Methane

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.

Read More

Feed-in tariffs: another romantic delusion

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.

Read More

Snakes

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.

Read More

Adair Turner’s cheerful views on climate change

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.

Read More

Yes, do lag your loft

For once, the government has got its climate change policies right. The idea of a windfall tax on energy suppliers has widespread support. One hundred or so Labour MPs have come out in favour. Caroline Lucas, the newly elected leader of the Greens, has advocated such a policy and many Conservatives express private approval. The trade unions were infuriated by Alistair Darling’s refusal to back the proposal. Rather than backing a windfall tax, it looks like he favours plans that oblige the utilities to improve the energy efficiency of customers’ homes.

Read More

The Great Glen Energy Co-operative

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.

Read More

UK energy demand

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.

Read More

Are biofuels responsible for the sharp spikes in food costs?

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.

Read More

A public share offer is the right way to fund the gap in the financing of the London Array*

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.

Read More

Roy Spencer presentation to the Heartland Institute conference

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.

Read More

Energy efficiency of home phones

BT low energy power supply phoneBT 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’.

Read More

Policy confusion on nuclear and wind

Sizewell B nuclear power station
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.

Read More

More bad news for the poor

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.

Read More

Trends in UK domestic electricity use

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?

Read More

Nuclear power: the new generation

The new Finnish nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto (OLK3)
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?

Read More

The promise of cellulosic biofuels

Switchgrass biofuel crop
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.

Read More

Carbon uptake by plants and trees is vulnerable to autumn warming

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.

Read More