Got even more wood ?
February 3, 2010
So DECC has launched a consultation document package for its Renewable Heat Initiative (RHI)
Lots of good stuff in there, but the bit that I’d like to comment on is the incentivisation of wood chip/wood pellets for domestic heating.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong but to me this provision looks like a commitment to an effective long term taxation of the rural poor. Its a bit counter-intuitive at first sight, after all how could an incentive to use local renewable biomass result in higher bills ? Well, its all to do with having a limited land package available to provide that biomass.
There is a distinction in the consultation between biomass that originates from wood, that which comes from grown for energy crops and that which is the result of existing agricultural processes (such as straw), but what concerns me is the interaction between existing managed woodland and possible new energy crops such as mycanthus and willow. The problem is that the RHI incentives only relate to pellet or chip burning boilers effectively replacing fossil-fuel burning boilers and central heating. Standing hardwood doesn’t make economic sense for pelletisation or chipping, its wears the machinery and takes more time and energy to produce and harvest.
What the consultation leaves out (and I can’t find mentioned anywhere in the document package) is the economic impact on existing wood users and those who cannot replace boilers. In other words me !
My situation is as follows: I live in a little village in Cornwall that is a good 10km from the nearest gas main. Most houses in the village use coal or wood to supplement Economy-7 electric heating. In many ways its a typical granite-built miners village. No cellars, very little outside space, houses are well over 100 years old (so low ceilings) and built of thick solid stone walls. Speaking for myself only; I don’t have a boiler, just an immersion heater that I turn on if and when I need hot water. I don’t have central heating, just a single electric storage heater that is powered by Economy-7 over-night. I rent the cottage and have only a small amount of space outside. I am not unusual in this county.
What I do have is a nice big fireplace that I can settle down in front of in the evening. I burn wood in that grate and buy my wood from local suppliers or one of the many local shops who sell 5kg bags of split logs over the counter.
My concern is that if pelletised or chipped wood becomes a lucrative product, managed woodland in the area will shift towards those products and away from larger trunked species suitable for splitting and domestic use. It’ll take time, I don’t expect to see the price that I pay for wood to rocket overnight, but the house that I live in will be around for at least another 100 years so the issue is not gong to go away. Over the 20-50 year timescale, by shifting the forestry from bulk wood to processed chip you will see a price differential mount that penalises those living in houses that cannot be physically altered to accommodate pellet burning boilers. These houses are generally smaller, cheaper and occupied by those less able to cope with price rises. Effectively this is an incentive that will put the rural poor at a greater disadvantage than ever.
I like the idea of increasing biomass use as I previously stated in Got Wood ?, but this particular policy seems poorly devised.
Random Energy Ideas Part Four
August 5, 2009
This one is a bit convoluted, but bear with me I wouldn’t type it all out just to annoy you.
Heat is an up and coming issue in the UK, specifically what to do with all that waste industrial heat from power stations and steel plants (if there are any left). Excess domestic heat can be dealt with by just opening the windows, or if you want to be super hi-tech pumping it into liquid or solid storage, but try that with the excess heat from even a modest power station and you’d end up standing in a pool of magma. What you really need is a set of complimentary large-scale parasitic industries that need large amounts of heat (almost) all day (almost) every day.
Apologies to proponents of domestic heating grids, but I don’t see the point of digging up the roads and changing everyone’s central heating system, if you can use the heat as efficiently in industry or agriculture. You are increasing resource use not decreasing it and I like to be able to control the heating in my house. I assume that everyone does, which means that we will all use the heat at the same time or not. Where does it go when ‘not’ is the majority thought ? The overall aim is surely, most efficient use of energy on a country-sized scale, which makes commercial or industrial use of waste heat much more preferable, especially since factories don’t care about the view and can be located next to the heat source on land that is cheap and nasty.
Here are some possibles, most of which turn out to have been mentioned before, but hey, in for a penny;
Industrial laundry – Got a few hospitals, hotels and army barracks that don’t need ‘special fabric conditioner’ ? Well, you most likely also have a full-time laundry. Its hot, it uses heat, it produces heat. Hitching these up to a waste heat system seems like a no-brainer. You have to factor in transport to and from the site to make sure that its actually a more efficient use of energy, but that happens all the time anyway.
Server Farms – what ? Don’t they need coolth rather than warmth ? Well yes, but any heat difference can be converted to the opposite heat difference with a bit of fancy thermodynamic engineering, you just can’t do it with 100% efficiency. Not only are server farms big electrical power consumers, so the shorter the cable run to them the better, but they also require large amounts of refrigeration. Instead of using electricity to power that refrigeration why not use waste heat from the local power plant. Don’t spend a million on PV so that you can tell your shareholders that you provide enough to do the server room lighting, spend it re-locating next to a power plant and knock holes in your energy budget. Or if you simply have to be somewhere else warm your own and neighboring buildings with excess heat from servers.
Greenhouses – worried about food security, food miles, invasive species, pesticide use, water consumption, whatever floats your boat really. The world of agriculture is a lot more controllable under glass. With waste heat you can heat or cool a set of glasshouses, collect & store the rainwater and you can control the humidity, exercise some degree of hygiene and you can keep more of the beasties off your cabbages. You’ll still need fertilizers and pesticides, but since they are not getting wsahed straight into the local river you need less. More to the point you can produce much more food locally over a larger portion of the year. No energy other than waste heat required.
Fish farms – along the same lines. UK fish stocks are said to be struggling. World fish stocks are said to be plummeting. I have no idea whether that is true, all I know is that whenever I’ve cast a hook over the side for mackerel I have never failed to catch my dinner. But I don’t do it very often and I’ve noticed that cod is not always alone on the menu in the chip shop these days. Anyway…..
On the shores of Lake Victoria the fishermen prize the tilapia. Its a nice looking fish with firm, white, tasty flesh. Its great fried whole, but will take the same range of flavours as a sea fish like a bass. They are freshwater, algae feeding, quick growing and easy to ‘domesticate’. They are an ideal farming fish as far as I can tell as a non-pescitorialist. They just won’t breed at a water temperature of less that 30C.
Again the food security, food miles argument comes in, but it also has a conservation element since we aren’t munching on sea-caught, wild stocks. Just a word of warning though, the tilapia that you can buy in the local UK supermarket are a farmed cousin of the tilapia nilensis that is hooked out of Lake Victoria. Its still tasty, but just not quite as nice, and a bit smaller. Maybe that’s wild vs farmed I don’t know.
You would have to do this fish farming in covered ponds with good circulation but, again, nothing but waste heat required. You could even float some aquaculture on the top of the ponds so as to grow the fishes food on-site and maybe take a crop from (I’m thinking of something like corriander with fibrous roots), but that’s only guesswork.
Other industrial-scale heat sinks
Food processing factories – all those cook-chill ready meals are prepared somewhere.
Ceramics – from tiles to toilet bowls, they all have drying facilities and large kilns that could benefit from pre-heating
Swimming pools and leisure centres – or indeed any large spaces that are heated year round like
Airports – heated runway ? well, terminal buildings anyway
Shopping Centres, hospitals, large office complexes.
Basically what I’m saying is, keep those damn heat pipes out of my house ! There’s plenty of other places to shove them before you get to me. If you want to include them in new developments that’s fine, I can decide to move into one or not, but my house is my home is my castle is my cave is my den. I don’t let just anyone in. Don’t even get me started on smart meters !
That sounds crazy but I’m only joking a little. The whole retrofit and external influence on home life is a serious issue and one that often gets forgotten in a blizzard of techno fixes and macro economics. Energy services are there to make life better. If the downsides outweigh the upsides don’t do it.
Demand Reduction Mortgage Endowments
March 9, 2009
Thinking about how to build demand reduction into home ownership.
When taking out a mortgage in the UK most (if not all) lenders require the borrower to have some form of life insurance so that they can mitigate the risk of non-payment because of death. This has often been in the form of an endowment policy.
How about we turn that around and require the banks to provide an demand reduction endowment for borrowers ?
The issue is this; if we carry out extensive home improvements aimed at demand reduction the value of a home will probably go up. A report published today by Oracle Inc puts US willingness to pay at just under $30,000 extra for a home that is close to energy self-sufficient. That all sounds great if you are a home owner, but it means that if you are on a low income or a first-time buyer the barriers to your entry into the home market gets higher the better the home’s energy efficiency. Effectively the market builds in inequity and forces those with least ability to pay higher energy prices into the least efficient housing stock.
By asking/forcing lenders to put part of each mortgage payment into an endowment that pays directly for demand reduction improvements you could ‘build-in’ the cost of those improvements. Put a tax break on the policies to offset any damage done to lender profits and you get a rolling program of housing stock finance. The endowment pays out on a sliding scale as technologies become affordable and you drive down energy demand across the board.
The cheap stuff is often the most effective by proportion, so the endowments target lower income households, while making sure that the money is saved. Bigger ticket items, like solar PV, come later in the mortgage when the household is hopefully more affluent. As a government you get the flexibility of being able to hand spot payments out to mortgage holders accounts, without being accused of wasting money because it has to go on home improvements. As a householder you know that whatever you do your home’s energy efficiency will go up over time, so taking out some of that uncertainty about what is best to do.
As with a pension you could allow homeowners to add to their improvement pot, but you know that most won’t because they are already paying in their mortgages it doesn’t make much sense to pay in extra.
The upshot could be an improving housing stock where the most efficient homes still command a premium price, but where the market does not discriminate against low income households. Just a thought.
