Tag Archives: fossil fuels

Wind Power Kicks Fossil Power Butt

Posted on by
1

What if you ran the numbers for wind power replacing all fossil fuel and nuclear electricity in Canada? How could it work? How much would it cost?

WHO:  L.D. Danny Harvey, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Canada

WHAT: Mapping and calculating the potential for wind electricity to completely replace fossil fuel and nuclear electricity in Canada

WHEN: February 1st, 2013

WHERE: Energy Vol. 50, 1 February 2013

TITLE: The potential of wind energy to largely displace existing Canadian fossil fuel and nuclear electricity generation (subs req.)

As a kid, I really loved the TV series Captain Planet. I used to play it in the school yard with my friends and I always wanted to be the one with the wind power. Mostly because my favourite colour is blue, but also because I thought the girl with the wind power was tough.

Go Planet! Combining the power of wind, water, earth, fire and heart (Wikimedia commons)

Go Planet! Combining the power of wind, water, earth, fire and heart (Wikimedia commons)

What’s my childhood got to do with this scientific paper? Well, what if you looked at the Canadian Wind Energy Atlas and worked out whether we could harness the power of wind in Canada to replace ALL fossil fuel and nuclear electricity? How would you do it? How much would it cost? That’s what this researcher set out to discover (in the only paper I’ve written about yet that has a single author!)

Refreshingly, the introduction to the paper has what I like to call real talk about climate change. He points out that the last time global average temperatures increased by 1oC, sea levels were 6.6 – 9.4m higher, which means ‘clearly, large and rapid reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are required on a worldwide basis’.

Of global greenhouse gas emissions electricity counts for about 25%, and while there have been studies in the US and Europe looking at the spacing of wind farms to reduce variability for large scale electricity generation, no-one has looked at Canada yet.

So how does Canada stack up? Really well. In fact, the paper found that Canada has equivalent wind energy available for many times the current demand for electricity!

The researcher looked at onshore wind and offshore wind for 30m, 50m and 80m above the ground for each season to calculate the average wind speed and power generation.  Taking into account the wake effect of other turbines and eliminating areas that can’t have wind farms like cities, mountains above 1,600m elevation (to avoid wind farms on the Rocky Mountains), shorelines (to avoid wind farms on your beach) and wetlands, the paper took the Wind Energy Atlas and broke the map into cells.

For calculating your wind farm potential there are generally three options; you can maximise the electricity production, maximise the capacity factor, or minimise the cost of the electricity. The paper looked at all three options and found that the best overall option (which gives you a better average cost in some cases) was to aim for maximum capacity.

Using wind data and electricity demand data from 2007, the researcher ran the numbers. In 2007, the total capacity of fossil fuel and nuclear electricity was 49.0GW (Gigawatts), or 249.8TWh (Terrawatt hours) of generation. This is 40% of the total national electricity capacity for Canada of 123.9GW or 616.3TWh generation.

To deal with the issue of wind power being intermittent, the paper noted that there’s already the storage capacity for several years electricity through hydro in Quebec and Manitoba, as well as many other options for supply-demand mismatches (which this paper doesn’t address) making a national wind electricity grid feasible.

To run the numbers, the country was split into 5 sectors and starting with the sector with the greatest wind energy potential, the numbers were run until a combination was found where the wind energy in each sector met the national fossil fuel and nuclear requirements.

Wind farms required in each sector to provide enough electricity to completely replace the fossil fuel and nuclear power used in 2007 (from paper)

Wind farms required in each sector to provide enough electricity to completely replace the fossil fuel and nuclear power used in 2007 (from paper)

Once the researcher worked out that you could power the whole country’s fossil fuel and nuclear electricity with the wind energy from any sector, he looked at minimising costs and meeting the demand required for each province.

He looked at what size of wind farm would be needed, and then calculated the costs for infrastructure (building the turbines) as well as transmission (getting the electricity from the farm to the demand). Some offshore wind in BC, Hudson Bay, and Newfoundland and Labrador, combined with some onshore wind in the prairies and Quebec and that’s all we need.

The cost recovery for the investment on the infrastructure was calculated for 20 years for the turbines and 40 years for the transmission lines. The paper found that minimising transmission line distance resulted in the largest waste generation in winter, but smallest waste in the summer, however overall, the best method was to aim for maximising the capacity factor for the wind farms.

But the important question – how much would your power cost? On average, 5-7 cents per kWh (kilowatt hour), which is on par with the 7c/kWh that BC Hydro currently charges in Vancouver. Extra bonus – wind power comes without needing to mine coal or store radioactive nuclear waste for millions of years!

Estimated wind power costs for Canada (from paper)

Estimated wind power costs for Canada (from paper)

Some more food for thought – the researcher noted that the estimated cost for coal fired electricity with (still unproven) carbon capture and storage technology is likely to be around 9c/kWh, while the current cost for nuclear generated electricity is between 10-23c/kWh. Also, the technical capacity factor for turbines is likely to increase as the technology rapidly improves, which will reduce the cost of producing wind electricity all over again.

This is all great news – Canada has the wind energy and the potential to build a new industry to not only wean ourselves off the fossil fuels that are damaging and destabilising our atmosphere, but to export that knowledge as well. We can be an energy superpower for 21st Century fuels, not fossil fuels. I say let’s do it!

Carbon in Your Supply Chain

Posted on by
2

How will a real price on carbon affect supply chains and logistics?

WHO:  Justin Bull, (PhD Candidate, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada)
Graham Kissack, (Communications Environment and Sustainability Consultant, Mill Bay, Canada)
Christopher Elliott, (Forest Carbon Initiative, WWF International, Gland, Switzerland)
Robert Kozak, (Professor, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada)
Gary Bull, (Associate Professor, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada)

WHAT: Looking at how a price on carbon can affect supply chains, with the example of magazine printing

WHEN: 2011

WHERE: Journal of Forest Products Business Research, Vol. 8, Article 2, 2011

TITLE: Carbon’s Potential to Reshape Supply Chains in Paper and Print: A Case Study (membership req)

Forestry is an industry that’s been doing it tough in the face of rapidly changing markets for a while. From the Clayoquot sound protests of the 1990s to stop clearcutting practices to the growing realisation that deforestation is one of the leading contributors to climate change, it’s the kind of industry where you either innovate or you don’t survive.

Which makes this paper – a case study into how monetising carbon has the potential to re-shape supply chains and make them low carbon – really interesting. From the outset, the researchers recognise where our planet is heading through climate change stating ‘any business that emits carbon will [have to] pay for its emissions’.

To look at the potential for low carbon supply chains, the paper looks at an example of producing and printing a magazine in North America – measuring the carbon emissions from cutting down the trees, to turning the trees into paper, transporting at each stage of the process and the printing process.

Trees to magazines (risa ikead, flickr)

Trees to magazines (risa ikead, flickr)

They did not count the emissions of the distribution process or any carbon emissions related to disposal after it was read by the consumer because these had too many uncertainties in the data. However, they worked with the companies that were involved in the process to try and get the most accurate picture of the process they possibly could.

The researchers found that the majority of the carbon is emitted in the paper manufacturing process (41%) as the paper went from a tree on Vancouver Island, was shipped as fibre to Port Alberni in a truck, manufactured into paper and then shipped by truck and barge to Richmond and then by train to the printing press in Merced, California.

Activity Carbon Emissions (CO2/ADt) Percentage of Total
Harvesting, road-building, felling, transport to sawmills

55kg

12%
Sawmilling into dimensional and residual products

45kg

10%
Transport of chips to mill

8kg

2%
Paper manufacturing process

185kg

41%
Transportation to print facility

127kg

28%
Printing process

36kg

8%

Total

456kg

100%

Supply Chain Emissions (Table 1. Reproduced verbatim from hardcopy)

The case study showed that upstream suppliers consume more energy than downstream suppliers, however downstream suppliers are most visible to consumers, which poses a challenge when trying to get larger emitters to minimise their carbon footprint, as there’s less likelihood of consumer pressure on lesser known organisations.

That being said, there can be major economic incentives for companies to try and minimise their carbon footprint given that Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railways (who shipped the paper from Canada to the printing press in California in this study) spent approximately $4.6billion on diesel fuel in 2008 (the data year for the case study).

Given that California implemented a carbon cap and trade market at the end of 2012 and that increasing awareness of the urgency to reduce our carbon emissions rapidly and significantly means the price of carbon is likely to increase, $4.6billion in diesel costs could rapidly escalate for a company like BNSF. If part or all of their transport costs could be switched to clean energy, as polluting fossil fuel sources are phased out the company will start saving themselves significant amounts.

The companies in this study were very aware of these issues, which is encouraging. They agreed that carbon and sustainability will be considered more closely in the future and that carbon has the potential to change the value of existing industrial assets as corporations who are ‘carbon-efficient’ may become preferred suppliers.

The researchers identified three types of risk that companies could face related to carbon; regulatory risk, financial risk and market access risk. The innovative businesses who will thrive in a low carbon 21st century economy will be thinking about and preparing for operating in an economy that doesn’t burn carbon for fuel, or where burning carbon is no longer profitable.

I really liked the paper’s example of financial risk in the bond market ‘where analysts are projecting a premium on corporate bonds for new coal fired power plants’, meaning it will be harder for companies to raise money to further pollute our atmosphere. This is especially important given that Deutsche Bank and Standard and Poors put the fossil fuel industry on notice last week saying that easy finance for their fossil fuels party is rapidly coming to an end.

Of course, no-one ever wants to believe that the boom times are coming to an end. But the companies that think ahead of the curve and innovate to reduce their carbon risk instead of going hell for leather on fossil fuels will be the ones that succeed in the long run.

Sleepwalking off a Cliff: Can we Avoid Global Collapse?

Posted on by
2

‘Without significant pressure from the public demanding action, we fear there is little chance of changing course fast enough to forestall disaster’
Drs. Paul and Anne Ehrlich

WHO: Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, Department of Biology, Stanford University, California, USA

WHAT: An ‘invited perspective’ from the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (the Royal Society) on the future of humanity following the election of Dr. Paul Ehrlich to the fellowship of the Royal Society.

WHEN: 26 January 2013

WHERE: Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences (Proc. R. Soc. B) 280, January 2013

TITLE: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

Dr. Paul Ehrlich has been warning humanity about the dangers of exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity for decades. He first wrote about the dangers of over-population in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, and now following his appointment to the fellowship of the Royal Society, he and his wife have written what I can only describe as a broad and sweeping essay on the challenges that currently face humanity (which you should all click the link and read as well).

When you think about it, we’re living in a very unique period of time. We are at the beginning of the next mass extinction on this planet, which is something that only happens every couple of hundred million years. And since humans are the driving force of this extinction, we are also in control of how far we let it go. So the question is, will we save ourselves, or will we sleepwalk off the cliff?

Drs. Ehrlich describe the multiple pressures currently facing the planet and its inhabitants as a perfect storm of challenges. Not only is there the overarching threat multiplier of climate change, which will make all of our existing problems harder to deal with, we have concurrent challenges facing us through the loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity from mass extinction, land degradation, the global spread of toxic chemicals, ocean acidification, infectious diseases and antibiotic resistance, resource depletion (especially ground water) and subsequent resource conflicts.

you have humans Wow. That’s quite the laundry list of problems we’ve got. Of course, all these issues interact not only with the biosphere; they interact with human socio-economic systems, including overpopulation, overconsumption and current unequal global economic system.

If you haven’t heard the term ‘carrying capacity’ before, it’s the limit any system has before things start going wrong – for instance if you put 10 people in a 4 person hot tub, it will start to overflow, because you’ve exceeded its carrying capacity.

The bad news is we’ve exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity. For the planet to sustainably house the current 7 billion people it has, we would need an extra half an empty planet to provide for everyone. If we wanted all 7 billion of us to over-consume at the living standards of the USA, we would need between 4 – 5 extra empty planets to provide for everyone. Better get searching NASA!

The Andromeda Galaxy (photo: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/NHSC)

The Andromeda Galaxy (photo: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/NHSC)

The next problem is that a global collapse could be triggered by any one of the above issues, with cascading effects, although Drs. Ehrlich think the biggest key will be feeding everyone (which I’ve written about before), because the social unrest triggered by mass famine would make dealing with all the other problems almost impossible.

So what do we need to do? We need to restructure our energy sources and remove fossil fuel use from agriculture, although Drs. Ehrlich do point out that peaking fossil fuel use by 2020 and halving it by 2050 will be difficult. There’s also the issue that it’s really ethically difficult to knowingly continue to run a lethal yet profitable business, hence the highly funded climate denial campaigns to try and keep the party running for Big Oil a little longer, which will get in the way of change.

The global spread of toxic compounds can only be managed and minimised as best we can, similarly, we don’t have many answers for the spread of infectious and tropical diseases along with increasing antibiotic resistance that will happen with climate change.

Helpfully, Drs. Ehrlich point out that the fastest way to cause a global collapse would be to have any kind of nuclear conflict, even one they refer to as a ‘regional conflict’ like India and Pakistan. But even without nuclear warfare (which I hope is unlikely!) 6 metres of sea level rise would displace around 400 million people.

One of the most important things that we can be doing right now to help humanity survive for a bit longer on this planet is population control. We need less people on this planet (and not just because I dislike screaming children in cafes and on airplanes), and Drs. Ehrlich think that instead of asking ‘how can we feed 9.6 billion people in 2050’ scientists should be asking ‘how can we humanely make sure it’s only 8.6 billion people in 2050’?

How can we do that? Firstly, we need to push back against what they refer to as the ‘endarkenment’, which is the rise of religious fundamentalism that rejects enlightenment ideas like freedom of thought, democracy, separation of church and state, and basing beliefs on empirical evidence, which leads to climate change denialism, failure to act on biodiversity loss and opposition to the use of contraceptives.

And why do we need to push back against people who refuse to base their beliefs on empirical evidence? Because the fastest and easiest way to control population growth is female emancipation. Drs. Ehrlich point out that giving women everywhere full rights, education and opportunities as well as giving everyone on the planet access to safe contraception and abortion is the best way to control population growth (you know, letting people choose whether they’d like children).

More importantly, Drs. Ehrlich want the world to develop a new way of thinking systematically about things, which they’ve called ‘foresight intelligence’. Since it’s rare that societies manage to mobilise around slow threats rather than immediate threats, there need to be new ways and mechanisms for greater cooperation between people, because we are not going to succeed as a species if we don’t work together.

They’d like to see the development of steady-state economics which would destroy the ‘fables such as ‘technological innovation will save us’’. They’d like to see natural scientists working together with social scientists to look at the dynamics of social movements, sustainability and equality and to scale up the places where that kind of work is already happening.

They point out that our current methods of governance are inadequate to meet the challenges we face and that we need to work with developing nations who are currently looking to reproduce the western nation’s ‘success’ of industrialisation, so that they can instead be leaders to the new economy, because playing catch up will lead to global collapse.

Do Drs. Ehrlich believe that we can avoid a global collapse of civilisation? They think we still can, but only if we get fully into gear and work together now, because unless we restructure our way of doing things, nature will do it for us. It’s your call humanity – shall we get going, or will we sleepwalk our species off the cliff?

Renewable Reality: Feasible and Inexpensive

Posted on by
2

‘Aiming for 90% or more renewable energy in 2030 in order to achieve climate change targets of 80-90% reduction of CO2 from the power sector leads to economic savings, not costs.’

WHO: Cory Budischak, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, Department of Energy Management, Delaware Technical Community College, Newark, USA
DeAnna Sewell, Heather Thomson, Dana E. Veron, Center for Carbon-Free Power Integration, School of Marine Science and Policy, College of Earth Ocean and Environment, University of Delaware, Newark, USA
Leon Mach, Energy and Environmental Policy Program, College of Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, USA
Willett Kempton, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, Center for Carbon-Free Power Integration, School of Marine Science and Policy, College of Earth Ocean and Environment, University of Delaware, Newark USA, Center for Electric Technology, DTU Elektro, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, Lungby, Denmark

WHAT: Working out how you could power a region with renewable electricity and the cost of doing it

WHEN: 11 October 2012

WHERE: Journal of Power Sources, 225, 2013

TITLE: Cost-minimized combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of the time

This research from the US is quite practical. The researchers looked at the electricity use from 1999 – 2002 in the ‘PJM Interconnection’ which is a power grid in the North Eastern USA that includes Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and parts of Indiana, Illinois and Michigan.

They wanted to know what a renewable power grid would look like, how much it would cost and how you could do it. Research excitement!

The PJM Interconnection power grid area in the blue lines. Pink stars are the meteorological data sites (from paper)

The PJM Interconnection power grid area in the blue lines.
Pink stars are the meteorological data sites (from paper)

So what does a renewable power grid look like in this area? It involves a combination of renewables, which are onshore wind, offshore wind and solar in multiple locations which provides the greatest range of renewable power sources (if the wind is still in one state, it may be blowing in the next state).

The first hurdle this team had to jump was storage. The most popular storage model for renewables is wind-hydro hybrids (which I’ve written about previously here), however in this corner of the USA, there’s not much hydro power. So the paper looked at the options of electric vehicle grid storage, hydrogen storage and battery storage (lithium titanate batteries for those playing at home).

They used the data from 1999-2002 to model the hourly fluctuations of electricity demand, which averaged out at 31.5 Gigawatts (GW) of 72GW of generation. They then matched the load hour by hour with renewables and worked out which was cheapest.

They calculated the costs with a level playing field, which means no subsidies. No subsidies for renewables, but also a magical time when there’s not billions upon billions of dollars each year for fossil fuel subsides as well.

The results were that a renewable grid with 30% of coverage produced 50% of the power required for the sample years, while a renewable grid that provided 90% of the power coverage produced double the power required and a renewable grid that provided 99.9% of the power coverage produced three times the energy required. The researchers found that an overproduction of renewable electricity was preferable to trying to exactly match the power required and also reduced the need for storage.

A few of the benefits they found were that offshore wind and solar often generate when inland wind doesn’t, and that there was greater over-supply of power in the winter months which could allow for natural gas heating to be replaced by renewable electric heating.

Renewable power in the 99.9% model only needed fossil fuel back up 5 times in 4 years (from paper)

Renewable power in the 99.9% model only needed fossil fuel back up 5 times in 4 years (from paper)

What about the costs? The researchers looked at what the cost was for power in 2010 dollars and then adjusted for efficiencies to estimate the 2030 cost of power for the model and the infrastructure.

The 2010 cost of power was 17c per Kilowatt hour (kWh), while a renewable grid with 30% coverage would cost 10-11c per kWh, a 90% renewable grid would cost 6c per kWh and a 99.9% renewable grid is at parity with the fossil fuel grid at 17c per kWh.

The reason the 99.9% cost is higher than 90% is because filling the gap of that final 9.9% requires more infrastructure to further diversify the grid, but I think the most important thing they found in their research is this:

‘The second policy observation is that aiming for 90% or more renewable energy in 2030, in order to achieve climate change targets of 80%-90% reduction of CO2 from the power sector, leads to economic savings, not costs.’

Yes, even in coal country in the USA, switching to a hybrid renewable system (in a level playing field) is cheaper than the current cost of fossil fuel electricity. It also comes with the added benefits of no mercury poisoning from coal fired power plants too!

The paper concludes that while excess power generation in a renewable grid is a new idea, it shouldn’t be too problematic since it saves on storage needs and is the most cost-effective variation.

Their advice for plucky leaders who would like to make this grid a reality? The most cost-effective way to build this grid is to aim for 30% renewables now, and phase in the rest to 90% in 2030. Each step along the way to more renewable power will not only be a climate saving step, it will save money as well.