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#18: Next Generation Microgrids; The Burning Man Sculptor Behind SolarWing
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In this episode, we speak world renowned sculptor and designer, Zach Coffin who has helped redefine the limits of large-scale kinetic art, both ‘on Playa’ in the context of the Burning Man experience, and through publicly accessible and interactive municipal art projects in cities around the world. Zach joins us in New Orleans from his home base in the San Francisco Bay area. As Chief Technology Officer at Helios Industries, Zach is now leveraging his sculpture, engineering, and design background to develop cutting edge renewable energy microgrid gen sets that hold the promise of completely transforming humanity’s relationship to mobile energy generation, freeing us from the noise, pollution, and safety issues associated with diesel and other internal combustion (ICE) generators.
Zach shares his pithy take on the art world and the importance of climate action, as well as details about his personal journey as an artist, innovator, and climate technology developer. Along the way, we learn about origins of the now ubiquitous ‘Twenty foot equivalent unit’ (TEU) shipping container, which has since revolutionized global shipping, and how the Burning Man event has evolved with regard to large interactive art, urban planning, and sustainability.
Please visit the episode 18 webpage to find additional links, references and background information.
GUEST BIO:
Zach Coffin
Helios Industries
Founding Partner and Chief Technology Officer
Zach is a globally recognized sculptor with an extensive portfolio of installations. His primary artistic domain is the creation of large scale kinetic sculptures using structural steel, stone, and other materials. His creations are designed to evoke awe in the seemingly impossible, such as giant floating slabs of stone or massive metal structures which move gently with the wind. He achieves this by implementing his vision through detailed design, mechanical engineering and precise machining combined with a deep understanding of the properties of the metal and materials used to form his works.
Zach has been building large-scale kinetic and interactive sculpture for over 25 years. His work draws from engineering and the history of industry for a visual language that is practical and dramatic yet unadorned. He has received multiple public and private commissions throughout the United States and Europe.
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Transcript
Humanity's Resilience: Roaches and Future Prospects
00:00:00
Speaker
I happen to be very, very worried about humanity's survival with with the early knowledge of climate change and global warming. And what I realized is that humans were not exactly unlike roaches in the sense that we were not going to die. We were not going to perish as a species. It became really clear to me that that and some portion of humanity would survive no matter what happened because of our creativity.
00:00:25
Speaker
and our resilience. So the question becomes, what's the nature of that existence? Would it be harsh and crude and brutal? Or would it be gorgeous and amazing and aesthetically pleasing?
Technology as Savior: Climate Solutions Beyond Trees
00:00:36
Speaker
and There is a movement now, and and I agree with it completely, that we can envision a brighter future, that technology got us into this mess, and technology is gonna be what brings us out. So we're not gonna solve the problem by planting more trees and by burning less fuel.
00:00:52
Speaker
We're going to solve the problem by finding better solutions that make life better and solve the
Diesel Generator Replacement: Free Power for Resilience
00:00:57
Speaker
problem. In a way, it's kind of as transformative as the shipping container where you know what used to take a week to unload the ship, you could unload and load that same volume in five minutes. What we're building is a replacement for generators, particularly diesel generators of the 25 to 50 kilowatt level.
00:01:15
Speaker
By flipping that paradigm on its head and creating a unit that will basically produce free power for the next 20 years, then it becomes a real question of what can we use these electrons for? In New Orleans, there's a real visceral understanding that climate change is happening and that is incumbent upon us to figure out more resilient ways to handle the storms, catastrophes, droughts,
00:01:43
Speaker
You know, all the heat waves, all of those things that are they're hitting us.
Zach Coffin: Sculptor, Designer, and Kinetic Art Innovator
00:01:47
Speaker
Welcome to the Blue Economy Primer, a New Orleans based podcast where you learn from the experts the practical tools and solution sets that will empower your community to adapt and thrive in a new blue era of rising seas and economic discontinuity. Today, we're speaking with a world renowned sculptor and designer who has helped redefine the limits of large scale kinetic art.
00:02:09
Speaker
both on Playa in the context of the Burning Man experience and through publicly accessible and interactive municipal art projects in cities around the world. Zach Coffin joins us in New Orleans from his home base in the San Francisco Bay Area. Zach is now developing cutting-edge renewable energy microgrid gen sets that hold the promise of completely changing humanity's relationship to mobile generators, freeing us from the noise, pollution, and safety issues associated with diesel generators.
00:02:37
Speaker
Zach, thanks so much for joining us on the Blue Economy Primer.
From Photography to Sculpting: Zach's Artistic Evolution
00:02:40
Speaker
Can you introduce yourself to our audience, please? ah Sure. I was born in Atlanta. And right after high school, I was lucky enough to become a newspaper photographer um for a daily newspaper of law and business back in the era when newspapers actually still made money. And through that, I got a scholarship at the Cooper Union in New York City for the art school.
00:03:03
Speaker
I went to art school and started pursuing sculpture with a ah specific focus on kinetic work, and I started my early ah sort of complex relationship with gravity, ah exploring ways that sculpture could be sort of ah seemingly to defy gravity, take advantage of the strength of materials to try to change the way we think about gravity um and and materials and mass.
Disillusionment and Public Art: Coffin's Art World Journey
00:03:36
Speaker
During that process, I lived in a bunch of different places in New York being a poor student, including living on an anchored ferry in the in the Hudson River. I have some very distinct memories of pulling with just myself a giant boat, with you know and basically the the the difference was the friction was dropped to zero, and that informed a lot of my work in the future.
00:04:05
Speaker
um Because I was in at Cooper Union and enmeshed in the modern art world, the contemporary art world at the time, i was it was in the early 90s, and that was during the period where the art world, it seemed to me, was being taken over by this very superficial realm where art was basically becoming a method for money laundering, for very, very sophisticated money laundering. And it didn't seem like any um particularly interesting intellectual ideas were being pursued, nor was there a particular interest in advancing craft. And during that time, I became quite disillusioned with the modern art
00:04:46
Speaker
the contemporary art world at that time. I did, however, gain a year-long artist-in-residency at Socrates' Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, which was created and run by a pretty revolutionary artist, a very well-known blue-chip artist named Marc de Souverault.
00:05:05
Speaker
And that was my first exposure to utilizing very large equipment and the the possibilities of kinetic interactive art where you place giant sculpture in an unsupervised setting so that the people who weren't necessarily looking for an art experience would encounter and possibly have very dramatic and and conceivably transformational experiences with art.
San Francisco and Burning Man: A Shift in Artistic Perspective
00:05:32
Speaker
So that led me on a whole path of seeking ways to build large-scale kinetic public art that was interactive and yet be safe. And this is extremely difficult, and it led me on a whole number of journeys. And in the process, I gained a lot of experience in machine work, welding, um aspects of you know law, liability,
00:06:01
Speaker
you know I was basically created a set of work that was the the law the lawyer's definition of an attractive nuisance. um There was also a bunch of other things that I learned over a 30-year career of doing big public art that of about corrosion, wear and tear, galvanic corrosion, different materials, and that kind of thing. So all of this informs what I'm doing today.
00:06:26
Speaker
So how did you get from New York City out to the Bay Area and then out into the Burning Man world? Leaving New York, um I basically fled the art world and decided that I was not going to be an artist, that I was going to focus on building quality objects and move to San Francisco during the the early 90s. I think I moved there in 1993, maybe 1994, which is a really amazing and in fertile time to be in San Francisco.
00:06:57
Speaker
And I started building um I started a shop with a with another fellow and we were building all different kinds of all kinds of things primarily for the Academy of Art College. During that time, one of the people that I was supervising um insisted that we go out to Burning Man, and this was in 1996, and Burning Man was quite small, not very well known. I think the tickets were $65 or something like that. So I went out to Burning Man almost on a whim and basically went through three days, which changed my life.
00:07:29
Speaker
um One of the things that I recognized during that time with crazy dancing and crazy parties in the middle of one of the most hostile and environments on the planet, I happened to be very, very worried about humanity's survival with with the early knowledge of climate change and global warming.
00:07:48
Speaker
And what I realized is that from that process is that humans were not exactly unlike roaches in the sense that we were not going to die. We were not going to perish as a species. It became really clear to me that that and some portion of humanity would survive no matter what happened because of our creativity.
00:08:07
Speaker
and our resilience. But then, so the question becomes, what's the nature of that existence? Would it be harsh and crude and brutal? Or would it be gorgeous and amazing and aesthetically and hythetically pleasing?
Metallurgy and Kinetics: Interactive Art in Birmingham
00:08:21
Speaker
So that sort of re- reinvigorated my interest in in art, because I realized that aesthetics became aesthetics were really critical and inspiration was really critical for for the human soul for what we need as a species. But you also have experience working in the southeast, right?
00:08:42
Speaker
So I basically picked up, and on ah on a tip, I packed up all my stuff and moved to Birmingham, Alabama, right after Burning Man, because I found i got a tip that there was a there was ah large sculpture facility or a large sculpture space available for exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
00:09:03
Speaker
and there was a patron base there that was very interested in um supporting the kind of industrial scale work that I was you know starting to really pursue. So I went to Birmingham, Alabama, did a show of three large pieces called Industrial Jungle, very well received solo solo show at the museum, um and started selling about one large piece a year in Birmingham. Bought a house,
00:09:29
Speaker
um and was you know focused on building really large-scale stuff. It was also in birm in Birmingham that I started to really understand the nature of metallurgy, strength of materials, the possibilities of precision machine work.
00:09:45
Speaker
and the possibilities of kinetics. It was also in Birmingham that I built the first of my um of what became a whole series of works called rock spinners, where I mounted a large rough boulder on a bearing at its exact center axis of balance, which would allow a two-year-old to spin a 9,000-pound rock.
00:10:07
Speaker
And my thinking there was to completely transform um so the way we the way we relate to our our world. with the understood like Everyone understands the weight of a large boulder. And if you go up to a big boulder, you are not going to be able to push it.
00:10:25
Speaker
But by mounting it on a precision bearing, it transformed that relationship through friction. And and that hearkens back to my experience in the Hudson River of pulling you know a 30,000-pound boat boat by myself, right because the the water water may drops friction almost to zero. So I was searching for a way to get something like that without having to you know be in
Sculpture to Solar Design: Creativity Meets Sustainability
00:10:50
Speaker
water be on water, float a boat, or that kind of thing.
00:10:53
Speaker
Can you explain to us how your interest in renewable power generation evolved out of your initial sculpture work? That was sort of the the genesis of the the work that I did for 30 years and led directly to the the work that I'm doing now with the with the design for the solar solar generator.
00:11:14
Speaker
During that time, in order to keep my connection to the Bay Area, I kept going to Burning Man, so I would drive across the country and and have that experience. And um in 2000, almost as ah as a joke, I proposed bringing a large rock to the event. um the The theme that year was the body. And I figured I would provide the kidney stone for the body because they laid out the ah the theory of the man flat on the ground. and Charlie Smith, another well-known Atlanta artist, did the did an anatomically correct heart. I just brought in a kidney stone. And Larry Harvey, the founder of the event, thought that was very funny and then asked me if I would make it spin. So the next year, I built the first rock spinner out there at Burning Man, which was a 23,000-pound boulder that you could spin. It was pretty remarkable.
00:12:09
Speaker
So that sort of launched this whole career of of you know big rocks, big rocks moving that I have continued to explore for for some years. So Temple of Gravity is 2003? Yes, 2003. So I did the rock. I did a brought out a big rock, which I call the Sisyphus Project. And then I made that rock spin, um in which case i it was kind of yeah I left the rock out there in the desert. We move it to a nearby ranch.
00:12:36
Speaker
And then I built the built a machine to lift the rock and mounted on a bearing and a bearing and shipped all that from Atlanta. And then on the p playa, we hung this huge rock
Logistics Revolution: Shipping Containers at Burning Man
00:12:47
Speaker
and and made it spin. It was an incredibly. um It was it was a very difficult project and taught me a lot about not doing work on the playa, if you can, if you can help it. So a lot of pre planning, pre design.
00:13:04
Speaker
um I sort of ran out of, ran out of rope in Birmingham, Alabama and needed to make a change. So I moved back to Atlanta because I found there was a, there was a a set of artists who had done a warehouse complex. And so I bought into that warehouse complex.
00:13:20
Speaker
um And then the um sort of the theme of the year in 2003 was um faith. I think it was faith. Yeah, it was faith. And being somebody who does not come from the church and is pretty much looks at the world from a scientific perspective,
00:13:41
Speaker
I figured the only thing that I truly had faith in was gravity. And so I built a temple for gravity, which consisted of five ah pipes to make a big dome, um five stones to anchor that dome at the bottom, and then five hanging slabs of granite that weighed anywhere from 15,000 to 17,000 pounds each.
00:14:07
Speaker
um We actually fabricated everything, did all the stone work, the quarry work in Georgia and then shipped everything out to Burning Man. How did you manipulate pieces of rock that big once you were actually on site?
00:14:19
Speaker
Burning Man had never had a piece of that kind of scale, and they didn't have the equipment to install it. So I opened the phone book back then, it was before the internet, I opened the phone book and found a crane operator in Reno, who unlike all the other crane crane guys, who you know all the other guys were like, well, you know it'll be at eight hours minimum with you know overtime and so on and such forth. And it was really clear that that would be cost prohibitive. And I finally found this guy named Richard Scott,
00:14:50
Speaker
who said, hey pal, that sounds like a lot of fun. And so he came out with a 40 ton crane, which which is way bigger than had ever been at Burning Man before. And we put together we put together the piece. And it was to a large extent transformative for the art at Burning Man because it it showed the possibilities of very large scale work and it was work that was actually um not sort of a there was some there were large large things being built at Burning Man at the time but they were all sort of in the sort of theater set sort of tradition whereas lightweight and it was you know it was all kind of a a facade and I wanted to deal with the the real thing the the real object and
00:15:38
Speaker
And you cannot—you can't fake mass. Mass is something you can't—there's no way that you can fake the feeling of interacting with a hanging 17,000-pound slab of stone. And the work was—it was a ah smashing success. it People still talk about it to this day because it— really transform the way they had thought about gravity, the way they had thought about art out at Burning Man, and it was a piece that matched the scale of the playa. And scale is really important um with with ah in a context of outdoor art.
00:16:13
Speaker
So I'd like to ask you about how the containerization of Burning Man happened. But before we go there, could you give us a little bit of a background about the phenomena of the shipping container at a global scale and how that became such a ubiquitous tool for shipping, et cetera? Because I was there at Burning Man really early, 1996, I think there were maybe four or five thousand people out there that year. And it was a pretty pivotal year for Burning Man. And I also didn't think that it would survive. And lo and behold, it did.
00:16:44
Speaker
I watched Burning Man transform from a bunch of janky stuff on trucks that were brought out every year. And by logic, they started you know it was inevitable that they started putting everything in containers and using large forklifts to just lift the whole container and put it on the Playa. So you didn't have to load and unload a truck, which is tremendously labor intensive.
00:17:07
Speaker
And containers have their own their own logic, and it matches what what happened at Burning Man matches pretty closely what happened with but with the rest of the world, with containerization. And the container the container phenomena happened. There's two really good books on it. One of them is 99% of Everything.
Internal Combustion vs. Solar: The Generator Dilemma
00:17:27
Speaker
And the other is The Box. And they're both um really good histories about how the shipping container um basically took over the world and transformed our civilization.
00:17:40
Speaker
And I could be wrong on the little de on the details, but I think it was in the 50s that a sort of maverick entrepreneur in New Jersey needed to figure out a way to um to ship more efficiently. I think he was running stuff down to Florida maybe.
00:17:58
Speaker
and the the costs for shipping were tremendously high back then because you had to hire Union stevedores to unload ships by hand and it would take days if not weeks to load and unload ships and so he started experimenting with um first i think he did trucks he would just pick the whole trailer and put them on and then eventually he arrived and i'm not sure the the details are all in the books but the that They arrived on the shipping container standard, which has now basically transformed industry and transformed the way we move goods around the planet um and ah in a way that we don't even see today, but it is utterly transformative economically and what it's made possible.
00:18:44
Speaker
And basically, they decided on an 8 by 20 foot, not metric, um standard. And the um the main entrepreneur, one of the critical things that he did was that he did not patent that design, which basically released it to everyone and allowed it to become the international standard for shipping.
00:19:07
Speaker
um And the the the ability to take 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of material, pack it into a metal box, and then move it from ship to train to truck with in one move, taking minutes rather than days, was utterly transformative for the for the economics. So how does that relate to the logistics of the Burning Man event?
00:19:29
Speaker
So when i since I was going to Burning Man every year, and after i the the as a a little aside, the crane operator I hired for the Temple of Gravity turned around and started the heavy equipment division at Burning Man and brought all of his expertise with large equipment and heavy equipment that that that frankly wasn't really available to the Burning Man community because They were all a bunch of anarchist partiers from San Francisco with no real heavy equipment experience. So he brought in a whole wealth of of heavy equipment experience, and I watched as the the organization transformed, as it kept growing. and which The population was doubling every year, basically starting in 1996 until the tickets sold out sometime in the—I'm not sure exactly when, but it was in the mid-2000s, I think.
00:20:22
Speaker
um So I watched it grow into this gigantic organization, but they had all these logistical needs and a very narrow window of time to bring everything out to playa because of the federal—the permit time was limited by the federal government. So they had to bring everything out in less than two weeks.
00:20:43
Speaker
So um also as an aside, I became a crane operator for Burning Man, got my crane operator's license, and I continue to do that to this day, helping artists in camps build their work. It's very rewarding and interesting work. How many containers are we talking about? I watched as Burning Man transformed, and without increasing the installation time of the city, they were we were in a the the Heavy Equipment Division started to um bring out at least 1,000 shipping containers owned by the organization.
00:21:18
Speaker
and at least a thousand shipping containers that were brought in by the participants. And so we were able to build a city of nearly 80,000 people in something like seven to eight days. Really remarkable, right? Now, how does power generation come into play?
00:21:34
Speaker
During that time also, the number of ICE generators, which is internal combustion engine, primarily diesel but also gasoline, um exploded.
00:21:45
Speaker
um people People went from living in tents and sort of camping out to full-on luxury um with air conditioners and all the accoutrements of an elaborate and orgiastic party, if if you if you will.
00:22:01
Speaker
um But as part of that generator, that that explosion of generators, we had a huge increase in noise, a definite increase in sort of like fumes that you would smell walking by. That and the Porta Johns became kind of a ubiquitous smell thing. And then what i really what really bothered me was the heat island effect and the fact that it was very noticeable in the two nearly 30 years that I've gone to Burning Man, the increase in warmth.
00:22:28
Speaker
um And some of that is probably due to global warming. As I look looked around at my nomadic life, I realized that the only time that I was in one place on the planet at the same time every year was at Burning Man. And so during that time, I had a point of reference. And in the early years, it was always really cold at night. In fact, there were some there were a series of years that I always showed up with.
00:22:51
Speaker
with heavy winter gear because of some of the cold. And now I barely bring a coat because it's just basically almost always warm, especially at night. And a big part of this is the generators. And also, you know, as somebody who's aware of what we're—of the impact we're having on the planet, I felt very um conflicted and troubled by the fact that, you know, a bunch of,
Engineering Solar Solutions: Challenges and Innovations
00:23:15
Speaker
you know, relatively wealthy, privileged white people were going out to the middle of nowhere dragging thousands and thousands of gallons of fossil fuels out and basically burning it to air condition our tents. um And it never felt right, especially when one of the biggest things that we were battling out there was the massive incredible amount of solar radiation that was just coming down every single day.
00:23:37
Speaker
So combining all of those aspects, what you see is the possibilities of all those containers and the speed of deployment of containers. I started working on a design which would utilize the TEU envelope, which is 20-foot equivalent unit. It's a very strange acronym, but it is the standard it's the the industry standard ah ah term for a 20-foot shipping container.
00:24:01
Speaker
um So I started designing a 20-foot shipping container that would have and a set of unfoldable wings using basically a the same technique and design as a scissor lift, but just making it project sideways, um and started toying with the geometry of that and the in the deployment aspects of that.
00:24:23
Speaker
in that In the process of working on that design, I was invited to be one of the fellows at BlackRock Labs. And David Shearer, the founder of BlackRock Labs, which is the nonprofit sustainability arm of Burning Man, introduced me to Ryan Martana, and we became business partners to develop this idea.
00:24:44
Speaker
Ryan had experience in solar and batteries so we had a good skill match and we started developing this prototype. As I started getting into it, I realized that I didn't have the engineering chops nor the ability to model the forces for the scissor properly and doing giant cantilever beams is one of the the most stressful things you can do to a beam. Cantilever is the toughest.
00:25:07
Speaker
So I recruited my good friend and boss at Burning Man, Andy Moore, we call him Bruiser. He's a mechanical engineer with ah decades of experience in heavy equipment in the in large, big, big, big cranes. and And he stepped in and did all the FEA analysis on the scissor beams. And kind of amusingly, my first design, when we put it in the computer model and mapped the forces,
00:25:32
Speaker
The beams crumpled as if they were an aluminum foil. So we had to really beef up the scissors and kept—it was a whole iterative process where we could make the scissors strong enough. And this is also—it was well matched because— Andy has a lot of really practical experience and particularly in cranes where the implications of failure are dire. ah Millions of dollars, lives lost, that kind of thing when there's a crane failure. So my sort of risk-taking behavior was an attitude towards that kind of thing was really mitigated by his
00:26:10
Speaker
very conservative understanding that we would have people hanging out, living, camping underneath these wings. So he required a certain um safety factor that um as time has gone by and as we've tested the unit in real world circumstances, I really appreciate that that conservative approach. And it also makes me very confident that these units will last 20, 30 years without any problem.
00:26:35
Speaker
As we started this, COVID hit. And I had, by chance, I had had a stack of commissions that ah with public art public art commissions. so And COVID shut everything down. So I had the luxury of working the design using CAD and redesigning and redesigning and redesigning the the design. And it took about a year and a half to two years to not only come up with a workable design, but to um you know design the scissors so that they would resist um the the forces and be relatively simple to engineer, build, and to to deploy. um So that was ah a tremendous, it was it was a an odd gift to have that time um to to work those things out because of because of COVID.
00:27:26
Speaker
Right about the time when Burning Man was starting back up, sort of at the end of the epidemic, we managed to use my studio at American Steel in Oakland to build our first prototype. And it was one of those times of magic where, um unfortunately, American Steel was this remarkable artist community of—and I had been there for 10 years with my studio under a 10-ton bridge crane, um good truck access and all that.
00:27:53
Speaker
But these basically, these real estate development jerks from Portland came, bought the building, and kicked everyone out. And there wasn't any negotiation possible. We were just told to leave. It just so happens that as everyone was leaving from my bay, which is large industrial bays under a 10-ton bridge crane, during that time, everyone around me started to move out. And so as we needed more space to build the first unit,
00:28:21
Speaker
More space became available. It a building during the time of grace. It was kind of a remarkable thing to watch. so we So we built the first unit. It was a struggle. We were bootstrapping everything. We didn't have enough money. You know, everything is hard in the startup world.
00:28:39
Speaker
But the prototype works and it worked out of the box. um It was kind of remarkable the prototype the first one we built was called dragon wings and We took it out to Burning Man and it and it worked it worked flawlessly There's some real key aspects to the design that are really important One, um the fast deployment, um so you could pick it off a truck and you could you could ah move it within minutes with a large forklift or with a specialized side lifter machine for for moving containers. And the machinery to move containers, TEUs, is ubiquitous worldwide. we can We can basically get a container nearly anywhere on the planet now. There is the resources to do that.
00:29:22
Speaker
So it was really important that it that it conformed to the shipping container standard. um The other thing that that became really important was that um it had a zero footprint. And what i what i but I mean by that is that space is very valuable at Burning Man during the event in the city, right? Space is a premium. Like, I've seen near-fist weights fights break out over eight inches of of a of a property line between camps that, you know,
00:29:52
Speaker
I would still be there six days later, and it was a barren wasteland. So it was this very ephemeral value thing that happened. So I knew that if we had a large solar array, it would have real implications for the for the use of the ground.
00:30:08
Speaker
So by making this unit um unsupported so they cantilevered wings and then placing this unit on top of ah the existing thousand or two thousand shipping containers that were out there, the effect was zero
Manufacturing in New Orleans: A Solar Future
00:30:21
Speaker
footprint. It had no effect on the on the real estate of the of the city itself. And the big bonus is you get a 90-85 foot wings of of shade. You got hard shade that was high, high in the air. so you could park under it, you could put your tents under it. Whatever you had, you could put under the shade and shade is really important for because the sun is so intense out there. And the other really critical thing is the storms come up very quickly without warning at Burning Man. The other thing that is different than a lot of other solar installations is that we gave it a brain. So with wind sensors and other ways of being aware of the environment around it. And so whenever the wind would kick up to a certain level,
00:31:02
Speaker
We designed it so it would automatically retract um and self-protect in the wind. So it worked out to be a really good design and some aspects that we didn't even consider in the beginning were really pretty remarkable. One of them was that by closing up automatically, the panels would go vertical, which would knock off any accumulated dust, which was always a huge problem for big solar arrays out at Burning Man. They would accumulate a lot of dust and you would either have to go and wash them every day or you're um solar generation would drop dramatically from that. So that was one aspect that was really good. And the other thing we discovered kind of in the middle of it is that if we closed it just about 10% in wind, it became much more rigid. So there was waste and it would still generate power, maybe not quite as much, but it would still generate power.
00:31:53
Speaker
So we went through that process, the whole startup thing, trying to raise money, trying to figure out how to manufacture to scale. All these things are actually really, really hard. It's like Elon Musk is no no hero of mine, but he did say at one point building a prototype is easy, manufacturing at scale is really hard. And that is true and that continues to be true.
00:32:16
Speaker
So we built another prototype, um the parted ways as a business partnership. And I'm now in the New Orleans area working with some remarkable fellows to um build the next generation design. I've completely redesigned it. I've made it, given it more power, more storage, um a lot of big advantages, lighter weight, easier to manufacture. um All of these things are part of the the next generation design.
00:32:46
Speaker
So why come to Southeast Louisiana with this idea? It seems to make a lot of sense to manufacture in the
Solar Technology's Impact: Disaster Relief and Beyond
00:32:52
Speaker
New Orleans area for for a variety of reasons, but the critical ones are that there's not a ah a very large um venture, ah you know, startup investment culture here, but it is— here and it's vibrant and it's enthusiastic um and they're also not dealing with the you know constant influx of pitches and ideas that the Bay Area is because so many people have made so much money in the Bay Area with apps and other things. There's a culture there of um both constant pitching and also
00:33:29
Speaker
ah a culture of the venture capital there that really expects irrational returns. um that are not really they They work well for apps, but they don't really work it doesn't work very well for manufacturing because manufacturing by its very nature is complicated and is a relatively low margin business and there's just no real way around it.
00:33:50
Speaker
The other big thing in New Orleans is there's a real understanding, a real visceral understanding here that climate change is happening. It is upon us and it is incumbent upon us to figure out more resilient ways to handle the the on the the oncoming climate um storms, catastrophes, droughts.
00:34:11
Speaker
you know All the heat waves, all of those things that are are hitting us, people in New Orleans know that stuff is coming in a really gut-level way. um So the it just it seems to resonate. There's also a tremendous manufacturing base here, and there's a long, long history of of energy, of energy being a really critical part of the economy.
00:34:34
Speaker
um But there's also recognition that that energy is all oil, it's all fossil-based, and it's going to cook us if we keep doing this thing. But, you know, you have to have an economy in order to make any kind of changes. So all of that infrastructure, all that industrial infrastructure, a lot of industrial knowledge um and tooling are here.
00:34:55
Speaker
And there's a real willingness to explore other other ways of producing the energy and and supporting the economy. And this design, it fits very well. It's not incredibly difficult to build, um and it and it fits very well within the skill sets that are readily available here.
00:35:17
Speaker
So those things, along with this remarkable network that seems to be centered around the New Society and Tim Williamson, and the the network that's that's formed around it with ah really good folks who are not only willing to take a little bit of risk,
00:35:33
Speaker
but really want to see New Orleans thrive and really want to see the economy transform to a sustainable one. So it feels like the culture is right. It feels like the industry is right. It feels like the costs are much better than California. It is much easier to manufacture its scale here.
00:35:51
Speaker
And then there's all this um both federal and state incentives to go green. um And then there's a whole lot of um sort of what we would normally be called Republican businessmen who have recognized that green means green, as in greenbacks.
00:36:08
Speaker
And so there's a lot of enthusiasm and interest in what and what we're planning on doing. So it feels to me like it'll be possible to scale um ah scale this technology in a way that would be um not only you know be a thriving business and provide a lot of jobs for the economy, but has the potential to transform the energy sector and really um set this this area on a much more sustainable path.
00:36:36
Speaker
So I want to remind our listeners that we'll have lots of links available to some of the references that Zach is talking about including those books and of course his website where you can see some of this amazing artwork that he's done these these large-scale sculptures. So Zach you've talked about how climate change is palpable around the world and particularly affecting this region. How do you see the use of solution sets like the solar wing growing and changing the way people use energy?
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, first of all, understand that that what we're building is a ah is a replacement for generators, particularly diesel generators of the 25 to 50 kilowatt level.
00:37:14
Speaker
um And generators, um there's there's really no mobile solution um to replace generators out there now. And generators are loud, smelly, expensive. um They are contributing directly to the to the global warming. um And you have to provide fuel, a constant constant amount of fuel.
00:37:38
Speaker
So by flipping that paradigm on its head and creating a unit that will basically produce free power for the next 20 years, then it becomes a real question of what can we use these electrons for.
00:37:54
Speaker
On a sunny day, we're going to average between 150 and 180 kilowatt hours a day of generation and we can store a lot of it in batteries. And we're we're able to leverage the EV industry batteries to, to um you know, the EV industry is is really bringing down the cost of batteries so that we can do a lot of storage. We can easily do two to three days of generation storage in these units.
00:38:22
Speaker
So then you have a situation where you have—you can replace a generator in any situation, but unlike a generator which costs between 60 cents and 80 cents a kilowatt hour for power, you've got a situation where you're making power every day for zero dollars, for zero—marginal costs. just the It's just the capital cost of the unit.
00:38:42
Speaker
So there's all kinds of situations where they where we can find a use for for electrons um that, in a way, it's kind of trend as transformative as as the as the shipping container, where you know what used to take a week to unload the ship, you could unload and load that same volume in five minutes. We've got a same sort of paradigm shift in the sense that Once you have this unit you have 25 you know 150 to 180 kilowatt hours of power um To use for whatever you want with no marginal cost and the next day you'll have that same amount of power again, right? So there's applications that are just um kind of open to the imagination right um everything from one one idea that I've had is
00:39:32
Speaker
You have a set of autonomous drones, a solar wing on a truck, and a tank of water. You get it, you deploy it as close as you can to ah to a newly emergent fire, forest fire. And then you have a swarm of drones um charging with the solar wing, picking up a gallon of water, and then using infrared technology to find the hottest spot on the fire and drop just a gallon of water.
00:39:56
Speaker
But because you're not using human pilots, you don't have to worry about the safety factor and keeping clearance between the between the flying the the flying vehicles, right? So you can essentially use a ah drone ah drone swarm to put out fires very quickly um with much less use of resources and energy and and and capital equipment than our current paradigm.
00:40:19
Speaker
And that's just one thing, one area. ah You could use it in farming. um A lot of a lot of of vegetables and fruits are lost to rot in the fields. um You could power a refrigerated container so that far and you could move it with the with the harvest so that farm workers could immediately put the fruits and vegetables into refrigerated containers and reduce loss.
00:40:42
Speaker
At the same time, you could have that unit travel with the harvesters and provide shade for them, cooling for them, and atmospheric. You could harvest water, atmos atmospheric water for potable water. So there's all these solutions that we haven't even thought about because the cost of energy was too high.
00:40:59
Speaker
right By pushing the the marginal cost of of power to close to zero, opportunities show up all over the place. Now, of course, there's also um disaster you know disaster relief. You've got um the ability for to have power without the the supply chain problems of diesel. I mean, every time you hear about a major storm, everything gets all messed up. um It's a disaster. Three days later, sunny skies, beautiful weather, it's clear.
00:41:28
Speaker
But there's no power, and they can't get diesel to the generators. And after the first couple days of ah fuel run out, suddenly everyone has these—you know, I mean, a generator without fuel is yeah about as useful as a—it's more useful as a boat anchor than anything else, right?
Tech Optimism: Innovation for a Sustainable Future
00:41:45
Speaker
It has no no particular value.
00:41:47
Speaker
We don't have that problem. we don't have that So pre-staging these before before major weather events so that there's you could set up cooling stations. ah Once again, atmospheric water water harvesting is a real possibility. um yeah like There's basically no situation where humans can't improve life with more electrons. like like We can continuously find new uses for electrons if we have them and then they're not too expensive.
00:42:16
Speaker
um One big issue that's coming up and that's blocking the way of the adoption of EV electric vehicles everywhere is range ah range anxiety. And the problem is is that we are not able to provide enough charging stations and enough places so that people feel comfortable taking their EVs to you know distant areas or places off of the off of the beaten path.
00:42:42
Speaker
And if you look at the costs and timeframe to install charging stations, not not only does it take a lot of engineering and a lot of geotech stuff, and every installation is kind of the same, um requires the same amount of engineering, unique unique permitting, every jurisdiction has their own permitting process, own building department process, so on and such forth.
00:43:05
Speaker
we can flip that whole paradigm on its head by showing up with a solar wing with an EV charger and deploying five minutes, right? So um if you're at national parks, you don't want to drive a long way to a national park with an EV and then not be able to drive home and put yourself in a position where your EV is dead, you've been hiking and you can't you have to hike out, whatever. So we could stage we could put these all different kinds of places and um charge EVs with no marginal fuel costs at all, and that could really hasten the the deployment of EV all all over. So that's just one application, and the the the possibilities are kind of endless.
00:43:50
Speaker
um Cell phone towers all have backup generators because they need their critical infrastructure, and they need to stay up 24-7. Well, if there's a power outage situation or like what's happening in California, where in high wind, dry situations, they just cut the grid off because they can't have the power lines drop into—it start fires, right? So they just shut off the power.
00:44:12
Speaker
Well, cell phones, um ah towers need to stay up and running. and ah Grocery stores need to keep their freezers freezing. Otherwise, you know millions of dollars worth of the food is lost. There's all these situations where you know all of these systems, there's no option for them other than backup diesel generators with all their problems. Well, we could be a replacement for for all different kinds of situations.
00:44:35
Speaker
So it's it's kind of endless. The question it always comes down to what is the capital cost of the equipment and whether we can bring the cost down low enough to make it a real practical solution. And that requires manufacturing to scale. So that's really what we're focused on now. Wow, Zach, thanks so much for sharing some of these ideas. Is there anything else that we haven't had a chance to talk about that you'd like to touch on?
00:44:58
Speaker
Well, I would say that um you know I guess I kind of grew up during a period of doom and gloom about the future and about how global warming is going to end humanity. And I think there is a movement now, and and I agree with it completely, that um you know we can we can envision a brighter future.
00:45:21
Speaker
um that technology got us into this mess and technology is going to be what brings us out. So we're not going to solve the problem by planting more trees and by burning less fuel because humans are just not going to do that.
00:45:34
Speaker
we're gonna solve the problem by finding better solutions that make life better and solve the problem. And I think that it would be really it really behooves us to think positive and recognize that that life can be better and that we can use these and phenomenal tools and these phenomenal technologies. I mean, just in in the last 10 years, the the price of solar panels has dropped, I don't know, what is it, like 100 fold? I mean, it's one of the,
00:46:02
Speaker
One of the greatest things in human history in terms of economics is the both the the price of solar-voltaic electrons, and then on the flip side, the adoption of widespread adoption of LEDs for lighting, it's one of the the greatest economic transformations in history, and that's only happened in the last 10 years. so If we embrace the future and and envision a better, more positive future for humanity, where it's not one of scarcity, but it's one of um you know figuring out ways to help humanity advance and grow and change without um the the the kind of scarcity and suffering that is so often part of the conversation when we discuss global warming and climate change and so on,
00:46:51
Speaker
Yes, it's it's going to be painful and there's going to be some really, really gnarly storms and some some really catastrophic events. But I do think that if we embrace the embrace the future and embrace the technologies that are just now coming online and really practical at scale,
00:47:07
Speaker
We can have a much brighter future and a better and a better ah world for our children than the ones that that are kind of that the the sort of of the current paradigm is is sane and It doesn't mean we should be lackadaisical or Pollyanna ish and just sit on our heels and assume that everything will be fine We're gonna have to work at this But it is possible and the new technologies that are coming in online right now with batteries PV and all the other like hyper efficient things like the new heat pumps and thing and and other aspects are really bringing that technology within grasp for us now.
Engagement and Resources: Podcast Wrap-up
00:47:43
Speaker
Well, Zach, that certainly sounds like a great vision for the future that we'd like to be a part of. Thank you so much again for being on the podcast. We certainly look forward to staying in touch and supporting what you're working on and seeing what comes of Solar Wing in the coming months. Right. It was a pleasure talking to you.
00:47:58
Speaker
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00:48:28
Speaker
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