Category: Climate change innovation

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Looking at the capability of the world being powered from solar or wind

The sun sends 470 exajoules of energy to the earth every 88 minutes. This is how much energy the earth uses each year. If we captured just 1% of the sun’s energy this would still give a 6 times more electricity than we need. 

In a similar vein, if wind turbines collected just 20% of the wind energy on earth this would be 8 times what the entire world uses each year.

In terms of area, to generate all the power that the earth needs (using current efficiency) we would need roughly 1 million square km or about 11% of the Sahara desert. Obviously, this is an oversimplification, but it shows that the world is more than capable of running on clean energy.

The energy is there to be used, we just need to undertake it at speed. Vested interests in fossil fuel companies have fought aggressively against this move for decades. Their time must be over, the world can and must clean up its act.

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Tesla has made more sales than Audi BMW and Mercedes combined in their home market

In September Tesla sold more cars in Germany than Audi A4 BMW 3 series and Mercedes c class combined.

Why is this important? Well firstly the Tesla cars are more expensive. As a result they naturally compete against similarly priced cars with a combustion engine. This is why this news is so exciting – it is clearly taking an enormous part of this well established market.

What is particularly concerning, is that these are the people which car companies make their most profit from. Those people with less money, will tend to either buy used cars – no extra money for the established players (though with supercharging and various other things like data, Tesla can profit), or buy small runabout cars – these tend her very small profit margins, and anyway even if you managed to make 20% profit when you’re only talking about to the car that costs £5,000, you still have to sell an awful lot of them to make substantial rewards.

Indeed the next few years are perhaps their last chance to fight back. This is because with the Tesla gigafactory in Berlin, the number of cheaper Tesla cars will explode in the next few years. 5 to 10 years after this many of those will join the used car market at prices that could quickly reduce cheaper cars demand as well.

Where are we (my family and I)? We have been liking the idea of going electric for some time. Unfortunately someone wrote our car a few years ago – too soon for us to go electric. However (as I wrote about a few weeks ago), we have just jumped in having found an old tesla s for far less than normal in the UK. Indeed with the current price of petrol, we think that it will only be about 7 years before we save the purchase price in reduced cost of travel

Continue reading “Tesla has made more sales than Audi BMW and Mercedes combined in their home market”
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When was human caused climate change first noticed?

There are still a large number of people with vested interests, who are arguing that climate change science is not settled and we need to wait a bit more.

How long should we wait?

Guy Callendar released a paper in 1938 – considered revolutionary at the time, which linked fossil fuel burning to the warming of the earths atmosphere. Indeed in 1896 Svante Arrhenius a Swedish scientist first predicted that increasing carbon emissions could significantly increase surface temperatures.

In other words it is now 126 years since a scientist predicted that global warming would be likely if we continued to release carbon emissions, and a paper was released 84 years ago confirming that Scvante Arrhenius prediction was correct.

So why are we still arguing about it? Does the free market truly allow profit to be prioritised over a scientific fact that was proposed more than a century ago, and confirmed nearly a century ago? Had the world dealt with carbon emissions back then we would be looking at a very different situation.

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The British government has promised to go carbon neutral by 2050 how much to generate all electricity from wind?

How can we produce all our electricity through wind and solar? These are the two most wide-spread possibilities in terms of green electricity generation. It has been calculated, that in order to power all UK homes from wind, we need funding of 50 billion.

Now while this number is huge, the British government spent over a trillion pounds last year. This means that the investment required to generate 100% of our power from wind is about 5% of one years spending. This strikes me as incredibly cheap. This investment, would allow about 4 times as many turbines to be added as there currently are.

There would obviously be other costs, such as storing electricity for when the wind is not blowing. The important take away, is that this is negligible. Indeed with debts of over 3000 billion, adding 50 more is not a big step.

More importantly, it is calculated that doing nothing could cost the UK alone trillions of pounds. If we invested this money over the next say 8 years (so that all the money was available by 2030 and all the turbines were up and running by 2035) it becomes quite a small investment in government spending terms (though it is still a large amount of money).

It is estimated that by 2050 climate change could cost the UK up to £20 billion a year. Of course other countries around the world will likely have to pay far more. The UK has the 12th highest electricity use in the world as a country, this means that while each country will need a lot of money to go fully green electricity, it is not necessary to break the bank.

Different countries will have different ways to reach net zero, and we should help and encourage this move – but why dont we start planning the necessary investment, make sure that the UK leads the way in eliminating our electrical carbon footprint?

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The UK has 11 billion climate fund:60 ngo are calling for some of it to be used for family planning

Across much of the world where species are at risk of extinction there is an exploding human population. From Africa with rapidly growing populations in the east west and south, to Asia with growing populations in almost all countries, the biggest threat to the continued survival of wild species is the loss of habitat.

The thing is, that a rapidly growing population is generally an issue in countries which are poor. The reason for this is that they have lower standards of healthcare, and therefore less family planning.

As such, if the government were to set up a project which spend a couple of million educating educators in 50 countries across the third world, and supported the resulting work, the growth of the populations in these countries could slow or even stop and go into reverse. This would allow the standard of living to increase again.

Alongside these benefits, would be lower pressures on the wealth of biodiversity which so much of these countries economy is based around.

Importantly, this would be likely to have far more impact than it would cost.

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Green projects in the UK are being endangered because of unfair transmission pricing

Transmission charges are paid when transporting electricity from where it is made to where it is used.

This is quite normal, and it is the way that the power grid has worked for centuries. This will become ever more important, as the distance between generation and consumption of electricity increases.

Why is this distance increasing? When you build a coal or gas powered power station, it does not need anything in particular to be able to make power. So long as it has a ready supply of what ever it uses to power its generators, electricity continues to flow.

Renewables are different. Wind turbines need to be erected in places where there is a lot of wind – this is why the UK has built so many off the coast. Solar power is generally either placed on large roofs (factories and such) or out in fields. We need to have more roofs filled and fewer fields – It would be possible to power all the UK power needs if all rooftops were covered, but that is a different subject). Fields are generally expensive near cities and cheap far away.

This is where the problem arises. The UK is capable of generating more than enough power for the British population. However, if electricity generated in Netherlands France and Germany are all let off transmission charges – as they currently are, but our own power generation has to pay it, this is the equivalent of giving all foreign electricity a significant discount. This is obviously insane, as it means that we discourage our own power generation, at a time where we should be investing billions in green power generation.

Analysis shows that on average EU power firms pay 48p per megawatt hour in the transmission system. In Scotland the average is £6.42 – more than 13 times the price. In the windiest parts of Scotland it is £736 per MWH

OFGEM needs to bring in rules that encourage the UK net zero target. This must happen fast. Without, we are likely to end up not building the tens of thousands of wind turbines necessary as it will cost more to export than it is worth.

Right now, we are essentially subsidizing imports and heavily taxing domestic power. This is a quick way for the government to kill off this entire industry.

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Easyjet continues to make progress towards its zero carbon planes due in the sky 2030

One of the most complex issues to address in decarbonization is that of air travel. It is all very well for people to suggest that simply nobody should travel. This is not a long-term solution, not least because the vast majority of conservation relies on tourism to raise the funds for it to take place.

Long-haul flight is a problem to be fixed in the future, however easyjet is working on finding a solution to short haul flight of up to 500km.

Wright electric, the company which is developing the planes has announced that it has created an electric propulsion motor at 2MW. The aim would be to use 10 of these motors – which would add up to a similar amount of power as the aircraft the fly today. 2MW for an hour at full capacity would be 20MWH

Whether Wright electric has identified batteries that can supply enough power to run these motors for long is not yet known.

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Coal power stations could cut coal use, and therefore emissions by 50%

Coal power plants have to be a thing of the past as soon as possible. This is because no matter how efficient they are, they are powered by digging up carbon and releasing it into the air.

However for the time being, there are many coal power stations across the world. Vishwanath Haily Dalvi of the institute of Chemical technology in Mumbai India has been looking at how we could assist this process with the suns energy.

By collecting the suns heat energy, and using this to heat the water, the amount of coal needed is reduced by 50%.

This could therefore be a more economic way of reducing emissions from power generation. Given that coal power emits 0.85 pounds of carbon per kwh (about 380g), cutting this in half would make carbon far cleaner. While this may well be expensive to set up, it might allow coal power plants to operate for a few years longer and therefore be worthwhile, as well as offsetting some of the damage from the large number of coal powered stations being built across countries such as India and China.

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In 2020, for the first time the UK got more energy from renewable sources than from fossil fuels

In 2020, renewable electricity accounted for 43% of the UK electricity, while fossil fuels accounted for just 38%. The remaining generation came from nuclear. Unfortunately, that proportion was reversed in 2021.

Never-the-less the British prime minister announced in October at the Conservative conference, that the aim is to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2035 (I would suggest that they need to decide if nuclear is a green generation or not – I would suggest it is, but it should therefore be included in the figures, in the long-term it is not likely to be needed, we should be able to generate all our electricity from solar and wind).

It is encouraging to think that by 2035 all our electricity will come from green sources. In addition as no ICE cars should be sold after 2030, by 2035 the proportion of clean propulsion should be rapidly moving towards 100%

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It looks like Oil companies are looking at the future beyond oil. They are definitely not all in

While there are still many right-wing networks that deny the truth to global warming – or increasingly admit the world is warming but suggest that humans have nothing to do with this (a hard thing to argue as the only thing that has changed is us and our carbon emissions- and the change is happening faster than anything we can find in the last few million years), fossil fuel companies do not seem to be making the Investments necessary to move their business in the timescale available.

Proportion of oil capitol investment in non- fossil fuel sources. This is over 2010-2018
Continue reading “It looks like Oil companies are looking at the future beyond oil. They are definitely not all in”
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