Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

Coastalwatch said:

Martyn1981 said:

Along with earlier steps – including lower speed limits to control emissions of nitrogen dioxide,

Now wouldn't that be an interesting proposition if introduced. Say limiting FF cars to 45 or 50mph. Can you imagine the repercussions! Undoubtedly humungous protestations from their owners but what greater incentive would one need to encourage most people to go electric and for what cost? As I don't think there would even be a need to offer financial incentives as additional encouragement!

Now that BEV options are expanding, I think some sort of speed, weight or price limit on new ICE's might be possible, but it'll scare the hell out of the automotive old guard. I think it was California that was considering a bill to limit new ICE sales by price ($50k(ish) if I remember correctly).

michaels

I was thinking about solar on school roofs and was wondering if any of the existing UK community schemes might allow a group of parents to invest capital in school roof panels and get their capital back perhaps with a small return whilst also giving the school cheap/free electricity?

Coastalwatch

michaels said:

I was thinking about solar on school roofs and was wondering if any of the existing UK community schemes might allow a group of parents to invest capital in school roof panels and get their capital back perhaps with a small return whilst also giving the school cheap/free electricity?

 I think you'll find there was a post about such a scheme sometime before Christmas. Further to that many such schemes have been running for a number years. Unfortunately you just need to know where to look. The link below will give you an indication although their existing offer was over subscribed so a little frustrating for you at present. But I'm confident others will arise in the coming months if you've a mind to keep a look out!

https://schools-energy-coop.co.uk/share-offer-2/

michaels

Coastalwatch said:

michaels said:

I was thinking about solar on school roofs and was wondering if any of the existing UK community schemes might allow a group of parents to invest capital in school roof panels and get their capital back perhaps with a small return whilst also giving the school cheap/free electricity?

 I think you'll find there was a post about such a scheme sometime before Christmas. Further to that many such schemes have been running for a number years. Unfortunately you just need to know where to look. The link below will give you an indication although their existing offer was over subscribed so a little frustrating for you at present. But I'm confident others will arise in the coming months if you've a mind to keep a look out!

https://schools-energy-coop.co.uk/share-offer-2/

Thanks,I found that with google too but was wondering if there was a scheme where parents at a single school could invest together for that school alone. I bet there are plenty at our kids school who would love to invest 10k for 25 years at 3% tax free if it also benefitted the school with cheap leccy.

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Coastalwatch said:

michaels said:

I was thinking about solar on school roofs and was wondering if any of the existing UK community schemes might allow a group of parents to invest capital in school roof panels and get their capital back perhaps with a small return whilst also giving the school cheap/free electricity?

 I think you'll find there was a post about such a scheme sometime before Christmas. Further to that many such schemes have been running for a number years. Unfortunately you just need to know where to look. The link below will give you an indication although their existing offer was over subscribed so a little frustrating for you at present. But I'm confident others will arise in the coming months if you've a mind to keep a look out!

https://schools-energy-coop.co.uk/share-offer-2/

Thanks,I found that with google too but was wondering if there was a scheme where parents at a single school could invest together for that school alone. I bet there are plenty at our kids school who would love to invest 10k for 25 years at 3% tax free if it also benefitted the school with cheap leccy.

I think you are describing a PPA, or a form of PV lease like they do in the US and Australia. You'd set up a company* which pays for the install cost of the PV, then meter what the school uses, and charge them an agreed price (possibly with an inflationary uplift) for the leccy they consume. That price could be zero, but you'd need to see what you could sell the excess for to work out if export would cover the cost of the install. Too low a price and the school may find inventive ways to consume more, reducing your potential export income(?)

*I'm sure someone who knows vastly more than me can chip in, but presumably the company would have partners equal to the money paid in, or perhaps ownership shares, again based on capital invested. I'd guess that some sort of model for this already exists, or advice on best practice and 'lessons learned' could be gathered from other such schemes, as I'm sure this has been done before.

Martyn1981

The article is interesting, if you can get past the title. Am I going mad, or should it be 'flounders', or even 'founders flounder'? But I digress, and back to the article and this reminds me of the saying:

When the tide goes out you see who's swimming naked? or It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked.
(Interpretation: Things may look good and rosy up to a certain point, but if a company is leveraged too much expecting a wave to come, but instead the tide goes out, everything will be exposed.)

America’s fracking boom founders as global prices and demand collapse

The US shale industry was forecast to deliver record high oil production this year. Only a few months ago the Permian basin was expected to increase its oil output to a new high of 4.8 million barrels per day, on the way to spurring the entire US market to a record daily output rate of 9 million bpd in 2020.

The Permian, North America’s largest shale basin, has been one of the biggest drivers of a shale oil boom that helped make the United States the biggest oil producer in the world, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Instead, the region – which stretches from western Texas to eastern New Mexico – has endured its biggest one-month production decline in history. Now observers expect to see a string of oil-well closures, rising debts and bankruptcies as the coronavirus pandemic slashes demand for crude and threatens to wipe out hundreds of startup frackers. Suddenly, reaching 9 million bpd has become highly unlikely.

“Even before the oil price crash, the business models began to change. Investors historically provided a lot of capital to the industry to finance the capital growth. Last year, they began asking these companies to come up with more disciplined and balanced capital programmes and focus more on profitability,” Abramov says.

The companies that survive will be the leanest left standing, he adds. “It won’t be the same industry once prices recover.”

Solarchaser

Coastalwatch said:

Solarchaser said:

I gotta be honest. I winced at speed reductions.
I know, Greater good, but.... from a business perspective, it will increase my working day, and from a personal perspective. I like going fast lol

When working I was always encouraged to work Smarter, not harder(faster). Guess you'll be first in the queue for a Tesla then!

Indeed.. to both.
I've been pushing company I work for to give me a tesla.
Work smarter... spend less time travelling to jobs, more time on site ;-)

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

The article is interesting, if you can get past the title. Am I going mad, or should it be 'flounders', or even 'founders flounder'? But I digress, and back to the article and this reminds me of the saying:

When the tide goes out you see who's swimming naked? or It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked.
(Interpretation: Things may look good and rosy up to a certain point, but if a company is leveraged too much expecting a wave to come, but instead the tide goes out, everything will be exposed.)

America’s fracking boom founders as global prices and demand collapse

The US shale industry was forecast to deliver record high oil production this year. Only a few months ago the Permian basin was expected to increase its oil output to a new high of 4.8 million barrels per day, on the way to spurring the entire US market to a record daily output rate of 9 million bpd in 2020.

The Permian, North America’s largest shale basin, has been one of the biggest drivers of a shale oil boom that helped make the United States the biggest oil producer in the world, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Instead, the region – which stretches from western Texas to eastern New Mexico – has endured its biggest one-month production decline in history. Now observers expect to see a string of oil-well closures, rising debts and bankruptcies as the coronavirus pandemic slashes demand for crude and threatens to wipe out hundreds of startup frackers. Suddenly, reaching 9 million bpd has become highly unlikely.

“Even before the oil price crash, the business models began to change. Investors historically provided a lot of capital to the industry to finance the capital growth. Last year, they began asking these companies to come up with more disciplined and balanced capital programmes and focus more on profitability,” Abramov says.

The companies that survive will be the leanest left standing, he adds. “It won’t be the same industry once prices recover.”

I worry about the tar sands in Canada - they need much higher price sand have no doubt budgeted on profits from sales being saved to pay the clean up costs.  Of course what will happen is that the companies will go bankrupt (having paid the managers huge bonuses in the good years) and the clean up bill will be left with the local tax payers and the environment will be left to fester.

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

The article is interesting, if you can get past the title. Am I going mad, or should it be 'flounders', or even 'founders flounder'? But I digress, and back to the article and this reminds me of the saying:

When the tide goes out you see who's swimming naked? or It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked.
(Interpretation: Things may look good and rosy up to a certain point, but if a company is leveraged too much expecting a wave to come, but instead the tide goes out, everything will be exposed.)

America’s fracking boom founders as global prices and demand collapse

The US shale industry was forecast to deliver record high oil production this year. Only a few months ago the Permian basin was expected to increase its oil output to a new high of 4.8 million barrels per day, on the way to spurring the entire US market to a record daily output rate of 9 million bpd in 2020.

The Permian, North America’s largest shale basin, has been one of the biggest drivers of a shale oil boom that helped make the United States the biggest oil producer in the world, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Instead, the region – which stretches from western Texas to eastern New Mexico – has endured its biggest one-month production decline in history. Now observers expect to see a string of oil-well closures, rising debts and bankruptcies as the coronavirus pandemic slashes demand for crude and threatens to wipe out hundreds of startup frackers. Suddenly, reaching 9 million bpd has become highly unlikely.

“Even before the oil price crash, the business models began to change. Investors historically provided a lot of capital to the industry to finance the capital growth. Last year, they began asking these companies to come up with more disciplined and balanced capital programmes and focus more on profitability,” Abramov says.

The companies that survive will be the leanest left standing, he adds. “It won’t be the same industry once prices recover.”

I worry about the tar sands in Canada - they need much higher price sand have no doubt budgeted on profits from sales being saved to pay the clean up costs.  Of course what will happen is that the companies will go bankrupt (having paid the managers huge bonuses in the good years) and the clean up bill will be left with the local tax payers and the environment will be left to fester.

Have a read of this article, which explains that clean up funds are small as the industry is supposed to be around for much longer to pay into it ..... potential disaster looming for tax payers if (as(?)) the industry collapses:-

Martyn1981 said:

Couple of articles on Canadian tar sands oil. The industry is struggling, has been getting support/bailouts for years, and has paid very little into clean up funds as it was expected (hoped) to be around (and profitable) for decades. Also the pipeline taking the oil across the US is running into more legal problems.

A Tale Of Two Cleanups: Oil Sands Vs Mining

Martyn1981

Extracts from this week's Carbon Commentary Newsletter (which will be published every two weeks going forward):
[I'm guessing the last sentence in item two should read 'relatively in-expensive'.]
[Item 5 really jumped out at me. Huge cumulative savings from a relatively simple and cheap product.]

1, Using waste heat. Swedish pioneer Climeon said that it had commissioned its first plant at a Japanese geothermal site. Water coming to the surface at a geothermal site usually has a temperatures of at least 180 degrees if it is going to be used to generate electricity. After passing through a steam turbine, the water may still be around 100 degrees and this is used by Climeon to generate a second source of electricity. The Climeon technology is only about 20% efficient but still offers a productive use for waste heat in many industrial applications and shipping as well as geothermal energy.
 
2, IRENA projections. The International Renewable Energy Agency put forward a plan for complete decarbonisation by 2050. It bases its suggestions on expansion of renewables (up 520 GW a year or about 3 times the current rate of increase), hydrogen from electrolysis (1700 GW of capacity by 2050), energy efficiency gains and biofuels. IRENA projects a cost for full decarbonisation without offsets of about 3% of global GDP, compared to today’s investments in energy of around 2%. The key implication of its work is that 100% decarbonisation is practical and relatively expensive, except for the difficult sectors such as aviation and cement. (Thanks to Gage Williams).
 
3, Cellulose-based clothing. In What We Need To Do Now, I suggest that the clothing industry is the worst single example of the polluting linear economy. Virtually no clothing is fully recycled anywhere in the world. Both cotton and plastic production cause environmental problems well beyond their apparent significance in terms of annual tonnes of production. Cellulose-based products are a potential way forward. The leader in this industry is Austria’s Lenzing with its Tencel biodegradable brand made from wood taken from renewable forests. (I try to avoid the use of the word ‘sustainable’ because of its capture by profoundly unsustainable companies). Upscale UK retailer John Lewis announced a new range of clothing made from Tencel. Prices are not cheap but durability will be excellent. Already low by the standards of cotton or polyester, Tencel targets a 50% further reduction in carbon footprint (scope 1,2 and 3) by 2030 as a result of greater use of renewable energy and complete decarbonisation (scope 1,2 and 3) by 2050.
 
4, Reversible electrolysis/ fuel cell. The world needs hydrogen as the storage vector for surplus electricity but it also needs an inexpensive means of rapidly converting that hydrogen back to electricity when necessary. Efficient reversible electrolysis is therefore an important target for researchers. Scientists at a US national laboratory published the results of a study that showed good levels of efficiency and minimal degradation at lower-than-expected temperatures using a new low-cost perovskite compound. The science is difficult but this seems a convincing demonstration that current electrolysis technologies (alkaline and PEM) may face competition from a potentially much cheaper technology.
 
5, Efficient cooking stoves. About 3 billion people rely on solid fuels – principally wood – for cooking. Many stoves are both inefficient and produce dangerous levels of indoor pollution, particularly affecting women, who are often responsible for the cooking. Many projects around the world have tried to improve the design of cooking stoves to reduce airborne emissions and forest loss. Funding has often come from carbon offset schemes however most have had relatively poor takeup. The Gyapa project in Ghana has had better success. it claims 1.5 million stoves in use (in a population of about 31m people, which probably means less than 10 million households). The stoves are all made locally from recycled metalware and ceramics, are sold at about $10 and offer a saving of about $100 a year in fuel costs. One of Gyapa’s main sponsors, UK offsetter Climate Care, announced another million tonnes of CO2 saving, bringing the total to over 4m tonnes.
 
7, Impact of air pollution on solar output. The effect of pollution on photovoltaic output has been extensively researched, particularly in countries with extensive coal-fired electricity generation. One 2019 study suggested that Chinese solar output was depressed by 13% by comparing what PV would have produced in 1960 and in 2008, when air pollution was at its peak. (Since then there has been a small recovery). A paper published in 2018 showed a figure of 12% for India. The reduction in other places was typically lower. Data from Singapore, for example, showed a 2% cut. Last week saw new peaks in PV output across much of Europe and commentators were quick to suggest that diminished pollution was responsible. In my opinion, given that most solar power is installed well outside cities, this conclusion may be overstated. I doubt that the drop in NO2 and particulate pollution is responsible for more than a 1 or 2% rise in solar output. More important may have been the very high levels of insolation combined with relatively low temperatures. (PV performs better in cooler conditions).

8, Siemens and the place of hydrogen. Siemens is the second largest producer of natural gas turbines in the world. But senior people in the company are increasingly pushing the role of hydrogen. The CEO of Siemens’s New Energy business said that ‘Hydrogen is in its initial industrialization phase, just like when solar and wind industries started up’. ‘Basically, what I am saying is that the possibilities for the use of hydrogen are huge’.  He went on to state that the cost of H2 is now about €3 per kilo in the best global locations, within reach of the industrial price of hydrogen at around €2. However, any enthusiasm for the new gas must be tempered by the knowledge that the huge fall in natural gas prices (now less than 20% of what they were 18 months ago in the UK’s wholesale market) makes hydrogen look very expensive. Today’s natural gas price is about 0.5 € cents a kWh and even hydrogen prices as low as €2 a kilo imply a cost of about 6 € cents a kWh, or over ten times as much. Obviously, today’s natural gas prices are unsustainable and will rise as the US fracking companies go bankrupt and disappear, but low fossil fuel prices will delay hydrogen adoption.
 
9, Blockchain energy trading. Australian company Power Ledger has had a very good few months, signing up several European utilities as customers for its blockchain-based energy trading software. In France, for example, Power Ledger has just agreed with retailer ekWateur that its 220,000 customers will be able to choose their precise source of supply, such as a particular wind farm in Brittany, and track it every thirty minutes. The intention is to move on to offering clients the option of trading surplus energy between themselves. Power Ledger also announced a contract with a housing developer in Western Australia to provide the software to enable new apartment complexes to offer solar PV, battery storage and peer-to-peer energy trading. 
 
10, Marine energy. Despite the impressive performance record at the MeyGen site off north-east Scotland, tidal energy collection is usually seen as expensive and unreliable. But this week China said it had switched on its first full scale marine turbine. This machine is based on a cut-down version of the MeyGen design from developer Simec Atlantis, the operator of the Scottish project. This Chinese offshore installation took just eighteen months to complete, despite the turbine being manufactured in the virus city of Wuhan. Separately, Portugal decided to licence another attempt at wave, rather than tidal, energy. The developer will be Eco Wave Power, a Swedish company with a technology that uses onshore installations to capture the energy hitting breakwaters or other barriers. As those who have followed the industry know, wave power has been particularly difficult to develop because of the need to withstand enormous energy surges. Eco Wave’s solution looks a potentially interesting way of avoiding the huge capital costs this implies. (Thanks to Harold Hutchinson).