Electricity in the Heat Wave; World Smoking Habits; Madmen Ads from the 1970s and a Tragic Comedian.
June 24, 2024 Volume 5 # 4
When the Wind Don’t Blow and The Sun Don’t Shine
At the peak of the `Heat Dome’ this week Ontario electricity demand exceeded supply.
Thank goodness for nuclear, because wind and solar were all but turned off and stayed that way all week. The reading from an App named Gridwatch I look at every day.
Toronto has one advantage that doesn’t show: Deep Lake Water Cooling. A number of large downtown towers are cooled by pipes that extend into Lake Ontario, creating a giant heat exchanger. One of few cities in the world to do so and it is the largest such project in the world. In 2006 I noticed they were tearing up streets outside the CBC, where I worked at the time, and decided to find out about it.
I wrote an article for the Technology Section of The Economist about it in 2007. I can’t find my original file, and the editor at the paper re-wrote it in Economist style, as they always do. So I am publishing the story as it ran in The Economist.
Technoglgy Quarterly | Hydrothermal cooling
A cool concept
How to use cold water from lakes and oceans for air conditioning
Apr 24th 2007|
GEOTHERMAL heating—using the warmth of the Earth's interior to heat water—is an old idea. Using the planet's natural coolness, though, is something of a novelty. Nevertheless, as cooling and heating are merely two ends of the same process, it could save money and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. As long, that is, as you can find a suitable source of cold.
Fortunately for Toronto, it sits next to a very large supply of the stuff, in the form of Lake Ontario. Canada's largest city has been pioneering the idea that instead of using electricity to power air conditioning, a useful supply of cold can be directly extracted from the environment.
Three large pipes have been run 5 kilometres (3 miles) into Lake Ontario, to a depth of 83 metres. The water at that depth is a constant 4°C, its temperature protected by a layer of water above it, called a thermocline. The water is piped to a filtration plant and then to a heat-transfer station on the lakeside. Here the chill is “transferred” to another closed loop, consisting of smaller pipes that supply the towers of the city's financial district. Built at a cost of C$230m ($200m) over four years, the system is run by the Enwave Energy Corporation.
One of the first buildings to be connected was the Toronto Dominion Centre, a distinctive set of office towers. Three of the five black buildings were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So was their air conditioning. Connecting them to the deep-water cooling project saves 7.5 megawatts of electricity.
The two newer towers, modelled on Mies van der Rohe's designs, were also recently connected and this summer all five will be air conditioned by water from Lake Ontario. That will save another 2.5 megawatts. Another 12 megawatts will be saved from the connections to the Royal Bank Plaza and the Metro Centre, home to local government.
Some 36 buildings in the central business district have now been connected and a further sixteen have signed on to join the system. The project is expected to save the city 61 megawatts, enough to power 8,500 homes.
Toronto's project is the largest of its kind in the world and the only one that combines cooling with drinking water. (The water taken from the lake goes on to reservoirs and provides about 15% of the city's drinking water.) Other cities use similar cooling projects. The one in Stockholm uses seawater and is about two-thirds the size of Toronto's. A much smaller system at Cornell University uses Lake Cayuga as a source.
Geneva would be an ideal candidate for the system, as Lake Geneva is both cold and deep. The city is investigating a scheme. Tokyo also has deep water, but has not yet done anything about using it.
Not all cities can benefit. Chicago, for example, initially appeared promising as it has harsher winters than Toronto and sits beside frigid Lake Michigan. But close to dry land, Lake Michigan is shallower than Lake Ontario. To get cold water, engineers would have to lay pipelines that were six times as long as Toronto's. Officials in New York have explored using such a system, but ran into a similar problem: the neighbouring ocean is too shallow.
Using cold water for air conditioning saves more than just energy. Most office and apartment towers put the cooling units on the roof. Removing them means the space can be used for something else, such as a running track or a garden.
The three original Mies van der Rohe towers in Toronto have the cooling units built in between floors, so they appear as black, windowless bands from the outside. The owner is now working out how to convert that to office space, which in downtown Toronto is as precious as electricity.
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That last sentence was true then, but not now.
There is now a glut of office space in downtown Toronto, mainly because of the Work From Home phenomenon spawned during COVID. Some office space is being converted to residential, though it’s not that easy. Plumbing is a big problem because office towers don’t have the same bathroom and kitchen needs as apartments do.
British Election Wipeout Projection
The election is on July 4th; this reflects seat count based on polling on June 19.
The Conservatives could even be third in the seat count behind the Liberal Democrats, a party that hasn't been in power since 1922, though then known as plain Liberal. David Lloyd George where are you? The current British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is expected to lose his seat, the only sitting Prime Minister ever to do so. While Europe swings right, Britain is swinging left.
Who Smokes in the Modern World
I quit in 1993 and only 12% of Canadians over 15 smoke, and just about 23 % of Americans — the global average—which is why those two countries are not on this list. France and four Balkan countries are the top European smokers. Pacific islanders smoke and are also obese, so they have high rates of diabetes and low life expectancy.
Life Expectancy
French life expectancy is still impressive, but at the bottom of Europe’s list, though the purpose of this chart is to show that southern European countries have high life expectancy. The United States and Canada are not on this list, though richer people in North America live longer, and poorer people die younger. Money helps: look at Switzerland and Singapore, two havens of the super rich.
Having a Doctor Helps
No Reason for This, Except I Found It Interesting
"The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire," Voltaire
It was German, as is this map. Its ruler at its peak was man with the red beard, Fredrik Barbarossa, pictured below. Then it stretched from Sicily to Denmark. By the time Napoleon broke it up in 1806 it was much smaller and weaker.
An Ad Campaign that Could Never Run Today
Smirnoff Vodka ran ads in the 1970s that refelected the hedonism of the era. They ran in Britain, which isn’t as puritanical as Canada and the United States in the Ad Biz.
Just a guess, but these ads were designed by men, not women. MadMen. Imagine an ad campaign today that glorified heavy drinking and dropping out of life,
Essay of the Week
A tragic obituary from 2010 of a comedian who almost made it.
***
Eric Tunney was a funny man from Canada who came close to making it in television in Hollywood. But he never did. For a while it looked as if he was on the fast track to become a Conan O’Brien type success story.
The stand up comic from Windsor, Ontario, could contort his face into an Elvis lookalike or play the straight man for Ed the Sock. He was a success in comedy clubs before he finished high school and soon proved he could mix the light banter, comedy and cheeky interviewing technique that is the shtick of the talk show host.
The aim of most stand up comedians is to graduate from the live stage to television: Letterman, Leno, Carson and O’Brien were all stand up before they sat behind a desk on late night TV. When Mr. Tunney moved to Los Angeles 13 years ago he already had years of experience in comedy clubs from Florida to Toronto and he had successful runs on television in Canada. Almost right away he landed a job co-hosting a national talk show with ex NFL star Terry Bradshaw. But the show only lasted a couple of months.
He signed a deal with to host a program on an American cable network. But all of sudden there was a management change at the network and the entire show was cancelled. It happened one time after another
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“He used to tell his friends he didn’t want to bore them with the stories of how close he came,” said Kelly Hoppe, a Windsor musician who knew Mr. Tunney well.
Eric Tunney was born in Toronto, but moved with his family to Windsor, Ontario when he was a boy. He went to F.J. Brennan, a Catholic high school. “Everybody liked him. Eric was the class clown. He was always doing something to startle a nun,” said a friend.
When he was only 14 he wandered into the Komedy Korner, a club in Windsor. He wasn’t old enough to be in there legally but soon he was working there.
“He started working the spotlight for some of the acts, people like Jim Carrey who used to come through here in the 1980’s,” said Leo Dufour who owns the club.
From there Mr. Tunney talked his way on to the stage and started doing standup comedy when he was just 15 years old. Soon he was working not just in Windsor but also in comedy clubs in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Lansing and other car towns. He would even make references to his hometown and its large Francophone population.
“Where else do you get names like Debbie Dumouchelle,” The startup comic has no writers so Mr. Tunney came up with his own stuff. He then polished and practiced it until it was good enough to present to a live audience.
“He was a natural comedian. Great delivery, timing and a real presence on stage,” said Mr. Dufour. He was also impressed at how hard he worked at perfecting his own material. “He took comedy seriously.”
He dropped out of high school a couple of months before he graduated because his agent found him a tour of US comedy clubs that started in southern US. He soon moved to Toronto and became a hit at local comedy clubs. That was when he started performing with Steve Kerzner in Ed the Sock, a cult hit on CITY TV in Toronto.
At one stage he did a pilot for a talk show with the CBC. He was sure he got the job, but it was a sign of what was to come in Hollywood, when someone upstairs cancelled the program.
“He was terrific. He did mock interviews, you’d thin he’d been doing it for 10 years,” said Kelly Hoppe who played as one of the musicians at the pilot. “He could ad lib and wise crack but his style was to be a more serious interviewer like Jack Parr or Dick Cavett. He did a spectacular interview with John Frankenheimer the film producer when he was filling in for Bob Costas in a show that followed Letterman.”
In some ways Eric Tunney lived the life of his on stage persona. H e drove an old Cadillac, from 1964, the year he was born. He dressed like a character from Mad Men, classic suits, and loved to smoke a large cigar and wave around a glass of whiskey in his standup routines.
A couple of years ago Mr. Tunney moved back to Windsor. He worked for a while as a tele-marketer, something he was good at since he was such a great talker. He still did comedy. One of his last routines was done in a church basement around the time of the H1N1 scare.
“Coming in here tonight first you see the holy water and then there’s the purele. Of ye of little faith. If you’re Catholic shouldn’t the holy water be enough?”
In spite of being funny, he was depressed and never got over not making it to the big time the way he wanted to.
“He was so bent on being the next Letterman that his inability to achieve that paralyzed him,” said Mr. Hoppe. “In the end he didn’t have as sunny an outlook as you might have thought from a man who made so many people laugh.”
Eric Tunney was born in Toronto on September 9, 1964. He died of an accident at home on March 28, 2010 in Windsor. He was 45. An only child, he is survived by his parents Gerry and Renate.