Five years on

In our regular critical review, Hannah Bullock revisits stories we identified as interesting back in 2001 - and checks where they’re going now.

Sustainable crops take root

Imagine a field where plants grow up year after year without needing to be resown, and which resembles more of a wild prairie than a densely packed expanse of crops… Agronomist Wes Jackson’s vision of a sustainable agricultural system, based on ancient perennial plants, won him an award five years ago [ ‘Perennial food system in spotlight’, GF27].  But how close is he to realising this?

“It’s not an instant solution,” he told us, explaining that we’re looking at 25-50 years before these crops are perfected for commercial planting. His Kansas-based Land Institute’s breeding programme, running for almost 30 years now, has nevertheless made significant steps towards ‘perennialising’ species such as wheat, corn and maize. Some of the plants, crossed with wild perennials like quackgrass, are now setting seed through self-pollination.

They are worth the wait, he believes, because they “reward the farmer and the landscape rather than the suppliers of the input”. Because seeds aren’t sown each year, there are fewer fossil fuel-powered machines involved, and less ploughing means less erosion, keeping the goodness locked up in the earth.

But Jackson wants to take the vision further: “If we stop at perennial monoculture, we will have missed the point. Now our goal is perennial polyculture. That means putting species together and mimicking nature’s ecosystems - the exact opposite of man’s current farming techniques.”
The Land Institute,
www.landinstitute.org , +1 7855 823 5376

Storing wind energy

What does happen to wind power when the breeze drops? Energy company Innogy thought it was on the verge of cracking how to capture and store wind power five years ago, with its Regenesys system [ ‘Power storage for renewables’, GF27]. The ‘giant batteries’, set up at power plants in Cambridgeshire and Mississippi, would store turbine output in a chemical solution, and convert it back into usable electricity when needed.

Regenesys is now only 18 months away from commercial use. The technology, however, has been sold off to US energy storage company VRB Power. The new owners are also trialling a smaller storage system, the VRB-ESS, using a vanadium electrolyte rather than sodium bromide to store the power, and designed for remote sites where grid connection can be a problem.

The remote Shetland island of Unst has taken a different route. The community has hooked its wind turbines up to a hydrogen fuel cell to provide back-up electricity when the wind drops - a small but significant piece in the jigsaw for the predicted large-scale hydrogen revolution [see ‘H2GO; are we nearly there yet?’ GF56].  “We wanted to demonstrate that the hydrogen economy isn’t a pipe dream - and that it doesn’t have to be made by multinationals,” explains Sandy Macaulay from the PURE Project. “What we’ve ended up with,” he adds, “is an energy-secure supply. Not a cheap one, but a secure one. And you can’t put a price on that.”
www.vrbpower.com
www.pure.shetland.co.uk, 01957 711 838

Green fleet runs out of juice

The idea had plenty of mileage: a fleet of vans powered by renewable electricity, delivering lots of parcels but no carbon emissions. And Electric City did see some fine moments. On Valentine’s Day 2002, eight vans and sixteen drivers worked flat-out to deliver flowers and presents to loved-up Londoners. But five years on, the vans have been sold off and the depot lies empty. Despite the best ethical credentials and gallons of effort, Electric City simply couldn’t pay its way.

The limitations of battery technology were a major factor in the company’s demise. Valentine’s Day ended with a van running out of juice and being pushed home from Tower Bridge. Electric vans need to be charged for eight hours every 50 miles, and there aren’t many parking places with 13-amp plug sockets on the streets of London. “We needed to get maximum value out of every single mile,” explains former co-director Georgia Malden. “I would go hot and cold if we got a delivery of a single parcel to Richmond.”

Although Electric City built up a loyal base of over a hundred customers, they were mainly niche green businesses with the odd parcel to deliver here and there. Shops and businesses with lots of deliveries in a small area tended to stick with their existing couriers. Delivery is a notoriously cut-throat business with tiny profit margins, explains Malden - even without the technological constraints that Electric City faced.

Not all is lost. The business raised awareness about green issues simply by being out on the streets: “The vans were great, so quiet and calm, and people were always fascinated about them,” recalls Malden. There’s a happy ending for her, too, as romance blossomed with an old friend she took on for casual driving work. Five years on, they’re still together.
- Rebecca Willis

IT makes third world waves

Blackberries, Bluetooth, dotcoms, blogs… Digital gizmos have exploded over the last five years - particularly in developing countries. Take Bangladesh’s Grameen- Phone, which has seen a fiftyfold increase in users over that time [ ‘Third world wide web’, GF27].  Five million people now use the mobile service which is helping put more power in the hands of farmers and producers. The exciting part is that GrameenPhone isn’t doing charity handouts, but has created a real market for the products - the service is run by local women in their own neighbourhoods.

“There’s been a real shift in emphasis over the last few years, from Western companies pursuing PC-based philan- thropy, to actually running viable mobile phone business models,” says James Goodman, who’s been tracking these trends for Forum for the Future. “The technology sells itself, because people want to be part of a social network, which becomes more and more useful as its members grow.”

Motorola, for example, has developed stripped down phones cheap enough for the market. Some networks offer phone-based microfinance services - such as money transfers using phone credit - which are helping the ‘unbanked’ get a foot on the business ladder. And Hewlett Packard has poured money into the more conventional computer-based ‘i-communities’ it promised five years ago. In South Africa and India, on-line community portals now keep locals in the loop on issues such as the latest market prices for their produce, and women are being trained up as local photographers.

But whether these ‘e-inclusion’ initiatives are having the desired effect of stimulating “entrepreneurship and economic growth” in these countries remains to be seen. David Grimshaw from sustainable technology charity Practical Action sounds a note of caution at Western companies flooding the local market with their own technology, which risks creating a costly dependency. The price of buying a software license for a typical desktop in Kenya is equivalent to spending £31,000 in the UK. A better solution, according to Grimshaw, is ‘open source software’, where “instead of people just owning rights to use someone else’s software, they share it, adapt it and use it without cost”. In essence, he says, stimulating economic development ought to be “about ‘right tech’ rather than ‘hi-tech’ or ‘low-tech’”. Additional research by Suzanne Fane-Saunders.
GrameenPhone, www.grameenphone.com
HP, www.hp.com/e-inclusion
Practical Action, 01926 634400, www.itdg.org

8 March 2006

Hannah Bullock and Suzanne Fane-Saunders