The electric car for the rest of us...
This week US electric car pioneers Telsa announced their new model (the 'Telsa S') should top 250 to 300 miles on a full charge when it goes on sale later this year. Of course, the small print says.. with no head-wind, no aircon, windows closed, tyres correctly inflated and a brand new battery.
Even so, for a car in this class it is a technological breakthrough. But this comes at a hefty price tag of around $70,000. Would anyone, aside from a rich enthusiast, pay this much for a car that may just about get you from London to Birmingham and back?
Even with the high price tag there is cause of optimism as eventually all this technology will filter down to the rest of us. Perhaps.
So far, hybrids (normal petrol cars with a battery and electric motor) haven't proved to be massively economical offering around 70mpg. The first batch of European small electrics have been expensive and range constrained - often at less than 100 miles. As in many areas of energy storage, battery technology has not evolved to keep up. Lithium Polymer batteries, like those used by Tesla are still hugely expensive.
Enter the Fisker Karma... This American muscle car exhibits a very unique approach that seems to have been overlooked by many manufacturers. An all electric drive train with a small efficient petrol engine used purely to charge the battery pack. The Fisker turns the hybrid concept on its head but is a pure 400hp sports car intended for fun, but still achieves 300miles range with a claimed 120mpg.
Its long been known that around 70% of the energy released in burning petrol is lost as heat. A further 10% can be lost in the drive train, leaving around 20% to actually propel the vehicle. Diesel engines on the other hand can reach thermal efficiencies of 50%.
So our concept for an affordable transitional vehicle would be this:
- Mid-size people carrier (eg Ford C-Max)
- all electric 100hp drive train
- high efficiency 1ltr diesel generator
- 100 miles of all electric driving range extended to 400miles+
- Combined 200mpg+
It's possible that this car could already be on someone's drawing board... we hope so!
Open letter to PM from Caroline Lucas
by Caroline Lucas MP
Dear prime minister,
I welcome the fact that, after almost two years in power, you used the recent Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) event to finally indicate the level of your commitment to creating an urgently needed green economy.
It was encouraging to hear you acknowledge that the main cause of recent energy bill hikes has been rising gas prices – not green policies, as many in your party and your government seem intent on claiming.
Indeed, since you were elected as prime minister, a yawning gulf has emerged in the government over key energy and climate change policies and, as you will know, there is widespread concern that this is proving disastrous both for our economy and our environment.
I share these concerns.
Since the CEM was a high-level ministerial event, attended by energy ministers from 23 different countries, I would have expected the prime minister of what aspires to be the "greenest government ever" to make far more of this opportunity.
It was an ideal chance to show real ambition for our trailblazing renewables sector and champion the potential for building a resilient economy through investment in tackling climate change, as well as addressing fuel poverty.
Instead your remarks were short on real content and commitment. They revealed poor leadership, poor understanding of the risks of climate change and a poor grasp of the opportunities afforded by renewables and energy efficiency.
You have confirmed that your government believes the UK should remain addicted to gas and fossil fuels. Given the huge potential of our national renewables and energy efficiency sectors to provide secure and home grown clean energy for the future, and in particular our potential to become a world leader in marine renewables, this lack of vision is bad for the economy and bad for consumers.
I agree that renewables need to become financially sustainable. That is the purpose of providing public subsidies to new industries. But it is disingenuous to demand that renewables suddenly become financially sustainable at the same time as your government is indirectly subsidising the dirty fossil fuel industry to a tune of six times more than renewables.
Your weak position on our long term energy mix is ill-informed, will be costly to householders in future, and won't put our country on track to exploit the employment opportunities of a truly thriving renewables industry. Nor does your position recognise the need to cut carbon emissions in line with the science.
The Climate Change Act commits the UK to cutting carbon emissions reductions by 80% by 2050, but these are the wrong targets. They only give us a 50-50 chance of keeping climate change to below 2C.
Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, warns that "under current policies we estimate energy use and CO2 emissions will increase by a third by 2020, and almost double by 2050. This would probably send global temperatures at least 6C higher within this century."
Achieving a more secure, sustainable energy system, in line with the goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures to under 2C, is still possible but requires urgent action by the world's governments. And it requires honesty with the public about the risks of inaction to the economy, for example, to health, agriculture, food production, water resources, coastal flooding, and extreme weather events.
As prime minister, you can begin to make a real difference if you attend the Earth summit in Rio in June. Governments are currently failing to avert the prospect of catastrophic climate change, so the UK has an opportunity to lead by example on the world stage, starting by giving its backing to an EU target of at least 30% greenhouse gas reductions by 2020.
The scale and urgency of the threat of climate change demands national and international leadership of extraordinary boldness. It's time for you, who rebranded the Conservative party on the environment, to step up.
Yet we clearly need some better policies than those you are offering at the moment. Your government's nuclear policy is tatters – you pledged not to spend public money on subsidising new nuclear, yet it's clear that it cannot be built without state aid. The huge costs and liabilities involved in nuclear make it completely uneconomical, and it certainly won't deliver energy security or emission reductions in the timescales required. Meanwhile, carbon capture and storage remains little more than a pipe dream, and the era of cheap fossil fuels is over.
So here are five measures that would help, and should have been in your speech:
Instead of saying yes to shale gas exploration, the government must declare a ban on all fracking. Serious questions remain over the impacts on groundwater pollution, health, air pollution, whilst the evidence indicates that the exploitation of shale gas is incompatible with tackling climate change. Moreover, since shale gas extraction will also divert investment away from renewables, the UK's potential reserves must be left in the ground.
A commitment that electricity market reform (EMR) legislation will be designed specifically to enable the development of various renewable energy technologies, rather than being written by and for the nuclear industry. Nuclear power has no place in a green energy future.
We need a road map to demonstrate how the UK's electricity sector will be virtually zero carbon by 2030, as recommended by the UK's own independent advisers on the Committee on Climate Change, and required to meet existing climate targets.
An end to subsidies to fossil fuels, and for the UK to show leadership on this internationally. The UK and other G20 leaders committed to this in 2009 and have done little since. The UK fossil fuel subsidy is estimated at £3.63bn in 2010, mostly in the form of VAT breaks and considerably more than the £1.4bn subsidy for renewable energy in the same year.
Reducing energy demand should be made a priority, both in the proposals for EMR and elsewhere across government policy making. Energy efficiency is the best way of keeping bills down, addressing fuel poverty and reducing the need for new energy supply of any kind, yet your speech yesterday was silent on the subject
These polices don't just make economic and environmental sense, they have public support too. A recent poll by YouGov revealed that 64% of people want their electricity 10 years from now to be sourced from renewable energy, while just 2% want more gas.
The climate crisis is real – so too is the economic one. That's why I am urging you to use the Queen's speech to announce legislative proposals that will help us overcome both, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, eliminating fuel poverty and reducing climate emissions – and sending a clear message to your party, to detractors in your government and to other leaders internationally.
I look forward to your response.
Yours sincerely,
Caroline Lucas MP
Brighton Pavilion, Green party
Published 30 April 2012
Is celebrity opinion worth a jot?
On a recent edition of the BBCs "The One Show" the veteran broadcaster and celebrity Janet Street Porter was given 5 minutes to voice her own very personal hatred for wind energy projects.
Of her three main objections: noise, cost/efficiency and visual impacts she had to concede defeat on all but one.
Visiting a large wind farm in Kent she admitted on camera they weren't actually very noisy at all. Very disappointing!
Next she said they are so costly and inefficient at over £1M each and only generating at a capacity of 25% - 30% and then was immediately shown to be wrong again. No machines are designed to run at 100% for prolonged periods and the "spare" capacity is also a function of life expectancy. The £400M given in subsidy to renewables also pales when compared to the vast amounts given to run the nuclear program and to clean up after it. Reluctantly Ms Porter conceded defeat yet again.
Which left her only one argument - they are ugly. That's a very subjective and personal opinion which she has every right to. There are however plenty who think the exact opposite.
So, how much should we care that "celebrities" use (or abuse) their position within society to push their own personal and sometimes prejudiced views upon the rest of us? In a balanced television debate should 5 whole minutes of prime time be given to such a personalised and non-informed view?
Of course it's ok to criticise renewable energy, but please let's have some well informed balance.
Top climate scientist warns on "climate denial"
by Michael Mann
As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked, politicians have demanded I be fired from my job, and I’ve been subject to congressional and criminal investigations. I’ve even had death threats made against me. And why? Because I study climate science and some people don’t like what my colleagues and I have discovered. Their attacks on scientists are part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged in a cynical effort to discredit climate science.
My work first appeared on the world stage in the late 1990s with the publication of the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which featured what is now popularly known as the hockey-stick graph. Using what we call proxy data – information gathered from records in nature, like tree rings, corals, and ice cores – my co-authors and I pieced together the puzzle of climate variability over the past 1,000 years. What we found was that the recent warming, which coincides with the burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution, sticks out like the blade of an upturned hockey stick.
By itself, this finding didn’t indicate that humans were solely responsible for the warming, but it was a compelling demonstration that something unusual was happening and, by inference, that it was probably related to human activity. Over the last few decades, the evidence, based on work from thousands of studies, has become much more robust and conclusive.
Nevertheless, our graph depicting the anomalous warming trend became an icon in the climate-change debate. Since then, I’ve found myself a reluctant, and almost accidental, public figure in the larger discussion about human-caused climate change.
Being caught in the middle of this “debate” has given me an opportunity to talk about the stark reality and dimensions of the problem. As the staid scientific journal Nature put it, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the accepted scientific evidence, and we must fight back against the disinformation that denies this real and present danger to the planet.
Make no mistake: Skepticism is fundamental to good science. Whenever a conclusion is drawn or a proposition is made, the demand that it stand up to scrutiny is the self-correcting machinery that drives us towards a better understanding of the way the world works. In this sense, every scientist should be a skeptic. Good science responds to good faith challenges, and to contradictory evidence that is presented, and climate-change science should be no different.
Unfortunately, many of the people who call themselves climate skeptics and have attacked my work and the work of my colleagues are not really skeptics at all, but climate contrarians or climate deniers. Their skepticism only runs one way – against studies that point to the reality of a changing climate. They dispute evidence with the flimsiest of arguments, which don’t stand up to the least bit of scientific scrutiny. A recent attack on NASA’s climate scientists by people, including some astronauts, with little to no expertise in climate scienceis a powerful case in point.
With the help of well-oiled politicians, ill-equipped and often complicit media outlets, and vested interests like the fossil-fuel industry, climate deniers have tried to portray the evidence for human-caused climate change as some house of cards – a hoax that’s teetering on a single hockey-stick graph. In reality, the evidence for human-caused climate change is more like a vast puzzle, a few pieces of which come from paleoclimate data like what my colleagues and I studied in our hockey-stick paper.
The climate-change policy debate is often framed purely as a question of science. Science is a necessary part of the debate, but the question of when, how, and if we adapt to climate change and reduce the emissions that drive it is also a necessary part of the debate, and must be informed by economics, politics, and ethics.
By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing much of the carbon that had been buried in the earth over the eons into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and other gases. Those gases are acting like a heat-trapping blanket around the planet.
If we continue down this path, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet – one with more widespread drought and flooding, greater competition for diminishing water and food resources, and national-security challenges arising from that competition.
As a father of a six-year-old daughter, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to make sure that she doesn’t look back and ask why we left her generation a fundamentally degraded planet relative to the one we started with.
There’s a tendency for people to be so overwhelmed by the challenge and the threat of climate change that they go from concern to despair. They shouldn’t. While some warming is already locked in, there’s still time to turn the ship around. We can still limit our emissions in the decades to come in a way that prevents some of the most serious impacts of climate change from occurring.
The worst thing we can do is bury our heads in the sand and pretend that climate change doesn’t exist. We can, and should, have the worthy debate regarding what to do about it –a discussion that is sorely needed – from Washington to Beijing and back again.
Michael E. Mann is a member of the Pennsylvania State University faculty, holding joint positions in the Departments of Meteorology and Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with other scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He recently published a book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” describing his experiences at the center of the climate change debate.
HM Gov burnt £700M loosing solar pv court case
Rumour has is that the total cost for the Governments failed attempt to re-instate the illegal cuts to the Solar PV feed-in-tariff could amount to £700M. The Supreme Court dismissed the Government appeal in March 2012.
Given the 2010/11 budget for the entire FITs scheme was only £867M this appears to be a massively expensive "own goal".
In the meantime many installers are reporting a 95% drop in installations since the start of April.
For a fraction of the £850bn spent on bailing out the banks, free solar panels could have been installed on every suitable household roof in the country. This would have done away with the need for the solar pv feed-in-tariff and created tens of thousands of jobs in the process.
The science of denial
Watching Horizon on BBC2 last night it became clear why the Climate Change deniers have such an easy time of things, compared say to the scientists struggling to warn us of impending peril.
In the programme entitled Out of Control, cutting edge research into how our behaviour is largely dictated by the sub-concious included an intriguing experiment. Participants were given a set of 80 questions asking them to predict the chances of them suffering everything from a broken arm to cancer. After each question the participant was given the actual statistical probability which in some cases was higher and in others lower. Finally the entire set of questions were repeated and the participant allowed to adjust their previous answers.
The results were stunning... overwhelmingly participants would revise down their answers where they had overestimated, but NOT where they had underestimated. The conclusion being that we sub-consciously filter out information we do not like.
Further proof that we are less in control of our minds that perhaps we would like came from an experiment where individuals were asked to simply chase and catch a small remotely operated helicopter darting around in a random flight pattern while wearing a head-mounted video camera. Each was asked to describe the strategy they had adopted and unsurprisingly each sounded very different. Until that is, the recorded videos were analysed and it became evident that despite the strategy each participant thought they had used... they had all done exactly the same thing: moving about to keep the helicopters flight path appear straight relative to their own position.
Of course none of this should be any surprise. We eat food that we know is unhealthy, drink alcohol, smoke, drive fast cars and... well you know the rest.
So even after being presented with evidence as compelling as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth which predicts a fairly bleak future unless we make radical changes, most completely normal people will simply choose to carry on as normal. This not because they do not care, or do not take the subject very seriously.. but because sub-consciously deciding to change your life to save the planet is a mental leap that few are able to make. Add to this the tendency for herd behaviour and you arrive at where we are today with any trivial doubt, piece of misinformation or junk science that the deniers can throw in the public domain re-enforcing the sub-concious desire to ignore bad news, not to stand out and stick to what has worked previously.
And this is the other non-surprise; for as long as we've understood herd behaviour, others have become skilled shepherds. Take for the example, the junk science published for decades on behalf of the tobacco industries. By spreading just enough F.U.D (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) it was possible for the sub-concious to discard the bad news that smoking does, indeed kill. This made a lot of money, but sadly continues to kill around 100,000 people in the UK every year.
Perhaps the debate needs to be reversed, turn Climate Change into a good news story.... after-all, a good many properties that are currently 5-10 miles inland could become prime seafront real estate by the end of this century.
Somehow we think this approach is not likely to work. So we will have to wait for a seismic shift in the public sub-concious before any serious attempts to tackle Climate Change can begin. Let's hope it doesn't come too late.
MIT develops 230% efficient LED
Yes that's right.. 230%. This new type of LED emits more light energy than the corresponding electrical energy it consumes.
Magic?
No.... Endothermic. As researchers drove the input voltages lower and lower they discovered the new design of LED gets colder and colder and starts to absorb heat energy from its surroundings. From 30 picowatts of electrical power the new design is able to emit 69 picowatts of light.
Whether this can be scaled up for general usage remains to be seen, however its an exciting development that will have many applications in low power electronics, for example ultra low power computer displays.
Hello, we're back
UPDATE: Spoke too soon! There are still issues with the distgen.com domain. Distgen.co.uk is functioning correctly.
The distgen.com and www.distgen.co site is now back up and running again after yesterdays technical glitch.
Our apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced by the downtime.
1000's of new jobs at risk after Tory attack on wind
The Guardian on Sunday reported that thousands of new jobs and over £500m of foreign investment is on hold after the Tory 'Green Revolt' from a few weeks ago.
In addition, proposals to reduce Feed In Tariffs and previous cuts to the value of certificates awarded under the Renewables Obligation have added to the financial uncertainty.
As a result, proposed new developments including factories and R&D plants from several major manufacturers are now at risk pending reassurance from the Government that they are not back tracking on previous commitments to a low carbon economy.
General Electric. £100m manufacturing plant "on hold"
Vestas. £???m. 2,000 jobs in a new Kent factory. "waiting to see"
Siemens. £210m + 700 jobs. "significant lack of enthusiasm"
Mitsubishi. £30m in R&D. "Commitment from Government is vital"
Well done Tories.
Oil from tar sands = eco disaster
As the world moves inexorably closer to the end of the oil age, new and environmentally disastrous forms of oil extraction that were previously unthinkable... are now reality.
Garth Lenz speaks passionately about the risks to the one of the worlds largest carbon sinks in Alberta, Canada. What happens there will have direct affects on the rest of the world.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84zIj_EdQdM]