Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

How not to use feed-in tariffs

As I mentioned when expressing doubt about Bloom Boxes, many environmentalists assume that distributed generation of electricity is inherently preferable to large-scale generation and transmission. As I have argued in the past, there are good reasons to argue the converse. Micro wind turbines are especially dubious, given that the energy output from turbines increases with the diameter of the blades. Those little rooftop turbines some people install just don’t make sense, unless they live in very remote and windy areas. In a place as northern and cloudy as Britain, home solar photovoltaic arrays may make even less sense, especially if investments in more cost-effective options like improving efficiency of energy use have not yet been made. Saving many kilowatt-hours a day through better insulation beats producing a trickle of electricity, especially given that it is less costly.

In a recent essay, George Monbiot argues that feed-in tariffs for small scale renewables are regressive and a waste of money:

[The government] expects this scheme to save 7m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020(5). Assuming, generously, that the rate of installation keeps accelerating, this suggests a saving of around 20m tonnes of CO2 by 2030. The estimated price by then is £8.6bn. This means it’ll cost around £430 to save one tonne of carbon dioxide.

Indeed, if the government is going to provide feed-in tariffs for renewable projects, they must be the sort that can actually make a difference: multi-megawatt run-of-river hydro projects, concentrating solar stations that can put out baseload power, and the like. If the government wants a sound climate policy for homes, it should be tightening building standards, encouraging retrofits, and the like.

Vancouver’s last Olympics?

Richard Brenne has written an interesting post on why climate change means 2010 was probably Vancouver’s last opportunity to host the winter Olympics:

Global warming is the reason Vancouver will never host another Winter Olympics. They barely dodged (biathlon) bullets at dozens of events, and the Olympic Committee would rather use Donald Trump’s hair as the Olympic flame than go through this again. Climate change is all about likelihoods of things like the record warmth Vancouver has had increasing, and the Olympic Committee rolled Jim Hansen’s dice and came up snake eyes.

He goes on to describe the extreme efforts taken to improve snow conditions, as well as the unusual circumstances in which events were conducted: from snowboard events on slushy runs to Nordic skiers racing in unprecedented temperatures.

The whole thing is worth reading.

The real story on glaciers

There has been a huge amount of talk about the claim in the IPCC’s most recent report that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. That figure is wrong, and came from a dubious source. That said, the state of the world’s glaciers is not encouraging. Germans are putting a reflective cover on their last glacier, to slow down its melting. The global glacier index shows a clear trend of decline. This graph shows the data on all glaciers, 30 reference glaciers of special importance, and a subset of North American glaciers. Not only is the decline clear, but it is clearly accelerating.

Perhaps the biggest news is from Greenland, as described in Alun Anderson’s excellent After the Ice:

If you take into account the rapid collapse of the glaciers, how much water is Greenland adding to the world’s oceans? In 2008, [Caltech glaciologist Eric] Rignot teamed up with scientists from around the world and estimated that the ice sheet had been losing 30 gigatons of ice a year from the 1970s through the 1980s, 97 gigatons in 1996, and between 239 and 305 gigatons in 2007… A gigaton is a billion metric tons, or the weight of a cubic kilometer of water. Add the latest annual figure of 305 gigatons to the oceans and the sea level rises by close to a millimeter. Keep going faster for a century on top of the natural thermal expansion of the oceans as they warm and ice melting elsewhere and that is enough for governments around the world to have to add billions to the cost of coastal defences. The acceleration is deeply worrying. Its cause appears to be those rapidly moving glaciers: the paper shows that they account for between 40 and 80 percent of the ice loss.

I called up Eric Rignot in his laboratory and asked if he was surprised too. He laughed. “Even just a couple of years ago, to state that the ice sheet was losing as much mass as it is, would make me considered a wild man. I think if you had told people in 1990 that I would make a prediction in 2008 that we were going to lose three hundred gigatons per year of ice in Greenland, everybody would have laughed. He is not serious, they would have said. There is no way you can get anything like that.” So what will happen next? “We see acceleration. It’s not a linear trend; it’s more rapid than that. I don’t know where it’s going to go. Ten years ago we thought we knew everything. Now we know we don’t.” (p.233 hardcover)

Once this ice is lost, it won’t be coming back. When bright shiny snow gets replaced with dark ground, the Arctic absorbs even more energy from the sun. Furthermore, the shrubs that replace tundra (and the forests that replace them) are progressively more absorptive of sunlight. Partly, this is because the new vegetation extends above the snow.

It is really hard to see how anybody looking at the data can conclude that glaciers provide support for the contention that climate change is not happening, or not likely to be a problem for human beings.

Caltech’s new solar cells

In an announcement that is exciting, if accurate, researchers from Caltech claim they have developed cells that can capture 85 percent of total collectible sunlight using only a fraction of the silicon required for conventional cells. The cells are 98% transparent plastic, with just 2% of their volume comprised of silicon.

For now, they have only built tiny ones. If the approach can be effectively scaled up, it could help cut the capital cost for solar photovoltaic facilities.

Bill Gates on nuclear power

Bill Gates has brushed up against climate issues before. First, he apparently considered investing in the oil sands. Later, he invested $4.5 million of his own money in geoengineering research.

Most recently, he gave a talk at the TED conference advocating that developed countries and China cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 (producing an 80% overall reduction), and do so largely on the basis of nuclear power. He thinks fast breeder reactors capable of using U-238 are the way forward, given how much more fuel would be available. His favoured version of breeder reactor is the traveling wave reactor, which is theoretically capable of using little or no enriched uranium.

Emissions equation

Gates argues that the key equation is: (population) X (services) X (energy use for services) X (greenhouse gas intensity of energy). To get down to zero, one of these elements needs to be reduced to that level. He argues that more services are important, especially for the world’s poor. Efficiency, he argues, can be improved quite substantially – perhaps increased three to sixfold, overall. The real work, he argues, needs to be done by cutting the GHG emissions associated with energy production to near zero.

Energy options

Gates argues that the energy systems of the future will need massive scale and high reliability. He singles out five he sees as especially promising, though with significant challenges:

  • Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – hampered by cost, access to suitable sites for injection, and long-term stability of stored gases (the toughest part)
  • Nuclear – with its cost, safety, proliferation, and waste issues
  • Wind
  • Solar photovoltaic
  • Solar thermal – all three limited by land use, cost, transmission requirements, and the need for energy storage to modulate fluctuations in output

Four others he describes as potentially able to make a contribution but decidedly secondary in importance:

  • Tide
  • Geothermal
  • Biomass
  • Fusion

I agree that fusion is a long shot that we cannot count on. I am more optimistic than Gates about the other three. Pumped tidal power could provide some of the energy storage he sees as so important. Enhanced geothermal looks like it has a lot of promise. Finally, combined with CCS, burning biomass offers us a mechanism to actually draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bury it.

The big picture

Cutting from the world’s current global emissions of about 26 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of CO2 down to zero will require enormous activity. Quite possibly, nuclear will need to be part of that, despite its many flaws. That said, we need to be hedging all of our bets. One big accident could put people off nuclear, or fast breeder designs could continue to prove impractical. We need to be deploying options like huge concentrating solar farms in deserts and massive wind installations at the same time.

It is also worth noting that Gates’ assumptions about the rate at which emissions must be reduced are more lenient than those like James Hansen who are more concerned about when massive positive feedbacks will be kicked off. If the people who say we need to stabilize at 350 ppm are correct, Gates’ prescription of a 20% cut by 2020 and an 80% cut by 2050 will be inadequate to prevent catastrophic or runaway climate change.

Gates talks about this a bit during the questions. There are two risks: that his assumptions about the speed with which emissions must be cut are too lenient, or that his beliefs about the pace of technological development and deployment are overly optimistic. He thinks geoengineering could “buy us twenty or thirty years to get our act together.” Here’s hoping we never have to test whether that view is accurate.

Arctic sea ice volume

I expected Alun Anderson’s After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic to mostly contain information I had seen elsewhere. In fact, it is chock full of novel and interesting details on everything from marine food webs to international law to oil field development plans. I read the first 200 pages in one sitting.

One chapter goes to some length in describing how we know what we do about Arctic sea ice volume. It is harder to measure than the extent of sea ice, which can be observed in all sorts of ways by satellites (optical instruments, synthetic aperture RADAR, passive microwave emissions, etc). One effort to estimate how ice volume is changing was based on multibeam SONAR on submarines. An 11 day survey conducted by Peter Wadhams, using the nuclear-powered HMS Tireless concluded that 40% of Arctic sea ice has been lost since the 1970s. Another team, led by Drew Rothrock, used previously secret US submarine data to confirm that figure for all areas that submarines have been visiting.

Anderson also describes the importance of the cold halocline layer: a thin layer of cold water that insulates the bottom of Arctic ice from the warmer Atlantic waters underneath. Without this layer, multiyear Arctic ice would be doomed. For a number of reasons, climate change threatens to undermine it. If it does, the complete disappearance of summer sea ice could occur faster than anyone now expects.

There are many reasons to worry about the vanishing Arctic ice, from the increased absorption of solar radiation that accompanies lost albedo to the danger of invasive species entering the Atlantic from the Pacific. I’ve written previously about ‘rotten’ ice, and many other issues in Arctic science.

Those much-hyped ‘Bloom Boxes’

Now that some figures are on their website, it is possible to comment a bit more meaningfully on Bloom Energy (beyond noting that they can attract a lot of heavyweights to their press events).

They seem to have deployed 3 megawatts of fuel cells in seven installations. That’s twice as much power as is provided by Grouse Mountain’s solitary wind turbine. Of these, two installations (with an output of 900 kW) are running on methane from renewable sources. According to Wikipedia, the fuel cells cost $7,000 to $8,000 per kilowatt. That is extremely high. An open cycle gas turbine power plant costs about $398 per kilowatt. Wind turbines cost something like $1,000 per kilowatt. Nuclear is probably over $2,000 and even solar photovoltaic is cheaper than $5,000. From an economic perspective, natural gas also isn’t the most appealing fuel for electricity production. It has significantly higher price volatility than coal.

Without more statistics, it is impossible to know how the efficiency of these fuel cells compares to conventional natural gas power plants, either before or after transmission losses are factored in. Bloom’s literature says that, when they are using conventional natural gas, emissions from their fuel cells are 60% lower than those from a coal power plant. Frankly, that isn’t terribly impressive. Coal plants generate massive amounts of CO2, relative to their power output. It also isn’t clear whether methane from renewable sources would be more efficiently used in these distributed fuel cells than in larger facilities based around turbines and combustion.

Many environmentalists assume that distributed power is the future, but there are definitely advantages to large centralized facilities. They can take advantage of economies of scale and concentrated expertise. They may also find it easier to maintain the temperature differential that establishes carnot efficiency.

It will be interesting to see how Bloom’s products stack up, when more comparative data is available.

Wave Hub

Despite moderate potential, wave power is one form of renewable energy that hasn’t really gotten off the ground yet. One project in Cornwall is helping to change that. Wave Hub will test four different kinds of equipment for converting wave energy into electricity, producing 20 megawatts of power in the process.

The equipment will be about ten miles offshore.

David MacKay estimates that the UK could deploy as much as 1,000km of wave power generators, yielding four kilowatt-hours per day for each person in the UK. That’s small beans beside the 116 kilowatt-hours that people in the UK actually use, but we need to be looking into all available renewable options.

Best books of 2009

Back in 2007, I put up a post listing my five favourite books of the year. Somehow, I missed 2008. Despite that, I am still happy to assert that the 2007 list includes some of the best books I have ever read.

Among the books I read in 2009, these are the five I most emphatically recommend:

It was a tough choice.

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood would be a natural successor to Oryx and Crake back in 2008. Unfortunately, the better book of the two remains the original.

If I had read Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed soon after it had come out, it might have been one of my choices. That said, it is a compelling and important book.

Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution certainly deserves a nod. For anyone who wants a comprehensible account of why we know as much about evolution as we do, this is the book to read.

You can read all my book reviews here.

I may eventually cook up a retroactive 2008 list.

Past lives of climate deniers

My friend Antonia sent me a nice article by Jeffrey Sachs, describing what today’s most prominent climate change deniers were doing, before they took up this cause:

Today’s campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing “acid rain.” Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What this reinforces is how artificial the climate change denial movement is. Status quo actors, from Duke Energy to Saudi Arabia to Canada’s oil-sands-funded politicians, want to avoid climate change legislation. They have found some shills happy to spread confusion, in order to advance that aim. What is sad is how many ordinary people have lined up to be duped.