One Hundred and One Nights
August 28, 2009
With just over three months to go until the Copenhagen session of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change and less than a year left in office Ed Miliband his folks at DECC are working overtime.
The latest consultation is on improving grid access. Now I don’t pretend to understand all the details of how the process works right now or how the Security and Quality of Supply Standard (GB SQSS) and BETTA interact, but given that less than four years after BG SQSS’s introduction its proposed that it be completely re-written I’d surmise that its not been an un-alloyed success.
The fact of the matter is that there are literally dozens of electricity generating projects waiting in a queue to be connected to the grid. DECC estimates that projects totaling around 60GW of capacity is waiting for a date that they, and their investors, can work to. That’s a lot of advanced projects sitting on the shelf, waiting for a market into which they can sell their product. Not all of them will get all the way to production, but still that is a very slow queue when, lets face it, we could do with the work and the UK’s grid could do with some action on replacing the big coal plants that have to be phased out under the EU’s Large Combustion Plant Directive.
On a lighter note with COP15 just around the corner the government appears to be starting to flap. Malcolm Wicks wants a tripling of nuclear power while Ed Miliband was again vilified by some in the UK over coal plans after a speech to the South African Centre for CCS , while £1 billion of loans are guarenteed for offshore wind and £10m of grants to its even offer shore floating cousin (I’ll say some more on offshore wind at a later date).
Its all starting to look a bit desperate. You can make your own mind up as to why, but I have to ask who are we trying to impress here ? Most commentators agree that there is little point trying to appeal to UK voters, except maybe on a ‘look what we achieved last time we were in government’ ticket in 2014/15. The US is busy trying to convince itself that we kill our grannies as a matter of health policy. The Russians hate us. The Chinese couldn’t give a damn. So is it the Commonwealth that we are playing to ? A wider alliance of minor nations that will buy our climate friendly products after we defend their honour at COP15 ? Who is it ?
The answer may come in 101 nights time.
Random Energy Ideas Part Three
July 14, 2009
This is an idea that I first aired at the Falmouth Energy Week Conference in the innovation workshop, but that I’ll fully explain here.
There is a problem with new physical machinery in general. It doesn’t work very well.
There is a problem with innovation in the physical machinery of new low carbon energy systems. It costs a lot.
There is a problem with gaining people’s acceptance of new things in their landscape. We fear change and the unknown.
Here’s an idea to address all three issues a little at a time.
In order to increase the efficiency of the new physical machinery of a low carbon energy system it needs to be tested. It needs to be tested under different physical loads, under different environmental conditions and in different locations in order to find the optimum design characteristics such as low environmental impact, high output over as large a set of conditions as possible, low failure rates, etc.
But a lot of that can be done without building full-scale pilots and most of it can be done without building anything physical at all.
There is a common characteristic of many of the low carbon energy flux capture devices and indeed energy efficiency improvements i.e wind turbines, wave devices, tidal devices, high altitude kites, vehicle streamlining, etc, etc. That common characteristic is that their efficiency can be modelled using mathematical techniques called finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). These models are difficult to design and take a lot of computing power to run, so only the larger companies and consultancies have their own in-house modelling capabilities.
How about we, the people, pay for a really good modelling tool to be built, but instead of forcing aspiring designers to buy it we give it away. But that’s not all. A key element of this issue is the ability to run lots of simulations to find the most efficient solution before building the damn thing, so we build the modelling tool to run on many, many computers at the same time using another technique called distributed computing. If you’ve seen SETI@Home or any of the other screensaver programs that take a chunk of data and use your home PC to analyse that data before sending the results back to a central point, you known what I mean.
And that’s the third issue dealt with too.
In making the general public part of the design process we automatically build in acceptance. We demystify and educate and empower through the simple act of involvement in the process. In contrast to the shared-ownership models of community acceptance that rely on a certain venality that rankles with many, this would be a genuinely altruistic action that has a side benefit of making sure that every participant had a vested interest, albeit a small and non-monetary one, in seeing these devices work. The designs would be publicly owned, the implementation would be privately done, and could include a portion of community participation if appropriate to the project.
If you wanted to you could have a split between device design and project implementation. If you think about a 3D terrain model (Ordnance Survey already has these) and placing turbines on it to minimise visual impact vs output, or even offshore for lines of sight. You could introduce a genetic algorithm to produce multiple design iterations, for example of a turbine blade and model the efficiency of each iteration to produce an efficiency envelope. You could model vibration modes at different operating speeds to minimise noise and failure rates. Every scenario that you could think of modeling would be accessible to every company.
There you go. Cheaper, community-embedded, device designs with a higher chance of acceptance and therefore a higher chance of implementation.
Random Energy Ideas Part One
June 16, 2009
In this train of posts I’m going to share some of the better (less stupid) energy related ideas that I’ve had over the last year or so.
Rural Energy Clusters
It may be difficult for a single farm in the UK to justify the expense of a decent sized wind turbine, biodigestor, biomass CHP (willow), CSP or it may not have a sufficiently large stream to install a micro-hydro plant. However cluster 3 or 4 farms together and the economics may get a great deal better. Not only is the CAPEX spread between several farms, but having a diverse set of energy technologies should smooth some of those intermittency issues and make the finance side more predictable. Farms being farms, they would probably qualify for some grants already, but if not you could put a policy instrument in to encourage low carbon energy use.
Don’t misunderstand I’m not proposing that these clusters go off-grid, they are businesses that require energy whatever the weather after all, rather that they each have a smart meter that reads generated electricty back into a central, aggregated account and offsets each individual farm’s electricity use in proportion to their investment. The only additional infrastructure needed would be the generating technology and a relatively dumb smart meter, maybe a few substation upgrades if it takes off. Where the work is needed is in the back-office to aggregate the account details.
This is where it starts to get interesting. While it would be better for generating technologies such as biomass & biodigestion, where actual stuff is being moved, for the farms to be located close to each other, the characteristics generating technologies such as hydro, solar and wind mean that the farms don’t even have to be in the same district. They just need to come to a mutual agreement to team up where energy is concerned. Distance is no object. Its a sort of extension to the town twinning scheme.
There you go. A way for farms to co-operate in energy production and work towards carbon neutral food production.
Conference Collaborations 1
March 3, 2009
As a group my student collegues and I are organising a conference to run later this year called “Transforming the Energy Future:Pathways to Change”. We had a competitive pitch between ourselves and the subset that I was part of won. The USP was to bring an incredibly wide range of energy actors together with graphics, media & design students from our campus, our sister campus and beyond in order to get a really inter-disciplinary feel.
Apart from providing a forum for debate on energy between the normal governmental, academic and non-governmental interests, we wanted to give access to students from other disciplines to the, sometimes rather closed, energy policy debate and comment through means that they feel comfortable in i.e. their own disciplines, so films for film makers, graphics for graphicists, etc. It doesn’t sound much, but the bunker mentality in academia is already being felt as the administration starts to express its reservations about the idea.
We had our first meeting with some graphic design students at University College Falmouth today to present our idea for collaboration and it went well. A number have come forward to have a more detailed meeting and maybe take on the task of providing a graphical interpretation of the conference’s mission.
I was a little nervous. I wasn’t sure what to expect. For the graphics students this is an elective choice to be involved, so there was no guarantee that any of them would want to take part. I’m glad that there was a positive response and am looking forward to some really interesting approaches to the brief.
Next meeting, next week.
