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.
Energy Security = Energy Inter-dependence
July 25, 2009
You can be energy secure by being energy independent or energy self sufficient, so the populist argument goes. That is, if you produce all the energy that you need from sources that are within your own national territory, so it must mean that you control every aspect of their production from price to pollution.
Nice rhetoric if you can afford it. Few countries can. Few countries even know their own supply chains well enough to guess at whether energy self-sufficiency is achievable.
At a guess, America could probably be energy self-sufficient for the next couple of hundred years or so. It would have to break pretty much every trade agreement that it ever signed up to, and switch a large portion of its industrial endeavor towards energy provision, but it could probably do it. Canada would collapse as an economy, Mexico would too, and two long and winding land borders would become ‘hostile’ rather than ‘friendly’. The US would become pariah state in environmental terms as well as economic since the majority of its indigenous resources are in the form of coal, but hell, who cares with walls thick enough and high enough to keep the Mexicans and Canadians out they couldn’t hear anyone else either.
Europe could never be energy self-sufficient, but it has never tried to be. Europe has too much industry for the number of people packed into the area for the myth to hold. And Europe knows about this stuff, after all the EU was conceived, in a large part, to avoid just such a situation with economic have and have-nots in close and envious proximity.
I propose that the founders of the European idea were right that energy security is not energy independence. I propose that energy security is energy inter-dependence. That moving towards an atomisation of energy source and use will, by necessity, require an atomisation of self-interest. Is a world culture of “screw you too” really what we want ? If nothing else it will severely restrict trade opportunities.
Or maybe I’m wrong and we should fully embrace the concept of enlightened self-interest and abandon the nation-state as an entity. A global return to the city-state, each self-sufficient with energy and food provided by its own hinterland. The good old days, yes ? The Borgias certainly seemed to thrive.
I’m not sure that we’re quite ready for that, but I see no reason why the concept of nationhood should be permanent. After all it was only invented a few hundred years ago. We’ve had it for longer than ipods, but for shorter than paper or the wheel. But what constitutes a nation where global debates are conducted here and are available there, may mean something fundamentally different by the time internet reaches everyone.
Its a simplistic argument, I know, but beware of simplistic policies. They are insidious. It took 30 years for the Berlin Wall to be torn down.
Update: Nice little summary of protectionist measures from The Times
and the organisation that it mentions – Global Trade Alert
Random Energy Ideas Part Two
June 19, 2009
Feed-In Tariff Franchises
I like this one. Its got real possibilities.
The UK is going to bring in feed-in tariffs for some renewable energy sources. Not sure which. Not sure when. But it will happen. This opens some possibilities, like roof rental for solar. My idea is a bit more holistic.
If feed-in tariffs were enabled the possibility of local ‘Mom & Pop’ power companies is raised. This could placate much enmity within the planning process with operators being locally based and directly accountable to the communities that they live in (there has always been an issue with perception vs reality here but I won’t go into that).
To get a significant number of these ‘local’ power companies why not set up an off-the-shelf McPower franchising system.
The franchise would cover the technical feasibility, planning process and engineering set-up. Once commissioned the franchisee would be tied to the franchisor (possibly an existing network operator, possibly not) who would supply any specialist consultancy and engineering supplies required at +/- market rate.
The franchisee would be responsible for operation, care & maintenance of the installation. It would, for a large proportion of the set-up fee, take a cut of the energy supplied and a portion of the sale of any carbon credits generated. The option could be given that the franchisee can ‘save’ carbon credits for redemption in the future thus giving them the option to hedge their capital investment through exposure to the EU carbon market.
Capital investment for the project would initially be via a loan from either the franchisor or a commercial bank that has applicable skillsets (it would be an investment bank but I’m not sure that any of those still exist).
The reason for a network operator to engage in this kind of operation is
less on the ground staff, pensions, etc
a quick and guaranteed payback on capital investment (loan would be secured)
probably an increased chance of gaining planning permission for additional generating capacity covered under the RO
a tied-in supply of carbon credits (under supposed terms & conditions of franchise)
Reasons for planning authorities to buy-in
local operator on a scale that is accessible and accountable (to local govt and populous)
meets objectives on employment (many areas with potential for renewables are both under populated and under employed)
meets objectives on sustainable industry (with majority of supply chain easily seen it is easier to assess sustainability)
Reasons for a franchisee to buy the franchise
allows a small skilled/semi-skilled business to operate in an area that is remote (lifestyle)
ethical industry (lifestyle)
allows access to an area of industry that was not previously available (economic gap)
has back-up from the big boys (insurance)
can grow the business by adding more sites (possible for terms and conditions allow for good corporate citizenship proof by operation. This would qualify the franchisee to acquire more sites in the area as they gain a good reputation within the community. Cycle of benefit)
Possible problems
Still requires a well funded corporate or govt agency behind it to sustain the model (to facilitate loans and supply chain economies of scale that make the franchise model viable)
Franchisees may be seen as puppets rather than local operators
Ideal first targets large farmers and land owners with significant on-site energy needs (there is a possibility of linking in with subsidies for CAPEX on renewables for these to negate the need for development loans). It allows a risk reduction and diversification of income stream for these users.
There’s your business model, now away you go and make it happen 
