In Reykjavik and Infected

Hello,

This will be brief for the same reason that it is delayed - sinusitis and a cold. Yes, I've been besieged by microbes. I find myself typing from a small cot in the Salvation Army Guesthouse in downtown Reykjavik. The room is somewhat like a prison cell, but more austere. I do theoretically have the option to leave the premises at any moment, but must confront an utterly unpleasant desk worker every time.

As for progress on the Watson, I'm deeply entrenched in a few interesting projects. I have assumed responsibility for shipping and insuring a half-million-dollar turbine gear from Iceland to Germany via the Netherlands. It's a complex task to say the least, and surprisingly educational.

I've also spent a few days talking with the owner of www.thinkgeoenergy.com. This website is the de facto source for all news geothermal. The site's owner is also the Director of Sustainable Energy at the Bank of Iceland, so I've enjoyed a few top-floor powwows in the Islandsbanki headquarters. Today I wrangled myself the opportunity to write an article for the website, which is super exciting, and could lead to even great involvement down the road.

A third project is researching H2S abatement technologies for Landsvirkjun Power, the largest electricity producer in Iceland, and now the subject of the world's most stringent H2S gas abatement regulatory policy. I called up the Director of Safety at Calpine, which operates The Geysirs geothermal field in California (largest geothermal development field in the world), and told him about Landsvirkjun's gas problem. He literally laughed at the policy - achieve 99.5% abatement in 4 years. It took Calpine 30 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve the same results. He told me to "que up the mission impossible music," but also offered some good information and the opportunity for a private tour/Q&A for my Landsvirkjun hosts when they head to Cali for a conference in one month. Hey, it's a start...

Reykjavik is a cool town. The rural folk call it "Fear City," but it feels more like "Swank Village" to me - lots of euro clothing stores, jewelry shops, and extremely trendy cafes, bars, and restaurants. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Reykjavik, buy Armani. The Reykjavik International Film Festival is on, and tomorrow I'm planning to see a movie with my friends from the very first house I stayed in here in Iceland (Carola and Hersir).

OK, I'm off to mow Amoxicillin, irrigate my sinuses with salt water, and spray steroid laced liquids into my nostrils. Then I will stretch out on my bed, at least until my feet and hands touch opposite walls (literally).

Casual Day At The Office...

I love the smell of ammonia gas in the morning. I spent the morning wearing a gas mask and analyzing corrosion in the power plant's heat exchanger. Is this the "hands on experience" that Thomas Watson had in mind?

Pretty intense working conditions...

It's all worthwhile when you step outside and see this, the first snow of the year:

The Great Sheep Wrangle of 2010, or, Karmically Paying For What You Consume

Exhausted from hours of wading through sheep doo and arduous wrangling, I sat on a generations-old lava wall and snapped a large flake of dried cod from my salty filet. I crammed the stiff meat into my maw and allowed my saliva to soften the fish until I could switch from sucking to chewing. Some blueberries, picked minutes ago on a nearby hillside, rinse the fish down my throat. This is the Icelandic way, and I've learned to enjoy it for reasons beyond the acquired tastes. Earning that food is delicious too.

One of my missions here in Husavik, should I choose to accept it, is to translate the expansive control panel at the power plant from Icelandic to English before an American company assumes proprietorship and operation of the facility. But I don't speak Icelandic.

My landlord, Ditta, is fluent in English and Icelandic. She has agreed to assist me in exchange for an equivalent amount of labor in gathering berries, moss, and sheep. I deemed this a fair trade. In fact, I replicated it with a different housemate who helped me translate French technical drawings in exchange for my services as her personal chef.

So, to win the favor of my power-plant building mentors I must first indulge in the Icelandic tradition of living from the land. I picked four trash bags of moss, which we will cook into breads, sauces, and soups. I hand picked a full bucket of blackberries. Most recently, I wrangled three sheep in the annual "rettir," the event where all local farmers go to reclaim their sheep after a summer of carefree wandering and fattening in the verdant summery pastures of Husavik's outskirts.

Each farm dispatched a group of horsemen numbered proportionally to the farm's number of sheep. These horseback herders joined forces last Thursday. They rode hard for three days to gather sheep from all the hills and dales in the area, and on the fourth morning they came blasting over a ridgeline with about 2,500 sheep bleating and stampeding their way into a massive corral of basaltic lava brick. The walls have been built and maintained by generations of farmers here. Each farm dedicates two days per year to the maintenance of this large and intricate pen.

Our horsemen, dressed in white shirt, red tie, and black pants, signal the event's inception with yells and whistles. Hundreds of farmers, friends and families all began marching in lines to send sheep flooding from one large area into a smaller area where they were identified by ear tags and hauled into the corresponding farm's section in the lava structure.


After Ditta's family found its 60 sheep, we marched them about three miles by foot along a country road. Two sheep collapsed of exhaustion, so we put them in the car. We finally deposited our sheep on a big green pasture, and retired to the farm house for waffles and jam (from the very berries I picked).

I offered many solutions to the inefficiency I saw at the rettir:

Why don't you tag their ears with colors so that you can find them faster? Couldn't we just use one of your tractors and trailers to haul the sheep instead of getting six people to walk the sheep back to the farm? Why not keep the sheep from mixing each summer by leaving them in separate parts of the countryside and building a few fences? The lava structure needs so much work - why not use metal fences that won't need so much repair work?

Each suggestion, despite its economic sensibility, seemed to upset or offend my host (below, middle). I slowly realized that the point of the rettir is not to efficiently aggregate sheep, but to aggregate culture. Historically, the rettir was the grandest social day of the year, and it remains so in many ways. I saw dancing, singing, local foods, old friendships, authentic costumes, traditional back-to-the-earth activities, and so much rich culture. Building the walls is a right, not a duty. The same goes for riding three days to collect the sheep - I've never seen such pride.

"You need to learn what real value is"

After the event, I ate the best waffles of my life. I saw the farm where the cream came from, I picked the berries myself, and we mixed our hearty batter by hand (side bar).

The tea steeped in the moss I harvested, and the cheese came from just down the road.

Sorting moss...

I recalled fishing for my cod and wrangling my mutton. Without thinking I exclaimed "this is the life!" and everyone agreed.

I never say that. I never cavalierly scream "this is the life!" in some stranger's house. I swilled strong coffee and listened to indecipherable Icelandic conversations and I felt completely content.

But how can this be? I've done all these things that I considered to be "the life," so how can this stinking, sore, famished, sheep-crap-covered experience rank among the best? I used to tell stories about sitting with Lindsay Lohan in shi-shi night clubs or rubbing elbows in the swankery of London's Whiskey Mist lounge or New York's Masa. I reveled in that stuff because it was the most exclusive, because I got access and you didn't. But I'm quickly learning how shallow those experiences were.

My currency of satisfaction has been wrong. I never really earned those experiences. I never knew value - not like this value of really and truly earning my bread. Hard-earned dignity and quality experiences always trump cheap thrills.

Excuse me for taking this rant towards energy, but I'm paid to do so.

This all has implications for electrons. Not all of them are created equal, or rather, the consumption of one energy source is not equal to another. All energy sources have their problems and their advantages, but we aren't measuring them properly are we?

You don't pay the same for the corn-fed, steroid-pumped, factory slaughtered cow as you do for the pasture grazing, organic, natural beef, do you? We discern between hand-wrangled, heather-munching mutton and industrially processed mutton, don't we? So why do we pay the same utility bill for coal power as we do for solar power?

Dollars don't measure the political weapon of oil that Venezuela or Saudi Arabia can turn on us. Dollars don't measure the high mercury levels in American fish from coal emissions. Dollars don't measure the burdens our resource-depleted future will inherit. Dollars don't measure the hazards of a nuclear waste dump, or the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.

Dollars do well at measuring the quantity of energy we produce, but dollars do very little to measure the quality. As a consumer, you can't pay more for energy that you deem to be of a higher quality (a few utilities actually now offer the option to pay more for wind or solar power, but most do not).

Just as my initial preference for efficient and streamlined herding would have destroyed the rettir's true value, our economic system's preference for low-cost energy output perversely incentivizes some bad energy choices. We currently operate the tractor delivered, metal pen enclosed, automatically sorted, and industrially butchered sheep herds of the electron world. Only in this case, we don't forfeit culture, but resource security, environmental quality, and sustainability.

Investors dictate the energy sources, but consumers have little ability to affect investment. "Low-cost" trumps all. Investors look at our alternative energy options and say that they are "too expensive," which I've come to learn simply means that they don't pay back fast enough. What about the value - I'd argue the very real value - of not feeling like a jackass because your energy source just flattened 20% of West Virginia? I can't tell you how good it feels to turn on the lights and take long showers in Iceland and know that every single joule is clean and renewable. I'd honestly pay more for this feeling back home, but there aren't any established avenues for me to pay that premium.

Robert Kennedy said in a very poetic speech that "GDP measures everything except that which makes life worth living," and I finally know what he meant. He was absolutely right. The type of output also matters in addition to the volume of output.

If we want to make any progress on our energy system, then we may want to consider how to value quality. Hand-wrangled power plants (clean, domestic and sustainable) will cost a little more in terms of dollars, but does the satisfaction of paying the full karmic price of our energy have no merit?

Producing food by hand, even if it's economically inefficient, makes it taste better because you know you didn't cut any corners and you can take pride in the meal. I'd argue that electricity can be a lot like jam or sheep - people will pay for energy that doesn't cut the corners of sustainability, cleanliness, and security.

In fact, we already monetize those fuzzy feelings. We've branded them "green," and our government has placed a regulatory premium on them through feed in tariffs, RPS standards, and poisonous emissions regulations. Perhaps the next step is to launch the Whole Foods of electricity - giving people the option to volitionally and proactively choose their energy source. I have a few ideas percolating on that front.

This will be my last post for a couple weeks as I wrap up here in Husavik, move to Reykjavik, and buckle down on a few time-constrained research projects. Thanks very much for reading, please share the link, and check back in about 10-15 days for more physical and mental ramblings...

Week 8: Boxing with Philosophers

I’m sitting on my front porch with a mug of extremely strong Icelandic coffee (most of us would call this espresso). I’ve watched for an hour as my fjorded front yard disappeared behind foggy curtains.













I’ve chosen to shelter my feet with the handsome Elven slippers featured below.













Days like this lend themselves to mental wandering.

I have in my mind at this very moment a boxing match. Not just any fight, but something to rival Rocky II, something to top the Rumble in the Jungle, even more splendiferous than the Thrilla in Manilla. In the blue corner we find Adam Smith spraying menacing jabs and hooks through the air. The red corner contains a vicious Karl Marx bouncing spryly on his toes. The tension between these two philosophical heavy weights has slowly built until we arrive at this current moment – Madison Square Garden can’t possibly contain another spectator.

Ronald Reagan and Bill O'Reilly finish taping Adam’s fists; I think I just saw them hide some barbed wire in Adam’s left glove. Those guys will do anything to win. Is that Ayn Rand taking bets?

I look left and see Castro massaging Karl’s body – foreboding in its hairy corpulence. Friedman just broke a bottle and threatened Hu Jintao in the stands. This place is blowing up.

I’m down in the middle of the ring to referee this crazy thing, only, instead of the standard tuxedo I've opted for a chromatically equivalent coat of Siberian Tiger pelts. It looks awesome, trust me.

Jay-Z finishes the pre-fight show, and now we move onto the main event. The fighters tap gloves, I ring the bell, and our two brutish contenders crash into each other, clubbing with fists of economic zeal.

If I succeed in my main goal for this year, then I will be able to narrate the rest of this fight. How would the philosophical brawl play out in your mind?

The proposed goal of my fellowship was not to learn the specifics of power generation, but to build a philosophical foundation for my aspirations. Each experience I have out here should, theoretically, inform my idealistic and naïve quest to work towards a better energy system. Everything I see is a hook or jab or uppercut in this fight for my ideology.

I definitely tend towards the deregulated free market side of things, but I can't avoid the countless examples of scandal and corruption that could have been prevented through some stricter regulation and oversight, through a little less greed. BP might not have spilled that oil if it had just a bit more patience. Lehman might not have gone broke if it had just a bit more caution. Iceland might not owe $75 billion if it had given bankers just a few more rules.

You don't want to strangle businesses with rules, but it seems irresponsible to leave the door wide open for catastrophic failures like the financial crises (American and Icelandic). These really were examples of unrestrained greed causing major problems for everyone, even those completely detached from the reckless speculation (America) and corruption (Iceland).

This post is a silly way to describe something I wrestle with constantly. I project Adam Smith and his "dismal science" as an embodiment and validation of my selfishness. Marx is my avatar for selflessness. If I ever succeeded in building a power plant, what portion of my effort should be to make a buck, and what portion should be to improve the broader energy system? The answer probably dictates what kind of plant I'd build.

More importantly, is making a buck in this business mutually exclusive with helping the future? I'm out here to answer those questions - to find a personal balance between Adam and Karl. Again, I'd love to hear where you find your balance. Here are some of the examples that have batted my philosophical badminton ball around since landing here:

I’ve learned about the rampant corruption in Iceland’s privatized and deregulated banks. The idea was to increase the profitability and competitiveness of the banks by removing regulatory burdens and de-socializing the financial system. Unfortunately, Iceland's bankers opted for robbing Iceland’s banks from the inside beginning immediately after the deregulation and privatization in 2005. They shipped millions of dollars into offshore accounts then fled the country. Within three years the privatization had bankrupted Iceland’s three largest banks, which had to be bailed out by the government and foreign loans, thereby bankrupting the entire country.

The economic wreckage is incredible here. Imagine a national debt of 5 times GDP. I’ve seen a lot of kind families financially crushed by that scandal, the ensuing currency devaluation, and the investments that materialized to zero. At first I defended my first love, capitalism, and said, "that's not capitalism, it's just crime." I've slowly learned that the economic systems we choose set a tone for the population - economic philosophies affect people's goals, attitudes, and behaviors.

Deregulating the banks sent the message that banking is about making money, not protecting wealth. The result was profiteering taken to a wild and illegal extreme, but an extreme that didn't exist here before the privatization. The majority of Iceland's left-leaning population despises this kind of thinking, and they counter it with genuine community support, outreach, and kindness. My next post will illustrate this community cohesion.

The banking example has Smith against the ropes and Marx is brutalizing the Scotsman. But then Smith pulls a rope-a-dope, faking left with an example of greedy excess and coming up with the massive right hook of lowering costs and improving quality through competition.

I observe all these socialized energy companies with outrageously bloated overheads, unnecessarily opulent office buildings, careless employees, and unpunished mistakes. For example, imagine buying a new fleet of transformers for Reykjavik that don’t fit into their housing because you never bothered to measure – literally an “it’ll probably fit” mistake that costs millions of dollars. Now imagine not getting fired.

Nobody gets fired. The socialized businesses don’t go broke; they just take out more loans. Reykjavik Energy’s balance sheet is outrageous, and it would have been dead and buried a year ago if it were private. Iceland's weird brand of socialized capitalism means that many businesses have no incentive to conserve or stay lean. People assume regulation will take care of the system, but it clearly doesn't. There's no incentive to do better than expected, even when expectations are pretty low. Everyone just notices a slightly higher energy bill to offset the utility’s lackluster performance.

Marx is bleeding, wheezing, spitting out teeth.

I observe companies hamstringed by overregulation, and Smith momentarily gains the upper hand. Just then I see some contractors cut corners to save costs at the expense of a quaint fishing village’s energy infrastructure. Marx slugs Smith with the local economic collapse that followed this shortsighted profiteering.

This fight keeps raging, and I’m just trying to figure out what to think. I see sloppy footwork in both sides of the ring. I also see admirable qualities in both fighters. The answer must be somewhere in the middle, but where?

I’m beginning to envision Marx and Smith both collapsed on the floor, equally exhausted from so many rounds of uncompromising brutality. Just as I reach for the mic to call this fight a disappointing draw, Stephen Harper dashes out, snatches the title belt from my hands, and runs away back to his utopian blend of efficient free markets and kind social systems.

Personally, this philosophical brawl keeps my ambitions in check. There are many legal ways to take advantage, to deceive, and to advance yourself by throwing another under the proverbial bus. But after you live with someone who was just run over by that bus, you clearly see that "legal" doesn't mean "right." Recklessly shoveling out sub-prime mortgages, even if you break no laws, is still wrong. Crippling the environment, even by legal means, is still wrong. Conversely, doing a little good, even if it’s less profitable, is still good.

I think that the next ten months will really help me hone in on this philosophical balance point.

Flow Like Whoa

I thought I might post these two flow diagrams. They detail the pathways of water through some auxiliary systems attached to Husavik's power plant. I made these diagrams for Recurrent Engineering to help with their due diligence work as they plan to buy the plant, refurbish it, and sell it back to the town.


















The first schematic shows where the power plant's cooling water goes. The water either flows to a fish farm (supplying warm fresh water for the fishies) or to a "hot pond." If a "hot pond" sounds menacing, just take a look at the photo above - it's about 15 degrees C, lush, and great for swimming. The power plant's dump site is basically a small manmade lake, and has developed into a cute little park. Seriously unlike the effluent from some other industrial processes, aye?.

















The second schematic diagrams a system designed to garner additional BTUs from a nearby recycling/trash facility that sometimes burns rubbish and can reheat water for the power plant. Eventually this hot water flows to the town's district heating system.

So yesterday I bathed in the power plant's cooling effluent and showered in its fuel source. Did I mention the healthy minerals in the geothermal waters? My skin feels great! This is a power technology I can really endorse.

Week 7: Chasing Bruce

7:45 AM: Ring, ring, ring. Blocked number.

(drowsily) “Hello, this is Cully”

(Exuberantly) “Cully, baby, aren’t you making the coffee yet? What are you good for?”

(Stunned) “Bruce?”

“You know it kid. I’m in Husavik. You have an interview with Husavik Energy at 2:30”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. You want to get involved? Find a way to get here. Soon.” Click.

That was basically my first contact with Bruce after not hearing from him for about two months. Bruce is a mentor and major player in the power plant development business; he rarely deigns to include me in his plans, but when he does, things get intense. Describing Bruce is a challenge because of his singularity. A sharper, sometimes serious version of Rodney Dangerfield from Caddy Shack might approximate him. He’s a playful and light character with a business edge that emerges suddenly when required.

Bruce builds power plants all over the world, and he’s very good at it. He runs a consultancy with a clientele described as “the rich and famous.” I’ve enjoyed hearing stories about George Soros and Australian billionaires. Bruce makes it rain, and he agreed to teach me how after I pursued him across America for one month, eventually waiting in New York for two weeks until he gave me the opportunity to come to his house (referred to as the magic cottage) for a five-hour interview and tutorial. That was several months ago, and I haven’t heard much from him since.

Bruce and his team of world-class engineers built the power plant here in Husavik, and now they are back to make some repairs. The opportunity seemed ripe for me to learn the inner workings of a power plant. However, this is no ordinary plant. It is the first of its kind. Early adoption is going down on the sleepy shores of Husavik, a small fishing village of 2,000 people on Iceland’s north coast. I’m here to learn what makes this plant, a Kalnia Cycle model 34 binary phase geothermal power plant, work.

Alexander Kalina, Russian èmigrè to America, invented Kalina Cycle technology for the explicit purpose of greater efficiency when utilizing low temperature resources for power generation. Thermodynamics always limit geothermal power plants, and I’ll simplify a complex issue by saying that cooler incoming water limits the amount of energy available for power production.

Kalina Cycle technology uses a new “working fluid” of ammonia and water to increase the energy available from low temperature resources by as much as 20-50% when compared to existing technologies. The technology’s advantages become more pronounced at lower temperatures, which is good news for the 120C brine pumped 20km to Husavik from a geothermal field to the south. Keep in mind that many geothermal plants in Iceland receive incoming temperatures of 240C or higher. Here is a photo from inside the plant at Husavik:

















After Bruce hung up, I sat in bed, dazed. Bruce agreed to mentor me, but then I didn’t hear from him for months. He said my first lesson would come in Iceland, but I didn’t know if he would actually show up to teach me anything about this business or the technology. Last Wednesday he did.

I packed my bags as fast as possible, then ran to ISOR for a last-minute PowerPoint presentation to educated the whole staff on how to use my map of Chile’s geothermal industry before I left town. I boarded the next bus for Husavik, and arrived to discover that Bruce didn’t have room for me in his car because of an important Danish visitor. I ran several miles to the power plant in order to see it for the first time. I ended up meeting with the local energy company the following morning, and after garnering their approval, I met the team of engineers that I will work with.

This month I’ll help evaluate equipment, check the functionality and condition of the plant’s components, and translate the control station (a massive array of screens, dials, knobs, and levers) from Icelandic to English. I’m also doing a bit of due diligence on a part of the plant that Bruce and his colleagues still don’t know if they want to buy. This should provide a hands-on way to learn how a power plant works.

Living in a town of 2,000 in northern Iceland might not sound very appealing to some of you, but just take a look at the view:
















I live with a Spanish girl who is studying to be a French-English-Spanish translator and works at a café in town. Another roommate is a Spanish-teaching, yoga-instructing, artist who grew up locally – she owns the house I’m living in. My third roomy is an Austrian whale-watching guide, who took me out Minke Whale watching yesterday.

















The town bustles with a diverse and international young crowd attracted by the whaling museum, whale research center, and various whale-related tourist businesses. Last night I attended a barbeque onboard a beautiful sailboat where I met 20-something-year-old characters from the following countries: Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden, Spain, France, Germany, Estonia, and America:


















Also, there is a phallus museum… seriously:


















Bruce and his “cast of hundreds” left on Friday, and I had my first chance to explore Husavik and its outskirts. I climbed a mountain directly behind Husavik, intermittently following haggard sheep trails and breaking my own trail through the waist-high underbrush. I reached the summit at noon, and got my first look at the arctic cycle lying just north of Husavik's shores. I snacked on cheese and bread, then dropped off the back of the mountain.

I ran out of water while tramping around, and felt a bit worried when I became lost at one point. Eventually I emerged over a knoll and found myself in some utopian geriatric berry-picking scene. I looked around at about twenty grey-haired Icelanders stooped over, collecting blueberries. I peered down, picked a berry, ate it, and replicated that process for about an hour. Yes, I spent my Saturday foraging about in the Icelandic heather and gnashing on succulent blue fruit.

































Occasionally I sat in the thick loamy cushion of berries and flowers (the seat of my Carhartts now stained various shades of purple) and contemplated my situation, the year ahead, my friends, family, girlfriend back home, and how much my life has changed in such a short time. I left home less than two months ago, and I feel worlds away from everything I’ve known for the last 23 years. I’ve already learned volumes, and I can look forward to learning so much more about energy, the world, and myself in the months to come.

I met a French girl who asked me if it's hard to spend so much time alone and away from my close relationships. I paused and said,"it is hard, and I do miss those people, but I'm becoming much closer with myself. You can't keep any secrets from yourself out here." The time and distance has given me so much time to think. It's the healthiest I've ever felt emotionally - the most secure.