Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

thevilla wrote: »

You consider 20 deg C (68 f) cold? Hmmm. Don't visit my house.

Same here, I find 20C ideal in the winter, when things are 'buttoned up', and around 22C the rest of the year when doors/windows are open and there's a nice draft/breeze.

pile-o-stone

“The Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers recommends: 16°C for factories, 18°C for hospitals, and 20°C for offices.”

https://www.unison.org.uk/content/uploads/2014/08/TowebTemperature-at-Work-Information-Sheet-Aug14-update2.pdf

JKenH

I have seen this story reported in several publications over the last few days but surprised it hasn’t made it onto here before now given the grave consequences for the world. I am also wondering how the climate scientists got this so wrong.

Billions of tonnes of ice in Greenland is melting 50 years ahead of climate change schedules, preventing inhabitants from moving around the country by sledge and leading to the surreal spectacle of children playing in the Arctic sea due to rising temperatures.

A heatwave gripping the Arctic region is causing unprecedented levels of melting ice, and has also seen global sea levels rise, in a clear sign that climate change is taking its severe toll much more quickly than predicted.

The glacier-covered island is experiencing record-breaking temperatures which rose to 22C on August 1, 15C above the average rate. On that same day, the severe heat caused Greenland to lose 12.5 billion tons of ice, a staggeringly large amount even by Arctic standards.

Martin Stendel, a Danish climate expert, has warned that the overall amount of ice that melted on July 31 and August 1 was enough to cover all of Florida with nearly five inches of water. Extreme cases of ice melting typically occur once every 250 years, however the enormous loss of ice on August 1 was the second since 2012, in a sign that the climate crisis is rapidly worsening.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/28/climate-change-melts-billions-tons-ice-greenland-fifty-years/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottsnowden/2019/08/16/greenlands-massive-ice-melt-wasnt-supposed-to-happen-until-2070/

Martyn1981

Surprise, surprise, BEV's won't melt the grid, and smart charging improves things further:

Smart Charging Is Better Than Dumb Charging, German EV Study Finds

Here’s a real doozy. If the world had millions of electric cars and every one of those electric cars was plugged in to recharge at the same time, the demand for electricity would cause the electrical grid to melt down in spectacular fashion. Imagine transmission towers overheating and falling to the ground in a shower of sparks, littering the countryside with live high voltage wires just waiting to electrocute innocent people. Oh, the humanity!

While all of these fiendish pronouncements may seem ridiculous, the faithful minions funded by the Koch Brothers have no problem saying stupid things like those. That’s OK. They are paid — and paid well — to spread disinformation. Doesn’t mean we have to believe them.

A lot of those ideas are based on a kernel of truth. For instance, if every electric car in the world started charging at precisely the same time, that definitely would disrupt the electrical grid, especially in future years when there are millions more of them on the road. Of course, anyone with more than a fourth grade education should realize such a hypothetical scenario is totally unrealistic. But when it comes to spreading fear and doubt the Kochroaches hired by the fossil fuel companies are the best in the world.

For the past 15 months, Netze BW, the utility grid operator in Germany’s Baden-Württemberg region, has been studying the charging habits of electric car drivers in its service area. The data collected has been compiled to create a new report that allays many of the fears about charging lots of electric cars simultaneously.

The implications for smart charging are clear. Just because a car is plugged in to a charger does not mean it needs to be charging all the time. Chargers that are connected to the internet can be turned on and off remotely by the local utility company to balance grid loads while still making sure customers will start the next day with a full battery charge.

Martyn1981

Carbon 'tax' and bio-char news:

It’s The Economics, Stupid! The Case For Carbon Fees

The researchers developed their own version of the productivity model created by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow. According to Science Daily, they found that when the cost of energy comprised a larger fraction of the cost of production, new ways were found to reduce energy use or to use it more efficiently. Rong and his colleagues asked what would happen if these historical relationships between energy costs and efficiency improvements continued into the future. When this dynamic was continuously in play, according to their model, by 2100 energy usage would be reduced by up to 30 percent relative to simulations where this dynamic was not considered.

“Other studies have examined how taxing carbon emission would drive innovation in renewables,” explained co-author Ken Caldeira. “But we show that it would also lead to more efficient consumption of energy — not just by getting people to use better existing technology, but also by motivating people to innovate better ways to use energy. This means that solving the climate problem, while still hard, is a little easier than previously believed.”

Biochar’s Role In Mitigating Climate Change

“I have always wanted to influence the world in a positive manner, and my vehicle, for now, seems to be entrepreneurship,” explains Henrietta Kekäläinen, Co-Founder and CEO of Carboculture.

Thanks a lot, Henrietta for your time today. We’re going to try to start from the very beginning, so everyone can follow the discussion. Let’s be honest, we’re also very new to this topic at The Beam. Could you please explain what biochar is, where it comes from, and what the process is to obtain it?

Biochar is a stable form of carbon, made from woody materials in a heat and oxygen-deprived system. Conventionally, biochar has been made as a small residue of biomass power production. Each tonne of biochar contains about three tonnes of carbon dioxide. When the wood is taken and turned into a stable carbon, it can’t escape as a liquid or gas, which would happen if it were burned or decomposed.

Biochar is carbon that you can hold in your hand – like charcoal. In the natural carbon cycle, about 1% of carbon is sequestered. By making biochar of the biomass, you can sequester up to two-thirds of the carbon in the biomass. Nature already knows how to sequester carbon into the soils, but we need to learn.

Loads more in the article.

markin

New Device That Channels Heat Into Light Could Boost Solar Cell Efficiency to 80%

Solar cells that transfer sunlight into electricity are a brilliant part of modern technology, but one particular aspect has proven to be a huge headache. They're not super efficient - most of the sunlight they absorb is lost in the form of heat.
As a result, the average efficiency of a commercial solar panel is between 11 and 22 percent. Now, a new device could boost that to a whopping 80 percent.
The design is based on an array of single-wall carbon nanotubes, which recapture the thermal photons of infrared radiation - that's the heat - lost by solar cells. Then, the device emits that energy as light in a different wavelength, which in turn can be recycled into electricity.
"Thermal photons are just photons emitted from a hot body," explained engineer Junichiro Kono of Rice University. "If you look at something hot with an infrared camera, you see it glow. The camera is capturing these thermally excited photons."
Infrared radiation is the part of sunlight that carries warmth. It's invisible to the naked human eye, but is on the same electromagnetic spectrum as light and radio waves, and X-rays. It's emitted by your stove, or a campfire, or even by your warm cat, purring on your lap. Basically, anything that emits heat is emitting infrared radiation.


"The problem," said engineer Gururaj Naik, "is that thermal radiation is broadband, while the conversion of light to electricity is efficient only if the emission is in a narrow band. The challenge was to squeeze broadband photons into a narrow band."

Their system involved fine films of densely packed carbon nanotubes, already developed by Kono and colleagues in 2016.
One of the properties of these nanotubes is that electrons in them can only travel in one direction. This produces an effect called hyperbolic dispersion, whereby the films are metallic conductors in one direction, but insulators perpendicular to that direction.
That means that the thermal photons can enter from pretty much anywhere… but they can only exit one way. This squeezing process converts the heat to light; from there, it can be converted into electricity.
In the proof-of-concept device the team developed, the carbon nanotube film can withstand temperatures up to 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 Fahrenheit), although the material is capable of withstanding a much higher heat, up to 1,600 degrees Celsius (1,292 Fahrenheit).
The engineering team then subjected their device to a heat source to confirm the narrow-band output. Each one of the resonator cavities in the film reduced the band of the thermal photons, producing light.
The next step in the research will be to collect this light using photovoltaic solar cells and converting it to electricity to confirm efficiency predictions.
"By squeezing all the wasted thermal energy into a small spectral region, we can turn it into electricity very efficiently," Naik said.
"The theoretical prediction is that we can get 80 percent efficiency."
The research has been published in ACS Photonics.

https://www.sciencealert.com/device-that-channels-heat-into-light-could-boost-solar-efficiency-to-80-percent

Reed_Richards

thevilla wrote: »

You consider 20 deg C (68 f) cold? Hmmm. Don't visit my house.

Having moved house last year, I am convinced that my new room thermostat reads about a degree higher for what feels like the same temperature. For practical purposes this doesn't matter but it would muddy the waters when it comes to making comparisons.

Martyn1981

Quarter 2 coal generation in the UK is only 1/3rd of last year (Q2). Could we see zero coal soon in Q2 or Q3?

[Slight downer, but as coal generation levels get close to zero, that will also massively reduce our leccy based CO2 emission reductions going forward. Just spitballing here, but if we appoint CO2 levels of zero for RE, one for gas, and two for coal, then currently we have RE displacing coal, gaining us 2 points, and some gas displacing coal, gaining a bonus point, so 3 points total. Once coal is gone, then we 'only' have RE displacing gas, so one point. But perhaps the bonus points then come from growing BEV sales and RE (via leccy) displacing petrol and diesel.]


Share of coal in UK's electricity system falls to record lows

Martyn1981

We've talked about electric airplanes with batteries, but here's the other option using hydrogen and fuel cells.

Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?

In the global battle against carbon, aviation is one of the toughest challenges of all. Grids are getting ever greener thanks to renewables, cars are going electric, even construction is exploring new ways to become more sustainable.

But air travel is popular, dirty and, most importantly of all, hard to power with anything other than hydrocarbons.

That’s where Megill comes in. The German-Canadian is seeking the holy grail of air travel – a manned aircraft powered by a liquid hydrogen fuel cell. The technology, engineered by the non-profit organisation AeroDelft which he co-founded in 2017, promises a sort of atmospheric alchemy: a power source whose principal emission is water vapour.

JKenH

Article in the Telegraph focussing on the benefit to the economy of offshore wind developments to run down coastal fishing towns like Grimsby and Hull.

Decarbonising Britain’s energy looked at first like an exorbitant cost. The venture is instead turning into an economic and social bonanza faster than almost anybody ever imagined.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/09/01/offshore-wind-boom-reviving-east-coast-towns-neglected-depressed/