77 comments on Energy Debate in Switzerland
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Francois,
There are people who say that to reduce or at least limit the growth of CO2 pollution, you have to focus on China & India. What good does it do to reduce GHG emissions in CH if China opens one or two coal fired powerplants per week for the next 10-15 years?
Since the Swiss (and other countries too of coarse) are rich enough to invest the money, we should go to china and build their powerplants. Or at least make them significantly less polluting.
To me, that seems the cheapest way forward. So I am a bit surprised that people are so negative about carbon trading. After all, carbon trading is no more than the mechanics behind this idea.
I wonder what the structure of the grey energy is, the 4.7 tonnes of CO2. How much of that energy embodied in Swiss imports comes from coal power stations in China? One of the main drivers for China building all those power stations is counties like Switzerland buying Chinese manufactured goods. Swiss electricity has a far lower carbon content than Chinese energy - maybe a smart move, from a carbon point of view, is to bring back energy intensive manufacturing from China to Switzerland. This could be achieved with carbon based import tariffs.
Chris,
Putting up tariff barriers reduces the wealth of the people. There are numerous comparative advantages that china has wrt manufacturing, not only cheap energy. Your proposal would cut that off, impovering both the chinese and the swiss. That's not what we want. It would be easier just to clean up these polluting plants.
Investing in chinese clean powerplants is not easy. Politically it will be very difficult to sell to the public, especially when it becomes clear (in a decade or so) that we have not only a GHG problem, but also a very real energy crisis.
Chris,
I agree that accounting for imports as carbon emissions is important. I think that individual countries can do this using a carbon tax or individual carbon rationing. I would think that it would be best to apply these to both domestic and foreign products without distinction. Longer transits for goods will lead to some preference for domestic products, but a bit of innovation in shipping put the onus on the exporting country to do better or become less competitive. Thus, innovation is encouraged both within and without.
Chris
Richard:
I agree that this would be a good idea, but this is not how carbon trading generally works at the current time. As one of the participants explained, carbon trading would allow the Swiss to continue driving around in the heaviest and most fuel-inefficient SUVs. All we would need to do is to increase the price of gas by 10 Cents per liter, and use that money to buy carbon credits from any country that is not currently at its CO2 emission limit yet. Problem solved ... errh not.
By the way, carbon capture in coal-burning power plants is still a not fully solved problem. Several technologies for "washing" the carbon out of the exhaust of such power plants are known, but they increase the price of electricity generated in this fashion by roughly 7 Cents/kWh. In addition, huge amounts of carbon are being generated that need to get stored somehow, and we don't know yet how to do that.
Could we pump the CO2 into oil wells, for example? How would we guarantee that the CO2 disposed in this fashion really stays underground? Could we pump the CO2 into salt deposits in the ground? How could we guarantee that the CO2 stays there? Should we try to bind the carbon to some type of rock? This would require gigantic earth movements.
At the current time, we don't have either the technical knowhow nor a legal framework for properly and permanently disposing of captured carbon.
The coal power fired plants currently being built in China have on average a 28% thermal efficiency. Then there are the distribution losses, especially over long distances and these can account for some 8%.
In the west the average thermal efficiency of a modern pulverised fuel (PF) plant is about 38%.
There are several emerging coal technologies such as supercritical boilers and Integrated Gasification, combined cycle which are considerably more efficient and have a significat effect in reducing the CO2 emissions.
These raise the thermal efficiency of the plant to very close to 50% making it comparable in efficiency with combined cycle gas turbine.
Put simply, an IGCC plant could deliver power to the end user at twice the efficiency and half the coal consumption of the typical Chinese plant.
We should be assisting the Chinese in providing them access to these modern designs, and also investing in them in the west to replace our aging coal fired plant.
After all - why is China burning all this coal? To make cheap manufactured goods for the West. Consider it part of a trading deal, cheap goods in exchange for state of the art energy efficiency.
The modern coal technologies are described here:
http://www.australiancoal.com.au/cleantech.htm
Ken
Good thinking. And while we're add it we should pay for the replacement of Russia's old non-CCGT gas power stations with state of the art CCGTs. This would be truly win-win as Russia would need to use less gas internally, be able to sell more and Europe would have increased supplies available. The relationship between Russia and the EU could only improve. Even "gifting" Russia the CCGTs might end up being a smart move.
Chris, List,
When I think of your recent post about the nuclear cliff that we are facing, with no relief until the early 2020s, then we really must consider the coal technologies that bring about fuel savings and implement them now, both in the developing Far East, India and the lazy west.
Between the USA and China, they burn 2.3 billion tonnes of coal per year.
Can this be sustained over the next decade or so?
Would it not be better to start building supercritical coal plants ASAP so that we at least have some stop-gap, before the propose new nuclear plants come on line in 2020 or so.
Most of the UK coal plants are getting fairly old too, built in the 1960s and 1970s. Drax is having a rolling program of turbine blade replacement to make its steam plant more efficient.
What about all the CCGT gas sheds thrown up in the 1990s - how many of them will be fully serviceable by 2015 - especially with the cost saving advantages of gas being a thing of the past? What is the typical service life of a 600MW gas shed?
Regarding China, its development and the need for electrical power.
You can be sure that the Chinese are more open to suggestions for a technology transfer which cold help them significantly reduce their coal consumption over the next decade. Its much easier to build a clean coal plant in Shanghai, Shenzhen or Beijing than spend 8 years debating in the west, who's back yard the new generation nuclear plants will be situated.
If the West wants to continue to have access to cheap manufactured goods, then they should at least help pay for modern efficient factories and the accompanying modern efficient power plant.
Power plants should now have reached the point where they are an "off the peg" item built to a generic approved design. Standardisation of design of a supercritical coal fired plant would mean that they could be rapidly deployed where they are most needed.
We are all facing a crisis. Now is the time for action on a globalscale. We have the technology available to reduce fossil fuel consumptions both for power generation and surface based transportation.
Why don't we just get on with it, or is there something else round the corner, that is causing our world politicians to procrastinate??
Don't you think we could fully utilize on the available capital right here at home. Jesus, we can't even get a tax credit for solar extended in this country. And you think we are going to get money to help Russia cut its carbon emissions. Very funny.
No need for gifting since it is already happening:
http://www.industcards.com/st-other-ru-moscow.htm
I would rather we spend our money at home to build nuclear plants, upgrade houses with better insulation, install ground source heat pumps, fund research on photovoltaics, and other measures that reduce our energy usage and provide us with energy from more sustainable sources.
We should spend the money on building our own nuclear reactors.
Even with the best technology, if China continues to build coal plants at this pace, the increased efficiency won't mean much with respect to what needs to be done; reduce carbon emissions by at least 80% by 2050 or earlier, not to mention the reductions that need to occur now. And I haven't even mentioned the 150 plants the U.S. has on the drawing board (although a few may have been taken off).
Promises of better technology are just a way for the coal companies to lure us into a continuation of the past. They want to sell coal, period. All else is mainly PR.
Most certainly. If you wish to increase the fuel-efficiency of the power plant, you need to increase its operational temperature. This requires better control technology ... and it reduces the life span of the power plant. Yet, this is a good thing, because a more fuel-efficient power plant also puts out less CO2 per kWh of generated electricity.
Francois:
And besides, as we speak and by the end of the week, China will have built at least one more coal fired, not carbon capture ready, power plant probably without the latest pollution control equipment much less any hope of capturing carbon.
Let's be real. It does not matter what Switzerland or the rest of Europe does as long as we permit this steady march to Armageddon to continue. Maybe we are making ourselves feel good through our personal virtue but unless we stop these coal plants now, we are totally screwed.
Even with the United States on board, which is a big if, and even if we all started walking and riding bicycles tomorrow morning, this problem simply cannot be solved without China and India on board. I understand China's point of view. We, in the Western world has been spewing out this crap since the industrial revolution. Telling them to stop now is unfair.
But what is the alternative. Switzerland could simply disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't make a bit of difference in the future temperature of the planet.
I agree with tstreet about the scale of China's expansion. China is growing a Britain's worth of electric generation capacity every year.
But Peak Coal will eventually force the Chinese to shift to nuclear, photovoltaics, and wind.
People will do what works within what is known. Our critical task is to make known sustainable infrastructure.
I want to turn this question around and ask: Why is it that so few people recognize that every human on the planet should be accorded the same human rights? Although there is nothing in any charter that says this: Surely one of the most fundamental human rights should be the right to have equal access to energy as any other human? It is not up to the Chinese, nor the Indians to make cuts in their carbon emissions. Global warming is the responsibility of the wealthy and the first world should be shouldering the bulk of the burden of carbon reductions. Any other suggestion is pure discrimination.
From an interview:
SPIEGEL: Which nation on earth is most responsible for global warming?
[NASA climatologist] Hansen: Some US politicians are making the argument that China is soon going to be the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and that's true. Within a few years, they will pass the US. But climate change depends upon the cumulative emissions over time because much of the CO2 we emitted in 1850 is still here and it's still damaging. So it's not only about the present emissions. Therefore, the US is responsible for more than three times the amount of emissions than any other country, with China and Russia being next, and Germany and Great Britain after that.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,476275,00.html
From another interview:
[Australian ABC TV's]KERRY O'BRIEN: What is the most recent evidence of what's really going on with the ice caps, the Arctic and the Antarctic?
JAMES HANSEN: There are two things that are cause of concern. First of all, if we look at the history of the Earth, we know that at the warmest interglacial periods, which were probably less than 1 degree Celsius warmer than today, it was still basically the same planet. Sea level was perhaps a few metres higher. But if we go back to the time when the Earth was two or three degrees Celsius warmer, that's about three million years ago, sea level was about 25 metres higher, so that tells us we had better keep additional warming less than about one degree. And the other piece of evidence is not from the history of the Earth but from looking at the ice sheets themselves, and what we see is that the disintegration of ice sheets is a wet process and it can proceed quite rapidly. We see that the ice streams have doubled in their speed on Greenland in the last few years and even more concern is west Antarctica because it's now losing mass at about the same rate as Greenland, and west Antarctica, the ice sheet is sitting on rock that is below sea level. So it is potentially much more in danger of collapsing and so we have both the evidence on the ice sheets and from the history of the Earth and it tells us that we're pretty close to a tipping point, so we've got to be very concerned about the ice sheets.....
KERRY O'BRIEN: You said just a couple of weeks ago that there should be a moratorium on building coal fired power plants until the technology to capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions is available. But you must know that that's politically unacceptable in many countries China, America, Australia for that matter, because of coal industry jobs and impact on the economy.
JAMES HANSEN: Well, it's going to be realised within the next 10 years or so that we have no choice. We're going to have to bulldoze the old style coal fired power plants.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1870955.htm
Maybe that realisation will come when the Arctic summer sea ice is gone in 2013:
Causes of Changes in Arctic Sea Ice; by Wieslaw Maslowski (Naval Postgraduate School)
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/May032006_Dr.WieslawMaslows...
"if we look at the history of the Earth, we know that at the warmest interglacial periods, which were probably less than 1 degree Celsius warmer than today, it was still basically the same planet. Sea level was perhaps a few metres higher. But if we go back to the time when the Earth was two or three degrees Celsius warmer, that's about three million years ago, sea level was about 25 metres higher, so that tells us we had better keep additional warming less than about one degree."
If anyone believes there is a single driver to climate change and that that is CO2 they are deluded. Comments like the above seem to settle on the idea tht Co2 in the troposphere and lower is like a thermostat ona boiler and just needs tweaking - simply by burning less fossil fuels or even sequestering etc.,
Would that it were that simple.
The othere components of fossil fuel combustion provide the race with even worse consequencs as a trip to China / Hing Kong will radily demonstrate.
Broadly good to be able to see what other countries one doesn't readily think about are doing. I like the idea of GREY Co2 emissions - new to me. Cabion trading is a species of snake oil it merely moves the problem elsewhere - just as California is moving coal fired power generation to poor sparsely populated Wyoming.
Interesting views of swiss on time to build nuclear plants and the forthcoming Uranium Peak.... far sighted french saw this years ago - hence COGEMA.
Yes, the West, especially the United States should get on track to radically reduce their carbon emissions. But that will be of little use if China and India continue to build these coal plants. We simply can't make up the difference. Yes, in some ways it is unfair. But how would you suggest the world make the necessary cuts? What good are human rights on a dead planet?
It seems to me if you were on the Titanic, waiting for China to build a lifeboat before you build yours is a weak decision.
In the niche of highly repetitive congested travel we are less that 10% efficient. At the start, moving a ton to move a person is wasteful. Secondly, every Start-Stop requires power to reestablish kinetic energy. We are constantly consuming power at the square of the velocity change.
PEC (Parasitic Energy Consumption, or Parasitic Energy Waste) is a simple ratio which cancels the velocity squared complexities. PEC equals the moving mass, divided by the mass of cargo/passenergs, times the number of Start-Stops.
"Beam me up Scotty" would be perfect use of energy. Move only what you want, one stop from origin to destination.
Cars (moving a ton to move a person) and trains (moving 3 tons to move a person) are especially wasteful.
Personal Rapid Transit, such as will open at Heathrow this year are radically better.
Wtf?
An "entrepreneur" pushing his product.
"Gadgetbahn" with minimal if any real world economic success.
Alan
ULTra at Heathrow is not mine. Vectus Sweden is not mine.
If are serious about mitigating the consequences of Peak Oil and Climate Change you have to look at the fundamentals realistically.
Your contempt for ideas not your own is indicative of why little has been done to mitigate Peak Oil and Climate Change. You make your decisions with your emotions. Attacking the idea of reducing Parasitic Mass is to say that the mass of the vehicles we move does not make a difference. Do you understand fundamental kinetic physics?
If we already had the solution to Peak Oil, we would have been executing it. We need inexpensive, simple solutions that can attract people from their cars.
My reason for posting PEC information is it is now vital to take realistic action to mitigate the consequences of Peak Oil. My hope is there are people in the Peak Oil community interested in doing small practical things that will grow into solutions.
So far it has been a waste of time. But I remain hopeful.
Keep up the hope.
Not everybody thinks your ideas are crazy. :-)
Thanks. We need more action on more ideas. Economic Darwin, try a lot of stuff and keep what works.
Reinforcing current failures will fail.
You do have a commercial interest in your version of PRT.
So saying you are not an entrepreneur pumping your product in disingenuous just because you link to competitors products.
BTW, how is your soon to open (as you yourself announced) Mall of America PRT coming along ?
Your self invented "issue" of Parasitic Mass is not an issue ! Regenerative braking (recycle the energy from each stop) and the low friction of rolling steel on rolling steel make the issue meaningless.
The USA spends 0.19% of it's electricity to run the NorthEast Corridor (Semi-High Speed Amtrak from DC to Boston), the massive NYC subways, the Long Island RR, subways in Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami and Light Rail (trams to you Swiss) in dozens of cities. 0.19% !! We could move most of the USA (with their Parasitic Mass) for a couple of percent of our electrical use. What's the big deal !?!
I have seen the multiple PRT economic failures (Morgantown & Miami come to mind) and see no reason that yours should not be as bad, if not worse.
My reason for posting PEC information is it is now vital to take realistic action to mitigate the consequences of Peak Oil.
And that is PRECISELY why unproven (with almost surely unworkable economics) should be completely ignored in the USA. We do not have the time, money or energy to waste making you rich (perhaps your true reason for posting ?) on systems that will later be junked.
I have seen real, problem solving Light Rail systems lose at the ballot box because of PRT & monorail snake oil salesmen promising the moon as "Better". The day after the ballots were counted, they had packed their bags and were gone forever. And only sprawl and the automobile were left.
Best Hopes for REAL solutions,
Alan
I think existing heavy and light rail are going to be some of our greatest allies in the next 3-5 years. We are going to provide feeder networks to them.
As for Morgantown being a failure, you are absolutely wrong. You declare a failure without regard to the fact that it has delivered 110 million injury-free passenger miles. The people love Morgantown's PRT , yet you know better than they do? That is using your emotions to make a decision that is not supported by 37 years of experience.
As for the physics, it does cost less to move less. No amount of ranting can change that.
As for unproven technologies, our current infrastructure is the cause of Climate Change and Peak Oil. More of what is not working, will likely result in more of what is not working.
We built our current infrastructure. We can build better.
Morgantown PRT took about a decade to get the operational bugs out and deliver reliable service. Morgantown had such high costs that the Feds refused to pay for a promised expansion, but Sen. Byrd and a lawsuit finally shook loss the money. Operating costs per pax-mile are high.
And most telling of all, a second one was never built.
Morgantown was an economic failure and should not be repeated.
Alan
As for the physics, it does cost less to move less. No amount of ranting can change that.
BS !!
Operating costs of operational PRT are QUITE high !
REALITY !
You disagree that it costs less to move less?
Patent the means. I am willing to pay to license such brilliance.
Morgantown's startup problems were startup problems. Is it your position that trains never have had cost overruns?
Back to Morgantown being a failure. Yes, the Federal government no longer subsidizes it. So if I understand your position correctly, a transport system is a failure if it can operate without federal subsidies?
Mr. James is busy pushing his project. Notice how he ignores rollerblades or bicycles on his 'parasitic load' and has to go with mythical things like 'beaming' or 'jpods'.
And the myths are even mis-cited. As any Star Trek fan could tell you whenever the Enterprise suffered a power drain from the warp drive system the transporters were the first thing to become unusable, since they required a huge amount of power to operate.
Hope we never have to worry about peak di-Lithium... :-)
PEC has to do with relative efficiency not absolute power use.
Moving zero parasitic mass, and avoiding repetitive start-stops is important.
If you have a train that weights 3 tons per every person it seats, you must have the heaviest train in the world...?
The newest norwergian train for short and medium distances, the type 72, weights 160 tons and seats 306.
http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSB_type_72
That's 0,52 tons for every seat. Half full it's still only 1,04 tons/person. At 3 tons/person it's only 17% full.
The older trains are lighter still, ~0,37 tons/seat for the type 69.
I bet this beats even the JPod. And look at all those cheery people, see commuting can be fun!
A densely packed commuter train can get to about 800 pounds per passenger. This train is probably in the 600 pounds per passenger.
JPods weight 400 pounds, so when fully occupied, the vehicle to passenger allocation is about 100 pounds.
PEC is the ratio of moving mass to desired mass times stop starts. If all these people are going to the same place (one Start-stop) then absolutely this train approached the energy efficiency of PRT. Under these circumstances trains are perfectly competitive with PRT.
Love the picture. It illustrates that people can find a way to improve efficiency.
You might think this is funny, but it is probably closer to being what the future will actually look like than most of us care to admit.
Many people might eventually consider themselves fortunate to have it even THAT good!
That was supposed to be sarcastic, but I guess I failed.
No I don't see that picture so funny after all, for various reasons.
There are a great number of people injured in these types of transportation every year. People living on the railroad tracks. Poverty is not fun at all.
Another thing in that picture thats disturbing is that they in fact are commuting. Who invented this ridiculous concept anyways? Sleep at one place, work at another place sometimes many a miles away. Hence waste your days traveling from one spot to another.
As for the future, I'm doubtful that it will get to that point as pictured. We can't afford long-range commuting in the future if things are headed where I think they are. People just have to live within cycling or maybe light-rail distances from work.
If the objective is to move seats, your logic is good. If the objective is to move people then empty seats equates to waste.
Every Start-Stop requires power to rebuilt kinetic energy. So even if every seat were occupied, you still waste power times the number of start-stops on the route.
In nature all delivery mechanisms, like blood, stream resource to need, on-demand. You have 20 trillion small red cells. Batch processes are not competitive. You do have batch processes in nature but they are reserved for waste products.
Taken to extremes your logic leads back to walking/running. No excess weight, just what we need to move. I still have to subscribe to the "if it sounds too good, it probably is". There is always a trade off. With rail (vs. say cars) we trade flexibility for energy efficiency. What trade-off does PRT offer? I'm guessing that it is expensive equipment since it seems to offer both flexibility and efficiency of energy use. Usually those type of systems bake in the energy use up front (e.g. using high energy input raw materials so they are light, etc.)
If PRT doesn't make a trade-off it is very unlikely to be a REAL solution. I'm not saying impossible, but when we dig to the bottom of each of these revolutionary ideas we always run into the thermodynamic wall.
There are always trade offs. There is always engineering. But there is also innovation.
Current transportation is amazingly inefficient. Here is a chart from Livermore Labs showing 80% of transportation energy goes directly to waste (drives Climate Change).
Increased efficiency can be taken as profit. There is a lot of room for efficiency. That is why US DOT, Study PB-244854, recommended Personal Rapid Transit as the way to combat oil embargoes in 1975. That is why Morgantown's PRT was built. That is why British Airport Authority is installing it at Heathrow. That is why Posco invested in Vectus.
If available energy is fixed or depleting get better with what you have. Are there trade-offs, yes. You can only go where the networks are. But then you cannot drive your car where there are no roads.
There is a huge profit in preempting waste. It is simple technology. It is a Physical-Internet.
The fact that no subsidies are required to build the networks and they will generate a profit for those that build them will encourage them to be built quickly and with private capital.
Yes, of course.
The fuel-efficiency of cars is at roughly 20%. It can be almost doubled by building better motors. According to the Carnot cycle, the maximum efficiency of a regular gas engine is somewhere close to 40%. However to reach that efficiency, you need to run the motor at full power. Yet, we run our engines most of the time very close to their idle speed, i.e., at a speed where they are least efficient.
The reason is that we like car engines to be hopelessly over-dimensioned so that we can accelerate rapidly. It is during those times of rapid acceleration that the engine runs most efficiently.
One way to improve on the situation is to use hybrid cars. The gas engine of a hybrid car is much smaller and runs almost constantly (while it runs) at full speed. It is used primarily to recharge the batteries, whereas the power for fast acceleration comes out of the electric engine. Furthermore, some of the power lost during deceleration can also be used to recharge the batteries.
Consequently, a hybrid car (even if it is not a plug-in hybrid) can achieve a fuel-efficiency factor of close to 40%.
There are many things that can be done to increase efficiency. I think we will need them all.
This isn't about lifeboats. We will all be on the same sinking boat regardless. Yes, the U.S. must act. Having acted, however, we, with the Europeans and Asians must get the Chinese to act.
My intent with "lifeboats" was to encourage immediate and local action.
Lifeboats will not save the world, but they may save those you care about. If enough people act far enough in advance to save themselves, the next 40 years will be less ugly then they are likely to be.