Alternative Power Blog

Few things are more annoying than receiving emails from some cretin you never heard of asking your aid in disbursing the $571 million left to him/her. Or guarding your inbox against phishing. Sure, you can just hit "delete", but software developer McAfee reports that the act of writing and deleting spam consumes 33 billion kWh annually at a cost of $3.6 billion. Each spam email also incurs a carbon dioxide emission cost of 0.3 g. What are the options, other than universal adoption of advanced spam filtering technology?

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As the railways of Schenectady, New York grew, they moved beyond the limits of pedestrian traffic and outward along city lines. Schenectady, the home of the General Electric Company (GE), then became the site of an important experiment. In 1903, GE successfully tested a dual current powered trolley that could switch from direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC) en route. This innovation was first put into service in 1904 between Schenectady and Ballston Spa, another New York community some 14 miles away.

Trolley Technology

The trolley motor consisted of a series of compensated wound motors, which were operated by means of a series parallel controller. The center poles along the rural trolley routes supported two types of electric copper wire above the trolley tracks. One carried 600 volts of DC current, primarily within the city limits, while the other supported the 2,200 volts of AC current to power the vehicle during the transition to and outside the city limits. These trolleys were also constructed in a way that enhanced their stability at higher speeds along rail lines running through the country and between cities.

Thanks to this new technology, the trolley's range and speed were increased. Now, the new AC/DC electric trolley lines could be built outward from city centers into the countryside, connecting neighboring cities many miles away. These new trolleys were known as interurbans.

Trolley Travels, Trolley Tracks

Iinterurban lines radiated out from city centers. Because they used AC current to propel them, they could acquire the speed of a locomotive. Typically, interurbans reached speeds of over 60 miles per hour when leaving the city limits. Because of this, independent interurban rail companies were able to extend their presence across New England and the Midwest. Ohio led the way with the most trolley track of any state, with over 3,000 miles of track laid by 1920.

Fun, Fares and Freedom

With interurbans, a rider could travel from Chicago, Illinois to Oneonta, New York in a matter of three days - just by using the trolley system. This was still a lengthy trip by today's standards, but one was much faster than with a horse-drawn carriage. Waiting for trolley transfers and lodging overnight contributed to much of the trolley trip's duration.

Closer to home, these fast interurban lines made it feasible for workers to live away from the congestion of the city and commute to work from afar. The streetcar fare for an interurban run between the center of downtown Schenectady and the center of Albany, New York some 16 miles away was 25 cents one-way and 40 cents round-trip. The typical fare for a local trolley route was a nickel. This 5-cent fare remained the standard in most American trolley cities for many years. This provided greater opportunity for the business owner, and also provided freedom to the working-class family that wished to escape the dreariness of the increasingly congested city center.

The Schenectady Experience

Managers and laborers alike, some of who lived as far away as Gloversville (20 miles west of Schenectady), could commute to work at the massive new General Electric plant in Schenectady. But workers also commuted to many industries throughout the tri-city region and beyond. Textile workers commuted to the glove factories in the aptly-named Gloversville while iron workers traveled from Waterford along the Hudson River to nearby Troy to work at the Iron Works. Some domestic servants also commuted to well-heeled Saratoga Springs, New York, an emerging resort town north of the city. Yet not all passenger traffic on the different trolley lines was merely just for commuting to work.

Streetcar Suburbs

By facilitating the growth of "streetcar suburbs", interurbans helped to change the fabric and face of American life. Soon, trolley companies promoted their lines to people who were looking for a place to live or land to buy outside of the city. For many, a residence along a trolley route represented a refuge from the overpopulated urban downtown. In essence then, the trolley companies (and not the automobile) were the first drivers of suburban living.

Editor's Note: Part 11 of this multi-part series will run in two weeks.

Resources:

Trolleys Down the Mohawk Valley, Charles Gordon, 1968

Previous Blog Entries in This Series

The American Streetcar (Part 1)

From Stagecoach to Streetcar (Part 2)

From Horse-Drawn Streetcars to Cable Cars (Part 3)

The Birth of the Electric Streetcar (Part 4)

Electric Streetcars and Trolley Technology (Part 5)

Electric Streetcars: Private Lines and Public Roads (Part 6)

The Rise of the Electric Streetcar (Part 7)

Electric Streetcars and the Industrial Revolution (Part 8)

General Electric and the Schenectady Streetcar (Part 9)

Historic unemployment – historic in my forty-two year lifetime, for sure – has hit the U.S.: 9.4% as of this month, the worst it's been since David Bowie's popular Let's Dance album was released in 1983.

Connected with this statistic, comes the fact that the auto industry, once a key factor for producing, in volume, the kind of high-paying jobs that help the global economy recover from its normal, cyclical downturns, will not be playing its normal recovery role this time around.

So what will fill the void of those lost auto industry jobs, in helping us get back to a "new normal" of global economic stability?

Image at right and next two images courtesy Wikipedia. -->

Replacing those forever-lost Detroit jobs with newer and longer-lasting "Green Jobs", or jobs connected to the production of clean, renewable energy, has been one of the solutions proposed by many leaders in both the U.S. and from around the globe.

But it's difficult to replace a hundred-year-old, tried-and-true "top-down" North American model of energy production, with a newer model utilizing a "thousand points of light", distributed-producer approach. This I discovered while viewing a November 2008 CBC-TV documentary entitled The Gospel of Green, available on the CBC's web site. Click here to go there.

The CBC's Fifth Estate journalists focused on the work of Dr. Hermann Scheer, a German parliamentarian who was successful in getting his fellow citizens of the Federal Republic to adopt laws requiring regional energy providers – equivalent to our local utility companies here in the U.S. and Canada - to buy back electrical energy from small producers, like independent family farmers.

As a result of these laws, already in effect for a number of years in Germany, farmers used to raising - for usually small margins - livestock like pigs and cows, are now processing otherwise wasted – and greenhouse-gas contributing - organic waste material, turning it into biogas, and running turbines for electricity production and sale back to the local grid. On the same farms, photovoltaic cells – manufactured at a newly-built facility in high-unemployment former East Germany – are used to boost even further the energy output of the re-tooled farming facilities.

Unfortunately, as the documentary points out, when the equivalent small family farmer – working on a farm in Ontario – tries to replicate success seen in Germany, he runs into a number of obstacles – like the cost of making an uplink to the local grid – and his long term success, as a profitable, small and independent electrical producer, is in question. Much of this farmer's problems have to do with the mentality of the regional authority responsible for nuclear, coal, and "traditional" energy production, a mentality not really viewing the small producer as adding much value, and more of a headache than an answer moving into the future.

<-- Dr. Hermann Scheer, author of Energy Autonomy (2007), The Solar Economy (2002) and A Solar Manifesto (1994). Image courtesy citris-uc.org.

So what are your feelings about a thousand points of light, when it comes to selling energy back to the grid? Do you think incentives for your local utility are fine as-is? Will Dr. Hermann Scheer be making his pitch in your home town soon?

Not sure if he's traveled to my area yet, but I think a speech at our capitol in Albany, New York would get folks in the Empire State and elsewhere thinking a bit.

- Larry Kelley

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/the_gospel_of_green

http://www.citris-uc.org/CDS-Feb16-2007

The railway industry in and around Schenectady, New York represents what most industrialized cities were experiencing at the turn of the twentieth century. The Schenectady Railway Company electrified its streetcar lines in 1891 - just three years after Frank Sprague's Richmond line began running. From then on, the city of Schenectady would be transformed in myriad ways.

Thomas Edison and the General Electric Company (GE) were quick to see the potential for locating an efficient manufacturing facility in the upstate New York community after buying the Schenectady Railway in 1896. Then, the population of Schenectady was a mere 13,000 people. By 1903, however, the city had grown exponentially to 53,000 year-round residents. By 1920, there were 90,000 year round residents.

Schenectady's population explosion can be attributed mainly to two major and growing industries: the General Electric Company and the American Locomotive Company (A.L.C.O.) But such rapid growth did not come without a cost.

Trolleys and Traffic

Rush-hour traffic in Schenectady was a major problem, especially during shift changes. GE soon realized with the number of shop workers employed at its facility, it was imperative to move first-shift workers out as quickly as possible so that second-shift workers could enter the shop quickly.

To solve this problem, General Electric built a dedicated trolley loop at the entrance of the GE complex so that extra trolley cars could be fed into the main line of cars without interrupting the regular traffic flow. An astonishing 3,000 people were loaded and unloaded from the trolley cars in less than a half an hour. There was always a mad dash for seats on the trolleys during shift changes, so a rider had to be savvy when it came to claiming a seat.

Glassblowers at "The Works" (as GE was called at the time) came up with an ingenious plan. They constructed "stink bombs" by cooking a mixture of horsehair and butter and sealing the foul concoction in a glass tube. When an empty trolley car turned through the loop, the workers would throw the stink bomb through an open window. This guaranteed the glassblowers an empty trolley at the next stop. It seemed that they were "impervious" to the aroma.

Schenectady's Famous Figures in the Age of Innovation and Industry

Many engineers and entrepreneurs traveled to Schenectady and lived the trolley life in a quest for innovations and inventions. They also sought to acquire and improve the latest technologies of the time.

Albert Einstein, Guglielmo Marconi, Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford were some of these now-famous figures who used the trolley to get around Schenectady and the 450-acre General Electric facility. There, they worked with Thomas Edison and Dr. Charles P. Steinmetz, who was the chief engineer at GE for most of his career.

One evening, Henry Ford was to meet with Charles Steinmetz. Ironically, Mr. Ford took a ride on a Schenectady streetcar (and not an automobile) to cool down after he became angry with Dr. Steinmetz, who had forgotten about his meeting with Mr. Ford. Dr. Steinmetz had been working feverishly on a laboratory experiment and forgotten all about entertaining the irascible automaker.

By 1903, General Electric, through the research of Charles Steinmetz and Edison, had debuted a new trolley railway system that was able to span the distances between cities through the use of AC current and long-distance trolleys called "interurbans". The best was yet to come.

Editor's Note: Part 10 of this multi-part series will run in two weeks.

Resources:

Trolleys Down the Mohawk Valley, Charles Gordon, 1968

Previous Blog Entries in This Series

The American Streetcar (Part 1)

From Stagecoach to Streetcar (Part 2)

From Horse-Drawn Streetcars to Cable Cars (Part 3)

The Birth of the Electric Streetcar (Part 4)

Electric Streetcars and Trolley Technology (Part 5)

Electric Streetcars: Private Lines and Public Roads (Part 6)

The Rise of the Electric Streetcar (Part 7)

Electric Streetcars and the Industrial Revolution (Part 8)

Alternative Power is the theme of this blog, and so what better place to write about an alternative employment option for mechanical engineers, both student and experienced, trained in energy technologies like solar, wind, geothermal, fluid power, etc., than right here.

<-- This and next image courtesy Wikipedia.

I can't claim credit for being the first here to write on this topic. CR4 engineer-blogger Tigger, back in April of 2005, blogged on the topic of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), during the time of the humanitarian disaster connected to the Indonesian Tsunami. Click here for his earlier thread.

A non-profit founded 2000 to help the developed world with their engineering needs, Engineers Without Borders was created to "...involve and train a new kind of internationally-responsible engineering student."

As Tigger mentions in his earlier thread, Doctors Without Borders, or "Médecins Sans Frontières" in the original French, founded 1971 in Geneva, Switzerland, was the organization with a similar mission that inspired Engineers Without Borders.

It was during a recent District A Leadership Meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), held at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, that this 40-something mid-career engineer came to realize how important EWB has become.

During a panel discussion of early career mechanical engineers - recent graduates and working 20-somethings - an impromptu question was posed by ASME's president-elect Amos Holt, a proud Texan, on what was currently of interest to young engineers these days: were they "Gear Heads", like many mechanical engineers of years past were, or did they have other technical interests related to mechanical engineering?

Image at right courtesy ASME.org. ->

Being someone who rarely works on his car anymore, let alone enjoys it, I found this particular question very interesting. None of the seven or so twenty-somethings raised their hands to Mr. Holt's question. However, multiple panelists did admit to participating in, and taking much satisfaction from, EWP, before taking jobs in corporate America.

Consequently, during the current economic downturn, volunteering for an EWP project seems to me to be a smart option for recent engineering graduates, downsized engineers, or otherwise under-worked engineers, who wish to continue using and refining their skills while simultaneously helping folks outside the U.S. in real need. A place to weather the storm, assuming a reduced income is something someone, especially someone with some serious student loans, can tolerate.

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers_Without_Borders_(USA)

http://districts.asme.org/districta/