Tag: energy

Sustainable energy NZ #1 – can we live on renewables only?

Welcome to the first post in the Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air – A New Zealand Perspective series. Today we’ll be going through the figures of our current energy use. This helps us get a baseline of consumption to aim towards, and lets us explore the difficulties in calculating per capita energy use. For the background to the work, please visit yesterday’s post here.

Before we begin, we should note the following:

We follow MacKay’s example in presenting all energy data in kWh/day/person. McKay’s motivation for this was that kilowatt hours are energy consumption units that most of us are familiar with from our monthly electricity invoices. To give you an understanding of the numbers, one 40W lightbulb consumes 40W per hour, or ~1000W hours (1kWh) a day. Most toasters are rated to 1kW, so running one of these for an hour will take 1kWh of power. A petrol car driving 100km will use, on average, 7 to 9 litres of petrol, which is the equivalent of 70-90 kWh of energy (one litre contains ~10 kWh). If interested, read McKay’s chapter on his reasoning and methodology here: [8z7lwjg]
All of the reference links (like the one above) are tinyURL codes. Eg the EECA library will be [ydtzb5v]). We’ve done this to maintain the same format as McKay. Most are hyperlinked but if not, type in tinyurl.com/(whatever the code).

The sources that we’ve used are noted at the end of this post, as well as our contact details and a link to the spreadsheet that we’ve used for all of our calculations. OK! With that housekeeping out of the way, lets get into it!

The big question that is continually asked about renewable energy is: Can NZ live with renewable energy only?

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A Sustainable Energy Future For NZ (without the hot air) – An Update

This is a guest post by Phil Scadden and Oliver Bruce (bios at the end of the post), who have updated to Phil’s 2009 paper Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air – A New Zealand Perspective, which was published at Hot Topic. Inspired by the approach used by Cambridge physicist (and now chief climate change advisor to the UK government) David MacKay in his book of the same name, they bring a common sense perspective to the strategic energy debate we need to be having. Over to them:

Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air by Cambridge physicist David MacKay is an excellent and highly readable book of numbers about the questions associated with sustainable energy (available as a free download at www.withouthotair.com). As an advocate of sustainable energy, he describes himself as “pro-arithmetic” rather than a campaigner for one type of energy production over another, which is surely what informed debate needs. Rather than dealing with daunting numbers, he reduces energy calculations to units of kWh/day/person. 1kWh is the unit we pay for in our electricity bills — the energy used by one bar heater switched on for one hour. If you want to understand the which actions actually save energy (and which are just hype) then you need to read this book. Turning off a cell phone charger when not in use for a year saves the energy found in one hot bath. “If everyone does a little, then we will achieve only a little”.

The majority of MacKay’s calculations are done for the UK. Phil was interested in a New Zealand perspective and so published the original paper at Hot Topic in 2009 (found here). Oliver read McKay’s book earlier this year, came across Phil’s work (thanks to John Peet at Phase2 for the referral) and with his help updated the figures for 2012.

To this end, we have used a similar approach to look at two questions:

  • Can New Zealand maintain its current per capita energy consumption without fossil fuels and, in particular, can we live on renewable energy sources alone?
  • How can we achieve a BIG reduction in our personal and national energy consumption, in order to reduce our power requirements?

After completing the updated paper, we had a discussion with Gareth about the best way to publish the work and decided to run the report as a series of posts at Hot Topic. There are two reasons for this:

  1. Easier to get feedback issue-by-issue from the Hot Topic (and wider) community.
  2. It makes for a more palatable read than simply giving you folks a 22 page document.

This post today is a quick overview of the changes since the 2009 report, and serves as an introduction to the series which will appear at Hot Topic over the next couple of weeks.

For those that can’t wait, the full updated (2012) document can be downloaded here. Note it may end up being revised as your community finds errors in our work, so it might be better to wait till we’ve completed our series!

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Still time for the energy revolution

The International Energy Agency (IEA) continues to plug the energy transformation necessary if we are to have any hope of staying within a 2oC rise in global temperature.  This month has seen the publication of Energy Technology Perspectives 2012 (ETP 2012) in which they explain the technologies and behaviours that according to the press release “will revolutionise the entire energy system and unlock tremendous economic benefits between now and 2050”.  My references to the book’s content in what follows are derived from the executive summary. (The book is priced.)

ETP 2012 argues that the technologies we already possess are adequate to the task of cutting emissions drastically if used in an integrated way. The resultant overhaul of the world’s energy system by 2050 will not come cheap. Considerable extra investment money will be needed, $36 trillion by their calculation. But that is genuine investment, not cost, and moreover investment with an excellent return of $100 trillion in savings through the reduced use of fossil fuel. Investing in clean energy makes excellent economic sense at the same time as assisting in the mitigation of climate change.

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A Pathway to Sustainable Energy

“Will we look into the eyes of our children and confess that we had the opportunity, but lacked the courage? That we had the technology, but lacked the vision?” These words preface the report Energy [R]evolution 2012: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook published this month by Greenpeace, the European Renewable Energy Council and the Global Wind Energy Council.  It’s the fourth edition in a series which began in 2007. The publication is book length and over its pages describes a renewable energy scenario which sees CO2 emissions fall 85% from 1990 levels by 2050. I thought it well worth drawing attention to.

The authors can hardly be accused of utopian dreams. The technology exists to access stores of renewable energy far larger than the world’s energy requirements. The publication describes in careful and comprehensive detail an achievable programme of transition which would leave no need for the world’s fossil fuel resources to be pursued to the point of exhaustion or anywhere near it.  Carbon capture and storage is not part of the scenario, for reasons of cost and uncertainty; nor is nuclear energy, which, for reasons of cost, safety and inability to reduce emissions by a large enough amount, is marked for phase-out.

The reduction of demand through energy efficiency, the “sleeping giant” which offers the most cost-effective way to reform the energy sector, is a vital element in the transition. Over and over again surveys and analyses are making this clear, and the report is very much in line with an increasingly common theme in the literature.  High levels of projected energy demand diminish dramatically when energy efficiency is given high priority. The document shows the effect of best practice in various sectors of the economy.

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G8: self-deception on energy and climate

The section of the recent G8 Camp David declaration which deals with energy and climate change can only be described as depressing. No clarion call from these nations. Instead, a confused jumble starting with an “all of the above” statement:

… we recognise the importance of meeting our energy needs from a wide variety of sources ranging from traditional fuels to renewables to other clean technologies. As we each implement our own individual energy strategies, we embrace the pursuit of an appropriate mix from all of the above in an environmentally safe, sustainable, secure, and affordable manner.

How fossil fuels can be considered environmentally safe and sustainable elements in an energy mix is not explained. But apparently this mix is somehow compatible with a low carbon economy:

We also recognise the importance of pursuing and promoting sustainable energy and low carbon policies in order to tackle the global challenge of climate change.

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