Saving money on charging

Last year I moved house and this year I replaced my Nissan Leaf with a VW ID.3. A good choice, newer – even though second-hand – and 200% more range. But it needed a different home charger – one with a type 2 connector. I’d been using an untidy lash-up so now I needed a real home charger.

There are lots of home chargers. They charge at up to 7kW and promise lots of advantages such as access to money-saving dynamic tariffs. But they cost £300 to £700. And then there’s installation cost. One electrician quoted £1,150 to install a new consumer unit, mine has no spare circuits, run a thick cable on a safe and inconspicuous route, tricky in my house, and connect the charger. Would it be worth it?

Some chargers do give access to EV-friendly tariffs that allow you to charge at low rates. But I estimated that EV charging would only be 10% of my power use and the tariffs I looked at would charge more than my current rate on the other 90%. So the total cost would be higher. Bad idea.

Which just leaves charging speed. At 7kW I could charge the ID.3 from 20% to 80% in about 6 hours. That’s nice but I rarely need to charge it that much as I generally keep it charged above 40%. When I do I can usually put it on charge the previous afternoon. So If I start charging at 6 pm and plan to leave next morning at 8 am I’ll have 14 hours to charge it. That’s more than enough to charge it from 20% to 80% or, more likely, from 40% to 100%.

So I just didn’t need an expensive charger but I did need something tidy. I employed an electrician to install an external three-pin socket on a spur from an existing ring main. He did a good job and charged £276. I bought a charging cable, cost £106, which is permanently plugged in and attached to the wall. Also a plastic holder for the connector on the cable, £14. Total cost £401. Saving £750.

So far it’s been easy to use, has charged at 3kW and has had zero faults. Why pay more?

Can renewables meet the need?

A recent tweet celebrated the supposed fact that at peak, recently, Germany derived 25% of its power from solar. The source given was data published by the Fraunhofer ISE at https://www.energy-charts.de/power_de.htm.  But is the claim true?

Actually no. The highest proportion in recent weeks was reached during August 2nd when a combination of low demand, low winds and strong sun produced about 56% of Germany's electric power from solar pv. A very good result - though obviously excluding fuels used for space heating, travel, etc.

But it's a power number - a measurement over a short time - specifically the middle of the day. There is no solar power at night and not much in the early morning and evening. A bit of rough analysis for a more representative day, 27 July in fact, shows that solar produced 22% of the power at peak but 10% of the day's energy. Extra investment in solar PV could increase the peak as much as you like - even to 100% - but that would still need over 50% of the energy to come from somewhere else (possibly wind or a storage system).

And this is mid summer.

A similar analysis for January shows a solar PV power peak of c8% but providing only c2% of the day's electricity. And the average over that week is much worse.

Is wind the answer? Sort of. Germany gets more energy from wind than from solar PV and it's available at night and in winter. But it's even less predictable than solar. At midnight on January 5th it provided just 3% of the needed electrical power.

Moreover periods of low wind can last for days - there was almost no wind for the whole seven days starting January 17th.

There are partial low-carbon solutions - nuclear, tidal, hydro, import of power from very large new solar farms in north Africa and various kinds of storage - but they all have their own problems.
Any responsible plan for our energy future must show how it would cope with periods like 17 to 14 January - and at what cost.

Peak mining

Mining is facing a crisis which will transform it and us. That’s the claim made by Simon Michaux  of the University of Queensland to a meeting in Adelaide.

Michaux bases his analysis on hard data. Since 1850 Population, per capita energy consumption and total energy consumption have all increased exponentially. We now use 8 times as much energy per person than in 1850. We are better off in many ways – almost all of which require energy and metals. And it is mining that produces coal and metals as well as diamonds and other gemstones.

So the demand has increased and this requires miners to dig and process more rock. And that just the start.

Mining is getting harder. Since 2002 the multifactor productivity index has decreased by 40% - it’s now at its lowest level for 35 years. That means that it takes 40% more resources – energy, water, labour – to produce one ton of useful material. That’s because everything is getting more difficult:

o   Discovery rates are falling; most new mining projects are expansions of existing mines.

o   We have to use poorer ores. For instance, copper ores used to contain 4% copper but now it’s no more than 0.6%. And it’s not just Copper. Michaux shows data for seven other metals and diamonds that tell the same story. This is no surprise. When it comes to minerals “no one is making them any more”.

o   The ores we do use are harder, which means the grinding process takes more energy. We have to process harder ores, demanding more energy.

o   The size to which the ore must be ground has also fallen, from 150 microns to typically 4 microns. So that also needs more energy – the energy needed increases exponentially as target size declines.

So the volume of rock to be processed and the required energy grow exponentially. This has been achieved through economies of scale. For the future the industry proposes to scale up and dig deeper.

Unfortunately there are a few problems with this. Energy production from all sources is expected to peak in 2017. The required water may not be available. Communities may recognise the harm caused by polluted air and water and prevent or restrict major developments.

And, says Michaux, there’s a further problem. The global crude oil market changed in about 1975. Prior to that production increased each year and the price rose slowly, reaching $50/barrel. After that production stagnated and the price rose sharply, reaching $147/barrel in 2008 – the start of the financial crisis.

The oil price needed to make exploration economic is now $100/barrel. But that’s also the price at which economic growth is difficult. Without growth there’ll be less demand for minerals.

And that will produce peak mining.

What will follow is less clear. Michaux foresees a big switch from extracting new material to “mining our rubbish tips”. He believes we will get there following a major geopolitical transformation somewhat as follows:

o   Mineral-rich countries demand an increased share of the minerals.

o   The money system become unstable.

o   Money-based international trade is replaced by large-scale barter with key decisions taken by the mineral-rich countries on the basis of utility not profit.

This is probably optimistic!

There’s a lot of good stuff here and it’s not stuff that environmentalists and climate change activists often talk about. But it should be.

Methane hydrates: Threat or promise?

Methane is a valuable fuel and a potent greenhouse gas. At low temperatures and high pressures it combines with water to make methane hydrates. There's a huge amount of the hydrates - perhaps twice as much as all other fossil fuel deposits - on the seabed - especially in the far north.

The obvious threat is that warming waters - those in the north are warming fastest - will destabilise the hydrates releasing vast amounts of methane and thus accelerating climate change. This is a particularly scary possibility for three reasons:

• It's a positive feedback loop. Once established it will probably overwhelm all the other mechanisms.
• The sea warms slowly and warming lags the relevant gas releases. 
• Hydrate deposits are poorly understood so we can't forecast how much methane will be released how soon. 

It's therefore possible that we have already released enough greenhouse gases to create catastrophic climate change. Most climate scientists think this unlikely; but the IPCC consensus has usually been over-optimistic.

Hydrates also have a promise. Methane is a very clean fuel and its extraction from hydrates will probably be an efficient process. IF we switched from coal and oil to methane and IF we could keep leakage well below 1% then we would reduce the greenhouse effect. It's no panacea but it would help a lot.

Those are big IFs. In practice new energy sources usually add to consumption. The US currently benefits from fracked methane but instead of closing coal mines it is exporting coal - much of it to Europe.

In a sane world hydrates might be an opportunity. In fact they remain a dreadful threat.

Good News 2: Recycling nuclear waste

Nuclear waste is nasty. It's poisonous and very long-lived. There isn't a whole lot of it compared, say, to spoil from coal mines, but it's a lot nastier. And there will be more, even if we build no more nuclear power stations.

Discussions so far have concentrated on surface storage followed, eventually, by disposal underground. There's an unsurprising reluctance by most people to have it stored under their ground. But is that the best we can do? Can it be reused or recycled?

Turns out we can do better - and there are several ways.

1. We can bombard the waste with high-speed neutrons from a particle accelerator. This causes the radioactive nuclei in the waste to split (fission) creating much shorter-lived elements. These are easier to deal with since we only have to store them safely for centuries, not millenia.
2. We can add Thorium to the waste before bombardment. The mix will then generate power much as a Uranium reactor does except that it will consume waste and will probably be safer.
3. We can design the reactor to create its own fast neutrons and omit the accelerator top get a new design of power-generating reactor.

Though the basic physics is well understood the engineering is not and it will take at least a decade, maybe two, to fix that. Perhaps they will never work.

But to know this we need research. The first accelerator-driven research reactor was commissioned in Tokyo in 2009 whilst Europe's own reactor, Guinevere, went live in Paris last January. Let's hope the problems can be solved. We badly need nuclear reactors that don't leave us with long-lived radioactive waste if we're to break our addiction to fossil fuels.

Fiddling the numbers

Background

The Coalition inherited a scheme under which energy companies were obliged to pay a 'feed-in tariff' (FIT) to anyone who installed solar photovoltaic panels (PV). For most of 2011 it was paid at 43.2p/kWh provided they didn't have more than 4kW of panels installed. However, and this made the scheme really attractive, the rate is indexed so it will rise each year in line with inflation. The money to pay the FIT is raised from energy consumers generally. It is not paid by government.

Last year the government started a consultation on reducing the FIT but cut the FIT before the consultation period had ended. This produced a great rush to install solar panels with 30,000 installations in the last week of the old tariff. That's six times as many as the previous rate.

The Court of Appeal held this hastiness to be wrong in law. The government appealed to the Supreme Court. It said it had made the appeal because delay would have cost energy consumers £1.5 billion over 25 years.

The first nonsense

£1.5 billion over 25 years is £60 million per year. That's a small sum by government standards. It's also only £1 per person per year - which is clearly trivial. So this cannot be the reason for cutting the FIT - particularly with such unseemly haste.

The second nonsense

Because the FIT is both paid by and paid to energy consumers this cannot be the net cost to consumers. There are administration costs which are a net burden on consumers but these should not be more than a few percent of the money that is collected and paid out.

Current episode

In February Caroline Lucas asked the government to state the assumptions used to create that figure. She got a reply from Gregory Barker, minister for climate change in the Department for Energy and Climate Change, on February 20th.

I wrote immediately to Barker challenging his figures and pointing out the second nonsense. In replying the Department for Energy and Climate Change addressed the detail inadequately but ignored the second point.

A further challenge by me under the Freedom of Information Act (the date was now April 13th) produced the reply that they would have to “extend the time limit for responding by 10 days because of the complexity of the request”. So, a calculation that was sufficiently solid to justify a ministerial reply to Caroline Lucas in February was not fit to show me in May.

Why am I not surprised?

Watch this space for more.

Energy use in the lifeboat scenario

This post now relates to a revised version of the Lifeboat scenario.

The lifeboat scenario is the least unpleasant of my three climate change scenarios. However, it will be extremely difficult to realize as can be seen by considering the central issue of energy use. Though the uncertainties are too great to say exactly what changes will be needed to keep the lifeboat afloat we’ll almost certainly need to act in at least four ways.

First we must improve our efficiency in using energy, eg by community heat and power schemes, better house insulation and more fuel-efficient cars. This ought to be the easiest option because in cutting energy use we also save money. If people, businesses and governments aren’t doing what’s needed – and they mostly aren’t – that’s because of inertia and a preference for short-term convenience over long-term savings. Information campaigns, carbon taxes and stricter standards can all drive savings here.

Second we must reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation by:

a) Introducing low-carbon sources of energy such as wind, tidal, solar and nuclear.

b) Adding carbon capture and storage facilities to gas, coal and oil-fired power stations.

These steps are expensive and some of the technologies are unproven at least on the scale required. Moreover the effects of making these changes will only be felt over many years but their impact is large.

Third, we must replace other uses of fossil fuels, eg petrol for cars, with low-carbon electricity. This probably means settling for some loss of performance and perhaps of comfort and safety (since comfort and safety often add weight thus increasing fuel consumption). However, a great deal of driving is short journeys in which comfort is secondary and high speed a positive disadvantage.

Fourth, we must reduce our total demand for energy-consuming goods and services. We must:

a) Do less of the things that consume energy, eg travel, especially by car and plane, and eating meat.

b) Replace the things we buy less often.

c) Reduce the world population.

Now, there should be something in this list to offend everyone! Why will we need to do all these things? Because it’s likely that by the time we get international action on climate change we will be approaching, or even past, the point at which positive feedback effects cut in to drive increasing temperature gain. Indeed, some experts, Prof. James Lovelock for one, think that we have already passed the tipping point. So we will not be able to organize a soft landing. We’ll have to use all the means we can find.

It’s entirely possible that all of the first four measures will be insufficient by the time we actually apply them. If so we’ll have to take actions of a fifth kind. That’s steps to effect the global climate directly, eg by using genetically engineering plankton to capture CO2 from the atmosphere or dispersing aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight.

Now I accept that the science is uncertain so perhaps we won’t have to treat this as a global emergency. But the lack of progress in addressing climate change and the track record of international institutions suggest that a pessimistic view is most likely to be correct. After all, if the nations can’t stop such visible horrors as the genocide in Darfur, how likely is it that they’ll take timely action on the infinitely harder and less visible problem of climate change?

The only safe assumption is that we’ll have to do all of these things is we are to avoid the horrors of the police world and Hobbes world scenarios.

And to do them requires both vigorous inter-governmental action and a major change in social attitudes. These are needed both to motivate governments to act and to make the costs and loss of goods and services acceptable.