Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

GreatApe

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

It called shortening the carbon cycle ... taking carbon from the atmosphere, storing it & then releasing the energy later has a net-zero impact on atmospheric CO2 whilst consuming natural gas/methane adds to existing CO2 levels ...

HTH
Z

You will create actual pollution hazardous to heath from converting the electricity to hydrogen and then hydrogen to methane and then methane back to electricity. It makes no sense to do it when all you need is a copper wire to export excess from one location to another.

lstar337

This is the kind of thing I would have if I had a ton of money!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-devon-41686498/hydro-technology-used-to-power-castle-drogo

So much fun!!

lstar337

GreatApe wrote: »

It makes no sense to do it when all you need is a copper wire to export excess from one location to another.

But copper wire offers no storage benefit.

Martyn1981

Couple of 'Carbon Commentary' articles from today's newsletter that I thought worth posting:

Power to Gas (P2G) - UK development

3, Conversion of methane and CO2 to fuels. The production of complex liquid fuels from simple and inert gases such as methane is possible but involves reactions carried out at high temperature and/or pressure. (Velocys – see note 8 – gasifies biomass and uses the Fischer Tropsch process to make fuels). A group of scientists at the UK’s Liverpool University and China’s Dalian University published a paper on a novel method of obtaining valuable precursors to fuels, such as acetic acid. The experiment uses a simple room-temperature reactor to which electricity is fed, creating a plasma. Methane is chemically changed in the plasma and then reacts with CO2 to make useful chemicals on a catalyst. This is another potentially very low cost route to make valuable liquid fuels using surplus (or very cheap) electricity.

Floating wind turbines.

7, Floating offshore wind. Hywind, a 30 MW farm off Aberdeen, Scotland, was opened. Statoil, the Norwegian developer, said it projected floating wind costs of €40-60 per megawatt hour by 2030, a three to five fold reduction on the price it obtains today for Hywind. Since perhaps 80% of the world’s offshore wind resources will be best exploited by floating turbines, the Statoil projection is an important number. €40-60 per megawatt hour for floating wind is less than the £57.50/€64.30 successfully bid for the latest UK fixed offshore farms to be constructed by about 2022. As a point of comparison, oil extracted from Statoil’s newest Norwegian fields costs about €22 per megawatt hour of energy value to extract. But of course electricity is worth more than crude.

Martyn1981

Electric cars emit 50% less greenhouse gas than diesel, study finds

Exclusive: researchers calculated the total lifecycle emissions of an electric car, including its manufacture, battery manufacture, and all of its energy consumption

Electric cars emit significantly less greenhouse gases over their lifetimes than diesel engines even when they are powered by the most carbon intensive energy, a new report has found.

In Poland, which uses high volumes of coal, electric vehicles produced a quarter less emissions than diesels when put through a full lifecycle modelling study by Belgium’s VUB University.

CO2 reductions on Europe’s cleanest grid in Sweden were a remarkable 85%, falling to around one half for countries such as the UK.

“On average, electric vehicles will emit half the CO2 emissions of a diesel car by 2030, including the manufacturing emissions,” said Yoann Le Petit, a spokesman for the T&E think tank, which commissioned the study.

silverwhistle

I guessed you'd be posting that here. The thing that interested me was the bit about Poland - the principle working even where lignite and stuff are still important. The usual below the line jibes "but they're burning coal to power it" will gradually be silenced.

As grids move to solar and wind the prospects look good. I'll be watching second-hand EV vehicle prices in a year or two. But can anyone lend me a roomy diesel for my annual skiing trip to the Alps...?

matty2767

With the Leaf, Nissan lend you a car for 14 days if you want to take a trip.

michaels

matty2767 wrote: »

With the Leaf, Nissan lend you a car for 14 days if you want to take a trip.

Depends on your dealer, ours made it so hard it wasn't worthwhile

Martyn1981

Outdated UK Onshore Wind Policy Could Cost £1 Billion

An unwritten UK Government promise of “no subsidies” for onshore wind is blocking potential development of the cheapest form of new electricity generation and could end up costing more than £1 billion over the next four to five years relative to other technologies.

A new report from the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) investigates the de facto policy ban on onshore wind, whose development was curtailed during the final years of the Coalition Government under former-Prime Minister David Cameron, and effectively banned after the 2015 General Election when the Conservative Party promised that onshore wind would receive no subsidies. The report outlines reasons why the UK Government may want to revisit onshore wind as a new source of electricity generation, especially given the recently announced Clean Growth Strategy.

The ECIU published its new report this week, Blown Away, which comes just in time to precede a Government-prepared review of energy costs in an effort to seek the “lowest energy costs in Europe” and a week or so after the UK Government published its Clean Growth Strategy, which will both seek to grow the national economy while cutting greenhouse gas emissions and simultaneously distribute in excess of £2.5 billion worth of investments to support low carbon innovation from 2015 through to 2021.

Blown Away specifically highlights the dramatic cost decreases seen for onshore wind over the last few years, where now electricity from 1 GW (gigawatt) of new onshore wind farms would cost £30 million per year less than it would cost from offshore wind — one of the technologies deemed appropriate to receive subsidies by the UK Government. More strikingly, 1 GW of onshore wind would cost £100 million less than electricity generated from new nuclear or biomass plants — also technologies rewarded with Government subsidies. Onshore wind is also cheaper than high-carbon gas generation, according to the ECIU.

Martyn1981

Could Puerto Rico be an example to teach the world how to change to a series of integrated micro-grids?

Tesla & Sonnen Working Overtime To Power Up Puerto Rico

More than a month after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico’s aging electric grid, 80% of people on the island are still without power. Most are also without access to clean water. Two of the world leaders in solar power and microgrids — Tesla and sonnen — are making heroic efforts to provide power to hospitals and other critical facilities.

The island is considered an ideal candidate for a more distributed grid arrangement, with many small solar power plants feeding local microgrids fortified with battery storage to keep the electricity flowing after dark. Rather than the entire island depending on a conventional grid, the microgrids would be self sufficient in the event of an emergency.

Think of the existing Puerto Rico grid (and most other conventional grids) as a string of old-fashioned Christmas tree lights — when one goes out, they all go out. In a modern, distributed grid, a series of microgrids are connected to each other, but if one goes out, the others keep right on doing what they are designed to do, which is provide electricity to local customers.