One day, in the not too distant future I hope, politicians will stop playing one-upmanship with environmental policy and will also stop all this silly talk about CO2. No I'm not about to say CO2 is not the cause of the current warming the planet is experiencing, in fact, I couldn't care less which side is right on that matter really.
After all there are clearly many eminent climatologists, oceanographers etc etc on both sides who know far more about the subject than I could ever hope to know. The problem is is that CO2 output is not really where our concern should be targeted.
What we should be doing, as I have said more than once on this blog, is resolving the scandalous waste of energy that exists between power plant generation and the consumer destination. Currently, the estimate is that we simply lose 60% of all that energy we produce. Sod the environmental arguments, that waste is just insanely stupid and evidence of wholesale incompetence on our part.
Imagine if we could reduce that wastage to say just 10%? We could continue to consume at the same rate that we do now, whilst actually producing 50% less energy. This would consequentially shut up the "CO2 obsessives" at a stroke, irrespective of whether they're right or wrong. At the same time we might actually see energy prices falling as well.
The question is, is it possible? The answer, I believe, and so do parts of the Green lobby, is yes. We need to just look at Woking Borough Council where it is happening as we speak. They are over 90% self-sufficient for all the energy of Council owned properties (including rented accommodation) through the use of local, decentralised combined heat and power generation, as well as photovoltaic usage, solar panels and a variety of other sustainable sources.
In fact, Woking is only connected to the National Grid for matters of resiliency, and energy prices are an order of magnitude lower in their properties. Instead of us banging on about reducing carbon emissions we should be conentrating on decentralising our power generation thereby reducing the massive wastage enroute to the consumer.
8 comments:
That estimate of 60% lost seems low. Don't we lose about 20% in generation and 60% more in distribution? Meaning 70-80% in all? And aren't China and India and so on facing bigger losses with bigger grids, distances, and flakier plant too?
This is a huge issue. Compared to flights it is humungous. Blogged about it (and Dale's buy in to the C4 apostasy as opposed to the G8 apostasy) a day or two ago HERE including:
- rethink national/international grid meme
This last is now looking disastrous with up to 90% of energy lost in distribution over huge distances. Let's tell China and India and Africa about that rather than expecting them to settle for poverty.
You only blogged about it a day or so ago? I was doing writing about last summer when I was in Spain so nernernernana!
Seriously though, the 60% figure I got came from Friends of the Earth last year.
Dizzy, this is an interesting post and food for thought.
I work in IT and have spent six months or so understanding how our power & environmental systems work in the Data Centre.
Our computers and power plant consume about 150 Kilowatts, all day, every day. After moving the electrons around, that power all goes into the room as heat (apart from about 75 watts, which goes out of the wires to a few VoIP phones and then into that bit of the office as heat.)
To get rid of that heat, we have to suck it out of the room by shifting vast quantities of air over cooling panels in a closed system. Moving all of that heat also requires energy, about another 100 kilowatts.
So, we are throwing away 0.25 of a Megawatt of heat energy straight out onto the roof. Every other data centre does the same, as there aren't really any cost-effective ways of recovering that energy.
This is a big issue for IT in general, as electricity is now the biggest revenue cost on the spreadsheet and an energy crisis could seriously impact big business profitability.
However, this is a good thing- because it will drive development of energy efficient systems both in the Server Room and on the roof.
Forget all the guff about global warming- reducing the cost base is good for business.
We buy "green energy" as part of a general trend towards Corporate responsibility (even though it is slightly more expensive than what I'm told is now called "brown energy") but this isn't really sustainable as not everyone can buy it whilst green sources remain so minimal (and indeed unreliable).
Woking Borough Council being self-sufficient in energy is totally unrelated to energy loss between generation point and consumer. They can be self-sufficient and will still be suffering similar losses between their CHP plant and the point of consumption.
That said, energy efficiency (in all forms) is very important. Unfortunately, one of the most efficient ways of distributing electrical power is through overhead lines. Bury power lines in the ground (as is the growing habit, to 'lessen the environmental impact') and they are immediately more lossy. Sadly, this seems to be lost on most 'environmentalists' who seem more concerned with appearance than efficiency.
No its not unrelated. Their energy loss has been massively reduced by virtue of the generation become localised.
I think you will find, that the gains enjoyed by not transmitting power over distance, are nullified by the loss seen as a result of dispersing generation into a lot of titchy little plants rather than one (or several humungous ones).
Economy of scale, it's called.
Do the sums.
the sums have been done. Woking has proved the case. Sorry but you're wrong.
I'd happily bet a billion pounds, or my life, that Woking is efficient because it uses otherwise-wasted heat for generation - not because it avoids the losses incurred in transmitting electricity at ultra-high-tension over the national grid. The latter are trivial.
If your sums are coming out otherwise, they are wrong.
John B
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