A true renaissance man

Why or how did you first become interested in the environment?

Well, I think I lot of my questions began with Sept. 11th. [For me] there was a need to know why this happened, and in my readings, I found a lot to link the political problems around the world to energy. And in further readings found there were other ideas out there that we could use to mitigate some of our demands on energy.

But you must have had some sort of interest in the environment before that?

Well again, after doing some of the reading and getting to the bottom of some of the political relationships around energy, I started looking at other societies. [I looked at] native societies that would be quite happy with, say, one solar panel for their home – just to power one light, one lamp in their house.

I found that within the two extremes that there might be a happy medium that balances a respect for one’s environment and the need to advance technologically. 

When I first looked into solar energy I was skeptical. There was such negative press towards renewable energy, saying that they did not work, and I was afraid to invest my money into it.

So it took a leap of courage to say, “I’m going to try it”. I spent $4500 and I bought my first six panels. I spent a few more dollars to install it and was floored by it, how flawlessly it worked. That’s when I started asking even more questions.

I am actually surprised that you came about your conversion to the Green economy as a consumer first, because I have always thought of you as an electrical engineer that installs solar panels.

I got interested in renewables as a profession when installing my own panels and I was fortunate enough to be able to change my career. And I was lucky enough to join a company that was installing solar panels.

Now hopefully I can stay ahead of the curve as the technology is evolving. When they couldn’t give me work [in the winter] I was lucky enough to get this other job to keep me working all year around. But my interest has persisted and once in a while I will do a project for someone, either a friend or someone in need…and in some cases off-grid power.

What kind of challenges do you see for Green technology?

It seems like, right now, we are getting a little resistance to Green technology. There is a lot of support, but you only need a few [people] to raise concerns and then projects get stopped, delayed.

Maybe we still have a lot to learn, because green projects that don’t appeal to the people do not do the industry a service. They have to be acceptable. They have to fit in.

With my own project I had architectural issues. As far as the system itself, it was mechanically sound – able to withstand heavy winds and all that – but the problem was the proportions, optical illusion effects that bothered a few neighbors against the project, it was up in the sky. They wanted it closer to the ground. When it is on a roof it’s different, it is a structure that is already there. You see those are the lessons that have to be learned.

Maybe color coordination. I believe it is the next phase for solar panels – colors that blend in. You don’t want them to be too obvious. That is something that I wish manufacturers would consider.

For even free-standing solar arrays, I think that they could make designs that were more aesthetically pleasing. I think that is the next stage and I wish I was involved in something like that. But at this point I have to be satisfied with my challenge of making my home 100% energy independent when it comes to electrical power.

Tell me about your home solar system in Quincy.

I have a 5KW freestanding solar array that, together with a 3KW roof-mounted array, makes it an 8KW system. Those two combined are calculated to zero out my electrical consumption.

I ran the roof system for a year and I figured out that it produced a third to about 50% percent of my power usage. So by having the 5KW system, I will be exceeding my demand.

The next plan is to add one car that is a 100% electric car. My main aim is to be a renewable energy and clean technology consumer.

Now that you are essentially an energy provider, can you describe what the pay back is? Return on investment?

I have one good example – up in Maine where I have my other house. When I first lived there, I had a diesel generator. It would use 8 gallons a day if I used electricity all day, 8 gallons of polluting power.

Well, multiply that by $4 a gallon and that’s $32 a day. So if I ran that thing for a year, then that would be $9000 (actually closer to $11,648) and the cost of the generator was $5000.

So I spent $10,000 and got rid of all that.

Now I don’t have the noise pollution from the generator, I don’t have the noxious fumes that I used to hate. And now I can power anything day or night – that is what sold me on the whole thing.

And I don’t have to maintain it. I installed the solar system in Maine in 2004 and in that time I haven’t done any maintenance work. Nothing, zero, it just sits there and does its work flawlessly. That alone is worth a few thousand dollars a year.

How has your time in Africa influenced your thinking?

I think I benefited from my experience living abroad. With the income levels that we have around here, the cost of solar power is very affordable for what it does.  But we still nickel and dime.

If only we could see what other less fortunate people around the world would think of solar power and renewable systems. If they earned what we earned, and if they lived in the conditions that we lived in and had that buying power, they wouldn’t think twice. Because I have seen people in Africa that would spend half of their income to buy one solar panel, which allows them to charge a car battery to draw enough power at night to light up a lamp.

Unfortunately in Africa most of their demand is going to be met by the Chinese. If we had taken the challenge on, we probably would be selling to the rest of the world.

So you think that this is a lost opportunity?

Oh yes, absolutely. I think that successful societies will be judged by how well we adapt to using these technologies. I truly believe that over time it will have an impact. Right now it doesn’t seem to be a big issue – we can meet our energy demand and all that – but at some point we have to look at the value of renewable energy and how we can harness it more efficiently.

Hopefully we will start to integrate them into structures going up anyway. So, [for example,] skyscrapers on the south side would have one strip of solar panels between the floors for the height of the building.

And here’s the key to it – first of all, the inverters are made here in Massachusetts. The solar panels are made in Tennessee by Sharp®, and the other material – the racking systems – are made in Arizona. It is an American industry, all installed by Americans. Then it starts producing 100% American energy.

Tell me more about your house in Maine.

One of the main ideas was to use as much reused or recycled materials as possible. For instance, I incorporated a lot of steel into the construction that was otherwise going to be waste. It didn’t have to be re-manufactured or re-smelted – I used it right in the structure. I also reused waste construction materials that would otherwise have gone into a dumpster.

Once that was done, we ended up doing a solar electric system. It’s a small system because we do not live there all the time – only 1.2KW. The maximum time that we could use it is probably two days a week, because of our usage and not because of the capacity of the battery storage system.

So you could increase the system’s capacity?

Yes, by adding more panels we could increase it to a 7-day system.

We also wanted to have the use of a wind turbine, so I constructed an 80-foot tower to install a 1KW wind turbine with the right to reserve the use of a wind turbine in the future. Even though we didn’t need it at the time because solar met all our needs, we wanted to have our property grandfathered to have a wind turbine. And that has been working great for the past 5 years.

With those two systems we met our electrical needs, but we then realized that we needed to heat water. I came across a number of solar thermal panels that had been installed in the 1970s on a lot of houses around the metropolitan Boston area.

You mean from back during the first environmental movement?

Those systems had not been maintained. So I ended up investigating them and found the cause of why they failed.

Nobody maintained them. They used antifreeze to prevent the pipes from freezing, and over maybe a 5- to 10-year span the maintenance system broke down. That’s why in a car you have to replace the antifreeze. When the antifreeze wears out the pipes within, the panels will freeze on a cold night and burst all the copper pipes. Then the system will stop functioning.

I found these panels and was able to buy them for a fraction of the amount that they were worth and opened them up and fixed them. Out of 5 panels, I was able to restore 3 to heat all my hot water. So over the summer, when we are spending a lot of time in Maine, we do not pay for any heating of hot water. We built a system that heats 125 gallons a day and we have an outside shower for bathing demands and so on.

How about heating the main structure and rooms of the house?

A wood stove meets regular heat demands. There is a heating system, that uses the solar and wind systems, which maintains the temperature in one room in the basement. The rest of the house is heated by firewood.

I have been to your house in Maine and I was particularly amazed by the use of truck wheel hubs as major structural elements. Tell me more about your use of recycled materials.

There were basic conditions I wanted to meet. First, I wanted a structure that was going to span the test of time, because I felt that a lot of pollutants are caused by temporary construction. If a building is built so that it can last a few hundred years and be inhabited by many, many generations, then it will reduce the impact on the environment. 

The other thing I really like about that house was that I didn’t use or tried to limit the use of industrially generated building materials like lumber. All the lumber I used was purchased from a local sawmill. So it gave that guy an income and means of living and it reduced my carbon footprint by lowering transportation distances.

Yes, and see, that’s good material, because obviously with anything that is mass-produced, the price ends up going way down. If I got a racking system to support my panels, it would cost me 3 times as much.

This goes back to the reason why we need to support renewable energy. Because the more people who buy into renewables, the cheaper it’s going to become.
My hope is that within the next 10 years we are going to see more and more people. 

Actually I am seeing a change. I’m seeing people that are interested in it and that are trying it out.

Why isn’t everyone doing this? It just makes sense, particularly in the third world.

“I think that the sun should be the primary source of power for mankind. Then after that we can look at other sources… like wind and water flow. But as far as cost effectiveness, when you eliminate the transmission cost of power, the quickest way to provide basic electrical power to mankind in rural areas and isolated parts of the world is actually solar. You don’t have to transmit it by power lines. Solar goes directly to the source.”

The big thing is that it is individual solar and not mass-produced solar. Big power sources, like the large wind farms in the Midwest where you have to build a large infrastructure, are a harder sell than small renewable systems that the individual user could install.

That’s right. Actually I think one area that would cause movement forward is a direct incentive for communities that are impacted by a wind turbine project. It might be worth assigning the benefits of that project to a defined radius of communities around that project for some number of years.

If you said, “Okay, look, this is a good area for a turbine, and the power generated here is going to go to this community. Essentially this community is now going to come off the electrical grid,” I think you’d see a lot of support for that project.

[Laughter] You see, we are attacking this the wrong way. I think if we brought everybody into it, then even the staunchest of critics would eventually succumb.

Yes, like I don’t have to pay for any of my electric from the main power grid.

It doesn’t have to happen forever it could be for, say, a 5 or 10-year period.

Yes, I think that it would be a marvelous way of dealing with this. If Cape Wind gave electricity priority to surrounding communities and wrote off their electric bills for X amount of years, or took their usage averages and said, “for the next 20 years, if you keep your usage to X, you pay no bill,” that would help improve energy conservation as well.

Cape Wind thing was kind of an extreme overreaction to a project in the distance. It shows just how removed we are from energy supplies and our resources. We are removed from our food, we are removed from our energy – we do not see that people from other countries have to live with contaminated water from oil drilling and rivers that are contaminated with oil slicks all over the place.

You know in Central America, and in Africa, and in all these other places where these companies drill, they dispose of some of these waste products from the drilling? Who thinks about those people?

So what other plans do you have for the future?

I have been working on a project to recycle books for needy schools in Africa. With the help of my wife and the town and community that I live in, I have managed to send two shipping containers with thousands and thousands of books for two schools in Central Africa. So in my next project, in 2013, I hope to include solar systems from some of the solar panels that I have recycled.

These panels will work perfectly in a tropical environment and they probably have another 20-year life span. It is my hope to be able to recondition these for use at a boarding school where they can heat some of the water for the kids.

In a lot of these boarding schools in Africa, in Zambia for instance, kids have to bathe in cold water. And when the outside temperature is 90 degrees and you have water coming from pipes in the ground that is about 50 degrees – it’s chilly. So if you could warm that water, you know that it would be much more appreciated.

It is my hope to do more of that and travel over there and help install them. That could be a science project for them too. To see how a solar hot water system actually works.

Would there be enough panels to start a business to install systems in Zambia?

Zambia is one of the major producers of copper. The irony is, they export all of it as copper plates to places like China, Europe and the United States, and [those countries] turn them into finished materials.

So I think one of my main roles is to introduce these systems to schools, to get staff and students to start thinking about it. Some of those kids when they leave school will become engineers. And maybe one of those students will say, “Why don’t we divert some of that copper and use it to heat all of our water?”

What I want to look at is the long term, where will I have the most effect? The demand is there. If a factory could be built to build simple thermal panels, it probably wouldn’t require the complexity of the panels built here for cold climate use.

I think you are right. If you can plant the seed of what is possible, then who knows what fruit it will bear in the future?

That in a nutshell is the plan. I am committed to the advancement of renewable energy in this country, but I also have an eye out for Africa. Because it appears that in many areas they are being left behind – they have been denied so much over history. I think once they are given a chance we will see what is possible.

Climate change is real over there. The erratic weather – sometimes it will rain for a whole week and wash villages away. Floods are becoming a regular occurrence. The problem is real, but it seems like just getting by the recognition of the problem has become an issue. Denial is a horrible thing.

Everything has a cause and effect, every action has a reaction, there is nothing in the universe that doesn’t have a counter response, and so whatever we do has to have a reaction. The question is how fast is the blow back going to be. Everything has blow back.

I think when China surpasses us as the biggest polluter the world has a problem. Then we won’t have to worry about the introduction of renewable energy; I think mankind will be forced to make the choice.

It would be better to do it preemptively and use science to preempt the problem.

Well, the last question. What would you like to tell someone out there that is
thinking about becoming a renewable energy pioneer?

I think that the advice I would give is: don’t expect it to be easy. Being a leader is always difficult. You have to look at what others have had to sacrifice to better society. Everyone has
the ability to be a leader in his or her own small way. You don’t have to be the President, you don’t have to be the Mayor, but you can be a leader in your own little community and stand up and break the ice and say, “You know what? I am not afraid to do this.”

I think the biggest thing is to keep the dialog going on projects such as this. Keep talking and try to find a solution for people’s concerns.

earthfolk – walter cowham

“Everyone has the ability to be a leader in their own small way. You don’t have to be the President, you don’t have to be the Mayor, but you can be a leader in your own little community and stand up and break the ice and say, “You know what? I am not afraid to do this.”

–Walter Cowham
Engineer and Environmental Builder

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