Falmouth Energy Week 2010 May 24-25
May 29, 2010
What a difference a year makes !
Last year was full of hope. Openness and interdisciplinarity was part of the deal. Media exposure was integral to the design of the event.
This year the doors closed. Chatham House rules were imposed (and this report is composed under those restrictions). No media were there to report (though some did attend).
So what did we discuss at this exclusive event ?
Well. It became apparent that attendees saw the exclusivity as part of a wider trend (though they didn’t apparently see themselves as contributary to that trend). The phrase ‘decisions made in smoke filled rooms’ was one that was heard in more than one session. Speakers seemed less open to suggestions and there was a definite sense of ranks closing.
Partly this was put down to the relative success of the climate skeptic movement and the failure of COP15, but also to the new government’s policy set and approach so far. However, as a newcomer to this ‘scene’ I can’t help feeling this is the way that the regulars prefer it.
Fuel poverty seems to be taking a back seat with some kind of diluted concept of equitable apportionment of cost taking over. A greater focus on real politique and economics rather than innovation was evident. Argument rather than advance you could say. Calls for quick action, some action, any action seemed like a call to spend money rather than a call to change systemic conditions. Gone was the rhetoric of radical progress. In came the mumbled apologies of compromise.
Utter Tosh from Frost & Sullivan !
May 12, 2010
Please someone pinch me ! I’ve just read this article on the Renewable Energy Focus website, which usually has some good pointers to decent reports, but this press release is just stoopid.
Apparently HVDC is the only viable transmission system for offshore wind (which its not) but it suffers from being too expensive at short distances (which it does) and apparently AC doesn’t work under water (?!?).
Now, news aggregators like REF can’t check everything. Its simply not economic to do so. But when a press release starts with a direct contradiction to existing reality (quote “Underwater electricity transmission is not possible with alternating current”) you have to at least have a flirt with checking the source.
I couldn’t get a hold of the report that this press release is publicising. Frost & Sullivan don’t give away their “research” for free, but if the report is of a similar quality to the press release I don’t want to read it !
For the record ALL the UK’s current offshore wind installations use AC transmission. HVDC is hampered by its expensive transformer/rectifier costs which mean that you need to have a cable run over about 30km before it’s better performance in terms of lower transmission losses outweigh the extra upfront expense in hardware.
Yes, its true that with more installations that cost will come down, but it will always remain as long as the onshore grid is AC. If you take the extreme example of Scroby Sands, 2.5km off Gt Yarmouth’s seafront. That wind farm just plugs straight into the grid through a small sub-station with no need for extra rectification kit. If it were forced to use HVDC you would need a rectifier at either end to gain virtually nothing in decreased transmission losses over 2,500m of cable.
So Mr Frost & Sullivan. Your report is wrong. Your press releases are misleading. How’s business ?
Smart, sassy (and just a bit too forward) electricity and water meters
November 20, 2009
I am on record as having big reservations about smart meters. I’m going to tell you why.
I love the idea that by allowing people more access to data on their own energy footprints they can, if they so wish, target specific behaviours of their own that waste energy and/or water and so bumping up their bills unnecessarily. For example; if you can see from your bill that running your washing machine after 8pm saves £1 per wash as opposed to running it straight after you get in from work at 6pm, why wouldn’t you change that ? There is no cost to you and you save £50 per year if you do the laundry once a week. The energy that you use is no longer peak, so the expensive to run, marginal power plants don’t have to spark up so often. Those tend to be gas-fired in the UK, so that’s less emissions too. There are no losers expect the gas producers. Everything’s lovely in smart meter land !
But that’s not what is being proposed. You can do that with a really dumb smart meter that just allows charging banding by the hour, rather than what the UK has right now which is just a peak/off-peak/Economy 7 tariff distinction. Those dumb smart meters are known as AMR+ (Automated Metering Reading +). They allow the meter to work on a time resolution of the utility’s choosing (they generally choose hourly metering) and can be read remotely (various solutions here include power line communications, wifi, radio, telephone lines, its really not that important). The important thing is that the time resolution allows utilities to match charges to gross usage, meaning that they can plan their generation much more efficiently and reduce overall costs. In most places, you’d expect that saving to be passed on, so encouraging customers to shift usage to lower tariff periods, creating a virtuous circle until consumption self-optimises. Its up to the customer to react to the price signals in the way that best suits their lifestyle, if they do it at all, and some may not choose to.
The proposals that are being touted by most governments and industry in the industrialised nations go much further than this. They mostly use a system called AMI (Automated Metering Infrastructure) which allows utilities to ‘speak’ in real time to each house and under some proposals to each appliance, so that best use of available power and water may be made. Of course you have to take the utility’s word that this is happening since you can’t verify it in real time without access to their mission critical data. Most proposals include a degree of remote control extending from the grid into the house and past the meter to the appliance. The most often cited, and least intrusive remote control would be the switching off of refridgerators, where it doesn’t really matter when they work so long as they do work. But washing machines have been proposed, tumble driers, electric heaters. I’ve even seen a proposal to downshift the current available to lighting circuits as a response to voltage drops in the distribution grid, not turn them off, just make them slightly dimmer, though I’ll admit that this may have been referring to street lighting, not domestic since I can’t now find the reference.
This is granular and pervasive control of technologies that directly impact our everyday behaviour. Most significantly to me though is the psychological effect of chronic loss of control of our home environment. Once the power switch doesn’t necessarily mean ‘on-off’ any more we lose a significant degree of certainty in precisely the place that we consider safe and certain – our home.
That’s a totally different relationship between utility and customer. It hands the control to the utility and makes the end-user (you can’t really call someone who has no choice a customer) a passive recipient of whatever the utility deigns to allow.
OK, that’s hyperbolae.
In practice most countries have regulators that would provide oversight and try to make sure that consumer rights are protected, the problem with that is that some countries have liberalised markets for utilties and private companies will always try to find a way to maximise profit. It is in their design and they are legally obliged to do so if they have shareholders who want dividends.
The argument is that by time-shifting appliance operation you get the same effect as with AMR+, only you do it automatically, and therefore you can rely on it to provide bigger savings in terms of infrastructure, generating and emissions costs. I’m not actually convinced that the last one is terribly relevant here, the power or water will still be used after all, the only benefit may be in the marginal efficiency of the peaking plant, but I don’t believe that the degree of difference between AMR+ and AMI in terms of emissions is going to be the biggest driver. Its all about cost.
So here’s the problem; because only a very few countries have installed AMR+ at a national scale the pressure is on to jump right up to AMI because it fits in really nicely with the whole smart grid concept of providing stable voltage by a dynamic relationship between generation and consumption as all the proposed new energy generating and saving technology is rolled-out. The meters all have the 20-25 year life so no-one wants to have to do this twice if they discover something that requires AMI.
I haven’t seen any compelling evidence that you actually require AMI to establish a smart grid and there are some really knotty issues around privacy and data use once you put in the more advanced AMI.
There has just been a great report published into these issues by the Canadian group Privacy by Design.
I think that its interesting that if you want really secure data you divide it up, store it and use it in different ‘locations’. I think the spooks call this compartmentalisation. In the financial industry its called Chinese Walls. If you want to work out what’s going on, what behaviours are happening, you bring data together. So bringing water usage data together with electricity and gas. How much insight does it need to put a water use increase together with an immersion heater being switched on and a fan heater being turned on in the bathroom to tell that someone is having a bath or shower ?
I also like the postman analogy in the report mentioned above. You don’t expect the postman to read your mail, so why should your utility know when you are having a shower ?
Or, as the report suggests, it makes so much economic sense to direct the charging of your electric car to your utility bills, but it means that they know where you are or have been.
I’d like to suggest another comparison. When researchers carry out a new piece of work they have to consider the ethics involved in both the collection and the use of the data that they find. In some cases, for instance those involving children or the mentally ill, special vetting or training may have to take place to ensure a full understanding of the researchers responsibilities. The sanction being dismissal, possible professional ruin and even jail. I’d like to know what the proposed safeguards and sanctions are for a full implementation of AMI ?
It turns out that we don’t all play by the rules when it comes to other peoples data, as we found out this week when T-Mobile came under investigation for one of its employees allegedly selling swaths of personal details for personal gain.
I think smart meters, of the AMI type, can be implemented, but only when houses have smart controls that can exert pressure back on the utility and protect the household’s interests.
If the utility wants to switch off your fridge, it should have to negotiate a price for doing so with each house.
Switching appliances on and off is a major cause of electrical component wear. If the utility wants to degrade the performance of appliances that I have worked hard to afford I’d like some recompense.
Using your washing machine may actually be necessary. You’ve run out of nappies or spilt a drink down your best shirt just before an interview. You may not want to sell the utility the ability to time-shift that demand. You may actually want the utility to service your needs.
Or if you’ve done you washing but the utility doesn’t want to let you dry those fresh sheets before your new girlfriend arrives, you may be willing to sacrifice the meadow fresh scent for one more night or not. It all depends ….
AMI is a great bit of kit, but so is AMR+. Not quite as flashy, but very servicable and we know that it works. What isn’t up to standard is the home automation to enable AMI to be rolled out without loss of privacy or loss of personal control.
I will support every move towards what the Italians have already achieved – a roll-out of 27 million forward-compatible AMR+ meters that resulted in potential savings of $100 per household on bills and an estimated 3GW of power plant not being built. After that I think that it should be a personal choice over whether to hand your home over to the utility or not. If the meters are forward-compatible then you can download new software remotely when that choice is made without fannying around with full the privacy and control issues around full AMI.
Active roads – a new poetry of motion
October 9, 2009
A couple of media stories, a long road journey and my recent change of status to homeworker provoked this thought – what are active roads up to ?
Let’s define what I mean by active roads first.
These are energy transfer or recovery systems that are part of the vehicle/road combo that moves mass around the world. Technologies like piezo-electric road surfaces, hydraulic speed bumps, and wireless power transmission work together to increase the overall efficiency of transporting that mass around.
I’m guessing that most people know by now that conventional internal combustion engine-based independent transport systems (some people know them as cars running on roads) are pretty inefficient in energy terms. Most of the stored energy in petroleum is liberated as heat which goes to the nearest sink (usually the atmosphere, though I did see a patent on recovering some of that heat to power refrigeration in lorries). I’m also guessing that most people know that there are some economic, environmental and social implications of using petroleum distillates to power this transport system. And I’m also finally guessing that you are rapidly tiring of my use of silly words to describe it all, but that is deliberate so I make no apologies for it.
The reason why is because the car/road combo is a system. I want to make it seem as complicated as it is. It includes oil exploration, production, pipeline construction, rig (de)commissioning, environmental monitoring and remediation, demand planning, road route design and optimisation, integration with utilities such as electricity and water at local and district level, industrial planning to make sure that mass in all it’s living and non-living forms reaches its various destinations safely, regulation to make sure that safely really means safely, structured and orderly markets to buy and sell all the bits necessary to run the system, mines to supply the metals for the vehicles, quarries to provide the road making materials, people to maintain all the elements of the system, police to enforce speed limits, ambulances to scrape people of roads when they break those speed limits, etc, etc, etc. And that’s not even thinking about the pleasure & leisure aspect of vehicle ownership. Or the food distribution and consumption aspects. Or the philosophical aspects. I could go on, and on, and on. But I won’t.
It boils down to this – cars are life in our industrial societies. Which makes roads as much part of our world as food or football. They feed our mind, body and soul. I’m willing to bet that there are many, many people out there who wouldn’t even exist were it not for the influence of the car/road system.
They are so embedded in our psyche, in our culture, in our economy, even in our sense of self that any radical change to the car/road combo is a big deal.
However the road isn’t personally ours, so we forget about it for the most part unless it has a hole in it or is full of other masses being moved or is about to be built/not built somewhere we want/don’t want it to be built/not built. But it is the real enabler, the car is parasitic on the road. There is no such genre as ‘the car movie’, yet ‘the road movie’ continues to provide a backdrop to examine the journey of our lives. OK, that’s a bit florid, but you get the idea.
So now roads themselves are starting to have an active part in the conversation. They are becoming more than they once were, harvesting energy from mass in transit that would have otherwise dissipated and giving it back to the next lump of mass, so that each mass can continue to travel along the road further and faster.
I think that the road has the measure of us.
Our civilisations grew up with roads. Drovers roads to move bovine mass. Roman roads to move Italian mass. Freeways to move free mass.
As a technology the road is persistent and pervasive. Almost every other technology is parasitic on the road. Even numbers. Without trade no need for numbers, without roads trade would be limited to barter, so roads are also responsible for the existence of money.
And yet it has taken until now for roads to start to be taken seriously as a participant in the conversation. They have watched from the sidelines, maybe a little shy, maybe just soaking it all in before revealing their master plan with a flourish.
Maybe not.
It was a VERY long drive and I wasn’t under the influence of anything apart from tiredness. But there is a serious point that I wanted to raise. If you feel that energy systems should be optimised then the movement of mass is an essential part of that. If you have to move mass, move as little as possible as efficiently as possible then look at recovering waste energy around the edges. But first consider whether the movement of ideas is more efficient than the movement of mass.
Copper in Wind Power
September 24, 2009
Based upon the research that I detailed in my previous post we can say the following with a reasonable degree of certainty;
The UK will need to increase its raw copper imports by at least 10%, from 2007 levels, if it is to achieve its wind power objectives AND manufacture the components of that new industry on British soil.
The further offshore that wind farms are built, the more copper they use per MW of installed generating capacity (kind of obvious but you still need to crunch the numbers to show it).
The UK currently exports more copper scrap per year than would be required by the proposed new wind industry, based on figures from the British Geological Survey.
The copper cables that are being buried during wind farm construction are not planned to be recovered upon decommissioning. This policy constitutes a planned consumption of copper that is contradictory to the principles of sustainable development since it ‘offshores’ energy consumption and environmental impact associated with copper production in preference to reuse. However, it provides the UK with a readily available source of copper in the form of recoverable buried cables with a known location. This could be considered a hedge against security of copper supply in the long term.
I have found no evidence that this possible long-term hedge against copper supply risk is a conscious and explicit government-led policy, but given that we have another 3 billion people coming to tea before 2075 and that copper has no viable substitute for 100% of its applications, it sounds like it might be a sound policy from a security of supply standpoint. Completely unethical of course, harvesting resources from other nations to hoard for future use, pushing up prices by artificially constraining supply and forcing developing nations to utilise resources earlier in their development cycle than they would have otherwise. But pragmatically better to establish a new form of copper mine within UK territory before supply really gets constrained.
The question is what are the alternatives ?
The obvious answer that I came up with was recycling. The UK only recycles about 42% of its scrap copper (from the BGS again). Of that 37% comes from manufacturing (offcuts, the remains after pressings, and the like), the rest is recycling as you and I know it. The old copper heating pipes and wires from old motors that we have finished with only make up 5% of the UK’s total copper (re-)consumption, 19 times more comes from new mined resources and from the pristine factory scrap. That is massively wasteful on all sorts of levels.
I recently read a paper on a Markov Chain analysis of copper (Eckelman & Daigo, 2008) use that concluded that the average copper atom was used 1.9 times for technology in the 60 years between its extraction from geological reserve and its dissipation back into the environment. If we assume that copper should theoretically be used around 20 times before it is dissipated (using a conservative 5% reprocessing loss), we currently have a copper system in the UK that is roughly 10% efficient.
That has to offer massive opportunities to the copper recycling business, as well as opportunities to decrease the environmental impact of the copper cycle without compromising the ability of the UK to meets its wind power goals.
