Print this pageThe power of idealized design
The ability of idealized design to convert problems into opportunities can be seen in the hypothetical example below. For three real life problems, compare and consider the response from using a solely analytical approach to that with idealized re-design.
Analysis
|
Problem 1. New Zealand has significantly exceeded its green house gas emission limit under the Kyoto protocol and faces a $NZ 500 million bill.
|
|
Problem 2. Livestock farming, especially dairy, is damaging our natural waterways with fertilizer and effluent run-off.
|
|
Problem 3. As a result of war, drought and bio-fuel manufacture the third world faces massive protein shortages and a humanitarian disaster seems inevitable.
|
Some of the responses may help short term, but they will increase the cost of energy and farming in New Zealand and lead to habitat destruction. More regulations will certainly not supply food, or improve anyone’s quality of life, for the long term.
Idealized re-design “Thought for food” - Industrial Photosynthesis
This is only one of many possible re-designs in response to these problems. A simplified form is presented here to demonstrate the potential of switching from problem solving to mess management by idealized re-design.
Applying systems thinking and the eco-effective principle, waste = food we can imagine a process that gets its energy from the sun, takes in farm waste and carbon dioxide as nutrients and outputs protein and oxygen..
Large bioreactors filled with Mono-cellular algae can be fed with dairy effluent and operated at the optimum atmosphere of 5% CO2 in air. The CO2 taken from the flues of coal fired power stations.
The design eliminates the waste streams by re-conceiving them as valuable food production inputs. The potential “per hectare” protein output is five times that of a dairy farm.
The design uses commercially available technologies.
- The biotechnology is fully proven and has been available for 50 years. Pilot plants were built in the 1960s to study this process. Industrial photosynthesis, as it is called, was largely abandoned in the early 1970s, ironically because it was hard to get enough CO2 and Nitrogen to keep the reactors going.
- Using the newly developed carbon capture technologies we can get enough CO2.
- If effluent becomes a revenue generator our famers will quickly find ways to keep it out of streams.
- Coal, of which New Zealand has over 1000 years supply, can continue to be used to provide electricity at low cost with no greenhouse gas emissions.
- Waste heat from the power station is used to ultra heat treat the incoming farm effluent to provide the sterile conditions required by the algae.
The design eliminates our Kyoto problem, makes dairy effluent a revenue stream for farmers and would feed the third world indefinitely.