Interview with Amy Seidl
Photo courtesy of Amy Seidl.
The University of Vermont (UVM) is regarded by many as an eco-friendly university. Every undergraduate student is required to take a course relating to environmental sustainability and the Princeton Review ranked UVM within the top 5 green colleges in the nation four consecutive years from 2017 to 2020. While the university might be making an impact on its campus, the state of Vermont still struggles with sustainable transportation. Transportation is estimated to account for 40% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, making up the largest share of any sector, according to the Vermont Agency of Transportation. As Vermont looks forward, electric vehicles (EVs) will undoubtedly play a large role in the state’s effort to minimize its carbon footprint, but if the energy used to power these vehicles is still being generated through burning fossil fuels, EVs are still resulting in emissions down the line.
Amy Seidl, Co-Director and Senior Lecturer of the Environmental Program at UVM, has been using renewable energy collected from her roof-top solar to work around this issue. Living in a house off-the-grid has allowed her and her family to charge their one fully electric and their one hybrid vehicle directly using the electrons that their solar panels capture for almost 8 months out of the year.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down and ask Amy how she felt about different aspects of transportation and the sustainable transition that is on the horizon. In her responses, she covered topics including off-grid living, solar panel efficiency, the need for battery improvements, how her home can have even less of an environmental impact, and more. The Environmental Program has an extremely passionate co-director in Amy Seidl and an individual whose commitment to sustainability is truly inspiring.
Q: As a Vermonter, how important do you see sustainable transportation in making Vermont a greener place?
Amy: That's a great question, and it makes me think about it, both as an individual who wants to transport herself with the least impact, as well as the social and societal transition that we're all trying to make together, you know. So two things, I do live in a renewable energy home. It's long been my goal to capture electrons, now entirely from the sun, to run my transportation. For the 25 years that we've lived in this home, we have certainly taken advantage of changing technology and incredible efficiencies in technology. Just as an example, we used to have a three-kilowatt array that took up pretty much the roof of our small house. And that same area of space, let's just call it 20 by 10 (feet), can now create twice as much electricity.
We've doubled our generation the last two years which catapulted us into this category of able to plug in a vehicle with our excess power. There's something, I have to say, quite captivating about living in a place that gets 90 days of sun a year and running your house and all that is needed in your house, not our heat, because our heat comes from wood, but pretty much running everything else, and trying to drive on that budget of electrons that you're capturing.
It's a cool thing because it's a microcosm of what I hope sustainable transportation might look like in the future. As you know, the state wants to see 90,000 electric vehicles in I think 2025, maybe 2030, but it's not far away. And this is a captivating vision because it does not disrupt the norm. Everybody in America mostly relies on single occupancy vehicles to go everywhere. And I think the electric vehicle idea which, because you're one of my students, you know that it's problematic in terms of its environmental impact, is still a really important thing to pursue. In the short term, it keeps us from carbonating the atmosphere anymore. But in a broader paradigmatic approach to sustainable transportation, I think many people would be real strong critics of the electric vehicle idea. Even if it's coming from renewable electricity, like I described, even home generated renewable electricity, because the vehicles still need surface area, pavement, parking, and a lot of other fossil fuel-based resources and (other) resources to maintain a society that has the luxury of transporting ourselves with single occupancy vehicles.
Sustainable transportation is such an important plank in attaining sustainability in Vermont. The low carbon transformation pathway to sustainability has been (all) about electric vehicles. And I've adopted them. I see how they're going to be adopted, statewide and nationwide. I mean, there's so much money and investment behind them. I'm also critical of their full adoption because of the infrastructure that is needed for EVs. Other things, mass transportation, trains, walking, you know, good housing, where people work, is probably as important and certainly should be as studied and invested in as the EV approach to sustainable transportation.
Q: Do you ever have any trouble during the year since we only get 90 days of sun with being able to charge your car?
Amy: Absolutely yeah, absolutely. What happens is that many days in the winter, most days in the winter, we're not able to do it. Starting in April, we're able to plug in again and then we can plug in through October, early November. There are two drivers in our household, and we have one all electric vehicle and one plug in hybrid. I can also plug in here (UVM’s campus), which is great, and my husband can plug in at his office. We do supplement our battery charge depending on where we are and how far we've gone with the public infrastructure as well as what we're generating at home. But absolutely, it is not 100% and the reason it's not is that we're off the grid, so we don't have other electricity coming into the household other than what we generate. If we're limited by a cloudy day, or just low sun on the horizon, like in December, then we just have to use public infrastructure.
Q: Was your house originally off the grid or did you guys build it that way?
Amy: We bought a really small camp, like a 600 square feet really small little cabin, a place that was run on wind power. But it was used seasonally. Pretty quickly, we brought solar to complement the wind. And the cool thing is that solar and wind in Vermont are really great complementary power sources, because there's good data to show that when the wind is blowing, oftentimes the sun isn't shining. So it's just very compatible. That said, good wind really needs to be pretty high in the sky because any kinds of trees or things that are of a similar height interrupt the laminar flow of wind. And there's this really interesting power relationship between the speed of wind and the generation of electricity for wind turbines. It's a power generation to the third power, so the higher wind you can capture, it's not just a multiplier of two, it's a multiplier of three in terms of your generation capacity. What people end up doing is maintaining the laminar flow by cutting the trees or anything that would interrupt that strong wind, or raising the towers as high as they can to capture the uninterrupted flow. That became a problem because we live in a forested area, we would be cutting a lot of trees. But actually what happened was we had a giant windstorm and the turbine came down in the windstorm and we just used the insurance money to put up more solar, because solar is getting more and more efficient and battery storage is getting really efficient. We could design a system that can be fully charged by the sun, and then not need another charge for about 10 days because the battery systems are just so much more robust in holding charge. We were essentially moving from lead acid to lithium ion. Nickel cadmium is another type, but not the type we have.
Q: How viable do you think off-grid renewable energy is? Do you think that it really fits a place like Vermont, more than it fits a more urban state? Do you think since everything is so spread out, that it’s a really good option here, but might not be as good somewhere else?
Amy: It’s a really great question. I find myself in an off-grid home partly because the utilities never decided to come up as far as we are on this hill. But my preference would actually be on-grid because the surplus of electricity that we generate at times of the year. Starting from April through early November, we could be dumping a lot of power into the grid. If we were on grid, then we would be using the grid as a bank. Not only that, but power demand is increasingly high in summer, when solar is very productive and very generative. If we weren’t off-grid we could be helping to supply that load.
Q: Do you think there has been an over-emphasis on investing in electric vehicles as opposed to public transit?
Amy: Absolutely. I think there’s several issues there, but we haven’t raised the issue of social justice yet. It’s important to note that these are expensive vehicles even when they’re subsidized and so it just automatically cancels out a whole lot of people who can’t access this technology or have to wait until those vehicles are secondhand, probably 10 years from now. To your question, yes, I think the emphasis has certainly been overly focused on this single occupancy vehicle as the sustainable solution. And that’s because I think we tend to think about sustainability through a technological lens, and not through a social justice lens. Freedom and cars is really kind of convoluted in our minds. If we had a society that put less emphasis on the individuality of our citizens then we would have an easier time selling taxation to bring about sustainable transportation and decreasing our carbon emissions through more public means. I’m actually quite concerned about Green Mountain transit right now. If you don’t have the ridership and investment (needed), you may lose the infrastructure, kind of like what happened to Amtrak. I think it’s going to take some real studying of places around the world that have accomplished it. I have gone to Copenhagen with students, and they have seen a revolution in ridership (referring to bikes). It was from the kinds of things that you wrote about for Main Street (referring to the Great Streets project) but even more draconian. You cannot drive during certain times, and if you do, it’s going to cost you a lot of money. Denmark and cities like Copenhagen have achieved 75% trips as pedestrians or through bike traffic. It’s big time, and they used a culture that was primed to do that work because it’s a social democracy. They already pay a lot of taxes and expect the government to take care of them in these different realms. The values are not the same (here). How do we put EVs into reach?
Q: I feel like most people in your position regarding energy generation would feel like they’ve done their job and they don’t have to do anything else, but I know you. What ideas do you have going forward about improvements to the house? Are they energy efficiency type things?
Amy: We’re wondering if we can power with our electricity a heat pump because I have become more circumspect about the use of wood heat. For a long time, we thought of biomass as a society as a carbon neutral source of power and heat. But because the challenge of climate change is so real and so at the door, I’m not sure because of the true lag time between the combustion of organic wood material and the eventual uptake of that carbon dioxide in photosynthesis of new forest. That lag time is probably hundreds of years, certainly decades of time. So, we’re still carbonating the atmosphere in a very real sense. The next thing for us is to see is if we can’t heat with the power of the sun as well as transport with it and run our electricity. We could probably put up more solar, but we are really efficient right now and I’m not sure we could be more efficient with our usage. We run things on DC power so it doesn’t have to go through an AC inverter, which always uses power to invert. The other thing isn’t about energy but about sustainability. We have a big garden and increasingly, because we’ve lived there now for 25 years, we have mature fruit. We have blueberries, raspberries, and gooseberries, and our apple and pear trees are getting bigger and more plentiful, and I think that our site could be a really good site of producing food for other people. That’s what my neighbors and I are thinking. If we can’t put our electrons into the grid maybe we can use the solar energy through our food systems to contribute.
Q: My last question is definitely less about sustainability and more about your perspective of the world. How has having kids changed your views about things? About the planet?
Amy: Wow, thank you for asking that. I have a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old. One graduated from UVM last May and my second one told me today she’s going to come to UVM. We are so thrilled. How has it informed change? First, deciding to have children is such a personal decision, and for me, having children was transformational. In my classes we’ve talked about transformation and pathways to transformation and how paradigm change and shift can happen in the individual as well as societally. It takes great effort. But my paradigm shifted when I had children and I think partly what changed was that my work in being a scholar of the environment and being a promoter of environmental and social justice and protection is now informed by a generation that I’m in close contact with. I think of them when I think of these Ideas. I think of my stewardship needing to be on behalf of these children and their young, now young adult lives. While you might say right now that I do that because I always teach that demographic, there’s something about that relationship to them (her children) that is so, so important to me, it’s maybe the most important thing to me that what I do is for the benefit of them. It feels very mutual, I get to do things that will not only, and this is very ideal, steward the planet, so that we do see transformation, so that we do live within our planetary boundaries, so we do have greater equity, and that my children get to live in that world.
