A blow that will affect the UK renewables industry for decades

At one stroke Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has guaranteed that Britain will get very little electricity from smaller scale renewables. He has announced that the ‘threat’ (his words) from ground-mounted solar panels makes it necessary to urgently review the feed-in tariffs for all solar installations above 50 kilowatts. These tariffs were meant to be stable until April 2012 and would then fall in a orderly and guaranteed way over the next few years. He hasn’t said by how much the rates for larger scale PV will fall, or when the reduction will happen. But the uncertainty introduced by his intervention, and his obvious willingness to fiddle with the feed in tariffs whenever he feels the urge,  means that he has destroyed the ability of developers to raise money for any substantial renewables project. The UK renewables industry, from PV to geothermal, needs certainty and stability and this is precisely what has just disappeared.

Solar farms 

The Secretary of State’s actions have been prompted by a rash of planning applications for large ground mounted solar farms, principally in Cornwall because the financial returns will be better there than anywhere else in the UK. Perhaps 30 solar farms would have been built before the PV feed in tariff started to fall under the orderly ‘degression’ laid out by his department.  Not a single panel has yet been placed on the ground and only about four schemes have got planning permission from Cornwall council so far.

These  four schemes will probably be constructed although their financiers will be worried that the Huhne review will be implemented before the farm is completed. A small delay might mean – who knows? - a serious fall in the returns available to investors because a key component doesn’t arrive from China in time. 

All the other schemes fighting to get through planning processes and to arrange for connection to the grid will probably be abandoned. The DECC Press Office could not tell me when the changes will be introduced but it sounds like sometime over the summer. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact on the PV industry across Britain.

The Cornish PV industry might have built 150 Megawatts of capacity in the next year, driving down costs across the industry and giving the UK vital experience of this technology.  While this would only have provided about a twenty thousandth of UK electricity demand, it would have been the first time that the UK government had ever seen how to get a substantial renewables industry started and flourishing.  Once doesn't have to believe that PV is the right technology for Britain - and I certainly don't - to despair at the stupidity of Huhne's move.

But at the first sign of successful commercial industry developing, the government has pulled the rug and the energetic edifice of financiers, construction companies and German firms entering the UK to provide the know-how to get the equipment on the ground will now collapse within weeks. In a symbolic coincidence, one of the most important German solar firms, Conergy, had only just announced its arrival in the UK when the Huhne statement was made. The able entrepreneurs just beginning to see a role in the renewables industry will return to other sectors where their talents aren’t abused in this way.

Why is the end of any substantial hope for smaller scale renewables in the UK?

Most renewable projects take substantial amounts of time to get to the point at which construction is complete.

For example, the process of getting a solar farm running takes up to a year. (Wind takes far longer).

1)      The developer finds a site that is suitable

2)      The developer approaches the landowner and agrees terms

3)      The scheme is costed and planned. The developer needs to work out how the farm will be constructed and how it will connect to the local grid

4)      Planning permission is applied for and local consultation takes place. This may take four months

5)      Environmental assessment will happen. Will the site affect breeding birds, for example?

6)      The funds necessary for the farm will be raised

7)      Construction can start, and connection cables will need to be dug to the nearest electricity transformer

 To get any substantial project from the start of this process to the start of  installation takes hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment.  That is before considering the cost of the panels themselves. To get the project financed, the investors must believe in the reliability of their returns. By indicating today (February 7^th 2011) that rates will go down sometime ‘in the summer’ but giving no indication of the amount of the reduction, Chris Huhne has made it impossible for any PV project above 50 kilowatts to go ahead anywhere in the country.

But, more generally, his action has demonstrated that any renewable technology which is attracting real commercial interest will be arbitrarily penalised to ensure it doesn’t develop. The Conservative 2010 manifesto said ‘Britain needs an energy policy that is clear, consistent and stable’. Today’s announcement is the opposite.

 The case that the FiT tariff wasn’t designed for larger scale projects

The Huhne announcement suggests that the Cornish PV developers were somehow abusing the FiT regime and that he was forced to act against the ‘threat’ that they represented. The DECC press office told me that ‘commercial companies were exploiting’ a scheme designed for smaller projects.  It told me that larger-scale solar installations ‘weren’t anticipated’.

The response to this is obvious. Throughout its long-drawn out evolution the Feed In Tariff was always intended to offer a guaranteed rate to projects up to 5 megawatts. A 5 megawatt photovoltaic installation will cost about £14m today. Did the government not realise that this scale of investment can only be made by a large and well-funded company? And if it didn’t want large companies to get involved, why did offer FiTs up to the 5 megawatt level, instead of stopping, say, at 100 kilowatts?

 Huhne’s press office said that the 5 megawatt limit was a mistake made by the previous government and the current administration was merely rectifying it. But here’s what the Lib Dems (Huhne’s party) said about the FiT scheme in their 2010 manifesto -  ‘ Liberal Democrats will .. ensur(e) the feed-in tariff scheme which guarantees prices for micro-generation will benefit community-scale, small business and agricultural projects of under 5MW.’  The truth is that all parties supported the Feed in Tariff in all respects and Huhne is wrong to claim otherwise.

To make a real difference to electricity supply renewables must be implemented on an industrial scale. If we continue treat renewables as a charming and quaint cottage industry and refuse to allow entrepreneurs to prosper, we will leave the UK energy industry in the hands of the six oligopolists who currently dominate the industry.  Today we have just thrown away another chance to get innovation and cost-reduction in the UK energy industry.

Addendum: the impact on PV

About 20,000 installations of PV have now been completed in the UK. The average size is about 2.5 kilowatts and the total capacity therefore about 50 megawatts. (Many of these smaller installations on domestic roofs will have been incentivised by FiTs of 41p per kilowatt hour, compared to the much lower  29p paid to the prospective Cornish solar farms.)  These 20,000 installations will produce about the same amount of electricity as nine of the Cornish farms that will have been abandoned in the last 24 hours.

Domestic PV is almost completely irrelevant to our electricity needs. To make a meaningful difference to our renewables targets we need hundreds or even thousands of solar farms. Italy put in place 2 gigawatts of PV capacity last year and 5 gigawatts is expected this year. This is one hundred times the scale of the UK.

'Peak Travel'

 A new paper suggests that the industrial world may be close to ‘peak travel’.(1) After a half a century of rapid increase, the number of kilometres travelled per person has started to slow down or even reverse in advanced countries. Car travel per person appears to have peaked at around 4,000 miles per year in Japan, around 7,000 miles in Europe and about 9,000 miles in Australia and Canada. The US, at around 13,000 miles per person, may be seeing a sustained fall.  While this decline is probably partly driven by rising fuel prices and economic stagnation, there is growing evidence of a saturation of the need for car travel. Similar results are seen for public transport and for domestic air travel – and indeed for freight transport. The implication is that the rich world may not have to choke off the demand for mobility by further huge increases in fuel taxes or road pricing because other forces are already depressing the amount of travel. (The authors don’t say this, but I suspect that their results would not be as striking if they had included international air travel where demand is still growing).  ‘Peak travel’ would be unambiguously good for emissions as about 25% of all CO2 emissions in developed countries arises from motorized travel and up to about 5% from air flights. Improved fuel efficiency in cars and the move to electric vehicles will cut fossil fuel use rapidly if the number of miles travelled continues to plateau.

 At first sight, the flattening of the number of kilometres travelled is surprising: most econometric models have shown personal transport demand continuing to increase for decades to come. These models are driven by the assumption that as people get richer they travel more. For example, the US Energy Information Administration’s model forecasts the number of miles driven using estimates of future growth in disposable income, fuel prices and demographic adjustments for the number of elderly people and females in the driving population.

 Similarly, here is the latest forecast from the UK’s Department for Transport. It shows a 43% increase from 2003 to 2035 in the number of vehicle kilometres.

England, Forecast Change compared to 2003	Year	Traffic (Vehicle km)	Congestion (Lost time/km)	Journey Time (time/km)
Central Forecast	2015	7%	6%	1%
	2025	25%	27%	4%
	2035	43%	54%	9%

 Source: Road Transport Forecasts, 2009, UK Department for Transport

 The annual increase to 2035 is about 1.1% a year. This figure is consistent with the trends of recent decades (see below) and is used by the UK’s Committee on Climate Change in its central forecasts for the next few decades.

Historic Growth in Traffic, GDP and Oil Prices, Average Annual Growth

Decade	Traffic	Oil Prices	GDP	Comments
1950s	8.4%	-0.5%	2.4%	Strong increase in 1st car ownership
1960s	6.3%	-3.7%	3.1%	Strong increase in 1st car ownership
1970s	2.9%	24.4%	2.4%	Oil Crises
1980s	4.7%	-10.3%	2.3%	Strong growth post 1982, falling oil prices
1990s	1.4%	-2.9%	2.1%	Early 90s recession, fuel duty escalator
2000-2007	1.2%	15.4%	2.8%	Steady traffic growth, rapidly increasing oil prices

Source: Road Transport Forecasts, 2009, UK Department for Transport 

What is going on? Why are the traditional models of transport demand showing continued growth but actual distances travelled tending to plateau and fall? The authors of the paper speculate that the obvious reason is that most people don’t want to spend more and more time in cars or buses. The amount of daily time occupied in travel is, they say, about 1.1 hours and any increase is unwelcome to most people. And as congestion increases, the distance travelled in the typical 1.1 hours per day is inevitably tending to fall and we are now seeing that decrease in national travel statistics.

So it looks like the modellers had it wrong. Travel demand will probably not continue to increase because - unlike truly desirable activities, such as going out to a restaurant or buying nice clothes - most of us see travel as a chore not as a pleasure. Motorised transport is getting more efficient as fuel consumption is improving and the world  is switching to electric cars. Even if GDP continues to increase we may see a sharp decline in transport-related emissions.

(1)   Are we reaching peak travel? Trends in passenger transport in eight industrialized countries. Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper, submitted to Transport Reviews.

Oil industry sees barely a bend in the curve of global emissions

 BP gave us its forecasts for world energy use in mid January. It sees global energy consumption rising by about 1.7% a year to 2030, down slightly on the 1.9% recorded over the last 20 years. Most of the increased use comes from fossil fuels. Here's the BP figures for the increase in fossil fuel use for the period to 2030

Gas  - up 2.1% a year

Oil (including biofuels) – up 0.9% a year

Coal  - up 0.3%

While renewables are forecast to become increasingly important, growing at about 8% a year, this is not enough for low-carbon sources (including nuclear) to provide even half  of the supply to meet the growth in world energy demand.

	2010-2030	1990-2010
Energy use	+ 1.7% p.a.	+1.9%
Increment provided by fossil fuel	64%	83%
Increment from renewables	18%	5%
Expected increase in greenhouse gases from energy use	+1.2%	+1.9%

If BP is right, CO2 emitted from the burning of fossil fuels rises from about 29 billion tonnes in 2010 to about 38 billion tonnes in 2030. The growth all arises in the developing world and the company says that OECD emissions will be 10% lower in 2030 than they are today. Overall, the BP figures suggest that the world has no hope of achieving the goal of stopping carbon dioxide levels rising above 450 parts per million, the level that many analysts believe is the number that approximately equates to a 2 degree temperature rise.

The International Energy Agency suggests that achieving a peak of 450ppm requires the world to reduce emissions from energy use to below 25 billion tonnes within twenty years but the oil company's figures are over 50% above this figure. If BP is right, the rise in temperatures is likely to be at least 3 degrees and probably 4 degrees, enough to change the distribution of world agriculture and population distribution to an unprecedented extent.

BP’s estimates of greenhouse gas emissions growth are only slightly lower than the IEA’s estimate of the annual percentage change in energy demand with no further mitigation measures over the next 20 years (1.5% for the IEA figure, compared to 1.2% for BP). In other words, BP is deeply pessimistic about the impact of the developed world’s carbon reduction programmes, suggesting that they will have little impact.

As the latest report from the UK’s Committee on Climate Change points out, the national commitments made after the Copenhagen conference by OECD countries would cut emissions by about 55% by 2030, a vastly greater decrease than BP expects will actually happen in the industrial world. Governments are telling a very different story to that offered by the oil companies.

Global precipitation levels hit new high in 2010

Climate change scientists have consistently predicted that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will increase global average precipitation levels. At the same time, many areas will see increased drought. 2010 shows early evidence for this forecast. The US National Climate Data Centre said earlier this week that the year equalled the hottest on record and this finding reached some of the newspapers. Less noticed was NCDC’s calculation that global rainfall levels were the highest since at least 1900. This year's anomaly (variance from the average) was over 50 millimetres, up significantly on the two previous peaks of about 45 millimetres. (For a sense of scale, Oxford's rainfall averages between 600 and 750 millimetres a year.)

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-prcp-anom/201001-201012.gif

This information probably doesn’t surprise any of us. In mid January 2011 we are seeing very serious flooding in Brazil, Sri Lanka and Australia.  And the list of countries that suffered extreme rainfall in 2010 is a long one. So although UK residents – who have just been through the coldest December in living memory – have increasingly little faith that climate is warming, they may more easily believe that rainfall is increasingly heavy.

NCDC explicitly links some of the main flooding events in 2010 with the concurrent high temperatures. Importantly, it says that the unprecedented Pakistan floods (affecting 20 million people) were connected to the extremely hot air masses holding temperatures over Russia at high levels in summer of last year.

But global weather patterns are never consistent. Although Pakistan had catastrophic floods, Bangladesh has the driest monsoon season for fifteen years.  Some parts of Brazil and Peru, including the vital Amazon region, were also very dry. The UK had less rain in the first half of the year than in any comparable period for half a century. Ontario had very little spring snow and Canada as whole had its driest winter since national records began in 1948.

One of the most troubling things I experienced during 2010 was delivering talks about climate change, mentioning the risks of extreme rainfall such as in Pakistan and being told by sceptics in the audience that the cause of floods is not high levels of rain but poor agricultural practices or increased urbanisation speeding the rate of water runoff.  Both of these two explanations have a grain of truth but I hope that the increasingly obvious global threat from high levels of rainfall, and the increasing intensity of that precipitation, gets people to reconsider whether climate change is causing more floods.

A little dishonesty on future electricity prices: the new proposals for reform of the power market

The UK intends to reform the way the electricity market operates in order to encourage the growth of low-carbon power production at the expense of fossil fuel generation. The Department of Energy and Climate Change said in December that it would both increase the levy on CO2 from power stations, making coal and gas electricity more expensive and also reward low-carbon electricity by guaranteeing high prices for nuclear and wind power. Both these changes will tend to increase power prices to businesses and households. Nevertheless, the Department claimed that its proposal would not effect customers significantly, noting ‘small impacts on bills in the near term, but in the longer term bills are expected to fall by 2030’ (1). Can bills really be lower as a result of changes designed to increase wholesale prices? Let’s get one thing clear to start with. Despite any impression given to the contrary, electricity bills are going to rise sharply under the government’s proposals. Wholesale power changes hands today at around 5-6p a kilowatt hour. Charges for transmission, distribution, customer service and VAT, as well as retailer profit, add another 7p to this total, meaning a retail price to household customers of about 12-13p. The government’s December consultation documents make clear that its purpose is to double the wholesale price of electricity to around 11-12p by 2030. If the increase in wholesale charges is simply passed on by the retailers, the cost to householders will rise to 18-19p, an increase of about 50% on today’s prices. Although the government may wish to disguise this fact, the future increase in prices is a fundamental part of its policy. The average householder is going to be paying about £200-£25o more per year for electricity.

Why does it need to increase prices in this way? The simple fact is that gas-fired power stations are producing power at a full (‘levelised’) long-term cost of around 5p per kilowatt hour. No low-carbon technology is currently remotely competitive with this figure. Research commissioned by the Department suggests a figure of 7-8p for nuclear power and perhaps 9p for onshore wind. (And regular readers of Carbon Commentary will know that 8p for nuclear seems a suspiciously low figure).  Unless the cost of gas-fired generation rises by at least 4p, the generators will simply continue to pile their capital into this form of power station and the UK will end the next decade with relatively little offshore wind and few nuclear power stations under construction.

Current estimated costs of generating one kilowatt hour at a modern CCGT (gas) power station

Fuel	3.4p
Carbon price in ETS	0.4p
Operating costs	0.4p
Contribution towards capital costs	0.7p
Total	4.9p

 The National Grid’s seven year forecast from spring of last year suggested that generators are planning to build about 17 gigawatts of CCGT power stations – about one quarter of current UK generating capacity - before mid 2017, compared to only about 12 gigawatts of new wind. And because well-sited wind will typically produce only 35% of its rated capacity over the year, this 12 gigawatts is only equivalent to about 4 gigawatts of actual generation, a quarter of the new gas power station output.

The government, and its adviser The Committee on Climate Change, want to largely decarbonise the UK’s electricity production by 2030. The precise target is to reduce average emissions to less than 100 grammes of CO2 per kilowatt hour, 20% of today’s level. The aim will not be achieved if gas (producing about 350 grammes of CO2 per kWh) forms the backbone of UK electricity generation. The implication for policy-makers is obvious: gas needs to be made more expensive to price it out of the market.

The December proposals seek to achieve this objective by increasing the price of carbon dioxide from about £12 a tonne now to £70 in 2030. In addition, the government’s forecasts see the price of gas rising to about 74p per therm, compared to about 55p in winter 2010/2011. These two forces will increase the cost of gas-generated power. A countervailing reduction will arise because a) there will be small efficiency improvements in CCGT, with about 60% of the energy value of gas being turned into power, up from about 57% today, and b) power station construction costs are likely to slip slightly from their recent and unusual figures of over £1,000 a kilowatt.

My approximate assessment of the net impact is as follows.

Cost of producing electricity from gas in 2030

Current cost per kWh	4.9p
Impact of increasing CO2 tax to £70 per tonne	+2.0p
Increasing fuel price	+1.3p
Efficiency gains	-0.3p
Net cost in 2030	7.9p

The government’s proposal to raise the carbon dioxide price to £135 a tonne by 2040 will add a further 2.3p per kilowatt hour, taking the cost of generating electricity to over 10p. If it does this, nuclear and onshore wind will almost certainly be cost-competitive, particularly if the government guarantees the prices that these technologies obtain in the electricity market. Generating companies looking at whether to invest in CCGT plants may have second thoughts.

All this is fairly straightforward, and probably sensible if you think fossil fuels need to be driven out of electricity production. But the question remains, why does the government say there will no impact on prices from its twin promises to sharply raise the carbon price and to guarantee returns to low-carbon generators? The unfortunate truth is that the Department has employed a trick to disguise what it is doing, hoping commentators wouldn’t notice.

The carbon pricing proposals it has put forward for consultation see the CO2 costs rising quite gently to 2020, followed by sharp rises to 2030 and beyond. These will be written into law. The trick is that in its December documents it assumes that the free market price of CO2 within the European trading system, currently languishing at about £12 a tonne, will anyway rise almost as fast as the UK’s new mandatory carbon price in the next decade. Since power stations are all already within the ETS, gas generators would pay much higher carbon costs anyway. By 2030, the European market price and the UK’s legally enforced level would be identical. The counter-factual against which the UK is presenting the impact of its mandatory minimum carbon price is a guess about the future evolution of the market price for CO2, not today’s levels or even future markets indications. And if government thinks the European price will reach £70 by 2030, the carbon price legislation it proposes for the UK will have no effect.  

This linguistic trick seems to me to be verging on the dishonest. People deserve the truth: under the Department’s assumptions about fuel and carbon prices, electricity prices for householders will rise by about 50% by 2030 if we are to largely decarbonise generation by the date.

There is another problem not squarely faced by the Department. Participants in the market for gas see a real possibility that prices may fall, not rise, over the next decade or so. The shale gas revolution is really changing the gas market. If prices fall from today’s levels, the attempt to use the carbon price alone to drive the cost of gas generation above alternative low-carbon technologies will fail. Even the Climate Change Committee acknowledged the possibility in its recent 4^th Carbon Budget. Here’s what they said:

‘The International Energy Agency has estimated the scale of unconventional gas resources and the range of costs of production. These suggest that the gas price of 76p per therm in 2030 under the central fossil price scenario is towards the high end of the range of supply costs (actually, it is above all but the prospective costs of some Artic gas sources) while the DECC’s lowest price of 35p/therm and the current price of 40-50p per therm are closer to the middle of the range’ (p265).

The unfortunate  truth is that if the generating companies really think that gas is going to cost 35p a therm in 2030, they will still want to invest in CCGT and not wind or even nuclear. No-one is very comfortable with this fact but the decarbonisation of electricity generation will not easily take place while generating assets remain privately held and utilities are completely free to continue to invest in fossil fuel power stations.

5^th January 2010

Just how ambitious are the UK Climate Change Committee’s targets?

   The CCC suggested this week  (December 7th 2010) that the UK should aim to reduce its emissions by about 46% below today’s levels by 2030. (60% below 1990 figures). Its plans suggest a reduction of 1.5% a year for this decade, followed by about 4.4% per annum in the following ten years. These are very rapid changes and rely on the successful implementation of decarbonisation initiatives across all parts of society. What does data from recent history tell us about the scale of the task?

The European Environment Agency has recently published a series of factsheets on energy use and CO2 emissions across the EU-27 over recent years. I have tried to tabulate the main results to give a sense of how challenging a task the UK is setting itself.

The evolution of energy demand and emissions in four sectors of the European economy

Sector Energy usage change CO2 output change ‘Energy efficiency’ change Comment           Households +0.5% -1.1% Up 1.0%   Transport +1.4% +1.4% Up 1.0% Much faster improvement from 2000 onwards Manufacturing +1.0% -1.1% Up 2.1% Energy usage is per employee, slower improvement from 2000. Services (1997-2007) +0.6%  Na Up 1.3% Efficiency is measured as kWh per unit of value added

Source: http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/#c7=all&c5=&c0=10

What are the key messages from this table? First, energy demand tends to grow substantially less than GDP. Nevertheless, we can expect energy use to continue to increase, probably at a rate of about 1% less than the economy as a whole. Second, some sectors including personal transport over the past few years and manufacturing in the nineties, have shown improved efficiency of energy use at rates of more than 2% a year.  But complete decoupling of energy use from growth has certainly not been possible thus far. So the CCC’s targets must rely on decarbonisation of energy supply.

The crucial change, of course, is moving electricity generation from fossil fuels to low carbon sources. This will enable improved emissions from heating (for example through the widespread use of heat pumps) and from transport (through the use of electric cars). The problem is that many of the CCC’s cost estimates for low carbon generation look optimistic. Although this year’s report has accepted, unlike some of the Committee’s past analyses, that nuclear costs are going to be higher than predicted a few years ago, it still uses a figure of only 7p per kilowatt hour for fully utilised plants. The uncomfortable reality is that the cost will almost certainly be over 10p. And the risk is that long-term abundance (and thus cheapness) will always mean that the generators want to build gas turbines (as is happening at the moment).  These gas plants, offering cheap, reliable electricity and relatively low carbon emissions are almost certainly going to stop decarbonisation at the rate the CCC says we need. The Committee’s insistence that we can get to the 2030 targets for less than 1% of GDP looks increasingly impossible.

Electric cars - scepticism finally starts to fade

Those who follow unusual ways of forecasting the future have got an interesting new source of information for assessing the prospects for electric cars. The first production Chevy Volt electric cars have just rolled off the production line in Michigan for sale in a small number of US markets from early next year. The first of these extraordinary vehicles has gone to the GM museum and the second was put into a charity auction, closing on 14^th December. After three days, the bidding has reached $180,000, over four times the forecourt price of the car. For fans of electric vehicles, this little nugget of data suggests that at least some bidders see the Volt as potentially a stunning success. You wouldn’t bid much if you felt the car would fail lamentably. Also this week, National Grid CEO Steve Holliday said that his company’s base forecast is for 1 million electric cars in the UK by 2020. Electric cars will be about a fifth of UK car sales from 2016 onwards, he said. Note: these numbers are not consistent – current UK sales are about 2 million a year, so one fifth is about 400,000 cars, or 1.6 million vehicles sold from 1.1.2016 to 31.12.2019. But his enthusiasm was nevertheless clear. Since he is partly responsible for ensuring the UK has the electricity system available to charge these cars, his opinion matters. Other forecasts, such as from strategy consultants BCG in January of this year, also see electric and hybrid cars representing a quarter or more of total sales by the end of this decade.

The Chevy Volt wins praise from almost all of those who have driven it. Luxurious and well-styled for the American market, reviewers uniformly call it a ‘real’ car. Its European version, the Vauxhall/Opel Ampera, is similarly highly regarded. The engineering of this vehicle makes it unique. The car is always powered by electricity, as will be the Nissan Leaf, but when the batteries run low a small petrol-powered generator recharges them as the car drives. The 16 kWh battery gives about 25-50 miles of driving, depending on the temperature and how you drive, and the generator kicks in automatically after this point. A full battery and a full tank gives the driver about 300 miles of range. Farewell ‘range anxiety’.

I looked at the patterns of driving of UK cars to estimate how many miles a year the average Volt/Ampera will be powered by electrons and how many by petrol. The National Travel Survey’s 2009 figures gives estimates for the number of miles driven each year by the average UK car and splits this into journeys of various lengths. Typically a car is driven about 8,400 miles a year (and this number is now falling). My estimate is that about 1,600 miles will be travelled using petrol, less than 20% of the total. (These figures assume that the driver typically gets 40 miles of driving before the petrol engine starts). If this figure seems surprisingly low, consider the research finding that the average driver (not the same as the average car) only takes 7 trips a year, on all modes of transport, over 100 miles.

Very roughly, and assuming that the Volt/Ampera is charged on overnight cheap electricity, the savings will be about £600 a year in fuel costs. The list price of the car in the US is about $41,000. Translated directly into UK £, and VAT added, the figure is about £32,400, substantially more than a Nissan LEAF. A £5,000 subsidy for early buyers brings the figure down to £27,000 or so. Making a direct comparison to an equivalent internal combustion engine car is difficult because of the high quality of the Volt’s fittings. But it is probably about £7,000 above the fossil fuel competition. (Knowledge of cars is not my strong suit – different opinions very welcome). Apart from the fuel savings, there’ll be no excise duty to pay and insurance for electric cars is looking as though it is less than equivalent petrol vehicles. Industry people suggest that depreciation rates should be lower – there are far fewer moving parts and mechanical wear will be very much less.

Nevertheless, electric cars are still not quite direct competitors to internal combustion engines. The key problem is the battery, currently costing over $1,000 per kilowatt hour of storage. The Volt has 16 kWh and the Leaf 24 kWk, so the cost problem is obvious. The association for the promotion of electric car batteries in the US has set a target of $250 per kWh, but consultants BCG see a realistic number as $360-440 kWh by 2020. If the BCG figures are achieved, the cost of the Volt’s batteries will fall by about $9,000 (just less than £6,000) by 2020. Optimistic forecasts from GM’s Chevy division seem to indicate that other components will also fall in price substantially, implying that by about 2020 the forecourt price of an electric car will be little more than a petrol-engined vehicle. And then there are the fuel savings.

What about CO2? The Volt is only moderately low emissions when in petrol mode, delivering about 145 grammes of CO2 per kilometre. The lowest emission models are now tipping below 100 grammes in Europe. So for the typical mileage and average UK CO2 emissions from electricity generation, the saving are negligible when compared to a small fuel efficient car such as the Citroen DS3. Against a new business salon car with emissions of 160 grammes per kilometre, the savings are about 0.7 tonnes a year, or about a third. As the percentage of low carbon electricity supplied to the Grid rises, the CO2 savings increase.

If the Volt is as successful among users as it has been among motoring journalists, the huge investment in this vehicle may help GM finally return to being the technology leader among world car companies, a position it probably lost in about 1965. Perhaps as important, it will provide a signal to all other manufacturers that the era of the electric car is finally here. Or rather back again since many of the most interesting vehicles of the early 20^th century ran on electric batteries.

James Delingpole on DDT

 Some of the most vocal climate sceptics employ a very effective tactic when attacking those who want action on greenhouse gases. They try to show that the environmental movement, which is now so exercised by the threat of climate change, has made many substantial and costly mistakes in the past. Why, the sceptics say, should anybody believe the environmentalists on the issue of global warming when these people have been wrong about so many other things? The example of DDT is often used as an illustration of how wrong-headed scientists can cause untold suffering by their work. This propaganda needs a response. Here’s what James Delingpole wrote about this insecticide on 5^th November 2010.(1)

‘The near global ban on DDT – inspired by Rachel Carson’s junk science bestseller Silent Spring – had caused millions to die of malaria.’

And then, a few sentences later

‘What ABOUT those millions and millions that Rachel Carson inadvertently massacred with her entirely unfounded claims about the effects of DDT on birdlife?’

Let’s work through these statements word by word.

a)      ‘The near global ban on DDT.’ The word order is important. Delingpole presumably knows that there is no ‘ban’ on the use of DDT for use in disease prevention but that its use is prohibited in agriculture. So when he writes ‘near global ban’ he hopes that we misunderstand this to mean that it is banned across most of the globe rather than the correct statement that DDT is subject to a ‘global near-ban’ which restricts its application to malaria prevention.

b)      ‘Rachel Carson’s junk science bestseller’. Silent Spring is one of the most influential books ever written and its publication in the US can be seen as the start of the modern environmental movement. Carson noticed a reduction in birdlife in many rural areas and blamed agricultural pesticides. Her work has been challenged many times, but no-one has ever contended that the core thesis of the book - immoderate use of pesticides had caused severe loss of wildlife - was wrong. Not even the most committed opponent of the restrictions on DDT says, for example, that the insecticide does not affect the reproductive success of birds at the top of the avian food chain by thinning the eggshell.

c)      ‘Junk science’ The words ‘junk science’ are increasingly employed by the global warming sceptics to cast doubt on the validity of claims made by climate science. It is difficult to rebut epithets like this. Delingpole is trying to link his claims about DDT to his views about those people who want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He wants us unconsciously to absorb the message that all environmentalism involves ‘junk science’.

d)     ‘Caused millions to die of malaria’. DDT continues in use in anti-malaria campaigns. Rapid progress is being made in many parts of the world on malaria eradication. Those countries where malaria is still not effectively controlled, principally in Africa, are losing the battle not because of a ban on DDT but because of poor public health provision and, for example, the growth of sunlit pools of stagnant water after deforestation. DDT is probably less used as an insecticide in tropical countries than it would have been had we not seen its effects on wildlife but Carson is hardly to blame for this.

e)      ‘Rachel Carson inadvertently massacred’. Delingpole knows that most people don’t seen environmentalists as wicked but he can try to successfully portray them as gullible and dangerous fools. So he suggests that Carson didn’t set out to kill millions but her benighted adherence to her erroneous views caused great suffering. We are expected to understand that environmentalists concerned about global warming are equally misguided and destructive.

f)       ‘Entirely unfounded claims about the effects of DDT on birdlife’. There probably isn’t a single scientist alive today who contests Carson’s central thesis that the effects of DDT are severe. Not all types of bird suffer from its effect but in addition to birds at the top of the food chain any creature, such as the robin, that eats earthworms is affected by the chemical. Carson was not the first to notice this. Here is the first paragraph of a 1958 scientific report by Roy J Barber.(2) The main purpose of this paper is to call attention to the possibility that moderate applications of DDT under certain conditions can be concentrated by earthworms to produce a lethal effect on robins nearly one year later.

Rachel Carson was a quiet, cautious person who carried out her science with precision and care. She never suggested that society should give up insecticide use but told us of the huge, unforeseen impact of massive and indiscriminate use of under-researched chemicals, often sprayed from the air in volumes that would now seem utterly horrifying. Climate sceptics that use her work on DDT as an example of the deleterious impact of environmentalists are profoundly mistaken. She represented science at its careful, thoughtful best.

Silent Spring is dedicated to Albert Schweitzer and carries his words on its title page. ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth’.  This sentiment is as relevant to today’s climate challenge as it was to the over-use of insecticides half a century ago.

(1)   http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100062459/why-being-green-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry/

(2)   http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3796459.pdf?acceptTC=true

Solar roads

Most people will be surprised, but Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways. In fact, the A8 “Milano-Laghi” motorway (connecting the city of Milan to Lake Como and Maggiore) was completed in 1926.  But Italy will soon be able to claim a new “first”: the A18 Catania-Siracusa motorway, a 30km addition to Sicily’s 600km motorway network, will be a fully solar-powered motorway, the first in its kind. Work is well underway to complete commissioning of this road, which will be the most advanced motorway in Europe, including many outstanding features in terms of control systems, surveillance apparatus, tarmac quality, safety features (one of its new tunnels has also been commended for its levels of safety). Construction activities are concluded, and a quarter of its solar photovoltaic (PV) panels were already operational by the end of September. Pizzarotti & Co., the general contractor for this project, aims at having all of them online by early December. Road testing is due in November, while on 1st January 2011 the Catania-Siracusa motorway will open to the public. By then, 100% of its electricity needs will be met by the PV panels installed along the road: 80 thousand of them. Lights, tunnel fans, road signs, emergency telephones, all the services and street furniture installed on the A18 will be run with solar power: distributed over a surface of 20 hectars, the photovoltaic array was obtained through the construction of 3 artificial tunnels on a 100m wide, 2.8km long stretch of road, a project with an overall cost of €60 milion. Annual solar electricity production is estimated at about 12 million kWh, which will save – constructors claim – the equivalent of around 31 thousand tons of oil and 10 thousand tons worth of CO2 emissions every year.

The Catania-Siracusa motorway is one of the first experiments where a major infrastructure and distributed power generation are integrated in one design, surely the first at this scale. Furthermore, all the green areas involved in this project will be subject to a major environmental renovation scheme: the contractor provided for planting thousands of trees and plants, improving existing tree lines and hedges, increasing the extension of local woods.

This however is not the first time renewable energy and sustainability are key to a road project in Italy . In the last few months, still in Sicily, solar panels for a total of 368 kWp where installed along the A20 Messina-Palermo: they now provide electricity for all the buildings located along the 183km motorway. A thousand km away in northern Italy, the A22 Brennero motorway (which crosses the Alps towards Austria) saw the installation of a soundproofing barrier along a residential area of the motorway route: the 1km long barrier is made of solar panels able to produce some 680,000 kWh per year, thus covering 20% of the local electricity needs.

But this new paradigm in energy management is not being pursued just on single, isolated schemes: a further and more meaningful example of this shift in Italy’s infrastructure design approach is witnessed through the widespread implementation of LED road lights and photovoltaic car park shelters being rolled out in all Italian motorways by Autostrade per l’Italia (ASPI), the leading European concessionaire for toll-motorways construction and management, with more than 3,400km of the 6,500km long Italian motorway network. In fact Autostrade per l’Italia launched a series of initiatives  to promote the use of renewable sources for the production of electricity and improvement of energy efficiency in its buildings and infrastructure. The plan provides for production of electricity from renewable sources, energy saving measures for tunnels and service areas lighting, replacement of heating and air conditioning systems with high-efficiency plants, use of geothermal energy underground to produce heat and electricity and tri-generation (production of electrical, heating and cooling energy) in the main office buildings, and finally a “passive” improvement at their headquarter buildings in Rome and Florence and outlying structures (section departments, maintenance points, snow point). This actions will result in a reduction of CO2 emissions of about 40% and substantial savings in maintenance costs. In 2009, 6,378 lighting fixtures were replaced, while for 2010 the installation programme counts a further 10,766 LED units, reaching approximately 50 percent of the total. An extended programme for the construction of 100+ photovoltaic generation sites is also being completed in 2010: a first phase provided for the installation of patented PV sun-shading shelters at 87 service areas (for a total of 4MWp), while phase 2 involves design and construction of several PV sites, ranging from 200kWp to 1MWp (a mix of stand-alone and integrated modules), adding a further 3MWp.

With Italy’s solar energy boom now invigorated by the renewed Feed-In Tariff scheme “Conto Energia”, which gained the country enormous investments and the second position in the global PV market (with a projected 1,500MW installed capacity in 2010 alone), energy-driven design is finally making its way to mainstream thinking.

Carlo Ombello at www.opportunityenergy.org

Falling southern English wind speeds - another problem for the renewables industry

One south of England wind farm faces default on its bank loans because wind speeds have been as low as ever recorded and electricity output has therefore been much less than expected. So far this year the power delivered by the turbines has been less than two thirds of what is predicted in a typical year, meaning is cash flow is failing to meet even the most pessimistic projections. Statistical analysis suggests that electricity output this low should only be achieved once every several hundred years. Another wind farm in southern England reports similar results, with electricity delivery this year so limited that it would only be expected once a century. 2009’s figures were almost as bad. These results will make it much more difficult to get bank finance for English wind farms. If the rules-of-thumb for wind speeds are turning out to be incorrect, financial institutions will be much more cautious about lending. This note looks at the likely variability of wind farm output and compares it with solar photovoltaic power. Although the returns on PV are likely to be lower, does the recent decline in southern English wind speeds make solar an easier investment to finance?

(At the end of this note I ask UK PV owners to forward me their output records so that I can assemble a central database – needed if we are to persuade banks to lend large sums on solar installations. Erratic output makes financing much more difficult.)

Wind farms

When wind farms are being planned, the developer erects a wind speed meter, usually for one year at the site of the proposed turbines. This was thought to give investors and banks a firm indication of likely electricity output levels. But recent extraordinarily low average wind speeds have made this measurements seem much less reliable.

The consulting engineers who measure wind speeds usually provide developers with figures for average speeds across the year. They translate this into typical power output for the turbines chosen for the site. They also provide a ‘P90’ figure, an estimate of the electricity output that will be exceeded in nine out of ten years. This figure is, of course, lower than the average expected output.

I have looked at the business plans for three wind farms in the UK that were constructed in the last ten years. The P90 output figure is about 87% of the mean expected output. In other words in 90% of all years, the electricity delivered will be at least 87% of the estimated average. (For those of a statistical bent, the expected standard deviation in power output is about 10%).

Two of these wind farms publish details of the actual output to shareholders. In one case, output so far this year has been well below the P90 figure. I have carried out some simple statistical analysis, suggesting that the output levels from the turbines should only have been achieved once every several hundred years. Similar, but less extreme, results are seen at the other wind farm.

These wind levels may just be exceptional – the unprecedented persistence of Artic high pressure over the 2009/10 UK winter certainly reduced typical wind speeds. Some people have suggested that the summer melting of Artic sea ice is affecting wind patterns. It could also be that general meteorological conditions have militated against high winds over the last few years. Or it may that the engineers have simply hugely underestimated the underlying degree of natural annual variability in southern UK winds In other words, the average estimated power outputs for these wind farms are correct over a period of decades, but the chance of the actual number being much higher or much lower in any particular year is significantly greater than has been projected.

In all of these cases the implications for English wind farm developers are potentially severe – the banks will be willing to put up a much smaller fraction of the total cost. Their financial models, which require wind farms to be able to pay back the interest and loan principal even in unusually bad years, will have to be revised.

Solar

There are few month-to-month records of the output of solar PV installations in the UK. We know that the expected output has a much tighter distribution than wind power because solar insolation levels are more stable year on year. But just how much more reliable is PV? I did some simple statistical analysis of the monthly output from the installation on my roof to provide some estimates for those looking to get banks to help finance their own purchases of PV panels. This is not great data but will provide a reasonable figure for those trying to guess at just how variable the cash flow from PV will be.

I have six years of monthly figures from our house. (In one month the failure of one of the inverters affected the figures for fourteen days and I have adjusted for this). My analysis shows that the annual P90 figure for a small installation in central southern England is about 3% below the expected average output. To give a simple illustration, if the expected output (which can be obtained from several databases on the web) is 1500 kilowatt hours, then in nine years out of ten the actual output will be greater than 1455 hours. (1) In other words, the natural variability of solar PV output each year is only about one quarter as much as wind power, at least as far as I can measure it in Oxford.

I also looked at the difference between the best 12 month period during the six years during which we have had PV and the worst. The worst ever yearly output (March 2009 to February 2010) was 1388 kilowatt hours and the best was 1552 (May 2007 to April 2008), with the lower figure being 89% of the higher. This variability is dwarfed by the figures from the English wind farms for which I have data.

In order to lend significant sums to PV developers, banks will need good records of the degree of variability of output. They cannot be expected to lend cash to installations if there is a reasonable prospect of cash flows being insufficient to service the loan. If you have any data on the weekly, monthly or yearly output from your PV installation in the UK, please may I have a copy in order to keep a centralised database tracking the variability of electricity output? Thank you.

(1) Anybody wanting the actual six year output figures from my house to carry out their own modelling is welcome to email me. (chris@carboncommentary.com)

Chris Huhne's statement on nuclear, October 18th 2010

Chris Huhne’s announcement of a further consultation on the government’s National Policy Statements on energy gave him  a chance to clarify the stance on the provision of ‘subsidy’ for new nuclear power. His parliamentary statement says that

• there will be ‘no public subsidy for new nuclear power’
• this means ‘no levy, direct payment or market support for electricity supplied or capacity provided’
• Unless, and this is a very big unless, ‘similar support is also made available more widely to other types of generation’
• And, moreover, he is ‘not ruling out action by the Government to take on financial risks or liabilities for which it is appropriately compensated or for which there are corresponding benefits’.

What lies behind this new declaration? It suggests that the government will actually be prepared to provide financial support in the form of

• a guaranteed  carbon price (because this will affect all electricity generators equally)
• and/or guarantees for capital raising, probably in the form of credit insurance (because such insurance would ‘appropriately compensate’ the government for the risk)

Carbon price

This web site has previously suggested that the carbon price necessary to get new nuclear construction in the UK may be as high as £110/tonne of CO2. (A similar figure is probably needed for offshore wind, which is currently being subsidised through the alternative mechanism of Renewable Obligation Certificates – ROCs).

This high figure is driven by the cost of the construction of the new Areva EPR reactor in Finland and its implications for what a similar reactor would cost in the UK. Areva recently announced that it now made provisions against the cost of finishing the Finnish contract of €2.6bn, implying that the total cost of constructing the OL3 plant is thought to be at least €6bn.If EDF and the other potential operators of new nuclear in the UK believe that UK reactors will cost this much, then the floor for the carbon price will indeed need to be at least as high as £110 a tonne.

Areva’s latest financial presentation admits that the second EPR site at Flamanville in Normandy is likely to cost almost as much as the Finnish reactor. But the two other reactors being built at Taishan in China look as they will be constructed at much lower cost. Areva’s own estimate for the total bill in China is about €1,500 per kilowatt, or about €2.5bn for the 1.6 gigawatt plant, about 40% of the Finnish cost. If the construction cost were similar in the UK the required carbon price to incentivise EDF would be very much lower than the £110/tonne of CO2 that I suggested earlier. The figure would be nearer £50/tonne.

Will the cost of UK reactors be more like Finland or China? Does the huge reduction in EPR cost in China arise because of lower local labour costs or because Areva has effectively learnt the lessons of the utter financial disaster at OL3? Will Areva continue to reduce the cost of the EPR as it gets more skilled at managing costs downwards? These are the critical questions that face EDF’s nuclear team in the UK.

Here’s what the respected nuclear industry construction cost sceptic Professor Steven Thomas said ‘The future of the EPR is clearly in doubt. Construction work on the two orders in Europe has gone appallingly wrong, the process of getting generic safety approval (in the US) is long-delayed and continues to throw up serious unresolved issues, and estimated costs are continuing to escalate at an alarming rate’.

Credit insurance

The UK has previously indicated a strong preference for a high carbon price to provide the umbrella under which nuclear power stations can obtain financing. The US has favoured credit insurance, with the government taking a risk on the construction costs. The last few weeks have seen setbacks for this policy as the potential nuclear operators have backed away from nuclear construction, partly in light of the high price for the insurance.

The Calvert Cliffs 3 project was a flagship for the federal government’s quarantee programme. (Credit insurance quarantees the lending backs repayment of the debt from constructing a nuclear power station). It collapsed in early October as the consortium backing the plant finally faced what had long become obvious: the likely cost of the government loan guarantee (said to be more than 8% of the construction cost) was crippling. Add in the recent clear declines in electricity demand and rising shale gas production and it seems to no longer make financial sense to use new nuclear power in the US. The other three or four projects negotiating for federal guarantees are also likely to fall away.

The upshot of all this is that the UK government’s promise not to ‘subsidise’ new nuclear is looking increasingly incompatible with rapid progress on construction of Areva EPRs (or the Westinghouse equivalent) in the UK. If we want nuclear, 'subsidy' is inevitable.

Monbiot's pig

 The last few weeks have seen George Monbiot write passionately in support of measures to improve biodiversity. To the surprise of many, he also gave us a reasoned defence of eating meat. Are these two themes consistent? Can biodiversity be maintained if world food production includes a significant amount of farmed meat? A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests strongly that George cannot both maintain an omnivorous diet and defend biodiversity. (1) Now, and far more so in the future, livestock farming imposes stresses on global ecosystems that are incompatible with maintaining species diversity. Pelletier and Tyedmers’ article demonstrates that livestock farming pushes human society over important three global ecological boundaries: biomass use, the nitrogen cycle and climate change. In each case, failure to remain within the sustainable limits creates unmanageable pressure on biodiversity. Monbiot’s defence of meat eating is based on two assertions. First, he says that Simon Fairlie’s book Meat: a Benign Extravagance shows convincingly that livestock farming is only responsible for about 10% of world emissions. Second, a move away from the factory farming of ruminants (predominantly cattle) towards a system that fed pigs and chickens with our agricultural and domestic food waste would significantly reduce the climate change impact of livestock. It would also decrease the diversion of cereals such as maize to animal feedlots and away from human use. Both of these assertions may be true. But they don’t tell the whole story.

First, climate change. We know that temperature increases and changes in rainfall patterns are already seriously affecting the survival ability of many types of plant, animal and insect life. The global target of maintaining temperature increases at less than 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial level will require us to cut annual emissions to no more than about one tonne of CO2 per person by 2050. Pelletier and Tyedmers’ article says that emissions from livestock today are equivalent to about 52% of this level today, rising to about 70% by 2050 as the dietary habits of the rich world are adopted by today’s industrialising nations. If we are to meet our targets for emissions, large scale livestock production, particularly of methane-producing cows and sheep, is impossible. Switching to pork and chicken only makes limited difference to emissions levels.  

The impact of livestock production on the possibility of staying within the other important boundaries is even worse. At present humankind uses about one quarter of the total net production of biomass across the world each year and this figure is rising as the planet’s population increases. The food we take from the world’s surface is perhaps one half of this figure, either directly or in the form of biomass eaten by farmed animals. Livestock farming accounts for about 58% of total food-related biomass use. Increasing numbers of farmed animals will require more food and the new paper estimates that livestock alone will use up 88% of the total sustainable amount of global biomass that can be appropriated by humankind for its own purposes. The increasing need to devote land to producing food for animals (for example, soybeans in what was the Amazon rainforest) necessarily implies a reduction in the space and plant diversity available to sustain threatened species.

Lastly, the paper looks at the impact of livestock farming on the amount of reactive nitrogen on the planet’s surface. Nitrogen atoms in the air are bonded with another atom of nitrogen to form a stable molecule. Humankind has found ways of breaking the bond and turning nitrogen atoms into important components of artificial fertilisers. ‘Half the synthetic fertiliser ever used on Earth has been applied in just the last 15-20 years’ say Pelletier and Tyedmers. Adding fertilisers to crops increases the amount of food produced but at a cost to the many species of plant and animal life that would lived alongside the crop. The improvements in food productivity, largely driven by the need to feed huge numbers of livestock and increasing population, have resulted in drastic ‘ecosystem simplification and biodiversity loss’.  If George Monbiot wants space for threatened species to live, he cannot also allow it to be used for heavily fertilised monocultures to feed the world’s farm animals.

Argument rages over what the sustainable amount of unbonded nitrogen added to the soil can be. The paper’s authors suggest tentatively that today’s use of nitrogen is about three times the acceptable future level. This will affect crop yields adversely. Today, over half the world’s corn production is fed to animals. If we continue with livestock farming at its current levels, this means that reducing nitrogen fertiliser use will reduce the amount of grain left for human use. So it we are to give priority to maintaining biodiversity and feeding the extra three billion people by 2050, livestock farming has to reduce dramatically. Today’s ultra-intensive production techniques for food, whether they are feedlot production of cattle or highly fertilised grain production, are unlikely to be possible in the not-far-distant future

The unavoidable conclusion is that meat eating is going to have become an unusual luxury for all of us. Or it will have to be grown in a test tube. Animal sources of protein will have to be replaced by plants such as soybeans which have ecological impacts of up to two orders of magnitude lower than cattle farming.

One three separate grounds the new PNAS paper therefore says that livestock farming is difficult to accommodate without increasing the rate of biodiversity loss. Nevertheless, let’s be kind and allow George Monbiot a little meat and dairy. We’ll accept his view that pigs are better than cattle and get him a sow for his back garden, happily eating the kitchen waste. George consumes about 2,000 calories of food energy a day and we’ll assume that the unconsumed food in his household allows the sow a daily 1,000 calories that would otherwise have been thrown away. (In order to get a fat pig, he will therefore have to share with a neighbour).

A pig kept outdoors might be able to turn those 1,000 calories of food waste into 150 or 200 calories of meat. Don’t believe the figures you see suggesting higher conversion efficiencies – they assume that the pig is fed the highest quality maize and is not free to take much exercise that would burn off some of the energy value of the waste food. Even at the maximum 200 calories meat production a day - a couple of bacon rashers – George will only get about 10% of his energy intake from animal products, compared to the European average of about 30%. The unfortunate  truth is that a little bit of meat and dairy may be compatible with keeping within  global ecological constraints but nothing like today’s levels of meat and dairy consumption.

(1) Nathan Pelletier and Peter Tyedmers, Forecasting potential environmental costs of livestock production 2000-2050, PNAS Early Edition, October 2010

Nuclear power;Green power?

(This is the text of a talk given at the Science Museum's Dana Centre on September 23rd 2010) I’ve spend most of today at a prospective site for a large solar farm in Cornwall. My colleagues and I think we can find space for 2 megawatts of capacity here, costing about £7m. Cornwall has the best solar radiation in the UK but we would need 150,000 of these farms, covering over 5% of the UK, to meet current annual electricity needs.

Last week I did some work on a very small wind farm in Norfolk, helping a parish council assess its impact on the community. The farm will provide about 3.5 megawatts at peak and probably cost around £5m. We’d need something like 50,000 installations of this size to replace annual electricity consumption. David MacKay says we’d have to devote all of Wales to wind farms to get to this amount.

The Committee on Climate Change indicates that we must almost completely decarbonise electricity production by 2030. So here’s some numbers for the cost of decarbonising current levels of electricity production using the most viable current technologies. Solar PV – around £1,000 billion. Onshore wind – about £250 billion. By contrast, just adding more gas power stations to replace closing coal, oil (and nuclear) would cost the country about £50bn.

Herein lies problem number one. Renewables remain expensive. Decades of underinvestment in R+D have left us without a significant UK renewables industry. We are now investing less than a sixth of the level in the mid 70’s in energy research. If we’d put a billion a year into marine energy, rather than a very sporadic few tens of millions, we might now be in a different position and able to exploit the tides and the waves at a reasonable price. We’d have a built an industry capable of serving the world.

But money isn’t the only problem. To get decarbonisation by 2030 we need not only

a)      Large resources of private and public capital

b)      Continued expensive R+D, often of dubious immediate productivity

But also

c)      Huge political support, including a tolerance for expensive failure of new technologies

d)      A high and reliable carbon price

e)      An willingness to spend billions building stronger transmission links to Norway, Iceland, Netherlands, Ireland and France to deal with intermittency, and to meet the need to export electricity surpluses when the winds are blowing hard

f)       A ruthless programme of peak shaving, introducing schemes to ensure that demand will never rise above pre-determined levels

g)      active demand management, meaning, for example that our fridges turn off when wind speeds fall unexpectedly in Scotland

h)      Huge investment in energy storage, probably including massive subsidy of electric cars and electric charging points

As a digression, my eco-friends tell me we can achieve most of what we want by ‘energy efficiency’. Well, it is true that heating and transport are highly wasteful users of energy in the UK. A petrol car is only about 25% efficient and the UK’s heat losses through buildings are a national disgrace. But the efficiency with which we use electricity cannot be increased dramatically, particularly in the home.  Anything that uses electrical resistance to generate heat – an iron, a toaster, a washing machine, a heater or a kettle is already close to 100% efficient. We can improve efficiency somewhat on our heat pumps in the form of fridges and freezers. And consumer electronics have some space for efficiency gains, but these are tending to be wiped out by increases in the number of these devices in the home. Yes, we can move from fluorescent to solid state lighting but lights are only 15% of our home power consumption. It may be important to note that domestic electricity consumption has barely fallen in the recession.

And any future efficiency gains are going to be outweighed by the need to move transport and home heating towards using electricity. Electric cars and heat pumps for our homes are vital ingredients in national plans but will eventually add at least 50% to our electricity needs.

So my conclusion is that achieving our low carbon ends by 2030 is virtually impossible using renewables. Although offshore wind is speeding up - congratulations today to the new Thanet wind farm – we simply aren’t moving at the rate we have to. For example, we now have about 3,000 wind turbines compared to almost 20,000 in Spain. Britain – the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy sources – has made nothing like the commitment it needs.

The result is we will get more gas and, even worse, coal. Just today I got a PR release from the energy practice at Ernst and Young, banging a drum to the effect that the UK needs to let its large existing coal plants escape EU pollution rules and continue operating after 2015. Similarly, the owners of Didcot, just down the road from where I live, are beginning to soften up the local press for a campaign to keep this coal-burning dinosaur open.

This is why nuclear may be necessary. It is expensive, probably hugely expensive, and highly problematic in other ways. But is backed by the big 6 suppliers and it seems that if we guarantee a carbon price we can probably persuade them to provide the capital and organisational resources to make nuclear happen. Make no mistake, we need these companies and their access to the banks and bond markets to enable us to meet our decarbonisation objectives. Microgeneration, expensive renewables and other small initiatives simply aren’t enough.

But what about Olkiluto?, I hear you say. The new Finnish nuclear plant is years behind schedule and will almost certainly cost more than twice the contracted cost. Remember, though, that China is now constructing 25 nuclear power stations, mostly using an Areva design and expects to have more nuclear by 2020 than the UK’s entire current generating  capacity. China is going to iron out the design defects of the EPR for us.

We are left with no alternative but to go, perhaps slightly shamefacedly, to RWE, EON and EDF and ask them just how high electricity prices need to go to get them to start a crash programme building new nuclear. It goes without saying that the national negotiating position is not strong. We might have wished for another route, but all other options have disappeared.

When an industry needs billions, a million doesn't help: Why DECC will delay UK geothermal power by doling out micro-finance

The UK government has announced a further £1m of grants available for companies involved in research into ‘deep geothermal’ energy. Five kilometres below the surface temperatures can be as high as 200 degrees or more. This heat can be extracted by drilling multiple holes, fracturing the deep rocks, pumping liquids into the wells and forcing hot water to the surface. The heat in the water can be used to generate electricity and for district heating systems. Deep geothermal will almost certainly work and provide near year-round electricity. The problem is that we still need hundreds of millions, and probably billions, of pounds to solve the major technical challenges facing the industry. £1m is an absurdly small amount of money and will achieve nothing. Compare this to the nearly $700m committed by the US Department of energy last year or even the $44m provided by the Australian government. When will the UK government learn that drip feeding money into early stage renewable technologies is almost certainly counter-productive? Cornwall has attractive rock formations for the extraction of heat from deep rocks. Several companies, such as EGS and Geothermal Engineering, have outline proposals for power stations that will use the heat for conversion into electricity. EGS is seeking to develop a 4 MW power station (about the output of two large turbines when the wind is blowing hard) at the Eden Project at a cost of about £20m. Geothermal Engineering has just got planning permission for a site near Redruth.  1970s research into the granite of England’s southwest showed substantial potential. As with almost all other government R+D into non-fossil fuel energy, public funding was ended abruptly as it became clear that getting deep geothermal to the point where it could reliably generate electricity would absorb large amounts of cash.

Interest in geothermal is quickening around the world with Google.org a major player. (Google.org is the charitable foundation associated with the search engine company).  Google.org alone has invested over $15m into several geothermal technology companies. The challenges these companies face are very substantial. They need to be able to drill multiple very deep holes (think Deepwater Horizon), find ways of fracturing the rock at this depth so that a large area becomes porous, pump water down to the bottom of the well, collect the superheated water and get it to the surface without losing temperature and then convert the resulting relatively cool steam into power. (200 degrees is a far lower temperature than would normally be used in a power plant).  None of these individual technical problems are insuperable but taken together they will need a huge R+D effort to overcome.

The US Department of Energy has a sense of the scale of the task. Last year it announced funding for about 120 separate projects costing $338m, backed up with £350m matched private and non-federal cash. The typical individual project will have funds of over $5m. One demonstration at Bend, Oregon will use about $45m of funding, including over $20m from the federal government. This is the scale of the money needed to get anywhere in this new industry. The UK’s £1m will not even pay to drill a single deep hole below Cornwall’s surface.

In fact, I suggest that the problem is even worse than this. Drip feeding absurdly small sums of money into an industry actually delays R+D. The band of hardy engineers with knowledge of the technology spend all their time competing for dollops of cash in order to survive the next wages bill. Actual R+D is minimal with all energy devoted to grant applications and dealing with government officials anxious to monitor the success of the project. It would be far better if these determined people went to the States or Australia and worked for a properly funded company there. They can then bring the results of their work back should they ever wish to return. When an industry needs billions, a million doesn’t actually help.

How much future CO2 are we already committed to?

If we were starting afresh, we probably wouldn't chose to build an energy infrastructure based around fossil fuels. But like it or not, we are stuck with power stations, cars and homes that use carbon-based energy sources. The problem is that almost all these buildings and vehicles last a long time. If they stay in use, we are committed to large-scale future production of greenhouse gases. But how large? A new paper in Science by Dr Steve Davis and colleagues at Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California, gives us a clear estimate. Davis says that our existing energy infrastructure will put about 500 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ into the atmosphere during the course of its life (this is about 15 times the world's annual emissions from all sources today).

The paper calculates this number by examining the number of power plants, motor vehicles and homes around the globe and estimating how long they will remain in use. The research team found that in the past, the average electricity-generating station lasted about 35 years before being demolished. Cars typically run for about 17 years before being scrapped, lorries and buses nearer 30. Since we know when all the power plants in the world were constructed and the average age of the planet's vehicles, Davis and his colleagues could estimate how much carbon dioxide will be emitted by existing infrastructure during the remainder of its life.

Put another 500Gt of CO₂ into the atmosphere between now and 2050, and the expected temperature rise will be about 0.5C of extra warming on top of what we have already seen. (Of course there is a very wide range to this forecast because of the uncertainties in the models of how temperature change is related to emissions). Davis and his colleagues make the point that if we stopped building new coal-fired power plants tomorrow and manufactured no new cars or trucks we would therefore keep warming well below the 2C increase which global scientists think is the maximum tolerable. Davis's climate models suggest that CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere would rise to about 430 parts per million (ppm), a rise of about 40ppm on today's level and well below the 450ppm level that scientists often associate with 2C of warming.

That's the good news - today's energy infrastructure probably isn't enough, by itself, to topple us into wholly unmanageable climate change. The bad news is that this figure assumes that we build no fossil fuel power stations in the future and that all our new vehicles and homes are zero-carbon. That's not going to happen and the scale of the challenge is grimly indicated by the current rate of growth in low-carbon electricity. Of the 1,300 gigawatts of new power station capacity built since 2000, 31% uses coal, 34% gas and 4% oil. This leaves 2% nuclear and 17% renewables. And even this number substantially overestimates the share of future electricity production coming from renewables since both wind and solar power plants only produce a fraction of their maximum output. The wind and the sun aren't available all the time.

In a perspective in Science, Dr Marty Hoffert of New York University looks at how much energy we are likely to need to meet the world's requirements in future. Keeping the world's economy going requires continuously production of about 14,000 gigawatts of energy. That's equivalent to about 10,000 large-scale power plants. As the world economy grows, this is likely to rise to at least twice this level by 2050, even if we achieve major gains in the efficiency with which we use energy. So the challenge is to run down existing carbon-polluting energy sources rapidly and to replace them with atmosphere-friendly equivalents.

The scale of this task is immense. My rough calculation is that the world needs to ramp up its yearly rate of installation of low-carbon energy about 30-fold from today's levels within the next couple of decades.

A few wind turbines aren't going to be enough.

Electric cars: Boris backs the wrong technology.

By the end of this year the world’s major car manufacturers will standardise on a new charging system for electric batteries. German manufacturers have already announced support for what is called the ‘7 pin’  option and by the end of the year Nissan, Renault and others are expected to follow. The 7 pin system allows the use of 3 phase electric power rather than the single phase used in domestic homes. This makes charging far quicker, eventually meaning that a full charge will take no more than 30 minutes. The government is ploughing ten of millions into subsidising the creation of public charging points. But in the most important UK location, London, the authorities are insisting on only installing old-fashioned single phase charging points and have locked out those manufacturers offering 7 pin. Mayor Boris Johnson must reopen the tender to allow bids from companies able to offer modern equipment rather than back last century’s technology. The batteries of early electric cars take many hours to recharge. The small numbers of battery cars on the road today are usually charged at the home using standard three pin sockets on an off-peak tariff. The rate at which the batteries can be charged is severely limited but this is not important if the car is not needed overnight.

Public recharging points are different.  Here the speed of recharging is critical to the future acceptability of electric cars. If my car has a range of 100 miles and I need to travel further, I want a widespread charging network that allows me to plug in the vehicle, go to have a snack, and return to find it fully charged.  Quite rationally, the world’s car manufacturers decided they needed a global standard for the electronics, cables and connectors for these networks. Without such a standard my drive to Birmingham might be stalled halfway because the charging points weren’t suitable for my particular vehicle.

In the last few months the form of that international standard has become clear. Mercedes and Smart have committed their support and other manufacturers will follow by the end of 2010. Countries such as Ireland have also committed to creating a national network based on this standard. ‘7 pin’ refers to the number of pins in the connectors. 7 pin is capable of taking charge from 3 phase electricity, the type that is used in almost all commercial locations. So, for example, your office will probably have 3 phase power but your home will not. Broadly speaking, 3 phase power will is available everywhere the authorities are likely to want to put a charging point. Commercial operators, such as motorway service stations will all use it.  Importantly, 7 pin connectors can also be used to charge cars parked at home, using conventional domestic sockets. It is a flexible and robust standard.

The first mass market electric car to arrive in the UK is likely to be the Nissan LEAF in spring 2010. It will almost certainly have a 7 pin connector. For this car to have the success it needs, 7 pin public charging  points are vital.  Remember than Nissan intends eventually to make the Leaf in its Sunderland factory and it won’t look good if Nissan’s UK sales are held back by an inappropriate charging infrastructure.

The 7 pin system allows charging at a rate of up to 63 kilowatts, compared to less than 7 kilowatts at home. This greater charging rate can’t be fully utilised immediately because most cars will not themselves be appropriately equipped.  But commercial electric vehicles, such as the Modec urban delivery vans will probably soon be able to take the full power from 7 pin charging points, enhancing the commercial attractiveness of these British-made world leading vehicles.

All the evidence suggests that the 7 pin system will be installed in all the world’s electric cars from next year. London has chosen to ignore this. By this time next year it intends to have installed 700 public charging points, paid for by central government funds. None of the companies that have been allowed to compete in the tender have the capability to offer the 7 pin charging system and all are offering the older single phase alternative. Importantly, the single phase charging system that London intends to use has metal posts that are physically too small to accommodate 7 pin cabling and in the future.  When London eventually decides to replace single phase posts with the 7 pin alternative, as it eventually must, it will have to dig up the street again.

Why has this happened? Charging technology is moving fast and London didn’t realise soon enough that 7 pin would be the dominant worldwide technology. Public procurement rules meant that that the Mayor’s office had to ‘pre-qualify’ potential suppliers several months ago. This was before reliable supplies of 7 pin equipment from companies such as Chargepoint Services became available. But if London proceeds with the tendering process it will be locking itself into many hundreds of charging points that will be effectively useless by this time next year. This is costly and will delay the takeoff of sales of electric cars. Newcastle, which along with Milton Keynes successfully bid for government money to install a public network of charging points, has just agreed to admit 7 pin suppliers into the contract race. London urgently needs to do the same.

'Foodprints'

Growing food and bringing it to our tables accounts for about 20% of UK greenhouse gas emissions. Including the impact of the deforestation elsewhere that is driven by UK food demand, the figure may rise to around 30%.(1) If developed countries are to reduce their emissions by four fifths by 2050, it is painfully obvious that food production and consumption habits will have to change dramatically. A recent report on the emissions reductions obtained by people participating in ‘The Fife Diet’, a programme designed to increase willingness to buy only locally-produced food, show just how difficult emissions reductions are likely to be. (2) The two key problems are now well known. Food production systems in the developed world tend to produce about one unit of energy for every ten units of energy input. Therefore the recent - only possibly humorous - suggestion that the UK government should introduce electricity generating treadmills into prisons would therefore add to total energy demand, not reduce it. To remain at a stable weight, prisoners would need to eat more calories and these calories might take ten times as much energy to produce as the maximum amount of electricity generation derived from the treadmill. We need two kilowatt hours or so of energy a day to fuel ourselves but it currently takes 25 kWh to produce this.

Second, the footprint of food is dominated by that of meat and dairy products. Most estimates show that over half the emissions from a Western diet derive from meat. As people get richer, they demand more animal protein, increasing both direct emissions, particularly of methane, and also heightening the pressure to convert forest to food production. Stabilising and then rapidly reducing global emissions from the food production chain is appallingly difficult to reconcile with increased levels of prosperity.

The Fife Diet is a successful and well-regarded experiment to push people in eastern Scotland into thinking actively about the source of the food that they buy. It is similar to the Canadian 100 mile diet. (www.100milediet.org), which asks individuals to commit to only buying food grown in the local area.  It therefore isn’t just about local food, but also about buying seasonal produce and so help get a fuller sense of the connection between what we eat and how and where it is produced.

From a small base, the local food movement is gaining strength around the prosperous world. The detailed survey of Fife Diet members showed that the greenhouse gas emissions from the food that they bought, cooked and then disposed of are lower than the national average. But the impact of merely buying locally is small.

     Greenhouse gas emissions (CO2e) from food, per year per person

                                                            2.8 tonnes                   2.1 tonnes

                                                            UK adult average         Fife Diet members

The lower number comes not from the energy-saving benefits of buying local, which provides only 8% of the reduction, but from the smaller amount of meat and dairy eaten by the survey respondents. The impact of the higher level of organic food consumption, lower wastage and greater food production at home of the Fife Dieters did not produce a significant cut in their emissions compared to the UK average. The lower meat consumption cut emissions by over half of tonne, about three quarters of the total reduction. But at 2.1 tonnes a head, the Fifers still had emissions from food consumption greater than total per capita allowance for 2050. And it has to be said that the greater eco-awareness of the Fife diet people probably meant that they already had a much lower food footprint before becoming members.

The conclusion is a painful one. Getting down to about 0.5 tonnes a head by mid-century will almost certainly require a portfolio of measures that combines near-total decarbonisation of the energy sources in food production (eg the farm tractor runs on electricity or sustainably produced bio-diesel) and a radical change in consumption habits. Vegan food, produced on largely animal free farms, will become the dominant source of nutrition if we are to meet our targets. (Unless, that is, we find a way of artificially producing meat in vats). Importantly, several recent studies show that vegan food that is manufactured to look/taste like meat (such as industrially produced tofu) often has a ‘foodprint’ not dissimilar to its meat equivalent. The food we will eat will have to be largely unprocessed wholefoods, such as complete grains. (3)

In other words we will need both changes in consumption patterns and substantial advances in technology. Neither shifting shopping patterns (eg just buying seasonal food from the region and cutting out most meat) nor relying on technological change will be enough.  We need both. The remaining problem is that the eco-greens who support local farming, mild vegetarianism and organic techniques are a very different set of people to the urban techno-greens who lead the drive for total decarbonisation of energy production, perhaps through nuclear power or tens of thousands of wind turbines in the Fife countryside. Building consensus over food is going to be as difficult as over energy supplies.

(1)    These are figures from a variety of sources but are in line with the recent report from WWF entitled ‘How Low Can We Go’.

(2)    Fife Diet: Carbon foodprint (sic): comparative study and member analysis, August 2010.

(3)    As a failed vegan, I find the research and advocacy at www.stockfreeorganic.net to be powerful and highly informative.

What happens to energy bills when a household installs an air source heat pump?

Readers of this post may also like to consult a later article in which I do more detailed work on the impact of cold weather on the electricity use of ASHPs at http://www.carboncommentary.com/2012/02/08/2268. The results discussed in the post below may not be typical.  Do air source heat pumps (ASHP) save householders money? And do they reduce CO2 emissions? In an earlier article on this site I suggested that potential purchasers should be cautious on both measures.  I was a little too pessimistic: a recent visit to a home with an ASHP enabled me to get actual data on energy consumption before and after the pump was installed. Carbon and cash savings were better than I expected, although the ASHP still does not represent a good investment without subsidy. But the government’s proposed Renewable Heat Incentive will provide very substantial cash payment to encourage a rapid take-up of these devices.

Details on the home with the new heat pump.

The ASHP was installed at a ground floor flat in a very large Victorian semi-detached house in north Oxford. The floor area is about 140 square metres/1500 square feet, compared to the average UK property of around 85 square metres. The walls are solid brick, a feature that makes the house quite difficult to heat economically.

The owners of the property have kept records of all their energy bills. Before the installation of the ASHP in May 2009, the house typically used about 2,600 kWh of electricity and 24,000 kWh of gas. The gas provided the fuel for space heating, water heating and cooking. These numbers are in line with UK averages for housing of this size and type.

Energy use in year before installation of ASHP

Electricity	2,680 kWh per year
Gas	24,950 kWh per year
Total energy use	27, 630 KWh per year

The ASHP provides space and water heating. So some gas is still needed for cooking. After installation of the ASHP, the first twelve months energy use was as follows

Energy use after installation of ASHP

Electricity	8,481 kWh per year
Gas	950 KWh per year
Total energy use	9,431 kWh per year

As expected, the total energy demand went down very considerably. If we assume that underlying electricity use (lights and appliances) stayed the same as before installation, the ASHP provided the house with heat using 5,801 kWh of electricity. This replaced about 24,000 kWh of gas (this excludes my estimate of about 950 kilowatt hours of gas used for cooking).

At first sight, these numbers look suspiciously good.  Heating the house uses only one unit of electricity where four were used before. Most estimates of the efficiency of ASHPs suggest that they only produce about 3.15 units of heat for each unit of electricity. The explanation is that this house had an old and inefficient gas boiler. So although 24,000 kWh of gas were used for heating only about 18,000 would have produced usable heat. Divide 18,000 kWh by 5,801 kWh of electricity and the underlying performance of the ASHP was actually very slightly less good than predicted. (For fans of this index, the Coefficient of Performance was about 3.10). This is to be expected; a hard winter will marginally affect the efficiency of a heat pump.

So there was a real improvement in energy use. This is why many countries are strongly encouraging heat pump installation as a way of reducing the demand for fossil fuels. But what about the cash savings? Electricity is much more expensive than gas. My calculations used British Gas’s lowest online tariffs for Oxford and showed that the houseowners will have saved about £145 a year by buying a heat pump rather than replacing their old boiler with a new and much more efficient model.

The CO2 saving can also be calculated. Generating a kilowatt hour of electricity in the UK causes emissions of about 0.5 kg of CO2 compared to about 0.2 kg from burning a kWh of gas. The transition to an ASHP in this house saved about 1.1 tonnes of CO2 a year, or just over a fifth of total emissions from heating. This is a good saving and will rise as electricity generation moves to lower carbon sources such as wind and new nuclear. In other words, the government is right to push us into using ASHPs.

But heat pumps are costly. The one whose electricity use I measured cost about £4,000 more than a good new condensing boiler. So cutting your energy use in this way doesn’t come cheap. The government’s proposed Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) will therefore pay householders an amount each year to compensate for the high cost of installing a pump. The RHI will make an estimate of a reasonable heat demand for a house (based upon its size and whether it has cavity walls) and then pay 7.5p for each kWh of heat that the ASHP is ‘deemed’ to replace. In the case of the house whose energy use I measured, the deemed heat use will probably be about 15,000 kWh – a little less than the actual figure before the ASHP was installed. So the yearly subsidy payment (for 18 years) will be about £1,125. This payment (which may be adjusted downwards before being finally implemented in April 2011) clearly provides a real incentive to spend an extra £4,000 when replacing an old boiler. In fact, you might say the payment was too generous: the rest of us will all be paying a little bit more on our gas bills for the next few decades to cover the cost.

What about the other worry I expressed in my earlier article? Did the house stay warm in winter? The owners were more than pleased, saying that their home was comfortable even during the coldest nights. My nervous scepticism was wrong; even in a old brick build house a good ASHP of the right size can provide all the heat we need.

The world's first molten salt concentrating solar power plant

On 14 July 2010 the Italian utility Enel unveiled “Archimede”, the first Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant in the World to use molten salts for heat transfer and storage, and the first to be fully integrated to an existing combined-cycle gas power plant. Archimede is a 5 MW plant located in Priolo Gargallo (Sicily), within Europe’s largest petrochemical district. The breakthrough project was co-developed by Enel, one of World’s largest utilities, and ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development. Several CSP plants already operate around the world, mainly in the US and Spain. They use synthetic oils to capture the Sun’s energy in the form of heat, by using mirrors that beam sunlight onto a pipe where pressurised oil heats up to around 390°C. A heat exchanger is then used to boil water and run a conventional steam turbine cycle. Older CSP plants can only operate at daytime – when direct sunlight is available -, an issue that has been dealt with in recent years by introducing heat storage, in the form of molten salts. Newer CSP plants, as the many under construction in Spain, use molten salts storage to extend the plants’ daily operating hours. Archimede is the first plant in the world to use molten salts not just to store heat but also to collect it from the sun in the first place.

Image: Archimede Solar Energy

This is a competitive advantage, for a variety of reasons. Molten salts can operate at higher temperatures than oils (up to 550°C instead of 390°C), therefore increasing efficiency and power output of a plant. With the higher-temperature heat storage allowed by the direct use of salts, the plant can also extend its operating hours well further than an oil-operated CSP plant with molten salt storage, thus working 24 hours a day for several days in the absence of sun or during rainy days. This feature also enables a simplified plant design, as it avoids the need for oil-to-salts heat exchangers, and eliminates the safety and environmental concerns related to the use of oils (molten salts are cheap, non-toxic common fertilizers and do not catch fire, as opposed to synthetic oils currently used in CSP plants around the World). Last but not least, the higher temperatures reached by the molten salts enable the use of steam turbines at the standard pressure/temperature parameters as used in most common gas-cycle fossil power plants. This means that conventional power plants can be integrated – or, in perspective, replaced – with this technology without expensive retrofits to the existing assets.

 

Carlo Rubbia

So why hasn’t this technology come before? There are both political and technical issues behind this. Let’s start with politics. The concept dates back to 2001, when Italian nuclear physicist and Nobel prize winner Carlo Rubbia, ENEA’s President at the time, first started Research & Development on molten salt technology in Italy. Rubbia has been a preminent CSP advocate for a long time, and was forced to leave ENEA in 2005 after strong disagreements with the Italian Government and its lack of convincing R&D policies. He then moved to CIEMAT, the Spanish equivalent of ENEA. Under his guidance, Spain has now become world leader in the CSP industry. Luckily for the Italian industry, the Archimede project was not abandoned and ENEA continued its development till completion.

There are also various technical reasons that have prevented an earlier development of this new technology. Salts tend to solidify at temperatures around 220°C, which is a serious issue for the continuous operation of a plant. ENEA and Archimede Solar Energy, a private company focusing on receiver pipes,  developed several patents in order to improve the pipes’ ability to absorbe heat, and the parabolic mirrors’ reflectivity, therefore maximising the heat transfer to the fluid carrier. The result of these and several other technological improvements is a top-notch world’s first power plant with a price tag of around 60 million euros. It’s a hefty price for a 5 MW power plant, even compared to other CSP plants, but there is overwhelming scope for a massive roll-out of this new technology at utility scale in sunny regions like Northern Africa, the Middle East, Australia, the US.

The Italian CSP association ANEST claims Italy could host 3-5,000 MW of CSP plants by 2020, with huge benefits also in terms of jobs creation and industrial know-how. A lot more can be achieved in the sun belt south of the Mediterranean Sea, and in the Middle East. If the roll out of solar photovoltaics in Italy is to offer any guidance (second largest market in the World in 2009), exciting times are ahead for Concentrating Solar Power.

By Carlo Ombello. Carlo's web site is at www.opportunityenergy.org

A trick of the trade, not the playing of a trick

The word ‘trick’, apparently in relation to an attempt to hide a decline in recent temperatures, was the single most damaging aspect of the Climategate emails affair. News and comment around the world focused on this single expression. The climate scientist Myles Allen recently pointed out that even the BBC repeatedly used the phrase  'trick.. to hide the decline' as part of the backdrop to its television news reports. (1) The assumption was always that this word must necessarily have indicated intent to deceive but a cursory examination of dictionary definitions shows that the word ‘trick’ is at least as likely to mean a use of a skill or technique. This fact should have been given more prominence by media covering the Climategate affair and by Sir Muir Russell's recent report. We now know that the expression in the emails referred unambiguously to the decision not to use data derived from measuring the width of recent tree rings in part of a graph of temperatures. The tree data suggested that a decline in temperatures in recent decades but we know from thermometer records that the rings were giving false information. To ‘hide the decline’ wrongly indicated by the information from trees, the University of East Anglia scientists replaced the data with instrumental records.

The investigative report by Sir Muir Russell and others examined the phrase and while they criticise the failure of the scientists to provide details of their technique when the chart was published, they seem to accept the explanation of Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit at UEA, that the word can ‘mean for example a mathematical approach brought to bear to solve a problem’ when used by scientists. The impression given by Sir Muir’s report is that this sense of the word ‘trick’ is a specialist term, a jargon word that would be understood by other scientists but not necessarily by ordinary people. It is as though the word is an artifice, only used as a sort of internal language in communications between experts, perhaps in order to confuse the wider public.

This interpretation of the meaning of the word is wrong. In conventional English, as used by men and women in ordinary life, the expression has had two sets of meanings for several hundred years,  as well as many other subsidiary connotations. The first of these main meanings revolves around deception or fraud.  The second refers to the use of a skill and has no overtones of malpractice whatsoever. In fact it suggests admiration and appropriateness. It is a great pity that Sir Muir and the journalists that covered Climategate have not made more efforts to demonstrate this point. As a result, the impression among non-experts is still that the CRU scientists behaved wrongly.

Here are the definitions from the full Oxford English Dictionary, the language’s most important record of the history and meanings of words.

Meanings implying deception

 A crafty or fraudulent device of a mean or base kind; an artifice to deceive or cheat; a stratagem, ruse, wile; esp. in phrase to play (show) one a trick, to put a trick or tricks upon. (+ three closely related senses)

A freakish or mischievous act; a roguish prank; a frolic: a piece of roguery of foolery; a hoax, practical joke. (+ two closely related senses)

Meanings implying skill

A clever or adroit expedient, device or contrivance; a ‘dexterous artifice’; a ‘dodge’. bag of tricks.

The art, knack, or faculty or doing something skilfully or successfully.

The OED also gives many other meanings to the word, such as a particular habit (‘up to his old tricks’) or a prostitute’s customer. Because the OED entry for ‘trick’ was finished in 1914, most of the quotations used to support the definitions offered in the dictionary are several hundred hears old. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, an offshoot of the main OED, gives more modern quotations to illustrate what a word means. Here is one example from the writer and broadcaster Clive James: 'I learned the trick of carrying nothing much except hand baggage'. No sense of deception or artifice there.

The Shorter Oxford also provides a useful definition of this sense of the word 'A clever or skilful expedient; a knack or special way of doing something’. Those writing and commenting on Climategate should now specify that this sense of the word was almost certainly what the CRU scientists meant rather than continuing to imply some form of disingenuous or dishonourable behaviour.

(1)    At a meeting at the Royal Institution in London to discuss Fred Pearce’s extremely thorough and illuminating new book, The Climate Files, published by Guardian Books, May 2010.