The Genesis
I was asked recently to envision where I wanted to be. If I could spend my time doing anything, what would I be doing? Where would I be doing it?
The answer came easily:
I would be in the center of a vibrant hub of innovation, a place buzzing with excitement and creativity. I’m inventing and problem-solving alongside others.
We’re designing elegant solutions to people’s problems, what we make is clever, useful, and beautiful.
The facility we work in is a living testament to our design ethos and methods. The building sits on a river and operates like a beaver’s dam. Instead of polluting, the facility actually repairs, builds, and nourishes the local ecosystem. It purifies the water, it expands habitat, it builds soil.
This vision was so compelling that I found myself coming back to it over and over. It occurred to me that it would be worthwhile to try to articulate it more clearly and fully.
The Concept
STEM+CEL stands for Science Technology, Engineering & Math Community Economic Laboratory.
At it’s core, the STEM+CEL is a self-replicating factory.
Every STEM+CEL factory contains the essential manufacturing technology to produce industrial machinery. It can not only replicate itself, but also many other specialized CELs that perform unique functions, precisely like its namesake, the stem cell.
The GreenLab is one of the many CEL offshoots that delineate from the STEM+CEL. The GreenLab is an R&D facility for sustainable products, most likely housed within a research university or international design firm.
While the STEM+CEL is involved in heavy industry, things that will likely require (at least initially) pollution mitigation efforts, the GreenLab is a facility that is as close to a fully circular natural system as possible.
An excellent articulation of this vision of circularity is outlined in a book called Cradle to Cradle, by green architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart.
Everything is a resource for something else. In nature, the “waste” of one system becomes food for another. Everything can be designed to be disassembled and safely returned to the soil as biological nutrients, or re-utilized as high quality materials for new products as technical nutrients without contamination.
Nutrient Flow
In my concept, the GreenLab fully embodies the closed-loop systems of regenerative nutrient cycles described in the Cradle to Cradle model.
For instance:
The grounds of the factory could include a small forest of fast-growing bamboo. The bamboo would be sustainably harvested on-site for use as a raw material (perhaps ground and combined with a biodegradable resin) to iterate into physical shapes as part of the product design process.
All off-cuts, as well as any discarded models could be composted and turned back into soil for the forest.
Additionally, intermediate steps such as fermenting the ground pulp of the bamboo (prior to composting) to create solvents such as alcohol or vinegar, would be possible as well.
Further, anaerobic biodigestion of the bamboo scraps could be used to generate biogas which could be burned cleanly to heat the facilities, or in any other industrial process, like recycling aluminum.
Power Generation
A crucial element of the GreenLab, and the STEM+CEL more broadly, is that generates 100% of the power it requires. In the most idealized version, it is so hyper-efficient that it actually generates a net positive amount of energy.
While the roof could be used for solar panels, a far superior energy-generating method comes from its hybrid-hydro system. Plus, a living roof is just sexier.
*I seem to have found the Achilles heel of Google’s Gemini AI, it is deeply confused by water wheels…
The GreenLab’s water wheel would be a serious upgrade from the wooden water wheels of yore. Mechanical hydropower was abandoned as a serious technology a long time ago and, from what I understand, there has been little advancement in the technology since the late industrial revolution. This seems like an area ripe for revisiting— I imagine that with our modern understanding of fluid dynamics, materials science, and physics that huge gains could be made in overall power generation, efficiency, scalability, replicability, and cost.
I would re-imagine water wheels as power columns.
Water is sticky. You might not think of it that way, but tiny water droplets on your window, they’ll stay there all day. Capitalizing on this adhesive property of water, Nikola Tesla designed a water turbine that (he claimed) is far more efficient than the conventional impeller style. Not a scientist, but it seems like an interesting place to start.
The vision that I had of this would be a series of vertical columns stacked with these discs. Each column would have to be partially encased, or somehow have the water flow shaped and directed to cause the columns to spin. In this way, the column could be fully submerged in the water, something a conventional water wheel cannot do. This also solves for changes in water level. The water level drops in a drought? Less power, but not a problem. Water level surges in a flood? That’s actually beneficial. It would generate maximum power.
Google’s AI had trouble understanding this concept, so forgive the incomplete visualization of the idea. Still, hopefully, this makes it a little clearer:
I think you get the idea.
The power column concept could promise continual power generation in nearly all conditions. It would also have a much (much) smaller ecological footprint than that of a dammed hydropower station, and be far more reliable and powerful than a traditional water wheel.
A key feature of the GreenLab’s harnessing of hydropower would be its direct mechanical drive.
Before electricity, water wheels powered machinery through direct drive or with a series of belts and pulleys. Incredibly complex industrial operations (like making cloth) used to be operated entirely with the mechanical power of water wheels. Modern cities were developed, in large part, around their ability to capitalize on the industrial-scale power that rivers can provide.
This is where the real efficiency is gained. As Low-Tech Magazine’s Kris De Decker explains:
In a modern hydropower installation, a water turbine converts the energy in the moving water into rotational energy at its shaft, which is then converted into electrical energy by the generator that is coupled to the turbine. Next, the electrical energy is converted back into rotational energy by the electric motor of the machine that is being powered. Every energy conversion introduces energy loss…
In an old fashioned hydropower installation, there was only one conversion of energy; A water wheel converted the energy inherent to the water source into rotational energy at its shaft. The same shaft also moved the machinery, so that the only source of significant energy loss occured in the water wheel itself…
The higher efficiency of direct hydropower brings important advantages. If the intermediate step of generating electricity is bypassed, considerably more power can be gathered and utilized from a given head (the vertical distance travelled by the water) and water flow rate (the amount of water that runs down a stream). This advantage can be used to increase the energy production of an existing water power site. It also means that more potential water power sites become available, and that relatively small streams and rivers can be shared by several hydropower units. [emphasis added]
This is a crucial function of the Hybrid Hydro system of the GreenLab, it is primarily a mechanical system. Will it also generate electricity? Of course. The electricity will be valuable for a variety of functions that mechanical energy can’t accomplish: lighting, electronics, and selling power to the grid. My favorite part, what makes this a truly hybrid system, is that certain machines will utilize computerized speed governance.
As I’ve learned in my work in the manufacturing sector, there are certain materials that must be operated on at precise speeds. Stainless steel, for instance, requires much lower speeds for milling and machining than, say, aluminum. While I imagine that a purely mechanical system could be devised to keep these speeds within a tolerable range of consitency, I think it would be far more apporachable (and precise) to have a computer monitoring the speeds in real time and continually suppressing or boosting the speed to acheive a seamless constant. Even with this light overlay of electronic management, I imagine the efficiency would still be far superior to that of a purely electric system.
Again, not a scientist, but this seems intuitively correct and totally feasible with the clever application of existing technology.
Next Steps
While there are (many) more thoughts I have about how this GreenLab could function, the sorts of programs it would offer, and the relationship that people would have to the machines themselves, but I’ll save those thoughts for a later time.
My primary goal here is to get the ball rolling, share this idea, test it against the constructively critical eyes of others, find collaborators, and to signal my intention and committment to bringing this into the world.
Have thoughts?
I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment below or message me directly through the Substack App.
:)
P.S. please enjoy these strange and fascinating AI interpretations of the STEM+CEL / GreenLab
Sounds fascinating. I’m not anything close to a STEM geek, but I love your collaborative vision. I am a plant nerd and student of permaculture so those regenerative principles fit right in with your plan.
Love it! A leafy green way of creating energy, combining old and new technologies. It's a shame my friend Alan Scott Robinson isn't here anymore to talk with you about turbulence and how he got it out of fountain water. Let's talk about how the vertical water wheels would work--it's a fascinating concept! And send your piece to Maria Finnerty. I think she would love it.