Nicole Foss: How I Prepared My Family for Peak Oil

Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth joins Jim this week from Europe to discuss her personal efforts to prepare her family for Peak Oil and the general economic uncertainty that she believes is headed our way. Nicole believes "there is a hell of a lot we can do, but we can’t have business as usual."

Nicole is co-editor of The Automatic Earth, where she writes under the name Stoneleigh. She and her writing partner have been chronicling and interpreting the on-going credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multi-faceted predicament. The site integrates finance, energy, environment, psychology, population and real politik in order to explain why we find ourselves in a state of crisis and what we can do about it. Prior to the establishment of TAE, she was previously editor of The Oil Drum Canada, where she wrote on peak oil and finance.

Transcript

Jim Puplava:    Joining me on the program is Nicole Foss from the Automatic Earth and Nicole you recently did a video and it is called How I Prepared My Family for Peak Oil. I thought we would start our discussion today because I think one of the factors that we are starting to see right now, with oil prices at $90 in a weak recession along with high unemployment, is we are starting to see the effects of peak oil because you kind of wonder why we are at close to $90 given such weakness. Now some may say that is speculation but, putting that aside for now, I would like to talk about what you did to prepare your family. Now as I understand it Nicole, you sold your house in England in the 1990’s and you bought a farm in Ontario and lets talk about what you did as you discovered peak oil to get your family and prepare for it, what did you do first?

Nicole Foss:    Well first, we looked at the viability of the model we had. We were living in England and the property bubble in England is quite extreme. It was extreme even then—it is worse now—but at the time we looked at a situation where everything that we had was tied up in our property. We would not have had the ability to be self-sufficient in any way, we would not have had enough land, and we wouldn't have had any spare resources so we thought this is probably not the best place to be. So we sold everything we had in England, we moved to Canada where I grew up, so I already had citizenship. We bought a farm and because property is a lot less overvalued in Canada we were able to buy a 40 acre farm with seven barns for half what we sold our house in England for. That gave us enough spare resources to then be able to install a renewable energy infrastructure for instance, and we also spent the next several years learning how to do things on a farm. So what we built was a system with three kilowatts of solar panels, we have a battery bank in the basement that runs all the essential loads 24 hours a day. So we are not off grid but all the essential loads are effectively off grid.

Jim Puplava:    If I may stop you there, let us talk about the importance of batteries because a lot of people here in the US have solar panels but don't have a battery backup system. Let’s talk about the importance of those batteries.

Nicole Foss:    Yes, if you do not have storage capacity, if the grid goes down, you have no power anymore than anybody else does. So what you have—if you have say a contract through feed and tariff—you have solar panels, you sell power to the grid, what you have installed is a money generating machine so long as the grid is still in existence. But if what you want is the power then you need to have a storage component. Now there are a number of feed and tariff contract systems that do not allow you to do this, so if you want a feed in tariff and you want to get a premium price for the electricity you produce, you cannot include a storage component. To me that completely misses the point of installing solar panels in the first place. We refused to connect towers to the grid even though they would have paid us 82 cents a kilowatt-hour had we done so because for us the storage component was critical. We have six deep cycle marine batteries in the basement; the system is designed so it will run the essential loads for four days even without any sun, any main power, or any generator fuel. We can charge those batteries with any one of those. If the sun is there fine, we can charge them with main power. We have two different kinds of generators, a gasoline generator, and a diesel generator that runs off our tractor. If we have any one of the above, we can charge the batteries and therefore we can run the essential loads. Four days without any of those and we might have a problem but there is a limit to what contingencies you can realistically cover. Now the essential loads are things like a fridge, freezer, a few lights, the security system, the sub pumps—the well pump is probably the most important because if we did not have the ability to run that we would not have any water in the house. If we could not run the sub pumps our basement would flood so we put in a system that runs only the essential loads off that battery bank and it runs them all the time.

There is another raft of things that are less essential but run off the generator panel, so for that we would have to have the main or either one of the kinds of generator fuel. So that would include things like a microwave or washing machine, things that are not essential but are rather nice to have and other than that, the remaining loads we would only have if we had main power. Things like the ability to cook with an electric stove for instance; it is far too big a load to run off any kind of renewable energy system or realistically any generator either. So when people put in renewable energy systems, they have to think about what are the essential loads. If they are trying to satisfy or to supply all the load they currently have, all their current demand, it is going to cost them a ridiculous amount of money and it is really not a good use of money. What we did when we moved into that house was we dropped our demand by 90% before we tried to supply what was left and we do not supply all of what was left, only the most essential things. So it is always better value to reduce your demand first—they would call it megawatts—so invest in reducing your demand before you attempt to invest in supply. If you cannot afford supply and storage, I would go for storage on its own because if you have simply a battery bank in your basement, if you have the ability to store say perhaps a weeks worth of electric power for your essential loads, chances are the main power is going to be available within some point within that week.

All the more likely, if you live in an urban area, if you are in a rural area it is harder—you have to be a lot more self-sufficient. You probably do want the ability to generate power, but if you live in a city—well even Bagdad gets a couple of hours of electricity a day. What the storage component does is allow you to not have to care when that couple of hours of electricity is because it simply recharges your batteries whenever it is available and then you can run your essential loads. So that really I think is the important way of looking at it, you want to have redundancy in your system so that there are many ways to achieve the same essential factor. So many ways to charge the batteries for instance or at my house one of the things we looked at was how many different ways could we cook and looking at all the different possible inputs that we might have. Well there is the electric stove, there is a wood stove in the kitchen, a 1928 Aga—we could run a microwave from a generator. We have solar cookers, we could cook on propane with the barbeque, or butane with the Coleman stove. We could set up a tripod outside in the courtyard and cook on an open fire with a dutch oven. When there is that many different ways of achieving the same essential function, then the odds are you are going to be able to achieve that function even if you do not have the full range of input.

Jim Puplava:    Nicole you have a farm outside the city and you elected not to use wind power, why did you make that decision.

Nicole Foss:    The effectiveness of wind power really critically depends on wind energy density because the amount of power you produce depends on the square of the wind velocity. So if you do not have good wind resources you are more or less wasting your money if you put in wind power. We do not have particularily good wind resources where we are; we are not by a lake or anything like that. We could have done it—it would have cost us the same amount as our solar panels, and we would have gotten about 15% of the energy from wind, 85% from solar for the same amount of money. Now it is useful if you are going to be off grid—you have no choice because there are three months when you really get no sun and you cannot cope with that unless you have an alternative. So for that you would have whatever you could get from wind and you would have a backup generator as well and maybe if you wanted to be particularily environmentally minded, you can run that generator off biodiesel so there are a number of ways to approach it. Another factor with wind power where we have our farm is ice storms, so if you have your wind turbine that gets iced unevenly, then the wind blows, it can simply rip itself to shreds. So you might be climbing up a 100-foot tower with a hammer in your hand in the middle of January trying to knock the ice off your wind turbine so that it is not wrecked the next time the wind blows. So there are a number of issues with wind where we are, I would say that if you are in a place with good wind resources, it is fine, but if you are not it is probably not a good use of your capital. You would be better off going with say more storage or say fuel storage for a generator but that can be difficult as well because fuel storage can be challenging. If you use gasoline you have to use stabilizers, even so it will not last more than two years at most, diesel will last longer but it can corrode your tanks from the inside out. Then the whole bottom of the tank can collapse so you have to have pretty good storage facilities if you are going to look at storing liquid fuel and that can be a challenge, plus it can also be expensive. So there are a number of quite the choices that have to be made and the right answer will really depend on where you are and what your personal capacity happens to be. Some places with geothermal is going to be wonderful, some places solar, some places wind, some places all three. The storage component is going to be critical whichever way you go I would argue though.

Jim Puplava:    Nicole, you have done this on a 40-acre farm outside the city, let us talk about an individual living in the city because most people live in large metropolitan areas. Would you say solar is probably going to be the most practical way to implement something in that case because obviously in a city you cannot erect a wind turbine at least with the HOAs and probably the city would not let you do it? So is solar the most practical?

Nicole Foss:    Certainly, where you live in San Diego I would say it is. In some places, it is not necessarily going to be a panacea especially in places where it can be cloudy for months at a time. So it really depends where you are and how sunny the area is where you happen to be. But you are right about wind turbines in the city; they really do not go together. Some people talk about putting a wind turbine on your house that will vibrate and threaten the structure of your house. If you try to put a wind turbine in your backyard, you are putting a 100-foot tower in your backyard; your neighbors are going to complain. Normally you have to put a tower in a place where if it fell down it could not hit any buildings. So that is pretty much not going to work in the city, plus you really depend on laminar wind flow. If you have structures that are interfering with the wind flow, you will not get anything like the power that you should out of your wind turbine anyway. So I would not think of wind in a city unless you happen to live on some exceptionally large lot and have very forgiving bylaws.

Jim Puplava:    You know, one thing that we are talking about preparing for peak oil and you are talking about creating your own power systems, one of the things we experienced here a little over a month ago Nicole is the electrical grid system went down because of the power structure between Arizona and San Diego. So for the first time Nicole it just was not a brown out, the entire city was dark for seven or eight hours. So we are seeing them happen more often. Now something else that you did, you live on a farm, you are outside the city but there may be a need to go into the city. You also have, you thought about transportation, you guys have bicycles so let us talk about that or even the idea of lets say a hybrid or an electric car.

Nicole Foss:    Well we do not have electric vehicles partly because, well they are very expensive, the battery systems do not last very long, and the cost of replacing them is ridiculously high. So I would not go with an electric vehicle, especially not for living outside of the city and especially not for living in the kind of climate I live in where you do not get decent grip on the roads, on icy roads with something like a Prius. I have heard from people who try to drive them in the mountains in wintry conditions and they are really not ideal for that at all. They are better for cities where you do not have such a challenging environment but I would not go with an electric vehicle unless it was say an electric bicycle. What I would do in the summertime, I would ride a bicycle, and you could get a cargo bicycle in fact for transporting goods. I could also walk if I really needed to, it is quite a long way, but it could be done in a day if necessary. For winter, we have dog sleds and dogs and we could ride a dog sled down a frozen river if we needed to, even if no one was clearing the roads or we could ski. There are many possibilities but most of the time I think people in the winter, in that kind of circumstance would just stay put over the winter so you would have to grow and store food and things and just basically arrange to stay where you are for long periods of time. But then again that is not San Diego that is the other opposite extreme really so what you do for transport will really depend on where you are as well. In America, it is hard to walk places, they do not have sidewalks, and the whole system is not setup for anyone who is not driving a car. The distances are long so I think it could be really very challenging in some American cities, more so than in Canada where there are at least bicycle paths you could walk on even if you did not have a bicycle.

Jim Puplava:    Yeah, for example in California we are getting more into putting bicycle lanes and especially in planned communities but in some cities that might be impractical. Let us talk about food, I mean obviously on a farm you have got a lot of land, you can grow crops but let us talk about somebody who lives in the city, maybe has a backyard. I know during WWII we used to call them Victory Gardens, but my understanding Nicole, it does not take a lot of effort just to have a small garden, or if you live in a place, where it is cold, have a greenhouse.

Nicole Foss:    We have put in both, we have a heated greenhouse in fact so that we can extend the growing season because our growing season is so very short. But yes, there is a lot you can do even on a reasonable sized suburban lot. I mean if you have one of these new properties, where there is about three feet all around the edge of the house then there is not a lot that you can do with that. But if you have an older lot with a bit more ground, there is an enormous amount that you can grow. I was visiting a suburban house in Lawrence Kansas this last summer and the amount of food the woman managed to grow there was absolutely phenomenal. So there really is a lot that can be done, there is urban homesteading, there are quite a lot of resources available online about that, what people can do in suburban environments. Less so in urban ones and there are things you might be able to grow in your balcony if you are ten floors up but it is always going to be extremely limited. The nice thing about if you are in a city, you cannot be self sufficient, but you are less likely to have to be because the centralized systems are far more likely to survive in concentrated areas than they are in rural areas. So the choice I would say is really, the best choices are urban or rural because in an urban area you do not really have to be self-sufficient although you face other challenges. In a rural area, you do have to be self-sufficient but you more or less can be with a lot of effort I must say and it is a simple thing to do but it is possible. It is what in-between that is a trap, suburbia is a trap because you have all of the dependencies and none of the ability to do anything about them. Although you can grow food on a suburban lot, you are going to be far more car dependent, it is going to be very difficult to put in renewable energy. You are not going to be able to put in a well or a septic system or anything like that, so I tend to suggest to people that they go for one extreme or the other, but to really understand what the implications of each of those extremes are.

Jim Puplava:    Let us talk about a situation that maybe could be practical: for example, food storage, having spare water, candles, and the brown out in San Diego. But you may be living in an area where number one you do not get a lot of sunshine, there may be extended periods of time; I can think of places like Chicago for example where you have got overcast days for a considerable amount of the wintertime. What about just storing some practical things because Nicole one thing that we have seen in the last ten years, we have seen hurricanes, we have seen earthquakes, we have seen tsunami’s. I mean we have seen a lot of weather related events and a good portion I know of individuals in the United States live along the eastern and west coast, all along the coastline.

Nicole Foss:    We had an enormous blackout in 2003; fifty million people lost power because a branch fell on a line in Ohio. So our complex systems can be extremely vulnerable to very simple and predictable factors. Ottawa had a power loss for about a day, other places lost power for a lot longer than that and it took them a good two weeks to restore full power in Ottawa because the nuclear plant all went offline and it took two weeks to restore them again. They had to go into full shutdown and then they cannot be brought back online quickly. So when you do have an interruption, sometimes it can take a very long time to bring the system back up, even if you are not facing any systemic challenges. This was just bringing the system up after a line tripped in Ohio and even so it was difficult and they had to beg people not to put their air conditioning on for fear of crashing the system again. So it was very, very challenging and we do have to think about how vulnerable our centralized life support systems really are and what we can do about them instead. Certainly storing some essentials would be a very good idea for a lot more than the 72 hours that the government recommends that people look after themselves, or the government decides the people must look after themselves--72 hours is really not enough. I would certainly think of trying to store enough food and water for at least several weeks if at all possible. For some people it will be harder than others. If they live in a small apartment and they do not have much space, but there are a lot of foods and things that are very energy dense for instance that can be stored in a very small space. So I would certainly think about preserving food and storing some of the essentials so that you do not need to rely on these centralized systems as soon as 72 hours so that you are able to look after yourself for as long as possible.

Jim Puplava:    What about also just practical things like maybe a radio or something that has power to it? So like one of the things that we did is we had a cell phone radio so when the power went out here in San Diego, we could listen to the news because originally we were told it was a terrorist attack and that would create some kind of fear. But as we listened to the radio, we found out where the source of the power out came from and we were kept up to date when power would be restored. What about those kinds of practical things, batteries, candles, and things like that?

Nicole Foss:    Oh absolutely, we have a wind up radio as well, and without the windup radio, we would not have known what was happening in the eastern seaboard blackout of 2003. We were glued to that radio for the whole time; it was the only thing that worked. So they are cheap, there is no reason not to have one, that sort of thing is ideal. You can get solar battery chargers, rechargeable batteries; you can get wind up LED lights, all sorts of things. You can get human powered generators that come with their own little battery bank and inverter so then you can run small loads. There are lots and lots of things, I would say water filters are important. If you have the kind of water filter that the aid agencies use in the third world which only costs about $250, then you could drink water out of puddles if you needed to because it filters it so finely that it takes out the sorts of things that could make you ill if you drank it. So in the third world aid agencies use these to filter surface water full of goat droppings and God only knows where. So there are all sorts of systems that exist and a lot of them are not very expensive. Solar cookers are not very expensive, they are about $250, and then you do not need any power at all to be able to cook, any fuel. Water filters and a supply of extra filter elements, those are not especially expensive, these things are available easily now just with the internet and a credit card. They may not be available at all in the future so I think we really need to think about what things we can put in place that will enable us to look after ourselves. Preferably, building enough spare capacity that we can look after other people as well, because if one tries to simply look after number one, then that does not make you very popular at all. It is far better to encourage your neighborhood or your group to take joint actions because then you are far more robust than anything you could possibly hope to do as an individual.

Jim Puplava:    We might want to point out too Nicole, the time to do these kinds of things is now when you are not experiencing an emergency. I mean thank goodness when we lost power in San Diego, we had multiple systems for cooking, and we ended up cooking on our barbeque that night with candlelight. We had a self-windup radio so we could keep track, we had candles, and we have canned food storage. These are the kinds of things that when something hits as you mentioned the blackout a couple years ago where fifty million people in this country lost power, you want to do this before the crisis hits so that when it does hit, when we lost power, we knew exactly what we had to do. We were prepared for it and I think that is something I think we should stress to our listeners that the time to prepare is when you do not have a problem.

Nicole Foss:    Absolutely, I could not agree more because anything you try to get a hold of when there is already a problem; it is going to be too late. You will not get a hold of anything, the store shelves will be empty, you will not have time to get things ordered and sent to you that you might order over the internet or from a catalog somewhere. So you really have to have your systems in place, the problem is when you are in the middle of a crisis, peoples time horizon shrinks to almost nothing and they tend to run around like headless chickens and cause a lot of trouble. The more people who we can keep out of that situation the better it is for everybody and what happens if you prepare in advance, you are in a position where you have the luxury of the long term. You have money, you have power, you have access to what you need, that gives you enough of a cushion that you can make your plans so that you do not end up forced into a short term crisis management situation, and that is really, really important. Too many people are going to lose the luxury of the long term and end up in that state of short term crisis management and the more people we can have prepare in advance the better it is for everyone.

Jim Puplava:    Nicole as we close, I know we are talking to you in Italy today and you have to get somewhere but you made a video on how I prepared my family for peak oil and there is a text to that. If our listeners would like to watch that or get a hold of it, how could they do so please?

Nicole Foss:    It is available on the local futures website; it is a talk I did last year at the local futures conference in Michigan in November. It was only put up online but the material was actually recorded a year ago. So if you Google local futures, the person who arranged the conference his name is Aaron Wissner, and so you can Google him as well, W-I-S-S-N-E-R. So the material is available online.

Jim Puplava:    Also, if you would like to follow Nicole’s work and a lot of her writing, Nicole give out your website if you would.

Nicole Foss:    The website is theautomaticearth@theautomaticearth.blogspots.com, and we are going to be moving to a new website eventually that will have a lot more in the way of preparation and information. So we have to get that coded up to move away from BlogSpot to allow us to do that, but that is very much what is coming.

Jim Puplava:    Alright, the website is theautomaticearth.blogspot.com; we have been speaking with its proprietor Nicole Foss, Nicole I want to thank you for joining us on the program.

Nicole Foss:    You are very welcome, thank you for having me.