(Originally written Sept 29 - posted Oct 13)
Joe Romm ran a competition at Climate Progress, to write what Canada would be like in 2050 if the pollution lobby held sway. This is what I came up with, summoning everything I could from my rhetorical repertoire to write a melancholy dirge.
I’ll introduce a periodic kaizen suggestions category to the blog here, to capture, well, suggestions I send to companies and organizations when I see “low-hanging fruit” for improvement. This somewhat plays to ideas found in book club selection The Toyota Way.
The first in the series is an email I sent in May 2010 to IKEA, relating to their particle-board furniture — which is not accepted at recycling depots in the Metro Vancouver area.
The email I sent IKEA is below the fold.
Not originally intended as a book club selection, the insights of John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future on biological succession in the natural environment, seemed to effortlessly explain trends in the energy sector. On these grounds, its arguments and speculations were deemed highly relevant to company employees, given the firm’s involvement in high-tech energy systems.
In brief, Greer argues that deforested areas are likely to be dominated at first by weeds, which reproduce rapidly. Over time, however, efficiency counts more than growth rates, and so such areas tend to return to forest, which cycle nutrients more effectively. In the short run, speed wins; in the long run, efficiency counts.
The energy technology parallel could be that fossil fuels have held a key advantage for centuries, on account of their being ease of exploitation. (As with weeds, their inefficiency with respect to GHG emissions could have been a small weakness relative to their scalability.) Energy technologies currently being pursued offer better efficiency (lower “carbon intensity”) but are generally unable to scale rapidly. Solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells and even nuclear power plants generally require a much larger up-front investment of energy and money, than their fossil-fuel counterparts.
As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 
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The final book in the book club’s (first?) energy trilogy was Peter Tertzakian’s A Thousand Barrels a Second. The book came on the recommendation of a colleague, and the author’s metaphor of an energy evolution cycle seemed particularly relevant given the firm’s positioning in the clean tech / clean energy sector.
In addition, the book seemed complementary to Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — it was thought that exposure to a second perspectives would add significant value and context for book club members who don’t ordinarily trawl the “energy” section of bookstores, libraries, or the web.
As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book.
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Energy Shift was chosen as a book club selection for much the same reason as Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller: the company is in the alternative energy field, and so would benefit from employees knowledgeable about the energy sector.
As a policymaker-oriented volume, the book wasn’t as detailed or analysis-driven as I’d hoped. An example comes in Chapter 2, which repeats the common refrain that energy demand will continue to rise by 2% per year for the foreseeable future. It would seem to me that the developed world is likely to continue experiencing several years of economic malaise, in light of the debt overhang and worsening demographics. Reduced consumer demand could somewhat dampen economic growth in developing economies as well, with a commensurate effect on energy demand.
None the less, the book was highly valuable, if only to know the kind of advice being given to movers and shakers.
As usual, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy.
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In light of the company’s focus (energy) a decision was made to cover a few books about the energy sector. Jeff Rubin’s wordily-titled book on the subject of peak oil — or at least, peak cheap oil — was chosen as the first volume of what has turned out to be (thus far) a trilogy.
Since few of us can relate handily to the volume of a barrel of oil (about 160 litres), and thus price-per-barrel numbers are somewhat abstract, the book review includes Litre-equivalent-prices to accompany the per-barrel figures. While numbers like $80 / barrel sound expensive ($80 is a fair amount of cash after all), putting this in the perspective of it being 50 cents per Litre, provides valuable context.
As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book.
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(Written May 18. Posted with minor adjustments June 17.)
The EPIC conference is coming up again — the consumer-oriented kin to the industry-oriented GLOBE conference, it tends to draw a more idealistic crowd. (And not necessarily as knowledgeable one…) None the less, when it comes to freebies, it’s a more interesting and rewarding than its businesslike cousin — I use a “shoofoo” bamboo hand towel freebie from Epic 2009, to wipe off my desk at work.
The hand towel is probably a representative microcosm of the stuff flogged at this show: bamboo grows with a virulent quickness, so is assumed to be a “green” material. But most bamboo products come from China… which doesn’t tend to follow environmentally sound practises. Analogously, a lot of IKEA wood comes from Russia — which is in the same boat. (As a side-note, this doesn’t reflect on our formerly-Communist friends — every developed country went through a growth-at-all-cost phase; environmental regulation tends to appear once enough enough people achieve a certain level of material comfort, and presumably political influence. And admittedly, by this standard Alberta isn’t a developed country yet. 
)
Fortunately, Shoo-Foo has respectable third-party certification to ensure its bamboo is grown in an environmentally conscious manner.
Tickets are $10. Exhibitors of interest (to me at least) include:
…and many, many, many others from the “D-Z” portion of the alphabet.
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* emissions (and costs) associated with overseas shipping are usually dwarfed by emissions (and costs) from local transport. This makes sense, since a truck might hold 10 tonnes of goods, but a boat might hold 100,000 tonnes. Even though the boats emit a lot more than the trucks (they use much dirtier fuels, for one) on a per-tonne basis, they cost and emit much less. As such, arguments that high fuel prices will reduce globalized trade are likely to be incorrect. (I’m looking at you, Jeff Rubin! )
High fuel prices causing recessions and decreased demand for goods in general — *that* will more likely hit trade (and thus globalized trade) a lot more.
Newsweek ran a story awhile back on how “big oil’s gone green for real”. (Though the correct phrase would be “big oil’s gone greenwashing for real”.)
A sample looks-good-at-first-glance sentence is the following:
In fact, while companies like BP and Shell are cutting back on commercial projects in wind and solar, Big Oil is taking a closer look at how they might be used to increase efficiency internally, or to free up increasingly profitable fossil fuels, like natural gas, for commercial sale.
If going green means cutting back on alternative energy programs, George W Bush should’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize. Increasing efficiency is something any good business does, so that’s not a real mark of improvement. And the stated reason for pursuing natural gas is money-green, not sustainability-green.
As it turns out, this is a case of advertiser-funded media gone awry. From ClimateProgress:
Newsweek since 2007 has sold advertising packages to the oil industry’s biggest influence group that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.
American Petroleum Institute ranks among advertisers that have reached a spending threshold that allows them to attach their name to a Newsweek event and have their top executive as a panel speaker…
…journalism and ethics experts decried the arrangement.
“You’re selling access,” said Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. “Newsweek is using its reputation as a great news organization to convene these officeholders to talk about public policy. Then it’s renting out a space at the table for one of its customers who would not be at the table if not for giving money to Newsweek”…
To mark this occasion, and in light of the current goings-on at Copenhagen, I put together a “Big Oil Hierarchy of Denial”, along the lines of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Five Stages of Grief. Sort of a guidebook to the different stages that Exxon & co have gone through, over the years. Enjoy!
Note: the list is to be read from the bottom up.
For the third year in eight, European nuclear reactors are having to shut down in summer, on account of the heat. To understate things mildly, this does not bode well for nuclear as a major power source, in a warming world! One-third of France’s nuclear capacity is currently offline, to avoid discharging excessively warm water into nearby rivers (water contains less dissolved oxygen as it gets warmer; pumping enough hot water into a river kills marine life).
France has 19 reactors, so if visualized as a litter of identical nineteen-uplets, this is equivalent to knocking six of them offline during peak periods when everyone’s turning up the “climatiseur”. (Another three are run full-time to enrich the uranium fuel — sadly I can’t recall my source, but it was a generally reliable contributor to The Oil Drum — so electricity for civic purposes has dropped from sixteen to ten reactors’ worth.)
Back home, Ontario’s Bruce Power reactors are sited next to Lake Huron (a much larger body of water) so shouldn’t ever suffer this kind of problem. For lake- or ocean-side reactors, the primary hurdle to nuclear power is cost — a hurdle with which the fuel cell industry is all too familiar.
The estimated cost of nuclear power (as calculated by companies submitting bids to build reactors in various countries) is in the 20 cents/kWh range over the reactor lifetime. Consequently, nuclear is more expensive than pretty much everything but solar photovoltaics — and the latter are getting cheaper as production scales up. (Each time worldwide installations double, solar gets about 20% cheaper. And installations are doubling every 2-3 years.) __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
The EPIA’s recent estimate that solar PV installations grew 129% from 2007 to 2008 is excellent news.
While growth is likely to be stunted in 2009 (due in part to the collapse of the Spanish economy, last year’s biggest market) this is the kind of trend that should warm greens’ hearts, and not the planet. One factor which works to solar’s advantage is the recent collapse in polysilicon prices back to “normal” levels — which will improve silicon-photovoltaics’ cost-competitiveness, even as some companies’ profit margins will be squeezed.
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While wind energy is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, the rule of thumb is that it can’t be used for more than about 20% of the grid, due to its intermittent nature. Basically, to accomodate large amounts of wind, you need to be able to turn other sources of power on or off instantaneously — to account for situations where the wind dies down or comes up suddenly. That means hydro (which accounts for about 20% of worldwide power generation; quelle coincidence!).
While solar is also intermittent, a big advantage it carries over wind is that it only provides energy during peak usage hours (from morning to evening). Which generally makes it easier to tie into the grid. While wind energy production will continue to overshadow (heh) solar electricity for a few years — generation capacity is currently about 120 GW to 5 GW — solar’s ease of grid tie-in should help it surpass wind perhaps a decade from now.
For now, the next milestone for solar will be to outpace nuclear; in 2007 new nuclear generation capacity was about 2 GW. Solar installations in 2008 were about 3 GW peak, which normalizes to about 1 GW (since solar doesn’t provide energy at night, and provides a lower-than-peak amount of power in the morning and evening).