Tag: renewable

The Climate Show #33: Salinger, carbon carnage and recursive fury

In this week’s news-packed edition of The Climate Show we have an exclusive interview with Jim Salinger, probably New Zealand’s highest profile climate scientist, talking about extremes and the shape of things to come. John Cook discusses his new paper with Stephan Lewandowsky, Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, which is already upsetting climate cranks around the world, plus we look at carbon bubbles, renewable energy beating coal on price, and a simply superb iPad app.

Watch The Climate Show on our Youtube channel, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, listen to us via Stitcher on your smartphone or listen direct/download from the link below the fold.

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Grand final: Sustainable Energy NZ #16 – counting up the dollars and sense

Welcome to the sixteenth and final post in the Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air – A New Zealand Perspective series.

To recap, we started with a bit of energy accounting and worked out that Kiwi’s use around 88 kWh/d/p (methodology for what the kWh/d/p means is here), and that of this, about 33kWh/d/p came from sustainable sources or we couldn’t substitute. As a result, we’ve been looking for how to shift the remaining 55kWh/d/p of our current energy use to renewable energy sources. We approached this in two ways:

How much could we increase our energy generation capacity in renewable sources?

Here, we looked at hydro power, geothermal and wind (and a summary on the big three), solar, biofuels, marine and waste energy and did some basic calculations on the overall potential of these sources. Then:

How much could we achieve a BIG reduction in our personal and national energy consumption, and where those savings would come from.

We went through the areas of energy use for Kiwis, including road, air transport, home energy use and general consumption before doing some calculations on the overall reductions we think we could make.

What might it cost to achieve an all-renewable energy economy?

Today, we’re looking at how this might translate into action at a national level. This post contains both some costing, and suggestions for action that might effectively be channeled into effective change.

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Sustainable Energy NZ #15: Keeping it lean and mean – a summary of energy use.

Welcome to the fiftheenth post in the Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air – A New Zealand Perspective series. After our previous posts on hydro power, geothermal and wind (and a summary on the big three), solar, biofuels, marine and waste energy, we’re now attempting to answer the question:

How can we achieve a BIG reduction in our personal and national energy consumption?

Remember, as before, the units are in kWh/day/person – ie. if you ran a 40W lightbulb for 24 hours, it’d take ~1 kWh over the space of a day. We then divide it by person to give you a sense of the scale of the resource proportionate to the size of the population. Be sure to check out the methodology. For reference – we’ve been looking to replace around 55 kWh/d/p of energy currently generated by fossil fuels. Be sure to check out our treatment on road, air transport, home energy use and general consumption from the last few days.

Summary of Energy Use

Using the MacKay categories (but ignoring imported goods and energy spent overseas on air travel), our total energy use of 88kWh/d/p breaks down as shown in Fig.3:

Fig.3  NZ Energy Use (by end use)

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Sustainable Energy NZ #14 – how much energy hides in food and ‘stuff’

Welcome to the fourteenth post in the Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air – A New Zealand Perspective series. After our previous posts on hydro power, geothermal and wind (and a summary on the big three), solar, biofuels, marine and waste energy, we’re now looking at answering the question:

How can we achieve a BIG reduction in our personal and national energy consumption?

Remember, as before, the units are in kWh/day/person – ie. if you ran a 40W lightbulb for 24 hours, it’d take ~1 kWh over the space of a day. We then divide it by person to give you a sense of the scale of the resource proportionate to the size of the population. Be sure to check out the methodology. For reference – we’ve been looking to replace around 55 kWh/d/p of energy currently generated by fossil fuels.

Food

Farming and food processing cost about 8kWh/d/p of the NZ energy bill, much of which is of course exported. This is only energy consumed in food production – a great deal more energy is directly incorporated into our food from the sun. When looking at land for either biofuel or solar production, energy production competes directly with food. We could grow a lot more biofuel if we produced a lot less milk, for instance. For the purposes of national energy supply, we doubt much can be gained in terms of energy efficiency to support current production.

New Zealanders eat more beef than the UK population, but we eat next to no grain-fed beef and barning is rare. Overall, the 15kWh/d/p for a UK person is probably pretty similar here. Reduce that to 10 for vegans, but remember that crops cannot be grown on much of the land that we graze (especially not continuously).

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Sustainable Energy NZ #11: How can we make road transport more efficient?

Welcome to the eleventh post in the Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air – A New Zealand Perspective series. After our previous posts on hydro power, geothermal and wind (and a summary on the big three), solar, biofuels, marine and waste energy, we’re now looking at answering the question:

How can we achieve a BIG reduction in our personal and national energy consumption?

We covered the breakdown of where we use this energy in the last post. Today we’re dealing with our biggest chunk of energy use: road transport.

A few notes before we begin: as before, the units are in kWh/day/person – ie. if you ran a 40W lightbulb for 24 hours, it’d take ~1 kWh over the space of a day. We then divide it by person to give you a sense of the scale of the resource proportionate to the size of the population. Be sure to check out the methodology. For reference – we’ve been looking to replace around 55 kWh/d/p of energy currently generated by fossil fuels.

Cars

About a third (31kWh/d/p) of our total energy use is spent on vehicle travel, which is high by international standards. (This figure also includes some diesel purchases by small farmers and transport operators that are not adequately captured by other statistics.) Incidentally, one litre of petrol contains ~10kWh of energy, so at a national scale, we’re all using around 3 litres of petrol/person/day. By comparison, the average UK citizen spends 14 – 16kWh/d/p on personal vehicle travel.  Consider that the average NZ car drives 18,000km in a year. If all were medium SUVs (0.9kWh/km) with 2 people in them, then this would translate into only 22kWh/d/p. It is clear then that we must make a lot of single-passenger trips in inefficient vehicles. Worse, this works out at a staggering 46kWh/d per vehicle (excluding mopeds, but including trucks)!

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