Energy Security = Energy Interdependence Addendum
January 20, 2010
Interesting presentation by Jeff Rubin at the Business of Climate Change conference in Toronto in Sept 2009
Its 45 mins long, but well worth it to see how an experienced (and charismatic) financier sees the issues connecting energy, trade and globalisation. I think his timings are wrong, but otherwise its a reasonable reading of a potential future.
You’ll note that he never once mentions energy independence, only alludes to energy security but never uses the phrase, and speaks about the development of regional economies as oil costs erode labour price advantages currently experienced by emerging economies. Don’t misunderstand, its all about energy security, but he doesn’t fall into the rhetorical trap of invoking overtly nationalistic tendencies. He uses protectionist measures (carbon tariffs) to get to his view, coupled with internal carbon pricing, but everything is in believable economic terms.
If we consider Canada, and specifically British Columbia (BC), as a thought experiment in this context its interesting to see the North American western seaboard as an emerging power in Rubin’s new re-jigged, less global economy. Yes, there is a focus on resources for export in BC, but with the amount of hydropower and BC’s commitment to zero carbon electricity there may well be a competitive advantage to base a regionalised economy along that seaboard, with population and industrial centres served by natural resource flows north and south of the 49th Parallel.
Apart from BC, the combined regional energy policies are supportive of a low-carbon transition with gubernatorial and state-level initiatives favouring low carbon energy sources in California, Oregon and Washington State. A cursory reading of their respective policy positions shows that energy independence is not a rhetorical standpoint that is used strongly, except by the Governor of Oregon. There are good (and reasonably obvious) reasons for this. BC and Washington State have excellent hydro power resources, and both have potential to raise the electricity production from small and medium-sized hydro. This reduces their dependence on energy imported from outside the region. California is known for its innovative technology and progressive policies in the energy field, so has much to gain by driving a new industrial sector.
But lets take a step back to Jeff Rubin’s point about localising production of goods. That implies localising non-energy natural resource production as well as energy. The western seaboard is in an enviable position to do this. Pretty much every kind of natural resource can be found in this part of the world; timber, fish, metallic ores, agriculturally productive land. As a region it’s got it all. But !
But on its own BC doesn’t have a large enough consumer-base to support a fully vertically integrated economy. Apart from the 3 million folks in the Vancouver area, its mostly forests and mountains. Likewise it doesn’t have the full range of agricultural products that most of us have come to expect in the last few decades, due to its climate. It has an excess of low-carbon power and raw materials (and no shortage of ingenuity). It could be energy independent, but it would end up paying over the odds for the food and manufactured goods that it seems likely would be produced in California in this new regional emergent economy. The binding cross-border factors could be water and electricity, but BC should also look at processing of those raw materials to add value to them prior to export.
So an internal drive to a progressive energy policy fits with a regional strategic economic vision. Energy security is allied with food and water security and internal economic coherence.
I think I’ve just convinced myself to move to Vancouver 
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.
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.
