Tag: NZ

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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Wind gets cheaper

Writing in the latest newsletter from the NZ Wind Energy Association CEO Eric Pyle rebuts the idea expressed by some market analysts that because there is significant excess of electricity generation capacity in NZ and demand is flat there is no need to build new generation. He tackles them on economic ground and it’s interesting that he claims new wind generation is justified in purely market terms, without invoking its environmental benefits.

Markets should encourage innovation and drive least-cost solutions. In the electricity sector this means lower cost generation is used instead of higher cost generation. This happens on an hourly basis in New Zealand’s electricity market. This does mean there will be excess capacity as more expensive generation is replaced over time by lower cost generation.

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Carbonscape go Dutch with Clinton, win cash award

We have frequently posted on the progress of New Zealand company Carbonscape, and it’s a pleasure to report that they have just taken a runner-up prize in the international Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Challenge co-sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), receiving a grant of €100,000 (NZ $156,600). The mission of the CGI is to “forge solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges”.

Carbonscape made the short list of three finalists from more than 500 other contestants. It’s a reminder of how active innovative entrepreneurs around the world are working on a host of ideas which are waiting in the wings for the global community to turn away from an economy based on fossil fuels.

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Bad news but great pictures: dating NZ’s shrinking glaciers shows strong link between ice loss and CO2 increases

Here’s a superb video from the Department of Education at the American Museum of Natural History, showing how NZ and US scientists are examining the precise timing of glacier advances and retreats in the Mackenzie country around Lake Pukaki using surface exposure dating. Like all good geologists they use big hammers and small explosives to shatter rocks in order to sample “cosmogenic” Be-10 — a beryllium isotope formed when cosmic rays hit quartz in newly exposed rocks. See here for more on recent surface exposure dating work in the Pukaki area. Hat tip to Climate Crocks for spotting the video.