Right Hand Blink

Ottawa’s Big Dig

righthandblink — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:15:15 +0000

South Boston Tunnel

The latest figures indicate that Ottawa plans to spend $4.7 billion on a new Light Rail System for Ottawa. That should is a concern! We keep taking aspirin for the headache but we don’t relieve any of the stresses that cause the headache in the first place. Let’s just take a minute and do some thinking out of the box.

Why do we need the light rail system? There are those who would say that we have too many cars on the road, that there is too much traffic congestion. It takes too long for commuters to get to work. There may also be retail businesses that need clientele and the shoppers stay away if they can’t easily get to the stores. A lot of people are upset. We saw that with the bus drivers strike. Fair enough. Then there are the hockey games. Ever try to get to Scotiabank Place on game night. Who would want to go in that traffic! Now that’s important!

So let’s say for a minute that we really do need this Light Rail System. According to Councilor Clive Doucet this new Light Rail System will not provide any service to any community beyond the greenbelt, what we call Suburbia. This new system will only service the core of Ottawa. For those of you who don’t know, Ottawa now extends all the way to Kempville and Ashton. This city is so large that our per capital density disqualifies the city for funding from the province for transportation. The money goes to Toronto. So after the system is finished how will all the people who live outside the greenbelt get to work downtown?

The City says the transit plan is affordable. City Treasurer Marian Simulik said that the first increment is going to cost $2.1 billion, with the city’s share being $700 million. The funds will be raised "from reserves, development charges, gas tax revenues and debt financing." Frankly people, where were all these options the last time the councilors said they had to have a tax increase? The only way the city could afford to keep the royal swans was through a donation of $300,000 from IBM.

Let me give you an example. The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority constructed the South Boston Tunnel for what was suppose to cost $14.6 billion. Construction began in 1991 with completion scheduled for 2007. After 16 years of construction, it ended with a staggering price of $22 billion. This project is fondly referred to as "The Big Dig."

At the beginning of the project, Congressman Barney Frank asked, "Rather than lower the expressway, wouldn’t it be cheaper to raise the city?" The project has incurred criminal arrests, escalating costs, death, leaks, and charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials. The Massachusetts Attorney General is demanding contractors refund taxpayers $108 million for "shoddy work" including some outright fraud by some contractors.

What is really shocking about the project is that they knew, before they started, that in ten years the number of cars on the road would double making the net effect to traffic congestion a net zero.

One person recently wrote this comment about the mayor and city council related to the bus strike ". . . Can you and city council . . . honestly believe that the economic loss, personal hardship and general harm to this city was worth it?" Do any of you realize that the chaos that happened during the bus strike will be just a drop in the bucket compared to what will happen to Ottawa if that Light Rail System is built?

With the increase in the number of cars on the road, when the new light-rail system is completed the congestion will still be the same. This insanity has to stop. It’s time to think out of the box. For example: if we stopped development of the downtown core and built all the new high rise office buildings out in the suburbs, outside of the greenbelt, then people wouldn’t have to drive to work and the new light-rail system wouldn’t even be needed at all. Hasn’t the RCMP moved out to Merivale and Price of Wales? This isn’t rocket science.

No More Heating Bills . . . EVER!

righthandblink — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:27:00 +0000

www.energyshop.com

Are you concerned about the high cost of heating your home? If you are a pensioner or if you are going to retire soon, one of the main things you are going to worry about is the energy consumption of your house. You will be on a fixed income and your energy bills don’t care.

The following is a short version of a presentation called "The Economics of Energy". Energy is the lifeblood of everything we do. The World is faced with dwindling supplies of fossil fuels and we have an addiction to oil. But our addiction is a highly solvable problem. Unfortunately, there is a tendency for us not to do anything about it because it appears too complex a problem. But complex issues like energy can be understood by everybody. Most people are smart enough to get the basics. And the basics are what you need to start making sensible decisions.

Here are the basics. The best solution is greater efficiency in our use of energy. We must conserve. But the hardest part is knowing where to start. Getting an ecoENERGY audit performed on your house is a good place to start. It will help you to start to understand your house the fact that your house operates as a system. This is so important that we believe that it should be taught in schools. When we grow up, we find that we know nothing about the largest investment any of us make in our lives.

There are four parts to the house system: the building envelope, the outside environment, the mechanical system, and the occupants. Let’s figure out where should you focus. You have no control over the outside environment. The mechanical system is sized for the building envelope. There is really no control over the lifestyles of the occupants. The ONLY thing you can control is the design of the Building Envelope.

The Building Envelope or shell is composed of: basement walls and floors, above-grade walls, the roof, and the windows and doors. There are retrofitting opportunities that can be done on your house by simply upgrading certain parts of your house to keep the heat in. This means adding insulation, caulking and weatherstripping. Improving or replacing windows and doors. Improving the heating system.

Air-leakage control is the single most important retrofit activity. Because most houses are not airtight then you must realize that your heating dollars go to heating the outside. How big is the hole in your wall? The average Canadian house has a "hole in the wall" or Effective Leakage Area (ELA) of more than 16 inches in diameter or 1 to 2 square feet.

Even knowing all the retrofitting ideas can be confusing because how do you choose what to do? Where do you spend your money for the most best result? How effective are these retrofitting opportunities when you still end up with a heating bill? R-2000 houses are 80 percent efficient but that’s not good enough. You still get a heating bill. No matter how you look at it retrofitting should be done with the goal to minimize or even eliminate the ongoing costs of energy. Heat loss evaluations can help you to determine what has to be modified to improve the efficiency of your house.

So why don’t you efficiently retrofit your house, heat it with solar power, and get off of the electrical power grid? Better yet, why don’t you build a new house that is designed so that you will never have any heating bills? Why? Because it costs too much. Right? Does it really . . . . let’s face it, people don’t really know how much it would cost? Do you?

There is one thing you should know. Most of us know what the energy costs are for our houses. In 2000 Stats Canada found that the average homeowner with a family of 4 living in a single detached house spends about $3,000 per year on energy costs. Those costs are broken down to about 82 percent for thermal (hot water and heating) and the other 18 percent is electrical.

We would like to make a point here. It is important to note that we have been educated to look at things backwards. If it costs too much, we don’t want it. It’s called the "Wal-Mart mentality." We don’t look at the life-time costs of things that we purchase, especially the larger ticket items.

So let’s do the math. Eight-two percent of $3,000 equals $2,460 per year. Prorated over the span of a 25-year mortgage that’s $61,000, with no allowance for interest, inflation, equipment replacement or maintenance, nor allowing for any increase in energy costs. If we allow a meager 5 percent increase per annum, the prorated cumulative costs of thermal energy alone is $123,279 over that 25-year period. In 2000, it’s like paying for your house twice. However, in 2004 alone, electricity rates went up 19 percent and natural gas rates went up 29 percent. Dare you prorate your accumulated costs with those increases! Still can’t afford it? You can’t afford not to do it!

In Scandinavia, which is at the same latitude as Ontario, their building code requires R50 walls and R70 ceilings. There must be a reason for it. The Ontario Building Code only requires R20 walls and R40 ceilings. That’s what’s called conventional construction. It will cost you at least four times more to retrofit and add renewable energy to your existing house built with conventional construction.

Don’t want to be bothered! I don’t blame you. We are so accustomed to just sitting around and having the comfort of adjusting the thermostat. Well, according to our Federal Government, and other sources, by 2010 we are going to start running out of natural gas in Canada. Shortly thereafter it’s going to be rationed.

One point about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Should there be an shortage of natural gas in the Maritimes and we wanted to cut shipments of natural gas to the United States so that we could provide for the Maritimes, that is illegal. NAFTA does NOT allow Canadians to cut shipments of natural gas to the United States even in cases of emergency. That’s illegal under NAFTA.

So here’s what you do. Build a house with ICF block, designed with passive solar, add radiant floor heating, thermal solar panels and a storage tank in the basement, and voila! . . . No More Heating Bills . . . EVER! And the best part is that the money you save from all those energy bills will pay for the up-front costs of installing your renewable solar energy system!

Solar Power – To Be or Not to Be?

righthandblink — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 06:11:38 +0000

Where were you at 4:17 pm on Thursday, August the 14th, 2003? You might think that a crazy question. But you all know where you were at 4:17 pm on Thursday,
August the 14th, 2003. It’s what psychologists call a "Flashbulb Moment." Ironically, it’s when the lights went out. It should have passed the "Inter Ocular Impact Test" — that means it should have hit you right between the eyes.

Let’s not kid ourselves . . . when Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil refiners, runs a two-page advertisement at the beginning of the September 2005 issue of Scientific American saying. "It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We’ll use the next trillion in 30 years," we know the word is definitely out. There are no fuel gauges on oil wells or oil fields. When they’re empty, the oil is all gone.

For years we have been educating people about the benefits of renewable energy even so far as to give our presentation "No More Heating Bills . . . EVER!!!" at trade shows and energy conferences. One of the comments we generally received from members of the audience was that they just couldn’t afford solar heating. But when asked about the costs of solar heating, nobody had any idea!!! Have you noticed that every time gas prices skyrocket there is a surge of interest in renewable energy, but when the prices drop the interest in renewable energy wains!

We’ve been doing solar here in Canada for over 50 years. Every hour, the sun showers the earth with more energy than the world’s entire population consumes in a whole year. A friend of mine, Kurt Sjolund, put a solar thermal system on his house near Greenbank and Baseline here in Ottawa. On January 14, 2009, with the outside temperature -22 deg C, his system was registering an impressive temperature of 41 deg C.

In 2006, we stumbled across a book Gaviotas, A Village to Reinvent the World by Alan Weisman written in 1998. Gaviotas lies about sixteen hours east of Bogota by jeep in the direction of the distant Rio Orinoco, Colombia’s border with Venezuela. In 1966, Paolo Lugari first crossed the mountains and saw the Orinocan Ilanos where he started the project.

Gaviotas is an oasis of the imagination. It started with the nearly barren lands where nothing would grow and made that empty savanna flourish. What is more significant, was that the community they built was completely powered by solar energy. They didn’t use the type of equipment that we are used to seeing. They designed and built their own, from scratch. The new hospital is completely powered by the energy from the sun. A solar engine produces the electricity and a solar kettle provides all their hot water needs. The kettle works under cloudy skies and needs only one minute of direct sunlight to make water start to boil. They even have a solar clothes dryer. The solar refrigerator requires no moving parts.

Just to give you an idea just some of their other inventions, we’ll describe a few:
- Windmills that would pump thousands of gallons per day: a compact unit weighing barely 130 pounds, its blade tips contoured like airplane wings to trap soft equatorial breezes, even under four miles per hour.
- Solar pumps using liquids that dilates in sunlight to make a flexible siphon that would expand and contract to suck water out of streams or aquifers.
- A playground see-saw attached to a sleeve pump: As the children played, they replenished their school’s water tank.
- Spherical water storage tanks to compress the greatest volume into the least space.
- A thermal siphon, through which denser cold water constantly displaces hotter, would recirculate the water through the system with no moving parts, creating a virtually maintenance-free solar panel the designers guarantee for twenty years.

Other inventions include:
- Solar-heated showers, micro-hydro turbines, a cork-screwing manual well-digger, parabolic solar grain dryers, the rotating-drum peanut shellers, the ox-drawn land graders, and the manual baler.
- Hot-water solar panels made from burned-out neon tubes, the pedal-powered cassava grinder that reduced ten hours of work to one, the one-handed sugar cane press.

These people could have become wealthy off their resourceful technologies, but from the beginning, the Gaviotans had refused to patent their innovations, preferring to share them freely. To this day, all the inventions belong to the El Centro Las Gaviotas, their nonprofit foundation.

Gaviotas is not a model, it’s a path. Yet a place like Gaviotas bears witness to the ability to get it right, even under seemingly insurmountable circumstances. And Gaviotas does it all to harmonize with nature, not obliterate it. They have forged a way they believed will prosper long after the last drop of the earth’s petroleum was burned away.

As an engineer I realize that we could probably not use the same equipment in Canada and obtain the same results. They obviously have more sun than we do. However, I do realize that we could re-engineer their designs for our climate. Simply put, maybe all we would have to do is make the collectors larger, with a greater surface area so that it would absorb enough energy for our needs. Doesn’t this make more sense than having giant utilities: Since sunlight falls everywhere, the sole reason to centralize energy production is to keep utility companies in business.

The problem isn’t the technology. As I said previously we have been doing solar in Canada for over 50 years. Paola Lugari said, "There’s no such thing as sustainable technology or economic development without sustainable human development to match."

In 2004 we visited "The Toronto Healthy House." The house design was the result of a competition held by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Each side of this semi-detached house has an area of 1,730 square feet. These three-bedroom houses were build on a small lot right near Bloor and the Don Valley Parkway in what can now be described as downtown Toronto. What is significant about this house is that it is independent of city water, sewer, hydro and doesn’t use any fossil fuels. The owner of the house said that it was operating just as good as when it was designed and built back in 1997. You can pick up this house and put it anywhere and it will still work! We can do it!

According to Louis Lebret, a former French naval captain who taught in Paris at the Institute of Economics and Humanism, "Development means making people happy. Before you spend your money on roads and factories, you should first be sure that those are what your citizens really need."

Did You Know . . . If we had to purchase the radiant energy from the sun that was constantly falling on the entire surface of the earth at ½ cent per kilowatt hour [we are presently paying over 15 cents], the bill would be the staggering sum of $10,000 billion per day.

– Institute for Research in Construction at the National Research Council

The Bus Strike was Good for Ottawa

righthandblink — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:30:28 +0000

Ottawa has long been known as being a very apathetic community. The definition of apathetic is "having or showing little or no emotion" or "not interested or concerned" or "indifferent or unresponsive." At least that’s the way the rest of Canada views us. It’s like we in Ottawa are in a trace. It’s safe and boring.

But it started to change. We had a wake up call. One of the basic facets of life, that we took for granted, wasn’t there anymore. The OC Transpo drivers went on strike. It will be close to 55 days without the buses here in Ottawa by the time they go back to work. The ease of which we had getting around in this city disappeared overnight. And it’s been cold out there too. Temperatures at times have reached minus 35 degrees C.

They thought the city would come to a halt. But it didn’t. People had to be creative to be able to commute to work or do their day-to-day necessities in the cold winter. Businesses were having a tough time of it. Some people had to spend their spare hours and energy walking through snow drifts to get to and from everywhere they had to go.

But some people actually benefitted from the strike. We’re not going to get in to the politics of it here right now. There’s time enough for that in another article. So who benefitted? For once the cab drivers weren’t complaining. They must have done quite well and are probably are not happy that the strike is over. The Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Sun got a lot more ad revenues with the City of Ottawa and the Amalgamated Transit Union buying chunks of pages explaining about what was going on with the negotiations. There was also a lot of space dedicated to sources for rides and independent assistance about how to get around during the strike.

And the city saved lots and lots of money. They must have needed it. But don’t be too hard on the on the politicians. They are doing the work of two people; Laurel and Hardy!

YOU also benefitted. Let’s face it. You got lots of exercise that we were sorrily lacking. You got more fresh air than we have ever had before at this time of year. You did get to work probably with rosy cheeks and an inner sense of vitality. We started to feel good. People were alive.

But something deeper was happening to us. We started to get back to what’s truly important. We’re actually starting to care again. Now don’t get me wrong here. We are all caring people. But the strike forced us to widen out. We started to care about people who were strangers to us, whom we never met before. And it’s a good time to start caring like this because we are now going to go through some difficult times with this economic downturn. We’re going to need each other.

Here’s just one example; On January 23, 2009, the Ottawa Citizen carried a front page article titled "The Survivor: She walks 12 hours a day to save job." Anna Kraisingerova came to Canada from the Czech Republic about 12 years ago. She works a night shift at a Barrhaven grocery store and had to walk six hours to get to work because of the strike. When her shift ended, she walked back to her apartment at Carling and Bronson.

This article sparked a lot of interest in our Capital. Dozens sent e-mails and telephoned the newspaper in response to that story. There were three pages of contact numbers received for Anna. Each person on the list was reaching out to her. People opened their hearts, and their wallets to Anna. Some even offered to open their homes to her. Several people offered to build their day around Anna’s schedule. A couple of retired police officers offered to drive Anna back and forth to work.

What was most striking about the responses was how many people offered to help when their own lives were already filled with commitments and responsibilities. The offers to help cut across partisan politics, income levels, language, and other social divisions that tend to keep us apart, rather than bring us together.

Our city is a better place because of the compassion and generosity of the citizens.

I think we did so well helping others get around that maybe we don’t need OC Transpo anymore. We can save the city even more money that they are going to have to spend to get the riders back on the buses.

You probably won’t agree but we’re better off for the strike.
Don’t go back to sleep now!
Remember what you had to go through.
We’re better off for it. We are invigorated. We’re alive!