algal biofuels DOH!

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Interesting piece of research from Cambridge suggests that the energy required to circulate algal cultures through the tubes of bioreactors will consume far more power than the cultures will yield. I'm a big fan of the concept of algal bioreactors and I think its disingenuous for New Scientist to have published this without considering the contribution to filling that power void that renewable technology could supply. Wind turbines are fairly inefficient things for converting wind to electricity but they are much better at converting wind to mechanical power, which could be harnessed to supply the necessary pumping. Obviously wind isn't reliable and so you could have a mix of backup technology such as photovoltaics and particularly biogas produced from the anaerobic fermentation of the organic mulch left over from biodiesel extraction.

The obvious problem is that all this adds greatly to the capital costs of the whole plant. However, as algal bioreactors will need to be situated near a source of CO2 to feed the cultures and preferably a source of grey water as well then locating water treatment works, conventional power stations and bioreactors together on the same site seems a "no-brainer" and this would lead to economies of scale and reduction in system duplication. This sort of integrated treatment/power generation site is clearly the way forward in sustainable technology. Combined with CHP technology and rubbish incineration a well-designed system could offer a complete sustainable technology hub for small to medium sized towns.

Green Stimulus or Simulus?

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Report out a few days ago from Greenpeace and the New Economics Foundation. Pertinent statistics include:

• New and additional green spending included in the green stimulus package of the government’s Pre-Budget Report (PBR) is astonishingly small compared to other recent spending commitments, at just 0.6% of the UK’s £20bn recovery plan. This key element makes up just 0.0083% of UK GDP, but in the wake of the banking crisis nearly 20% of UK GDP has been provided to support the financial sector.

• New and additional green measures could save just 0.128 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) per year from the atmosphere and will only delay the accumulation of UK carbon emissions by six and a half hours by the end of 2011.

• Just over £100m is being allocated to spending that is genuinely new and additional; this is a fraction – less than 13% – of the annual bonus package given to staff at the failed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) which is estimated at approximately £775m. £100m represents just 0.0083% of UK GDP. Estimates for necessary new annual spending on environmental economic stimulus and transformation range from £11bn to £50bn.

• Figures from HSBC and the IMF indicate that among the major economies, the greater the proportion of GDP spent on bailing out banks coincides with a lower proportion spent on green stimuli.
  

• Several of the government’s measures are, in fact, in conflict with the environmental stimulus. By comparison with the new and additional spending of the PBR’s green stimulus, £2.3bn – around 22 times – has been put aside to assist the car industry. If spent on energy efficiency measures this would save about 3 MtCO2 annually.

• £27m has been put aside specifically for development of a new Land Rover vehicle, the Land Rover Group are one of the most climate-unfriendly manufacturers in Europe. The potential CO2 savings of the proposed vehicle have not been specified. This is not encouraging, particularly given that this financial support is likely to delay a shift to greater use of public transport and that historically much of the gain in efficiency in vehicles has been negatively counter-balanced through a gain in weight of the vehicle concerned.

• There has been a further commitment to spend on building 520 lane miles of road expansion. Research indicates that the provision of new lanes leads to relative increases of between 30 and 50% in the number of vehicle miles travelled on that road – in other words, more car use. This happens due to the phenomenon known as induced traffic: building new roads merely encourages more traffic.

There's another report from Greenpeace detailing how investment in an energy-efficiency programme to insulate public buildings and private homes could generate 55,000 jobs, reduce expenditure on energy consumption and bills and reduce carbon emissions.


What's the betting the government fails utterly to address any of these points?

biofuels

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Professor John Pickett FRS:



The Royal Society conducted a review last year of sustainable biofuel technology.

Marc Jacobson is super-awesome

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Word!

"Putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles, and transmission lines would not only create jobs but also reduce costs due to healthcare, crop damage, and climate damage – as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power,"

Energy & Environmental Science

energy insight

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Greenpeace published a review they commissioned on the 2020 renewable generation target. Its got some interesting bits, chief among which is that we won't be experiencing blackouts any time soon, despite what the tabloids say. What it does propose is the eminently sensible idea of a long-range plan for building renewable capacity to replace retiring generation and the establishment of just exactly what comprises "security of supply".

free electricity across the globe

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Its called Enhanced Geothermal Systems. Check it out. The MIT report is a big download (pdf). Table 9.8 gives the cost of electricity generated from EGS to be $0.05kWh to $0.074kWh. That's pretty fucking cheap.

Pure Energy Systems Wiki

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If you're as fascinated by renewable generation as I am then you should love this Wiki. I found my way there through their algal biofuels page, which is awesome!

new wave powered generation technology

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PFC.

(PFC = Pretty Fucking Cool).

DBERR report supports feed-in tariffs for microgeneration

I don't agree with microgeneration- I'm into HVDC and supergrids- but its a step in the right dorection. I can't wait to see the government eat its own words on TV. This report advocates feed-in tariffs, which microgeneration advocates have been screaming for for years.

An interesting point is made clear in the final paragraph of the report:

"The report offers a very different future, as do the Tories, who see microgeneration as central to their philosophy of redirecting power to individuals. David Cameron sees "decentralised energy" as "a key part of our political vision, energy for the post-bureaucratic age". He believes microgeneration could make Britain, and individual communities, "self-sufficient in energy"."

Here we see the Tories passing the buck of energy poverty neatly onto the free market. Those who can't afford electricity through the grid are hardly going to be able to install the several-thousand pounds worth of PV panels, micro-hydro, wind turbines, current inverters and battery arrays necessary to become energy-independent. Instead the rich fuckers are going to be doing this in droves as grid electricity spirals up and up in cost, leaving the rest of us to resort to reducing our own consumption.

interesting renewable generation factoid

According to Caroline Lucas, research shows that wind energy creates over 2000 jobs per terawatt of energy produced, compared to just 75 for nuclear.

I'd be very interested to find that research. A quick google failed to produce anything tangible.

novel renewable generation technology

This is subscription only but it looks awesome so I have pasted the full text of the article in here:

"Whirlpools created by currents as they flow over obstacles are powerful enough to tear apart bridges and offshore rigs. So why not use them as a source of renewable power?

Previous attempts to harness energy from the flow of the world's rivers and oceans have had limited success, at best. Tidal flow can only be tapped at certain times of day, while underwater turbines are only viable if they are mounted in rapid currents.

Now researchers led by Michael Bernitsas at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, are preparing for the first outdoor trials of a technology that makes use of the slow-moving currents down rivers and across the ocean.

When water flows over an underwater obstacle, whirlpools or vortices form alternately above and below it. The vortices create a tugging effect, so the result is an alternating force that yanks the object up and down (see Diagram). It is these oscillations that can have devastating consequences for rigs and bridges, but Bernitsas has now created a device that turns them into usable amounts of electricity.

In his lab, he took a cylinder 10 centimetres in diameter and 91 centimetres long with the same average density as water and suspended it horizontally in a bath. Then he generated currents of between 0.5 and 1.0 metres per second - speeds that are common in rivers. The vortices generated by the flow moved the cylinders up and down, and by attaching the cylinders to springs that turn an electric generator he was able to convert the motion into 10 watts of electrical energy. Bernitsas calls the technology Vortex Induced Vibrations Aquatic Clean Energy, or VIVACE, and plans to commercialise it with his company Vortex Hydro Energy.

He has also come up with an idea for squeezing more energy from VIVACE. At the Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering conference in Estoril, Portugal, in June this year, he will show how roughening the surface of the cylinders allows them to capture more energy. The idea was inspired by the fact that fish that use energy from vortices to help propel themselves forward also have rough skin.

VIVACE's big test will come next year, when the team plans to deploy a larger version in the Detroit river. They expect it to generate 3 kilowatts, enough to power lights on a nearby pier, and claim that still larger versions could produce megawatts of power at a cost of around 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. This would make it competitive with coal and gas-fuelled generators.

These projections are contested, however, by commentators who point out that the performance has yet to be tested in the fluctuating current of a real river. They also have doubts about the claimed cost of the power it produces, since it is not yet clear how much the system will cost to maintain. "It is very new and very different to existing devices," says Walter Musial of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. "There are a lot of questions still to be answered."

Q - Why isn't the government pushing this technology?

"Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, one of Britain's leading marine energy experts, estimates that the Pentland Firth alone could generate up to a quarter of Britain's electricity – more than is now being provided by all the country's nuclear power stations – making the channel between Orkney and the north Scottish mainland "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy.""

A - Because they're incompetent sociopathic wankers so wrapped up in their post-Imperialist ideological clusterfuck and in trying to convince themselves that the UK is still a world power that they are emotionally incapable of doing anything other than royally fucking other people's countries up at the expense of our own.

Word.

catastrophic wind turbine failure

Pretty cool.




I found it here. Sadly the chap appears to have posted it in association with negative comments about wind generation, emphasising that turbines can only generate within a given window of wind speed. As if that made climate change, rising fuel bills and energy insecurity worth tolerating.


Addition:

I am engaged in a dialogue with the blogger in question. Lets see if I can rescue him from his REN status.

German dreams

This is just plain awesome.

"Supergrid" gets thumbs up from industry

This concept has been developed twice before by thinktanks and now it is being vaunted by a commercial generator. Its a good thing to keep up your sleeve if you are confronted by a renewable energy nihilist who tries to tell you that renewables can't supply baseload capacity.

"Renewable Energy Nihilist". Nice.

RENs, I'll call 'em.

Like we didn't already know that renewable generation is completely cost effective

Some monkeys have done some sums and come up with a price to replace Europe's current electricity supply entirely with wind generation at a cost of £40 billion, plus the cost of a few thousand turbines. The plan can be made reality in 3-5 years, presenting an incredible opportunity to do something cost-effective and practical about the looming threat of climate change.

The UK government- the elite of climate change denialists- have, of course, declined to participate despite the increasingly unequivocal nature of the problem. This means that the government are actually acting against our interests, invalidating the reason for their existence. Do the public know this? Probably not. Too busy watching Ugly Betty or East Enders. Fuckers.

baseline data on output from renewable sources

This was distributed on the UK Green Party email list and looks to be an excellent source of information for anyone planning a renewable generation installation.

This is awesome ! !

Another way to harness intermittent renewable resources such as wind power and store it efficiently and vconveniently to cope with base load.

DEFRA: UK has a "good record" on tackling climate change

Yes, it sounds like a bad joke, I know.

Fuckers.

tidal power takes off

Tidal stream turbines- with a far smaller ecological impact than the vast tidal lagoon projects- are being installed in the irish sea.