Shipbreaking

Below is a video of a cross-channel ferry being beached in Aliaga, Turkey, ready for breaking.

As can be seen, this is an environmentally destructive way of doing things. I hope the various protesters who stopped Able UK from breaking ships in Hartlepool are satisfied when they see such scenes.

What a gas!

Please watch this video from New York. The homeowner had a gas company drill near his property to use a gas extraction technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. He claims that a consequence of the fracking is that his drinking water can be ignited.



This video absolutely stunned me. Of course such a video is not proof, but it definitely needs independently investigating. Fracking involves pumping water and/or chemicals down into the ground under pressure to break the rock and release the gas. It is a technique that could massively increase the amount of gas available for use. As is often the case, however, we do not get anything for free. It is claimed that the fracturing can release gas and the pumped chemicals into the groundwater, from where it can be drawn into wells.

A documentary film, Gasland, is released today. Its tagline is telling: "Can you light your water on fire?" The situation is, of course, more complex than it first seems - it is alleged that tests of some of these phenomena show that the gas is biogenic (natural) rather than from reservoirs.

This is important to the UK as a firm is about to start extracting gas from the sea off Blackpool using this very same fracking technique.

This brings a simple question to mind: would the executives of the companies involved drink the water coming out of this man's tap? I guess not; I certainly would not out of choice. If the gas company is responsible (and this should be easily provable by studying the isotopes of the gas), then they should be responsible for putting it right.

But neither should this be used as a reason to stop such development. The company developing off Blackpool should be thoroughly open about the chemicals and techniques they are using (as they appeared to be on Radio 4 this morning), and also release geological data. In return environmentalists should be honest about their agendas and congratulate companies that display such openness.

Rambling thoughts on wind and power generation, part 4

There was never going to be a fourth part to this rambling, but comments on- and off-line have rather forced my hand. This section will go into what I believe environmentalists should do.

Firstly, let me say that most environmentalists I have met have had their hearts in the right place. They care deeply about the environment, and many are guided by their own personal morals. I may disagree with some of what they say, but much of it makes sense. (And let's face it: there is no one environmental movement, and there are many disagreements between environmentalists about the way forward).

Having got that unheralded unanimity out of the way, this is what I think they should do.

All interested parties (i.e. the government, environmentalists and even armchair commenters such as myself) should sit down and produce detailed figures of where they foresee our power coming from by 2021 and 2031. In doing so, they are only allowed to reduce the maximum power used by the country by 10% (history has shown that efficiency savings are swamped by new uses for power). Their figures should include costs and risks.

Again, I would recommend David MacKay's book, 'Sustainable energy without the hot air' for anyone wanting to start on this process. At the very least you will learn a great deal about the issues. Knowledge is key - I have certainly learnt a great deal as I have written these posts. Try to throw your preconceptions into the long grass as you do the work, and try out various scenarios. Of course this is exceptionally hard to do in practice.

If anyone wants to decrease the available power by more than 10% then they need to explain:

• What the coping strategies will be (i.e. how to ensure that our economic and social life can continue with that reduced power).
• What the effect of that change will be with respect to the world's total energy consumption.

I read with interest the Green Party's manifesto at the last election. Amongst more sensible proposals (e.g. introducing smart meters), the 'energy' section contains the following:

Prioritise the new 3 Rs: Remove, Reduce, Replace. First remove demand altogether where possible (e.g. by stopping the carbonintensive activity altogether, or by true zerocarbon technology); then reduce demand (e.g. by energy-efficiency measures); then switch to renewables for whatever energy need is left.

I would like to know what 'true zerocarbon technology' is, as it does not currently exist in any form for many industries. Just look at the problem with electric cars: the range of such cars are far too low to be usable for most people, and the charging time is prohibitive. There is currently no acceptable replacement for the petrol and diesel engine. This is called betting the future on the unknown ('oh, something will come along...'). It may, but it may not, and possibly not in the required timescale. Even if we all moved to electric cars tomorrow, we will need a way to generate the power for them. The only solution is for us to all travel less, and it will be a brave politician to demand this of his or her electorate.

Stopping carbonintensive activity is also immensely difficult. Fort instance, do they want to ban the use of cement (responsible for about 5% of man-made CO2 emissions)? If so, how does that conflict with their other manifesto commitments, for instance to build new houses? Can we build high-speed rail without cement?

Reducing demand is economically dangerous. How do you reduce demand? Agriculture is a major source of CO2 emissions, yet how do we reduce demand and still feed the world's population? Oh, and the environmentalists will not let us use genetic modification to increase yields either.


Additionally, they say:

Aim to obtain about half our energy from renewable sources by 2020 and ensure that emissions from power generation are zero by 2030.

Yet they do not give details of how we will meet these targets without risking massive social upheaval (remember, there is only nine years before 2020). Saying 'build more windfarms!' is not a solution.

It seems to me that few in the environmental movement are being honest about their plans. Frankly, their sums do not appear to add up.

The energy section of the Green Party manifesto details their obsession with carbon, and nothing about how to mitigate the effect that their policies will have on the population. Whilst depressingly vague on the form these amazing zerocarbon technologies will take, it contains an entire section detailing their reasoning against nuclear power. This includes the staggering claim that, as doubling nuclear power would only reduce carbon emissions by 8%, it is not worth doing. They also say that consumers would have to pay for nuclear reactors, yet they conveniently forget that consumers are already paying excesses for renewable power (indeed, they want to increase such payments by increasing the feed-in tariffs).

It was not an energy policy; it was a series of wishes wrapped up in an unsustainable package.

The environmentalists need to come up with full solutions, including figures, risks and costs, rather than just sniping from the sidelines. Only then can there be true debate. MacKay has made a good stab at some of this (see chapter 27 of his book, where he details five possible low-carbon plans - page 212 shows these in comparison). None of these plans are perfect. I have yet to see similar breakdowns from the Green Party, Greenpeace or any of the other campaigners. (*)

If they cannot come up with the figures then their comments should be treated as a small part of a much larger whole.

(*) It would be interesting to see a website that takes MacKay's work and allows the user to build his or her personal energy policy for the country. Each decision could come with estimated costs and risks. At the very least it would give people an indication of the awful complexity of the issues. It could also give you CO2 emission totals and the geopolitical problems (e.g. of getting oil from the Middle East, or solar power from northern Africa). There is something similar to this that can be downloaded from the http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/ website, although based on Excel (**). Unfortunately it does require more than a little knowledge to use. A little extra work should get it there.

(**) This is a freakilly powerful Excel spreadsheet, and shows the power of this brilliant package. As a further aside, I once worked with a project manager who had written a comprehensive project management system in Excel. It was amazing, but I could never quite get my head around it.

Rambling thoughts on wind and power generation, part 3

As I stated in part 1, our nation is faced with two significant energy problems.

• Global warming
• Energy security

In the first and second parts of this post I concentrated on wind power. In this part I will talk about energy security.

So what is energy security? As is often the case, the term covers a series of issues. Firstly, it means that we have to have continuity of the raw sources of our energy. In the case of traditional power stations, it means we need uninterrupted supplies of gas, coal and oil, allowing us to generate power for end-users at an economic price. This is a problem as much of our gas and oil comes from countries that whose governments are far from stable, and supply is subject to the whims of their governments.

Secondly, it means that we have to be able to generate enough power to meet our requirements. It is no good having enough oil and gas if our generation and refinery capacity is too low. This is an issue as power stations built in the seventies and eighties reach the end of their lifespan.

Our politicians and media are concentrating almost solely on global warming, and little on energy security. This is a problem as energy security poses a much more significant threat to our way of life than global warming. Prolonged brown-outs (reduction in voltage to conserve power) and blackouts (power cuts) were common in the 1970s.  Unfortunately many people (including the National Grid chief) say we are heading towards blackouts by 2015. The Economist has a very good article about this. Some experts I have talked to say that blackouts will occur in some parts of the country in the next year or two.

It takes many years to bring a new power plant on-line, and we need to be planning for the problems now. The Labour government cynically kept on kicking this issue into the long grass, and it is now far too late to prevent it from happening. I hope I am wrong, but one of the issues at the next election will be a looming energy crisis. And the coalition government will be getting the blame for Labour's cowardliness, especially in relation to power generation.

However, the coalition are not blameless. They are continuing the last Government's plans that make it uneconomical for companies to build new power plants. Several Trent Valley power stations (e.g. Willington) were going to be rebuilt, but many of these plans have been thrown into doubt by the economics. Compare this with wind farms, which receive massive subsidies from the public. At the same time, our existing power stations are being targeted by green activists, making it harder for councils and the government to grant planning permissions for new build plants.

The ideal would be for us to rely on a varied combination of power sources. Wind power would be a part of this, as would tidal, hydro and wave. However, with the best will in the world these renewable sources will come nowhere near matching our requirements.

All politicians (indeed, anyone) who profess knowledge on this subject should read and digest David MacKay's book 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air'. It is available free on-line, or a hard-copy version can be bought from Amazon. It is so easy to come up with soundbites about this subject, but MacKay's book honestly describes the complexity of the issues in a readable manner. What is more, he tries to show how hard it is to meet the country's energy requirements from each source. I do not agree with everything within, but it is undoubtedly a vitally important read.

So what steps would I like to see the government make to improve energy security?

• Firstly, the Government should set a per-capita target for power requirements in twenty years time. 
• Secondly, they should work out what proportion of this energy should come from each source.
• Thirdly, they should make it economical for the power generators to build that capacity.
• Fourthly, we should invest in research and development of other energy sources (e.g. new nuclear designs and wave power).
• Fifthly, we should reduce the usage of oil and gas in power generation. We have to reduce the usage of gas from Russia and oil from the Middle East.

Power generation should be seen as a critical issue for our country. Many people say that the free market should be allowed to just get on with it; that may or may not work. What is not working is the current situation, where the government are interfering with the markets and forcing them onto a path (wind) that could never supply enough power to the country. We either let the markets rule, or control them more. The current halfway house is a farce.

Rambling thoughts on wind and power generation, part 2

A turbine blade outside the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight

In part 1 I discussed whether the environmental benefits of wind power generation were worth the environmental disadvantages. I thought that I would try and find some figures for the efficiency of wind power, especially in comparison with the environmentalist's hated figure, nuclear.

Many people claim that wind power is inefficient; after all, it is obviously at the whim of the wind, and no power can be generated when there is no wind.

So how bad is the situation? I have read many claims over the years, either stating that they are very efficient or terribly inefficient; naturally enough, environmentalists tend towards the former.

So what is the truth? A letter in issue 1278 of Private Eye gave me a useful pointer. A company called Elexon monitors the power usage in Britain. Its day-by-day reports  can be found at http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm (note, this website does not seem to work in Chrome, but works in IE 8). Scroll down the page to 'Peak Wind Generation Forecast'.

There is a great deal of interesting information on this page, but one thing that stands out is the variability of power generated by the wind farms metered by Elexon. They currently estimate that 2.4GW of power can be generated by such wind farms; currently (07/01) 406MW, or one sixth of the installed capacity, is estimated as being generated. Tomorrow it should be 1263 MW, or one half of installed capacity.

As can be seen, these figures are risible.

It should be remembered that whilst the maximum installed capacity of 2.4 GW is double the 1.2GW generated by the Sizewell B power station, the actual power generated can be far less. Think about this for a moment: *all* the installed wind power in the country can generate only double what one of our nuclear power stations generate. Think of the 3,000 wind turbines on land and out at sea, and realise how there is no chance of wind providing anything near all of our power.

So what about cost? Sizewell B cost £2 billion to build, and was designed to produce power at about 8 pence per kWh, including construction costs. It is believed that modern designs will allow the costs of nuclear power to be reduced significantly.

Modern designs are estimated to cost 2.3 pence per kWh, including decommissioning costs. In comparison, wind power is estimated to cost 3.7pence per kWh for onshore wind and 5.5 pence per kWh for offshore wind. Such figures should always be taken with a pinch of salt as the devil is truly in the details, but it shows the problem of wind power. Not only can we not generate enough power using wind, but the power we do generate is massively costly.

The sad thing is that successive governments have seen fit to reduce the skillsets available in this country to the degree that we will need to buy nuclear reactor designs from other countries. The situation is not much better in respect to wind power, where the majority of turbines are being constructed abroad. (*)

The answer seems obvious to me: nuclear is far better, if only because of the sheer reliability of its base-load generation. The French realise this, yet we are going down the road towards installing as much wind power as possible. In my opinion this is a mistake that British consumers will pay for in the future.

The Vestas R&D facility under construction

(*) There was a great deal of fuss in the media when Vestas closed down their factory making turbine blades on the Isle of Wight last year. Imagine my surprise when I walked beside the Medina River last week and found a truly massive new building being built by... Vestas. It is part of a £50 million research and development complex. Although it will not employ as many people as the old manufacturing plant, it surely is a welcome development.

The scale of the building was quite something to behold.

Rambling thoughts on wind and power generation, part 1

There is a lot of talk on the outdoor blogs about the number and size of windfarms being created in the Scottish mountains; Alan Sloman has written a number of excellent articles about a new wind farm in the Monadhliath range of hills.

Not being able to better his prose, and also not having a particular knowledge of that area of Scotland, I thought that I would look at the problem from other angles. Mainly: is it actually worth building wind farms?

What problems are we trying to solve in building wind farms? Put simply, our nation is faced with two significant energy-related problems:

• Global warming
• Energy security

Unfortunately, wind power does little to solve either of these. Wind power is intermittent in nature, whilst energy use is cyclical according to time of day and season. For much of the time we will have nowhere near enough power to meet demand. Part 2 will look into this a little further.

The answer, according to environmentalists, is to store the power for when it is needed. This is done in various places, such as the Ffestiniog and Dinorwig pump-storage schemes in Wales. These pump water up to reservoirs using electricity during the night, when there is a surplus of cheap power, and release it at times of peak demand. I have heard claims that we just need to build more of these. There are several obvious problems with this:

• There are few sites suitable for such schemes; you need a large height difference between the storage reservoirs and the generating plant, and the upper lake needs to be large to store the water. 
• Building such schemes are hardly green; a million tonnes of concrete were used at Dinorwig. Building large lakes in our upland areas also has obvious environmental consequences.
• They depend on cheap electricity to pump the water up; wind power is hardly cheap and is currently massively subsidised.

Of course, there are proposals for other means of storing energy, for instance molten salt storage. However these have only been built on a small scale, and there are a number of concerns about them, including pollution. We cannot bet the future on untried technologies.

We need maximum power in winter and yet, as happened recently, the cold weather coincided with low wind speeds. Therefore the wind farms were at low efficiency when we needed them most. This means that we will either need a massive over-capacity of wind power, some form of (currently untested at scale) power storage mechanism, or more traditional power plants to provide back-up power.

There is also the issue of how inefficient wind power is.According to the Telegraph, an area of land the size of Wales will need to be covered with turbines to generate just one-sixth of the country's energy needs. From this, it is clear that wind power is not the answer to either of the two problems that face us.

We need more honesty in the debate. What I would like to see are publicly-available and honest (*) figures about the power generated by wind farms compared to their stated capacity. Fortunately we have such figures (see part 2).

Wind farms have other problems. People campaigning against wind farms are often called NIMBYs, sometimes rightly. However such name-calling does not hide the fact that, in many cases, they have a point. Our uplands are precious, and anything that permanently alters them should only be done with care. It would be exceptionally hard for me to get planning permission to build a cottage in Brassington in Derbyshire, yet the Government are allowing four massive 102-metre tall turbines to be built nearby. A house can have negligible visible impact on a landscape; these turbines will be visible for miles around.

I was once told by a Greenpeace representative that, if necessary, windfarms could be dismantled and the wilderness reinstated. He was assuming that the turbines just sat on large blocks of concrete that could be easily removed. That may be the case; but it does not account for the miles of haul roads and power lines that are needed for construction and maintenance of the turbines, or to distribute the power. It may not be fashionable to say so, but this is a significant form of pollution of some of our most precious places.

I am not against all wind farms; off-shore ones may be useful (and expensive). But given the manifest disadvantages of wind, we really have to weigh the advantages of wind against the disadvantages on a case-by-case basis. The Scottish Government in particular is failing in this regard.

It seems to me that many proponents of wind power are looking at the advantages and ignoring the disadvantages. They think 'green' as being solely about power, and not about wildernesses.

 Will future generations thank us for destroying some of the last wildernesses in Britain in a perhaps-pointless quest for 'green' energy? I think not.

(*) I say honest, because figures have been massaged in the past. Solar installations in Spain have been accused of fraud. In one case, investigators noticed that a solar power plant was impossibly generating significant power at night. It turns out that as solar power generators can charge more for their power, they were using diesel generators to produce electricity and selling it at higher cost, pocketing the profit and defrauding the public.