June 26, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in Climate change | comments (0) |

Wind is in the news this morning, with the government due to announce renewable energy plans. Is wind a partial answer, or just hot air? There is so much contradictory evidence out there, it is difficult to decide. Yet few questions are more important. In this article we drill down to the key issues.

When Christopher Columbus, that’s the sailor, not the film director, set out in 1492, he not only discovered the Americas, he also provided a lesson on how we can slash the cost of travel and go some way at least to winning the war against the terror of climate change.

Think about how he got there.  He sailed, under the power of wind.   But here is the big flaw; he, just like the other great explorers, Vasco De Gama,  Walter Raleigh, Captain Cook, etcetera, often got stranded, out at sea, waiting for the breeze.    

And that, in a nutshell, says it all.  Wind can provide much of our energy, but wind power is hugely expensive because it is intermittent… unreliable.

According to some, wind power is at least a partial solution to one of our biggest ills, but according to others, the development of wind power is a fool’s errand, destined to fail.

There is no doubt about it.  The arguments against wind make a long list, and at face seem convincing.    But the criticisms overlook one key point, a key point that was best expressed in 1966 by a man who co-founded Intel, a certain Gordon Moore.

According to a report produced for the Centre of Policy Studies – “Wind Chill: why wind energy will not fill the UK’s energy gap” by Tony Lodge – wind power is expensive, very expensive.  It gives as an example Denmark. 

You may know, Denmark has invested heavily in wind power, to the extent that there is a wind turbine in Denmark for every 900 or so people.   According to the CPS report, in 2002 wind turbines provided Denmark with 19 per cent of the energy the country used.  “In theory,” says the report, “at peak output, the Danish wind farms could account for nearly 64 per cent of Danish peak power demand.”

Here is the rub.  The report says: “Not a single conventional power plant has been closed in the period that Danish wind farms have been developed. Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants have had to be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity and to provide back-up.”

One of the arguments put forward by the pro-wind farm brigade is that you can fire up power stations every time the wind drops. No wind, turn on the traditional power stations.  When it’s windy, turn them off.  But, says the CPS report: “Danes have found that it is not practical for large baseload plants to be turned on and off as the wind dies and rises: indeed, the quick ramping up and down of those plants, such as coal, would actually increase their output of pollution and carbon dioxide (the primary greenhouse gas).”

It says: “Baseload stations have to keep running so that they can ‘shadow’ wind turbines due to their intermittency. So when the wind is blowing perfectly for the turbines, the power they generate is usually a surplus and sold to other countries at an extremely discounted price; or the turbines are simply shut off.”

The report then cites the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken, which claimed that: “Wind met only 1.7 per cent of Denmark’s total demand in 1999.   And in 2003, for example, 84 per cent of western Denmark’s wind-generated electricity was exported (at a revenue loss).”

It says that: “The Danish grid used 50 per cent more coal-generated electricity in 2006 than in 2005 to cover wind’s failings. The increase in the demand for coal, needed to plug the gap left by underperforming wind farms, meant that Danish carbon emissions rose by 36 per cent in 2006.”

So that is pretty damning stuff.

There is another snag with wind.  According to David J.C. MacKay, Professor of Natural Philosophy, Department of Physics, Cambridge University: “If we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the country with windmills, we might be able to generate half of the energy used by driving a car 50 kilometers per day each. Britain’s onshore wind energy resource may be “huge,” but it’s not as huge as our huge consumption.”  In his book “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” he said: “I should emphasize how audacious an assumption I’m making. Let’s compare this estimate of British wind potential with current installed wind power worldwide. The windmills required to provide the UK with 20 kWh/d per person are fifty times the entire wind hardware of Denmark; seven times all the windfarms of Germany; and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world.”

Then there’s the cost of wind turbines.   CPS says: “The construction of wind farms in the UK, both onshore and offshore, is facing large cost increases as the raw materials required to build them become harder to obtain. Turbine costs alone have risen by about 30 per cent in recent years. Siemens, which makes turbines, has no spare capacity.”

CPS says the cost of electricity generated by onshore wind is around three times more than electricity generated by nuclear power.

So let’s just give up then.  Forget wind. Let’s focus on nuclear power instead.

It is just that these arguments overlook the key point.

Technological progress is a function of the resources we invest, and time.

When the US government charged the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with the task of investigating how to protect data stored on computers in the event of an attack, ARPA developed a computer network, which it launched in 1969.  This network evolved into the Internet.

The point is this: the very act of developing technology, advances our knowledge with unpredictable, but often far reaching and hugely beneficial, consequences.  That is why we are what we are today, and not still scavenging for a living in the Rift Valley.

Wind power is like computers in another way.  Wind  turbines are produced in massive quantities, and relatively quickly, unlike nuclear power stations that take decades to be built.  This quick turnaround increases the rate of technological advance.  In short, wind turbines are subject to their own kind of Moores’ Law.

And they are getting better.  According to this week’s Economist, Victor Abata, General Electric’s vice-president says that in 2002, GE’s wind turbines were out of commission for 15 per cent of the time; now it is more like 3 per cent of the time.

Sure, there is a spike at the moment in the cost of wind turbines.  Spikes occur.  Computer chips don’t always go down, there are occasions when they are in short supply and price goes up.  This happened in the early 1990s. But, over the longer-term, the trend is down, a long way down.

As more and more wind turbines are built, economies of scale will set in.  They won’t get more expensive.  To say they will get more expensive as more are built goes against the fundamental theories of economics. 

The anti-wind brigade talk about the law of diminishing returns.   In practice, examples of returns diminishing with greater production in industry are rare.    That is why globalisation is producing so much economic development.

It seems more likely that, once we get over the current bottleneck, wind turbines will get cheaper, and more efficient.

The larger the area wind turbines are spread over, the better.   Denmark is a small country.  The weather probably does not vary much across the land on any one day.    It is not like that in the UK.  It may be calm in Sussex, but blowing a gale in Scotland.  By spreading wind farms across the UK, energy generated by wind becomes more predictable.  This is even more the case if wind turbines are spread across Europe.

But the truly exciting side of this story is this. If you can combine wind energy with information technology, a new opportunity awaits.

Moving forward, computers will be able to apply the appropriate energy source to different appliances. 

So, things that require electricity in a more flexible way could draw their energy from the wind.  Storage heaters that heat up using electricity, then store the heat, releasing it gradually, are one example.  Another might be air conditioning.   If you go to bed and leave your mobile phone battery on charge, then all you really care about is that it is charged up when you wake up.  You don’t care if it charges in intermittent bursts throughout the night.

The same applies, by the way, to the laptop computer this article was written on; it was charged up last night.

But, and this is the truly exciting bit, think about electric cars.

You can’t have failed to notice, electric cars are in the news.  They are supposed to be many times more fuel efficient than petrol, and for people who travel no more than 50 or so miles a day, can provide all the energy required.

And when can you charge up electric cars? When you are not using them.   Wind generated electricity may be ideal.

In a way then, it will be as if our cars will be able to sail down the motorway.  But there is one big difference with sailing.

No doubt Christopher Columbus would have loved to capture all the excess energy in a storm and use it when the wind stopped.    Well, thanks to the potential for spreading many wind farms out across a huge area, linked via a grid, and thanks to batteries that can store energy, especially the batteries that will sit in electric cars, Columbus’s wishes may soon be granted.
 

June 24, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in Climate change | comments (0) |

As the price of oil continues to occupy gravity defying heights, talk turns to cars run on electricity.  But there is a snag with these cars; batteries are heavy, and heavy means inefficient cars.

Fret not, US presidential hopeful John McCain has come to the rescue.    He is proposing a $300 million prize to anyone who can develop “a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”

Mr McCain wants to wean America off its addiction to oil, and his ideas are bold.

“For every automaker who can sell a zero-emissions car, we will commit a $5,000 dollar tax credit for each and every customer who buys that car. For other vehicles, whatever type they may be, the lower the carbon emissions, the higher the tax credit,” he said yesterday.

Of course, in the run up to elections big promises are made. 

But Mr McCain has ventured some interesting ideas.

It seems there are two schools of thought on how we deal with global warming.  We can all stay in more, buy local produce, stop jetting off for our holidays, and if we want a night out, settle for the local shindig.

Alternatively, we can look towards technology. 

It seems our real failure to find commercially viable sustainable alternatives to oil, has been lack of will – or, put it another way, lack of money.

According to James Martin, in his book, The Meaning of the 21st Century, “The world’s reserves of oil, not counting the undiscovered ones, have a value of about 60 trillion USA dollars… coal reserves have a similarly-high value. If humanity set out to save energy, and move to non-carbon forms of energy… much of this vast amount of energy would be abandoned. Both oil-rich countries and petroleum companies want to hang on to their potential wealth.”

Mr McCain’s proposals are interesting.  It really is the glass is half full way of dealing with climate change – it is born of optimism, of faith in our ability to innovate out of danger.   But there are plenty of reasons to believe this approach may well pay off.

And if he gets in, let’s hope he enacts these proposals, and this isn’t another of those “watch my lips” moments.

June 3, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in Climate change | comments (0) |

There was a time when the British public’s favourite topic of conversation was the weather.     That was in the days before TV programmes like Location, Location, Location, when people bought properties to live in, and speculation was the preserve of city types.  

Yet maybe our pre-occupation with the weather tells an economic story, too.  Because, lets face it, the weather in Blighty can be downright awful – it is chucking it down with rain as these words are typed.

But where there is weather, there is energy – and when oil is priced at current levels we need other sources of energy.

Now independent consultancy Element Energy has released a report suggesting the UK could generate the equivalent of five nuclear power stations’ worth of energy, through installing energy generating devices in homes spread across the land.

So that’s solar panels and wind turbines, and those ground source-heat pumps which are gradually beginning to emerge.

In all, Element Energy reckons nine million microgeneration units could be installed by 2020, and the carbon saving would be the equivalent of taking all the lorries and buses off UK roads. Or to put it into cold figures, 30m tonnes of CO2 would be saved – that’s around 5 per cent of the UK’s current  level of carbon emissions.

Mind you, it’s a tall order; right now there are just 100,000 such devices fitted in the UK.

But there is a snag.  In the long-term there might be a saving from having these devices, but there’s a nasty big up-front payment involved, and that’s what is putting people off.   Well, that and planning laws – both Gordon Brown and David Cameron have had their own plans to have wind turbines fitted to their homes turned down by local authorities.

Element Energy wants to see these small-scale energy generation units carrying greater government subsidies.  As things currently stand, it expects the uptake of micro generators to hit just 3 million by 2020 – well short of the 10 million it wants to see.

So it wants the government to stump up some readies to make it happen.  This could be in the form of subsidies, or perhaps soft loans – payable over 25 years at cut down interest rates.

In all, Element Energy wants £21bn made available over the next 12 years.

Of course, in the long-term renewable energy won’t merely help save the planet – it could also make us better off.   Actually, it’s quite a good investment.  If you can install energy generation units now and have them paid off by the time you retire, then there will be a major saving on your energy bills.  

So in a way, having your home fitted out with micro energy generation units is analogous to saving for your pension – maybe then the government could treat this type of home investment in the same way and make it tax deductible.

It has been claimed before that the UK is the windiest place in Europe – but what the UK isn’t, is sunny.

The snag with solar power is that unless you get an awful lot of sun it is quite inefficient – so solar power provides an opportunity for countries in North Africa and the Middle East – even for the US, but in Europe its applications are more limited.

But if the cost of solar units were to fall, then the whole thing becomes more viable.  And this brings us on to General Electric, and its subsidiary GE Energy.

Yesterday, John Krenicki, president and chief executive of GE Energy said, “I’m very optimistic about solar. I think it will be a billion-dollar business for GE sooner rather than later.”

Then he hit the nail on the head.  “If you think about the solar that’s on the market today, it’s six, seven times more expensive than wind,” Krenicki said.  Then the ray of hope was beamed out.  “Solar requires material science breakthroughs, which is something that GE is good at,” said Krenicki.

The solar energy business is being held back by the supply of silicon – whch is why GE is now talking about “Thin film” which, Krenicki said,  “has a great chance to be the lowest cost scalable form of solar power generation.”

The potential to tap into the power of the Sun is enormous – according to an article in Scientific American earlier this year: “The energy in sunlight striking the Earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption of a year.”

And that is why for companies like GE, beavering away on trying to make solar energy more efficient, the opportunity is literally even greater than sky high.

May 9, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in Climate change | comments (1) |

With oil right up in price, and with bio-fuels proving so controversial, the case for exploring alternative forms of energy is obvious – and at face value, few must seem more appealing than wind power.  Yet actually, wind power is a hugely controversial topic – and now its very viability is coming under threat, thanks to the soaring price of commodities.

The world’s biggest wind farm is under threat.   Shell recently pulled out of the development, and although BWEA, the trade association for the UK wind and marine renewables industry, has tried to shrug off the Shell move, recently saying, “We expect to see a great deal of industry interest in taking over Shell’s share in the London Array,” the doubts just won’t go away.  

But now a new blow has been dealt, this time by Centrica.

Speaking to the BBC, Sarwjit Sambhi, Centrica’s director of power generation and renewables, said, “The economics at the moment make the returns marginal.”   

The Government has laid down this ambitious target for the development of wind farms generating 33 gigawatts through offshore wind farms by 2020.    It’s a great idea, but it was obvious from the off that there were very real practical barriers to achieving this target.

And if you attempt to build the world’s biggest wind farm, then clearly your efforts will have a big impact on supply.   The turbines have to be built, and the UK’s main suppliers are the Danish firm Vestas, and Siemens of Germany – both have bulging order books.

And thanks to the surging price of steel, the cost of building wind farms is soaring.    Recently Mr Sambhi told the Telegraph that the cost of building the wind farm had doubled to £80bn, and separately told the BBC, “The worrying trend is that if the manufacturing costs continue to increase, then I think that the wind target is under threat.”

One of the tragedies with wind farms is the controversy they create.

You hear a list as long as your arm of things that are wrong with them: they kill birds, interfere with radar, and are unreliable – but the real problem with wind energy is that most people just don’t want the turbines near them.

The most common criticism of the turbines is that they only generate power when it is windy and that, therefore, as they are unreliable, we still have to ensure they are backed up by carbon-expensive means of generating power, such as gas plants.

But that is true only up to a point.

By spreading wind farms across the UK, the unreliability factor is reduced.  Sure, the wind can suddenly drop, but not everywhere in Britain, all at once.

Besides, says BWEA, no form of generating power is 100 per cent reliable. It says other threats to the system far outweigh the variability of wind.  For example, it cites “failure of the cross-Channel link”. Apparently, the UK is connected to France by two 1000MW circuits which periodically fail. Loss of one circuit occurs more frequently than the loss of both, but neither occurrence causes any significant upset to system operations.

But what you need to bear in mind is that wind power can never generate all of the UK’s needs – the general feeling seems to be that around 20 per cent is viable.

As for the rising costs of commodities making these wind farms unviable – well this is a legitimate problem, and one that creates major difficulties in the short-term.  But remember, this is newish technology, manufacturers are finding new and more efficient methods of generating electricity by wind.

The key is investment, and as long as the investment is there, a way will be found, because wind is something that will never stop blowing, especially in breezy Blighty.

April 22, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in Climate change | comments (0) |

Wind farms are a good idea, but not here thank you.

It was going to be Britain’s biggest land-based wind farm – 181 wind turbines on the island of Lewis in the Hebrides. But yesterday, the Scottish Government said “No”. It was worried about the adverse effect on the wildlife in the region, where the air positively throngs with rare birds, such as golden eagles.

But Scottish energy minister Jim Mather says he still believes in wind energy. “I strongly believe the vast renewables potential needs to be exploited to ensure that the opportunities and benefits of new development can be shared across the country in an equitable fashion.” He said, “That’s why we will urgently carry out work on how to develop renewable energy in the Western Isles, in harmony with its outstanding natural heritage.”

The trouble is, no one seems to want wind farms.

In communities across the land, the local population are making passionate arguments for saying this is not the right place.

Quite often, they are right – and the Scottish Government may well be right on this occasion.

But, there has to be an acceptance that everything has its price.

If we are to fight the terror of global warming, sacrifices need to be made. Either we cut back, stay indoors and kiss goodbye to globalisation. Or we look towards alternative forms of energy.

This could mean nuclear energy, it could mean solar energy, or it could mean wind energy.

But whatever we adopt, there will be a down-side.

You really can’t have your cake and eat it.

April 10, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in Climate change | comments (0) |

Unless you are recently estranged from Mars, you will know food is up in price.  There are a number of factors behind this.    Rising population levels, coupled with growing wealth in countries such as China and India, are creating more demand.   Last year we were unlucky with the weather, and the world saw a series of bad harvests.    But the third element is the use of bio-fuel.   And yesterday, Gordon Brown, his clunking right fist punching into the soft underbelly of the bio-fuel lobby, entered the debate. 

It’s a kind of domino.    Oil goes up in price, so we look for alternatives.  Bio-fuel is hailed as the answer, and up goes the price of food.   Of course, bio-fuel has its critics; as it currently stands, it is not supposed to be especially good for the environment, and the carbon footprint created from growing the crops that yield bio-fuel, is almost as great as the carbon which is saved.

In Brazil, it’s a problem because rain forest is often cleared to create land for growing sugar. In the US, growing corn takes a massive toll on the environment.  Last year, a UN report said the “use of large-scale mono-cropping could lead to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion and nutrient leaching.” The report also warned that the further development of bio-fuel could put the supply of fresh water under pressure too.

In the US, the growing of bio-fuel is good for jobs of course, and helps alleviate calls to raise tariffs against overseas agriculture products. But the argument that bio-fuel is currently good for the environment is very shaky.   In time, this may improve; it is said that bio-fuel created from woody plants, such as switch grass or poplar, and even more promisingly, algae – could be much more environmentally friendly.  The trouble with getting our fuel from these sources is that at the moment the industry in these areas is tiny.  In the US, unions want to see current jobs protected, not some vague idea that new industries may emerge that could lead to new jobs in the future.

Of course, our resources of solar power, and to a lesser extent wind power, are virtually unlimited.  By switching to generating electricity from these sources, there will not suddenly be an increase in the price of sunshine, or wind.  

Yesterday, our Gordon said, “We need urgently to examine the impact on food prices of different kinds and production methods of bio-fuels and ensure that their use is responsible and sustainable,” said the Prime Minister with a clunking right fist in a letter to other G7 leaders. He added, “Rising food prices threaten to roll back progress we have made in recent years on development.”

The trouble is, not only is the cost of food going up, so too is the cost of oil, again. This morning, black gold rose above $110 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.  This morning’s price was not a record – but it was only just short of last month’s all-time high.