Articles by Chris Goodall
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The Guardian web pages are reverberating to the clash of arms between George Monbiot and UK supporters of feed-in tariffs for solar photovoltaic panels and other small-scale renewables. Monbiot claims solar power is an extremely expensive way of generating electricity in the UK and that the new scheme is another way of subsidising the wealthy middle class. The fans of feed-in tariffs note the success of similar schemes in other countries. They think that the cashback proposals will help create jobs in businesses that install and maintain low carbon energy sources. The UK scheme will help drive down the costs of renewable technologies and increase public support for wind and alternative sources of electricity.
The argument has focused on solar photovoltaic panels installed on domestic roofs. This note tries to quantify some of the costs and benefits of the new scheme. I’ll take one of the simplest possible examples: an installation of 12 panels on the roof of a medium-sized house in the south west of England, where solar radiation levels are relatively high for the UK. Does solar energy make sense in this country?
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The last few weeks have seen substantial questioning of the quality of the analysis of the global climate record. This presentation, made to the top year at a local secondary school, looks at the Oxford climate series and shows how the way the data is presented may significantly affect judgments on how fast warming is occurring at one particular point on the earth’s surface. Apparently innocuous changes, such as varying the number of years in a moving average, can make substantial changes to the appearance of a temperature series. The notes to this presentation can be seen by downloading the PowerPoint file and clicking Notes Page in the View tab; or alternatively by downloading the PDF. Anybody wanting the raw data and the accompanying charts is very welcome to email Chris Goodall at chris@carboncommentary.com.
If your browser is not displaying the presentation properly in the embedded viewer above (Internet Explorer 7 and 8 users may encounter a problem depending on their settings), it is available for download in PowerPoint or PDF.
Tags: climate change, PDF, PowerPoint, science, statistics, weather
The government’s announcement today on “green loans” to help homeowners make their property more energy efficient focuses on expensive investments in major improvements in Britain’s housing. These proposals are an important step forward, but much cheaper measures can be implemented now by householders eager to reduce their energy bills. In many cases, the financial return will be much faster than the big expenditures mentioned in the latest policy document. For every pound invested, the cash savings will also be better than putting up solar panels or even replacing your central heating boiler with an air source heat pump.
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Watch an interview with Chris Goodall about the updated version of his book, Ten Technologies to Fix Energy and Climate.
This video was originally posted on LlewTube and Treehugger.
Tags: electric cars, politics, renewables, video, wind turbines
The long-heralded announcement of Bloom Energy’s solid oxide fuel cell on 24 February generated huge amounts of excitement. Many compared the launch of the Bloom Box to the arrival of a new Apple product. Is it an innovative as the company claims?
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Tags: Bloom Box, Bloom Energy, Ceramic Fuel Cells, Ceres Power, Solid Oxide Fuel Cells
A recent UK Department for Transport (DfT) survey provides useful data on attitudes towards climate change and on cutting emissions. The fieldwork was carried out in August 2009 and so will not incorporate any effects from the recent criticisms of the IPPC and the revealing of a large number of emails written by CRU scientists at the University of East Anglia. The most interesting feature of the DfT research is that it continues to show that a very substantial majority of people believe that the climate is changing but that relatively few are prepared to welcome potentially painful changes to lifestyle, such as cutting the number of flights taken. The percentages of people suggesting high levels of concern about global warming are generally down about 3-5% since 2006.
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Tags: aviation, climate change, domestic, IPCC, public opinion
The UK government announcement on incentives for small scale renewables has three unexpected features:
- The payments for renewable heat, such as the home burning of wood to replace gas or rooftop solar hot water, are much higher than predicted.
- The figures for wind have risen since the autumn consultation document. This means that well-located wind turbines of the 6-15 kW size are likely to produce returns above 13% per year.
- The payments for solar PV have been increased slightly, but do not offer returns as good as wind. Importantly, the government has also signalled that it will allow PV installed at any time over the next 28 months to capture the full feed-in tariff. Previously, the tariff declined for installations made after March 2011.
An earlier article on this topic which looks in more detail on the incentives to take up the new ‘feed-in tariffs’ is here.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, housing, politics, power generation, renewables
The UK is one of the least forested countries in Europe. Although the amount of woodland cover has increased substantially since its nadir after the First World War, growth has slackened in recent years. The growing maturity of UK woodlands means that carbon sequestration is falling rapidly. An independent assessment commissioned by the Forestry Commission has proposed one way forward: a million new hectares devoted to woodland, generating a reduction of up to 15% of the UK emissions in 2050.
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Tags: biomass, carbon reduction initiatives, Climate Change Committee, electricity, forestry, Forestry Commission, UK
The previous post on this web site analysed a recent DFID press release on malaria and climate change.
I’ve been sent three recent papers by scientists in Kenya dealing with the epidemiology of malaria. Links to two of these articles are provided below. These documents show that the DFID assertion that malaria is increasing in highland regions of Kenya is highly questionable and that overall malaria rates are probably decreasing, although the geographic picture is complex. They also demonstrate that rates of infection respond to simple but well-targeted interventions. Eradicating malaria from Africa is a difficult target but not one without hope of success.
Climate change doesn’t make getting rid of malaria any easier. But blaming rising temperatures for high infection rates is carelessly avoiding the real issues: poor public health provision in some parts of Africa, land use change and inadequate availability or use of insecticide treated nets.
Tags: climate change, Kenya, malaria, science
The malaria life cycle. Source: University of Tuebingen.
A recent press release from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) suggested that millions more people in Kenya are susceptible to malaria as a result of mosquitoes colonising higher ground as global temperatures rise. (‘New evidence of a link between climate change and malaria’, 30.12.09 – see below). The press release was extensively covered in UK newspapers and elsewhere.
Simple analysis shows that the claims of the press release are almost entirely without foundation. The battle against the severe threat from climate change is impeded, not helped, by government departments issuing alarmist and exaggerated alerts based on poor science.
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Tags: climate change, IPCC, Kenya, malaria, politics, science
Call or write to Black & Decker to demand that the company launches its Thermal Leak Detector in Europe and elsewhere. This is the single most useful energy saving device I have ever seen. Europeans can buy it from Amazon.com in the States, but shipping and customs charges make it quite expensive. Let’s get it here before the winter ends.
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Tags: Black & Decker, domestic, energy saving gadgets, home insulation, technology
A previous article covered the remarkable growth of Spanish wind and the success in incorporating this electricity into Spain’s grid. It focused on the periods in November when wind provided much of the country’s electricity, peaking at almost 54% in the early morning of 8 November 2009. Wind was almost 23% of the Spanish total electricity production during the month of November, beating nuclear for the first time. Solar also grew rapidly in 2009, up from 1% in 2008 to 3% of national output.
The effect on CO2 emissions from power generation was striking. Carbon dioxide output fell by over a sixth, largely as a result of the growth in renewables.
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Tags: CO2 emissions from electricity generation, power generation, REE, renewables, solar, Spain, UNESA, wind power
UK supermarkets and DIY chains stock up to twenty different types of energy-efficient light bulbs but most households have some light fittings that cannot use any of these bulbs. There are several hundred different combinations of fitting, shape, and power. Some internet sites, such as www.lightbulbs-direct.com/article/energy-saving or www.gogreenlights.co.uk offer a very wide range of low-energy-use bulbs including many unusual types you cannot find in shops. One problem remains: it is not always possible to tell whether the bulb you see on a webpage will actually fit your lamp holder or whether it will be the correct brightness. Light-bulb Libaries may be the answer.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, energy efficiency, Philips
We don’t have direct CO2 records earlier than 800,000 years ago. So scientists use what are called ‘proxies’ – indicators that give us indirect estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Advances in scientific techniques have given us increasingly good proxies, meaning we can be more confident that our estimates of CO2 levels hundreds of millions of years ago are about right. There are anomalies: the various different proxies don’t always provide similar results. A paper published this week goes a long way to removing one important anomaly.[1] It shows that the proxy that uses estimates of CO2 concentrations based on isotope levels in ancient soil carbonates may have over-recorded atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at some periods. This brings the figures into line with other measures.
Why does this matter? In Mesozoic times, from about 250 to 80 million years ago, the soil carbonate proxy has previously suggested very high CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Some studies had concluded that the air had several thousand parts per million of carbon dioxide, peaking perhaps at fifteen times higher levels than today. But records suggest that the temperature was only a maximum of 10 degrees Celsius higher than today. If the standard ‘carbon cycle’ models are correct, the estimated CO2 concentrations ought to have produced warmer conditions. The importance of this new research is that it shows that adjusted soil carbon proxies indicate that Mesozoic CO2 concentrations probably never rose above 1,500 parts per million, a figure consistent with other proxies and with the probable temperature levels at time. This is one more important indication that ancient CO2 levels were strongly correlated with climate.
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Tags: science
Richard Black, the BBC’s online environment correspondent, attracted attention when he noticed that almost all climate sceptics are men. Instead, he might have chosen to comment that many of them were social scientists with leanings towards economics. Coincidentally, economics is populated by males. It is only this year that the first woman won the subject’s Nobel prize, and her work would not be regarded as part of the subject by many academic purists. Sceptics Nigel Lawson, Steven Levitt, Bjørn Lomborg, and others all think about the world as economists. That’s probably more important than that they are male.
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Tags: Bjørn Lomborg, econists, Nigel Lawson, Richard Black, sceptics, science, Steven Levitt, Tim Jackson
Image source: Hemmy.net.
The Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed has become the most visible developing country spokesperson on climate change. Nasheed has continued to press for radical reductions in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, most recently arguing for a 350 parts per million target in a meeting with activist and author Bill McKibben in Copenhagen.
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Tags: climate change, Copenhagen, Mark Lynas, PDF, politics, PowerPoint, renewables, The Maldives
Image source: Aviation Enviroment Federation.
The UK government asked the wrong question. It demanded that the Committee on Climate Change calculated how much air travel can rise without causing an increase in aviation emissions. Not unsurprisingly, the CCC answered by saying that the number of trips could rise at the same rate as efficiency improvements in air travel. The Committee said that emissions per passenger will fall by about 1% a year, and so travel could rise by about this amount. No shocks there.
By 2050, the CCC opined, the number of passengers taking trips from UK airports can rise to 370 million a year, up from 230 million today. The maximum possible number of new passengers at Heathrow from the addition of new runway and sixth terminal is about 60 million. Hoorah, said the industry, there’s space for the expansion. Unsurprisingly, the press misinterpreted the Committee’s report and said that it had ‘approved’ the government’s plans for the airport. By answering the government’s disiningenous question, the CCC has lost some of its impartiality.
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Tags: aviation, Climate Change Committee, politics, science, technology
Image source: Scientific American (courtesy of American Electric Power).
Two pieces of news provide evidence of a fightback by coal. American Electric Power’s Mountaineer plant in West Virginia is reporting significant success for its small scale carbon capture project. And the UK has just licensed exploratory boreholes for offshore Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), a woefully under-researched technology that may make CO2 sequestration easier. The scale of the challenge facing the globe’s coal users is enormous but with determined research and development, the fuel may remain usable for power generation in a low-carbon world.
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Tags: Alstom, American Electric Power, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Clean Coal Ltd, fossil fuels, Linc Energy, Powerfuel, Vattenfall
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency. Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage.
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Tags: climate change, Copenhagen, politics
Image source: The Sydney Institute.
Professor Ian Plimer is one of the most influential global warming sceptics. A university academic in Australia, his trenchant views on climate change have helped persuade opposition politicians in his home country to back away from supporting schemes to reduce emissions. His book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science (reviewed here last month) remains a best-seller in the UK.
He spoke in central London on 1 December at a meeting organized by the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The material in the talk was largely taken from his book, though his language was even more open and unrestrained. Unsurprisingly, in view of the controversy over the content of recently exposed CRU emails, he repeatedly used the word ‘fraud’ or ‘fraudulent’ to characterize the views of his opponents. He described his critics as ‘rent-seekers’ who spent their time seeking out the next research grant.
This article takes a small number of the more controversial statements made by Professor Plimer and sets them against the standard scientific view.
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Tags: fossil fuels, Ian Plimer, IPCC, sceptics, science, UKIP, United Kingdom Independence Party
Image source: Conservatives.
A new piece of research shows that potential Conservative voters in the UK are typically slightly less supportive of strong environmental policies than the population as a whole. Undecided voters that the Tories want to attract into their camp are generally even less convinced by eco-friendly political initiatives. Although the party leadership remains eager to portray itself with a greenish tinge, the lack of support among voters will tend to circumscribe the freedom to propose radical ideas for the 2010 election. If your target voters are wary of strong environmental policies, you don’t propose them in the run-up to an election.
Not unexpectedly, Tory voters want green policies to be focused on investment in emissions-reducing technologies and tend to reject any increase in taxes or restrictions on economic freedoms. So, for example, it will be difficult for the party to reject airport expansion strongly.
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Tags: Haddock Research, politics, public opinion
Image source: Taiga Company.
1) If you buy just one new appliance in 2010, make it a really efficient fridge-freezer. The improvements in the energy use of the best fridge-freezers have been really impressive in the last few years. If you have an old refrigerator, it may be responsible for as much as a sixth of your electricity bill. A good new machine might use less than a half as much power, particularly if it is not too large. A second benefit is that by choosing to buy a really efficient refrigerator you will be sending a clear signal to the manufacturers that energy consumption matters. An impressive new web site – www.energytariff.co.uk – allows you to compare the electricity used by almost all the appliances currently in UK shops. You can make well-informed choices from your computer.
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Tags: agriculture, aviation, carbon footprint, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, electricity demand, energy efficiency, food and grocery retailing, fossil fuels, renewables, technology
Let’s face it: energy efficiency is boring when compared to the (relative) excitement of developing new sources of low-carbon electricity or heat. The popular science magazines are full of articles on new forms of solar panel and the latest designs for wind turbines. Improving the insulation of ordinary homes, shifting to LED lighting or increasing the take-up of heat pumps rarely command the attention of editors.
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Tags: aviation, biofuels, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, electricity demand, energy efficiency, fossil fuels, motoring, nuclear, Passivhaus, science, technology
Image source: TreeHugger.com.
One of the frequent criticisms of wind energy is that national distribution systems (‘the grid’) cannot cope with large number of turbines because of the variability and unpredictability of their output. Grids need to match supply and demand precisely, the critics say, and because wind varies so much it causes huge problems. Recent data from two meteorologically unusual days in Spain – the world leader in the management of renewable energy supplies – shows this assertion is almost certainly false.
- During part of 8 November, Spain saw over 50% of its electricity come from turbines as an Atlantic depression swept over the country’s wind parks. (They are so big that no one seems to call them ‘farms’.) Unlike similar times in November 2008, when Spanish turbines were disconnected because the grid had an excess of electricity, the system accepted and used all the wind power that was offered to it.
- A very different event in January of this year saw unexpectedly high winds shut down most of the country’s turbines with little warning. The grid coped with this untoward incident as well. These two events show that a well run transmission system can cope with extreme and unexpected events even with a large fraction of power provided by wind.
Over the course of this year Spain will generate about 14% of its total electricity from wind and this number is likely to rise to the high twenties by 2020. Spain is showing the rest of the world that these figures are not incompatible with grid stability. Although wind is ‘variable’, ‘intermittent’ and ‘unpredictable’, a well functioning grid system can still use wind to help stabilise electricity costs, reduce carbon emissions and improve energy security.
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Tags: National Grid, power generation, Red Eléctrica de España, REE, renewables, Spain
Books referred to:
Ian Plimer, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science, UK edition, Quartet Books, 2009.
Christopher Booker, The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History?, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009.
The phrase ‘the science is settled’ is regularly used by politicians arguing for meaningful action on climate change. To the majority of the world’s scientists, global warming is a clear and present danger and those who deny it, or argue that its effects will limited or benign, are dangerous lunatics. Nevertheless, an increasing numbers of voters, particularly in the US and the UK, have drifted into the sceptic camp in recent months and years. A Pew Research October survey in the US showed the percentage of people seriously concerned by the climate change issue down from 77% to 65% in two years. An international survey by HSBC showed a fall from 32% to 25% over the past year in the percentage of people from developed markets saying that climate change was the biggest issue that respondents worried about. The overall figure across all 12 countries surveyed fell from 42% in 2008 to 34% in 2009.[*]
A batch of highly successful books from journalists and maverick scientists has provided the intellectual covering fire for this decline. The result of the growing scepticism will be a weakening of national resolutions to take the difficult steps required to shift rich countries away from dependence on fossil fuels.
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Tags: book review, Christopher Booker, fossil fuels, Ian Plimer, IPCC, politics, public opinion, science
The Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed stands in the sea off Kurumba to show the threat the islands face. Photograph: Chiara Goia. Source: Guardian.
Plans for a new windfarm are set to make the Maldives the country with the highest proportion of renewable power in the world.
The 30-turbine proposed windfarm, close to the capital Malé, will deliver 75 megawatts of electricity at full capacity, enough to provide electricity for the whole of the capital, the international airport and the surrounding resorts. Excess power will be used to run desalination plants that will produce bottled drinking water from the sea.
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Tags: biochar, Carbon Gold, carbon reduction initiatives, Falcon Energy, fossil fuels, GE, Mark Lynas, politics, power generation, renewables, STELCO, The Maldives
Lord Stern says the meat industry damages the environment. Image source: VirtualTourist.com
Clearly irritated that his argument in an interview in the Times had been boiled down to a ‘go veggie to save the planet’ headline, Nicholas Stern has issued a clarifying statement:
I think that once people understand the great risks that climate change poses, they will naturally want to choose products and services that cause little or no emissions of greenhouse gases, which means ‘low-carbon consumption’. This will apply across the board, including electricity, heating, transport and food. A diet that relies heavily on meat production results in higher emissions than a typical vegetarian diet. Different individuals will make different choices. However, the debate about climate change should not be dumbed down to a single slogan, such as ‘give up meat to save the planet’.
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Tags: agriculture, carbon footprint, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, food and grocery retailing, Stern Review
Until this week, we thought that Sizewell B was likely to be the most expensive nuclear power station built in the UK. Image source: World Nuclear Association.
The Guardian newspaper of Monday 19 October broke the story that the UK government is preparing to guarantee a minimum price for carbon dioxide emissions to encourage the development of nuclear power stations. Putting a high cost on greenhouse gas emissions from power stations will force up the wholesale price of electricity, ensuring a better financial return for nuclear power stations (and for renewables such as wind). The decision to create a floor price for carbon demonstrates that the full costs of nuclear technology are probably well above today’s wholesale electricity prices. We may well need nuclear power but we are going to pay heavily for it. The government’s optimistic noises from 2006 to the middle of this year about the commercial viability of nuclear power have turned out to be wrong.
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Tags: Climate Change Committee, Drax, nuclear, politics, power generation, Powerfuel, Sizewell
Wittingly or unwittingly, many manufacturers make it difficult to compare the electricity consumption of home appliances such as TVs and refrigerators. Although many appliances have been through standard EU tests and then been awarded a letter grade for energy efficiency, these grades are increasingly unhelpful in distinguishing between the excellent and the merely satisfactory. As in British school exams, an A grade doesn’t mean much because it covers such as wide range of performance.
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Tags: carbon footprint, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, electricity demand, energy efficiency, technology
Key Farmers Cameroon's coordinator, Etchi Daniel-Jones, at a plot in Ediki, in which the difference between char and non-char maize was exceptionally big. In this case, the plants on the control (left lower corner) were barely in their 8th leaf stage, whereas the plants on the char-plots (right, upper corner), were already tasseling. Photo credit: Laurens Rademakers, Etchi Daniel-Jones. Source: biocharfund.org.
Biochar Fund has reported extremely encouraging first results from its field trials in South West Cameroon. Working with small groups of subsistence farmers around the town of Kumba, the Fund set up and managed a large-scale experiment to assess whether maize (corn) yields were improved by the addition of biochar to the soil. The biochar was made from local agricultural wastes and tree thinnings. The data from the trials strongly suggests that biochar adds greatly to food production. Some areas showed yield improvements of more than 250% over the control plots. The areas dosed with biochar also showed substantially increased production of crop biomass, including roots, stalks, and leaves.
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Tags: agriculture, biochar, Biochar Fund, Cameroon, Key Farmers Cameroon
Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber CBE. Image source: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is the German government’s climate protection adviser and a distinguished physicist. He was interviewed by the German magazine Der Spiegel last week and gave a starkly simple view of how much CO2 the world can emit.
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Tags: Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, politics, Stern Review
Image source: flourish.org.
A study commissioned by the UK Food Standards Agency concluded that:
there is little, if any, nutritional difference between organic and conventionally produced food and that there is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food.[1]
Yes and no. What the study actually shows is that organic food typically does have higher levels of important nutrients but the high degree of variability in the measured levels means that we cannot be 95% sure that these higher levels are not the outcome of chance. The Food Standards Agency and the report’s authors have misled people interested in this topic and should revise the summaries of their work.
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Tags: agriculture, Climate Change Committee, food and grocery retailing, Food Standards Agency, Lord Krebs, politics, science, statistics
Copyright: Next Energy and Resources Co.
Solar photovoltaics slowly lose their generating capacity. Although some solar panels are still working satisfactorily 40 years after installation, the conventional view is that most will dip below 80% of their rated capacity within about 20 years. This will vary slightly between manufacturers and between different types of silicon.
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Tags: power generation, renewables, technology
The hydro site on the River Thames at Osney. Image source: Oxford Times.
Many viable UK projects to generate renewable electricity are not being financed because of shortages of credit from banks. At the same time, individual savers are only able to get tiny returns on their savings. In recent days a number of schemes for linking the UK surplus from household savings to the deficit in renewable financing have surfaced.
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Tags: investments, power generation, renewables
15 kW Proven Energy wind turbine. Image credit: Aeolus Power.
This article refers to the UK proposals made in July 2009. The actual feed-in tariffs will be more generous and the new rates are discussed in a follow up article here.
After months of deliberation, the UK government has announced a range of illustrative figures for feed-in tariffs (FiTs). FiTs are fixed payments made to the owners of small generating stations for the electricity that they export to the grid. Micro-generators need high payments to justify their expensive investment in buying and installing green generation.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, Goldman Sachs, politics, power generation, Proven Energy, renewables
Mitsubishi Ecodan. Image source: Ecodan brochure.
Small heat pumps are increasingly used to provide space and water heating in UK homes. This trend is strongly encouraged by policy-makers and the government’s proposed Renewable Heat Incentive will add further financial support. The enthusiasm for this expensive technology should be moderated: for a home on the mains gas network, the savings in money will be small. Carbon benefits are probable but far from guaranteed. Moreover, air source heat pumps are unlikely to be able to heat many older homes effectively. Government, manufacturers, and installers need to be very much more cautious in encouraging the use of heat pumps and should use far more conservative payback assumptions. Heat pumps will eventually be a good investment for homeowners but probably not yet.
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Tags: ASHPs, Carbon Trust, carbon reduction initiatives, Ceramic Fuel Cells, domestic, domestic heat pumps, Ecodan, energy efficiency, Energy Saving Trust, housing, Ice Energy, Mitsubishi, National Grid, Renewable Heat Incentive, technology
Copyright: Monkey Business - Fotolia.com.
Electricity demand has fallen substantially in the last couple of years and shows no sign of recovery. The cause could be:
- The impact of economic slowdown
- Better energy efficiency
- Demand reduction because of the high prices seen in recent years.
If the cause is the contraction in the economy, then we can expect electricity use to rise again when growth resumes. On other hand if it is energy efficiency, then it is reasonable to expect that the reduction will persist. Electricity demand is usually thought to be insensitive to the price of power. If it is high prices that are driving usage reductions, we have gained important information about how to reduce electricity use, and thus carbon emissions.
The conclusion of the analysis in this short note is that almost all of the reduction in energy demand comes from cuts in usage in big industrial and commercial users. This means that the most likely cause of the cut is the fall in economic activity. Household demand seems to have remained about constant.
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Tags: domestic, electricity demand, Environmental Change Institute, National Grid
Most governments in the developed world were elected on platforms that promised aggressive policies on greenhouse gas emissions. The reality has not matched the commitments made. The reasons for this are multitudinous and no one should ever underestimate the difficulties of weaning advanced societies off the use of cheap and convenient access to fossil fuels. But in addition to the standard reasons for slow progress we can see a large number of obstacles that spring from human psychology. In particular, some of the resistance to aggressive action on climate seems to spring from mental attitudes that may have helped us survive as a species in the past. Perhaps politicians intuitively recognise the existence of these barriers. So they continue to say that climate change is the most important problem facing humanity at the same time as adding new runways to the local airport or sanctioning the development of new coal-fired power stations.
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Tags: aviation, Bjørn Lomborg, carbon reduction initiatives, fossil fuels, Groucho Marx, Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, politics, power generation, public opinion, renewables, science, Stern Review
Smart meters will work with real-time energy displays showing energy use around the home. Photograph: Energy Retailers Association/PA.
Monday’s announcement by the UK government for smart meters for every home is heavy on ‘empowering consumers’ with real-time knowledge of our energy use and therefore helping us reduce our consumption. But we shouldn’t assume that this is the real reason why the UK is pushing ahead with the compulsory replacement of all meters.
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Tags: Department for Energy and Climate Change, domestic, electricity demand, politics, technology
Barley field near Wallington, Hertfordshire. Copyright: Paul Dixon. Licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.
Biochar increases crop productivity in many tropical soils. The reasons probably include improved water retention, reduced leaching, and better availability of nutrients to plant roots. In temperate conditions, studies have been fewer in number and haven’t produced results that are as clear. A new study[1] adds usefully to our knowledge.
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Tags: agriculture, Alfred Gathorne-Hardy, biochar, emissions trading
Ed Miliband, Minister for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian.
The government wants to emphasise the affordability of climate change mitigation. It produces low estimates of the cost of low-carbon technologies. In the recent 2009 budget documents, the government estimated a cost of 1% of GDP to meet the tough new 2020 targets. In his pronouncement on carbon capture at coal-fired power stations, energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband later said that his proposals will add 2% to electricity bills.
Are these numbers reasonable? Professor Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser, says no. In a BBC interview of 26 April, he indicates that he thinks that the cost of reducing the UK’s emissions is much higher than the government indicates but also that the financial implications of not dealing with the climate change threat are far higher than even Nick Stern suggests.
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Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climate Change Committee, Ed Miliband, fossil fuels, nuclear, politics, power generation, Professor Sir David King, renewables, Stern Review, technology
The Committee on Climate Change says the most important prospective source of cuts in greenhouse gases lay in the ‘decarbonisation’ of electricity generation. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian.
The budget confirmed the acceptance of the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendation for carbon emissions in 2020. The UK will have to reduce its CO2 output by about 110m tonnes by 2020, equivalent to a 21% reduction on actual emissions in 2005 (and 34% on the 1990 figure). The proposed rate of emissions reduction is far faster than the UK has achieved thus far and the chancellor’s budget shows the government has started to recognise the scale of the challenge.
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Tags: Alistair Darling, budget, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climage Change Committee, energy efficiency, fossil fuels, Kingsnorth, London Array, motoring, nuclear, politics, power generation, renewables
Pinus edulis (piñon shortened pine) before and after drought. Image source: Southwest Colorado Wildflowers.
Perhaps this isn’t surprising, but a new piece of research shows that the ability of trees to survive drought is reduced when temperatures are higher.[1] A species of pine that grows in dry conditions was exposed to temperatures 4.3 degrees higher than a control group. Both sets of trees were kept without water. The trees in the hotter atmosphere typically died in 18 weeks compared to the 25 weeks of the control.
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Tags: science
Image source: Smith Electric Vehicles.
Gordon Brown says he wants two or three cities to trial electric vehicles before the end of next year. After many false dawns, are we finally about to see the era of the battery car?
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, Gordon Brown, Imperial College, motoring, politics, Renault, Smith Electric Vehicles, technology, Tesla Motors, Valence Technology
The tiny pores in a piece of biochar. Image source: BEST Energies.
George Monbiot wrote about the carbonisation of organic matter in the Guardian last month (‘Woodchips with everything. It’s the Atkins plan of the low-carbon world’, Tuesday 24 March 2009), saying it was yet another miracle cure for the climate problem. And, like previous miracle cures, he said ‘biochar’ would turn out to be a dangerous delusion. It would deflect attention from taking real action on climate change. Parts of the planet would be turned into vast forest plantations with limited biodiversity to provide feedstock for huge factories. Vital food-growing land would be lost to vast corporations farming wood for turning into biochar. It is a re-run of the biofuels disaster, he said.
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Tags: biochar, carbon reduction initiatives, Clean Development Mechanism, Climate Ark, George Monbiot, Glen Barry, Guardian, James Hansen
Gallup reports a steep rise in the number of Americans thinking that climate change is exaggerated. Well, that’s how the US newspapers reported the results. A look at the detailed polling responses gives a slightly different view. The change more reflects a decline in the perceived accuracy of news reporting rather than a substantial swing in attitudes towards the threat from global warming.
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Tags: Gallup, public opinion
The existing Kingsnorth power station. Image source: E.ON.
E.ON’s £1bn plan for a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth is waiting for approval from the UK government. Other generators have shifted away from coal. Drax, which owns by far the largest coal power station in the UK, is investing in biomass. Other companies have focused on new gas plants. Why is the world’s largest investor-owned utility pushing ahead with a project to burn coal without carbon capture?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that burning coal to generate electricity is extremely profitable. Very low prices for emissions permits and tumbling coal costs mean that a profit-seeking management team is highly incentivised to try to push for permission to use coal in power stations. This article provides the background calculations for an estimate that the new Kingsnorth will generate an operating profit of about £300m a year if current fuel and carbon prices persist. Additionally, it also tries to show that the cost of fitting CCS equipment and running the plant to capture the large majority of all carbon emissions is likely to add no more than about 1.5p per kilowatt hour to the cost of generating electricity at current coal and carbon prices. This means that a new coal fired power station with CCS may have operating costs only marginally above gas power plants
Nevertheless, E.ON has just asked for government subsidy to install CCS at Kingsnorth from day one. The purpose of this article is to offer an estimate of the maximum the government ought to offer E.ON in order to get it to invest in CCS prior to opening the new power station.
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Tags: biomass, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, CCS, Climate Change Committee, corporate emissions, Drax, E.ON, electricity demand, fossil fuels, Kingsnorth, politics, power generation, RWE
The Maldives. Image source: Primetravels.com.
The Maldives will be the first country to be overwhelmed by the effect of climate change. The republic is a collection of coral atolls with maximum heights of one or two metres above sea level. Climate change is increasing worldwide sea levels and the atolls will probably go underwater by the end of the century.
The 300,000-400,000 people who live on the Maldives are not responsible for global warming. Their emissions per head (even including aviation fuels for incoming international tourism) are less than a seventh of typical European levels.
Many countries have set ambitious targets for the reduction of carbon emissions. The government of the Maldives seeks to encourage this trend by going one step further with a plan for near carbon neutrality within ten years.
This is an immensely challenging target. Chris Goodall (author of this blog) and Mark Lynas, the prize-winning climate change author, were asked to provide a short outline of how it might be achieved and what it might cost.[1]
In the rest of this note, we show our calculations. We will be the first to acknowledge that this work is incomplete. Although it was tempting to conduct fieldwork in some of the most attractive island resorts, we did our analysis using publicly available information and with help from officials attached to the Maldives government.
Our work shows that near neutrality is possible, but expensive. It will take at least $1.1bn for this small island state. The Maldives imports almost all its fuels in the form of refined oil products. Rates of financial return to the investment therefore depend largely on the price of oil. If expectations of future oil prices exceed $100 a barrel, we judge that the plan is sufficiently attractive to be financeable by international institutions such as the World Bank.
Comments on this work will be very gratefully received.
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Tags: agriculture, aviation, biofuels, carbon reduction initiatives, electricity demand, emissions trading, fossil fuels, Mark Lynas, politics, power generation, renewables, The Maldives, Valence
Power Station 571 aka the solar panels on my roof.
People like me who buy solar panels tend to become unreasonably fond of them. Many homeowners come to regard these silent blocks of silicon on our roofs as part of the family. I’m also particularly proud that our panels are registered at Ofgem, the utilities regulator, as Power Station 571. The reason for going through the cumbersome process to convince Ofgem that my silicon should be listed alongside Drax and Sizewell B was to benefit from the government incentive scheme for renewable electricity generation.
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Tags: domestic, Drax, microgeneration, Ofgem, power generation, renewables, Sizewell, Southern Electric
Photograph: Christopher Whalen.
George Monbiot rightly observes that the earth’s resources of biomass are limited and cannot be simultaneously claimed for multiple uses: liquid biofuels, fuel for heating, biogas, and biochar. This presentation (available for download in PowerPoint or PDF) looks at the globe’s land and biomass production to assess how much space can be given over to non-food uses and how much energy this can generate. This is one of the crucial questions facing the world: how much energy can we use from biomass before this affects the ability of the world to provide enough food for nearly 7bn people, rising to at least 9bn by 2050?
Ten Technologies to Save the Planet was listed as one of the Financial Times Science Books of the Year 2008.
Tags: agriculture, biochar, biofuels, biogas, biomass, file, fossil fuels, George Monbiot, land use, PDF, power generation, PowerPoint, renewables
In today’s Independent newspaper (London, Monday 23 February) I argue that we may need to accept some new nuclear power stations. I put forward the view that the trench warfare between the pro-nuclear groups and those that support renewables means that progress towards ‘decarbonising’ electricity generation in the UK is too slow. We probably need to invest in many different types of non fossil-fuel generation as rapidly as we can if we are to meet the tough targets for UK emissions reduction so painfully won by groups such as Friends of the Earth. We no longer have the luxury of ruling out nuclear expansion.
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Tags: Areva, Areva EPR, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climate Change Committee, corporate emissions, Council for the Protection of Rural England, EDF, electricity demand, emissions trading, energy efficiency, FGD, fossil fuels, LCPD, Mark Lynas, National Grid, nuclear, politics, power generation, renewables, ROCs, RWE, Sizewell
No climate data is without its critics. We do not have the equipment to measure the temperature in every square kilometre of the world’s surface so we cannot be sure that global ‘averages’ are correct. Disputes about the reliability of climate data will continue. But the US Government’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is one of the world’s most authoritative sources of global data.
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Tags: climate change, El Niño, La Niña, NCDC, temperature, weather
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) wrote in its December report that the world could expect about a 2 degree rise in temperature by 2100 if global emissions fell by about 50% by mid-century. It said that the risk of more than a 4 degrees rise is less than 1% if the world achieved this reduction. Because the UK has per capita emissions much higher than the global average, the Committee recommended that the country should cut its emissions by about 80%. This would eventually leave the UK’s emissions per head as about the same as the rest of the world.
The CCC report is thorough, robust and clear. But is its recommendation sufficiently prudent? In four main respects, the Committee has chosen a more optimistic conclusion than I believe is warranted. The implication is that its emissions reductions targets are not severe enough.
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Tags: Climate Change Committee, IPCC, politics, Stern Review
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| Photograph: Christopher Thomond. Source: Guardian. |
The new Conservative policy document on energy is keen to emphasise how smart it is. At its core are proposals for smart meters, smart grids, and smart battery charging. The enthusiasm for these technologies is almost palpable. On one page, the word ’smart’ occurs eight times. But readers of the policy proposals are largely left in the dark about what all these intelligent devices will do. David Cameron’s comments about building ‘an electricity internet’ didn’t shed much light either.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, Conservatives, David Cameron, domestic, electricity demand, Frontier Economics, Landis and Gyr, National Grid, Ofgem, politics, power generation, renewables, technology
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| The Vattenfall CCS power station under construction at Schwarze Pumpe, Germany. The main power station can be seen in the background. Image credit: Vattenfall AB. |
A powerful US coalition of large industrial companies, power producers, and environmental defence organisations has produced the first sensible plan for incentivising the early introduction of carbon capture at solid fuel electricity plants. The scheme proposed by the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) addresses the most important environmental issue in the world – the burning of coal to generate electricity – in a plausible and coherent way. Coal, which is almost exclusively burnt in power stations or in steel-making, is responsible for about 36% of US emissions. If we can find a way of cheaply capturing the CO2 from power stations and storing it underground, we can then also provide the technology to Chinese and Indian generators.
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Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, CCS, corporate emissions, fossil fuels, IGCC, power generation, USCAP
Government officials are searching for policies that will meet the twin aims of providing jobs and meeting the UK’s climate change targets. It is proving a difficult task. The easiest ways of reducing fossil fuel use will probably not create many new jobs in the UK. All large wind turbines are built abroad and although the construction work on a nuclear power station will generate a few thousand jobs, most of the key components will need to come from Europe and Japan. So where are the opportunities? I think two major areas stand out as excellent ways of generating jobs quickly without also dragging in expensive imports or sharply raising prices.
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Tags: argriculture, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, energy efficiency, fossil fuels, housing, offices, politics, power generation, renewables
The UK government’s enthusiasm for the construction of nuclear power stations is based on a May 2007 consultation document[1] published by the Department of Trade and Industry (now BERR). This paper argued that nuclear offered a financially viable way of generating electricity, broadly competitive with fossil fuels. It correctly pointed out that the cost of nuclear energy is largely determined by how much a plant costs to build, not by uranium prices or by the price of disposing of nuclear waste.
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Tags: Areva, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, economy, fossil fuels, nuclear, politics, power generation, renewables, TVO
We didn’t make much progress reducing emissions when times were good. Will the looming depression makes things worse or better? The discussion of this issue, at least in the UK, tends to be superficial. The only question asked seems to be ‘will people buy less eco-bling when times are hard?’
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Tags: aviation, carbon footprint, carbon reduction initiatives, corporate emissions, domestic, energy efficiency, food and grocery retailing, fossil fuels, housing, investments, motoring, politics, power generation
Honda’s withdrawal from the hugely expensive world of Formula 1 motor racing is another illustration of the pressures on the world’s car-makers. Now might be a good time for reflection. Does it make sense to use the petrol engine as the power source for the cars on the track. Isn’t it time to switch to electric cars?
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Tags: Formula 1, Honda, Lotus, motoring, technology, Tesla Motors
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| Renault’s Zoom concept electric car. Image source: Auto Express. |
Most major countries in Europe have decided to focus on one or two technologies to reduce carbon emissions. By making concentrated investments in one or two promising areas these countries are likely to achieve substantial cost reductions and rapid increases in deployment. By contrast, the UK is dabbling ineffectually in several areas and achieving little. Despite having large resources of renewable energy sources, the UK’s effort is diffuse, trivial in scope and clearly insufficient. We have almost the lowest percentage of our energy coming from low-carbon sources in the EU.
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Tags: Andasol, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, Modec, motoring, National Grid, Nissan, politics, Renault, renewables, Siemens, Smith Electric Vehicles, Suzlon, Vattenfall, Vestas
The funnel of water between the north-east tip of Scotland and the Orkney Islands contains some of the most powerful tidal energy in the world. The exploitable resource at the time of the fastest running tides may be as much 8 gigawatts. One source I have talked to suggests the figure could even be as high as 20 gigawatts. As I write this note, the National Grid’s website gives an estimate of the electricity use at this moment – about 55 gigawatts at peak-time on a winter evening. Be in no doubt, the Pentland Firth is the single most important source of renewable energy in the UK. The power concentrated in this narrow stretch of water could comfortably provide London’s electricity need. And it is entirely predictable to within a few percent every minute of every day. The tidal power will peak twice every 24 hours in a cycle that the Grid will be able to plan for decades in advance.
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Tags: Crown Estate, electricity demand, National Grid, power generation, renewables
Alok Jha of the Guardian wrote about Air New Zealand’s trial of jet fuel based on jatropha berries here. This note looks at the percentage of the world’s land area that would have to be devoted to the crop in order to provide for the total needs of aviation, an industry that uses about 5% of the world’s oil.
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Tags: agriculture, Air New Zealand, aviation, jatropha
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| Methane concentrations at the Mauna Loa observatory. The grey data points are preliminary. Graphic: NOAA. |
We seem to know less about methane emissions than we thought. After a decade of stability, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising strongly in the last 18 months. Early research work suggested that this rise was concentrated in the northern latitudes of the northern hemisphere and was consistent with greater emissions from decaying organic matter in melting permafrost or from the melting of Arctic sea ice. Now this result has been called into question by the publication of a new study showing the concentrations of methane are rising almost everywhere. Since methane takes some time to diffuse around the globe, the later work suggests that the rise in methane may not be directly due to enhanced emissions from biological sources.
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Tags: clathrate gun hypothesis, El Niño, La Niña, methane emissions
I’ve just been lucky enough to see Gordon Brown’s notes for a speech he will give in a few weeks time at the Walter Mitty Institute. It may be worth sharing some of his thoughts.
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Tags: Areva, EDF, Gordon Brown, Japan Steel Works, nuclear, politics, power generation
As with other great popular causes, such as improving access to public libraries, reducing the use of plastic bags, and the protection of urban hedgehogs, everybody is in favour of ‘feed-in tariffs’ for renewable energy. Widely used in other parts of Europe, these tariffs guarantee a high price for every unit of electricity exported to the grid from very small generating stations. Put some solar panels on your roof in Germany and you get paid 40p for every kilowatt hour that you produce and don’t use yourself.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, feed-in tariffs, London Array, politics, power generation, renewables
Together.com, the climate change campaigning organisation, has launched a new product for its annual campaign. It is promoting the traditional door ‘snake’ in its autumn publicity drive. Filled with insulating material, these colourful sausages stop heat leaving a warm room in winter through the gap at the bottom of the door. As part of the campaign, B&Q is selling snake-making kits for £1 on 20 October. National Trust properties are holding snake-making workshops over the half-term period.
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Tags: B&Q, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, energy efficiency
The easier of Adair Turner’s two main challenges is deciding how to save the entire UK banking system in his role as chairman of the FSA. As head of the Climate Change Committee, the more difficult job is persuading the government that it needs to take substantial action over greenhouse gases.
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Tags: politics, Stern Review
Community-owned wind farms are a rarity in the UK, despite their popularity in other parts of northern Europe. So should we welcome an opportunity for individual investors to invest in a newly built wind project in northern Scotland? Yes and no. The prospectus promises reasonable returns. But the protections to investors are limited and the information about the mechanism by which shareholders get their returns is sadly lacking. Even enthusiasts for individual investments in wind power need to be very cautious about investing in the Great Glen Energy Co-operative.
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Tags: Energy4All, Falck Renewables, Great Glen Energy Co-operative, investments, Millenium, power generation, renewables, ROCs
Elizabeth Kolbert looked at the Swiss 2,000-Watt Society project in the New Yorker of 7 July. Her interviewees provided estimates of the energy use of the typical Swiss inhabitant. The figures added up to about 5,000 watts. To be clear, this means each person is responsible for about five kilowatts of continuous energy use. This includes home electricity and gas, personal transport, industry, and office. To keep us in the ease and comfort we have got used to we are consuming, directly and indirectly, enough energy to keep two electric kettles boiling continuously, or driving a fuel-efficient car four hours in every day.
This article looks at the composition of energy demand in the UK. The figures are then broken down by sector and by fuel. The numbers are used in the introduction to Ten Technologies to Save the Planet (Profile Books, November 2008), where I try to assess whether we are likely to be able to use technology to reduce fossil fuel demand substantially.
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Tags: aviation, biochar, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, electricity demand, fossil fuels, offsetting, renewables, technology
The world has decided that much of the blame for the rising cost of foods can be ascribed to the use of grains for biofuels. The case for the prosecution is simply made. About one hundred million tonnes of maize from this year’s US crop will be diverted into ethanol refineries, an increase of a third on 2007’s figure. The maize used for ethanol represents almost 5% of global production of all types of grain. One in twenty cereal grains produced in the world this year will end up in the petrol tank of US cars. Other countries are also pushing ethanol, but the US has moved most aggressively to increase the use of food for fuel.
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Tags: agriculture, biofuels, fossil fuels
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Offshore location map of the London Array. Click on the image to see a more detailed map from the London Array website (opens as a PDF).
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Shell backed out of its commitment to provide the financing for one third of the world’s largest offshore wind farm off the Kent coast. The London Array, expected to cost about £2bn, now needs to find a new investor. What about tapping the public? The project has reasonable economics, and private individuals could benefit from 40% tax relief by putting shareholdings into pension plans. Perhaps as importantly, such a move would raise understanding of renewable energy generation among the wider community.
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Tags: DONG Energy, E.ON, investments, London Array, power generation, renewables, ROCs, Shell
Nigel Lawson and others are suggesting that temperatures have ‘stabilised’ since the late nineties. 1998 saw the highest global average temperature and only 2005 has closely matched it. Since no year since 1998 has exceeded the record, some commentators are saying the global warming has stopped. The implication, sometimes stated, sometimes not, is that the increasing rate of growth of CO2 concentration is having no effect on temperature.
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Tags: Nigel Lawson, science, weather
The Heartland Institute, a US free-market think tank, held a conference on climate change in New York in early March. It was a forum for some of the climate change sceptics to discuss their research. The conference got very little coverage in the media and was ignored by the science pages of the newspapers.
This seems a mistake. A large section of the population of the US and the UK, and smaller numbers elsewhere, believe that the apparent scientific consensus on global warming is a result of selective coverage by TV and press. The failure to cover presentations by some of the leading sceptics is support for the accusation that global media, and mainstream climate scientists, are refusing to engage with the dissenting views of reputable scientists who do not share the standard view.
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Tags: IPCC, science
BT announced that it was bringing out a new range of home phones with much improved energy efficiency. The claim is that ‘the new handsets boast power units designed specifically to consume around half the power of previous units’. BT said that almost all its extensive home phone range would contain the new energy-saving technology by mid-2008. Its press release gave very precise figures for the amount of CO2 saved – comparing the savings if all home phones incorporated the new technology to taking ‘57,000 cars off the road for a year’.
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Tags: BT, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, energy efficiency, technology
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| Sizewell B nuclear power station |
In the past three months, John Hutton, the UK government minister in charge of industry, has publicly backed an expansion of both nuclear and of offshore wind. Is this good for the UK’s climate targets? Possibly not.
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Tags: National Grid, nuclear, power generation, renewables, Sizewell
Two pieces of news from Tuesday 26 February. A UK investment fund is trying to raise £330m to build two large biofuels plants on the eastern coast of England. And the price of wheat rises to a new high of over $12 per US bushel in Minneapolis (over £220 per tonne) as worldwide shortages force prices ever upwards.
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Tags: agriculture, biofuels, motoring
In most countries electricity use is rising. The increase is gradual in developed areas, averaging only 1 or 2% a year. In the UK, the pattern was similar but recent years have tended to show declining growth rates, partly perhaps as a result of increasing prices.
One of the most interesting features of recent UK trends has been the flattening in electricity use in the home. This change is somewhat surprising. Improvements in home energy efficiency, through such things as the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs and high quality white goods, have usually been thought to have been outweighed by increases in the number and power use of consumer electronics. Large LCD TVs are, for example, much heavier electricity users than the old-fashioned TVs that they replace. Today’s games consoles are much more powerful than ones of five years ago.
So the reasons are not clear, but monthly year-on-year growth in domestic consumption of electricity has fallen to below zero in the last year or so. Is this a temporary change brought about by the steep increases in prices over the period 2005-6, which will be unwound when people get habituated to higher costs? Or is this a real change in household behaviour?
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Tags: domestic, electricity demand, energy efficiency
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| The Lighthouse by Potton |
Carbon Commentary has visited two sites to look at the costs of building houses under the new rules (not yet mandatory) established by the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH). By 2016, all new UK homes will have to have no net carbon emissions (‘Level 6’) and the implications for construction techniques are profound. Today, most homes are built to about Level 1, or possibly 2. To get to Level 6 will require huge changes in how houses are built, heated, and ventilated. And they will need expensive renewable energy technologies built into the home as well.
At Wimpey’s 145-home development in Milton Keynes, construction costs of houses at Level 3 are running at ‘100-110%’ more than standard. The self-build company Potton is offering a Level 6 design (one of the first in the UK) for an even more expensive £180 a square foot, up from about £75 for a standard Level 3 model. This takes the construction cost of a standard 1,000 sq ft (92 sq metre) home up from £75,000 to £180,000. Much of the increment comes from the need to install large amounts of renewable electricity generation. Some of the cost premium over today’s badly insulated homes will eventually erode as builders get better at building air-tight houses. But we shouldn’t be in any doubt about the huge implications of the CSH for builders, landowners, and buyers.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, electricity demand, energy efficiency, housing, Kingspan, Potton, Wimpey Homes
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| The new Finnish nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto (OLK3) |
Nuclear power may or may not be an unfortunate necessity. But a look at Finland should temper any optimism about construction costs.
The government’s decision in early January 2007 to support (or, more precisely, not oppose) the construction of nuclear power plants in the UK prompted strongly felt responses from all sides. To the electricity generating industry, nuclear power represents an attractive way of reducing emissions. To most – but by no means all – environmentalists, the push for more nuclear power is both a mistake and a missed opportunity: a mistake because no country has yet shown that nuclear waste can be stored effectively, and a missed opportunity because nuclear baseload generation reduces the incentive to develop wind and tidal power.
This article looks at what we can learn from the building of the nuclear power station at Olkiluoto (OLK3) on the western coast of Finland. The ground works started here in early 2004 and the plant is now due to open in 2011. Does this project give us confidence that nuclear power stations can be constructed at a reasonable cost and to a reliable timescale?
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Tags: Areva, Greenpeace, nuclear, power generation, Sizewell, TVO
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| Switchgrass biofuel crop |
Will next-generation biofuels have a less destructive effect on agriculture? A study just published by US government scientists suggests that so-called ‘cellulosic’ ethanol has much better energy balance than today’s biofuels.[1] By energy balance, we mean the energy used to make the fuel compared to its energy value when burnt in a car’s engine. News summaries of the paper’s contents focused on one estimate that suggested that to make cellulosic biofuels might only need 6% of the energy value contained in the fuel. Depending on which crop is used, where it is grown, and how it is refined, most of today’s biofuels have only a weakly positive energy balance. So the paper gives hope that we might expect considerable progress towards carbon-neutral transport fuels when we can start refining all vegetable matter, not just foodstuffs, into fuels.
Cellulosic biofuels may well become important sources of motor fuels. There is certainly huge amounts of money flowing into the field. Unfortunately none of the news articles covering the US research pointed out the technology for turning cellulose into fuel is still a long way from commercial viability. Yes, we can turn grass into ethanol, but at prices which will double the price of petrol. And the greenhouse gas savings will almost certainly not be as attractive as the paper suggests, not least because the authors did not include the serious impact of nitrous oxide emissions from fertilised fields.
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Tags: biofuels, carbon reduction initiatives, Mark Lynas, science
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise by about 2-3 parts per million every year and the rate is slowly increasing. As well as this upward trend, there is an annual cycle: carbon dioxide levels fall in the northern hemisphere summer and rise strongly in the winter. The reason is that most of the vegetated land area is in the northern hemisphere and during the northern summer plants and trees absorb CO2.One effect of increasing spring and autumn temperatures has been to increase the length of what is loosely called ‘the growing season’. Plant growth can start earlier in spring and can continue until later. It might be thought that this would help vegetation take up more CO2, acting as a counterweight to increased fossil fuel use.
Research published in Nature in early January very strongly suggests that this is not happening. Warmer autumns are associated with a bringing forward of the date at which plants start losing CO2, not the reverse. Higher spring and autumn temperatures are tending to decrease the length of the period each year in which northern hemisphere plants are taking up carbon. If this research is confirmed, this is yet another potential positive feedback because higher temperatures might diminish the ability of biomass to take up carbon.
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Tags: science
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| E.ON’s planned Kingsnorth supercritical coal plant |
E.ON’s plan to install supercritical coal-burning technology on its Kingsnorth site in Kent was (unsurprisingly) supported by the planning authority. A more interesting question is why E.ON persisted with the application in the first place. Even carbon efficient power stations emit far more carbon than gas plants. A high price of carbon would make the Kingsnorth coal plant uneconomic. The answer to the question must be that E.ON is confident that supercritical coal plants can be economically retrofitted with carbon capture technology (CCS). So even if the carbon price increases dramatically, coal will still be competitive.
E.ON’s US operation is closely aligned with the co-operative FutureGen venture, which plans to build a coal gasification plant in the US within five years. This power station will then capture CO2 and store it in sandstone. FutureGen gasification carbon capture technology is ‘pre-combustion’, unlike the ‘post-combustion’ focus in Europe. US electric utilities are now assuming that coal plants without CCS will not be allowed. But in both the US and Europe there seems to be a prevailing assumption that a $30 per tonne CO2 price is sufficient to cover the cost of CCS technology, meaning coal will eventually be back in the power station mix.
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Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, corporate emissions, E.ON, fossil fuels, FutureGen, Kingsnorth, power generation
Shell announced an investment in a Hawaii-based plant to make biodiesel from algae. Algae are the most promising route to low-cost fossil fuel replacements. Yields per acre will eventually be a multiple of other sources of liquid fuels, such as maize, wheat and palm oil. The other key advantage of algae is that they can be used to sequester carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion.
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Tags: carbon capture, fossil fuels
The UK government has announced an intention to allow offshore wind farm development around most of the UK. John Hutton suggested that about 33 GW capacity could be added by 2020. This would provide about 25% of current UK electricity demand (which is itself rising by 1 to 2% per year).
Simple calculations suggest that this change may add about 15-25% to UK electricity bills. Offshore wind is more expensive to construct and operate than onshore wind farms. The announcement may suggest that the government believes that offshore wind can be pushed through but that onshore farms are likely to be successfully opposed. The big push for offshore wind seems to mean that the government is losing faith in nuclear.
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Tags: electricity demand, London Array, power generation, renewables, ROCs, Siemens, Vestas
Inventions that take the breath away with their simplicity and elegance are rare. The new rechargeable batteries from USBCell qualify for this honour. As their name indicates, they are AA batteries that are recharged by the USB port on a laptop or other powered device. They are not cheap, but will repay the investment by being far easier to recharge than conventional rechargeable AAs.
The carbon savings from these batteries are not large. My calculation is that they might save 10kg of CO2 a year in a household full of portable devices. But they will, of course, reduce the waste going into landfill.
The company that makes the batteries has won some important awards for its innovation. More importantly, it also has some extremely interesting views on the evolution of home electricity demand. It correctly points out that a larger and larger fraction of home energy is used in 12V, not 240V appliances. We waste a lot of energy switching 240V AC down to 12V DC. Its next products include a box that will allow all DC devices (phones, handheld consoles, laptops) to be efficiently charged. Eventually, it will be possible to use cheap(-ish) solar power collectors to charge all the battery DC devices in the home. The savings in carbon would be worthwhile (but probably outweighed by the purchase of one extra TV).
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Tags: domestic, electricity demand, Mioxa, technology, USBCell
The Conservative Party published a policy paper in early December on decentralised production of energy. It argues for heavy subsidy for small-scale generation of electricity. The report is useful in focusing on the need to minimise the finance and administrative burdens on small generators. However, it omits any consideration of the costs of the scheme it proposes. It is woefully ill-informed about developments in other countries. The Conservatives have subscribed to a romantic view about micro-generation and are choosing to ignore the huge costs of subsidising inefficient local generators. If they want large-scale low-carbon generation they should either back nuclear, remove the planning problems with wind, subsidise tidal or biomass power, or invest in CO2 capture.
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Tags: Drax, London Array, politics, power generation, technology
The CBI brought out a report on climate change. It argues that the UK can achieve emissions reductions at a sufficiently rapid rate to meet the government’s old target of 60% cuts by 2050. The optimism is underpinned by McKinsey work that assesses 120 different options for reducing carbon dioxide, ranging from domestic solar panels to carbon capture. McKinsey assesses what carbon price is necessary to create the incentives for business and consumers to switch to using these technologies.
The McKinsey analysis appears to show that getting the UK on track will need carbon prices in excess of €90 by 2020, though this number will then fall.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives
The world understands ‘smart metering’ in many different ways. Gordon Brown used the expression in his first speech on climate change. He meant devices that give visual real-time indication of electricity consumption, largely in homes. To the UK Conservative Party (see this issue of Carbon Commentary) it means conventional meters that can record the export of electricity from a house, as well as its use.
Smart meters are much more useful than either of these two definitions suggest. Their primary value will be to adjust the price of electricity depending on the level of demand. This frightens politicians because they fear the backlash from users complaining of the horrendous cost of peak-time electricity use. But if we are to increase the percentage of electricity coming from intermittent and/or unreliable sources, smart meters are a necessity.
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Tags: domestic, electricity demand, energy efficiency, technology
The IPCC released a 23-page report summarising the work of the fourth phase. Newspaper headlines suggested the document was more apocalyptic than the third summary of 2001. The reality is more complex.
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Tags: IPCC, politics, science
The government announced that it was minded to allow Heathrow to expand. A new runway and sixth terminal will increase capacity from 480,000 to 702,000 flights. The government’s consultation documents – totalling hundreds of pages – did not provide an estimate of the impact on CO2 emissions. In this article, we offer a tentative figure of about 16m tonnes as the potential maximum impact of the proposed expansion. After multiplying by 2.7 to account for the other pollutants created by aviation, the increase takes the total UK emissions from aviation up to 144m tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
Another piece in this newsletter discusses Gordon Brown’s statement in the same week that total UK emissions from all sources may need to fall to no more 155m tonnes by 2050.
The disjunction between government policies on aviation and climate change is startling.
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Tags: aviation, BAA, Ferrovial, Ryanair
The environmental community tends to think that Gordon Brown doesn’t understand the complexity and size of the climate challenge. His first speech on the subject gave more detail than expected and reassured some that the prime minister does recognise the severity of the challenge. He moved towards an 80% reduction in GHGs by 2050, but even under optimistic assumptions his plans will not result in emissions reductions on the scale required. All his proposals were pain-free. He does not yet believe that the electorate is ready to face the real challenges of emissions reduction.
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Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Gordon Brown, London Array, politics, power generation, Stern Review, technology
In Denmark and Germany, large numbers of individuals own shares in local wind farms. If the government encouraged this in the UK, a large part of the local opposition would disappear. Onshore wind farms in windy locations are good investments which could form an effective part of many people’s pension plans.
One of the few co-operatively owned wind farms in the country has almost finished raising its funds. Investors have put up £3m to buy two existing turbines in the Fens. Locally owned wind farms should be encouraged as a cost effective means of cutting emissions.
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Tags: BT, Co-operative Bank, EDF, politics, power generation, public opinion, renewables, ROCs, Siemens
After decades of foot-dragging, the UK construction industry has begun to see the importance of good insulation and higher environmental performance. Large housebuilders are beginning voluntarily to build their major developments to a better standard than required by building regulations.
Housebuilders also see the increasing commitment by government to increasing the mandatory standards for home insulation and other environmental characteristics. By 2016, all new homes will have to be ‘zero carbon’.
A report just released by estate agents Knight Frank examines whether buyers are prepared to pay the cost of the eco-improvements. The answer seems to be a cautious ‘yes’.
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Tags: Berkeley Homes, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, energy efficiency, housing, Knight Frank, public opinion, R.gen
Amazon’s new e-reader has been widely discussed this week. Most of the comments have been unflattering. Critics have gasped at the high price ($400) and commented unfavourably on the slightly dated appearance of the device. Others asked why Amazon thought it could charge for newspapers and blogs that are available free via a computer.
This isn’t the first attempt to market an e-reader. Other pocket readers, such as Sony’s, have failed to make much impression. Will Amazon overcome the early objections and turn Kindle into something worth buying? I think the answer is probably yes, and the impact on CO2 emissions might be more than trivial. Paper and card manufacture is responsible for about 4% of UK emissions. (Much of the UK’s paper is made abroad, so doesn’t show up fully in national accounts.) Getting rid of paper use is a worthwhile carbon-saving aim.
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Tags: Amazon, Sony, technology
Shai Agassi, the California-based software superstar who wanted to run SAP but left the company in March when he didn’t get the top job, has come back into the spotlight as the CEO of an electric car start-up. The new company is funded by $200m of venture capital and investment bank money. This makes it one of the best-funded start-ups in history.
Agassi does not intend to make electric cars. Wisely, he is leaving this to the auto industry. He is focusing on the batteries. He’ll lease them to anybody with an appropriate car and he’ll develop large networks of ‘filling stations’ where the driver can quickly take out a discharged battery and swap it for a fully charged version on long journeys. By 2010, he wants a hundred thousands electric cars on the roads of California and elsewhere.
The obstacles are huge. Although lithium-iron-phosphate battery technology is improving rapidly, and will continue to do so for decades, full-size car batteries now cost at least €7,000. Getting mainstream manufacturers to build large volumes of electric cars that will take his batteries is another formidable challenge. Third, he has to persuade retailers to install the equipment to swap batteries automatically.
But our weary European scepticism needs to be rested for a moment. The long-run economics favour this idea. My sums suggest that at current UK petrol prices it costs at least six times more to drive a mile on petrol than it does on electricity. Battery prices will fall and performance will improve. At some point it is going to be so much cheaper to power a car with electrons rather than octane that even the slothful auto industry will switch. When the market has tipped it won’t be long before passenger cars are all electric. Agassi may be too early, and his business model may require too much capital, but electric cars are coming soon.
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Tags: fossil fuels, GM, motoring, SAP, technology, Tesla Motors, Toyota
The US presidential contenders are laying out their plans for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Mrs Clinton’s proposals are noteworthy for their commitment to re-engage with the global negotiations over future emissions caps and for her ambitious acceptance of the need for an 80% reduction in US emissions by 2050. The 80% target is rapidly becoming the preferred option of world politicians, a more ambitious target than the UK’s 60% figure. (The UK’s Climate Change bill will allow the new Climate Change Committee to recommend an increase to 80% if appropriate.)
Mrs Clinton espouses a cap-and-trade system for US emissions. Unlike the EU’s approach, she proposes to auction the permits. She will continue the disastrous US policy of encouraging the conversion of corn to bioethanol. She looks to renewable electricity to provide 25% of US power.
She will add to federal expenditure on R+D, but the number proposed is insufficient to have much effect. She stresses the high cost of energy (gas, motor fuels and electricity) to American citizens but not does mention that the impact of her measures will be to increase energy costs, not reduce them.
Mrs Clinton’s plan is calm and measured. Contrast her statesmanlike tone with David Crane, the CEO of a large electricity generating company, in a 14 October article in the Washington Post. Crane writes, ‘We are not running out of time, we have run out of time’ [his italics]. He argues that the US government should put an immediate price on carbon emissions to incentivise a rapid switch to carbon capture and storage in the US power sector. His tone is desperate: ‘I am a carboholic’ but I want to stop, he writes. We could all do with a similar sense of urgency from Mrs Clinton.
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Tags: politics
Two pieces of market research published in the last week give some more support for the view that opinion is moving towards accepting that climate change will require lifestyle changes. BBC World Service interviewed individuals across the globe. Power company E.ON produced its segmentation of British consumer attitudes.
The BBC survey suggested that over 80% of UK people are ‘ready to make significant changes in the way I live to help prevent global warming’. Nearly 90% think that changes in lifestyle will be necessary to address the problem. These numbers are approximately the same as among urban Chinese and only marginally higher than the US.
E.ON’s segmentation has over 20% of the UK already taking serious and possibly costly personal action related to climate change. Less than 15% actively reject any need to act now.
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Tags: BBC, E.ON, marketing issues, Marks & Spencer, public opinion
Energy efficiency improvements often do not deliver reductions in energy use. For example, when a householder installs better insulation, the energy savings are sometimes much less than would have been predicted. Sometimes this is because the insulation was badly fitted, but it is often because the householder runs the heating at a higher temperature when the house is better insulated. This is called the ‘rebound’ effect: when it becomes cheaper or more effective to use energy, people use more of it.
The many studies into this effect have produced a wide variety of different estimates for the size of this effect. Most cluster between 10 and 30%. This means that energy efficiency improvements generally result in a large net benefit. But these studies only capture the direct effect on consumers and businesses. A study from the UK’s Energy Research Centre shows that the economy-wide impact may be much larger. For example, lower heating bills may mean that householders are rich enough to take more flights. At an even higher level of abstraction, better economy-wide energy efficiency (through, say, improvements in steel-making technologies) may encourage more rapid economic growth, which in turn raises energy use.
Some economists think that the economy-wide rebound from energy efficiency gains is very large – perhaps over 100%. A figure over 100% suggests that total energy consumption rises after energy efficiency improvements. The tentatively stated view of a new report by the UK Energy Research Centre is that the true number is somewhat lower than this and may be around 50%, although it could be a great deal higher.
Government projections for the impact of energy saving measures never take the rebound effect into account. Policy-makers trying to reduce global emissions need to adjust their thinking to reflect the much lower than expected efficacy of energy saving programmes.
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Tags: domestic, energy efficiency, Stern Review
Organic matter, such as agricultural waste, heated in the absence of oxygen splits into two types of material: a charcoal (biochar), and hydrocarbon gases and liquids. When added to soils, the charcoal can provide a powerful fertiliser. The hydrocarbons can be burnt, either to generate electricity or to power an internal combustion engine.
Biochar is exciting growing attention around the world. Charcoal’s ability to improve soils can sometimes be spectacular. But more importantly from a climate change perspective, charcoal is almost pure carbon and is strangely stable in soils. It seems to persist for centuries. Charcoal can therefore offer substantial opportunities for long-term sequestration of carbon. The valuable fuels from the biogases and liquids are also carbon-neutral since they contain CO2 previously captured during photosynthesis. As a third major benefit, soils fertilised with charcoal seem to need less artificial fertiliser, thus saving fossil fuels. Fewer applications of fertiliser would reduce the level of emissions of nitrous oxide, a particularly dangerous greenhouse gas.
Biochar manufacture represents a way of productively storing large amounts of carbon. But the carbon in the charcoal could be burnt to generate electricity instead of being stored in soil. Current emissions trading schemes, such as the European ETS, do not allow sequestered carbon to be considered as equivalent to a reduction in greenhouse warming emissions. This is a mistake that will need to be rectified. It make more sense to use agricultural land to make biochar and biogases/bioliquids than to burn the biomass in power stations. Power stations burning wood benefit from buying fewer emissions certificates and from the renewable energy subsidy, but there is no comparable benefit from storing carbon in the soil. This is an anomaly that should be removed.
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Tags: agriculture, BEST Pyrolysis, biochar, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Dynamotive, emissions trading, ROCs
Post-industrial countries like the UK import an increasing fraction of their manufactured goods from China. The carbon emissions from the Chinese factories making these goods are not included in the UK’s totals. How much greater would the UK’s emissions be if we included the impact of goods manufactured in China?
In this article, we make some estimates based on a briefing note recently produced by the Tyndall Centre. The numbers I use are imprecise – and I am using them for reasons not envisaged by Tyndall – but I believe that the increase in the imports of Chinese goods has probably reduced UK emissions by about 6% below what it would have been. Perhaps more dramatically, the trade deficit is rising so fast that it is depressing UK emissions by a further 2% a year.
Without the safety valve of Chinese imports, the UK would be very likely to breach its Kyoto targets, which only measure domestic emissions. This is important in itself, but a more striking conclusion is that the trade with China has disguised a failure to cut emissions growth below the growth of British GDP. The UK government, and others around the world, regularly claim that CO2 output has been ‘decoupled’ from economic growth. The analysis contained in this note suggests that the apparent decoupling is actually an artefact of the growing deficit in trade with China.
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Tags: corporate emissions
The Goodall household is well-trained. Compostable products get put on the compost heap. Plastic bottles end up in the recycling bin. Where should Innocent’s new smoothie bottles made from bio-degradable corn starch go? Surprisingly, the answer is into landfill.
Innocent, the company with one of the purest brands in the UK, has made a mistake. For the last year it has used a new material called PLA for one of its ranges of drinks. It admitted last week that it would cease to use this bio-plastic later this year. But on its website it was still making some surprising claims. It says that the bottles made from this bio-plastic break down in garden compost heaps. They will not. PLA needs to be heated for several days to temperatures far greater than those in a domestic compost bin before it begins to rot. The bottles would break down in a commercial composter, but very few local authorities operate one of these plants. Innocent’s ethical consumers are going to find a large number of plastic bottles at the bottom of their compost heap next spring.
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Tags: food and grocery retailing, Innocent, NatureWorks
The Peak Oil question is beginning to become a central part of the daily debate on energy matters. On one side is an increasing number of independent scientists and oil engineers who note that world oil production is barely rising. Existing fields are running down and new reserves are found rarely. On the other side of the debate are the major institutions of the global oil industry. The International Energy Agency sees world oil supply rising from about 88 million barrels a day now to about 116 million barrels in 2030.
This last week saw another analysis (from Germany’s Energy Watch Group) suggesting that world oil production actually peaked in 2006. From now on, the group says, we can expect rapid declines. Many people worried about climate change see Peak Oil as a good thing. They believe that a shortage of oil and natural gas will slow down the rise in energy consumption and therefore help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The argument is actually more complex – it may well be that Peak Oil will tend to increase CO2. We will not be saved from ourselves by running out of oil.
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Tags: fossil fuels
Video conferencing has been around for a surprisingly long time. AT&T ran the first call in 1927. Since then, pundits have been consistently predicting that video conferencing was just about to take off. They have been wrong for eighty years. Why should we believe the techno-optimists now?
In the last year, several companies have launched video conferencing products that provide an experience similar to real meetings. The quality is surprising and even sceptics have begun to see the advantages of using a meeting room for an hour rather than spending three days going to Hong Kong and back. Cisco’s Telepresence product is generating enthusiasm that is tempered by the enormous costs of setting up the equipment and providing the bandwidth. But the company says that prices will fall dramatically over the next few years.
Is this going to be enough to get people out of planes? The signs are good. Even low bandwidth alternatives suitable for home use are getting praise from the experts. So if Cisco doesn’t make video conferencing work, Bay Area start-ups like VSee will probably start eating into the market for lower cost products.
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Tags: AT&T, aviation, carbon reduction initiatives, Cisco, corporate emissions, offices, Pearson, Reed Elsevier, Tate and Lyle, technology, Teleris, VSee, Wachovia
A recent Henley Centre survey suggested that 86% of people were eager to buy goods with less packaging, up 20% in the last two years. Nothing arouses as much spontaneous anger among British householders as the ‘over-packaging’ of foods. Recent newspaper headlines conveyed righteous indignation about the policies of UK retailers, in particular the failure to make all packaging recyclable.
The newspapers completely missed the point. Three issues need to be emphasised:
- Food packaging is a vanishingly small fraction of UK waste. Waste food is far more important.
- Good packaging is vital: it helps protect food from damage and helps lengthen its shelf life.
- Recyclable food packaging may actually be bad for climate change.
Making these points too loudly can get you lynched in some middle-class areas of Britain. Nevertheless, it needs to be said repeatedly that packaging, particularly of food, is not the environmental disaster it is made out to be.
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Tags: domestic, food and grocery retailing, politics, shops
Short comments on some of the major news stories from the last two weeks
Tags: news
CO2 output is accelerating, the ocean and land sinks are getting less effective at absorbing it. So the rate of growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing.
(Canadell, Le Quéré, and others, ‘Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 October 2007; URL: http://tinyurl.com/yqew8o [accessed 27 October 2007].)
The pre-industrial CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million. It was 381ppm in 2006. The growth rate between 2000 and 2006 was 1.93ppm, a significant increase on growth rates in earlier periods. Many policy-makers see it as vital to keep below concentrations of about 400ppm of CO2. The increase in the rate of rise of CO2 makes the achievement of this target more difficult.
Increases in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reflect the volume of global emissions and the effectiveness of the oceans and land mass in absorbing greenhouse gases. This paper contains evidence both that emissions growth is speeding up and that the greenhouse gas sinks are capturing less CO2.
The growth rate in emissions between 2000 and 2006 was 3.3% a year compared to 1.3% in the 1990s (please see the article on Chinese exports in this issue of Carbon Commentary for corroboration of this finding). This increase reflects fast economic growth, particularly in China and India and a worrying increase in the amount of CO2 produced per unit of global output. It cannot be stressed enough that this second cause of emissions growth is unexpected. We thought we were going to see energy use fall in relation to economic output.
By contrast, models have predicted a decline in the effectiveness of ocean CO2 ‘sinks’. This paper shows that we can have a strong suspicion (but not near certainty) that this process has started. The authors point to increasing wind speeds in the Southern Ocean as a primary cause. This turbulence ‘ventilates’ the carbon dioxide contained in the surface of the sea. Droughts in mid-latitude regions have contributed to the decreased efficiency of land absorption.
The paper concludes that – with large margins of error – economic growth generated 65% of the increase in atmospheric CO2; the decrease in the efficiency of the sinks generated another 18% and caused a rise in the carbon output required to generate a dollar of world GDP.
The authors summarise by saying that their results ‘characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing’.
Tags: news, science
Only 1% of imported organic food comes by air. But the Soil Association says that air freight ‘can generate 177 times’ the CO2 of shipping. Air transport is necessary for some fruit and delicate vegetables which provide a vital source of income in some poor countries.
The Association was caught in a dilemma. It didn’t want to give its valuable imprimatur to foods that caused climate damage but neither did it want to impoverish poor tropical communities.
It carried out a detailed and thoughtful consultation with stakeholders. It seems a model of its kind. The consultation produced a consensus that air freight was only acceptable if the products were farmed in a way that brought development to the local community. In essence the Association is saying that only ‘Fairtrade’ products will be able to carry its valuable label. It won’t be enough just to meet the ordinary standards for organic agriculture.
Peter Melchett, the policy director of the Association, said that the ‘results of our very widespread consultation show that most people in the North and the South say that they only support air freight if it delivers real environmental and social benefits. The linking of organic and ethical or Fairtrade standards does that’.
The Soil Association will now move to ratify this decision, which went against central government advice, at least as expressed in a recent speech by a minister.
In the same press release it also announced a move to involve the Carbon Trust in providing a ‘footprint’ for organic foods (please see the article on organic food and carbon emissions in Carbon Commentary Newsletter #1). It said it would move towards carbon labelling of organic foods (please see the article on Tesco and Wal-Mart in Carbon Commentary Newsletter #2 for reasons why we think this is a mistake).
In a slightly surprising move, it also announced that it would seek to ‘actively encourage people to eat less meat’. Since beef cultivation is an important source of emissions, this makes good sense, but the Association is taking a risk by suggesting people should change their diet.
It also intends to review whether heated glasshouses are appropriate recipients of organic labels. This last point is well overdue. The carbon footprint of a food from a Dutch heated glasshouse is likely to be far greater than an air-freighted equivalent grown in the tropics.
Tags: aviation, food and grocery retailing, news
BT uses over half of 1% of the UK’s electricity and is the single largest purchaser of green electricity in the UK. It buys over 10% of the country’s total supply of renewable electricity. It now seeks to develop wind turbines on some of its own sites. It intends to invest in about 120 2MW turbines to produce about a quarter of its own electricity or between 0.1 and 0.2% of the UK’s total need.
This is an impressively large plan. The cost is about £250m. The financial return will depend on how much of the electricity replaces power BT would have bought from other suppliers and how much is ‘exported’. Assuming very little is used by BT itself, the return will be approximately £50m a year, yielding a return of about 20% on the initial investment. These figures assume that BT gets a yield of about 28% of the rated capacity of the turbines, which is about the UK average.
These figures depend entirely on finding sites. I think that BT may well have substantial difficulties finding as many 120 places where it can capture enough wind to average 28%. Perhaps more importantly, at many of those sites which do have enough wind, I think it will have problems getting connections to the local distribution network. Two of the three initial sites identified by BT are in the Scottish Islands. Although a typical 2MW turbine is not a huge generator to add to the local network, the islands have quite limited electricity needs. Scottish and Southern may not easily be able to add these turbines to their network.
When I asked BT whether it had approached the local distribution companies to check on this point, I was not given an affirmative answer. This raises the possibility that BT announced these plans before detailed consideration of whether its aspirations are technically feasible. So it may be a great idea to erest wind turbines, but it looks like it will be much more difficult than BT realises. Companies like Ecotricity have been developing wind turbines on industrial sites for years. Though planning permission is easier, there are still huge obstacles to overcome. BT needs Ecotricity’s expertise immediately, but it will still struggle to meet its aspirations to grow its wind power capacity.
Tags: BT, corporate emissions, news, power generation
(Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, ‘Time to ditch Kyoto’, Nature, 449, 973-5 (25 October 2007); URL: http://tinyurl.com/ys8flx [accessed 27 October 2007].)
This short article has attracted attention around the world. Its thesis is that Kyoto is a dangerous distraction. It hasn’t worked, and its successor will not succeed either if it follows the same principles. Kyoto’s proponents have ignored its failures and exaggerated its effectiveness. It is worse than useless because it has stifled discussion of alternatives. However, their thesis is buttressed by two observations which are not accurate. They say that the International Energy Agency is predicting that world energy demand will double by 2030. It does not; it predicts a rise of just over 50%. Second, the paper states that the BP annual Statistical Review says that a likely global carbon price will not be high enough to induce major change. It does not; BP might think this, but its latest Statistical Review (referenced in the text) does not say this.
Like generals fighting the previous war, Kyoto’s originators based its design on the successful treaties on ozone depletion, acid rain and nuclear weapons. These problems were much more amenable to global regulation and the sharing of burdens was much more politically feasible. The authors of this paper suggest that policy makers should move away from treaties that try to put a cap on world emissions.
Prins and Rayner say that we need new techniques for getting a grip on the carbon problem. And, second, we need to work out how we need to adapt when severe climate changes arrive.
Their proposals for replacements for Kyoto are short and unspecific. In summary, they believe that the world needs ‘genuine’ emissions markets, not artificial constructs like Kyoto, and these markets must evolve gradually from local experiments. They mention approvingly some of the voluntary carbon markets that have grown up in the US. I think this faith in small informal markets is wholly misplaced. What possible reason would persuade a major polluter to participate?
The authors tell us we need to invest more in public R+D in clean technologies. In this they mirror Bjørn Lomborg (see the discussion of his book Cool It in Carbon Commentary Newsletter #3). They support messy public policies rather than ones that go for what they disparagingly describe as ‘elegant’ solutions. They see a role for measures such as mandatory technology standards (perhaps such as mile per gallon regulation on cars). The ideas they present are sketchy and unconvincing.
Many of us think that Kyoto and its successor are worth supporting as one of a package of measures. It is, after all, the only measure that we have currently got other than European ETS. Does it distract from finding other tools? I don’t see any evidence for the authors’ pessimism. Can it be merged with other global and local measures? Yes it can. No one pretends Kyoto is perfect, but because it tried to distribute the pain of emissions reduction reasonably fairly, it was a start. We can build on it; we need not destroy it.
Tags: Bjørn Lomborg, emissions trading, news, politics
It is adventurous of E.ON to decide to invest in tidal stream generator farm. The announcement in the last few days confirmed that the company intended to put a tidal plant off the coast of Wales in a partnership with Lunar Energy.
The Severn barrage scheme (see Carbon Commentary Newsletter #3) is a ‘tidal range’ scheme. The electricity is generated by damming the river at high tide and then letting the water flow out through turbines as the tide falls. Tidal stream technology captures the energy of the tide as it flows through constricted channels. The UK has many potential sites for tidal stream power stations, but the best locations are off the north coast of Scotland and around Alderney in the Channel Islands.
Why then has E.ON chosen Wales? Perhaps the company doesn’t want to test the technology in the toughest conditions. An attempt to use similar underwater turbines in New York’s East River has been frustrated by the breaking off of the tips of the turbine blades in the fast flowing tides. The UK’s offshore conditions will be far tougher. Or it might be that E.ON knows that it would be expensive or impossible to connect the turbines to the distribution grid in the locations of highest energy potential (see the news story in this section on BT’s plans for wind turbines in Orkney and Shetland). Previous rumours have suggested that the eventual site chosen will either be off the coast of Pembrokeshire or off Anglesey.
The recent report into the Severn barrage noted that there at least 24 different technologies for capturing tidal stream energy in the UK. The device promoted by Lunar Energy sits on the sea floor, is about 20m long and has a turbine diameter of about 12m. The blades sit within a case which focuses the tidal flow. As a Venturi device, the speed of the water flow within the case is greater than the flow outside, adding to the amount of energy that can be captured.
Is wave power economic? It is probably too early to say. The UK has excellent tidal streams around the country, but even this advantage may not be enough. Lunar Energy optimistically quotes figures of around 2.5p to 5p per kilowatt hour, which would make the technology extremely attractive, but these figures appear only to be based on some guesses made in the US. The Carbon Trust’s recent report suggested figures at least three times as much for the first implementations of tidal stream power plants. On the other hand, informal figures from the New York project have suggested figures close to the Lunar Energy estimates.
E.ON has been working with Lunar Energy for some time. It had been thought that the generator would not commit until after sea trials of the first Lunar device in Scotland next year. Last week’s announcement suggests that E.ON’s confidence in the technology and Lunar Energy is high.
Tags: E.ON, Lunar Energy, news, power generation
Nobody expects a Severn barrage to be built soon. But government opinion appears to be swinging in favour of the idea. The independent Sustainable Development Commission has just brought out a report that broadly supports a barrage. Though the environmental costs will be high, it says that mitigation measures will counterbalance some of the damage.
We now also have a better feel for the economics of the scheme or, more correctly, for both of the two main options for blocking the Severn. The bigger scheme blocks the estuary between Cardiff and Weston-super-Mare. It will cost about £15bn and deliver just under 5% of the UK’s electricity. The smaller – just downstream of the Severn bridges – will cost a tenth as much, or £1.5bn, but will provide a sixth as much power as the bigger project.
£15bn to build a barrage that decarbonises less than 5% of the UK’s electricity supply is a high price to pay. Scaled up to the whole of the electricity business, this is about 20% of one year’s GNP to replace coal and gas power stations. Even over twenty years, this cost is similar to Stern’s estimate of the cost of reducing the UK’s emissions for the economy as a whole. The smaller barrier delivers much less electricity, but at a capital cost per kWh of little more than half its larger cousin.
The Sustainable Development Commission acknowledges that private financiers are unlikely to put up the cash for the bigger scheme. The report doesn’t really discuss the viability of the smaller barrage but it is much more financially attractive. In terms of total capital cost and expected yearly output, the upstream barrage is very similar to the huge wind farm development called the London Array. The Array will be constructed with private capital. I believe that if the current renewable electricity support scheme remains in place a barrage across the upper Severn can be built with risk capital.
The Sustainable Development Commission thinks that the bigger scheme should be built with public funds. I am not convinced by this. The offshore wind resources around the UK are orders of magnitude greater than the useful energy of Severn tides. If the larger Severn barrage has construction costs of nearly twice the typical figures for offshore wind, wouldn’t it be better simply to speed up the licensing of wind farms?
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Tags: London Array, power generation, Stern Review
Bjørn Lomborg, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, is the most formidable critic of those who think that cutting climate-changing gases is the most important problem the world faces. He made his name with ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ and his new book continues his drive to get the world to see global warming as just one of the world’s important problems.
Lomborg believes climate change is happening, and that mankind’s activities are responsible. But he tells that we shouldn’t do much about global warming because the costs are very high and the benefits are limited and far-off. Like most books written by partisans in this impassioned debate, much of what he says can be questioned.
Nevertheless, this is an extremely valuable polemic: it stresses repeatedly that taking action to stop climate change may have very high short-term costs. If by clumsy attempts to hold down emissions we stunt the prospects for global economic growth, we may do more harm to the world’s poor than would be inflicted by climate change. It needs to be said time and time again that disease and malnutrition are killing far more people today than climate change. We are making progress diminishing the impact of these scourges. Despite what you sometimes read in the newspapers, world food supply and life expectancy are improving. Panic-stricken action on climate change must not be allowed to halt this progress. We need a rational assessment of whether it is best to spend money on slowing climate change or to whether we would achieve better effects from focusing resources elsewhere.
Bjørn Lomborg is an able debater with a passionate interest in his subject. But he overstates his case, focuses on only parts of the issue and avoids any discussion of a possible future acceleration of global warming. Even with these weaknesses Cool It needs to be part of the continuing debate on how to respond to the climate threat without crippling the poorest economies of the world.
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Tags: Bjørn Lomborg, book review, Mark Lynas, science
The Pre-Budget review in early October disappointed green activists. Environmental measures formed a small fraction of the government’s initiatives. It doesn’t look as though Alistair Darling sees climate change as one of the priorities of this administration. But there were two important commitments: a revision to Air Passenger Duty (APD) and (via BERR) a competition to run a commercial-scale carbon capture project.
The APD proposal attracted most attention. The government intends to change the duty so that it is levied on aircraft movements and not on individual travellers. Commentators, and the two main opposition parties, have long suggested that this would be a sensible change. Carbon Commentary disagrees. The proposed revision cannot be implemented without infringing international treaties on the taxation of air travel. The chancellor’s proposed consultation will eventually conclude that APD should remain substantially as it is now.
In the article, we briefly analyse the effects of APD and also show that the duty imposes an effective tax on airlines that is greater than would be levied if air travel were fully included in the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
The BERR Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) announcement was worryingly unspecific. It did not even bother to mention a figure for the value of the financial support. It also upset some major companies by only allowing entries for the competition from a limited range of technologies. The government is extremely vulnerable to the charge that it is back in the business of picking winners.
CCS is an extremely important part of any strategy for national reduction of emissions. The UK should be throwing far more money at research and development into the various forms of CCS. The simplest and quickest way to get innovation in CCS would be to include carbon storage as a technology that qualifies under the renewable obligation rules. We need to remove the difference between the financial treatment of renewable power generation and carbon capture. Both achieve the same outcome and both should have the same reward.
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Tags: aviation, BP, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, emissions trading, politics, Sainsbury's, Scottish Power
BT’s green credentials are well established. It is the largest commercial buyer of renewable electricity in the UK, emphasises the importance of carbon reduction across the organisation, and pushes voice and video conferencing at an unconvinced customer base. In any international ranking, BT’s sustainability measures get high marks.
But BT has the same problem as many other organisations: its server farms are growing in number and size. The increased power consumption in its data centres explains why the organisation’s electricity demand is growing. Eventually, its brand image will suffer as critics suggest that its public stance on green issues is not matched by its internal behaviour.
BT’s electricity use is about half a percent of the UK’s total, and its server farms represent over 10% of its energy consumption. BT says that data centre use is rising at 40% a year, and the company’s emphasis on growing video businesses, such as BT Vision, is likely to increase data storage and transmission demands into the foreseeable future.
BT’s response has been to attack the power use of the server with radical measures that set best practice elsewhere in the world. Its new data centres use fresh air cooling, not air conditioning, and the company runs its machines at much higher temperatures than used to be considered possible. Since cooling servers uses at least as much power as running them, this is an important step. The second major innovation is to run the farms on DC power, cutting the very significant losses in the multiple AC to DC conversions in a conventional centre. Better ‘loading’ of the computers helps as well. A well-utilised machine uses only a little more power than an intermittently under-employed server. BT claims that these measures can reduce the typical power consumption of a server farm by 60%.
Across the world, data centre energy consumption is becoming a bigger issue. The world has about 26m servers pumping out data day and night. Estimates suggest that they use about 2% of all electricity produced and global growth is probably around 15% a year. BT’s innovations may be a useful model for others to follow. But the unfortunate fact is that at current growth rates the maximum efficiency gains will be wiped out in less than four years.
In an intriguing trend, some companies are dealing with apparently unquenchable growth in data traffic by beginning to move away from thousands of servers based on PC technology towards huge single computers with lower total energy costs. Who said the mainframe was dead?
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Tags: BT, carbon reduction initiatives, corporate emissions, electricity demand
Many agricultural crops can be turned into fuels. Diesel substitutes can be made from the oil in seeds. The sugars in cereals and tubers can be fermented into ethanol.
At first examination, biofuels look as though they might significantly reduce carbon emissions. An agricultural crop takes carbon from the air through the photosynthesis process. When the harvest is processed, and the output used as a fuel, the carbon returns to the atmosphere. Proponents sometimes said that agricultural crops make ‘carbon-neutral’ fuels.
Over the last two years, this simple optimism has been eroded. Two further blows have fallen in recent weeks:
- Nobel winner Paul Crutzen and his team showed that we may have been underestimating greenhouse gas emissions from using fertiliser. The work suggested that emissions of nitrous oxide may be far higher than previously thought.
- Richard Doornbusch, who is attached the OECD, wrote a paper which said: ‘The conclusion must be that the potential of the current technologies of choice – ethanol and biodiesel – to deliver a major contribution to the energy demands of the transport sector without compromising food prices and the environment is very limited.’
The balance of evidence is that biofuels produced from crops grown in temperate climates save very small amounts of emissions. Moreover, the land used for biofuel crops could be used for food or biomass for energy. In tropical lands, biofuel crops may save carbon emissions. But the energy policies of richer countries may be incentivising tropical farmers to cut down forest to grow fuel crops. The effect of this almost certainly outweighs any emissions reductions.
Despite the increasingly prevalent view that biofuels are little or no improvement on fossil fuels, both the EU and the US are obliging retailers to increase the percentage of motor fuels derived from agricultural sources. This is a mistake.
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Tags: agriculture, Bjørn Lomborg, carbon reduction initiatives, science
The Advertising Standards Authority is struggling to hold the line on the advertising of environmental benefits. In June, the Authority put out a series of instructions trying to impose clearer conditions on advertisers. But it continues to have to adjudicate on a series of difficult decisions. Last week saw a wind power developer taken to task for over-estimating the carbon savings from turbines. The Authority had to decide which type of power station would produce less power as a result of a new wind farm – coal or gas. It took advice from the National Grid and proceeded to tick npower off, even though the power company was following rules previously set down by the ASA itself.
In at least one other country, the advertising regulator has thrown in the towel and told some advertisers simply to stop advertising green claims. Reuters reports that Norway’s Consumer Ombudsman has told car advertisers that ‘We ask that…phrases such as “environmentally friendly”, “green”, “clean”, “environmental car”, “natural” or similar descriptions not be used in marketing cars.’
We cannot be far away from this sort of rule in the UK. Green claims are almost invariably contentious and difficult to prove. We simply don’t have an accounting system that can deal yet with carbon. Advertisers are going to be forced to avoid any but the most clear-cut and well-documented savings.
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Tags: electricity demand, Ford, marketing issues, npower, science
Many companies selling to UK families have a strong sense that consumer demands are shifting rapidly. M&S recently talked to Carbon Commentary about its perceptions of changes in attitudes and behaviour. This article compares its results with those of a survey by the Henley Centre in summer 2007.
During the last year or so, the percentage of ‘green zealots’ in M&S research has risen from 3-4% to nearer 8%. Henley also sees a figure of 8% for the two greenest groups ‘principled pioneers’ and ‘vocal activists’. A further 31% (Henley Centre) or 30-35% (M&S) are actively concerned and want to adjust their behaviour. There has also been a big growth in this group in the last year.
In both surveys another third are aware of environmental and ethical issues, but are unlikely to take active steps unless pushed. A final quarter or so don’t care very much. M&S says that they are ’struggling’. Henley calls them ‘disengaged’.
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Tags: food and grocery retailing, marketing issues, Marks & Spencer, public opinion, shops
Ceres Power, a £150m AIM-listed company, recently demonstrated its new Combined Heat and Power product. This power plant is targeted at ordinary domestic homes. Combining an efficient central heating boiler with a fuel cell that converts gas to electricity, the new product has excited the City. Ceres is extremely optimistic about sales of the device, based on the cash and carbon dioxide savings it says can be achieved.
The Ceres fuel cell (on the left) is incorporated into an ordinary domestic condensing boiler (on the right)
Ceres promises reductions in utility bills of £300 a year and 2.5 tonnes savings in carbon dioxide for the typical UK house. Our short report shows why we think that these savings are unlikely even in the most appropriate UK installation. In fact, the emissions reductions are likely to be minimal and the reductions in the electricity bill will not easily justify the approximately £1,000 extra cost of the CHP cell.
Micro CHP is a difficult proposition. Other companies have found that it is hard to make substantial savings in domestic installations. CHP is not well suited to rapidly fluctuating and unpredictable demand for electricity and hot water.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, Ceres Power, domestic, electricity demand
Some scientists think that the world’s halting attempts to reduce carbon emissions are bound to fail. So they have proposed various schemes for counteracting the global warming impact of fossil fuels. The Gaia scientist James Lovelock proposed an unusual and untested idea in a recent paper. He suggested that we install millions of pipes to bring nutrient-rich water to the surface to feed carbon sequestering organisms. Other scientists are working on schemes as diverse as mirrors that reflect part of the sun’s energy, increased aerosol pollution to stop sunlight getting to the earth, and improving plankton growth by adding iron to the oceans.
All these schemes are ‘offsets’; they seek to counter-balance the impact of human activities with schemes to reduce CO2 elsewhere. The technology optimists believe that one or more of these techniques can completely counteract human effects. The cost often seems very reasonable – in the billions rather than the trillions – and the technological challenges seem not insuperable. The pessimists say these schemes will have huge unintended effects, possibly worse than climate change itself, and that toying with ‘geo-engineering’ projects, as they are called, simply delays the day that the world starts to realise it must cut fossil fuel use. Geo-engineering deals with the symptoms, not the causes, of global warming. And none of the proposed schemes deal with the adverse effects of higher CO2 concentrations, such as increased ocean acidity.
This article argues that all the major geo-engineering proposals have substantial pitfalls, but that it makes clear sense to increase the research funding into these schemes. The opponents and proponents of geo-engineering have got locked into an almost theological debate as to the ethics of climate modification but this argument should be secondary to the need to have well-defined back-up plans in the event of increasingly rapid deterioration of the global climate.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, science
New UK housing has insulation standards that do not come close to matching the best northern European levels. Individual homeowners and ethical investors have built single ‘eco-homes’ but a small new development in Bladon, Oxfordshire is among the first to be speculatively built by a mainstream housebuilder.
The new houses are not ‘zero-carbon’ and do not use the Passiv Haus technologies pioneered for low-emissions housing in Germany. But they are a substantial improvement on most mass-produced homes. Will they make the builder more money? No, says the company, but the experience it has gained will enable it to build eco-homes at a more competitive price in the future. These nine houses each cost over £40,000 more than their draughty Persimmon equivalents. The builder expects the price premium to be slightly less.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, housing
Both the Conservative and Lib Dem parties have produced position papers on climate change in the last few weeks. The Conservative document is over 500 pages long but contains very few specific proposals. To be harsh, it is little more than a prolonged agonising over whether the climate change problem can be addressed using conventional free-market mechanisms. The Lib Dem paper is a tenth of the length but does contain the outlines of a coherent set of policies.
This article analyses the Lib Dem proposals. It shows that the Lib Dems are prepared to use the price mechanism to choke off increasing demand for aviation. The party also contemplates extending the Emissions Trading Scheme beyond the 50% of the economy currently covered. On the other hand, it makes completely clear that it has no intention of raising the prices of energy and fuels to domestic consumers.
Although the party presents itself as the only UK political institution ready to grasp the need for an economy-wide carbon price that will bring down emissions by 30% in 2020, the detailed proposals are far less radical. In the material that follows, I try to tabulate the Lib Dem ideas, focusing on whether they use price, regulatory fiat or pious hope as the proposed means of emissions reductions. As in the Conservative paper, estimates of the costs and benefits of their policies are almost completely absent from the Lib Dem paper. It is a shocking commentary on British politics that no major party is prepared to quantify exactly how it proposes to shift taxes towards polluting activities and away from other sources.
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Tags: agriculture, aviation, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, corporate emissions, domestic, emissions trading, politics
The rivalry between Tesco and Wal-Mart is well known. Tesco’s imminent entry to the US heartland of the world’s largest retailer may have created an extra edge to the battle. And, unsurprisingly, the two giants are squaring up over carbon issues as well as over such things as employee conditions and global sourcing policies.
Tesco said earlier this year that it would eventually put carbon labels on all its 70,000 food lines. It has been trying to find way of doing this using Life Cycle Analysis, putting a greenhouse gas cost on every element of a product’s move from farm to plate. This was always a hugely over-ambitious project and recent weeks have seen the company drift back from its early optimism. Now Wal-Mart has come up with a similarly impossible dream – to use the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) to assess and manage the energy footprint of its suppliers. These big retailers know that they have to be seen to be doing something about greenhouse gases, so they have both launched incomplete schemes that will achieve little.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, corporate emissions, food and grocery retailing, Marks & Spencer, shops, Tesco, Wal-Mart
British Gas has launched a consumer gas and electricity tariff that will cost 10% more than its standard rates but which offers better green credentials than any other consumer utility tariff in the UK market.
The product has the following important features:
- The electricity is derived from renewable sources. The company says that this is not the key ingredient of the tariff. Later in this note I try to explain why.
- British Gas will buy and retire Renewable Energy Certificates for 12% of the electricity it supplies. This is probably the most important aspect of the proposition.
- British Gas will ‘offset’ all of the carbon dioxide produced as a result of each household’s purchases. This is the most expensive part of the deal for British Gas.
- There will be a small donation to a green education fund for schools.
BG says that it makes no extra money from the sale of its Zero Carbon product. This looks a justifiable statement to us. The important other questions to ask are:
- Why did BG decide that 10% was the appropriate premium to its main tariff? It could have designed a less costly offering with reasonably strong green features. Do mainstream ‘concerned consumers’ regard 10% as an acceptable price increment? Did BG need to ‘gold plate’ the new product to avoid any criticism that it was a proper green tariff?
- How will the company manage to ensure that it buys high quality offsets, and not the dubious offerings sold by consumer offsetting companies?
- The product is slightly complex and difficult to explain. Can BG cut through the competing claims of other green suppliers to build a large customer base for this high quality offering?
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Tags: British Gas, domestic, marketing issues, public opinion, ROCs
In early September, researchers from the Tyndall Centre in the UK put out a report that said that incorporation of the airline industry into the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will not provide significant incentive to cut emissions. The big polluters today are paying about €20 per tonne for their emissions. When aviation joins the scheme in 2012, this price would add about €5 for a flight to Barcelona. Tyndall argues that the EU and national governments cannot escape the conclusion that the ETS is not enough and that aviation must be constrained by other fiscal or legislative measures as well as by inclusion in the carbon tax net.
Tyndall has acquired an excellent reputation for its informed and passionate stance on aviation. Broadly speaking, its view has been that continued expansion of aviation is incompatible with the tight emissions targets that the EU and other bodies have set for the years to mid-century. It has consistently said that by 2050 unconstrained air travel will be using up most of the total carbon emissions that the world can allow itself. Aviation expansion will drown out emissions reductions in other areas.
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Tags: aviation, emissions trading
The evidence is not quite clear enough that organic food is better for the atmosphere.
The debate on whether organic agriculture reduces greenhouse gas emissions is a lively and sometimes acrimonious affair. The calculations are complex, the results depend on myriad factors that are difficult to quantify, and much research remains to be done. Those who give unequivocal answers to the question ‘is organic better?’ may not be recognising the extraordinary uncertainty that still surrounds many aspects of agriculture. Rather than produce a simple answer, this note offers a statement of the competing cases.
This topic has been widely researched but has produced very varying answers. There is certainly no consensus. In general, organic farming seems to be slightly better for the atmosphere than conventional cultivation, but for every ten studies that say this, five say something different. Almost all the conclusions are the subject of passionate debate.
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Tags: agriculture, food and grocery retailing
Do dedicated biomass electricity generating plants make financial sense?
E.ON UK has recently announced a plan to build a second power station using 100% energy crops as fuel. The first investment – a £90m power plant at Lockerbie in Scotland – will open within the next few months. The second plant, still only in the planning stage, will be in Sheffield on the site of a previous generating station. Both power plants will use wood from forestry and specially planted willow but Sheffield will also burn waste wood from other sources, such as industrial pallets. These are the first two large-scale plants in the UK if we exclude the ill-fated Arbre plant of several years ago. (Arbre was an extremely advanced wood chip gasification plant built in Yorkshire. It was never fully commissioned.)
By the standards of the electricity industry, the E.ON investments are tiny. The proposed Sheffield plant has a price tag of £44m compared to £1bn for E.ON’s intended investment in the new super-critical low(ish) emissions coal power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent. Nevertheless, Lockerbie and Sheffield do appear to make good financial sense, at least in part because of the revisions to the renewable energy subsidy scheme announced in the government’s June 2007 Energy White Paper.
This article looks at the prospective financial return from operating a power plant burning wood and other energy crops.
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Tags: carbon capture, Drax, E.ON, Kingsnorth, power generation, ROCs
The key conclusions from a good piece of market research
HSBC’s July 2007 survey entitled the Climate Confidence Index contained many surprising results. Carried out in nine major countries around the world, it showed that concern about climate change is far higher in developing countries than in the UK or the USA. As importantly, the inhabitants in these countries also think that the world is more likely to find ways to avert climate change problems.
Almost 60% of people in Brazil, Mexico and India see global warming as one of the most pressing problems the world faces, compared to little more than 20% in the UK. Broadly speaking, the richer countries tend to see terrorism as a bigger threat to the world than climate change. In all nine nations bar the US, the level of concern tends to rise quite sharply with age. (This result is also seen in most other surveys of UK opinion.)
Confidence that climate change will be successfully addressed by existing institutions is low in most places around the world. It falls to its lowest level (5%) in the UK. The UK also has the lowest level of people saying that they personally are making a significant effort to reduce climate change at 19%, compared to levels above 40% in developing countries. Fatalistic Britons are also almost the most pessimistic about whether global warming will be stopped, with only 6% of people saying ‘I believe we will stop climate change,’ compared to 45% in India and 39% in China.
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Tags: public opinion
Photo: the glacier at Ilulassit in Western Greenland
In early September, leaders from the major faiths came together in Greenland to pray for the future of the planet. They may well have chosen Greenland because of the visible and deeply worrying changes in the glaciers and ice fields that cover almost all its vast area. The melting of the ice sheet has speeded up dramatically since 2000.
The state of Greenland’s glaciers is critical to the rate of global sea level rise. A complete melting of the island’s ice would raise water levels by about 7 metres, enough to flood much of the world’s inhabited land. To give one example, 15% of Bangladesh’s population would be displaced by a rise of just 1.5 metres. Almost all the country’s habitable land would disappear if the water level rises by 7m.
The religious leaders went to the town of Ilulissat on Greenland’s western coast. Here a rapidly retreating glacier calves icebergs into a fjord at a rate of 35bn tonnes of water a year. The daily water loss would provide all the water London or New York needs for a year. Estimates suggest that between 6.5% and 10% of all the ice flowing off the interior icefields of Greenland melts into this fjord. This means that the increase in the rate of melt of this one glacier is adding about 0.06mm a year to the global sea level, 4% of the rate of rise during the 20th century.
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Tags: science
Drawing: the Indian treadle pump backed by Climate Care
Climate Care, the leading UK carbon offset company, has had an eventful few weeks. A few days after receiving an unexpected visit from climate activists who presented management with a basket of red herrings, the company put out a press release claiming that it would offset 1% of the UK’s total carbon emissions next year. In sixty projects around the third world, Climate Care claims that it will reduce emissions in 2008 by 6m tonnes, or ten times as much as it has done this year. It is claiming spectacular growth rates. Continuous critical attention from newspapers and sceptical greens does not appear to have dented Climate Care’s prospects one iota.
The core problems with offsetting are two-fold:
- guaranteeing additionality (ensuring that the investments in carbon reduction wouldn’t have happened anyway)
- verifying the reductions.
Climate Care fails on both of these two important issues. Though Climate Care is getting increasingly tetchy with its critics, the blunt truth is that the company simply doesn’t deliver genuine and quantifiable cuts in emissions. Increasingly, it works as an international development agency rather than as a business balancing one person’s emissions with a reduction in another’s. Climate Care may do a lot of good around the world, but it doesn’t cut carbon dioxide emissions in a reliable or auditable way.
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Tags: Barclays, British Airways, carbon reduction initiatives, Climate Care, Co-op, Land Rover, offsetting
An important recent paper looked at the links between economic prosperity and carbon footprint.
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