XYLENE POWER LTD.

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ENERGY:
The primary energy available to mankind is from five sources: past solar, present solar, residual kinetic, residual thermal and nuclear.

1. Past solar energy produced the fossil fuels coal, oil and natural gas.

2. Present solar energy is available via biofuels, hydroelectric power, solar panels and wind turbines.

3. Residual kinetic energy of the Earth-Moon system is available via tidal power.

4. Residual thermal energy from the Earth's core is available via deep wells drilled in active volcanic areas.

5. Nuclear energy is available via fission of heavy elements or fusion of light elements.

The process of obtaining useful work from any of these primary energy sources is constrained by heat dissipation as set out in the section titled: Energy Balance.

During the last century mankind consumed liquid and gaseous fossil fuel stocks that took many millions of years to accumulate via natural processes. At present extraction rates fossil fuels will soon become uneconomic due to depletion of accessible reserves, increasing costs of extraction and the consequences of accumulation of fossil carbon in the Earth's atmosphere.

This website focuses on the reasons for abandoning fossil fuels as sources of prime energy and the practical means of accomplishing that goal. One of the main hurdles is large scale implementation of a new process for synthesizing liquid fuels.

WEBSITE CONTENTS:
This website contains major sections relating to Power Line Carrier Lighting Control, Micro Fusion, Electricity Power Systems and CO2 related Climate Change. Each major section has its own Table of Contents. There is a presumption that the reader has some knowledge of engineering and physics.

Power Line Carrier Lighting Control is a technology for lighting energy conservation. Micro Fusion is a new technology for distributed heat generation. The heading Electricity encompasses technical, regulatory and public policy matters relating to electricity generation, energy storage, electricity transmission, electricity distribution, electricity conservation and electricity metering. The heading Climate Change encompasses environmental and public policy matters relating to fossil fuels and greenhouse gases.

CORPORATE ACTIVITIES:
Xylene Power Ltd. provides technical expertise related to the development and implementation of new technologies for: distributed heat and electricity generation, energy storage, energy conservation, energy management, energy metering, mechanical equipment monitoring and electronic security.

CLIMATE CHANGE:
Short term (< 5,000 years) global climate change is primarily the result of changes in the Earth's solar reflectivity (albedo) and the Earth's infrared emissivity. The physics of short term global climate change are addressed on this web site. Long term (> 5,000 years) global climate changes due to changes in solar irradiance or changes in the Earth's orbit are beyond the scope of this web site.

Present Canadian and American government energy policies implicitly assume that Canada and the USA have the unfettered right to release fossil carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at a per capita rate that is about four times larger than the average per capita rate for all of the other nations combined. This implicit assumption is now being challenged. Mankind presently produces carbon dioxide by combustion of fossil fuels about twice as fast as natural processes remove this carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As a result carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere and has reached a concentration higher than at any time during the past 500,000 years.

The excess atmospheric carbon dioxide reduces the Earth's infrared emissivity, which increases the dry land temperature and causes additional heat absorption by oceans, glaciers and irrigated land areas. As the surface temperature of open water increases the average atmospheric water vapor concentration increases. The extra atmospheric water vapor further reduces the Earth's infrared emissivity, which further increases the dry land temperature. The consequent ground level dry land temperature increase, measured far from any local source of heat, carbon dioxide or water vapor, is referred to as global warming.

If the additional heat absorption causes melting of snow or ice, there is generally a reduction in local solar reflectance (albedo) which causes further local heat absorption and hence further melting of ice or a local temperature increase. Melting of floating ice also increases the open water area, which further contributes to the atmospheric water vapor concentration and hence to the overall warming effect. Melting of land borne ice causes an increase in sea level.

Farming in the presence of global warming requires extra crop irrigation to provide sufficient evaporative cooling to maintain optimum crop temperature. Since the supply of fresh water is limited, global warming causes a reduction in cultivated land area. The increase in the atmospheric water vapor concentration that accompanies global warming increases the average cloud density, which reduces the amount of sunlight that is available for crop growth. These effects combine to reduce agricultural carbohydrate production, which reduces supplies of food, animal feed, organic construction materials (wood) and biofuels. World food reserves in storage are at a record low. Further increases in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration will lead to wide spread starvation.

The above graph, provided by NASA, shows a theoretical computation of the Earth's infrared thermal radiation emission spectrum as it appears from space. The big dip in the infrared emission in the wavelength range 13 um to 18 um is due to infrared absorption by carbon dioxide in the Earth's upper atmosphere. The lesser dips in the wavelength ranges 5 um to 8 um and 18 um to 25 um are due to infrared absorption by water vapor in the Earth's upper atmosphere. The red line shows the radiative emission for an ideal black body with no atmosphere. Analysis of this type of graph allows quantification of the various components of global warming.

As the peoples of the world become more aware of the causes and negative consequences of carbon dioxide triggered warming, present Canadian and American energy policies are certain to engender conflict. The atmosphere and the oceans simply do not have the capacity to allow other nations to emulate the Canadian and American energy intensive lifestyle using fossil carbon as a primary energy source. Preservation of the environment and principles of human equity demand that Canadians and Americans reduce their per capita release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by about a factor of nine. Achieving this reduction in release of carbon dioxide will require a massive investment in hydro, wind, nuclear and solar energy and related energy storage, electricity transmission and control equipment. Use of natural gas in place of coal for electricity generation is an interim measure that will slow but will not prevent global warming. The only solution to global warming is abandonment of fossil fuels for heating, transportation and electricity generation.

There are those that say that Canada causes only a small fraction of the world's global warming problem and hence Canadians need not address this problem. Such persons have an expectation of entitlement similar to the entitlement expectations of the Germans and Japanese that triggered World War II. In order to keep the peace it is essential for Canadians to set an example, not follow the worst of American policies.

If present trends continue the Earth will continue warming until the resulting climate change causes massive human mortality. The consequences of climate change are already being felt by many people.

The physics of carbon dioxide triggered global warming and the reasons for making energy systems independent of fossil carbon are set out in the section titled Climate Change.

ELECTRICITY:
For almost a century most electricity generation in Ontario has been done at large central plants. Electricity is conveyed to customers via high voltage transmission lines that feed local distribution networks.

After Ontario Hydro exhausted the large easily accessible hydro-electric resources in southern Ontario, it built large nuclear and coal fired thermal electricity generation plants. The nuclear plants were expensive and the coal fired plants emit carbon dioxide and toxic products of combustion.

Carbon dioxide is now a threat to the continued existence of mankind. The toxic products of combustion of coal are also a major public health problem.

Ontario must now take its coal fired electricity generation plants out of service and must develop distributed electricity generation using non-fossil fuel technologies. There must be sufficient new non-fossil fuel electricity generation capacity to replace the coal fired plants, to replace the aging nuclear plants, and to permit displacement of fossil fuels in the industrial, transportation and heating sectors. Distributed energy storage must be added behind electricity meters to level outputs from wind generators and to improve the utilization of the transmission/distribution system. Large reservoir pumped hydraulic energy storage is required to provide seasonal balancing for renewable electricity generation.

The electricity generation, storage, transmission and distribution infrastructure must be sufficient to allow rapid population growth in Ontario to accommodate people who are forced to evacuate other countries due to rising sea levels, agricultural failures and conflict resulting from global warming.

The change from an electricity transmission and distribution network based on central generation to a network containing much more distributed non-fossil fuel electricity generation requires changes to the metering methodology, electricity rates, switching systems and generation control. The output variability of individual wind, solar and hydraulic generators requires additional investment in infrastructure for electricity transmission, distributed power control and energy storage. In order to financially enable behind the meter energy storage electricity rates must substantially reward parties that input or output electricity at a nearly constant rate. Such parties use generation and transmission/distribution resources far more efficiently than do parties that are intermittent generators or intermittent loads.

In order to financially enable construction of required transmission/distribution, generators must pay for transmission/distribution costs at the same rate as load customers. Otherwise required transmission/distribution is not built when and where required because distributed generators do not have sufficient influence over transmission/distribution planning and construction. A further benefit of this proposed rate structure change is that it increases the value of marginal electrical energy without increasing total electricity cost to the load customer, which encourages more energy conservation.

The economics of distributed electricity generation and electricity conservation are set out in the section titled Electricity.

MICRO FUSION:
Micro Fusion is a modular micro-nuclear process. Each Micro Fusion module converts about 25 kW of electricity into about 250 kW of delivered heat in the temperature range 165 degrees C to 185 degrees C, without producing greenhouse gas or long lived radioactive waste. Micro Fusion can be practically applied to distributed stationary applications that require continuous heating or cooling. Subject to availability of sufficient electricity, arbitrary numbers of Micro Fusion Units can be clustered together to obtain any desired thermal output.

The principal application of Micro Fusion is in production of liquid biofuels to displace liquid fossil fuels. Subject to availability of sufficient cooling water and electricity, Micro Fusion can be used to enhance production of liquid biofuels such as ethanol and butanol (agriculture based gasoline substitutes) without production of green house gas and without soil depletion.

Due to the vast size of their country Canadians presently consume a lot of liquid fossil fuels for transportation purposes. In Ontario, which contains about one third of the Canadian population, the annual gasoline consumption is about 16,000 million litres, approximately 1316 litres per annum per capita. However, on-going large scale use of liquid fossil fuels is not sustainable due to depletion of petroleum reserves and due to fossil carbon dioxide related global warming.

Most of Canada is subject to a near polar climate. Almost every building in Canada has both a space heating system and a potable water heating system. Canada's total per capita fossil fuel consumption is extraordinarily high, in part because of the large volumes of fossil fuels that are used for winter space heating, potable water heating and like purposes.

The section titled Micro Fusion contains a subsection that focuses on production of liquid biofuels.

Micro Fusion is expected to play a critical role in reduction of net global carbon dioxide emissions by converting plant carbohydrate into liquid hydrocarbon fuels that displace liquid fossil fuels in transportation, space heating and water heating applications.

LIGHTING CONTROL:
Power Line Carrier Lighting Control involves the use of illumination and occupancy sensors to minimize electricity consumption by automatically controlling each lighting fixture to provide only the amount of light required at any particular time. Power Line Carrier signalling is used to minimize system installation costs and to permit maximum application flexibility. Optional central control based on time/day/date and energy management requirements can be provided. This website contains a section devoted to Lighting Control.

CHIEF ENGINEER:
Charles Rhodes, P.Eng., B.Sc., M.A.Sc., Ph.D., is the Chief Engineer of Xylene Power Ltd. Dr. Rhodes has more than 40 years of practical experience that includes development, manufacture, installation, operation and maintenance of: distributed energy control and equipment monitoring systems, high efficiency boilers and co-generation systems.

Other work by Dr. Rhodes has been in the areas of Power line Carrier, RF, VHF, and UHF communication systems, microcontrollers, electricity and heat metering, electricity rate issues, fluorescent lighting, solid state device fabrication, high vacuum systems, cryogenic physics, nuclear energy and the physics of climate change.

This web page last updated May 18, 2010.