Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
East Riding offshore wind
Wikipedia photo of a "jack-up" barge installing wind turbine foundations in the UK's North Sea waters.
It's always interesting to me when happenstance or geography forge links between any of "my" places.
The East Riding of Yorkshire, soon to be a major site for offshore wind development, was where my parents kept a vacation trailer when I was a kid, and the moors nearby were a popular patrol area when I was in RAF Mountain Rescue.
(The old North, East, and West Ridings of Yorkshire were former administrative subdivisions of this very large county, which was and is larger and more populous than several American states. They were phased out in the 1970s under attempts to consolidate county government and reduce costs. "Us" Yorkshiremen still use the old nomenclature for geographical reference and cultural meaning. The East Riding nomenclature, or simply "East Yorkshire" was recently restored.)
Even the RAF Fylingdales' "golf balls" on those moors used to be an identical DEW-line sister-station to the Charleston, Maine station where we are currently collecting wind data for the state of Maine. Although when systems were upgraded, Fylingdales continued in use, while at Charleston the only use for the slowly rotting steel pedestals that held the former radomes is as a research platform for our wind study!
The East Riding is well worth a visit, a great place for walks along the sea shore or moors, for fresh cod and chips and great bitter beer, and for beach holidays for the kids. One day, when I'm retired or perhaps a part-time professor, I hope to spend more time in all my old haunts, and we won't neglect the East Riding.
So I was fascinated to read this article on the hopes for an offshore boom there.
The descriptions of life in Grimsby during this recession sound a good deal like those in Bath, Maine, currently, except that at BIW it's the continued orders for destroyers and AEGIS cruisers that keep the yards, and families, afloat.
Of course, the overall scale of the UK's east coast wind farms are going to be almost an order of magnitude larger than the first generation of Maine offshore platforms will be. And a good deal easier to build, since the North Sea is a shallow sea, quite unlike the Gulf of Maine.
But the manufacturing and employment conditions are not dissimilar, while the grid-tie implications are quite comparable. The UK uses coal for electricity still, despite Thatcherite attempts to gut the former socialized coal-mining industry of northern England and Wales. The largest UK coal-fired power stations are in the former East and West Ridings. The government target is to reduce dependence on this climate-altering coal, as well as unreliable and mobbed-up Russian gas, by producing a very large portion of the UK's electricity supply using wind power. A massive DC "ring main" will facilitate the dispatch of this electricity to other North Sea countries.
The ambition of the project is considerable, and heartening, especially compared to the pessimism of US projections for coal, such as were found on Andrew Revkin's NYT blog yesterday.
Although Habib Dagher is a talented and ambitious man, with a great team working for him.
And if the British can build a giant wind farm on the Dogger Bank, I'm forced to wonder if Mainers might one day build on the shallower portions of the Georges Bank, of if the Newfoundlanders might use Sable Island.
So I don't quite share this pessimism. Which is a good job, since our students need to be encouraged, not discouraged.
All of us who work in the green energy and climate business have to have some positive vision, or we'd be wracked by fear for the future and made helpless and immobile.
So read the article and reflect on the fact that some folks, here and there around the world, are working to make cheap, efficient, climate-neutral energy a reality, at scale, on the ground.
Or in the water, as the case may be.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/17/giant-windfarms-east-coast
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Might it work?
The Cancun agreement is done, and the reductions measures it contains are not enough to avoid a global AAT rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius.
My first reaction, however, was some rather mild, grown-up pleasure at there actually being an agreement at all, never mind one with binding and verified emissions reductions.
My second one was, well it may just work. The latest information from the science world is largely encouraging as to the magnitude of carbon sensitivity. The Lean and Rind Work from 2008 and 2009 gives us the basis of a decadal-scale tracking measurement system, from which we will be able to detect destabilizing feedbacks. Each year we fill in more and more of the remaining uncertainty.
That might be enough good news on the one hand. And on the other, in the word of energy economics, the news is bad for energy prices and the recovery, but good for the climate: OPEC is planning to keep production steady, not increase it. Oil prices will rise as a result because demand for liquid fuels is rising as China and India grow.
(Gas, diesel and heat fuel prices will begin to rise again in the next few weeks as the holiday driving and heating seasons bite, and the world adjusts to the OPEC decision.)
That oil price alone will spur a good deal of cost-analysis based innovation and early-adoption in the west, as we realize that $4/gallon gasoline is not such a great deal, compared to say, the EPA-rated 99 mpg of the Nissan Leaf. Which by itself will drive faster deployment and at-scale production of the new energy technologies.
And there are some great ideas out there with demonstrable ability to be produced at scale: Bloom Boxes, Hyperion reactors, Nanosolar panels, Chevy Volts, all these are reality now, in production, no longer just prototypes. They are just waiting to pry loose some of that capital savings that is sloshing around in the economy. The one-year business investment tax break will help a good deal with some of the early adoption and raise demand, although this demand will also soak up a good deal of existing production and maybe raise prices as a result.
The ability of thin film solar technology to produce large amounts of peak load power, provide easier grid area balancing, and reduce power line expansion costs is beginning to be recognized in grid manager's minds. And ARRA-funded home energy improvement schemes are beginning to provide services all around the northern tier states. US fossil energy consumption should continue to decline slowly and steadily even though the economy is now adding jobs again. Other nations are also on track, notably most European ones.
It's a messy, complicated system of interacting areas of change, hard to track, almost impossible for the lay person to understand completely, but it finally is starting to move in a good direction.
Virtuous circles are way better than vicious cycles.
Having been responsible for big, messy systems many times in my life, systems that had to be watched and monitored and managed constantly to keep them in the virtuous circle category and prevent vicious cycles beginning -- flight lines for RAF jets, lost person search management, running small businesses, analyzing energy systems, helping to run a college -- I don't mind this complexity very much.
Any professional mid-level manager in any serious walk of life in any western democracy deals with similar complexity.
Which gives me my lecture notes for summing up in Monday's Global Change class, and Tuesday's Environmental Sustainability classes, the last class meetings of the semester.
The mild pleasure I experienced upon realizing that there was to actually be a Cancun agreement was similar to the mild pleasure I experienced when, several years into a very complicated scheme of academic and management improvement, Unity College's incoming GPA, SATs, gender ratio and other indicators, such as more students in our more academically-inclined degree majors, all began to improve and kept improving, year on year now for several years.
This was an enormous amount of work and no small amount of pain and debate personally and collectively, and there were a lot of "two steps forward, three steps back" moments, but the big ship did begin to turn around. Several years later, we have a small environmental college with rising standards and a very high quality of outcomes in the form of excellent young graduates.
But that took a lot of work on the part of a lot of people.
It would help to get a few more people on board with these climate management goals, too. Nothing too radical. I'm not sure we need too many more radical activist types, not at this stage. What we need now are good engineer/economist/manager types who understand the science and can also deal with technology and complexity, identify virtuous pathways, get their organizations on those pathways, and keep them there.
Lots and lots of the kind of ordinary but talented middle class people who go daily to the ordinary kinds of middle class jobs, the ones that run society, and while they're there at work they think about reducing fossil energy use and emissions reduction, and they make some changes and get some things done.
That's how we're going to do this thing.
If we all do our jobs, Cancun just might be enough of a global agreement. In itself it doesn't contain the necessary emissions reduction measures. But Cancun plus rising oil prices provide what might just be enough of a spur to innovation and adoption to get this thing moving.
And who is going to want to use a dirty fuel like coal, or even oil, when there's a cheaper, cleaner system available?
So it might just be enough.
My first reaction, however, was some rather mild, grown-up pleasure at there actually being an agreement at all, never mind one with binding and verified emissions reductions.
My second one was, well it may just work. The latest information from the science world is largely encouraging as to the magnitude of carbon sensitivity. The Lean and Rind Work from 2008 and 2009 gives us the basis of a decadal-scale tracking measurement system, from which we will be able to detect destabilizing feedbacks. Each year we fill in more and more of the remaining uncertainty.
That might be enough good news on the one hand. And on the other, in the word of energy economics, the news is bad for energy prices and the recovery, but good for the climate: OPEC is planning to keep production steady, not increase it. Oil prices will rise as a result because demand for liquid fuels is rising as China and India grow.
(Gas, diesel and heat fuel prices will begin to rise again in the next few weeks as the holiday driving and heating seasons bite, and the world adjusts to the OPEC decision.)
That oil price alone will spur a good deal of cost-analysis based innovation and early-adoption in the west, as we realize that $4/gallon gasoline is not such a great deal, compared to say, the EPA-rated 99 mpg of the Nissan Leaf. Which by itself will drive faster deployment and at-scale production of the new energy technologies.
And there are some great ideas out there with demonstrable ability to be produced at scale: Bloom Boxes, Hyperion reactors, Nanosolar panels, Chevy Volts, all these are reality now, in production, no longer just prototypes. They are just waiting to pry loose some of that capital savings that is sloshing around in the economy. The one-year business investment tax break will help a good deal with some of the early adoption and raise demand, although this demand will also soak up a good deal of existing production and maybe raise prices as a result.
The ability of thin film solar technology to produce large amounts of peak load power, provide easier grid area balancing, and reduce power line expansion costs is beginning to be recognized in grid manager's minds. And ARRA-funded home energy improvement schemes are beginning to provide services all around the northern tier states. US fossil energy consumption should continue to decline slowly and steadily even though the economy is now adding jobs again. Other nations are also on track, notably most European ones.
It's a messy, complicated system of interacting areas of change, hard to track, almost impossible for the lay person to understand completely, but it finally is starting to move in a good direction.
Virtuous circles are way better than vicious cycles.
Having been responsible for big, messy systems many times in my life, systems that had to be watched and monitored and managed constantly to keep them in the virtuous circle category and prevent vicious cycles beginning -- flight lines for RAF jets, lost person search management, running small businesses, analyzing energy systems, helping to run a college -- I don't mind this complexity very much.
Any professional mid-level manager in any serious walk of life in any western democracy deals with similar complexity.
Which gives me my lecture notes for summing up in Monday's Global Change class, and Tuesday's Environmental Sustainability classes, the last class meetings of the semester.
The mild pleasure I experienced upon realizing that there was to actually be a Cancun agreement was similar to the mild pleasure I experienced when, several years into a very complicated scheme of academic and management improvement, Unity College's incoming GPA, SATs, gender ratio and other indicators, such as more students in our more academically-inclined degree majors, all began to improve and kept improving, year on year now for several years.
This was an enormous amount of work and no small amount of pain and debate personally and collectively, and there were a lot of "two steps forward, three steps back" moments, but the big ship did begin to turn around. Several years later, we have a small environmental college with rising standards and a very high quality of outcomes in the form of excellent young graduates.
But that took a lot of work on the part of a lot of people.
It would help to get a few more people on board with these climate management goals, too. Nothing too radical. I'm not sure we need too many more radical activist types, not at this stage. What we need now are good engineer/economist/manager types who understand the science and can also deal with technology and complexity, identify virtuous pathways, get their organizations on those pathways, and keep them there.
Lots and lots of the kind of ordinary but talented middle class people who go daily to the ordinary kinds of middle class jobs, the ones that run society, and while they're there at work they think about reducing fossil energy use and emissions reduction, and they make some changes and get some things done.
That's how we're going to do this thing.
If we all do our jobs, Cancun just might be enough of a global agreement. In itself it doesn't contain the necessary emissions reduction measures. But Cancun plus rising oil prices provide what might just be enough of a spur to innovation and adoption to get this thing moving.
And who is going to want to use a dirty fuel like coal, or even oil, when there's a cheaper, cleaner system available?
So it might just be enough.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Nationally appropriate mitigation
In the environmental policy field there are key phrases in legislation that every serious wonk needs to be able to parse. It's generally best to know them off by heart. Examples are "joint and several" in Superfund, or "drinkable, fish-able and swim-able" in the CWA.
Cancun's example is above. It will be interesting to know what it will mean.
Cancun's example is above. It will be interesting to know what it will mean.
Friday, December 10, 2010
60% by 2030
The UK Government's influential blue ribbon panel on Climate, the Climate Change Committee, has released it's latest recommendation: that the country reduce emissions by 60% by 2030.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/07/committee-on-climate-change-targets-uk
This is technologically feasible, although it will be somewhat more expensive to be that far out in front than it would be to follow along later.
Some side benefits would be of high value: lower acid rain pollution over Norway and the North Sea, better London and Birmingham air quality, and, of course a massive boost to the green tech sector.
I'm not sure that the current generation of UK students, up in arms about their government's proposed tuition hike-and-loan scheme, all of which sounds impressively decent to American students, are the people to take this policy over in 2030, though.
Right now they just seem incredibly selfish and loutish to American eyes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/07/committee-on-climate-change-targets-uk
This is technologically feasible, although it will be somewhat more expensive to be that far out in front than it would be to follow along later.
Some side benefits would be of high value: lower acid rain pollution over Norway and the North Sea, better London and Birmingham air quality, and, of course a massive boost to the green tech sector.
I'm not sure that the current generation of UK students, up in arms about their government's proposed tuition hike-and-loan scheme, all of which sounds impressively decent to American students, are the people to take this policy over in 2030, though.
Right now they just seem incredibly selfish and loutish to American eyes.
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