A slide presentation showing the history of the Ramapo College Alternative Energy Center from its inception in 1974 through its demolition in 2001 and focusing on the sustainability lessons taught by the center. By Michael R. Edelstein, Ph.D., Professor, Ramapo College of New Jersey .

1. Defining Sustainability:
A Virtual Tour
• The Alternate Energy and
Environment Center (AEEC) 1975
by students and faculty
• Response to the energy crisis of
the 1970's.
• Demonstrate alternative methods of
producing and using resources,
particularly energy, food, and
shelter, that were not heavily based
on depleting and polluting sources
of fossil fuels.
• Create experiential and
interdisciplinary learning
experiences.

2. Creating a Sustainable Legacy
• provide people with the
necessities of life, food,
shelter, heat, electricity
and water
• ecologically sustainable,
able to be provided in the
long-term without
depleting the life-support
systems such as pure air,
water, soil, micro-
organisms and bio-
diversity of life essential
for the well-being of future
generations.

3. Public Education: Green Demonstrations
Demonstrate technologies
and ideas that could easily
be incorporated into a
visitor’s current household
and lifestyle, including:
• small-scale production of food
• yard and organic waste composting
• energy efficiency
• minimizing use of all resources
• reuse and recycling
• maximizing the use of the sun to
provide energy

4. Building Community
Model social and
community sustainability:
• full participation
• climate of equality
• mutual and environmental
respect
• achieve personal self
reliance and collective
survival
• demonstrate technological
and social/community
approaches

5. Building Community of Place

6. Experiential and Participatory Learning
Many students experienced their first opportunity to create,
understand design, and participate in shaping their setting to fit the
environment.

7. CONVIVIAL SYSTEMS
• relatively simple
• easy to use
• easy to understand
• participatory
• easy to maintain
• use local resources such as soil,
water, and the sun to provide
for human needs
• integrated technology and
social processes
• defining a new vernacular

8. The Center’s Integrated Systems
• Green Shelter
• Renewable Energy
• Materials Cycling
• Food Production
• Water Conservation
and Protection
• The Lessons

9. Shelter: Off-Grid and Renewable Power
The sun, wind, and biomass
(wood) provided the solar
schoolhouse with:
• heating,
• cooling,
• electricity
• hot and cold water
• cooking

10. The pioneering passive solar greenhouse
• Erected in 1974 in the midst of
the first Energy Crisis to
redirect people from a fossil
fuel dependent world
• Used discarded or donated
materials
• Off grid but never froze
• The greenhouse was directly
lit and heated by the sun
• The building was oriented due
south
• Only the south wall was
fenestrated
• The rest was tightly built and
insulated

11. Greenhouse as a Passive Solar Collector
In passive solar mode:
• Sunlight entered the structure;
• its energy was stored and re-
released automatically from
thermal mass by natural
processes without the use of
fans or pumps run by electricity
• The building is a solar collector
that collects, stores and releases
energy
• temperature kept above 40 dgrs
• Suitable for cool-loving plants
• No fossil fuels used

12. Accessory Systems: Backup, Covering

13. Reflection in the Solar Greenhouse
To assure adequate light for
optimum plant growth, many
surfaces in the greenhouse were
painted white to reflect light
from all sides, especially the
north. Storage was black.

14. Illustrating the Primary Uses of a Passive
Solar Greenhouse.
Winter growing of cold and
temperature swing tolerant
vegetables
Starting seedlings before
putting them out to the
garden
Extending the season for
certain crops: 1. summer
crops such as cucumbers,
tomatoes and peppers can be
grown into late fall and 2.
early winter and spring
crops such as brassicas can
be grown earlier.

15. THE SOLAR SCHOOLHOUSE:
Design Principles

16. Passive Solar Design
• The structure itself is the collector and heat storage system
• South facing windows are a form of passive solar collector called a
direct gain system– they collect solar heat.
• Sunlight enters and is absorbed by surfaces, changing into heat.
• Heat is transferred throughout the house without the use of fans or
pumps.
• Each square foot of south facing window typically saves you a gallon
of heating oil over the winter heating season.
• The building has no windows on the north or west sides, where heat
loss, not gain, occurs.

17. Storing Heat for Cold Nights
• To avoid overheating the
building and store energy
for nighttime use, thermal
mass is required in the
form of a concrete slab,
masonry, tile, or water
barrels.
• These absorb the sun's
energy, warms, and
reemits the energy later
when the house is cooling.
• The slab under the
Schoolhouse was insulated
to prevent heat loss to the
ground.

18. The Trombe or Vertical Mass Wall
• Indirect solar heat gain, passive solar collector
• No fans or pumps involved in the system
• Located at the far left front of the building
• Glazing looked onto concrete blocks painted black
• Openings at the top and bottom allowed warm air to
circulate
• The concrete block wall is superior storage

19. Energy Efficient Construction
Proper insulation of the walls and
roof: R-25 to R-30 for walls and
R-40 for roofs.
Windows R-3 or higher
Houses with large amounts of
insulation are sometimes called
superinsulated houses.
Air infiltration is stopped by tight
house construction
Very tight construction may
require use of an air-to-air heat
exchanger

20. Comfortable Functionality
• The recycled post and
beam construction
allowed for a large open
room without support
partitions
• Perfect gathering place
for classes, tour groups,
or social events
• Allowed heat to circulate
freely

21. Solar Electricity from Photovoltaic Cells and Wind:
Resilience from Off Grid vs Grid Options
Two photovoltaic cells sat in maximum
direct sunshine (30+ year life)
50 kW-hr a month for lighting and some
appliance use (1/10th use of typical
U.S. home)
A Windcharger wind mill produced 100
watts of power (14 volts at 7 amps
DC) when the wind exceeded 20 mph,
beginning at 8-10 mph.
OFF GRID: Electricity charged 12 volt
rechargeable batteries
DC-AC inverter brought the voltage up to
120 volts AC
NET MTERING: synchronous inverter
connects to utility power.
Excess electricity is sold to the utility.
At night, electricity bought from utility.
Meter runs backwards and forwards

22. Solar Hot Water
A passive batch solar water heater was
made from a 30 gallon metal water
heater painted black set in an
insulated box with a transparent
cover.
Reflective foil on the sides and back of
the tank directed all the incoming
sun's rays to the blackened tank.
This was a warm weather system.
As cold water was pumped from the
ground, its temperature was raised
from 50 degrees F to around 110
degrees F
Stored for night time use.

23. The Wind Generator
Our first wind
generator experience
at the AEEC places
the grid/off-grid issue
in historical
perspective. This was
a Jacobs Generator
from the late 1920s or
early 1930s (see
http://telosnet.com/
wind/20th.html).

24. The Jacobs’ Generator
1920's Jacobs brothers built
wind energy system to
electrify their remote
Montana ranch.
Mid-1920's, Jacobs Wind
Electric Company
Moved to Minneapolis in the
early 1930's.
Manufactured thousands of
wind electric plants which
provided power to isolated
farms and ranches. (http://
www.windturbine.net/history
.htm)

25. People Power
It was an unforgettable moment
in the mid-1970s when, the tall
wind tower having been
assembled by fifty Ramapo
College students on the ground,
they heaved together on long
ropes to pull the tower upright.
After the tower was secured, the
Jacobs Generator was moved
into position by a crane. Two
faculty then climbed the tower
and prepared the generator for
operation.

26. The Modern Windmill
After two decades of service, the
Jacobs was replaced by a modern
lightweight Whisper generator. The
new machine could generate 1
kilowatt despite its much smaller
size and it began generating at 7
mph breezes, unlike its heavy
predecessor, giving it wider utility
(http://www.electricalternatives.co
m/world_power_technologies.htm).

27. A Monument to Renewability
While the Whisper will be
re-erected at the new
RCSEC, the Jacobs will
be a centerpiece sculpture
in one of the gardens.
Thus, the Jacobs will
continue to tell its story
about the grid and the
history of alternative
energy to future
generations of learners as
it has for the past thirty
years.

28. Materials Cycling: The Recycling Center
A 1976 “ramada” structure
designed as a model
community recycling
center
Processed entire
household waste
stream even waste car
oil.
1986 NJ Recycling Law
transferred recycling to
Mahwah

29. Modeling the 3-R’s
3 R’s of waste
management:
• Reduce avoid waste
creation
• Reuse longer use life
• Recycle recapture
resource
values
90%+ of the 6+ lbs. of
waste we each generate
daily

30. Food Production: Four Season
Gardening
An integrated food
system combined:
• a three-season
intensive organic
garden and
• a passive solar
greenhouse

31. The Garden
The High Cost of Modern industrial
large-scale agriculture:
• 20% of all our energy (farming,
processing, transport, storage
and preparation)
• artificial fertilizers, pesticides
and herbicides (resources and
pollution)
• land degradation from erosion
and salinization
• water use for irrigation
• natural ecosystems (grasslands
and forests) are being destroyed
Yet very large amounts of
food can be produced on a
small scale without these
negative effects.

32. Becoming a Food Producer: Eating
Fresh Local Foods
With some knowledge and a
relatively small effort, we
can grow a lot of our fruit
and vegetables for
consumption in a small
space in our backyards.
The AEEC gardens
empowered students to
grow their own food with
most ecological and
sustainable approaches.

33. Intensive Small Pot Gardening
• intensive spacing of plants on
raised beds
• mulching
• enriching soil with natural
organic fertilizers and nutrients
• extended three-season planting
and growing techniques
• natural pest control (for insects,
plant diseases and animals)
through cultural methods,
mechanical and biological
controls, and safe use of natural
chemicals

34. Soil: The Crucial Resource
The goal of an organic
gardener is to continually
increase the fertility of the
soil, leading to better
plant growth using
intensive spacing and less
problems with disease and
insects (healthy plants will
usually outgrow the
problems

35. Key Principles: Diversity, Succession, Natural Methods
(Intercropping and Companion Planting)

36. Year-Round Growing in This Climate

37. Permaculture
Permaculture:
• perennial and self-seeding food
plants
• require little care
• supply an edible landscape,
productive ecosystems, and good
land management.
• The AEEC featured a small
orchard, extensive plantings of
edible perennials and a small tree
nursery to support campus
planting.

38. Water Pumping Wind System and Water
Storage
DO you know where your water
comes from and goes to?
We must consider both water
quantity and of water quality.
The AEEC demonstrated both
water conserving lifestyles,
buildings and landscapes and
efforts to protect aquifers from
contamination. Water must be
treated as a renewable resource.

39. Water as Renewable Resource
Need: the garden, greenhouse and
solar school house
Source: drilled 100’ well to
aquifer
Delivery: An encased pump
powered by a windmill and
later a solar panel.
Water was pumped into a raised
cask for storage.
Gravity was used to move the
water to its point of use.

40. Conservation as Renewal
Water conservation Steps:
Plants require 1 inch of
water per week:
Drip irrigation to plant roots
to avoid evaporative
losses
Hose and hand watering were
done early in the morning
Mulch was used to keep
garden beds moist and
prevent evaporative
losses.

41. The Composting Privy: Coming
out of the Water Closet
waterless toilet served to
challenge visitors to think
about their assumptions.
the waterless toilet not only
avoids substantial water use
but it also allows for recovery
of human waste as composted
soil. Although not suitable for
food crops, this soil is a great
nutrient source for ornamental
plants. (See Sim Van Der Ryn
and Stuart Cowan’s chapter
“the Compost Privy Story” in
their Ecological Design, Island
Press, 1996).

42. Ecological Literacy
Those who toured the former
Alternative Energy Center
learned to understand how
their observations reflected
the very fundamental laws of
science. The First and Second
Laws of Thermodynamics,
The Law of Conservation of
Matter and the Laws of
Ecology. In sum, they gained
an ecological Literacy, the
knowledge and wisdom of
how to live on our earth.

43. The Law of Conservation of
Matter
The first principle is that we can
neither create nor destroy
matter; we can only change it
from one form to another. There
is really no such thing as waste
in nature since the wastes of one
species is food for another. We
thus try to reuse and recycle all
matter within our local system.
Everything that we think we
have thrown away is with us in
some form or another; there is
no away.

44. The Law of Conservation of
Energy
The second principle
involves energy flow.
We cannot create or
destroy energy; we
can only change it
from one form to
another. But at what
efficiency do operate?

45. Second Law of Thermodynamics
(or Entropy Law)
As we convert energy from one
form to another, energy quality
is always degraded.
Concentrated or high quality energy
is useful and can do many
things. Dispersed energy is low-
quality and not very useful.
In other words, energy once
degraded cannot be recycled to
do useful tasks.
Low quality energy = pollution.
Dispersed pollutants are practically
impossible to remove from the
environment.

46. Renewable Means Sustainable
The only energy
source that is truly
sustainable in the
long-term is from the
sun.

47. Laws of Ecology
The laws of ecology tell us that:
humans are interconnected and
interdependent with everything else
on earth
Everything is interconnected: we
cannot do just one thing
Nature knows best:
we must not interfere with earth's
natural biogeochemical cycles in
ways that destroy our life-support
systems.
Everything goes somewhere: there is no
"away"
Unassimilated Waste = pollution

48. Nature as the Ultimate Teacher
Participant learning followed Barry
Commoner’s ecological rule that
"nature knows best."
Students created, built and
experimented with nature as a
guide---the ultimate teacher.
They witnessed the cyclical
relationships of nature---how
compost fuels plants that are
eventually composted.
They came to see nature as a learning
process, where response to
feedback builds highly variable
and adaptive systems.

49. Collective Problems and Promise
It may seem at first that one person can have
little effect.
Remember that each positive thing we do
has a multiplier effect.
• Saving water saves energy and also
reduces pollution.
• Recycling an aluminum can reduces the
need to mine more ore, process it,
transport it, and produce the can.
• All along the chain, energy and pollution
is reduced.
As the world climbs toward 9 billion people,
the cumulative ripple effect we each
create is significant indeed.
But the solution is not merely individual.
We must act together to address our
collective impacts. A sustainable future
requires our participation and leadership.

50. Working Together We Can
Achieve a Sustainable Future

51. Remember the Lessons of the AEEC
The concepts that we
see in this tour ---the
AEEC’s Legacy---can
play a major part in
helping to achieve
long-term stability or
sustainability.