Category: Climate change innovation

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The end of coal powered electricity generation in the UK? Where is the rest of the world on cleaning their power generation

The last coal powered power plant in the UK is having its last day today, before it is closed down

The shrink in the electricity generation in the UK for coal, has been quite astounding. in 2006, coal produced 37% of the electricity for the UK, dropping to zero by 2024.

Holborn Viaduct was the first coal power plant, opened in 1882 (In the early 1800s, coal was used to make town gas for lighting and to fuel the expansion of Britain’s burgeoning railways, but not for electricity).

It is estimated that the UK has burnt 4.6 billion tonnes of coal since this time, emitting a little over 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Greece and the U.K. achieved the fastest coal power reductions — moving at a quicker pace than what’s needed globally but Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Romania, Germany, the United States and Chile are all not too far behind. However, there is still a huge amount of work to be done. Coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, supplied 36% of electricity generation in 2022. This must drop to 4% by 2030 and then 0% by 2040 if the world is to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C and prevent the most catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis. This is frankly an astounding rate of decline, and there are many countries around the world, who will have to be supported, if we are to meet this requirement.

Paradoxically, the USA also appears on the list of countries furthest from phasing out coal, along with India and China. It is quite feasible for the USA to cut its way to coal at a surprising rate (though whether Trump returns to the White house, or Kamala moves from the vice presidents wing, to the presidents wing, is likely to have a big impact on whether coal is left behind in the USA or not)

It is true that coal is the most dirty fuel, but we still have a great deal of work to do as a species, if we are to avoid the worst of global warming. It is thought that we have just 6 years to stop burning gas, and this accounts for around 22% of global electricity generation. In much of the west, gas is also used for heating, and while there are alternative options (we had a heat pump installed this year, after it was clear that our boiler was failing). 73.8% of UK houses are heated in this way, and so there is clearing a big need for the transition to occur faster.

In the UK, all electricity generation is meant to be carbon neutral by 2035, so gas must disappear by then – though as the financial penalties for continuing to burn things and the cost of other electricity generation falls, the financial imperative to end gas power plant use, is only going to increase, so we may well get there far faster. It should be noted, that the government also has a 95% electricity generation target in 2030, so gas must reduce fast over the next 5-6 years.

Currently, wind power generation accounts for 30 gigawatt hours, but the 2030 target is 50, and solar generation is targeting a 5 fold increase in the amount of generation by 2035. These two alone, will greatly outweigh the loss of gas.

Of course, you can save money in almost any part of the world, but installing solar (we nearly have ours working) will not only help in cleaning up the grid, but our investment, is likely to be paid back from savings in around 3 years.

In the global south, it is even easier to make this work.

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Wind energy grew by 50% in 2023, is it enough?

50% growth in a year, is the fastest pace recorded in the last 20 years. The COP28 has a target of tripling clean energy capacity by 2030, and this speed keeps this target in contention.

Worldwide renewables have now reached 510 gigawatts of energy, which is fantastic, and means that humanity stands a good chance of pushing out fossil fuels in the near future. However, it suggests that renewable power is behind target, with the expected increase being 250% by 2030, rather than 300%.

Still, it is growing, and many countries are only slowly getting round to making their own progress. Another positive, is the increasing number of houses that are putting solar panels on their own roofs – with the huge rewards for investing in solar (and other home generation) and the reducing costs, the finances are increasingly obvious. While this is initially, meaning that well off people in the developed world are doing this, there are large parts of Africa, which are skipping large joined electricity networks, and getting remote communities off grid one by one.

It seems inevitable, that wind and solar are going to supply the majority of our energy needs in the future, however, the faster this happens, the better it is for all of us.

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Natural hydrogen at 95.8% purity found at drill site in South Australia

The vast majority of hydrogen on earth is locked into water. While splitting water and then recombining it can be done, and is in some forms can be thought of as a battery, it has long been postulated, that there might be hydrogen deposits in the earths crust. Not considered valuable until recently, few were looking for hydrogen.

This has changed dramatically, and after writing several months ago about a find in the USA, another has been made in South Australia. This find has 95.8% pure hydrogen, greatly reducing the purifying costs (the same company has also found deposits of helium at 17.5% pure).

This hydrogen should not be used for passenger cars, but instead in applications where nothing else can do (like air travel) . Even shipping, currently highly polluting, does not need to be. A mixture of kite sailing, new retractable sails of various kinds, and even electric motors with batteries, means that shipping should be able to rapidly decarbonize over the next few decades. This hydrogen must be used carefully – while these deposits might be large, they are not endless. As such, we want to use this for uses which cannot use batteries.

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So you think that only the poster child of climate change – the polar bear, is threatened by the changing climate? Think again – now rhino?

White Rhino

Rhino are unable to sweat, which means that as temperatures increase, both black and white rhino are more and more reliant on finding shade, in order to keep their huge bodies within safe temperatures – will there come a time, where this is impossible? What other species might be at risk, even far from the poles.

Continue reading “So you think that only the poster child of climate change – the polar bear, is threatened by the changing climate? Think again – now rhino?”
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The telegraph has put out an article suggesting that homegrown food has 5 times greater carbon footprint than conventional: is that right? Should we all end our allotments?

Looking at the busy mass of growing green, it is hard to see how this is the most inefficient way to grow food…

The study that the article is based on comes from the university of Michigan, and is frankly badly, badly made. It is the quintessential study, where this is the answer, now how do we get there, sort of study.

So, what did they do? Well, they put gardens into 3 different categories

  • Backyard gardens – single occupancy
  • communal gardens (like the above)
  • Urban farms

Your backyard garden has about as small a carbon footprint as it is possible to have, it is possible that fruit or veg from here actually has zero carbon footprint. Community gardens can be a bit different – you have a small area, so you might use more compost or fertilizer, and it is possibly further from where you live, so you might drive to it. However, this kind of place also has a low carbon footprint.

It is essentially just the Urban farms which are a problem here: growlights and watering and temperature controls all add up to large quantities of energy.

This video shows this is an easy way to understand.

Do not be put off! If you have an allotment or a vegetable patch in your garden, this is almost completely carbon free food, it does bring down your carbon footprint.

It is unfortunately the kind of study you can find in a newspaper like the Telegraph; I do not think it would be a surprise for any readers to hear, that this is not the place readers go to find out about the new scientific studies of this kind.

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Late last year Exxon spent $60 billion to by a shale gas giant – the deserve to go bankrupt

Exxon is like many other oil companies – they have buried their head in the sand, and have continued to deny the science.

There are still oil rigs littering our coasts, do we really want another rush to build more equipment, which will last long after the shale gas runs out?

What astounds me, is that, over the last 3 years, the price of Exxon shares has gone up 3 times over. This means that the majority of people who are investing in the market, believes either that there is a killing to be made from Exxon before it goes out of business, or climate change is wrong (it is true that investment in Exxon 3 years ago would have tripled, but a long-term investment is unlikely to be successful, as Exxon has to completely change its business model.

So, why is Exxon buying a shale giant?

Clearly, it thinks that there is money to be made, before the world transitions. The problem is that should Exxon be right, the world will suffer more global warming.

We already need to leave much of our known reserves of fossil fuels in the ground, Shale gas, is just more,

We need to be moving away from fossil fuels as fast as we can.

How is your family doing? As for us, we have bought a second had electric car, we have just installed our solar and thermal solar, and will in a couple of weeks, have a heat pump installed that will remove our last reliance on gas (these two moves, will have removed carbon from our travel and from our house running and heating – we also have zero carbon electricity). Obviously we still have a way to go, but we are making progress. Of course, from a finance point of view, it is a good move – it is true that our car was more expensive than anything we’ve had before, however, the purchase cost will only take 6-7 years to save back , and our house greening has a payback time of around 4 years- after that we should be several hundred pounds better off each month.

Exxon is still betting that there is more money to be made before the good times are over, however they are betting on our future.

It is foolish to invest in them, either they are right, and will make a fortune while the world suffers, or they are wrong, and this business venture will collapse.

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Ford has made clear its aim to take on Tesla and BYD by launching cheap electric cars

Is this news to anyone? It is known that the car industry is in a race to move to electric. Given the vast saving for the end line consumer, the huge reduction in pollution, and the fact that many countries have already set dates where combustion engine car sales will be banned, surely the response to this news is ” why have you not made this move before?

What is clear, is that ford is developing a smaller and cheaper EV platform. Well this is great, but everyone is trying to create small affordable electric cars.

Now, how many of these small cars is ford aiming to sell? Currently, ford makes a $28,000 loss on each electric cars. Which means that they need to bring this down, or 2 million electric cars sold my ford would cause a huge loss.

Tesla is making progress on their own cheap model – the so called tesla model 2. This is aimed to hit the target of $25,000, or around £18,000, and they are expecting to make millions of this model, which does not seem unreasonable.

We need to remember, that while we look on ford as an old car company (and they are) at the current moment, they are not bigger than tesla. So in 2023 tesla sold 1.81 million vehicles, all electric, while ford sold 1.99 million, however only 72,000 of these were electric. If in the future, only electric cars count, then perhaps we should already be looking at ford as the minnow in a pond with a huge shark that is tesla. If we look at profit, this might make this clearer, Ford made profits of $4.3 billion, while Tesla made profits of 15 billion.

So, is Ford a tiny electric car maker, or not? Is it going to become one of the most profitable electric car makers, or is it going to become a small car maker? Time will tell, however, the problem is that the 2 million small electric cars that ford says its is targeting, is also the same number that Tesla is going to be targeting. Can the world demand sustain 2 million from each? Possibly, in the future, but Ford may well find that diving into the pond of small Electric cars is a hard place to make money, and finding enough demand for 2 million electric cars may well prove to be the harder part of the transition.

Time will tell, but they certainly have their work cut out for them.

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Should Hertz dumping 20,000 electric cars be a warning to car buyers?

So Hertz is downsizing its electric car fleet, just a few years after buying them. Should this put off electric car buyers? Well, I would argue no, and I suspect that Hertz will live to regret this day.

So have Hertz abandoned electric cars? Nope, it is true that in the current climate, they have scaled back their electric buying car program from 100,000 cars to just 50,000 cars, but this is still a significant number.

Given that in the USA they own around 500,000 cars (elsewhere it is mostly franchise so they do not own the cars) suggesting that at the current time, Hertz will have around 10% of its fleet as electric.

What has prompted this? Well, largely a higher cost of repair cost.

The problem for Hertz is simple. They get paid a rate, to rent the car, they save nothing by it being electric, on the other hand, the renter, might save plenty of money, as refueling can be far cheaper (though admittedly, with currently high electric prices on this side of the Atlantic, public chargers are often just as expensive as petrol.

So, no, this does not (as business insider suggests) mean the end of the electric car. In fact, given that they are selling around 20,000 electric cars, it is quite likely that it will boost the number of electric cars in public hands.

It is true, that some fixes are far more than they should be (we have found that) but it is also clear that overall, electric car owners save money. Whether this will accelerate the change or slow it down, time will tell. It is often the case that once experienced few want to go back to a fossil fuel car, so renting them is useful. Unfortunately, given the price, Hertz treated them as premium, which meant this had less affect than might otherwise have been the case.

I think they will come to regret this, the world is going electric, and the transition is accelerating around the world. It seems likely that they will have to reverse this change within a decade.

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Do Ancient sea sponges point to an underestimate of the warming of the world?

There is much work around the world, which is going into measuring temperatures as accurately as possible and watching for change. While the British empire routinely took temperature readings on certain trips, and there are various other long records, there is no human record which goes back more than a few centuries. While this is irrelevant for human caused climate change, as we only started releasing large quantities of warmth trapping carbon dioxide in the last few centuries (largely started by the industrial revolution in the UK), we want to be able to both have more records from the last few centuries, and records that go far further back.

At just 10-15cm this sponge is likely to be close to full size on a laptop or computer

A variety of natural methods have been found, but this new ancient sea sponge method is interesting. This is because, lying 30-90m below the surface of the Mediterranean. In the Mediterranean even in the shallows with the water only changing by around 10 degrees, however, below 12-40 feet (depending on churn etc) the temperature is incredibly constant year round. That is not to say that there is no change in temperature, but it is very small.

So in this instance, these sponges have been recording changing temperature over the years, and according to their tempearture records, the planet has alread warmed by 1.7° C, which is half a degree more than the United Nations climate panel has seen elsewhere.

A number of climate scientists have questioned how wide-ranging a conclusion, you can draw from readings taken from one sponge species in just one location in the world. However, the lead researcher stated “Taking a precautionary principle, our findings show taht global warming is more advanced than we thought and therefore it’s a wake-up call that we have to get on with reducing CO2. He went on to add “We will experience more serious impacts from global warming sooner than we had anticipated”.

6 different speciamins of this sponge species were collected. The sponge can take hundreds of years to grow (to a size only 10cm-15cm). As it grows, it stores strontium and calcium in a ratio which relates directly to the temperature of the water around them. The team reconstructed global water temperatures going back 300 years through this method, and then combined them with land-based temperatures, in order to arrive at global temperatures. Because of the depth, the water temperature changes little from winter to summer, which means that the water tends to match the global average with surprising accuracy.

Incidence like the volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815 show up clearly in the record. However, unfortunately, it also confirms that manmade warming started in 1860, and given that global temperature changes are benchmarked against averages of the temperature between 1850 and 1900, it shows that this cannot be considered pre impact by humans.

However, responses are rather more encouraging. Essentially, the point is, that regardless of the sense in taking readings from a moving point, given that both our current position and the warming that we have targeted are against the same wrong number, it is irrelevant – if the start temperature was higher, but all our readings are out by the same quantity, it does not mean we will hit dangerous levels any sooner – these were worked out using the same incorrect measurements.

However, whatever is true, what is clear is that we still need to cut emissions alarmingly fast if we want to escape changes that are likely to kill many people, and displace hundreds of millions more – if not billions.

See Animals Wild