THINGNESS OF ENERGY

Energy materials and flows are often hidden in basements or invisibly channeled through pipes and wires. 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—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 depend 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?

Distributed Energy

Rushing water in Northern Quebec. Nuclear fission in Buchanan, New York. Gas boilers and steam turbines in Queens. These are some of the many sites of electricity generation that feed into the space where you are standing. The energy pulsing through the Sheila C. Johnson Center lobby, keeping it warm or cool, bright and inviting, channels through transformers along hundreds of miles of transmission lines and arrives via massive infrastructures that span national borders. The outlets and vents of this room are the exit ramps of a complex amalgamation of energy networks and flows. Stable and consistent delivery of energy relies on countless humans who design, regulate, deliver and maintain these systems, every day— including The New School’s Facilities staff.

Energy generation, itself, consumes energy with material effects that are geologic in force and scale. Trucks that deliver heating oil run on the fossil fuels they carry. The metals in pipes and boilers, and the copper wires that conduct electricity throughout the walls of The New School, have been refined and smelted from geologic formations extracted from the earth. Hydroelectric facilities rival skyscrapers in size, and require rivers to be diverted and thousands of square miles of land to be flooded. Electricity production through the combustion of fossil fuels, such as at Ravenswood Generating Station in Queens, releases climate changing greenhouse gases. At the Indian Point Energy Center, 40 miles up the Hudson River, high-level nuclear waste, the by-product of nuclear energy production, is stored on site. Presently, there is no permanent storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, so it must remain at the facility indefinitely. The scale of time that it will remain dangerous to life exceeds imagination.

Box included polaroid images from New School infrastructure, images of three suppliers of energy to the New School: Ravenswood Generating Station, Long Island City, Queens (Located approximately 6 miles from The New School, Robert Bourassa Generating Facility, Northern Québec, Canada (largest hydroelectric power station in Canada,located approximately 1235 miles from The New School) and Indian Point Energy Center, Buchanan, New York (a three unit nuclear power plant, located approximately 45 miles from The New School).

Accompanying wall text: There are approximately 2,772 outlets throughout The New School buildings:
2 West 13th Street, 66 Fifth Avenue, 68 Fifth Avenue and 70 Fifth Avenue

Energy of Deep Time

The things that are converted into New School energy are the products of monumental earth forces, such as light, heat, temperature, pressure, plus time spans of millions of years. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are complex material outcomes of highly specific planetary forces and spans of time that humans cannot replicate. Humans are out scaled by the energy things we require for everyday living. We are also outscaled by the new things of energy that energy generation produces. For example, designers, engineers, and policy makers have been unable to design and develop a deep geologic repository for the safe storage of the nuclear waste that results from nuclear power generation. Highly radioactive waste from nuclear power generation encumbers an immense material burden upon future humans for millennia to come.

Box included samples of water, #2 heating oil from 66 West 12th street, images of uranium ore and dry cask storage of spent fuel at Indian Point Energy Center, a 300 million year old coal sample, and a rabbit foot fern.

Carbon Trading Across the Eons

The "natural" carbon cycle of the earth seeks a balance:  when the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere goes up, natural carbon removal processes are triggered. Millions of years ago, plants removed carbon from the atmosphere and sediments then sequestered it for eons deep below the earth's surface. When we burn fossil fuels, we re-inject carbon from this other time into our own. This infusion of additional carbon from outside our own time and space upsets our contemporary carbon cycle.

"Carbon trading" or "carbon offsetting" are human inventions.  They calculate how much carbon human activities (such as taking a transcontinental airline flight or using a computer for 24 hours) add to the atmosphere. Then they tell us what it would take (planting a specific number of trees, connecting a specific number of windmills to the energy grid) in order to subtract an equivalent amount of carbon or add an offsetting amount of oxygen into the carbon cycle.  However, as long as we continue to use fossil fuels of any kind, we will be adding carbon to today's carbon cycle at an "unnatural" rate, greatly taxing, if not overwhelming, the cycle's slow, natural readjustment.  

Despite these challenges, The New School is actively engaged in implementing numerous material changes that directly reduce energy consumption at the university. These actions involve ambitious policies (such as the Climate Action Plan), efforts to improve university-wide eco-literacy, and various forms of institutional commitment, such as The Talloires Declaration, PlaNYC University Challenge, and the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS®).  The New School aims to be carbon neutral by 2040. 

Direct emissions will remain one of the biggest challenges. When humans add carbon from deep time to today's cycle, it does not balance out, even when “traded."  It sets up and becomes equivalent to new geologic futures.

Scales of Light and Heat (humans = watt?) Convert Yourself

You might think you’re an energy consumer, but actually, you're an energy converter. In fact, all energy "consumption" is really energy conversion. You convert the caloric potential of the food you eat into energy to power your daily activities. The New School converts oil and gas into heat and air conditioning, and electricity into light, elevator rides, computer lab time, and websites. 

The British Thermal Unit (BTU) and the Kilowatt Hour (kWh) are two of many units of measurement invented to calculate the amount of work that can be done when material things (wood, water, oil) are converted into the energy (movement, force, speed) that it takes to do the work. 

The ultimate converter of things into energy on earth is the Sun. The Sun fuels all work that is done on Earth, from the work that plants do to convert soil into food, to the work of propelling the ocean's currents and generating the planet's weather. The Sun also supplied the light energy that organic matter converted into chemical energy millions of years ago, only to be transformed by time and pressure into crude oil, coal, and natural gas, which humans are rapidly converting into airborne emissions.

There is no "zero" when it comes to energy, just conversions with material consequence.

Cover text:

“The sun's rays are the ultimate source of almost every motion which takes place on the surface of the earth. By [their] heat are produced all winds ... By their vivifying action vegetables are elaborated from inorganic matter, and become, in their turn, the support of animals and of man, and the sources of those great deposits of dynamical efficiency which are laid up for human use in our coal strata.”

—John William Herschel, nineteenth-century astronomer, from his 1833 Treatise on Astronomy

Inside text:

In 2011, The New School consumed 14 million kilowatt hours of electricity. This is equivalent to approximately 48 billion burning matches.

A BTU (British Thermal Unit) is a unit of energy that represents the heat that will raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. It is approximately the amount of heat generated by burning one matchstick.

Vibrant Matter and the Power of Configuration

Abundant winter precipitation in Canada can result in increased hydroelectric supplies. Droughts place immense strain on bulk power systems. Tornados and ice storms can knock out power for hours, or cause long-term damage. And incredibly, solar flares can cause power surges in vulnerable transformer systems on Earth and inflict region-wide damage to power grids.

Energy supplies and infrastructures are products of, and subject to, forces of the natural world. Seasonal variations and storm patterns directly affect how and when we receive electricity. Architects, designers and engineers attempt to create and channel energy through efficient and stable systems that can adapt and respond to changing circumstances.

And yet, humans cannot design or plan for every possible earth dynamic or event. 

As witnessed in March 2011 in northern Japan, geologic events can out-scale human imagination and overwhelm human capacities to respond. In such complex scenarios, and despite our best attempts, energy infrastructures, such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant, can become actants in their own right, capable of exuding forces and materials that move independently of human intention, desire, and control. When an energy infrastructure encounters forces it was not designed to meet or withstand, the long-term consequences will pivot upon the moment's particular configuration of humans, things, and landscape—and the precise sequencing of their exposures to the forces in play.

Vibrant Matter and the Power of Configuration invites you to consider a few of the actants that materially shape contemporary energy realities: landscape, infrastructure, policies, media representation, public opinion and geologic force. You are invited to add words and images to the installation, and move the magnets to simulate potential configurations and design scenarios.

Visitors were invited to add to, and to re-configure, the magentized pieces within the box.

Thingness of Energy is a research-based artwork. The Material Bibliography provides full texts, references, and additional readings that support the installation. Staff, faculty, and students of The New School were invited to add articles to the racks provided in this area of the installation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RELATED LINKS

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

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