The energy question [purplecthulhu]

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ElReg has a long but rather interesting report on what happens when hard numbers are put to the future of energy production in the UK. The conclusions are interesting, both in terms of what can and can't be done, and in terms of what's likely.

I won't say anything here immediately about the conclusions. I'll let you go away and read the article and then we can discuss it in the comments.

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There are 20 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I don't buy it. The point about turning off the standby functions is that that is _wasted_ energy - energy that needs to be created and transported... for no better use than a little less fuss when you switch on the TV. And it's not just the one act, but many, and many wasteful things are not identified.

The other thing is that once you start being energy aware, you don't stop. You isolate your hot water heater, buy energy efficient fridges, turn the central heating down when not in use, and, and, and.

I am always sceptical about calculations that show that we *need* a certain amount of energy, because there is abundant evidence - not just green daydreams, practical evidence - that most of those needs can be radically reduced if not eliminated alltogether. And I find it much more productive to concentrate on what you can do rather than proving that whatever you do doesn't make much difference.

Check here for more information on chargers and the like.

Yes, every little helps, but we can't eliminate dependency on large scale energy generation using fossil fuels or nuclear without very large changes to lifestyle which most people would probably find unacceptable. And we also need to eliminate fossil fuel use for transport which will be even harder.

How much energy use do you think can be eliminated by efficiency measures? Remember, In the UK 50% of the energy usage per person is not under their individual control. It's offices, factories, shops, schools, goods transport etc.. Take that %age and then look at the rest of the article for how it might be produced. And remember that in Europe, lagged water heaters, efficient fridges, insulated homes are already much more common than in much of the US, so we've already made those savings.

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Hm. I haven't done the measurements on the charger, but mine gives off a fair amount of heat, so it's obviously drawing *something* - and the point is, it costs me two seconds to plug or unplug it. So however much or little energy it uses, (and it will cost more to generate the energy that is actually consumed at the outlet in my home), it's *wasted*.

And I don't just own one gadget that draws power without doing anything, I own five or ten.

we can't eliminate dependency on large scale energy generation using fossil fuels or nuclear without very large changes to lifestyle

Can't we? We haven't even started to try, so don't tell me it can't be done. I've been watching some of the developments in Germany, where you get community-based projects, which seem a good compromise between the need for the individual housholder to generate their own, and country-wide electricity generation. (My state of disorganisation sadly means I don't have the links at my fingertips.)

And even though you or I might not be controlling much energy consumption, *someone* is controlling it, and that someone is usually able and willing to react to public pressure. Public awareness (plus the need to save money) will go a long way towards become greener and more energy efficient. At one of my previous workplaces, certain jobs used to be done in the unheated warehouse, with inefficient space heaters. This left the employees grumpy and the electricity bills high. By clearing space in an unused (but heated) stockroom, energy consumption was driven down considerably.

As for goods transport, all of us can make an effort to buy local food. Doens't always work, but why should I buy milk imported from Germany when I can have British milk? Or even milk from my region of the UK? Some of those food miles *are* my responsibility if I am not aware. And it doesn't change my lifestyle any more than not bringing home tons of superfluous packaging has impeded the lifestyle of Germans. (Packaging laws that mean that the producer has to deal with the rubbish, plus the happyness of everybody to leave said superfluous packaging in the shops brought a change very quickly...

The longer we pretend that nothing we do will have any effect, the worse things will get.

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Community generation - yes, good, you get hot water as well as power. Certainly more efficient, but many of these are based on fossil fuels or wind which is already discussed in the report.

There are certainly things we can learn from elsewhere, and the German approach to packaging is one of them (I lived there for 2 years so have seen it in action). [They can also learn from us about some things, like avoiding fruit and veg rotting in the shops, but that's another issue.]

My optimistic guess is that we might be able to cut energy consumption by about 50% through all of the methods you discuss. That just makes the problem half as big for the UK. So you can go to the rest of the report and make the demands half the size. But if you want to move from guesswork to something more solid you'd need to make quantitative plans for how that 50% is to be saved. How are you going to make the vast bulk of existing UK housing stock more energy efficient, for example? How does the cost etc. of that compare the the cost of building new generating capacity? In hard numbers?

However, all of this pales into insignificance when you realize we have the best part of 2 billion people aspiring to our levels of material affluence and energy consumption in India, China and the rest of the developing world...

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You seem to have missed the entire point of the book and the article, which is to look at the numbers. If you want to claim that banning standby on appliances, or "community-based" projects, or buying local food, can have a worthwhile impact, then give us the numbers to go with those claims. If you don't have any numbers, then you're just guessing, which is not a good basis for our future energy policy.

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Local food isn't the angel it is made out to be (at least not as it is currently distributed). Most of the energy wastage in this case comes from cooking and storage.

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I haven't done the measurements on the charger, but mine gives off a fair amount of heat, so it's obviously drawing *something* - and the point is, it costs me two seconds to plug or unplug it. So however much or little energy it uses, (and it will cost more to generate the energy that is actually consumed at the outlet in my home), it's *wasted*.

Er, no. Let's take it from the top:

You'd be surprised how little power it takes to keep a small transformer warm; a couple of watts will do it, over time, because they've got chunky lumps of metal inside that hold heat efficiently, and they don't get hot enough to dissipate it through air convection -- so contact with your hand is the most effective way of cooling them. Typically we're talking 2-5 watts.

Now. Let us consider that there are about 15 million households in the UK. Let us postulate that each household contains no less than twenty such wall-warts or gizmos with a standby mode that could stand to be unplugged. How much juice can we save?

Five watts each, multiplied by twenty, gives us 100 watts per household -- a single incandescent light bulb's worth. Multiply by 15 million houses and we have 1.5Gw, the output of a full-sized coal fired power station. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

However: the UK's total power generation capacity is 40-60Gw (it varies over time), with a base load of roughly 40Gw. The base load is the power it takes to keep the country running all the time -- permanent power draw, basically. The best case for everyone turning off all their standby-mode devices all the time is a saving of 3% of the nation's base load. But in practice, those devices are going to be in use for quite a lot of the time, so the real saving will be considerably less.

Meanwhile, electricity generation is only about 30-40% of the country's energy budget -- it has virtually no impact on transport (only about 33% of the railway network is currently electrically powered). So we've saved, at best 1% of our total power consumption, and probably a lot less.

Now, as for the human cost of the plugging/unplugging gizmos, which doesn't get treated in most such analyses ...

It takes me 10 seconds to bend down and unplug a wall wart including the time to walk to the room it's in and identify it. It takes me the same time to plug it in again. Assuming one switch off/switch on cycle per day per wall wart, it therefore should take a household with ten of the things (see the normative assumptions above) 200 seconds per day, or just over 3 minutes. Multiply by 15 million for the participating households, and the human effort of doing this thing is 3 billion seconds per day, or about 90 man-years, spread across the nation. Valuing each person-year at a notional £20,000, each day we do this it costs us £1.8M, or two working lives. Another way of looking at it; using this costing technique, we lose 700 productive working lives per year, or the equivalent of £1.4 Billion in worker-productivity for the time spent turning wall warts on and off.

In other words, it's a lot cheaper just to buy another nuclear power station and forget about it.

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You may think I'm being unfair. Why not put all the wall warts in a house on one power block with a single switch, making it easy to turn them on and off? Well then, we reduce the cost by an order of magnitude. But it's still the same as the cost of a new nuclear power station, amortized over 7-8 years (rather than the 40-50 year running life of the plant.)

The "unplug your standby gizmos" movement is a superstitious ritual, not a practical measure to reduce the nation's carbon emissions. It will in any case be obsolete in the next few years, as gizmos with really low energy standby modes are mandated by law -- so you'd be saving milliwatts rather than whole watts.

Back during the second world war, there was a drive in the UK to strip out railings and send pots and pans to metal works to be melted down and turned into weapons. It was seen as a patriotic duty; if you had railings outside your home, you weren't doing your bit for the war effort. (The only exception was where they were really essential to keep people from falling down stairs or other holes in the ground.) Did this actually help the war effort? No it didn't; the total weight of railings and pans melted down for scrap probably wouldn't have built a single cruiser. But they kept doing it anyway, because it made people feel as if they were contributing and helping deal with the national emergency.

Turning off gizmos on standby mode is in the same league as sending your kitchenware to be melted down to make tanks; it's silly.

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I think the argument is almost the other way around - given that it's so difficult to persuade people to do the really painless no-brainer stuff like unplugging chargers and turning off the lights, how the hell are you going to stop them doing stuff they actually enjoy, like flying to New York to go shopping, or, on a smaller scale, having baths. I personally consider myself to be pretty green (by the low standards of carnivores admittedly) but when confronted by the green advice that I should turn the shower off whilst lathering up my hair and applying soap, and then turn it on again to rinse myself off, I said a very rude word.

I'm normally pretty optimistic about the changes in mind set that can be achieved by getting celebs to front "It's sexy to keep warm in a sweater!" campaigns, but the timescale (and political timidity) is such that it's important to think about how we can best replace fossil fuels as soon as possible, whilst simultaneously cutting down on use as much as possible.

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Quite... Or maybe I should say IAWTC

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On the other hand, advice to do the painless no-brainer stuff like unplugging chargers can be counterproductive, because it's easily shown to be nearly pointless, and other things get lumped in by association.

Giving people individually useful single tasks they can do (eg. do not make this flight. Yes, that specific flight that you were considering) is actually much more likely to produce good results than recommending general good practices, going by normal mass people-management guidelines. They'll do particular things, but plans that depend on changing human behaviour are just not going to work.

So the optimal solution would be to make all the energy-efficient technologies and methods the default. Overridable (I need incandescent bulbs for some applications, dammit), but the default, so people don't have to think.

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Which is where political timidity comes into it.

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Well, as an American energy hog, I can honestly say that I miss some of the most sensible things that help reduce energy use, like good water heaters (In my building, I have to run the water in my kitchen for almost 5 minutes to get it hot enough to wash dishes -- should I just heat some of it in the kettle?), public transport, radiant heating and rooms that can be shut off ...

I've been saying for a while that we need to go nuclear, and in a big way, with infrastructure designed for MOX and possibly more research into fast breeders. (The Pu fuel cycle can be made secure -- if we group the reactors that breed the fuel on the same sites as the reactors that burn it, and make defending them one of the primary tasks of the armed forces.)

Another issue: the radioactive waste disposal problem goes away if we can reach international agreements to put the waste depositories wherever it makes most sense, rather than insisting that they must go on the soil of the nation that produces the waste.

As for unplugging wall-warts? It's a bad idea. The energy you save is trivial compared to the energy costs incurred in manufacturing new wall warts to replace the small percentage of them that blow up when you power cycle them. Like most electronics, transformers and power supplies like to run at constant power the whole time -- whenever you flip the switch there's a small but finite probability that rather than switching on or off, it'll die. Turning them off saves a few watts per hour, but replacing them will consume megawatts (incurred in casting the iron core of the transformer, melting and refining the copper for the wires, etcetera.)

There's a lot of emotive crap in the whole "we must conserve power" debate; if you really want to save energy, just switch from having baths to showering (but not with a power shower), and heat your food with a microwave or gas-heated oven rather than a conventional one. Aaagh ...

I'm with the "turn the Sahara into a single solar panel" thinkers, because solar is the power which seems to be improving fastest and most consistently judging from my weekly skims of New Scientist.

But if it were that straightforward, you'd think that the Australians would be well on the way to doing it by now.

South of France and Spain could also do the job rather well...

What happened with that solar chimney that someone was meant to be building in Oz? There was a report on C4 news today implying that someone is planning a similar construction for the Battersea Power Station redevelopment. So has someone proved the concept and I haven't heard?

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Biofuels is the plan for Battersea I think - heaven knows where the 5th chimney fits in.

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It looked like a solar chimney to me, but maybe not. Any idea where I'd find out?

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searching on the BBC site gave me a story saying "biofuels", which backed up what I'd half heard on the news, but I can't find anything more specific.

Solar chimney seems extraordinarily unlikely (unfortunately cos it would be way cool).

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There's a large 'solar furnace' (solar-thermal) generation plant outside Seville at the moment - plans are afoot to build more/larger such units in the area.

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December