back to article Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap

A topflight science brainbox at Cambridge University has weighed into the ever-louder and more unruly climate/energy debate with several things that so far have been mostly lacking: hard numbers, willingness to upset all sides, and an attempt to see whether the various agendas put forward would actually stack up. Professor …

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  1. JimC

    Ecological Vandalism...

    At last too, some thought on the appalling ecological vanadalism of so called "Green Solutions". It just beggars belief that the "Greens" can be serious about that. It would involve ecological destruction on a positively Soviet scale, probably worse... At least the wildlife manages some kind of survival around Chernobyl...

  2. Dodgy Geezer Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Some unforseen problems.

    "If we used breeder reactors, but then again, we nearly invaded iran because they wanted something that *could* possibly be used to create weapons-grade materials, which breeder reactors definitely do.

    If nuclear is so safe and cheap, why is it that new reactors are only built when the government pays the insurance tab and offsets decommissioning?"

    Mark

    Umm... so you think that the US will invade us if we start creating weapons-grade materials? Whose side do you think they're on?? (on second thoughts, don't answer that...)

    New Reactors are only built when the government ensures that the planning permission will go through. Same as runways - they are cheap and guaranteed to make money at Heathrow, but they don't get built for exactly the same reason - too much protest and not enough government backing....

    Paris, in default of there being a better icon for expressing stupidity..

  3. fr33cycler

    It looks good but...

    ...there's always a certain conceit in these things that "at last someone should do the maths". Look at the Tyndall Centre's work on decarbonising the UK, or their "Living within a carbon budget" carried out for Friends of the Earth. It's a daft implication that they were based on nice pictures, not hard analysis. Its equally daft to call them woolly well sihing types - they are a team of scientists and statisticians that cover many disciplines.

    You could similarly look at energy modelling carried out by various other bodies planning future policy prescriptions - from Greenpeace to the Sustainable Development Commission. All of them have also used models to determine possible future scenarios.

    And BBC News had a "plan your own future energy scenario and see if you need nuclear" up on their website ages ago. I believe it ran on mathematical models, but perhaps it worked by asking a fluffy bunny rabbit the answer...

    Finally - maybe I've missed it, but does the good professor simply think we have to use that much energy - or could we possibly reduce our demand a bit???

    Finally to those pseudo scientists who love justifying standby/other electricty wasting devices on the basis it reduces the amount of energy your boiler uses to heat your home - try working out

    (a) whether you actually save your boiler any work at all when you are heating your home with wasted electricty in the summer and the boiler is off, or even during the day/overnight when many turn their heating off

    (b) how much carbon is released into the atmosphere for 1 kWh of heat from a gas boiler (which most of you have, though I accept not all) compared to 1 kWh of electricty

    (c) how useful is the heat you put into your room at lightbulb level?

    Its a stupid argument dressed up by those who may know a little science, want to prove their own indpendence of mind, but don't actually want to think too hard....

  4. Marvin the Martian
    Flame

    Lies, damn lies, and all without statistics.

    Hurray! Another person who has an unrelated expertise (an AI researcher) gives his 2cents worth (literally in this case). Oh, he's here to promote a book? That's allright then, ElReg, just pass the mike to him and praise him for "he's used numbers before, so he can do the math".

    For example, covering 10% of the land with windmills will power 1 car for 50km a day? Yes, one car per adult for 50km per day I can possibly believe, 500km I'd think more probable, and that would really be what we need.

    Clearly, insulation and more efficient water heating (for the mentioned daily showers) would help --- here in antediluvian Kings Cross, I have a central waterheater that pumps hot water to the flat, so inefficiently that we never heat, have single glazing yet summer and winter it's 24--28C here. So yes, start crunching numbers.

    I don't care whether average temperatures are now measurably up (ElReg's ongoing series disputing NASA's "up", what's your ultimate goal?), there's simple chemistry involved: you have a system in a relatively stable state, you start 150--200years ago pumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmo --- what do you expect? (a) nothing happens, (b) severe turbulence/ chaos/ disruptions or (c) all that plus a higher temp final equilibrium. ElReg keeps arguing (a) for sheer bloody mindedness; seems frankly a bit stupid bet to me.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Nuclear...?

    Well, if you stop saying "we'll site it next to that small village in the middle of nowhere" we might start believing it's safe. The natural home for safe power stations is inside the boundary of the M25 (or on the Thames estuary at least) because then we can avoid all the pointless transmission losses resulting from transferring electricity hundreds of miles. Hey, isn't the dome a good size for this?

    I don't object to the Beauly-Denny line on environmental grounds, I just think it shows how moronic our current out-of-sight-out-of-mind policy on electricity generation is....

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @Simon

    "Also electric cars are dangerous as they dont make a noise and you will get an increase in pedestrian accidents,"

    They do actually make *some* noise, it's just that with the current levels of background noise pollution and the fact that we are all trained to listen for honking big diesel and petrol engines they are hard to notice.

    Remove the background noise and you will likely find it much easier to hear an electric car coming...

  7. fr33cycler

    I'm so pleased you posted that Anne....

    I'm now awaiting all the apologies from those who leapt in to say it was great because it confirmed what they wanted to hear....

    Hold on...was that a pin dropping?

    The car thing is also based on an increase in the number of miles driven in the UK, and a decrease in the average efficiency of the cars used to drive those miles. Yet petrol sales (and presumably miles, 'cos not that many people can have changed their cars in the last few weeks) have been cut about 20% by current high prices because people are using their cars more carefully. Imagine how much better that reduction would be if rther than being a freak effect of global economics, it was the result of longterm decisions by Government who had used the proceeds to invest in alternatives, and set up taxation schemes to drive greater innovation in more efficient cars...

  8. Ash
    Go

    Interesting

    Ignoring el regs blatant 'push anything green sceptical' editorial slant this was a very interesting article.

    It seems to me that a combination of nuclear, and wind power (with distributed storage) will be the most practical solution to our current oil dependence. It will be interesting to see if we have enough time to make the changes in our infrastructure before our pipelines get turned off though... the government will procrastinate and avoid any unpopular (but necessary) decisions of course. Up shit creek etc.

    One thing in the article seemed blatantly wrong however. Assuming that having a warm house and hygeine cleanliness etc has to take up current levels of energy use. A few simple changes in improved housing insulation, micro generation of hot water from solar-thermal, low energy lightbulbs, cycling to work on nice days etc could markedly reduce energy usage in these basic areas. Individuals CAN make a difference.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @Anne van der Bom

    And you in turn missed the obvious point that electricity power stations are at best 40% efficient, and usually much less so - especially the "renewables". There are also losses in transmission and storage. A petrol can has the advantage that all the petrol doesn't run away when you leave it in the garage for a week.

    The good professor's figures stand up to scrutiny - unlike yours!

  10. chris
    Thumb Up

    But Anne!

    ...His conclusions fit the existing prejudices of a chunk of Register readers! *And* he has equations!

    As if environmentalists haven't been doing sums on energy consumption for a while. No-one read Mayer Hoffman's book then? Steven Pacala's work on the relationship between wealth and pollution creation that shows that it's the rich that are the problem?

    The message I get from this is: we can't live current energy-inefficient lifestyles forever, but most of the energy use is taking place on a societal not individual level.

    Therefore, society has to change. A las barricadas! Less tat, no bosses, longer holidays. What's not to like?

  11. Mike Bremford Silver badge

    @Marvin the Martian

    Er, 500km per day, per person on *average*? You are aware what average means aren't you?

    Your sums would have each and every one of us doing 100,000 miles per year, so unless you envisage a future filled entirely with travelling salesmen I assume your "he's a numbers man" comment was intended to be deliciously ironic. Well done.

  12. fr33cycler

    @anonymous coward

    True, some power stations are now less that 50% efficient (something many learned from those evil confusion dealers Greenpeace before you happenned to mention it), but they don't need to be in future and anyway it is somewhat irrelevant because he puts the car demand up against the output from the power stations (whether wind/solar, nuclear fuel or solar) and makes a statement that we will x million enough wind turbines to power those cars as if they were as inefficient petrol ones, not 5 times more efficient electric ones.

    Perhaps his figures stand up to your scrutiny, because you want to believe him.

  13. Anne van der Bom

    No I did not

    @Anonymous Coward:

    You missed the point completely. I and the professor was talking about wind turbines to provide the power for the cars, not conventional power plants!

    Please read carfully. And stay sceptic.

  14. Snert Lee

    tangents

    How green is the green plan when you've covered all the green bits up with concrete and cables for windmill support?

    I think the ideal answer would be a large reflector in space aimed wasted sunshine at enormous heat exchangers atop the earth-to-orbit bean stalk elevator.

  15. Chris
    Boffin

    solar power satellites

    As long as we're going to look at pie-in-the-sky solutions, what about power in the sky? The sun shines 24/7 in space. No clouds, no night. Collect it and beam it to Earth via microwaves.

    Or just put up a bunch of mirrors and reflect it down to stations in remote parts of the world where it can be converted to heat to drive conventional turbines.

    Or get that space elevator built and run cables down the inside of the shaft...

    Lots of options "up there".

    -Chris

  16. Anne van der Bom

    More ammo from me

    The line of reasoning is classical: divide and conquer. I examines each alternative energy source separately, and then dismisses it as unable to cover our energy needs in an acceptable manner.

    We would need to cover 40% of our country in wind turbines, so forget wind.

    We would need to spend x trillion on solar cells, so forget solar.

    We would need 100 sq km of farmland for biofuels, so forget biofuels.

    We would need to drill 15000 holes for geothermal, so forget geothermal.

    You must always look at the combination of different types of renewals. Never put all your eggs in one basket.

    I am not stupid. I do realise that renewables offer a huge challenge and are riddled by a host of problems, but are they unsolvable problems? Decide for yourself.

  17. Drunken
    IT Angle

    Strange Comparisons

    The first page of the article threw me completely, what does this mean?

    "if we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the country with windmills, we might be able to generate half of the energy used by driving a car 50 km per day each"

    Is that every car in the UK, or is it if every person drove a car they would get to 25km each? Or has he taken the actual average consumption of each car? I have no idea.

    And why compare cars which generally run off fuel, and not electricity. Electric cars are generally much more efficient, just their range is pretty poor.

    Oh well I'm confused. Time to have some beer, that will clear it all up.

  18. J
    Flame

    Very interesting, gotta read the book now

    Well, at least much better than what one regularly reads on the subject: wild speculation without any figures, where anything goes. When there are numbers and explicit assumptions, it's finally possible to check the plausibility (or not) of the conclusions. Let's hope more such thinking is done.

  19. Paul McKeigue
    Dead Vulture

    breeders and fast reactors

    There's enough uranium for the next few decades, so no need to rush with building breeder reactors. The risk of weapons proliferation is pretty minimal from a civilian reactor operated under IAEA safeguards: unless the reactor is specially designed to minimize build-up of Pu-240, the plutonium will be useless for weapons.

    The ideal design would be something like the Integral Fast Reactor, abandoned in 1994 after a prototype had been built. No need for uranium enrichment, transuranics never leave the site as they are processed in situ, and the waste is no longer radioactive after 200 years.

  20. Anne van der Bom

    Please don't believe me

    In line of my advise to stay sceptic, here is my calculation on the hot bath vs. tv on standby.

    A hot bath is around 70 l of water that needs to be heated from 15C to 35C. With a 90% efficient heater, that takes an amount of energy of (70000 * 4.2 * 20) / 0.9 = 6.5 MJ.

    A tv on standby consumes around 2 W of electrical power. With the average generating efficiency at 35%, that amount of energy buy you 6.5 million / (2 / 0.35) = 1.13 million seconds = 13 days standby time. Since a tv is on standby only 20 hours per day (and in use the other 4), I will apply a correction of 24/20, coming to around 16 days. Two weeks, not 6 months.

    This assumes the hot water for the bath is not created by a electrical boiler, but a gas fired boiler. In case of an electrical boiler, I would need to apply the 35% generating efficiency to the hot water too, making the hot bath equivalent to around 6 weeks of tv standby time. Another miss by a factor of 4.

    The 2 W standby figure is what I believe is a pretty common value.

    Please do not believe me. Check my math and assumptions! Stay sceptic.

  21. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

    windmills

    I think the idea of replacing our power generation with windmills has been and will always be a complete non starter.

    I think it was calculated out that the UK would need 35 000 to 40 000 of the things... and then have to double up on them in various locations around the country to keep the grid supplied... and then keep some nice gas power stations running in standby mode in case the wind dropped out too far.

    Someone mentioned his garden recieves 1kw/meter in sunshine..... ever found out how much power it recieves in jan at 7.30pm?

    Nuclear is a flawed technology, however it is a technology we have now, plus the fact the waste issues could be solved if the government of the day had enough backbone.

    But when it comes down to it, because most people believe electricky is made by magic pixies who live in the wall socket, I guess f all will be done to solve our impending power generation crisis

    Boris

    PS someone send that article to the green party/friends of the earth/the BBC and any other supporter of the so called 'green' movement

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @Anne van der Bom

    Anne, in using a 12L/100 km value, inherently he's accounted for the inefficiency of the automobile. Otherwise, he would have chosen 2.4L/100 km (divided by 5) to account for your claimed 20% efficiency. Are you suggesting he multiply through again by 5 times to account for it again, to be honest I'm not sure what your issue is with this. The calorific value he chose was based on the heat of combustion (had a quick look, 10kwh/L is fine for gasoline). The point of the section was to say, just as it says "how much power does a car consume", a average petrol car (read...not 100% efficient), not an electric car, running on gasoline of a given calorific value. The value he came up with as a ballpark is fine, there is nothing fundementally wrong with what he's done. I agree with being a skeptic, but I confess the tone of your posts here lead me away from thinking your a skeptic to thinking you've got a bit of an axe to grind. Read the section again, I don't think you've understood it very well.

  23. Dunstan Vavasour
    Thumb Up

    Demand, supply and price

    What this ignores, of course, is that as supplies tighten the price will go up and we'll use energy differently.

    The nations which are getting wealthy now aren't going to establish such a wasteful modus vivendi because it will impoverish them as fast as they emerge.And as prices rise, we *will* moderate our usage - we're already seeing "low cost" airlines suspending routes because they can't make them pay with fuel the price it is. As fuel prices ratchet upwards consumption patterns will change, not because gummint say so but because people are making choices about how to spend their money, and decide to put some clothes on rather then turn on the patio heater.

  24. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
    Paris Hilton

    Transportation of de light

    Before Winston Churchill ruined the planet by buying into Persian Oil, all mass transport in this country went by sail. OK if we had to use tugs and barges these days and move the population the way it used to move in daies ofe yore, we'd still have had to use diesel by now.

    But we'd use considerably less than road transport costs.

    Without a major revolution in such matters though, as the noted science bod indicates, we are living beyond our means.

    And if we don't want nuclear plants in every town, the way our grandparents had coal gas manufacturies, then we will have to shoot all the bean counters and then, when the time comes, all the politicians.

    No bad thing IMO.

  25. Darryl

    Actually

    "we might be able to generate half of the energy used by driving a car 50 km per day each."

    is not the same as

    "we might be able to plug a car into a wind turbine".

    It's a comparison of an example of energy generated to an example of energy consumed.

    But one of the favourite tactics of Greenies is to leap on comparison examples like the above and "prove" how preposterous they are when they come from anyone except for Al Gore and Greenpeace. I'm surprised you didn't make fun of how long an extension cord would be needed to plug the car into the windmill.

    I agree, stay skeptic. Question everything you're told by governments and special interest groups, including the Green propaganda.

  26. Anne van der Bom

    More ammo from me - type

    Oops. Make that 100.000 sq. km of farmland.

  27. Simon

    @Anonymous Coward, Electric cars

    I was actually following a car a few days ago that was spookily silent, then i spotted the Prius badge on the back.

    I was on a motorbike (No, my bike is fairly quiet) with the visor open and i could just hear the wheels gently rolling on the tarmac.

    I have an annoyance with pedestrians who think its ok to walk out in front you because its "Not their problem" (So I have been told...) so all it takes is a car driver to not be looking and you have an accident.

    Yeah, I know its more than simply the car not being heard, but its going to add to the danger.

    Where i work we have a charming little electric car that pics up the recycling bins and it plays a cute little tune while it drives around.

    Hey maybe when people are using electric cars there will be a mobile phone ring tone type fad for cars.

    Now what tune would you have your car play, hmmm?

  28. Anne van der Bom

    Thanks for the attempt

    @Anonymous Coward:

    You bet I've got an axe to grind with a professor that makes such obvious mistakes and nonetheless has the nerve of presenting his arguments as the final word in the renewables debate.

    You state that he used a fuel consumption figure of 12 l/100 km. You misread that, he used 12km/l, which (you may check that by yourself) is pretty much the average fuel consumption of a european car. Then you divide by 5 and conclude that an average car should consume 2.4 l/100. This is ~42 km/l or (in Imperial Units) 117 mpg. I know of no car that can do 117 mpg, let alone the average british car.

    If you had read a bit further down, you would have seen that he ends up with a figure of 40 kWh per day (based on 50 km per day). That 40 kWh/day is what I used in my calculation. So actually, what fuel consumption he based his calculation on, is of no importance.

    The 1.25 km/kWh consumption figure he ends up with is roughly five times as much as the actual consumption of an electric car in every day use. That is not what I would call a ballpark estimate.

    Thanks for the serious approach. Much better than the sheepish hooray hallelujah posts at the top of the page.

  29. Mark

    @Dodgy Geezer & turning off telly

    Dodgy, you silly cunt, the problem isn't the US will invade us but that if we use breeder reactors, how can we tell iran (and the international community to back us up) that the iranian breeder programme should be stopped because it is only going to be used for weapons manufacture?

    So us using breeder reactors means we can't control the weapons-grade materials.

    That's a political problem.

    And as for "turning off the telly doesn't save naff all", well how much is your telly giving you on standby? Nothing. So what do you lose when you turn it OFF? Nothing. It still isn't giving you a picture. Sure you may have to get off your fat arse to turn it on/off but people PAY for exercise.

    Oh, and to the AC: wind turbines aren't electrical stations. Ergo, power stations being 40% efficient doesn't change squat. Since this "educated" man was talking about the power output of the wind farms, the only subsequent losses are transmission. Damn near 100%. So the only component significantly reducing power efficiency is the motor in the car. And that's 90%.

    Just because an idea "proves" you right doesn't mean you're right.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    How about some budget numbers?

    A lot of this bloke's number crunching is based on the (in)efficiency of present-day technology. Here in the US at least, our yearly government expenditure on improving alternative energy tech is equivalent to a day of the Iraq war. The viability of alternatives will change significantly once relevant research begins seeing subsidies on par with oil+war. Unfortunately for most of us, that moment will be cunningly delayed until global developed markets reach their recessionary bottoms.

  31. Jim Lewis
    Stop

    Decentralised production reduces demand

    One of the major benefits of PV Solar and micro generation in general is that the power is produced much closer to where it is used.

    This is very important as a large proportion of the electricity generated, (and hence how much you pay for your electricity), is actually wasted in transmission.

    An example is traditional coal fired power stations. At best they turn around 30% of the energy in coal into electricity.

    At the point where you use it, a further 8% of that energy has been lost in transmission, IE coal delivers only around 22% of its energy to you home.

    Clearly generating power where you use it reduces the demand dramatically, and reduces the need identified in this report for massive wind farms or whatever.

    His biggest mistake is not recognising that far from reducing our usage of electricity, (which is acheivable as mentioned by other posters above), the much bigger issue is mking our distribution more efficient and decentralised.

    Guess why the big power firms aren't very keen on this approach?

    For information about practical application of micro generation on a large scale please visit the Woking counci site.

    By using community sized space heating and PV solr this authority has made real inorads into achieving reductions in CO2 emissions in line with Kyoto agreements.

    http://www.woking.gov.uk/environment/climate/Greeninitiatives

    As someone else said, wading into the debate with misinformation dressed up as serious scientific research does little to progress the issue.

    Back to the AI lab sir.

  32. Sollace
    Thumb Down

    @Anne van der Bom again...Re: you're hot water calculation.

    1. 15 to 35C. The average human is about 38C, A 35C bath, that's not hot it's tepid. The author was using 10C to 50C, that's a lot more typical, though if we want to skew the numbers I suppose we could be warming Saharan water from say a balmy 45C to 50C and save a whole lot of energy. Makes ther case better!

    2. 70L. Based on a typical Canadian Bathtubs internal size (maybe Europe's different) of roughly 142cmx61cmx36cm, 70L gets me 8.1 cm of soaking glory. The author suggests larger dimensions and deeper water, again more realistic.

    So the hot bath is now defined as 8cm of lukewarm water. I'd like everyone to go home and try this out tonight.

    3. Now we heat it. You assume a 90% gas heater. Why? This gets around the irritating 35% generating efficiency you goose the 2W standy unit with. Nice.

    Personally, When I bath I use a small bucket (10L) and limit the temperature to a balmy 25C. I like it brisk. Did I mention I have black solar coils on my thatch roof in my equatorial abode, so I'm pretty efficient.

    Tongue in cheek aside, you can manipulate your numbers to make your case, and in your case I think perhaps you're being a bit generous to your case. Again, you're not being skeptical, you're agenda is obvious here. From what I've read of the paper, the author is making ballpark calculations, and it's obvious, he makes no effort to hide this. The values he chooses are general, typical, what the average person uses. Be average, it's what everyone else is, and if you base your case on anything else, your argument doesn't hold much water (hot, tepid or brisk), because it assumes the best of people, that they'll change out of the good of their heart. Perhaps you've noticed, that's not reality.

    Sollace

  33. Chris G

    O.I.M.B.Y.s

    It seems as though all this interesting calculation is being made for us europeans and yanks and excluding the vast majority of the worlds population. If we want perfect low or zero carbon lifestyles Only In My Back Yard, then we really need to address another issue of prime importance to the world. And one that it seems only the chinese have addressed so far. That is that the world would function much better with a human population of around 2 billion. much less abuse of global resources , a MUCH smaller carbon footprint for humanity as a whole and far easier to address issues about lifestyle and it's apparent link to climate change/ pollution etc. The ultimate problem is everybody has a right to a decent standard of living, whether they live in Africa or Ealing but if there are too many of them all demanding their rights then the planet is going to suffer. The next big issue? Population control. Soon A government near you will have a spy in your pants!

  34. Adam Foxton
    Stop

    @James Pickett

    "I once did a back-of-envelope calculation that revealed that the amount of sunshine (@1kW/m2) enjoyed by my garden on one summer's day would be enough to heat my house for a year, so I agree that solar energy is a Good Thing. Given that the oceans absorb a fair amount of it, and distribute it a bit, why not use heat pumps to capture some of that energy? You could even help restore the melting Arctic, always assuming that it actually is..."

    1kW/m^2 is the maximum you can capture. Solar panels are nowhere near this efficient- you'd be looking at 20 great days of sun to power your house. Also, your garden would die as if you were capturing 1kW/m^2 your garden would be pitch black. You'd be getting little/no natural heat or light, so you'd be using your bulbs and heating far more, racking up your power bills. It sure as hell wouldn't be economical!

    Furthermore this doesn't work with higher density housing (flats and the like).

    Oh, and thanks to those pesky laws of thermodynamics a heat pump between the Arctic and the mediterranean would melt the Arctic faster unless you were putting work into the system (pumping heat from the Arctic to the Mediterranean).

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    @Chris "solar powered satellites"

    with an answer like that, I'm guessing your last name's Carter?

  36. Graeme Balir
    Joke

    New energy supply

    Surely the Prof. has missed a trick on any energy problems ... use politicians! An endless supply of hot air is available from the surplus of useless govt yesmen/women.

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Good man

    I have a great respect for David MacKay. His writings on machine learning are excellent. He treats the subject with complete rigour, yet still makes it comprehensible and even fun to read. If he can do the same to energy policy it will be a breath of fresh air.

    As a physicist, I tend to have a feel for how much power various options can provide (the enormous energy density of nuclear fuels, for example compared with solar, wind or tide). So I'm not really surprised by his results. But most people don't have a physicists insight into such things and for them it needs to be spelled out. You really do need to do these calculations before making decisions!

    I would sound one note of warning. Physicists like to approximate. That's all well and good when making ball-park comparisons. But if a political group wants to oppose one of his models, I'm sure they'll find plenty of questionable assumptions they can latch on to. Energy policy is political, after all, as much as scientific. I hope his work manages to survive the political attacks.

  38. Alan Potter
    Stop

    @Anne - I don't believe you

    @Anne, I tried re-doing your calculations. I firstly put 70l of water into my bath (eight year old house), and it was about 4" deep. I normally would use twice that depth. let's ignore the fact that the bath slopes outwards, and call it 150l for a real average bath.

    Also, the water temperature measured as 9.8C, not 15C.

    So, going by your 90% calculation, we get: (140000 * 4.2 * 25.2) / 0.9 = 16.5MJ

    I have two TVs in my house. One, an elderly Sony, claims 0.8W on standby. Another, newer one just says "less than 1W". So let's call it 1W, just to keep the numbers simple.

    Using your same calculation, I get 16.5E6 / ( 1 / 0.35) = 5.775 million seconds. That - by your calculations, which I am happy to accept, is 66.8 days of standby time for gas-heated water or 200 days for electrically heated water.

    regards,

    /alan

  39. Steven Raith
    Thumb Up

    @Various, electric car noise..

    Completely sidestepping the energy calculations and stuff, on the subject of the noises that cars make - Lotus, Hethels best export, had a concept many, many years ago, which I think was an electric powered [or otherwise quiet] Lotus Esprit or Elise.

    To make up for the fact that performance car fans [like myself] would miss the noise of fossilised trees being detonated in a sonorous sequence of small explosions, they developed an interested internal and external speaker system that could synthethise the noise of pretty much any engine you could sample, and if I recall, the idea was that the drivetrain would simulate having a power curve and gears, rather than using, say, CVT.

    So your Leccy Esprit could sound like a Ferrari F355 flat plane crank V8, wailing through to a simulated 9000rpm and crackling on the simulated overrun, or you could have a turbo four pot hot hatch-esque noise, with snorting induction and turbotcharger dump valve blow off. Or a smooth, creamy V12.

    And at the end of the day, plug it into the wall.

    I always liked that idea - and I dare say should leccy or hydrogen cars come to fore in a big way, that sort of thing will be very popular.

    I will miss real petrol engines though - nothing like following someone on a charge, and measuring how hard they are trying by the size of the flames they are shooting from their exhaust....

    Steven R

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    @fr33cycler

    To answer your question, I'm up in NE Scotland. Not exactly a sunny climate. Also, my house isn't exactly the best insulated, being 90-odd years old and being covered with small crevices that are just about impossible to get insulation to.

    Gas Central Heating on = very warm.

    No central heating on, nothing on standby (manually trip main breaker, go off on holiday for a week) = come back to a very, very cold house.

    No central heating on, lots of things stuck on standby = very liveable temperature. Not what you'd call "warm" but you can spend hours padding about in little to no clothing and not be freezing. One all-night torrenting session and the whole top floor's even more comfy.

    Things on standby make a helluva difference to the temperature in our house and I can imagine in others too.

  41. Sollace

    Re:Thanks for the attempt

    Yep, mixed up the L/km bit (clearly we need more fuel efficient cars in North America...). The point was, in using either figure, he's accounted for the engines efficiency, which you seem to think he didn't. Since I remain confused by what exactly he's done "fundementally wrong" in his calculation, can you do it for me. What is the energy consumption per day of a Petrol car, running on gas, going 50 km a day with a fuel economy of 12km/L. He says 40kWh, you say he's wrong. Fair enough, what is it? Remember, the point of that section was to calculate this value, not that of an electric car. I don't care what an electric car gets, it's not what he was calculating.

    As an aside, if he "has the nerve of presenting his arguments as the final word in the renewables debate", what exactly are you, I or anyone else doing? We're all presenting arguments....the nerve! His is one of the most balanced I've seen. By admitting you've an axe to grind, you're admitting to a lack of objectivity. That's great for an amusing argument, but not so great for intelligent policy.

  42. John B Stone
    Gates Horns

    The cats have the right idea

    The slide deck (on the linked site) is both enlightening and rather depressing. I was beginning to wonder if its major green contribution was in increasing the suicide rate (suicide being the greenest thing you can do). And then slide 164 - death by cats - priceless.

  43. Steen Hive
    Boffin

    He left out one very important factor

    How many brown people we are going to have to bomb/invade/kill/starve in each scenario to maintain our inefficiencies and profligate abuse of energy?

  44. Busted
    Stop

    @ Michael and anyone else that things CO2 is bad!

    "(a) Switching stuff and using low energy light bulbs >does< help. In my (rather high tech) house I brought electricity consumption down by 30% by this technique at essentially no inconvenience to me. Nationally, switching to low energy bulbs means that roughly 1 GWe of installed capacity can be switched off - about 2% o fUK demand or one power station we don't need to build."

    Nice to see you've replaced your normal non poluting light bulbs with ones containing lots of nasty chemicals well done there.

    "(c) The authors assumed faith in clean coal is endearing. This is a technology which has never been demonstrated at scale, and the scale required is collosal. Taking world numbers of something on the order of 10 billion tonnes of CO2 per annum, this occupies a volume at a minimum 10 cubic kilometres. This volume has to be gas tight with an internal pressure of 50 bar and storage would have to be permanent. This volume would have to be built every year. For the UK the demands are proportionately less, but it makes storing nuclear waste look easy."

    Oh that deadly CO2 again, you know we could just feed it to plant life I hear they quiet like it. I see your misconception that it's better we go with a really nasty polutant like nuclear waste or mercury light bulbs.

    WAKE UP MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING IS A LIE!!!!

    Whats far more important is the amount of real polutants that big business pumps into our air and water supplies things like heavy metals, man made chemicals etc. CO2 is easily dealt with by more vegitation something that more CO2 actually encourages.

  45. Mark
    Flame

    They don't quiet like it

    except insofar as we can't hear them speak...

    Dump plants in straight carbon atmosphere. Seal it. Plant dies. Why???

    Because plants need water, potassium, nitrogen and lots of other stuff.

    Are we increasing the water (not where dessertification is happening because of higher temperatures)? Are we increasing the trace elements? Are we increasing fixed nitrogen (well, only by overuse of petro-based nitrogen fertilisers)?

    HOW DO YOU KNOW AGW IS A LIE?

  46. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Everyone is missing the point

    The way to solve the energy problem?

    Reduce the demand. There are just too many people on this planet. All these figures and calculations mean nothing because they are based upon the scenario as it is now, with current population levels. In the past the amount of people in any one place was governed by the supply of food, now it needs to be by energy available.

    Want to build a new development there?" then how are you going to power it? Sorry sir not enough local power.

    All countries should have a one child policy and an incentive in cash on not having children, instead of the current situation where the government encourages the plebs to breed with child benefits.

    For the sake of my grandchildren I've decided not have children......?

  47. Marco

    Something's missing

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me this six page article neglects to mention what rate of energy consumption was used as basis of the calculations.

    Or was this swept away by saying "People who wash regularly, wear clean clothes, consume hot food or drink, use powered transport of any kind and live in warm houses have no need to worry about the energy they use to power their electronics; it’s insignificant compared to the other things"?

    My electricity consumption has dropped by 20% since using energy efficient light bulbs and turning electronics off instead of using stand-by. For others it might be more or less, but I would suppose that using energy better - without sacrificing comfort - should have an impact on how much of it we need to consume in the future. May it be through aforementioned lightbulbs or better isolated houses etc.

    Not to mention that some of you would certainly benefit from actually having to get up from time to time to turn on the TV or DVD player.

    That the professor thinks wind turbines are as dangerous as nuclear power is, well, a peculiar view. It may be true if you consider "as dangerous" as the danger of falling down when climbing on top of a wind turbine or nuclear reactor and trying to fix something, but it wasn't wind power that made Chernobyl uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

  48. Marco

    Re: @ Michael and anyone else that things CO2 is bad!

    >>> Nice to see you've replaced your normal non poluting light bulbs with ones containing lots of nasty chemicals well done there.

    The shortsightedness of some people here amazes me. There is one "nasty chemical" in these bulbs: mercury. Which actually is an element. And you probably don't know either that more mercury is produced by the average coal power plant powering an incandescent bulb for five years than if you smash a CFL on the ground outside.

  49. Michael Wright

    Can you get commercial insurance for nuclear?

    I know coal mining is hugely dangerous. According to Wikipedia, the PRC government acknowledged ~6 000 coal mining deaths in 2004. In all probability, the mining and use of coal has cost more lives this century than all the deaths attributable to nuclear energy, including not only Chernobyl, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, I know you can't rely on PRC statistics, but they're probably understating the figures; and yes, PRC safety standards are hugely lower than modern Western ones, but older Western mines were dangerous, and the use of coal hugely polluting. I had rellies who died of miners' diseases, and I can remember the London smogs of the '50s. Coal has killed, and is still killing, a lot of people.

    But: there is an industry that makes its money out of calculating risks, and the last time I looked, you can't get commercial insurance for the risks of nuclear power.

    What do they know? Or is it just prejudice? This is the only thing that gives me pause about fission power plants.

    Of course, I'm in my sixties and have no kids, so it doesn't make much difference to me, but you lot need to get it sorted.

  50. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    @ Simon AC DC

    Didn't George Westinghouse and Edisson already try this AC DC thing with the war of the currents? I was under the impression AC won because it lost less power due to the easier ability to up the voltage, which meant less resistance along the powerlines? Or does modern technology get round this?

    Just currious...

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