Ed Dowding

Here’s some figures for renewable power generation in 2006:

• 62.9% – Austria
• 48.7% – Sweden
• 29.9% – Portugal
• 17.1% – Slovak Republic
• 19.2% – Romania
• 17% – Denmark
• 12.4% – France
• 4.6% - UK
  

In November 2009, Spain generated 53% of its demand from wind alone last week (it was a bit windy). So if you’re from the UK, be embarrassed: we’re getting our bottoms kicked by Hans, Abba and the Siesta Monkeys.

Since so little seems to influence peoples’ thinking about energy and the environment, I wonder if world cup style national pride could be leveraged to get some action here? The protests about petrol prices would be that much more potent if the protesters were aware that José Siesta and Pierre Le Grenouille were loading up their electric cars for a quarter of the price, whilst also benefiting from much cleaner air, having to work less since they’re paying less, and generally being far better served by their governments.

There’s also the angle that the UK seems to be slated to have a lot of nuclear. All this is planned by EDF, a French company. Nuclear, as we know, has astronomical decommissioning costs which are never budgeted for so are not fairly compared to renewables whose decommissioning costs are tiny. So it’s not a massive leap – certainly one the Daily Mail would be adept at – to suspect that France is deliberately hobbling the UK with nuclear, whilst also increasing its own competitive advantage by investing in wind power.

If energy prices effect where industry locates in the free market of Europe, shouldn’t we be treating this as a national economic welfare issue?

So ‘competitiveness’ and ‘employment levels’ join national security, economy, and ethics and morality as reasons to invest every penny we have in renewable energy generation.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you have low-cost, clean energy almost every other problem vanishes.

I finally got around to watching A Farm for the Future (available on Google Video) a few nights ago, and found it to be a great introduction to the concepts of permaculture.

Key things to realise (some not from the programme):

1. Current methods of farming will not continue to feed you during your lifetime.
2. We (and I mean all of us, including YOU, reading this right now) are running out of oil.
3. Before it runs out it will get much more expensive.
4. Oil is the most expensive component of current methods of food production.
5. Your food is going to get much more expensive.
6. We import about 40% of our food (in the UK)
7. As food gets more expensive, other countries are going to stop exporting it so they can feed their own populations.
8. Oil-fuelled production food production is only 10% efficient in energy, and about 20% efficient in land use.
9. We could – if we choose to – produce up to 50 times more food from the same land. (Ok that’s a touch unrealistic since there are bound to be inefficiencies, but let’s be conservative and say just 5 times as much. It still makes sense, right?)
10. We haven’t even got touched on the nutritional or lifestyle benefits yet. I’ll leave that to other posts, but suffice to say you could live a healthier, happier, longer life.

Here are my notes from the programme itself:

• It was in 1981 that we crossed the “using more than we’re finding” threshold with oil.
• “It’s not just that current lifestyle are unethical – they’re unsustainable”.
• 10 calories of fossil fuel are required for 1 calorie of food (global average).
• GM crops are also dependent on fossil fuels, even though they may use less – ergo they are not a long term answer.
• A litre of oil is the energy equivalent of 1 person working for a week; the oil we use equates to 22bn (unfed) slaves (c.3x world population).
• There are 150,000 farmers in the Uk, with an average age of 60.
• Normally cattle are taken off fields in the winter since they turn pasture into mud. But with a blend of tough/soft, deep/shall rooted (etc.) grasses you can leave the cattle there year round. Thus no hay production required, or unused land area. It took 60 years for one chap to perfect that, in one area.
• Don’t dig. It destroys the life in the top 6″ of soil which plants thrive on. (See other posts on permaculture, too.)
• Don’t look after plants, cultivate soil.
• 95% of all food is dependent on synthetic fertiliser.
• Permaculture: conscious design of a better system (Wikipedia link).
• Khaki Campbell ducks eat lots of slugs and lay lots of eggs.
• Willow, lime, and ash leaves / branches are good fodder crops for animals.
• In a well considered permaculture plot, 12 man-days maintenance and 40 man-days of harvest will feed about 10 people per acre.
• Nuts are more efficient to grow than cereal crops. Sweet chestnuts can yield 2 tons per acre (about 60% that of wheat, with much less effort).
• During WWII, 40% of food came from small domestic production.

I suppose the question is “Neat. Is there any large scale permaculture so that we can feed lots of people? All the ones, like me, maybe in the cities, who don’t garden?”

Large scale production permaculture is probably going on somewhere (I understand that Pittsburgh Permaculture showcases examples), but to a certain extent it’s a bit of an antithesis to the small, intensive, and hyper-local principles. However the cities still need to be fed so.. a few answers:

1. The goal is community efficiency not self-sufficiency
2. It can be a great business opportunity, especially if more people know about why it’s being done.
3. It’s not an industrial farm, so don’t expect it to behave like one. If the old models aren’t working, don’t expect to see permaculture behaving in the same way. (That said there are some neat multi-storey urban farms.)

http://www.good.is/post/transparency-good-s-most-popular-infographics-of-2009/

I love this graph.

WOT = Well Off, Thoughtful
LIL = Low Income Lifestyle

Basically it says “Yes, you may recycle and think you’re green and lovely and one of the people who should survive The Great Reckoning, but actually you’re about 3 times more environmentally impactful than that fat TV watching pikey you feel so superior to.”

The main differences are the amount of things we buy, and the amount of flights we take. However we also just consume more of everything, which pushes us into an American level of planet abuse.

We do turn off our lightbulbs and insulate our roofs, though. So that smug, warm feeling is definitely real, it’s just misattributed.

I’m not suggesting Puritan self-flagellation (though I can think of some people who should try it), just some consideration for the alternatives.

If you’re thinking of popping off to Morocco for the weekend, of flying to Geneva for the week to go skiing, take the train. And if you’re thinking about buying something,  spend the money on a memorable experience instead – it lasts much longer.

Source: Peter Harper, Centre for Alternative Technology: Sustainable_Households a presentation given to the Transition Winchester conference.

We recycle used bicycles to build pedal-powered machines, bicimáquinas, which support and help facilitate the work of small-scale, self-sustainable projects. Through this work we hope to contribute to the conservation of the environment, the health or the Guatemalan people, and the productivity of the local economy.

MAYAPEDAL.

Via @Al_Humphreys

The founder of Ecotricity is building a wind powered (well, electricity powered) car. Read about it as his blog, Zerocarbonista.

The good news for Britain’s energy supply is that the sheer scale of the recession has cut our electricity demand and carbon emissions. An impending energy security crunch has been postponed.The bad news is that the recession will almost certainly delay investment in Britain’s energy infrastructure and encourage complacency.

[...]

For the past two decades we have had ample reserves to absorb the shocks: now the margins are beginning to wear thin. Many of the existing power stations were built in the 1970s or earlier. All the coal-fired stations are more than 30 years old, as are most of the nuclear ones. They are all coming to the end of their lives and their reliability is inevitably beginning to suffer.

[...]

Time is now very short in energy terms. Investment does not fit into neat electoral cycles. With about five years to go if the economy recovers, there are still things that can be done. Our energy policy was designed for the years of energy surpluses and North Sea gas. It is still focused on keeping costs down and sweating assets. What is needed is a radical rethink, with investment the priority. It will take a national effort to prevent a serious crisis in the middle of the next decade.

Without such a redesign, if there is a rapid economic recovery, things could get nasty quite quickly. As energy systems operate closer to the margin, small shocks have large consequences. Today a few demonstrators cannot make any serious impact, and even a prolonged interruption in Russian gas supply can be withstood. But as margins tighten, prices respond disproportionately. Britain has probably already committed itself to higher and more volatile prices.

Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College, writing in The Times.

There are a lot of curious inefficiencies in modern life. We end up owning an awful lot of things which we don’t use very much, but we have them because when we want when we really want them. Lawnmowers, tools for small jobs around the house, washing machines, and cars are just a few things which would suggest that we could be a little bit smarter in the way we handle things. I mean, it’s 2009, we know we have ever more people yet finite resources, and we know climate change is real, right? We really owe it to ourselves to sort out a few things and demonstrate that we’re as smart as we think we are.

So even if you can think of a better way to do things, how do you get those ideas adopted? The world is already very geared up to working in the way it does, so solutions have to address the following:

1. contribute to the economy
2. provide people with incomes and things to do
3. we just like getting new things
4. we like them to be ours
5. we like the convenience of having things where we want them, when we want them.

The one thing which is almost guaranteed to create change in everyone is saving money. As our own experience, Nudge, and innumerable other books tell us, we feel the pain of giving things away much more than we feel the joy of getting new things, so this is a great place to start. So what simple things can we do to create the biggest savings for people? What hits our wallets hardest? Cars.

Car clubs

You’ll probably already have heard of ZipCar (and many other similar companies) who supply a variety of cars at convenient locations for use whenever you want for as long as you want. They are considerably cheaper to run than having your own car, and require no maintenance. We can choose a new car every time (big one, smart one, easy to park one) so we always get the newness, and we have a sense of possession (though not complete) since we’re part of a club. And whilst there are some inconveniences such as perhaps having to walk a little further to the allocated parking spot, these are all outweighed by the convenience of not having to tax it, insure it, maintain it, or pay any upfront costs for it. From an environmental perspective it’s great since every zipcar means 15-20 fewer private vehicles on the road.

Does it work, though? Is there adoption? Does it deliver the benefits? Is it creating the change? Yes. It took 2 years to get the first 1,000 Zipcar members. Today it takes a few days. I’d say that’s pretty successful.

You may also like to see what the founder is working on now.

Car sharing

There are organisations like Car Share, FreeWheelers, GoLoco, etc which all help promote more optimal car use, but there are lots of drawbacks to this idea. It certainly has a role to play, especially in smaller communities, but does not address some of our key wants.

Completely new vehicles

I’m basically talking about the GM / Segaway PUMA here. This travels at a max speed of 35 mph and doesn’t have a lot of storage space but does provide shelter and convenience, and reduces urban traffic density. However a bike is also very good at this, at a fraction of the cost.

Electric cars

Whilst I personally prefer the idea of car clubs, it seems that these are going provide the largest part of the solution for zero-carbon personal transport, since they satisfy the things listed at the start, and are a minimal departure from the way things are at the moment.

Electric cars have the advantage that the energy source is interchangeable. It could be nuclear, coal, solar, wind, or any one of the sources of the huge amounts of renewable energy available to us today.

The market is innovating reasonably well. Tesla (no bailout) has developed two cars on less than $200 million — compared to the $1 billion General Motors (various bailouts and still going down) spent developing the now-deceased EV1. However there is still a long way to go with battery technology to make it really amazing….

… or is there?

Electric car networks

A few months ago I was told about Better Place. Their thinking is that if you have the network to support electric cars, ie charging points where you park, and refill points along the road, then actually battery life is not such a problem. Laptop owners will be able to relate to this, I’m sure.

If you have 20 minutes, I’d recommend this brilliant video by the founder which does a great job of showing what they’re doing, how, with who’s support, and why.

They are getting things done incredibly quickly. They’re about 5 years ahead of where I had thought them to be. Their  fervour and success is testament to the size of their mission. They are literally trying to save the world, and the way their going they have a good shot at it.

It is the kind of leadership, innovation, and confrontation of the facts shown by all those listed here that is going to create the world we should have.

Where Europe can help

I think we can all agree that the less we get involved in these companies and what they do, the better. They’re clearly innovating and creating very nicely.

There are areas where governments and the EU can, and should, help make things easier.

1. Compel industry standards, as they’ve done on mobile phone chargers, so that we can get on and build the networks and vehicles quickly and efficiently, and with as many low-cost and upgradable components as possible.
2. Support investment in the infrastructure. (See this blog post for information on the sunk cost of the bailouts vs the costs of an electric car network.)
3. Invest in research and innovation

• Where you consume water in your daily life

  http://www.good.is/post/transparency-how-much-water-do-you-use/

• Training the young to fix our problems
  http://www.yesworld.org/ and http://www.csl.org.au/
• The gift economy in Mali

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ELNsQdSMOc

• Twitter users skew towards the older crowd

  http://www.inquisitr.com/21484/twitter-userbase-skews-toward-older-crowd-data-suggests/

  (I’m beginning to think I might have to add yet another Twitter post qualifying previous posts.)

• Facebook unlikely to release currency

  http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/04/07/facebook-unlikely-to-launch-universal-virtual-currency-anytime-soon/

  Though what a great development if it did! An alternative currency on a global scale! That’s pretty cool and exciting.

• Sustainable Energy without the hot air – a great, free, PDF book

  http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/09/sustainable-energy-w.html

• Seychelles decides food security is more important than tourism

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7976415.stm

• Donor cards can now be filled in online!

  https://www.uktransplant.org.uk/ukt/how_to_become_a_donor/registration/consent.jsp

• Biochar is pretty interesting

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

• Ecology of Money by Richard Douthwaite is an excellent book comparing money systems issued by governments, commercial organsiations (ie banks), and by their users. Very interesting indeed, and stunning to think we’re not more aware of this.

  http://www.feasta.org/documents/moneyecology/contents.htm

• UK’s green companies facing tough times due to availability of credit and investment runs counter to the government’s stated intent.

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/06/renewable-companies-cash-crisis

• The Skoll Foundation’s mission is to advance systemic change to benefit communities around the world by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs.

  http://www.skollfoundation.org/