The 10 big energy myths
Chris Goodall, guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 27 2008

Myth 1: solar power is too expensive to be of much use

In reality, today's bulky and expensive solar panels capture only 10% or so of the sun's energy, but rapid innovation in the US means that the next generation of panels will be much thinner, capture far more of the energy in the sun's light and cost a fraction of what they do today. They may not even be made of silicon. First Solar, the largest manufacturer of thin panels, claims that its products will generate electricity in sunny countries as cheaply as large power stations by 2012.

Other companies are investigating even more efficient ways of capturing the sun's energy, for example the use of long parabolic mirrors to focus light on to a thin tube carrying a liquid, which gets hot enough to drive a steam turbine and generate electricity. Spanish and German companies are installing large-scale solar power plants of this type in North Africa, Spain and the south-west of America; on hot summer afternoons in California, solar power stations are probably already financially competitive with coal. Europe, meanwhile, could get most of its electricity from plants in the Sahara desert. We would need new long-distance power transmission but the technology for providing this is advancing fast, and the countries of North Africa would get a valuable new source of income.

Myth 2: wind power is too unreliable

Actually, during some periods earlier this year the wind provided almost 40% of Spanish power. Parts of northern Germany generate more electricity from wind than they actually need. Northern Scotland, blessed with some of the best wind speeds in Europe, could easily generate 10% or even 15% of the UK's electricity needs at a cost that would comfortably match today's fossil fuel prices.

The intermittency of wind power does mean that we would need to run our electricity grids in a very different way. To provide the most reliable electricity, Europe needs to build better connections between regions and countries; those generating a surplus of wind energy should be able to export it easily to places where the air is still. The UK must invest in transmission cables, probably offshore, that bring Scottish wind-generated electricity to the power-hungry south-east and then continue on to Holland and France. The electricity distribution system must be Europe-wide if we are to get the maximum security of supply.

We will also need to invest in energy storage. At the moment we do this by
pumping water uphill at times of surplus and letting it flow back down the mountain when power is scarce. Other countries are talking of developing "smart grids" that provide users with incentives to consume less electricity when wind speeds are low. Wind power is financially viable today in many countries, and it will become cheaper as turbines continue to grow in size, and manufacturers drive down costs. Some projections see more than 30% of the world's electricity eventually coming from the wind. Turbine manufacture and installation are also set to become major sources of employment, with one trade body predicting that the sector will generate 2m jobs worldwide by 2020.

Myth 3: marine energy is a dead-end

The thin channel of water between the north-east tip of Scotland and Orkney contains some of the most concentrated tidal power in the world. The energy from the peak flows may well be greater than the electricity needs of London. Similarly, the waves off the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal are strong, consistent and able to provide a substantial fraction of the region's power. Designing and building machines that can survive the harsh conditions of fast-flowing ocean waters has been challenging and the past decades have seen repeated disappointments here and abroad. This year we have seen the installation of the first tidal turbine to be successfully connected to the UK electricity grid in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, and the first group of large-scale wave power generators 5km off the coast of Portugal, constructed by a Scottish company.

But even though the UK shares with Canada, South Africa and parts of South America some of the best marine energy resources in the world, financial support has been trifling. The London opera houses have had more taxpayer money than the British marine power industry over the past few years. Danish support for wind power helped that country establish worldwide leadership in the building of turbines; the UK could do the same with wave and tidal power.

Myth 4: nuclear power is cheaper than other low-carbon sources of electricity

If we believe that the world energy and environmental crises are as severe as is said, nuclear power stations must be considered as a possible option. But although the disposal of waste and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are profoundly important issues, the most severe problem may be the high and unpredictable cost of nuclear plants.

The new nuclear power station on the island of Olkiluoto in western Finland is a clear example. Electricity production was originally supposed to start this year, but the latest news is that the power station will not start generating until 2012. The impact on the cost of the project has been dramatic. When the contracts were signed, the plant was supposed to cost €3bn (£2.5bn). The final cost is likely to be more than twice this figure and the construction process is fast turning into a nightmare. A second new plant in Normandy appears to be experiencing similar problems. In the US, power companies are backing away from nuclear because of fears over uncontrollable costs.

Unless we can find a new way to build nuclear power stations, it looks as though CO2 capture at coal-fired plants will be a cheaper way of producing low-carbon electricity. A sustained research effort around the world might also mean that cost-effective carbon capture is available before the next generation of nuclear plants is ready, and that it will be possible to fit carbon-capture equipment on existing coal-fired power stations. Finding a way to roll out CO2 capture is the single most important research challenge the world faces today. The current leader, the Swedish power company Vattenfall, is using an innovative technology that burns the coal in pure oxygen rather than air, producing pure carbon dioxide from its chimneys, rather than expensively separating the CO2 from other exhaust gases. It hopes to be operating huge coal-fired power stations with minimal CO2 emissions by 2020.

Myth 5: electric cars are slow and ugly

We tend to think that electric cars are all like the G Wiz vehicle, with a limited range, poor acceleration and an unprepossessing appearance. Actually, we are already very close to developing electric cars that match the performance of petrol vehicles. The Tesla electric sports car, sold in America but designed by Lotus in Norfolk, amazes all those who experience its awesome acceleration. With a price tag of more than $100,000, late 2008 probably wasn't a good time to launch a luxury electric car, but the Tesla has demonstrated to everybody that electric cars can be exciting and desirable. The crucial advance in electric car technology has been in batteries: the latest lithium batteries - similar to the ones in your laptop - can provide large amounts of power for acceleration and a long enough range for almost all journeys.

Batteries still need to become cheaper and quicker to charge, but the UK's largest manufacturer of electric vehicles says that advances are happening faster than ever before. Its urban delivery van has a range of over 100 miles, accelerates to 70mph and has running costs of just over 1p per mile. The cost of the diesel equivalent is probably 20 times as much. Denmark and Israel have committed to develop the full infrastructure for a switch to an all-electric car fleet. Danish cars will be powered by the spare electricity from the copious resources of wind power; the Israelis will provide solar power harvested from the desert.

Myth 6: biofuels are always destructive to the environment

Making some of our motor fuel from food has been an almost unmitigated disaster. It has caused hunger and increased the rate of forest loss, as farmers have sought extra land on which to grow their crops. However the failure of the first generation of biofuels should not mean that we should reject the use of biological materials forever. Within a few years we will be able to turn agricultural wastes into liquid fuels by splitting cellulose, the most abundant molecule in plants and trees, into simple hydrocarbons. Chemists have struggled to find a way of breaking down this tough compound cheaply, but huge amounts of new capital have flowed into US companies that are working on making a petrol substitute from low-value agricultural wastes. In the lead is Range Fuels, a business funded by the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, which is now building its first commercial cellulose cracking plant in Georgia using waste wood from managed forests as its feedstock.

We shouldn't be under any illusion that making petrol from cellulose is a solution to all the problems of the first generation of biofuels. Although cellulose is abundant, our voracious needs for liquid fuel mean we will have to devote a significant fraction of the world's land to growing the grasses and wood we need for cellulose refineries. Managing cellulose production so that it doesn't reduce the amount of food produced is one of the most important issues we face.

Myth 7: climate change means we need more organic agriculture

The uncomfortable reality is that we already struggle to feed six billion people. Population numbers will rise to more than nine billion by 2050. Although food production is increasing slowly, the growth rate in agricultural productivity is likely to decline below population increases within a few years. The richer half of the world's population will also be eating more meat. Since animals need large amounts of land for every unit of meat they produce, this further threatens food production for the poor. So we need to ensure that as much food as possible is produced on the limited resources of good farmland. Most studies show that yields under organic cultivation are little more than half what can be achieved elsewhere. Unless this figure can be hugely improved, the implication is clear: the world cannot feed its people and produce huge amounts of cellulose for fuels if large acreages are converted to organic cultivation.

Myth 8: zero carbon homes are the best way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from buildings

Buildings are responsible for about half the world's emissions; domestic housing is the most important single source of greenhouse gases. The UK's insistence that all new homes are "zero carbon" by 2016 sounds like a good idea, but there are two problems. In most countries, only about 1% of the housing stock is newly built each year. Tighter building regulations have no effect on the remaining 99%. Second, making a building genuinely zero carbon is extremely expensive. The few prototype UK homes that have recently reached this standard have cost twice as much as conventional houses.

Just focusing on new homes and demanding that housebuilders meet extremely high targets is not the right way to cut emissions. Instead, we should take a lesson from Germany. A mixture of subsidies, cheap loans and exhortation is succeeding in getting hundreds of thousands of older properties eco-renovated each year to very impressive standards and at reasonable cost. German renovators are learning lessons from the PassivHaus movement, which has focused not on reducing carbon emissions to zero, but on using painstaking methods to cut emissions to 10 or 20% of conventional levels, at a manageable cost, in both renovations and new homes. The PassivHaus pioneers have focused on improving insulation, providing far better air-tightness and warming incoming air in winter, with the hotter stale air extracted from the house. Careful attention to detail in both design and building work has produced unexpectedly large cuts in total energy use. The small extra price paid by householders is easily outweighed by the savings in electricity and gas. Rather than demanding totally carbon-neutral housing, the UK should push a massive programme of eco-renovation and cost-effective techniques for new construction.

Myth 9: the most efficient power stations are big

Large, modern gas-fired power stations can turn about 60% of the energy in fuel into electricity. The rest is lost as waste heat.

Even though 5-10% of the electricity will be lost in transmission to the user, efficiency has still been far better than small-scale local generation of power. This is changing fast.

New types of tiny combined heat and power plants are able to turn about half the energy in fuel into electricity, almost matching the efficiency of huge generators. These are now small enough to be easily installed in ordinary homes. Not only will they generate electricity but the surplus heat can be used to heat the house, meaning that all the energy in gas is productively used. Some types of air conditioning can even use the heat to power their chillers in summer.

We think that microgeneration means wind turbines or solar panels on the roof, but efficient combined heat and power plants are a far better prospect for the UK and elsewhere. Within a few years, we will see these small power plants, perhaps using cellulose-based renewable fuels and not just gas, in many buildings. Korea is leading the way by heavily subsidising the early installation of fuel cells at office buildings and other large electricity users.

Myth 10: all proposed solutions to climate change need to be hi-tech

The advanced economies are obsessed with finding hi-tech solutions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Many of these are expensive and may create as many problems as they solve. Nuclear power is a good example. But it may be cheaper and more effective to look for simple solutions that reduce emissions, or even extract existing carbon dioxide from the air. There are many viable proposals to do this cheaply around the world, which also often help feed the world's poorest people. One outstanding example is to use a substance known as biochar to sequester carbon and increase food yields at the same time.

Biochar is an astonishing idea. Burning agricultural wastes in the absence of air leaves a charcoal composed of almost pure carbon, which can then be crushed and dug into the soil. Biochar is extremely stable and the carbon will stay in the soil unchanged for hundreds of years. The original agricultural wastes had captured CO2 from the air through the photosynthesis process; biochar is a low-tech way of sequestering carbon, effectively for ever. As importantly, biochar improves fertility in a wide variety of tropical soils. Beneficial micro-organisms seem to crowd into the pores of the small pieces of crushed charcoal. A network of practical engineers around the tropical world is developing the simple stoves needed to make the charcoal. A few million dollars of support would allow their research to benefit hundreds of millions of small farmers at the same time as extracting large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Geothermal Industry Development Framework (GIDF)
Geodynamics, December 1, 2008

Australian governments have placed a great deal of confidence in the Australian
geothermal energy industry and acknowledged the important role it will play in Australia’s future energy supply through the collaborative development of the GIDF and the Geothermal Technology Road Map according to the national geothermal industry body, the Australian Geothermal Energy Association (AGEA).

Read more..

Scientists crack iceberg mystery
Reuters, November 28, 2008, 6:09 am

OSLO (Reuters) - U.S. scientists have figured out how icebergs break off Antarctica and Greenland, a finding that may help predict rising sea levels as the climate warms.

Writing in Friday's edition of the journal Science, they said icebergs formed fast when parent ice sheets spread out quickly over the sea.

"It won't help the Titanic, but a newly derived, simple law may help scientists improve their climate models" and predict ice sheet break-up, they said in a statement. The Titanic sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, killing 1,500 people.

Ice cracking off into the ocean from Antarctica and Greenland could be the main contributor to global sea level rises in the future. If all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica melted, seas would rise by more than 60 metres (196 ft).

The formation rate of icebergs was less linked to factors such as ice thickness, width of the ice flow, distance from land or waves, the scientists said.

Ice sheets are giant frozen rivers, caused by snowfall, that slowly flow to the sea and then break up.

In Antarctica, the Ross Ice Shelf extends 500 miles (800 km) over the ocean before the edges snap off and form icebergs. Many other ice sheets stretch just a mile or two.

Computer models that predict how ice sheets behave in warmer weather generally gloss over exactly how icebergs break off because researchers have failed to understand the mechanism, known as calving.

"For iceberg calving, the important variable -- the one that accounts for the largest portion of when the iceberg breaks -- is the rate at which ice shelves spread," the study said.

A fast spread means cracks form throughout the shelf and make it crack up. A slower spread means that deep cracks do not form as fast and the ice sticks together.

"The problem of when things break is a really hard problem because there is so much variability," lead author Richard Alley, of Pennsylvania State University, said.

"Anyone who has dropped a coffee cup knows this. Sometimes the coffee cup breaks and sometimes it bounces," he said of the problems of understanding cracking.

The U.N. Climate Panel predicts seas will rise by 18 to 59 cm (7-23 inches) this century because of warming stoked by human use of fossil fuels.

Presidential Climate Action Project

One of the most important challenges facing the 44th President – arguably the most important challenge – will be to quickly and effectively address the three interrelated problems of climate change, energy stability and national security.

Leading climate experts estimate that the international community has 10 years to make dramatic changes in greenhouse gas emissions if we wish to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. A similar need for action in the next decade is being created by the growing international competition for oil, the approaching peak in world petroleum production and America’s increasing dependence on oil from unstable or hostile regions. Left unaddressed, these problems may create unprecedented economic and environmental hardships and increasing global tensions.1

By the time the 44th President takes office, the window of opportunity to prevent these crises will be one-third gone. The people of the United States, as well as other nations, will be looking for an early indication of whether the President intends to lead the world’s largest energy-consuming and greenhouse-gas emitting nation on a responsible course of action.

To help the President launch effective Federal leadership on these issues, the University of Colorado and several partner organizations are engaging the nation’s science, policy, business and civic leaders to produce a Presidential Climate Action Plan (PCAP).

The plan will contain a broad menu of policy and program recommendations for the President, rather than advocating a particular policy. It will be announced early in 2008. During 2007-2008, the project will operate a web site that offers resource documents and background information on climate policy to assist the Presidential candidates in forming their climate-action commitments.

1. “Peaking of World Oil production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management”, Hirsch, Bezdek and Wendling, February 2005, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy

A climate of change
Economist.com, Nov 19, 2008

How countries' greenhouse-gas emissions have changed since 1990

BARACK OBAMA said on Tuesday November 18th that his presidency will “mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change”. According to new UN figures on greenhouse-gas emissions much remains to be done. Some 40 industrialised countries (though not China and India, for example) report emissions data to the UN as part of its Convention on Climate Change. Some of these countries, notably in eastern and central European, have shown big reductions from 1990 to 2006, driven in part by the collapse of heavy industries. By contrast emissions in Spain, Portugal and Ireland grew enormously as their economies surged ahead. Australia, Canada and America also pumped out more climate-warming gases. Despite a 5% decline since 1990 across the 40 countries, the recent trend is upwards. Since 2000 emissions from the former Soviet Union countries have grown by 7.4%, and those of rich countries by 2%.

News Roundup

IEA stokes doubts over world's climate fight
LONDON, Nov 12 (Reuters)

The world will have to bet on extreme measures to avoid serious global warming, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday, adding to growing worries that governments have under-estimated the problem.

The energy adviser to 28 rich countries detailed two paths for limiting warming to 2 and 3 degrees Celsius respectively, which would both require huge annual investments to deploy fossil fuels alternatives.

"Both scenarios imply that net greenhouse gas emissions turn negative -- carbon absorbtion exceeds gross emissions -- towards the end of the century," said the IEA's set-piece annual energy report, published on Wednesday.

If the world carried on as normal without taking new steps to fight climate change temperature would rise in the long-term by up to 6 degrees.

Above 2 degrees warming, "hundreds of millions of people would face reduced water supplies", and above 3 degrees food production worldwide would be "very likely to decrease", a U.N. panel of climate scientists said last year.

Limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees would be especially expensive because it would involve scrapping and replacing dirty power plants at a cost of about $3.6 trillion from 2010-2030, the IEA report said.

That compares with global efforts in recent weeks to shore up the world economy at a cost of about $4 trillion.

U.S. Consumers: Companies Should Pay To Manage Climate Change
Environmental Leader, November 16, 2008

The fifth EcoPinion Survey from EcoAlign finds that consumers generally agree on the definition of climate change, the importance of reducing climate change and the role of the individual to reduce climate change.

“Higher penalties on companies that contribute to climate change” was clearly the top response (61 percent) on the best way for society to pay for the costs of managing climate change, a nearly 45 percent differential with the next top response (16 percent) indicating “higher fees on products or services that contribute to climate change.”

OpenEco.org 2.0 Launched By Sun
Environmental Leader, November 16, 2008

Sun Microsystems has updated OpenEco.org, an online community that provides tools to help companies calculate, compare and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Xerox Details Its Environmental Ups and Downs
GreenBiz.com, 11 November 2008

Xerox lays out its environmental performance for 2007, compared both to 2006 results and its long-term goals, in its 2008 global citizenship report.

Xerox also brought itself closer to its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent between 2002 and 2012. Its original goal was to cut emissions 10 percent in that time period, but upped the goal after hitting 10 percent by 2006. By the end of 2007, Xerox cut its emissions 21 percent compared to 2002.

World's First Climate Change Refugees Acknowledged By UN
Solomon Times Online, 5 November 2008

Carterets Islanders have become the world's first climate change refugees according to a recent United Nations Report.

The one-thousand-500 residents of Carterets Island, an atoll of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, are fast becoming the world's first climate change refugees as officially stated.

A third of the population had refused to leave their island because they claimed they had spent all their lives there and would not move or claimed they would sink and vanish with the island.

Sea levels around the atoll have risen 10 centimetres in the past 20 years, inundating plantations.

The situation is deteriorating, islanders told officials. They said they urgently needed assistance to be relocated to higher ground.

Bougainville Administrator Raymond Masono says that they are still negotiating with landowners for land which they would resettle the islanders as their permanent home under the major climate change resettlement exercise.

He however says that the exercise would cost the Autonomous Bougainville and PNG Government millions of dollars starting next year through to 2014.

'Unprecedented' Warming Drives Dramatic Ecosystem Shifts In North Atlantic, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Nov. 7, 2008) — While Earth has experienced numerous changes in climate over the past 65 million years, recent decades have experienced the most significant climate change since the beginning of human civilized societies about 5,000 years ago, says a new Cornell University study.

Carbon Dioxide Levels Already In Danger Zone, Revised Theory Shows

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2008) — If climate disasters are to be averted, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) must be reduced below the levels that already exist today, according to a study published in Open Atmospheric Science Journal by a group of 10 scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

In their model, with coal emissions phased out between 2010 and 2030, atmospheric CO2 would peak at 400-425 ppm and then slowly decline. The authors maintain that the peak CO2 level reached would depend on the accuracy of oil and gas reserve estimates and whether the most difficult to extract oil and gas is left in the ground.

The authors suggest that reforestation of degraded land and improved agricultural practices that retain soil carbon could lower atmospheric CO2 by as much as 50 ppm. They also dismiss the notion of "geo-engineering" solutions, noting that the price of artificially removing 50 ppm of CO2 from the air would be about $20 trillion.

While they note the task of moving toward an era beyond fossil fuels is Herculean, the authors conclude that it is feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II and that "the greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable."

Top Scientific Meeting Urges Coordinated Response To Economic And Environmental Crises

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2008) — A fix for the economy must address ecological threats, a top international scientific meeting here has urged. Human society is moving dangerously beyond the planet's natural limits in a striking parallel to the financial debt crisis. “We're running the planet like a subprime loan,” Dr. Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre said. A coordinated response would reduce the risks of both kinds of crises in the future.

Scientific Community Called Upon To Resolve Debate On ‘Net Energy’ Once And For All

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2008) — “Net energy is a (mostly) irrelevant, misleading and dangerous metric,” says Professor Bruce Dale, editor-in-chief of Biofuels, Bioresources and Biorefining (Biofpr) in the latest issue of the journal published November 7.

Environmentally Friendly Acrylic Glass Made Of Sugar: New Enzyme Could Revolutionize Production Of Plastics

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2008) — In future, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA for short) – better known as acrylic glass – could be made from natural raw materials such as sugars, alcohols or fatty acids. Compared with the previous chemical production process, a biotechnological process is far more environmentally friendly.

PMMA is manufactured by polymerising methyl methacrylate (MMA). In a bacterial strain, scientists at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have found an enzyme which could be used for the biotechnological production of a precursor of MMA.

U.S. 'Super Bugs' Invading South America

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2008) — Two clones of highly antibiotic-resistant organism strains, which previously had only been identified in the United States, are now causing serious sickness and death in several Colombian cities including the capital Bogotá, say researchers at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston. The study, done in collaboration with Universidad El Bosque in Bogotá, is presented in a research letter published in the Nov. 13 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

U.S. clones of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis (VREF) have emerged in communities across Colombia. The variation of the MRSA clone, referred to as the USA 300, has been previously reported to be the most important cause of severe skin and soft tissue infections in the United States. The VREF clone is genetically related to a strain that hit a Houston hospital in 1994.