This is the final SMart article in a growing 5-part series on our city’s energy, water and food outlook. These three factors are critical to the city’s prosperity and, more importantly, its sustainability and viability. Last week’s article covered the importance of building electricity storage capacity (https://smmirror.com/2024/08/sm-art-column-your-homes-first-battery-is-in-your-car/) as our best and cheapest energy sources (wind and solar photovoltaic) fluctuate greatly in day and night cycles and seasonal rhythms. In particular, car batteries could capture some of the excess, fluctuating electricity generated by these sources (and, when not needed for the car’s mobility), feed it back into your home or business. Since electric cars have relatively large batteries and their number is increasing, they will be the city’s first widely deployed industrial-scale electricity storage facility.
Green electricity in abundance
As we increasingly meet all of California’s electricity needs from intermittent solar and wind sources over longer periods of time, there will be more and more times when we have clean “surplus” electricity. We could “supply” this extra power to neighboring states’ grids, but we would incur significant transmission losses, not to mention the pricing issues. It would be better to store it in local batteries of various kinds for immediate nighttime use and earthquake safety, or even use it to make hydrogen. Hydrogen is made by electrically “separating” hydrogen molecules from, say, water. The advantage is that the electricity used to make it comes from clean, renewable sources, because while hydrogen is expensive, it burns cleanly (no greenhouse gases or combustion particle pollution) and the only byproduct of hydrogen combustion is essentially water vapor. But the real advantage of hydrogen is that its power density is closer to that of gasoline or carcinogenic diesel fuel. This power density means that hydrogen will become the main clean energy source for heavy-duty industries: trains, trucks, ships, etc., applications that will never have enough energy capacity if they have to carry around heavy conventional batteries. You can think of hydrogen as a “battery” in another form. Although the hydrogen energy infrastructure is still in its infancy and at a primitive level even weaker than the sporadic charging possible for electric cars today, it will eventually dominate the heavy-duty market.
Another benefit of local battery storage is that battery-equipped homes and businesses can shift some or all of their peak usage to the hours when electricity is cheaper, as SCE moves to time-based pricing. We already have expensive Tesla batteries and their relatives available for instant local storage, providing this advantage and improving the chances of survival during both blackouts and earthquakes. Just like solar panels and windmills, whose prices have fallen dramatically over the past decade, battery technology will follow the same price drop as demand increases. Of course, hospitals, police stations, schools or businesses with balanced photovoltaic panels and storage capacity can continue to operate during our inevitable blackouts. As mentioned, some improvements in switching technology are still needed for this transition to be smooth, but these too are on the way.
Energy independence
However, for a full transition to clean, 100% renewable energy, we need industrial capacity batteries for urban applications. Batteries are improving rapidly and are no longer just the rare earths that power, say, your iPhone. Batteries made from a variety of exotic and common materials are being tested (e.g. sand, compressed air, etc.). They can even be made by changing the use of existing power assets. For example, during periods of additional solar/wind power, we can pump the water back up behind hydroelectric plants to reuse the increased water flow at night. In relatively short order, suitable, lower-cost materials, layouts, and pricing for urban-scale power storage capacity will emerge. While massive future battery warehouses, similar to the massive server farms that power the crypto phenomenon, may eventually prove to be the most effective storage solution, redundant, diffuse capacity is probably best for redundant survivability. This is similar to having thousands of distributed rooftop solar panels converting sunlight into electricity for thousands of homes and businesses, rather than having a few concentrated and potentially vulnerable power plants (e.g. Ukraine’s fragile power grid). A decentralized power distribution/storage solution also appeals to the American spirit of independence. Being independent from the power grid while still benefiting from its reserves is a positive value not only for survivalists, but also for ordinary citizens who understand how fragile our food, water, and energy grid has become.
In the three-way battle between increasing electricity demand and increasing clean electricity supply and increased electricity storage capacity, every building we build should help solve these real problems in some way. Even electric cars, which inevitably increase electricity demand, can help mitigate by providing accessible electricity storage. Modern homes and buildings up to three stories can meet and improve all three aspects, but do not yet need to store any of the electricity they generate. A typical apartment building can increase demand, but can also mitigate it by increasing rooftop electricity supply and often has space for future storage batteries. Regulations for these types of buildings should emphasize electricity generation and storage now, as this will inevitably be required sooner than we think.
Unfortunately, skyscrapers, which are increasingly flooding our city, are adding enormous amounts of electricity demand, but have virtually no utility capacity on their tiny roofs (without some unknown breakthrough technologies of the future) and, fatally, no storage capacity at all. For this reason, once built, they become a permanent liability to our ecological future: they are an ecological mortgage that can never be repaid. They destroy and devalue not only all adjacent properties, but also our city’s beach spirit; the developers, egged on by Sacramento, are like sharks in a skyscraper feeding frenzy that will permanently change our city for the worse and continue to impair its ability to survive for decades to come.
At a June rally in Nevada, Republican presidential candidate Trump described the frightening scenario of being surrounded by a hungry shark in a sinking electric boat. He faced the hypothetical choice of either being electrocuted by the boat’s wet battery or being eaten by the shark. So maybe we can use battery requirements to slow down the skyscraper sharks devouring our city. The least the city should do is mandate massive battery storage capacity in skyscrapers. We could have useful batteries in the underground floors of those skyscrapers, which would have been filled with parking spaces (before Sacramento eliminated all parking requirements). The city already forces new homes to get all their electricity from rooftop solar panels, which comes at the owner’s expense but also as a real public benefit. Likewise, skyscrapers that are useless for generating electricity should provide significant storage capacity at the owner’s expense but also as a public benefit. Thus, even if they seem unavoidable, they can be at least to a small extent and not entirely negative.
By Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA
SMart Santa Monica Architects for a responsible future
Thane Roberts, architect, Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA, Robert H. Taylor AIA, architect, Dan Jansenson, architect and building and fire protection officer, Samuel Tolkin, architect and planning officer, Michael Jolly, AIR-CRE Marie Standing. Jack Hillbrand AIA
Previous articles can be found at www.santamonicaarch.wordpress.com/writing
