I guess I got bitten by the energy efficiency bug when I was just a little girl of seven. I still remember the day. It was November and the rain had finally stopped. A big truck rolled down the dirt road to our village. It backed into a small clearing in our palm forest and unloaded a huge, box-like machine.
Before he drove away, the driver shouted playfully at all the kids that the machine would turn coconut shells into electricity and make us rich. It sounded like magic. I couldn't wait to find out how it could do that. Until then, we had quite literally lived in the dark — at least after the sun went down. My father was one of the men who volunteered to be trained to operate and maintain the machine, which, as I quickly learned, did indeed turn coconut shells into electricity, but by very unmagically incinerating them into a gas that could be burned by an engine.
Often, after school, I would think about what my teachers were saying about the machine — that thanks to the power it generated for lights and tools, people were using the evening hours to study or to make things. That fewer babies would be born. That fewer people would move away to the cities. That well, that was 10 years ago.
Today, everything is different. In fact, to give you an idea of just how much things have changed, a few weeks ago our village got another kind of generator. But instead of arriving on the back of a truck, this one came in as a free download; and instead of producing electricity, the new one may generate ideas that help us to save electricity and manage our resources more efficiently. Yes! Imagine, it allows us to see how a change in one part of our energy and resources ecosystem might affect other parts of the system. Our village leader, Dr. Advani, calls it our Saraswathi — the Hindu Goddess of wisdom and learning. He says the new software will probably help make our village more successful in terms of selling carbon credits.
The software takes a high-definition 3D satellite image of our village and augments it with real-time, geographically-registered information from hundreds of tiny, inexpensive SIM card-equipped power consumption sensors that all machines are equipped with — something the government mandated years ago to help everyone track and reduce the amount of energy they use.
This morning, Dr. Advani joined our class to find out what people my age — I'm 17 — would do to make our village more efficient. We have a large display pulpit in our classroom and for a while everyone squinted at the little red bubbles showing energy inputs and outputs next to different systems. We watched with fascination as the stream of dried waste represented in grams per minute on the display — actually clean-burning coconut shells from our warehouse — was fed into the generator by an electrically-powered conveyor belt.
The generator produces a maximum of 500 kW — more than enough for the couple of hundred households in our village. In fact, Dr. Advani says that a lot of our power is sold to the smart grid and that thousands of villages like ours, each contributing what it can, have replaced several coal-power plants.
As we watched the big display, we could see the power levels and locations of several small robotic collector vehicles as they scoured the floor of our palm forest for coconuts, as well as the locations of a dozen Bonnet macaque monkeys equipped with GPS neck collars. The monkeys are trained to shake the big nuts out of the trees, break them open, and separate the shells for processing. As the vehicles' batteries reached given levels, we could see them returning toward the warehouse where they would unload and recharge.
The big display also showed the status and output of dozens of other efficiency-enhancing systems in our small village — everything from the power demand of an electric pump that supplies fresh, charcoal-filtered water from our rainwater-collection cistern to the flow in our water pressure-powered sewage treatment plant that uses specially-engineered bacteria to eliminate 99 % of organic substances.
I guess I must have looked pretty impressed by all of this, because after a few moments Dr. Advani turned his deep black eyes on me like a spotlight and said, "Well, Ms Agamya, you seem to be taking this very seriously. Do you have any thoughts on how we might improve our energy efficiency?"
"Sir, our street lights burn all night even though most of us are asleep," I said as I touched the representation of a solar-powered street lamp on the screen, causing a red bubble to appear beside it showing '100 W.' "But in the mornings, when the street lights would be very helpful, they are out of power. As a result, people charge batteries for flashlights several times per week." I touched a few houses on the screen, and in each case a short list of "Appliances in use" appeared. Most included "Electric Torch Charging" with an indication of the power being drawn. "If most of these could be switched off," I continued as I marked the menu item and opened a navigation command that said 'Switch off All' "then our generator would save something in the neighborhood of," I looked up at the image of the generator, where a red bubble had appeared and pointed to the number, "2.5 kWh, which of course could be sold to the grid."
"Very elegant, Ms. Agamya," answered Advani, "but what would get people to turn off most of those chargers?" "Simple," I said, "just add movement sensors to the streetlights. That way they would be off most of the time and would still have plenty of power on dark mornings. And by the way," I added, "if we can store three hours of unused energy from each of our 60 or so street lights, that should save even more — 18 kWh per night to be exact."
Arthur F. Pease
