Now, I must start by saying that I'd far far prefer renewable energy increases NOT to occur if it magically prevented further deaths in this dreadful epidemic. However simple analysis of trends does imply that renewable energy is likely, ceteris paribus, to increase as a proportion of UK electricity consumption from around 37% in 2019 to around 43% in 2020.
Why? Well a big factor here is that electricity consumption seems to be running around 10 per cent less than one would expect this time of year. If this only translates to around 5% over the whole of 2020, then, added to continued (on trend) declines in UK electricity consumption, and the effects of recent additions to renewable energy generation, then this will produce quite a big increase in the proportion of UK electricity from renewables during the year.
Of course even if there was no renewable energy installed this year (although I'm assuming about 20% of planned installations occur this year) we would still see an increase this year because the installations registered last year will not have been operating for the whole of 2019, whilst they will be available for operation the whole of 2020. (I'm also assuming that maintenance of existing electricity infrastructure is counted as an essential activity). So that adds 2-3 per cent onto the RE proportion on its own.
Electricity consumption has been declining for several years now of course, and declines in overall electricity consumption will increase the poportion supplied by renewable energy simply because the bulk of renewable energy will continue to generate whilst it will be fossil fuels that will be usually constrained because of declining consumption.
My assumptions are to a degree weather-dependent - eg they will go awry to the extent that this year isn't as windy as last year, and to a lesser extent if it isn't very sunny.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/covid-19-drives-down-demand-as-lockdown-affects-usage-patterns
Sunday 29 March 2020
Saturday 28 March 2020
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/moscow-motorway-is-new-chernobyl-m3k3hx62n
https://www.newsweek.com/moscow-radiation-uranium-highway-chernobyl-1466880
https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/radioactive-waste-and-spent-nuclear-fuel/2011-06-comment-radioactive-dump-in-moscow-a-ten-year-history-of-reckless-procrastination
Sunday 22 March 2020
Why using hydrogen to supply heating would be a terrible choice
The natural gas industry is now campaigning to save its business by extolling the alleged virtues of converting gas heating to supply by 'blue' hydrogen. This blue hydrogen production would be done using natural gas to produce the hydrogen whilst capturing and storing carbon dioxide produced in the process. But this is a facade that will delay transition to a sustainable clean energy economy and waste renewable energy into the bargain.
Blue hydrogen is
not a substitute for energy from renewable energy. Even if the hydrogen was sourced from renewable energy (and not much of it will be) the result would be a grandiose waste of renewable energy. This is because using hydrogen from renewable energy to heat buildings is around four
times less energy efficient compared to using heat pumps (using renewable
electricity) to supply heating in buildings.
The gas industry's plan is to start off with blue hydrogen, after which at an unspecified period this would be replaced by green hydrogen generated from renewable energy like wind or solar. There are three big reasons why hydrogen in general is a bad choice for our heating networks.
First, carbon capture, in the blue hydrogen production process, is unlikely to be close enough to
100 per cent because carbon extraction processes become more and more expensive
the higher the proportion of carbon is captured (over 85 per cent).
In practice, of course, the carbon capture will probably not even be 85% as the gas industry seeks to produce hydrogen at a low commercial costs and tries to absorb the many infrastructural costs of changing the system to hydrogen. These are rather greater than the gas industry is letting on at the moment since hydrogen will need to be distributed differently compared to natural gas at present.
Second, such a programme will provide support for a continued fossil fuel industry
(including unabated methane leakage from extraction activities). The industry
will include the possibility (read near-certainty) of production that is not subject to carbon
capture and storage. There is then the issue of monitoring and accountability
over the extent to which the carbon is stored in a sustainable fashion. These are likely to be lacking.
The reality is that 'blue hydrogen' in the UK will be used to develop new natural gas fields that will only be economic if they carry on supplying large quantities of unabated natural gas to other parts of the world.
A third reason why 'blue hydrogen' is bad is that using 'blue' hydrogen, in as much as it succeeds in paving the way for supply of renewable hydrogen, will lock in a huge wastage of renewable energy compared to using this renewable energy much more efficiently.
On the one hand the electrolysis process by which renewable energy is converted to hydrogen is only 80 per cent efficient. That is bad enough since using renewable electricity to supply heating would not involve these losses. However things get a lot lot worse when you realise that the best way of suppling heating in efficiency terms is through electrically powered heat pumps. These use the renewable energy input some 3-4 times more efficiently to produce the same heat compared to heating by 'green' (renewable) hydrogen. We're going to need a lot of of offshore windfarms and solar farms already, so using renewable hydrogen when you could be using heat pumps supplied by renewable energy is a big, big waste of renewable energy.
We ought to focus on electrifying the heating system, not locking it in to hydrogen. New build properties can be built to maximise energy efficiency and using heat pumps to supply what should be a much-reduced need for heating services. Existing buildings can be heated with district heating supplied by large scale heat pumps, or at worst converted to electricity-only heating, or preferably fitted with heat pumps.
Hydrogen has its purposes, but heating buildings is not a good purpose. So all those green anti-nuclear activists who have for many years been thinking that hydrogen is a good way of using renewable electricity for heating should think again. Far from helping towards a renewable energy economy they may actually be inadvertently promoting demands for nuclear power since they will be increasing the need for non-fossil fuels to supply all the hydrogen needed for the heating sector. Green energy involves energy efficiency as well as green energy supply, and blue and even green hydrogen should be ruled out as a means of heating buildings.
Wednesday 18 March 2020
Sunday 8 March 2020
What's especially shocking about the coronavirus outbreak in Italy - a lack of testing
The news from Italy today is especially tragic given that the daily death toll rose to 133. But there's something that makes this look even more awful - and that's the very high ratio between deaths and confirmed cases in Italy. This suggests that a large proportion of the C virus cases in Italy have not been discovered - and therefore that the fact that the outbreak is, currently, dangerously out of control is related to this lack of discovery. This may well signal a very big lack in testing for infection in Italy, if not elsewhere.
In fact, according to the official statistics the fatality rate of confirmed cases in Italy, at 5 per cent, is rather higher than than the fatality rate of China, which is 3.8 per cent. Indeed the death rate among Italian cases appears to be getting higher.
Now, once one has excluded the possibility that the virus circulating in Italy is more virulent that the one circulating in China (elsewhere in Europe the death rate is much smaller than in Italy, so this seems unlikely) the one very concenring conclusion is that a very large proportion of the C virus cases in Italy have not been discovered. This has serious implications for controlling the spread of infection. The difference between the death rate in Italy and China may be partly or wholly concerned with the significantly higher average age of people in Italy compared to China. However, even if this explains all of the difference (I would be surprised if it did), Italy (and most other countries to a greater or lesser extent) are still falling well short of 'best practice' in testing, which is set by South Korea at the moment.
If we want to look for a country where a comprehensive testing programme has been conducted, we should look at South Korea. There has been a similar number of confirmed cases in S. Korea as in Italy. However, whilst, as of February 8th, there were 266 deaths in Italy, there were only 50 deaths in South Korea. Again, if we dismiss the idea that there is a different virus circulating in one of the two countries we can only assume that the death rate compared to confirmed infections is, using the S. Korean statistics, around 0.7 per cent.
The South Korean figures (garnered as a result of mass, often random, testing, as opposed to the much more apparently limited Italian testing) offer a little crumb of comfort in that the death rate is lower than some fears. However it also highlights the yawning likely gap between Italian official data and the much larger likely scale of the epidemic in Italy.
People have been discussing the implications of the rapidly increasing scale of the outbreak in Italy, but one lesson seems obvious to me. There needs to be a big increase in testing, most of all in Italy, but also in all other countries. If you don't know who has the disease, you don't know who their contacts are, and you cannot easily close off the disease.
Michel Foucault said that 'power is knowledge'. He is certainly right there, and at the moment we do not have nearly enough of the knowledge that is gained through testing
Source of medical data
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
In fact, according to the official statistics the fatality rate of confirmed cases in Italy, at 5 per cent, is rather higher than than the fatality rate of China, which is 3.8 per cent. Indeed the death rate among Italian cases appears to be getting higher.
Now, once one has excluded the possibility that the virus circulating in Italy is more virulent that the one circulating in China (elsewhere in Europe the death rate is much smaller than in Italy, so this seems unlikely) the one very concenring conclusion is that a very large proportion of the C virus cases in Italy have not been discovered. This has serious implications for controlling the spread of infection. The difference between the death rate in Italy and China may be partly or wholly concerned with the significantly higher average age of people in Italy compared to China. However, even if this explains all of the difference (I would be surprised if it did), Italy (and most other countries to a greater or lesser extent) are still falling well short of 'best practice' in testing, which is set by South Korea at the moment.
If we want to look for a country where a comprehensive testing programme has been conducted, we should look at South Korea. There has been a similar number of confirmed cases in S. Korea as in Italy. However, whilst, as of February 8th, there were 266 deaths in Italy, there were only 50 deaths in South Korea. Again, if we dismiss the idea that there is a different virus circulating in one of the two countries we can only assume that the death rate compared to confirmed infections is, using the S. Korean statistics, around 0.7 per cent.
The South Korean figures (garnered as a result of mass, often random, testing, as opposed to the much more apparently limited Italian testing) offer a little crumb of comfort in that the death rate is lower than some fears. However it also highlights the yawning likely gap between Italian official data and the much larger likely scale of the epidemic in Italy.
People have been discussing the implications of the rapidly increasing scale of the outbreak in Italy, but one lesson seems obvious to me. There needs to be a big increase in testing, most of all in Italy, but also in all other countries. If you don't know who has the disease, you don't know who their contacts are, and you cannot easily close off the disease.
Michel Foucault said that 'power is knowledge'. He is certainly right there, and at the moment we do not have nearly enough of the knowledge that is gained through testing
Source of medical data
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
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