Fuck RIMPAC 2018!

SUBHEAD: These exercises are a colossal waste of resources and energy that only demonstrate America's suicidal death spiral. 

By Juan Wilson on 29 June 2018 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/06/fuck-rimpac-2018.html)


Image above: Naval participants on RIMPAC 2018 on parade for a photo op. From (https://news.usni.org/2018/06/26/rim-of-the-pacific-2018-participation).

For those that don't know RIMPAC is the U.S. Navy term for the "Rim of the Pacific. Evert two years the Navy puts together a nautical dog and pony show that they call RIMPAC "xxxx", where the "xxxx" is the even numbered year in which it takes place.

"Friendly" navy allies from nations proximate to the Pacific Ocean are invited to join the festivities on land, sea and in the air experimenting with new weapons systems, setting off explosives and coordinating he destruction of the planet Earth.

The US Navy likes to show its magnanimity by inviting "potential enemy" nations like China and Russia to join in as observers presumably to scare the crap out of them with the broad show of force. This also gives the nation the option of punishing an "enemy" observer nations with a dis-invitation if they do something we don't like.

This year China was dis-invited (https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/05/23/china-was-just-uninvited-from-rimpac-heres-why/) because it had the gall to continue to build up its presence in the South China Sea. Heaven forfend!

Well here we are again. This year is "RIMPAC 2018"... and it is going on now. Why "Fuck RIMPAC 2018!"? Because it is a costly public relations stunt that pollutes the ocean and kills uncounted numbers of sea creatures. Something we don't need any more of.

Through World War II to date the United States has dominated the Pacific Ocean through diabolic destruction with nuclear weapons and unfettered domination of island peoples. It is a disgusting display.

These RIMPAC war game are headquartered in Hawaii, with Pearl Harbor (on Oahu) and the Pacific Missile Range Facility (on Kauai) playing a major role.

If you don't think these "games" come at a cost to us living on Kauai you are dead wrong. Just go back to our post whale on pod stranding of a whale in Hanalei Bay in 2004 due to RIMPAC activities at the bottom of the list or articles below for a taste of the US Navy's games.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Civil Beat views US military in Pacific 8/20/17
Ea O Ka Aina: "No!" to American Militarism 4/11/17
Ea O Ka Aina: DLNR responsibility on RIMPAC 7/6/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Participation in RIMPAC 2016 6/1/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Judgement against RIMPAC 2016 5/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Prepare for RIMPAC War in Hawaii 5/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to "take" millions of mammals 5/1
Ea O Ka Aina: Judgement against RIMPAC 2016 4/3/16 
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy's "illegal" War Game 11/17/15
Ea O Ka Aina: US court RIMPAC Impact decision 4/3/15
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 Impact Postmortem 10/22/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 - another whale death 7/26/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 in Full March 7/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: 21st Century Energy Wars 7/10/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War on the Ocean 7/3/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Voila - World War Three 7/1/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Pacific Pivot 6/28/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC IMPACT 6/8/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC Then and Now 5/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Earthday TPP Fukushima RIMPAC 4/22/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Asian Pivot - An ugly dance 12/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Help save Mariana Islands 11/13/13
Ea O Ka Aina: End RimPac destruction of Pacific 11/1/13 
Ea O Ka Aina: Moana Nui Confereence 11/1/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to conquer Marianas again  9/3/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pagan Island beauty threatened 10/26/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy license to kill 10/27/12 
Ea O Ka Aina: Sleepwalking through destruction 7/16/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Okinawa breathes easier 4/27/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy Next-War-Itis 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: America bullies Koreans 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Despoiling Jeju island coast begins 3/7/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Jeju Islanders protests Navy Base 2/29/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaii - Start of American Empire 2/26/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Korean Island of Peace 2/26/12   
Ea O Ka Aina: Military schmoozes Guam & Hawaii 3/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: In Search of Real Security - One 8/31/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Peace for the Blue Continent 8/10/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Shift in Pacific Power Balance 8/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC to expand activities 8/3/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War Games here in July 6/20/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Pacific Resistance to U.S. Military 5/24/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam Land Grab 11/30/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam as a modern Bikini Atoll 12/25/09
Ea O Ka Aina: GUAM - Another Strategic Island 11/8/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Diego Garcia - Another stolen island 11/6/09
Ea O Ka Aina: DARPA & Super-Cavitation on Kauai 3/24/09
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 - Navy fired up in Hawaii 7/2/08
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 uses destructive sonar 4/22/08
Island Breath: Navy Plans for the Pacific 9/3/07
Island Breath: Judge restricts sonar off California 08/07/07
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 sonar compromise 7/9/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 - Impact on Ocean 5/23/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2004 - Whale strandings on Kauai 9/2/04
.

USGS info on Kilauea Volcano

SUBHEAD: How much danger is there of massive tsunami caused by collapse of East Rift Zone area?

By Staff on 28 June 2018 for United States Geological Survey -
(https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/)


Image above: Photo from south of Puna as Kilauea volcano lava enters Pacific Ocean causing clouds of steam and vog. From (https://www.inverse.com/article/46466-kilauea-volcano-ocean-entry-deemed-hazardous-as-dangerous-laze-persists).

[IB Publisher's note: There is a wide range of opinions about the danger imposed by current volcanic activity on the Big Island of Hawaii. Some fear the risks are being minimized to keep people calm and not scare tourists away. Some even fear a catastrophe of biblical proportions is imminent. Below are recent reports by the United States Geological Survey. They may be hiding the truth to allay a panic. But they, more than any other source, have the real data. Here are some of their recent reports to the public.]

Answers to Questions about Kīlauea Volcano's earthquakes
June 28, 2018

The summit area of Kīlauea Volcano has undergone significant changes since April 2018. On April 21, the lava lake within Halema‘uma‘u overflowed onto the crater floor as the volcano's magmatic system pressurized.

On April 30, the floor of the Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō crater collapsed, as subsurface pressure forced open a pathway for magma to travel from Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō into the lower East Rift Zone. As magma moved into the lower East Rift Zone, pressure decreased in the summit's magmatic system and the lava lake level began to drop. The summit also started to deflate due to the pressure decrease.

As summit deflation (or subsidence) persisted, the number of earthquakes increased. Prior to the onset of deflation, about 10 earthquakes per day were typical at the summit. As of late June 2018, there are about 600 earthquakes located in the same region on a daily basis. Many of these earthquakes are strong enough to be felt, and some can be damaging.

These earthquakes are understandably causing concern, especially in Volcano Village and surrounding subdivisions. These Frequently Asked Questions about Kīlauea Volcano's Summit Earthquakes will help answer some of the most commonly asked questions about the nature of Kīlauea's summit activity, and the numerous earthquakes that are occurring in the area.



Saying "goodbye" to one GPS station and "hello" to two more
June 25, 2018

On June 18, Hawaiian Volcano Observatory staff said a sad goodbye to a GPS instrument that had faithfully recorded over 95 m (310 ft) of downward motion of the floor of Kīlauea caldera before losing radio contact. The GPS instrument, called NPIT, first started moving downward in early May at the onset of subsidence at Kīlauea's summit.

However on June 8, NPIT's motion picked up dramatically. This was when a portion of the caldera floor north of Halema'uma'u, where NPIT was located, began to slump into the crater. Over the next ten days NPIT GPS recorded down-dropping of 6-8 m (20-25 ft) with each summit explosion event, which have been occurring almost every day.

This, together with earlier displacements, added up to a position change of 95 m down, 55 m south, and 5 m east (310 ft, 180 ft, and 16 ft, respectively).

These data provide unique insight into the crater collapse process, showing us that it is occurring as a series of steps instead of as continuous motion. Drone and helicopter views confirm that NPIT is still intact and likely still recording data.

Unfortunately, the large motions have now resulted in a misalignment of the radio shot between the instrument and the observatory, cutting off communication and therefore data flow from the GPS station.

At about the same time that we lost the ability to contact NPIT, HVO staff completed work to add telemetry to two temporary GPS stations on the caldera floor.

These two stations, called CALS and VO46, are not located on actively slumping portions of the caldera floor and therefore do not show the dramatic downward motion that NPIT did.

However, they reveal that even portions of the caldera floor away from active slumping are moving downward very quickly; by as much as 1.0 m per day (3.3 feet per day) at station CALS. The data from these new stations can be viewed on the deformation page for Kīlauea.


Why so many earthquakes in the Kīlauea summit area?
May 29, 2018

Deflation at Kīlauea's summit has caused up to 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) of subsidence, which has stressed the faults around and within Kīlauea Caldera. Read more



GPS monitoring reveal where magma has moved
May 24, 2018

Kīlauea Volcano is currently erupting at two locations: from Halema‘uma‘u, a crater within the summit caldera, and from the lower East Rift Zone (LERZ) in and near the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna subdivisions.

Small explosive episodes at Kīlauea's summit are a consequence of magma withdrawing from a shallow reservoir beneath the east margin of Halema‘uma‘u. The eruption of lava along the LERZ resulted from the underground movement of magma eastward from the volcano's middle East Rift Zone.



Image above: Illustration of Kīlauea Volcano from the summit caldera to the lower East Rift Zone (LERZ). Blue arrows = contraction across the upper and middle rift zone, black arrows = expansion in LERZ. From original article.

GPS, tiltmeters, and satellite radar (InSAR) data captured how Kīlauea's surface has moved since the Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō vent collapsed on April 30, 2018. These data allow scientists to infer where magma was removed and the location to which it was transferred. In the first days following the collapse of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō, the largest signals indicated contraction across the upper and middle East Rift Zone—evidence that magma was being withdrawn from this area.

This was followed by expansion across the LERZ—evidence that magma was intruding into this part of the rift zone at depths of less than about 3 km (2 mi). The forceful widening of the LERZ continued through May 18, at which time a GPS site north of the intrusion stopped moving northwestward and stabilized.

In early May, days after the collapse of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō, the lava lake level in Halema‘uma‘u began to drop as the summit area subsided at a high rate. The lava lake surface disappeared from view on about May 10, at a depth of more than 325 m (1,070 ft) below the Halema‘uma‘u crater floor.


Image above: This plot shows vertical displacement of a USGS GPS (CRIM) station from April 26 to May 24, 2018. From original article.

Subsidence of the summit area continues. Between May 1 and May 24 the caldera floor subsided as much as 1.4 m (4.5 ft). The GPS station, labeled as CRIM on the edge of Kīlauea's summit caldera [Fig.2], has subsided about 0.6 m (1.9 ft).

Continued summit subsidence indicates that magma is moving from the summit magma reservoir and into the East Rift Zone at a higher rate than magma is entering the reservoir from below. To date, geochemical analysis of erupted lava indicates that summit magma has not yet erupted from the LERZ fissures 1-23.



Facts on stability of Kīlauea's south flank, past and present
 May 14, 2018

There have been several recent highly speculative stories, rumors and blogs about the stability of the south flank of Kīlauea and the potential for a catastrophic collapse that could generate a Pacific-wide tsunami. We wish to put these speculations in their proper context by presenting observations of the current situation and an assessment of past evidence of landslides from Kīlauea.

There is no geologic evidence for past catastrophic collapses of Kīlauea Volcano that would lead to a major Pacific tsunami, and such an event is extremely unlikely in the future based on monitoring of surface deformation. Kīlauea tends to "slump", which is a slower type of movement that is not associated with tsunamis, although localized tsunamis only affecting the island have been generated by strong earthquakes in the past.

The May 4 M6.9 earthquake resulted in seaward motion of approximately 0.5 m (1.5 ft) along portions of Kīlauea's south flank as measured by GPS stations across the volcano.

A preliminary model suggests that the motion was caused by up to 2.5 meters (8 feet) of slip along the fault that underlies the volcano's south flank, at the interface between the volcano and the ocean floor, about 7-9 km (4-6 mi) beneath the surface.

This motion is within the expected range for a large earthquake on this fault. The earthquake was probably caused by pressure exerted by the magmatic intrusion on the south flank fault, following the pattern of past earthquake activity that has been observed during Kīlauea East Rift Zone intrusions.

A small, very localized tsunami did occur as a result of the fault slip. Similar local tsunamis were generated by past large earthquakes, including the 1975 M7.7 and 1868 ~M8 events, both of which resulted in multiple deaths along the south coast of the Island of Hawai‘i.

Adjustments on the south flank caused another ~9 cm (3.5 inches) of motion at the surface in the day after the earthquake, followed by another 2-3 cm (~1 inch) since May 5.

This is higher than the normal rate of south flank motion (~8 cm (3 inches) per year) but is expected as the volcano adjusts after a combination of a magmatic intrusion along the East Rift Zone and a large south flank earthquake.

We did observe minor ground ruptures on the south flank, but this is expected given the strength of the May 4 earthquake, and deformation data show that the south flank continues to move as an intact slump block.

Geologic history combined with models of south flank motion suggest that the likelihood of a catastrophic failure event is incredibly remote. There are certainly signs on the ocean floor for landslides from other volcanoes on the Island of Hawai‘i and from other islands, but none are associated with Kīlauea.

In addition, Kīlauea has experienced much larger earthquakes and magmatic intrusions in the recent past. The large earthquakes of 1975 and 1868 were not associated with significant south flank landsliding, nor were major East Rift Zone intrusions in 1840 and 1924.



Image above: This plot shows vertical displacement of a USGS GPS (CRIM) station from April 26 to May 24, 2018. Cross-section through the lower East Rift Zone of Kīlauea Volcano. From original article.

Cross-section through the lower East Rift Zone of Kīlauea Volcano. Magma intruded into the rift zone and exerted pressure on the south flank of Kīlauea, likely encouraging the M6.9 earthquake that occurred on a fault located at the interface between the volcano and the preexisting ocean floor.

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Maui Breadfruit Company

SUBHEAD: With community help this local business was able to get off the ground and help others do the same.

By John Cadman on 27 June 2018 in Resilience - (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-06-27/maui-breadfruit-company-receives-slow-money/)


Image above: A pile of breadfruit (left) and John's business partner Maile (right). Note the volume of large tough fallen leaves typical of  breadfruit trees. From original article.

We all have them; you know, those things we call defining moments in our lives. I’ve had several, but the one that stands out most for me occurred in the Fall of 2012. I was asked to give a cooking demo at the local chapter of the Farmers Union on Maui.

I said, “Sure, what would you like me to focus on?”

The Farmers Union said, “How about breadfruit?”

I thought, “OK, I know a little bit about that—heck, I had even eaten and cooked with breadfruit a few times.” Just so it sounded like I knew what I was talking about, however, I figured I better do a little research and experimentation.

I can’t really explain it, but for some reason the light just came on for me. I quickly realized what an amazing food breadfruit is.

You see, it is one of the original canoe plants that the ancient Polynesian voyagers brought to Hawaii. It has been grown throughout the Polynesia as a staple food crop for many centuries. The tree itself has many uses, but the fruit is what is so amazing.

When immature it is firm, very much like a potato. As it ripens it becomes soft, sweet, and deliciously aromatic. The trees are amazingly easy to grow, extremely high yielding, and are very tolerant to many types of growing conditions.

Sadly, it has become a neglected food here in Hawaii, but I was determined to change this. I am convinced that breadfruit has more potential to address food security than does any other crop in Hawaii, where we import about 90% of what we eat.

Developing our local small-chain food supply is truly essential in overcoming this staggering figure.

So, with my newfound passion for this forgotten fruit, I began experimenting and making all kinds of delicious things using breadfruit in both its starchy and sweet stages. Fast-forward about a year, and I had come up with a dessert that was nothing short of amazing—or so I was told.


Image above: A slice of John's Pono Pie. Note Maui upcountry is one of the few places in Hawaii that can grow commercial strawberries. From original article.

Naturally, the next step was to quit my secure and high-paying job and go into selling breadfruit pies. That was four years ago, and now Pono pies are sold on all four of the major Hawaiian Islands, at health food stores, and in some excellent restaurants.

In Hawaiian, “Pono” means correct, beneficial, and done in the right way. I have tried to adhere to this principle in my business. One way is to source my ingredients locally. My breadfruit, sweet potatoes, bananas, honey, macadamia nuts, coconut, and coffee are all grown in Hawaii.

One of the greatest unintended consequences of bootstrapping my business is that I can help other aspiring food entrepreneurs by renting out kitchen time at my factory. This is a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Currently, there are no truly affordable options available to anyone who wants to develop a value-added product here on Maui.

Presently, five fledgling companies use my kitchen space. Although I have watched at least that many companies start up only to shut down when the harsh realities of small-company food production became all too real, at least they didn’t have to make significant investments in building or leasing an entire kitchen to find this out.

For my company, the additional income really helped in the early growth stages when cash flow is so crucial.

You see, I started the company with very little money. I believe that growing a company with as little debt as possible is the best way; but sometimes it is just not possible to expand without some financial assistance.

That’s where Slow Money Hawaii came in. Previously, I had my labels printed locally in small batches at a cost of $0.31 per label. My printer told me that if I could order in bulk it could get the cost down to $0.06 per label, but that would require ordering at least 100,000 labels.

Slow Money Hawaii connected me with some very supportive and enthusiastic community members who believe in breadfruit as much as I do.

The very generous loan terms provided by Slow Money enable me to make the monthly payments and still increase my profit. I really hope that someday I will be able to return the favor and help other aspiring food entrepreneurs as a Slow Money lender.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Changing the culture and ourselves 7/30/16
Ea O Ka Aina: In Soil We Trust 2/27/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Slow Money 12/16/10
Ea O Ka Aina: SuperBus vs StraddleBus 12/4/10
Ea O Ka Aina: COP16 as Cancun disappears 12/1/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Bringing Money Down to Earth 11/22/09
Ea O KA Aina: Breadfruit Recipe Experiments 11/15/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Investing in our community 5/25/09
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Tales of History are a Dead End Road

SUBHEAD: Solution? How most of villagers lived and thought in, let’s say, 1914 is a good start.

By Patrick Noble on 20 June 2018 for Feasta -
(http://www.feasta.org/2018/06/20/the-tales-of-history-are-a-dead-end-road/)


Image above: "Landscape" by Russian painter Ilya Mashkov in 1914. From original article and (https://www.wikiart.org/en/ilya-mashkov/landscape-1914).

[IB Publisher's note: FEASTA is the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability.]

Culture is what people do. It decays when people stop culturing. Changing a culture means changing what we do.

Often, that will need a step by step transition as we negotiate obstacles. Even though we follow some backward meanders, the river may flow on.

But there are some transitionary illusions – convenient untruths, which are not obstacles to be overcome, but dead-end roads to be avoided.

In those cases, we must turn back and begin again.
Dead-end roads (or stagnant backwaters) can be paved (or punted) with the best intentions – often because we are focused on singularly-important things, such as energy-use, pesticides, human rights…

We applaud solar panels on the buildings of a retail park, or the rising quantity of organic and fairly-traded produce in the super market swamp. But retail parks and super markets were created by and are maintained by fossil fuel.

Greening such infrastructures gives them an illusory credence. It satisfies complacent images of social justices, green energy and regenerative farming. But what came with oil must go with oil. However green we strive to make them the retail park and super market remain vast and stagnant backwaters.

We lazily mined those millions of years of sequestered photosynthesis. Now we must live by singular seasons as they pass. The thing about natural limits, is that they have shape – taste, scent, sound, mass, energy, volume, chronology… We can give them meaning, and if we know them truly, they can gain beauty.

Buying organic produce (for instance) in a super market defers a large part of cultural creation to infrastructures, which we cannot see, or taste. Those green market signals are not signs to a better future but delusive advertisements to the virtues of a dead-end road.


Just as the flow of money directly relates to the flow of energy, so does the flow of cultural effects. As the flow of fossil energy diminishes, so we must return to human sized spending power with human-size imprints.

Returning to just human size brings culture round us like a shawl. We can wear it – a durable vestment died with both personal and community colours.

We can divest from identity levelling, but powerful provisions of oil. They are, in any case much too large to fit. Of course, much of what we do is not measured by GDP, needs no fossil fuel and has no monetary value.

Nevertheless, it may be vital to the functioning of any measurable economic activity. As we leave oil in the ground and as oil infrastructures evaporate those unpaid activities of parenthood, home-making, cooking, gardening, story-telling, singing, dancing… will remain untouched and can swell as the consumption of piped entertainment recedes.

The culture we created by fossil fuel is no longer possible. Most of our choices have become dead-end roads. A 2% increase in GDP is more or less, a 2% increase in green-house gas emissions.

GDP could be just as accurately named GDCC – Gross Domestic Climate Change.
If culture is what we do, what do we do next?

Some difficulties emerge, because we are social partners to existing infrastructures. There will be some backward meanders (infrastructures don’t exist until we find or make them) and many dead-end roads.

We exist as a social species. Our identities are parts of the whole. When cultures break, they break identity. To heal ourselves, we’d heal the culture. But cultures evolve from deeper commons and may resist time-bound manipulation.

Alienated, we seek artificial, or imagined fraternity. Fraternity? – Where is the sexless alternative?

I cannot find a word – so it is with wider culture – its evolution and revolutions. Revolutions are usually temporal and unsatisfactory. Yet we do need a powerful, all-embracing, sexless equivalent to fraternity.

If cultures place evenly-sexed roots in the soil which feeds them, then a more balanced and so durable ethics can evolve.

That is how new commons emerge. In removing our dependency on the strata of fossilised years we become intensely dependent on local resources and on each other.

Since we need an utter revolution in the ways we live and think today, those commons must evolve quickly… How most of us lived and thought in, let’s say, 1914 is a good start.

Breaking connections to dead-end roads may mean both breaking and healing hearts. Broken cultures break hearts, but then healing hearts heal cultures. And with regards to quickly evolved commons, inherited commons lie neglected and dormant – awaiting resuscitation – somewhere very like the some-when of 1914.

Nostalgia is an answer – what has been could be. Within the nostalgic vision, deeper and essential commons survive, which could not be manufactured by reason and thin air. And they are familiar. The once and future life comes ready-made with poets, musicians, painters, familiar voices…

Once the nostalgic vision is adopted, circumstance will force pragmatic change and new artistry may sing for what newly surrounds it. The nostalgic vision provides a landing ground for the first footstep (the last flight!) – and one which can be communally understood.

Time, and the contrary physics of 2018 will change it – but we can embark with genuine ancestry.

Where do we find a coherent model for a life without fossil fuels? For most of us in the developed world, it is not a case of greening how we live, but of abandoning it.

Many of our infrastructures cannot be greened. They must be evacuated. We shall be refugees and foragers making the best of what we find. Why not pick up what is deeply familiar?

Why not revive how our grand, or great grandparents lived – untouched by subliminal advertisers, or shadily-financed political punditry – sequestered from time, yet beside the same spring of deepest commons, which flow between all generations?

Are you ashamed to step backwards? Why? – The paths we’ve communally taken have been misdirected. It is natural to retrace those bad steps to the first solid ground and then begin again – first-footing into new times – not with last year’s embers, but with the last durable; the last possible embers to ignite a future without fossil fuels.

Look – here’s where we traded, once upon a time – from ports on every mile of coastline – the last cutters, schooners, brigs… – pinnacle of thousands of years of evolutionary marine architecture. Coal evoked new designs, which have been short-lived – scarcely-tried – just a hundred and a score years old, because they embarked to a backwater of no return.

If we retrace our steps to 1914, when the last schooner was built in Porthmadog, we shall know where to begin with sea trade. Those futuristic-looking aerofoils on today’s (ill-fated) oil designs are futile – a reluctance to change how we live – just like solar panels in a retail park, or organic produce in a super market.

To be sure, we have new knowledge of aerofoils and hull design from amateur racing dinghies and keel boats. But still, we begin in 1914 when there remained a fragmented, but still working sail-trade. Then we can adapt what we’ve found with the advantages of that new knowledge.

In 1914, living canal and river networks flowed to the sea. Coastal communities were also connected to each other by sea. That shore-hopping trade has vanished today.

What’s more boats of fifty to two hundred tons, had recently been built in small ports and on beaches all around Britain by the communities which financed, sailed and traded with them – without advice from corporation, government or bank. Yes, by 1914 we find sail’s twilight years.

That’s why I alight there, in a time still depicted by remembered anecdotes within modern families and communities, yet when the total domination of fossil fuel had not yet been completed.

It seems to me, that our schooner may be a paradigm for everything. Let’s keep 1914 as a destination, (conveniently forgetting the contemporary idiocies of the powers). The same acreage of arable land was easily farmed without either coal or oil.

We had the steam plough at some headlands and a few small towing tractors, but their influence was insignificant. Traction was largely man, horse, ox and wind powered (though for machinery – milling and so on – steam and oil engines were already replacing wind, water and horse power). Major cities were ringed with market gardens…

Let’s consider crop yield – in 1914 average UK wheat yield was 1.01 tons per acre and in 2017, 3.36 tons per acre (Defra). It is a mistake to think that massive increase is derived from a similar increase in artificial fertilisers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and growth regulators.

Since modern organic farmers often achieve 3 tons per acre (we have done so ourselves on an upland farm), we can see that the greatest contribution to yield has been selective, in-line, plant breeding – an advantage I propose to keep as I step forwards from 1914.

In any case, true yield is output, minus input – so that when we subtract the massive inputs of today, (their finite material, mass, manufacture, and distribution) we end with a yield which is probably much like that of 1914.

When was peak phosphate?

Of course, organic yield depends on a proper rotation – so reducing it, if we add that increased acreage. However, organic methods must maintain an optimum mass of soil fauna (biomass), while continuous cropping continually reduces it.

We must add the negative of lost soil fauna to those inputs – or we can say, lost soil fauna is equivalent to lost acreage.

So, as we retrace our arable steps to 1914, using modern seed varieties, we begin with the considerable advantage of a possible 3 tons per acre in rotated fields, which can continue growing that same yield from that same fertility. Small birds will continue their songs and Summer air will be loud with flies, bugs and bees.

Of course, those regenerative courses in arable rotation will provide other good things – if we like eggs, milk, butter, cream, meat… However, in the UK much of today’s and 1914’s permanent pasturelands will prove more beneficial, to both economy and ecology (and photosynthesis) as forest.

Today, in 2018 futile inputs are destroying the ecosystems on which all cultures depend. They are also shrinking soil biomass – that is the capacity to grow future crops. If we shrink soil biomass, we shrink all the connections of a web in which Man is one very small part. For instance, soil fauna and atmospheric CO.2 are intimately connected…

Starting from 1914 and stepping into the future, we’ll find an abundance of market gardens and orchards close to cities and towns.

Their labour requirement can be almost entirely human, with horse and cart to auction and street market – or in the case of London – barge along Thames, or Lea – along which the night soils are discretely returned.

The market garden model is a better one than the field-scale vegetables and seasonal slave-labour of today. Our eco-modernist is polemical with population. I also – egalitarian, involved, ingenious (oil has no ingenuity) people will re-populate the land!

The horse will need her share of acreage but (along with forestation) will happily replace a part of that surfeit of sheep and cattle.

My nostalgia is circumspect. By 1914, enclosure and dispossession were complete. The dispossessed had migrated to the factory gate, or to the New World, or had been starved and evaporated from the map of Earth.

Sheep had replaced people in marginal lands and uplands, the mass slaughter of innocent young men was about to begin and only wealthy men held right to the ballot.

Women over thirty would have to wait until 1918 to hold voting rights along with men over twenty-one who had paid less than £10 annual rent.

Six out of seven males, and all women, held no voting rights in UK (then called Great Britain) until 1918.

I bequeath no virtues to our journey’s beginning but suggest that from 1914 a road to the future is possible – cyclic infrastructures, though decayed, are in place for revival.

Coal-fired suburbia was already spreading along rail routes from major cities. Yet for all but the suburban office worker, both work and pleasure were within easy walking distance.

The trades congregated in town and village centres. Local produce appeared in season, mostly by horse and cart, in grocers, green grocers and butchers’ shops and in street markets and fairs.

The majority of those businesses were family run and many of them descended though generations of skill and cultural tradition. Those businesses and those cultural traditions and the network of connections between them, were the economy.

Neither government, nor corporation had much part in it – only to fill the tea caddy, collect taxes (for war) and deny the vote to most.

Church and chapel, meeting house, theatre, concert hall, pub and tea-room made other connections. Though on occasion, authority passed by on his high, dark horse, to the prudent doffing of caps, while land agent and factor swept in for the gathering of rent, they played no part in production. Their business was violence and consumption.

The rural poor had it harder, because they were more isolated and conspicuous to that violence. To keep a roof, one had to be deferential to the gentry.

My partner’s great uncle was spotted taking a pheasant. He hid in a muck heap and with family help, made the passage from Liverpool to America – to escape the “justice” of an Australian penal colony. That was a story of many.

There’s a problem with the telling of history… and so also with how we’d like to make history. Still today, books are written, documentaries made, and classrooms taught – how kings, politicians, treaties, wars, generals and strategic marriages steered the passages of time.

We talk of fake news, but what if all our history lessons are fake? What if to attain that B.A. we must propagate nonsense? What if our whole modern narrative is fake and if people everywhere come to see the deception?

What is true news? – events in the making of culture and with that news, the possibility of an exited renaissance. Culture is what people do in spite of the powers. Kings, lords, lairds, squires (for UK) and corporate executives do nothing but extract various forms of rent and non-distributive taxes.

Culture is what people do who make things, grow things, maintain things, share and gossip about things – that is people who both physically and spiritually are the culture.

Culture is a living, pulsing, evolving thing. Yet how food was grown; how houses, bridges, roads, canals, harbours, ships, cathedrals… were built – how scarcity and surplus were exchanged – is invisible to historians, but for footnotes.

History has been the accumulated praise recitations of court bards. The cattle raid of Troy was made an epic adventure, in which even the gods participated. The shining walls of Ilium are celebrated as a symbol for a great, though soon to be fallen power.

But they were not – they were made by the dexterity, ingenuity and complex social fabric of unrecorded generations of busy people.

Hector and Achilles, like Napoleon and Wellington, could scarcely tie their shoe laces, let alone contribute to a culture. Ah – you say, but we all have roles and one role – one small part of the whole – is that of leader.

Right, I concede (a little) – but where is the record of the larger part whose lives have been coerced and parasitized by our celebrated elites and then hidden from posterity’s view by their academic, journalistic, or bardic sycophants?

The thing is, those history books lead us on another dead-end road. Because of them, we lobby governments, petition corporations and strike imitative, pugilistic attitudes. NGOs propose that to make history, we must behave like the history books and engage with the powers.

But look at their shoe laces!

Why seek to change what has, and can have, no creative power in the hope that it will mysteriously gain creativity by our instruction? We neglect our own parts in the evolution of culture by asking the powerful, who have not the means, (or attention span) to create a culture for us.

The culture which created climate change was not created by leaders. It was created by ordinary people, who did not pay attention to how they were led.

Corporations and governments have not the skill to create climate change – to find and extract those sedimentary layers of fossilised lives – to devise pistons, cylinders, cranks and wheels – to understand compression and ignition – even to understand how money can be either put to work, or put to destruction…

The powers have no thought of farming techniques, or of building ships to trade scarcity with surplus. They watch, preen and extract. Of course, there is fluidity – ordinary creative people can become extractive and powerful people can become creative – but nevertheless the pattern remains.

If we make a community in the woods, it will evolve leadership. Perhaps leadership is an essential part of human cultures – part of an inherited pattern of social behaviour. We have benign and malign leadership, so when we lobby the powers, we lobby for the benignity.

But lobbying for social change is futile, since we, the lobbyists are the physics of the society that must change. Governance is abstract, people are real.

Climate change, trashed resources and cascading ecosystems are real and have been caused by real, ordinary people. Only ordinary people can pull back from that destruction.

Ordinary people can achieve what no government can achieve – the evaporation of the super market, the end of aviation and the death of the family car. Perhaps a pied piper (leader) can call us away, but unless we do walk away, nothing will happen.

I say we recede into familiar community histories to the first sight of solid ground and then set out again from that original wrong turning to a dead-end road – which is where we stand now. We stand in super markets, jet the globe and polish our cars. Only we can stop doing so.

We prevaricate to suggest that we must first ask the powers to ask (or compel) us to stop. We cut out personal guilt and paste it on the powers.

But we (principally we) are guilty. It is comic to propose that governments should impose a carbon tax before we can stop burning it ourselves.

It is tragic that we remain loyal to an entirely oil-powered super market to change it for the better by market signals, when our own town centre decays because of our absence. It is both tragic and comic to petition against that third runway, as we simultaneously book a business, or holiday flight.

We created the super market, the airline and the family car – we built, maintained and paid for them – and we populate them – thronging a dead-end road. What can a leader do? She can do nothing.

We must do everything, because we did everything. I own some shares in those four hundred and twelve parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

.

Too Late Too Little

SUBHEAD: As we look down into the formation of the fossil fuels they are reaching up to pull us into their grave.

By Albert Bates on 17 June 2018 for The Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-people-in-range-of-secret.html)


Image above: The gorge Cayuga Falls in western New York State reveals the history of shale formations that created the fossil fuels we have become addicted to. From original article.

Approaching the vernal equinox in the Fingerlakes region of upstate New York I am at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biophysical Economics

At the end of the first day we took a short pre-dinner tour to the other side of Cayuga Lake and Taughannock Falls, one of the highest east of the Rocky Mountains (66 meters).

The site provided an interesting metaphor because the waterfall and gorge are an example of a hanging valley, formed where the stream-carved valley meets the deeper, glacially-carved Cayuga Lake drainage. As the gorge retreats westward it exposes more of the Devonian shale near the fall’s base.

The Late Devonian extinction was second of the six major extinction events including the one now in progress, and eliminated about 19% of all families, 50% of all genera and at least 70% of all species.

While the shale is named for its discovery in Devonshire, England, that part of the world at that time was in the Southern Hemisphere, part of the supercontinent, Gondwana. The Caledonian mountains were growing across what is now the Scottish Highlands and Scandinavia, while the Appalachians rose over America, all on that supercontinent.

As the scientists gathering from China, Russia, England, Australia, Latin America, Africa and beyond peered from the overlook down into the gorge, they were staring back 400 million years to a time when there was widespread anoxia in oceanic bottom waters, corals died, the rate of carbon deposition shot up, benthic organisms were devastated, especially in the tropics, ice melted from the poles and sea levels rose.

The Devonian shares much in common with our present extinction event.

Another effect of those changes was the deposition of fossil hydrocarbons, largely because the lack of oxygen in the ocean allowed them to be trapped without decay. We are looking down into the formation of the fossil fuels and they are reaching up to pull us into their grave.

“We have to make the momentous choice between brief but true greatness and longer, continued mediocrity.”
— William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (1866).
In his conference invocation, Neil Patterson opened with Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen, “Words Before All Else,” the Haudenosaunee liturgy with a spoken refrain after each statement of truth, “and now we are of one mind.”

In the Tuscarora language he shared with us the gifts of each of our relations, and then reminded us that everything we need is provided for us and all we have to remember is to give thanks.

I am writing this from the back of the auditorium and the conference has only just begun but my guess is that nothing we will hear will be any wiser than that.

My own 30 minute talk in the first session was a biophysical critique of negative emissions technologies and a reminder that the Paris Agreement’s targets will require a 11 to 20 percent annual decline slope for energy and consumables for the duration of this century.

For those in this audience still struggling to imagine a future with the creature comforts of the late 20th century extended (or even enlarged) to a warming world of 10 to 12 billion humans, these concepts are incomprehensible. They would prefer to grasp at straws like nuclear power or clean coal to sustain the unsustainable.
“Dry heaves are just nature’s way of demonstrating negative marginal utility.”
— Kent Klitgaard, Wells College
“I don’t know how you would teach the dinosaurs to be optimistic about the asteroid.”
— Charles A.S. Hall
I am reminded of Col. Creighton S. Abrams famous words from the Battle of the Bulge, “They’ve got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.” Some of us were trying to design some way for civilization to cope at a lower level of complexity, returning to nature’s all-wise fold, while others were trying to tweak the built environments and pedagogy of the colleges where they teach in hopes the problem will be solved by some kind of fairy dust invented by the next generation, or the one after that. Queue the economics lecture on discounting present value.
“Systemic overshoot can’t grow its way into sustainability.”
— Kent Klitgaard
“The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.” We can see in numerous ways how finite the biosphere is and how humans have been pushing beyond natural boundaries in what seems to be 100 years of miracles of engineering until we suddenly recognize we have been burning the 400 million-year-old furniture all this time and now the house has caught fire.
— Gloria Steinhem
“What we are seeing is just the outer bands of a shitstorm we are not prepared for.”
— James Howard Kunstler

By diminishing the capacity of nature we have been steadily been decreasing our own resilience, our margin for error, placing our own species in the queue for extinction. We can hope to build adaptive capacity but ultimately are limited by factors we are powerless to change, like the ability of mammals with sweat glands to cool their bodies after the world average temperature exceeds 7 degrees of change. Some millions of years from now we will be that dark layer at the bottom of the waterfall: the Anthropocene shale.

“Lest we forget,” Charles A.S. Hall said, “Cassandra was right.”

hieroglyphic stairway

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars
I am everything already lost
the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos
I use words to instigate silence
I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane
a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time
I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea
I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods
I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech


— Drew Dellinger

© 2017 "hieroglyphic stairway," from the book, Love Letter to the Milky Way, by Drew Dellinger

See also:

Get in the lifeboat now!

SUBHEAD: There is not much time left to find a way off this sinking ship. Find a seat soon.

By Juan Wilson on 19 June 2018 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/06/get-in-lifeboat-now.html)


Image above: Abandoning the Costa Concordia that capsized and sank in 2012 off Isola del Giglio, Tuscany, Italy. From (https://paullaherty.com/2015/01/05/lessons-from-the-costa-concordia/).

I know it's comfy in the First Class State Room on A Deck but that won't be for long. As Americans we've grown accustomed to having "the best". However, now in the first part of the 21st century we are beginning to realize that we all are not "on board". An increasing number are in steerage... already below the waterline.

People around the world in places that have been trashed by over population, war,  bad agriculture, eco-collapse and fanaticism have been rushing to the exits - primarily to Western Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the world held together by some combination of modern technology, advanced military, historic plunder, natural resources  and/or isolation.

Those "safe havens" likely won't be able to handle the additional load. This is particularly true if those escaping intend to live in the style that "western civilization" has become accustomed:
Automobiles for everybody, highways to everywhere; universal electric grid, internet, and cell service; air conditioning, refrigeration, supermarkets, frozen food;  jet travel and fresh fruit on the table from another hemisphere, next day Amazon delivery service - total security... etc.
Those services cannot be provided for the eight billion people that inhabit the planet now. At this point of degradation of the ecosystem it is probably not possible for even a tenth of that number. That's about what the population of the world was when America became nation independent in 1776.

Basically, this human population explosion is a function of the consumption of fossil fuels. See the chart below:


Image above: World population from US Census Bureau inj blue, overlaid with fossil fuel use (red) by Vaclav Smil from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects. From "Human Population Overshoot: What Went Wrong?"2/15/12 (https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/02/15/human-population-overshoot-what-went-wrong/).

What is the solution?
Back away from your dependence on fossil fuel (and all that it supports) as soon as you can. Make your life livable (and hopefully enjoyable) off the grid as soon as you can. Get in a lifeboat now! By that I mean have at your immediate disposal a place where you can survive, and even thrive, without dependence on "The Mother Ship" (The System, The Grid, Civilization, the United States of America. etc.).

There is no time for any delay. My wife and I have been working towards this goal for over a decade and we are not quite there. If the container ships and tankers were to stop coming to Hawaii we would face drastic changes, but likely our homestead could support human habitation.

Are you in such a place now? If the lights go out can you be in such a place securely within a couple of days? I say that because that is about as long as most people have the resources at hand to survive.

For starters, you will need your own sources for water, food, energy and shelter.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Settling into a Collapse Rant 11/15/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Oases on a future Eaarth 6/28/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Tales of a Dark Kauai 5/23/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The New Game 11/10/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Food, Water, Energy & Shelter 1/31/13
Ea O Ka Aina: The Titanic or Noah's Ark 3/4/12
Ea O Ka Aina: The Hero's Way 1/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Time to Stop Pretending 4/27/11
Ea O Ka Aina: All Aboard 12/9/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Here the Deal!  7/5/09
.

Civilization as Asteroid

SUBHEAD: We and our livestock are more than an order of magnitude greater than all animals on land.

By Darrin Qualman on 13 June 2018 in Resilience -
(https://www.darrinqualman.com/humans-livestock-extinctions/)


Image above: These 600-700 pound steers are being fed in a feedlot in Jetmore, Kansas, for “backgrounding” to gain weight to around 1,000 pounds. They’ll be sent to another feedlot for “finishing” before slaughter. From (https://aspenranchrealestate.com/Colorado_Cattle_Ranching).

Humans and our livestock now make up 97% of all animals on land.  Wild animals (mammals and birds) have been reduced to a mere remnant: just 3%.  This is based on mass.  Humans and our domesticated animals outweigh all terrestrial wild mammals and birds 32-to-1.

To clarify, if we add up the weights of all the people, cows, sheep, pigs, horses, dogs, chickens, turkeys, etc., that total is 32 times greater than the weight of all the wild terrestrial mammals and birds: all the elephants, mice, kangaroos, lions, raccoons, bats, bears, deer, wolves, moose, chickadees, herons, eagles, etc.

A specific example is illuminating: the biomass of chickens is more than double the total mass of all other birds combined.


Image above: At this KFC "broiler shed" there is only artificial light, no fresh air, and huge fans circulate the stale ammonia filled air. Chicken meat is perfect for our fast food culture. A producer can ‘grow’ a chicken within a few weeks with super large breasts, and minimize overhead through economies of scale. From (https://pos394.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/do-you-know-how-your-chicken-was-raised/).

Before the advent of agriculture and human civilizations, however, the opposite was the case: wild animals and birds dominated, and their numbers and mass were several times greater than their numbers and mass today.

Before the advent of agriculture, about 11,000 years ago, humans made up just a tiny fraction of animal biomass, and domesticated livestock did not exist.  The current situation—the domination of the Earth by humans and our food animals—is a relatively recent development.

The preceding observations are based on a May 2018 report by Yinon Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Bar-On and his coauthors use a variety of sources to construct a “census of the biomass of Earth”; they estimate the mass of all the plants, animals, insects, bacteria, and other living things on our planet.

The graph below is based on data from that report (supplemented with estimates based on work by Vaclav Smil).  The graph shows the mass of humans, our domesticated livestock, and “wild animals”: terrestrial mammals and birds.  The units are millions of tonnes of carbon.[1]  Three time periods are listed.


Image above: Graph of history of land based mammals and bird biomass over last 11,000 years. From www.darrinqualman.com.

The first, 50,000 years ago, is the time before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction.  The Megafauna Extinction was a period when Homo sapiens radiated outward into Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas and contributed to the extinction of about half the planet’s large animal species (over 44 kgs).  (Climate change also played a role in that extinction.)

In the middle of the graph we see the period around 11,000 years ago—before humans began practicing agriculture.  At the right-hand side we see the situation today.  Note how the first two periods are dominated by wild animals.  The mass of humans in those periods is so small that the blue bar representing human biomass is not even visible in the graph.[2]

This graph highlights three points:
  1. Wild animal numbers and biomass have been catastrophically reduced, especially over the past 11,000 years
  2. Human numbers and livestock numbers have skyrocketed, to unnatural, abnormal levels
  3. The downward trendline for wild animals visible in this graph is gravely concerning; this graph suggests accelerating extinctions.
Indeed, we are today well into the fastest extinction event in the past 65 million years.  According to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment “the rate of known extinctions of species in the past century is roughly 50–500 times greater than the extinction rate calculated from the fossil record….”

The extinction rate that humans are now causing has not been seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago—the asteroid-impact-triggered extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Unless we reduce the scale and impacts of human societies and economies, and unless we more equitably share the Earth with wild species, we will enter fully a major global extinction event—only the sixth in 500 million years.  To the other species of the Earth, and to the fossil record, human impacts increasingly resemble an asteroid impact.

In addition to the rapid decline in the mass and number of wild animals it is also worth contemplating the converse: the huge increase in human and livestock biomass.  Above, I called this increase “unnatural,” and I did so advisedly.


The mass of humans and our food animals is now 7 times larger than the mass of animals on Earth 11,000 or 50,000 years ago—7 times larger than what is normal or natural.

For millions of years the Earth sustained a certain range of animal biomass; in recent millennia humans have multiplied that mass roughly sevenfold.

How?  Fossil fuels.  Via fertilizers, petro-chemical pesticides, and other inputs we are pushing hundreds of millions of tonnes of fossil fuels into our food system, and thereby pushing out billions of tonnes of additional food and livestock feed.

We are turning fossil fuel Calories from the ground into food Calories on our plates and in livestock feed-troughs.   For example, huge amounts of fossil-fuel energy go into growing the corn and soybeans that are the feedstocks for the tens-of-billions of livestock animals that populate the planet.

Dr. Anthony Barnosky has studied human-induced extinctions and the growing dominance of humans and their livestock.  In a 2008 journal article he writes that “as soon as we began to augment the global energy budget, megafauna biomass skyrocketed, such that we are orders of magnitude above the normal baseline today.”

According to Barnosky “the normal biomass baseline was exceeded only after the Industrial Revolution” and this indicates that “the current abnormally high level of megafauna biomass is sustained solely by fossil fuels.”

Only a limited number of animals can be fed from leaves and grass energized by current sunshine.  But by tapping a vast reservoir of fossil sunshine we’ve multiplied the number of animals that can be fed.  We and our livestock are petroleum products.

There is no simple list of solutions to mega-problems like accelerating extinctions, fossil-fuel over-dependence, and human and livestock overpopulation.  But certain common sense solutions seem to present themselves.

I’ll suggest just one: we need to eat less meat and fewer dairy products and we need to reduce the mass and number of livestock on Earth.  Who can look at the graph above and come to any other conclusion?

We need not eliminate meat or dairy products (grazing animals are integral parts of many ecosystems) but we certainly need to cut the number of livestock animals by half or more.

Most importantly, we must not try to proliferate the Big Mac model of meat consumption to 8 or 9 or 10 billion people.  The graph above suggests a stark choice: cut the number of livestock animals, or preside over the demise of most of the Earth’s wild species.
  1. Using carbon content allows us to compare the mass of plants, animals, bacteria, viruses, etc.  Very roughly, humans and other animals are about half to two-thirds water.  The remaining “dry mass” is about 50% carbon.  Thus, to convert from tonnes of carbon to dry mass, a good approximation is to multiply by two.
     
  2. There is significant uncertainty regarding animal biomass in the present, and much more so in the past.  Thus, the biomass values for wild animals in the graph must be considered as representing a range of possible values.  That said, the overall picture revealed in the graph is not subject to any uncertainty.  The overall conclusions are robust: the mass of humans and our livestock today is several times larger than wild animal biomass today or in the past; and wild animal biomass today is a fraction of its pre-agricultural value.
Graph sources:
– Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 17, 2018.
– Anthony Barnosky, “Megafauna Biomass Tradeoff as a Driver of Quaternary and Future Extinctions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (August 2008).
– Vaclav Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).


.

Ditch the Batteries

SUBHEAD: Compressed air has longer life expectancy, technical simplicity, lower cost and lower maintenance.

By Kris De Decker on 9 June 2018 for Low Tech Magazine-
(http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-the-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html)


Image above: Commercial large compressed air storage tanks. From original article.

Going off-grid? Think twice before you invest in a battery system. Compressed air energy storage is the sustainable and resilient alternative to batteries, with much longer life expectancy, lower life cycle costs, technical simplicity, and low maintenance.

Designing a compressed air energy storage system that combines high efficiency with small storage size is not self-explanatory, but a growing number of researchers show that it can be done.

Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) is usually regarded as a form of large-scale energy storage, comparable to a pumped hydropower plant. Such a CAES plant compresses air and stores it in an underground cavern, recovering the energy by expanding (or decompressing) the air through a turbine, which runs a generator.

Unfortunately, large-scale CAES plants are very energy inefficient. Compressing and decompressing air introduces energy losses, resulting in an electric-to-electric efficiency of only 40-52%, compared to 70-85% for pumped hydropower plants, and 70-90% for chemical batteries. The low efficiency is mainly since air heats up during compression.

This waste heat, which holds a large share of the energy input, is dumped into the atmosphere. A related problem is that air cools down when it is decompressed, lowering electricity production and possibly freezing the water vapour in the air.

To avoid this, large-scale CAES plants heat the air prior to expansion using natural gas fuel, which further deteriorates the system efficiency and makes renewable energy storage dependent on fossil fuels.

Why Small-scale CAES?

In the previous article, we outlined several ideas – inspired by historical systems – that could improve the efficiency of large-scale CAES plants.

In this article, we focus on the small but growing number of engineers and researchers who think that the future is not in large-scale compressed air energy storage, but rather in small-scale or micro systems, using man-made, aboveground storage vessels instead of underground reservoirs. Such systems could be off-the-grid or grid-connected, either operating by themselves or alongside a battery system.

The main reason to investigate decentralised compressed air energy storage is the simple fact that such a system could be installed anywhere, just like chemical batteries.

Large-scale CAES, on the other hand, is dependent on a suitable underground geology. Although there are more potential sites for large-scale CAES plants than for large-scale pumped hydropower plants, finding appropriate storage caverns is not as easy as was previously assumed. [1-2] [3]

Compared to chemical batteries, micro-CAES systems have some interesting advantages. Most importantly, a distributed network of compressed air energy storage systems would be much more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Over their lifetimes, chemical batteries store only two to ten times the energy needed to manufacture them. [4] Small-scale CAES systems do much better than that, mainly because of their much longer lifespan.
Compared to chemical batteries, a distributed network of compressed air energy storage systems would be much more sustainable and environmentally friendly
Furthermore, they do not require rare or toxic materials, and the hardware is easily recyclable. In addition, decentralised compressed air energy storage doesn’t need high-tech production lines and can be manufactured, installed and maintained by local business, unlike an energy storage system based on chemical batteries.

Finally, micro-CAES has no self-discharge, is tolerant of a wider range of environments, and promises to be cheaper than chemical batteries. [5]

Although the initial investment cost is estimated to be higher than that of a battery system (around $10,000 for a typical residential set-up), and although above-ground storage increases the costs in comparison to underground storage (the storage vessel is good for roughly half of the investment cost), a compressed air energy storage system offers an almost infinite number of charge and discharge cycles. Batteries, on the other hand, need to be replaced every few years, which makes them more expensive in the long run. [5,6]

Challenge: Limiting Storage Size
However, decentralised CAES also faces important challenges. The first is the system efficiency, which is a problem in large- and small-scale systems alike, and the second is the size of the storage vessel, which is especially problematic for small-scale CAES systems.

Both issues make small-scale CAES systems unpractical. Sufficient space for a large storage vessel is not always available, while a low storage efficiency requires a larger solar PV or wind power plant to make up for that loss, raising the costs and lowering the sustainability of the system.

To make matters worse, system efficiency and storage size are inversely related: improving one factor is often at the expense of the other.

Increasing the air pressure minimizes the storage size but decreases the system efficiency, while using a lower pressure makes the system more energy efficient but results in a larger storage size. Some examples help illustrate the problem.

A simulation for a stand-alone CAES aimed at unpowered rural areas, and which is connected to a solar PV system and used for lighting only, operates at a relatively low air pressure of 8 bar and obtains a round-trip efficiency of 60% -- comparable to the efficiency of lead-acid batteries. [7]

However, to store 360 Wh of potential electrical energy, the system requires a storage reservoir of 18 m3, the size of a small room measuring 3x3x2 meters. The authors note that “although the tank size appears very large, it still makes sense for applications in rural areas”.
System efficiency and storage size are inversely related: improving one factor is often at the expense of the other.
Such a system may indeed be beneficial in this context, especially because it has a much longer lifespan than chemical batteries. However, a similar configuration in an urban context with high energy use is obviously problematic.

In another study, it was calculated that it would take a 65 cubic meter air storage tank to store 3 kila-watt hours of energy. This corresponds to a 13 meter long pressure vessel with a diameter of 2.5 meters, shown below. [8]


Image above: Compressed air storage tank 6 feet high by 45 feet long could store 3 kWh of energy. From original article.

Furthermore, average household electricity use per day in industrialised countries is much higher still. For example, in the UK it’s slightly below 13 kWh per day, in the US and Canada it’s more than 30 kWh. In the latter case, ten such air pressure tanks would be required to store one day of electricity use.

Small-scale CAES systems with high pressures give the opposite results. For example, a configuration modeled for a typical household electrical use in Europe (6,400 kWh per year) operates at a pressure of 200 bar (almost 4 times higher than the pressure in large-scale CAES plants) and achieves a storage volume of only 0.55 m3, which is comparable to batteries. However, the electric-to-electric efficiency of this set-up is only 11-17%, depending on the size of the solar PV system. [9]

Two Strategies to Make Micro CAES work
These examples seem to suggest that compressed air energy storage makes no sense as a small-scale energy storage system, even with a reduction in energy demand. However, perhaps surprisingly to many, this is not the case.

Small-scale CAES systems cannot follow the same approach as large-scale CAES systems, which increase storage capacity and overall efficiency by using multi-stage compression with intercooling and multi-stage expansion with reheating.

This method involves additional components and increases the complexity and cost, which is impractical for small-scale systems.

The same goes for “adiabatic” processes (AA-CAES), which aim to use the heat of compression to reheat the expanding air, and which are the main research focus for large-scale CAES. For a micro-CAES system, it’s very important to simplify the structure as much as possible. [5,10]

This leaves us with two low-tech strategies that can be followed to achieve similar storage capacity and energy efficiency as lead-acid batteries. First, we can design low pressure systems which minimize the temperature differences during compression and expansion. Second, we can design high pressure systems in which the heat and cold from compression and expansion are used for household applications.
Small-scale, High Pressure

Small-scale compressed air energy storage systems with high air pressures turn the inefficiency of compression and expansion into an advantage.

While large-scale AA-CAES aims to recover the heat of compression with the aim of maximizing electricity production, these small-scale systems take advantage of the temperature differences to allow trigeneration of electrical, heating and cooling power.

The dissipated heat of compression is used for residential heating and hot water production, while the cold expanding air is used for space cooling and refrigeration. Chemical batteries can’t do this.
Small-scale, high pressure systems use the dissipated heat of compression for residential heating and hot water production, while the cold expanding air is used for space cooling and refrigeration.
In these systems, the electric-to-electric efficiency is very low. However, there are now several efficiencies to define, because the system also supplies heat and cold. [10,11]

Furthermore, this approach can make several electrical appliances unnecessary, such as the refrigerator, the air-conditioning, and the electric boiler for space and water heating. Since the use of these appliances is often responsible for roughly half of the electricity use in an average household, a small-scale CAES system with high pressure has lower electricity demand overall.

High pressure systems easily solve the issue of storage size. As we have seen, a higher air pressure can greatly reduce the size of a compressed air storage vessel, but only at the expense of increased waste heat.

In a small-scale system that takes advantage of temperature differences to provide heating and cooling, this is advantageous.

Therefore, high pressure systems are ideal for small-scale residential buildings, where storage space is limited and where there is a large demand for heat and cold as well as electricity.

The only disadvantages are that high pressure systems require stronger and more expensive storage tanks, and that extra space is required for heat exchangers.


Image above: Experimental set-up of a micro CAES system. From original article, Source [30].

Several research groups have designed, modeled and built small-scale combined heat-and-power CAES units which provide heating and cooling as well as electricity.

The high pressure system with a storage volume of only 0.55 m3 that we mentioned earlier, is an example of this type of system. [9]

As noted, its electrical efficiency is only 11-17%, but the system also produces sufficient heat to produce 270 litres of hot water per day. If this thermal source of energy is also taken into account, the “exergetic” efficiency of the whole system is close to 70%.

Similar "exergy" efficiencies can be found in other studies, with systems operating at pressures between 50 and 200 bar. [11-21]

Heat and cold from compression and expansion can be distributed to heating or cooling devices by means of water or air. The setup of an air cycle heating and cooling system is very similar to a CAES system, except for the storage vessel.

Air cycle heating and cooling has many advantages, including high reliability, ease of maintenance, and the use of a natural refrigerant, which is environmentally benign. [11]

Small-scale, Low Pressure

The second strategy to achieve higher efficiencies and lower storage volumes is exactly the opposite from the first.

Instead of compressing air to a high pressure and taking advantage of the heat and cold from compression and expansion, a second class of small-scale CAES systems is based on low pressures and “near-isothermal” compression and expansion.

Below air pressures of roughly 10 bar, the compression and expansion of air exhibit insignificant temperature changes (“near-isothermal”), and the efficiency of the energy storage system can be close to 100%. There is no waste heat and consequently there is no need to reheat the air upon expansion.

Isothermal compression requires the least amount of energy to compress a given amount of air to a given pressure. However, reaching an isothermal process is far from reality. To start with, it only works with small and/or slowly cycling compressors and expanders. Unfortunately, typical industrial compressors are not made for maximum efficiency but for maximum power and thus work under fast-cycling, non-isothermal conditions. The same goes for most industrial expanders. [22-24]
Below air pressures of 10 bar, compression and expansion of air exhibit insignificant temperature changes and the efficiency can be close to 100%.
The use of industrial compressors and expanders explains in large part why the low pressure CAES systems mentioned at the beginning of this article have such large storage vessels. Both systems are based on devices which are operated outside of their optimal or rated conditions. [25]

Because inefficiencies multiply during energy conversions, even relatively small differences in the efficiency of compressors and expanders can have large effects. For example, a variation in device efficiency from 60% to 80% results in a system efficiency from 36% to 64%, respectively.
New Types of Compressors and Expanders

Because the performance of a compressor and an expander significantly impact the overall efficiency of a small-scale CAES system, several researchers have built their own compressors and expanders, which are especially aimed at energy storage.

For example, one team designed, built and examined a single-stage, low power isothermal compressor that uses a liquid piston. [22]

It operates at a very low compression rate (between 10-60 rpm), which correspond to the output of solar PV panels, and limits temperature fluctuation during compression and expansion to 2 degrees Celsius.

The low-cost device has minimum moving parts and obtains efficiencies of 60-70% at 3 to 7 bar pressure. [22] This is a very high efficiency for such a simple device, considering that a sophisticated three-stage centrifugal compressor, used in large-scale CAES systems or in industrial settings, is roughly 70% efficient.

Furthermore, the researchers state that the efficiency is limited by the off-the-shelf motor that they use to power their compressor. Indeed, another research team achieved 83% efficiency. [26]


Image above: A cutaway view of a modern, quiet, oil free scroll format air compressor. From (http://www.fusheng.com/FSAP/F_ProductInfo?ProductId=Prod_1-11-0&n=GW%20Series%20Oil-free%20Scroll%20Air%20Compressor&r_reg=en-us&rndt=w1tupMXK).

Another novelty is the use of scroll compressors, which are the types of compressors that are now used in refrigerators, air-conditioning systems, and heat pumps. Both fluid piston and scroll compressors have a high area-to-volume ratio, which minimizes heat production, and can easily handle two-phase flow, which means that they can also be used as expanders.

They are also lighter and less noisy than typical reciprocating compressors. [24]
 

Varying Air Pressure
Although compressors and expanders are the most important determinants of system efficiency in small-scale CAES systems, they are not the only ones.

For example, in every compressed air energy storage system, additional efficiency loss is caused by the fact that during expansion the storage reservoir is depleted and therefore the pressure drops. Meanwhile, the input pressure for the expander is required to vary only in a minimal range to assure high efficiency.

This is usually solved in two ways, although neither is really satisfactory. First, air can be stored in a tank with surplus pressure, after which it is throttled down to the required expander input pressure. \

However, this method – which is used in large-scale CAES – requires additional energy use and thus introduces inefficiency.

Second, the expander can operate at variable conditions, but in this case efficiency will drop along with the pressure while the storage is emptied.
During expansion the storage reservoir is depleted and therefore the pressure drops.
With these problems in mind, a team of researchers combined a small-scale CAES with a small-scale pumped hydropower plant, resulting in a system that maintains a steady pressure during the complete discharge of the storage reservoir.

It consists of two compressed air tanks that are connected by a pipe attached to their lower portions: each of these have separate spaces for air (below) and water storage (above).

The configuration maintains a head of water by means of a pump, which consumes 15% of the generated power. However, in spite of this extra energy use, the researchers managed to increase both the efficiency and the energy density of the system. [11]

Off-the-Grid Power Storage

To give an idea of what a combination of the right components can achieve, let’s have a look at a last research project. [27] It concerns a system that is based on a highly efficient, custom-made compressor/expander, which is directly coupled to a DC motor/generator.

Apart from its efficient components, this CAES project also introduces an innovative system configuration. It doesn’t use one large air storage tank, but several smaller ones, which are interconnected and computer-controlled.

The setup consists of the compression/expansion unit coupled to three small (7L) cylinders, previously used as air extinguishers, and operates at low pressure (max 5 bar). The storage vessels are connected via PVC pipework and brass fittings.

To control the air-flow, three computer-controlled air valves are installed at the inlet of each cylinder. The system can be extended by adding more pressure vessels. [27]


Image above: A modular system of multiple compressor tanks has multiple advantages. From original article.

A modular configuration results in a higher system efficiency and energy density for mainly two reasons.

First, it helps more effective heat transfer to take place, because every air tank acts as an additional heat exchanger.
 
Second, it allows better control over the discharge rate of the storage reservoir.

The cylinders can be discharged either in unison to satisfy a demand for high power density (more power at the cost of a shorter discharge time), or they can be discharged sequentially to satisfy a demand for high energy density (longer discharge time at the cost of maximum power).
By discharging modular storage cylinders sequentially, the discharge time can be greatly increased, making the system comparable to lead-acid batteries in terms of energy density.
By discharging the cylinders sequentially, the discharge time can be greatly increased, making the system comparable to lead-acid batteries in terms of energy density. Based on their experimental set-up, the researchers calculated the efficiencies for different starting pressures and numbers of cylinders.

They found that 57 interconnected cylinders of 10 litre each, operating at 5 bar, could fulfill the job of four 24V batteries for 20 consecutive hours, all while having a surprisingly small footprint of just 0.6 m3.

Interestingly, the storage capacity is 410 Wh, which is comparable to the 360 Wh rural system noted earlier, which requires an 18 m3 storage vessel – that’s thirty times larger than the modular storage system.

The electric-to-electric efficiency for the 3-cylinder set-up reached a peak of 85% at 3 bar pressure, while the estimated efficiency for the 57-cylinder set-up is 75%.

These are values comparable to lithium-ion batteries, but adding more storage vessels or operating at higher pressures introduces larger losses due to compression, heat, friction and fittings. [27-29]

Nevertheless, when I e-mailed Abdul Alami, the main author of the study, thinking that the results sounded too good to be true, he told me that the figures were actually overly conservative: “We stuck to low pressures to achieve near-isothermal compression and to ensure safe operation.

Operating at pressures higher than 10 bar would create serious thermal losses, but a pressure of 7-8 bar may be beneficial in terms of energy and power density, though maybe not in terms of efficiency.”

Build it Yourself?


In conclusion, small-scale compressed air energy storage could be a promising alternative to batteries, but the research is still in its early stages – the first study on small-scale CAES was published in 2010 – and new ideas will continue to shed light on how best to develop the technology.

At the moment, there are no commercial products available, and setting up your own system can be quite intimidating if you are new to pneumatics.

Simply getting hold of the right components and fittings is a headache, as these come in a bewildering variety and are only sold to industries.

However, if you’re patient and not too unhandy, and if you are determined to use a more sustainable energy storage system, it is perfectly possible to build your own CAES system. As the examples in this article have shown, it’s just a bit harder to build a good one.

There's more ideas for small-scale CAES systems in the previous article: History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy.

References & Notes
[1] Luo, Xing, et al. "Overview of current development in electrical energy storage technologies and the application potential in power system operation." Applied Energy 137 (2015): 511-536. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261914010290

[2] Laijun, C. H. E. N., et al. "Review and prospect of compressed air energy storage system." Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy 4.4 (2016): 529-541. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40565-016-0240-5

[3] There is increasing competition for potential CAES geologic units, as many are also well suited to the storage of natural gas or sequestered carbon. Furthermore, cavern storage imposes harsh requirements on the geographical conditions. For example, the originally planned Iowa CAES project in the US was terminated due to its porous sandstone condition. [2]

[4] Barnhart, Charles J., and Sally M. Benson. "On the importance of reducing the energetic and material demands of electrical energy storage." Energy & Environmental Science 6.4 (2013): 1083-1092. https://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/EES_reducingdemandsonenergystorage.pdf

[5] Petrov, Miroslav P., Reza Arghandeh, and Robert Broadwater. "Concept and application of distributed compressed air energy storage systems integrated in utility networks." ASME 2013 Power Conference. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2013. http://eddism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Paper-EDD-Concept-and-Application-of-Distributed-Compressed-Air-Energy-Storage-Systems-Integrated-in-Utility-Networks-July-2013.pdf

[6] Tallini, Alessandro, Andrea Vallati, and Luca Cedola. "Applications of micro-CAES systems: energy and economic analysis." Energy Procedia 82 (2015): 797-804.

[7] Setiawan, A., et al. "Sizing compressed-air energy storage tanks for solar home systems." Computational Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications (CIVEMSA), 2015 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2015. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ardyono_Priyadi/publication/274898992_Sizing_Compressed-Air_Energy_Storage_Tanks_for_Solar_Home_Systems/links/5670e2c408ae2b1f87acf927.pdf

[8] Herriman, Kayne. "Small compressed air energy storage systems." (2013). https://eprints.usq.edu.au/24651/1/Herriman_2013.pdf

[9] Manfrida, Giampaolo, and Riccardo Secchi. "Performance prediction of a small-size adiabatic compressed air energy storage system." International Journal of Thermodynamics 18.2 (2015): 111-119. http://dergipark.ulakbim.gov.tr/eoguijt/article/download/5000071710/5000113411

[10] Kim, Y. M., and Daniel Favrat. "Energy and exergy analysis of a micro-compressed air energy storage and air cycle heating and cooling system." Energy 35.1 (2010): 213-220.

[11] Kim, Young Min. "Novel concepts of compressed air energy storage and thermo-electric energy storage." (2012). https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/181540/files/EPFL_TH5525.pdf

[12] Inder, Shane D., and Mehrdad Khamooshi. "Energy Efficiency Analysis of Discharge Modes of an Adiabatic Compressed Air Energy Storage System." World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Electrical, Computer, Energetic, Electronic and Communication Engineering 11.12 (2017): 1101-1109.

[13] Vollaro, Roberto De Lieto, et al. "Energy and thermodynamical study of a small innovative compressed air energy storage system (micro-CAES)." Energy Procedia 82 (2015): 645-651.

[14] Li, Yongliang, et al. "A trigeneration system based on compressed air and thermal energy storage." Applied Energy 99 (2012): 316-323. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261912003479

[15] Facci, Andrea L., et al. "Trigenerative micro compressed air energy storage: Concept and thermodynamic assessment." Applied energy 158 (2015): 243-254. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261915009526

[16] Mohammadi, Amin, et al. "Exergy analysis of a Combined Cooling, Heating and Power system integrated with wind turbine and compressed air energy storage system." Energy Conversion and Management 131 (2017): 69-78. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261915009526

[17] Yao, Erren, et al. "Thermo-economic optimization of a combined cooling, heating and power system based on small-scale compressed air energy storage." Energy Conversion and Management 118 (2016): 377-386. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890416302229

[18] Liu, Jin-Long, and Jian-Hua Wang. "Thermodynamic analysis of a novel tri-generation system based on compressed air energy storage and pneumatic motor." Energy 91 (2015): 420-429. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544215011317

[19] Lv, Song, et al. "Modelling and analysis of a novel compressed air energy storage system for trigeneration based on electrical energy peak load shifting." Energy Conversion and Management 135 (2017): 394-401. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890416311839

[20] Besharat, M. O. H. S. E. N., SANDRA C. Martins, and HELENA M. Ramos. "Evaluation of Energy Recovery in Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) Systems." 3rd IAHR Europe Congress. Book of Proceedings, Portugal. 2014. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohsen_Besharat2/publication/270896130_Evaluation_of_Energy_Recovery_in_Compressed_Air_Energy_Storage_CAES_Systems/links/58a1fce0a6fdccf5e97109b2/Evaluation-of-Energy-Recovery-in-Compressed-Air-Energy-Storage-CAES-Systems.pdf

[21] Minutillo, M., A. Lubrano Lavadera, and E. Jannelli. "Assessment of design and operating parameters for a small compressed air energy storage system integrated with a stand-alone renewable power plant." Journal of Energy Storage 4 (2015): 135-144. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X15300207

[22] Villela, Dominique, et al. "Compressed-air energy storage systems for stand-alone off-grid photovoltaic modules." Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC), 2010 35th IEEE. IEEE, 2010. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9f1d/4273f8deb4a0a18c86eb4056e2fd378f8f3f.pdf

[23] Paloheimo, H., and M. Omidiora. "A feasibility study on Compressed Air Energy Storage system for portable electrical and electronic devices." Clean Electrical Power, 2009 International Conference on. IEEE, 2009. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Omidiora/publication/224581292_A_Feasibility_Study_on_Compressed_Air_Energy_Storage_System_for_Portable_Electrical_and_Electronic_Devices/links/5640d5d308aebaaea1f6ad44.pdf 

[24] Prinsen, Thomas H. Design and analysis of a solar-powered compressed air energy storage system. Naval Postgraduate School Monterey United States, 2016. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5783353621699682542&hl=nl&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5

[25] The small-scale system aimed at urban environments, which has a storage reservoir of 18 metres long, is based on a compressor that “had been in service for 30 years on building sites to run various air tools and had little maintenance done”. [8] This is detrimental to system efficiency, because a compressor that is not maintained well easily wastes as much as 30% of its potential output through air leaks, increased friction, or dirty air filters. This small-scale system also used a highly inefficient expander. All together, this explains why it combines a very large storage volume with a very low electric-to-electric efficiency (less than 5%).

[26] Van de Ven, James D., and Perry Y. Li. "Liquid piston gas compression." Applied Energy 86.10 (2009): 2183-2191. https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/liquid-piston-gas-compression

[27] Alami, Abdul Hai, et al. "Low pressure, modular compressed air energy storage (CAES) system for wind energy storage applications." Renewable Energy 106 (2017): 201-211.

[28] Alami, Abdul Hai. "Experimental assessment of compressed air energy storage (CAES) system and buoyancy work energy storage (BWES) as cellular wind energy storage options." Journal of Energy Storage 1 (2015): 38-43.

[29] Abdul Alami, e-mail conversation.

[30] Sun, Hao, Xing Luo, and Jihong Wang. "Feasibility study of a hybrid wind turbine system–Integration with compressed air energy storage." Applied Energy 137 (2015): 617 -628. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261914006680

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