detail, Thingness of Energy, 2012 (text reads: "”the electrical grid is a better understood as a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood— to name just some of the actants."
-Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

February 2 through April 24, 2012
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, northeast lobby
Parsons The New School for Design
2 West 13th Street (off Fifth Avenue)

Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 12:00 to 6:00 p.m.

Energy materials and flows are often hidden in basements or invisibly channeled through pipes and wires. The Thingness of Energy is a provocation to consider and directly experience the material realities of the energy that fuels The New School and enables learning to occur here each day. Taking The New School’s Climate Action Plan as its point of departure, the project reveals the deep geologic nature and effects of the materials we use to generate and transmit energy. And it underscores the power of deep time—both past and future—as a generator of energy forms and effects. By bringing into view things of energy that exist both within the walls of The New School and arrive here from far beyond the borders of New York State, the Thingness of Energy presents new opportunities to engage several realities and open questions that are crucial to energy futures. These include:

Our daily lives depends upon geologic materials that took millennia to form. We generate the massive quantities of heat and light that we use day after day out of the transformed remains of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. These "fossil fuels" will not form again within a timeframe that holds any practical meaning for us as human beings. How might these realities be more effectively communicated to contemporary humans?

Humans rarely examine the unimaginably long-term geologic effects that we set into motion when we interact with energy materials. These include irrevocable rearrangements of landscape and biosphere. How might we better grasp the scale of our actions' impacts?

Energy production and transmission infrastructures are vulnerable to forces of change that are often unpredictable and sometimes geologic in scale. Given that our lifestyles are dependent upon stable and consistent energy supplies, how might we design the where's, how's, and material compositions of energy infrastructures so that they flex and reconfigure in response to change?

At its heart, Thingness of Energy poses the question: What if "anticipating geologic scales of force, change, and effect" became a common design specification for energy production and distribution projects, policy-making, and infrastructure design?

The New School faculty, staff and students are invited to engage and build upon the content of the installation in relation to Spring 2012 courses and projects.

Project page sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

300+ million year old coal from Kayford Mountain, West Virginia (Kanawha Coal Field). Approximately 67% of The New School's energy is supplied by fossil fuels. From "Carbon Trading Across the Eons (Thingness of Energy), Jamie Kruse 2011-2012" (photo Elizabeth Ellsworth)

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The Thingness of Energy is researched and produced by artist Jamie Kruse (of smudge studio) in collaboration with The New School’s Office of Sustainability, Facilities Management; the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center; and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics under their two-year theme of "Thingness." The project is supported in part by The New School's Green Fund for 2012 and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. 

*The ideas expressed and represented in this project are those of the artist, and do not necessarily reflect views of faculty, staff or students at The New School.

For additional information, questions or comments, contact smudge studio.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RELATED LINKS

The New School's Climate Action Plan (PDF)

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett, Duke University Press, 2010
”the electrical grid is a better understood as a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood— to name just some of the actants” (Vibrant Matter, p. 25).

Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide | NOAA (measured at Mauna Loa)

02. 2011 | COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | Total Annual Building Energy Consumption for New York City
"The map represents the total annual building energy consumption at the block level (zoom levels 11-15) and at the taxlot level (zoom levels 16-18) for New York City, and is expressed in kilowatt hours (k Wh) per square meter of land area. The data comes from a mathematical model based on statistics, not private information from utilities, to estimate the annual energy consumption values of buildings throughout the five boroughs. To see the break down of the type of energy being used, for which purpose and in what quantity, hover over or click on a block or taxlot."

01.24.12 | BLOOMBERG | Tidal Turbines May Be in New York’s East River Generating Power by 2013
"The currents of New York City’s East River may soon be harnessed to produce electricity that can be sold to Consolidated Edison Inc. (ED) or the New York Power Authority. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission yesterday awarded closely held Verdant Power Inc. of New York the agency’s first license for a tidal-energy project, which will generate power from turbines to be installed on the river’s floor ... The 1,050-kilowatt project will use the river’s tidal flow without dams to produce electricity and has been under development since 2002, according to Verdant’s website. It’s designed to provide power to more than 9,500 residents on an island between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens ...The license “is a major step in the effort to help our country meet our renewable-energy goals,” FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said in a statement. It allows “for exploration of new renewable technologies while protecting the environment,” he said." RITE Project, East River, New York, Verdant Power

01.09.12 | NY TIMES | The Next Ice Age and the Anthropocene
"I’d suggest the growing body of research concluding that what was once seen as an inevitable descent into the next ice age has been put off for a very long time by the building blanket of greenhouse gases generated by humanity’s burst of fossil fuel combustion."

03.2011 | NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC | Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man
"Long after our cars, cities, and factories have turned to dust, the consequences of burning billions of tons' worth of coal and oil are likely to be clearly discernible. As carbon dioxide warms the planet, it also seeps into the oceans and acidifies them. Sometime this century they may become acidified to the point that corals can no longer construct reefs, which would register in the geologic record as a "reef gap." Reef gaps have marked each of the past five major mass extinctions. The most recent one, which is believed to have been caused by the impact of an asteroid, took place 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period; it eliminated not just the dinosaurs, but also the plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and ammonites. The scale of what's happening now to the oceans is, by many accounts, unmatched since then. To future geologists, Zalasiewicz says, our impact may look as sudden and profound as that of an asteroid."

12.28.11 | NY TIMES | Ship’s Espresso-Fueled Mission: Laying Cables Beneath the Hudson
"The cables on the ship were designed to carry as much as 660 megawatts of electricity — about 5 percent of the power consumed in New York City on the hottest summer days — to Midtown Manhattan from the main power grid west of the Hudson. The power could replace some of the supply that would be lost if Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo succeeds in his quest to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, 35 miles north of Midtown..The electricity that is to run through the cables, three of them bundled together with two thinner fiber-optic wires, is from the grid that serves New Jersey and several other states. It is usually significantly less expensive than electricity made in the city."

01.12.12 | NY TIMES | Getting Ready to React to Fukushima
"...to propose improvements in the industry’s “flexible mitigation capability” for a variety of hazards. Those might be earthquakes or flooding — although probably not from a tsunami, as was the case at Fukushima Daiichi in March — or some other hazard peculiar to the plant’s location, like a sandstorm.The industry’s proposal is essentially an emergency tool kit for an unknown emergency. But Mr. Heymer said that adopting it would take less time than trying to predict the likelihood of an emergency. In fact, he said, all of this equipment would be for accidents that are “beyond design basis,” or outside the envelope of conditions for which a plant was designed."

4.11.11 | NPR | Thirst for Clean Drinking Water
"Each day, coal, nuclear and natural gas plants use about five times the amount of water used on a daily basis by all American households combined — including 250 gallons of water per American per day to generate our daily electricity usage...But turn on the faucet in the bathroom to brush your teeth, and the water pouring out is probably just a bit older than Canada's old rock. Scientists don't agree on the precise age of the water on Earth, but it's certainly 4.3 or 4.4 or 4.5 billion years old. It's one of the more astonishing things about water — all the water on Earth was delivered here when Earth was formed, or shortly thereafter. The water around us is original equipment — it was included with the planet itself, in the first 100 million years or so. There is, in fact, no mechanism on Earth for creating or destroying large quantities of water. What we've got is what's been here, literally, forever."

01.06.12 | NY TIMES | U.S. to Block New Uranium Mines Near Grand Canyon
"The pressure for new mines has abated in anticipation of the ban, state officials said. Existing mines, numbering perhaps a dozen within the three blocs of land that make up the million acres in question, will probably be able to continue operations or to restart them when uranium prices make mining worth the effort again."

3.26.11 | NY TIMES | Japanese Rules for Nuclear Plants Relied on Old Science and Designing For Earthquakes: Assessing the Risks
"Two decades after Fukushima Daiichi came online, researchers poring through old records estimated that a quake known as Jogan had actually produced a tsunami that reached nearly one mile inland in an area just north of the plant. That tsunami struck in 869."

U.S. Department of Energy | How Fossil Fuels Formed
"During the millions of years that passed, the dead plants and animals slowly decomposed into organic materials and formed fossil fuels. Different types of fossil fuels were formed depending on what combination of animal and plant debris was present, how long the material was buried, and what conditions of temperature and pressure existed when they were decomposing."

NUCLEAR ENERGY INSTITUTE | Nuclear Waste: Amounts and On-Site Storage | Used Nuclear Fuel Storage Map

12.16.11 | NY TIMES | Despite Delay, the 100-Watt Bulb Is on Its Way Out
"By requiring that light bulbs use at least 25 percent less electricity, starting in 2012, the nation would use less energy, manufacturers would invent more efficient types of bulbs and the planet would be spared millions of tons of carbon emissions every year. But the traditional light bulb — that lowly orb of glass, filament and threaded metal base — has become a powerful emotional symbol, conjuring both consumer anxiety over losing a familiar and flattering light source and political antipathy to government meddling."

10.27.11 | NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS | Energy: Friend or Enemy? | William D. Nordhaus
"If we convert energy into metric tons of coal equivalent, the American economy consumes almost 40 tons of coal-equivalent energy per household each year. If this were delivered by a UPS carrier in ten-pound packages, it would require a delivery once an hour through the entire year."

6.09.2011 | NY TIMES | This Week's Solar Flare Illuminates the Grid's Vulnerability
"The next peak cycle of sunspot activity is predicted for 2012-2014, bringing with it a greater risk of large geomagnetic storms that can generate powerful rogue currents in transmission lines, potentially damaging or destroying the large transformers that manage power flow over high-voltage networks."

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center

04.30.2010 | DISCOVERY NEWS | Why You Should Care About the Sun
"Solar flares, a phenomenon related to CMEs, emit bright light all across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio all the way to -ray and gamma ray. These can change the structure of the Earth's charged outer atmosphere, the ionosphere, diminishing the accuracy of sensitive GPS measurements, interfering with communications, and making it a bad day for low frequency radio astronomy. (Yes, there are a few of us who care about that!)Even if you don't mind the occasional communication or navigation interruption, you have to watch out for large-scale power outages. Geomagnetic storms can directly affect transformers, causing them to fail, and increasingly interconnected power grids will only make the problem worse."

High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System (PDF)
A Jointly-Commissioned Summary Report of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the U.S. Department of Energy, 2009
"This comes at a time, however, when budgets are constrained and resources are limited. Both the public and private sectors must balance competing priorities like smart grid implementation, addressing climate change, and the growing need to expeditiously site and build new infrastructure. At the same time, it is crucial that electricity remains affordable for the average consumer. HILF risks are just one part of a much larger landscape of risks and concerns facing the sector.
The answers will not be found by simply filing this report away with its predecessors: there is much work ahead to meet these goals. This report is a beginning, not an end. We will need the support of all of our readers to realize the vision of this effort: effective public/private partnership to address HILF risks in a coordinated, systematic fashion."

How a Substation Works (Hydro-Québec)

12.1.2011 | BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS | Fukushima and the Inevitability of Accidents

ConEd Smart Grid information page

U.S. Drought Monitor

Map of primary Hydro-Québec Facilities (PDF) and Hydro-Québec supplies to the Northeastern United States (Greater New York area)

2011 Summer Reliability Assessment (PDF) | The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)

NYISO: New York Independent System Operator
"Managing the efficient flow of power on nearly 10,900 miles of high-voltage transmission lines — from more than 500 generating units — on a minute-to-minute basis, 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week."

Buildings = Energy | AIA | October 1-January 21, 2011
"According to the U.S. Department of Energy, currently about 40% of the energy consumed in the United States is attributed to buildings. Buildings = Energy explores how critical choices by people in the fields of design, planning, engineering, government, building management, and occupant behavior can make positive energy changes in our cities."

11.11.11 | NUCLEAR ENERGY INSTITUTE | Special Report on the Nuclear Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station
The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations has compiled a detailed timeline of events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The detailed report, prepared as part of the integrated response to the Japan events, was delivered on Nov. 11, 2011, to U.S. industry executives, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and members of Congress.

11.27.2011 | NY TIMES | Getting Smart in the Suburbs of Tokyo
"In a model house, Panasonic has installed ceiling LED lighting that twinkles down as natural light from outside dwindles. For central coordination, the house features a portal that can be viewed from any terminal through which residents can monitor and adjust internal electricity use."

11.27.2011 | NY TIMES | A New Urgency to the Problem of Storing Nuclear Waste
"The nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, earlier this year caused many countries to rethink their appetite for nuclear power. It is also, in subtler ways, altering the fraught discussion of what to do with nuclear plants’ wastes."

11.23.2011| BBC | Go Figure: Why Does Every Person Need 200kg of Steel a Year?
"Imagine that every year, every one of us gave birth to an eight-year-old made from steel. Disturbing image. Now go further. Imagine that you also gave birth - everyone, male and female, young and old, every year - to 10 cement, one plastic and three paper eight-year-olds and one new-born aluminum baby. Well, in a sense, you do. This is the global average production per head of stuff: about 200kg of steel each, for example, enough to sculpt a child."

Find out if your energy supply contributes to mountain top removal (MTR)

01.2009| Smithsonian Magazine | Mining the Mountains
"The Appalachian coal fields date back about 300 million years, when today's green highlands were tropical coastal swamps. Over the millennia, the swamps swallowed up massive amounts of organic material—trees and leafy plants, animal carcasses, insects. There, sealed off from the oxygen essential to decomposition, the material congealed into layers of peat. When the world's landmasses later collided in a series of mega-crashes, the coastal plain was pushed upward to become the Appalachians; after the greatest of these collisions, they reached as high as today's Himalayas, only to be eroded over the ages. The sustained geologic pressure and heat involved in creating the mountains baked and compressed the peat from those old bogs into seams of coal from a few inches to several feet thick."

10.27.2011 | BBC | Facebook sets up Data Centre in Lapland, Sweden
"More companies are placing their data centres in Northern Europe because the climate works well for the cooling systems necessitated by racks of huge servers."

10.26. 2011 | NY TIMES | Japan Gets Electricity Wake-Up Call
"Electricity had become like air. You never thought it would ever be unavailable,” said Hidetoshi Nakagami, president of the Jyukankyo Research Institute, which studies home energy issues".
"Until the wake-up call of the Fukushima disaster, “the whole energy setup in Japan was a way of life of the industrial, high-economic growth period,” of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Sueyoshi said. “March 11 has posed us a question. Should we maintain the way of the 20th century?"

10.25.2011| NY TIMES | Pushing the Humble Thermostat into the Digital Age
"The thermostat uses those settings daily, then adapts to further changes. If a person is out of town each Monday on business, the Nest sensors detect that and switch to an “auto away” setting for lower energy use."

How Clean is your Electricity? EPA

10.17.11| RiverKeeper on Indian Point

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*Special thanks to The New School Facilities staff, Karen Bruce at ConEd, Erika Osborne, Josie Lawlor, and Cryovial®.

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