solar panels have produced approx. 42% of our electricity since September. We hope the panels (Sharp 2.7 kilowatt array, Fronius inverter) will meet 55% of our electrical needs each year.  

Debate on how to calculate actual production involved a mathematician, a physicist, and a master electrician. The English major was clearly over-simplifying the math.

I’m learning that solar harvest, like a garden’s, is seasonal.  January’s production was discouragingly low.  March, with many snowy days, has been a surprise. The system often produces at capacity at mid-day. Fall and spring may be our top-producers. While folks in more temperate, low-lying parts of the country are planting tomatoes and ground cherries, feasting on spring peas, we harvest the sun.   

The panels were expensive, even with utility rebates.  At least this investment is outperforming the stock market.