David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air is a remarkably engaging book; it has certainly kicked off and contributed to some very energetic discussions here. The book, which was written by a physics professor at Cambridge and is available for free online, is essentially a detailed numerical consideration of renewable forms of power generation, as well as technologies to support it, and to reduce total power demand. MacKay concludes that the effort required to produce sustainable energy systems is enormous, and that one of the most viable options is to build huge solar facilities in the world’s deserts, and use that to provide an acceptable amount of energy to everyone.

The book has a physics and engineering perspective, rather than one focused on politics or business. MacKay considers the limits of what is physically possible, given the character of the world and the physical laws that govern it. Given that he does not take economics into consideration much, his conclusions demonstrate the high water mark of what is possible, with unlimited funds. In the real world, renewable deployment will be even more challenging than it is in his physics-only model.

Here are some of the posts in which the book has already been discussed:

• David MacKay’s sustainable energy calculations
• A renewable energy plan for the UK
• Carnot efficiency
• Increasing renewable capacity is much harder than increasing energy consumption

I have added relevant information from the book to the comment sections of a great many other posts, on everything from wind power to biofuels.

Even if you don’t agree with MacKay’s analysis, reading his book will provide some useful figures, graphs, and equations, as well as prompt a lot of thought. It is certainly one of the books that I would recommend most forcefully to policy makers, analysts, politicians, and those interested in deepening their understanding of what a sustainable energy future would involve.

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Many forms of renewable power generation, such as wind and solar, suffer from differing power output depending on how intense the natural energy source is at any particular point in time. One neat exception to this is a tidal barrage with multiple lagoons. By managing the water level in each, it is possible to smooth out power generation between tides, as well as make output constant between days with bigger tides and those with smaller tides. It is also possible to use such systems to store excess energy from other renewable generation sites (such as winds farms running at full power during times of low demand) and to release energy at times of maximum demand, or when output from other renewable options is flagging.

With two lagoons and pumps for both, there are a huge number of options. You can maintain one pool at a ‘high’ level, and the other at a ‘low’ level, topping up the former using natural high tides or pumping and drawing down the latter in the same ways. When the tide is high, you can generate power by letting water flow into the low pool from the sea, or by letting water flow into the low pool from the high pool. When the tide is low, you can generate power by letting water flow from the high pool out to sea, or from the high pool into the low pool. Whenever you are producing power, you can use it for any mixture of supplying the grid, pumping up the high pool, and pumping down the low pool.

The combination of pumping with tidal lagoons is even better than conventional pumped storage. This is because you can actually produce more energy letting the previously pumped water flow than it took to do the pumping. Wikipedia explains:

If water is raised 2 ft (61 cm) by pumping on a high tide of 10 ft (3 m), this will have been raised by 12 ft (3.7 m) at low tide. The cost of a 2 ft rise is returned by the benefits of a 12 ft rise. This is since the correlation between the potential energy is not a linear relationship, rather, is related by the square of the tidal height variation.

David MacKay’s book also has a detailed section on tidal pumping and two-lagoon arrangements.

Of course, tidal power is not without environmental consequences. It will certainly alter the marine ecosystems that exist wherever facilities are built, and may create consequences in river systems located behind the barrage. That being said, the many advantages of tidal power as an energy generation and energy storage option mean that it probably has an important role to play in building a sustainable global society.

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While useful, voicemail is a flawed technology that can be improved in many ways. Three recent examples come to mind:

First, there is Apple’s visual voicemail. The improvement here is like the improvement between cassette tapes and compact discs: each message is an independent ‘track’ that can be treated as a unit. That is nicer than just having a single audio string to deal with, since you can see right away who called and jump to any message.

Secondly, there is the voicemail system of my VoIP provider. The nicest thing they do is provide an option to email you MP3s of your messages, which include caller ID to let you know who they are from. Now, I only call the actual voicemail number to periodically delete all the messages accumulating there.

Third, and neatest of all, is the transcription feature in Google’s forthcoming ‘voice’ product. Not only do you get to see who called, but you get an automated transcript. I am sure the voice recognition is far from perfect, but people seem to find it good enough to evaluate which messages need to be listened to, and which ones are just ‘call me back’ requests. To some extent, this even makes voicemail searchable, which is a neat trick.

While sound has character and authenticity to it, it is really a degraded form of communication, when it comes to simple searching and management. It is nice to see innovative ways to overcome the limitations of sound-based messages, while still retaining the original format, for those situations where you actually want to hear the message.

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Over at Slate, there is an interesting article about art and chemistry: specifically, about the challenges involved in preserving artwork and historical objects that were made from fundamentally unstable plastics. As the article points out, this is an odd reversal of what most of the world is trying to do, namely eliminate plastic wastes that are proving far more durable than would be ideal. For instance, there is the worrisome North Pacific Gyre: a huge garbage patch in the deep ocean.

One interesting aspect of the Slate article is the assertion that some microorganisms can now digest plastics. This claim contradicts those made in Alan Weisman’s excellent book The World Without Us, in which he claims that such metabolic pathways had not yet evolved.

The overall question of materials over long spans of time is certainly an interesting one. They have a huge impact on what we do and can know about history. For instance, much of what we know about ancient peoples comes from examinations of the garbage and artifacts they left behind: clues that can give insights into diet, contact with other groups, and much else besides.

The the amount of material and information being accumulated in the modern world is unprecedented, the plight of the plastics curator is another example of how much of it is ephemeral. Perhaps that is more true of information than anything else. When the plastics and metals and dyes of our optical disks, hard drives, and flash memory systems start to degrade and fail, an unprecedented amount of information is likely to be lost, from baby and wedding photos to documentation of historical events.

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Over at FiveThirtyEight.com (the pollster site made famous by the Obama election), there is an interesting response to Jim Manzi’s opposition to climate change action. Manzi argues that climate change will ‘only’ cost 5% of global GDP, 100 years from now, so we shouldn’t worry too much about this. The obvious responses to this are that the consequences of business-as-usual emissions will be much more severe than that, profoundly threatening our current way of life. The FiveThirtyEight post takes a different approach, enumerating what the loss of 5% of global GDP would mean, if concentrated in relatively poor states.

Eliminating 4.99997% of global GDP is akin to eliminating 81 countries, with a total population of 2,865,623,000 – 43% of the world’s total:

We’ve gotten rid of almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa, destroyed the entire Indian subcontinent, created a big lake in South America, turned El Salvador into an island, and solved a lot of our problems in the Middle East. I suspect we could also have nuked North Korea, by the way, except that the IMF didn’t publish information for them.

There are, of course, flaws with this way of looking at things. That being said, it is a nice illustration of how abstract economic figures can become disconnected from the real world consequences they represent. As the post’s illustration demonstrates, even climate change that only cost 5% of global GDP could still be an extremely serious problem.

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Apparently, artificial ‘enhanced’ geothermal sites may cause earthquakes. The concept (mentioned here before) is to drill shafts down into hot rock formations, pump in cold water, and generate steam to drive turbines. It would considerably increase the number of regions where geothermal power could be used.

According to Swiss government seismologists and officials on the Basel project, an artificial geothermal project caused an earthquake in Basel in 2006 and was subsequently shut down. Even after the shutdown, thousands of smaller earthquakes occurred in the following years. Now, there are concerns about a project that AltaRock Energy wants to undertake in California. Google’s philanthropic arm is investing $6.25 million in the project. The proposed site already experiences as many as a thousand small earthquakes per year. This video has some further details.

Obviously, the earthquake risk needs to be assessed and managed. It may be that not as many sites are suitable for enhanced geothermal as previously assumed. Perhaps such projects will only prove viable in sparsely populated regions. In any case, it is an unfortunate blow to an otherwise promising looking type of renewable generation.

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The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released the most comprehensive report so far on climate change impacts in the United States: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The USGCRP consists of thirteen departments and agencies of the US federal government.

Some of the key findings include:

• Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.
• Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.
• Threats to human health will increase.

It’s good that accurate scientific information is being released by American government agencies. Hopefully, accurate and non-partisan information on the seriousness of the climate change threat, as well as the behaviours that can effectively mitigate it, will help drive the adoption and tightening of effective climate policies in the United States.

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Apparently, the government of Ontario is reconsidering its decision to build more nuclear power plants, due to concerns about cost overruns and the status of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL). The province was previously planning to spend $26 billion over the next few decades, expanding and refurbishing nuclear reactors.

Apparently, the Ontario government has rejected foreign bids from France’s AREVA and the American Westinghouse corporation, but doesn’t have sufficient confidence in AECL to commit for sure at this stage. They want guarantees from the federal government, in order to proceed.

I am torn on the question of whether to support nuclear power. It is certainly more appealing than additional coal power, when all the risks of each are taken into account. That being said, nuclear has always benefitted from large direct and indirect subsidies. It isn’t clear whether that public money would be better spent on alternatives, such as renewable generation, an improved electrical grid, energy storage, or demand management. I also have serious doubts about the competence of AECL, as well as our government’s effectiveness in regulating and managing it. It would have been nice for a foreign corporation with domestic support from its own government and taxpayers had taken on some of the risk associated with the new projects, rather than leaving it all in Canadian hands.

As an aside, Canadian nuclear regulators have discovered that Canada’s existing CANDU reactors are more dangerous than previously appreciated. In the event of a coolant leak, the chain reaction inside them actually speeds up, instead of slowing down. This could lead to dangerous overheating if a serious leak isn’t followed by a rapid shutdown.

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Apparently, Canada’s Competition Bureau is considering loosening rules on collusion to benefit oil sands producers. Specifically, the proposed rule would permit firms to coordinate on megaprojects, without risking criminal charges for anti-competitive behaviour. Firms could do things like plan staggered construction schedules, to try to avoid the large increases in costs that accompanied the run up to $150 a barrel oil last year.

While the chaotic booms and busts of Alberta’s oil patch probably aren’t economically efficient or environmentally benign, it’s not clear that giving firms more scope to coordinate their behaviour is a good solution. Already, the government of Alberta is far too lax in the regulation of oil sands projects. Given how the interests of oil sands producers can conflict fundamentally with those of the population as a whole (especially when long-term environmental damage and cleanup costs are considered) it seems a lot more sensible to improve coordination through government policies intended to enforce the public interests, rather than giving oil giants more leverage through which to seek their own.

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There is an interesting difference between the basic pattern that crime and security legislation tend to follow, after passage, when compared with the development of environmental laws. In general, crime and security legislation is too strong at the outset: it exaggerates a particular risk (say, youth violence) and then creates draconian measures intended to counter it. Generally, the measures are less effective than expected and there are virtual always harmful side effects not fully anticipated by the drafters of the law. Often, the courts compel the evolution of such laws into more pragmatic vehicles that strike a better balance between mitigating a problem and creating new ones, such as abuses of authority.

Environmental laws, by contrast, often start out weak and riddled with loopholes. As they operate, people realize that they do have the power to mitigate the target problem, are they are often tightened to that effect. Usually, costs turn out to be lower than the opponents of the law claimed they would be at the outset; after all, opponents of environmental legislation know that scaring politicians with talk of economic destruction and job losses is an effective approach to blocking stricter environmental rules.

A major difference between the two, I think, has to do with the psychology of politicians. Nobody wants to be seen to be ’soft on crime’ or insufficiently committed to fighting terrorism. In either case, there is a big downside risk if you oppose a law and then the problem it targeted gets worse. Since environmental outcomes are usually less clear (and less closely observed by voters), that is less of a risk when it comes to opposing environmental regulations.

There is also the flawed by widely accepted view that there is a trade off between economic and environmental health. You rarely hear politicians opposing tough crime or security legislation by evoking such a notion of ‘balance.’ While air pollution kills far more people than terrorism, the point is rarely raised in political forums. In order to improve environmental outcomes – and deal with the major threat of climate change – it seems necessary to improve the risk perceptions of both politicians and the public at large, as well as the sophistication of the debate about public policy issues.

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Adopting a personal ethical position where you don’t fly or otherwise travel long distances because of climate change is rather problematic: it has no upside, and a lot of downside. There is no upside because nobody is willing to copy you. Even people who agree that the science on climate change is compelling, that our emissions harm future generations, and that this creates moral obligations are unwilling to give up the opportunity to travel to interesting distant places, as well as visit friends and family members in far-flung locales (like the other side of this massive country). Tony Blair won’t give up his holidays in Barbados, and people with family, work, and school split between different regions won’t give up the option to cycle between them regularly.

The downside associated with making this kind of personal example is clear, and goes beyond sacrificing new experiences, family, and friends. Once you have taken the stance, any abandonment will be perceived by a lot of people as proof that environmentalists are hypocrites, that obligations to avoid highly-emitting activities are weak, etc. While the example of being abstinent isn’t forceful enough to make others equally scrupulous, the counter-example of lapses from abstinence provides rich material to rationalize morally dubious actions.

All this is true regardless of the strength of weakness of the key moral arguments that would underpin such a personal position. They are just undesirable secondary sociological characteristics.

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Auden Schendler’s Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution fills an important niche in the overall discussion about climate change and building a low-carbon global society. As the director of sustainability for the Aspen Skiing Company, he has personal experience with pitching and sometimes executing green projects, including those involving efficient buildings and renewable energy. His book offers some valuable on-the-ground observations that are lacking in higher level discussions like that of David Mackay. While the detail is welcome, the book does sometimes lack a sense of the bigger picture. The language and tone can also be annoyingly jocular, at times.

The most useful information in the book concerns the hurdles that exist to getting green projects done, even when they are well justified on the basis of lifecycle cost analysis. The initial investment is always larger, both in terms of time and complexity, and there are real risks associated with deviating from normal practice. Policymakers could clearly benefit from more direct discussion with the people who are ‘closest to the action’ and actually responding to policies when making their choices. In the end, Schendler sees a huge role for government: putting minimum standards into codes, providing financing to get projects going, and restricting the ways in which corporations can act while pursuing profits.

Schendler also weighs in on the value of individual actions, highlighting how only societal changes have the capacity to overcome climate change. Even so, personal actions are important for establishing credibility, which translates into some of the influence required to drive bigger changes. As a practical discussion of successes and failures, rather than a higher level theoretical work, this book is worth the time of those concerned with dealing with climate change.

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