Dr Marek Kubik

Blogger with a doctorate in energy and an interest in changing the world for the better. This blog was broadly about energy, and frequently ventured into engineering, economic and political territory. Please note I no longer actively blog on here and have moved web house to www.mkubik.com.

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I've moved (web) house.

In case you're wondering why I've been quiet on here, it's because I've been developing a shiny new website... which you can find at www.mkubik.com.

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Throwback to a photo I just discovered from last year.  Me showcasing my work on managing the variability of wind from the SET for Britain awards at Westminster. Pictured with MPs Rob Wilson and John Redwood, after hopefully educating them that even with 40% of electricity coming from variable renewables by 2020 (in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland), this variability is manageable and there's no reason to slow up the build rate to 2020 on these grounds.

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Sceptioneering: are wind sceptics getting their sums right?

The below is an excerpt from a simple engineering calculation carried out by wind energy sceptic Dr John Etherington, a former reader in Ecology at the University of Wales.  In his book, he boasts the title of Thomas Huxley Medallist at the Royal College of Science and a former co-editor of the International Journal of Ecology.  Sounds like a smart fellow.

Whilst Dr Etherington comes from a background in Ecology and may well be recognised, even esteemed in his field, he devoted his retirement to writing about wind energy, in particular how bad/useless/noisy/expensive it is.  With the greatest of respect to Dr. Etherington, it appears to be an area that he is completely ill equipped to deal with, despite his book receiving overwhelmingly supportive reviews.  Presumably other anti-wind sceptics on Amazon, reading what they want hear.

I figured it was a good idea to dissect some of his work and show why it appears to be written by someone that doesn’t understand basic engineering calculations and therefore makes assertions based upon straw men arguments that he himself has constructed.  Below is a typical excerpt from some of his working, looking at wind turbines and the equivalent number of cars they take off the road.

What ‘they’ say: “The avoided annual CO2 emissions from a 100 MW wind project is equivalent to taking 34,000 cars off the road.”

The instantaneous power output of a small car at motorway speed is about 50 kW (Hayden 2004). Thus a 2.0 MW wind turbine at 30 % load factor, producing an average power output of 600 kW corresponds to about a dozen cars driving on a motorway. However one has to be circumspect in comparing with the 'car at speed' figure as no car is driven continuously in this way. The annual average is a different matter as it takes into account the majority of the time when the car is stationary… Taking an annual average, with the vehicle stationary for much of the time, Hayden (2004) suggests that a small car dissipates a continuous 2.25 kW in which case the 2.0 MW wind turbine is equivalent to about 270 cars…”

To an untrained eye, the above assertion might look reasonable.  It sounds mathsy and it has references.  Dig deeper however, and it’s painfully obvious the author doesn’t understand basic engineering.  Etherington is not comparing like for like.  The assertion he is disputing is the carbon emissions from wind vs displacing cars and proceeds to do a calculation based upon power, not around carbon emissions.  He completes his calculation by taking the alleged average power consumption of a “small car” and uses their power ratio over a year to arrive at 270 cars per 2MW turbine (which of course implies 13,500 cars per 100MW but that sounds a bit more impressive I suppose).  For the sake of clarity he does (2MW x 30% capacity factor)/2.25kW = 270 cars. 

The result of the calculation is however, a ratio of how many car engines are the same power as a wind turbine.  This tells you nothing about carbon emissions whatsoever.

If we want to calculate the carbon emissions ratio we need to know how much energy a 100MW wind turbine produces in a year, with a 30% load factor as assumed by Etherington, this comes out to: 100MW x 0.3 x 24 hours x 365 days = 262.8GWh of renewable energy.

This energy is zero carbon, and replaces the energy that would have been produced otherwise by fossil fuel power plants on the grid.  For simplicity let’s use the 5 year rolling grid average CO2 equivalent emissions for electricity in Great Britain for 2006 (the year the book was written), which is 0.55998kg of CO2 equivalent per kWh*.  This is actually conservative (as the average factor will be lower thanks to the low carbon energy that is part of the fuel mix).  The total carbon emissions saved by this wind farm in a year is therefore 262.8GWh x 0.55998kgCO2e/kWh x 1x106 = 147,115 tonnes of CO2.

So now, what’s the average carbon emitted by an average household car in a year?  That’s trickier to measure as every car is different, depending on its age, type, fuel efficiency, whether it runs on petrol or diesel… a whole load of factors.  You can’t just take a value from a magazine from a single car and assume it’s typical (Which is actually exactly what Etherington does if you delve into his references). 

Based upon the database collected by DEFRA*, the best estimate of average passenger vehicle carbon emissions is 179.4gCO2/km for petrol cars and 164.1gCO2/km for diesel cars.  This also tells us there are twice as many petrol as diesel cars so taking a weighted average of the two we get: (2/3 x 179.4) + (1/3 x 164.1) = 174.3gCO2/km.

We then need to know how far an average vehicle travels in a year.  The Department of Transport ** reports this to be 6691miles (or 10,706km).

Based on these two bits of information the emissions from an average car are 10,706km x 174.3gCO2/km = 1.87 tonnes of CO2 per car.

So we now know we have 147,115 tonnes of carbon saved in a year, during which a car would produce 1.87 tonnes, which means this hypothetical wind farm would save the equivalent of around 78,670 cars – about a factor of 6 times higher than the estimate Etherington suggests, and even higher than original estimate he set out to disprove.

Oh.

  * According to DEFRA’s 2012 GHG reporting conversion factors, a freely available and verifiable source (and more importantly, not some magazine).

** National Travel Survey 2012, Department for Transport.

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Presentation I gave at the Association of Engineering Doctorates Annual Conference on my doctoral research, London, November 2013.

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Just a week in politics

If a week is a long time in politics, the above quotes from (what appears to be) the same man above show how a year or two can change priorities.  I’ll come back to the UK but I thought this might be a topical time to write something on energy prices.

Ireland receives a disproportionate level of attention from me in this blog, but with good reason as it is a fascinating case of renewable energy integration. The first system within Europe to target sourcing 40% of its electricity from variable wind generation. Critics may point to other examples such as Denmark, but this does not account for Ireland's unique geographic position, and weak interconnection to other EU electricity systems. Denmark is effectively part of a much larger Scandinavian pool of electricity systems and able to export its excess wind generation.

I attended an all-party group debate on energy security a week ago in Stormont, home of the Northern Ireland parliament buildings. Some very good points were made about the current status of the Irish grid. Security, although the topic of the debate, very much came second to cost. Customers in Northern Ireland face the second highest electricity bills in the EU.

The first counterintuitive point to understand is that this is caused not so much by the wind generation being built on the grid, but by the fall in demand over the past 5 years due to the lingering impact of the recession. The fixed costs of electricity production such as capacity payments and the transmission and distribution costs mean that as the demand stays low, the costs are divided between a smaller share of customers, pushing the costs for each individual. Increased overall electricity demand and usage should actually (perversely?) help lower bills.

Second, the transformation of the electricity system is going to strongly drive costs for the next few years. Many of the conventional fossil fuel power stations in Ireland are reaching the end of their operational lives and need to be replaced. Replacing them is capital intensive, regardless of what you replace them with. This is really a critical point, and one not appreciated by the anti renewable lobby.

We have strong reasons to be replacing our conventional generation with renewable generation in the UK and Ireland alike, but the cost of this and the infrastructure required will put upward pressure on bills for a few years before the fuel saving effect of wind energy beings to weigh in.

We cannot escape from the growing consumer resentment at energy costs, but there is a real danger this comes from a lack of understanding of these basic facts. It is easy for people to rally around simple black and white ideals when in fact the reality is more complicated. Rash knee jerk reactions, like David Cameron's indications he wants to roll back 'green levies' fall directly into this trap of misunderstanding the dynamic nature of the energy system. Such actions may depress prices in the short term but is underwriting a much larger bill in a few years.

If we don't replace the infrastructure we are retiring, we face rising costs, a shortening margin of spare capacity and potentially having to pay to delay closing some of the old generation. Doubly very expensive and extremely counterproductive to Cameron's vision to be the 'greenest government ever'… if that indeed is still his ambition.

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Tar Sands, Lobbying and the EU Fuel Quality Directive

Ok, so tar sands.  What do we know about them?  Generally speaking, they’re more carbon intensive than crude oil.  We don’t know exactly how much by, as our emissions accounting is project specific.  The UK Tar Sands Network argue they’re one of the world’s most carbon intensive sources of fuel full stop.  Big oil argues the emissions will come down as we scale up extraction. 

The biggest reserves of tar sands are in Alberta, Canada and in Madagascar.  There’s local evidence to suggest the indigenous Canadian populations living downstream of it are finding their air, water and traditional food sources becoming polluted.  There’s also Prof. James Hansen’s reckoning that full scale tar sand extraction makes it impossible to keep within our climate change carbon quota.

In the EU we passed legislation back in 2009 (Directive 2009/30/EC, Article 7a) to decarbonise our transport fuels 6% by 2020 below a 2010 baseline.  Small but important progress in a sector dominated by crude oil.  Part of this legislation, the fuel quality directive (FQD), required the cataloguing of the carbon intensity of feedstocks fuels  such as oil shales, tar sands, crude oil and liquefied gases.

The FQD is important for sending the signal that we need to clear up our fuel mix over time.  One of the contentious issues in the directive is the separate labelling of different types of oil product particularly for tar sands and oil shales.  This issue was voted on in February 2012 resulting in a stalemate delaying a decision.  Importantly, several countries, including the UK, abstained from the vote.

This has been attributed to intense lobbying from the Canadian government (who argue tar sands are not different, just a heavy type of crude) and the oil industry (who argue it isn’t possible to catalogue them separately because ultimately the products are indistinguishable).

There is an argument for delaying the directive to achieve more accurate categorisations, as championed by Norman Baker MP.    The Lib Dems argue it is important to get right now, as it will not be revisited for many years.  Greenpeace and the UK Tar Sands Network on the other hand argue that delaying too long means the legislation may not ever get passed, as the Council of Europe will move presidency, a new EU parliamentary year will leave it unfinished business.  Ultimately a new bunch of MEPs will be elected and all these occurrences will throw spanners in the political works.  The longer we delay, the more likely big infrastructure pipelines for dealing with tar sands will get constructed.  Once they do, the oil will flow regardless. 

Lobbying for a delay has a big impact.

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V-day (how an EngD viva goes down)

I yesterday acquired a new set of initials to use before my first name, after passing my thesis examination viva with minor corrections.  I am the first of many to do so with the title of 'doctor of engineering' at Reading University, and I am already being bombarded with questions as to what to expect, given the differences to a traditional PhD viva.

The first caveat to state is that each experience will be different, based on the specific nature of your thesis, the choice of examiners and the institution's requirements. 

That being said, here's my experience. 

To my understanding the differences seem to be quite minimal.  Reading University requires that the EngD thesis demonstrates novelty every bit as much as a conventional PhD examination.  Other institutions do not necessarily have the same requirements (my external examiner, who has examined an EngD before at another university, commented that the criteria were more lax in this regard).  So that's good and bad news for the TSBE; the good news is your viva will be very similar to a normal PhD, the bad news is that means you have to do every bit as much work for your thesis BUT you will also have to demonstrate industry impact with your research as well as passing all those modules that add up to the equivalent of the exam work for an MSc.  No wonder EngDs are thought of highly.

I submitted my thesis at the beginning of June, and within a month we had the examiners agreed.  An agreeable date was set for mid August, so 2.5 months after submission.  On the day, I was asked to sit outside the room and twiddle my thumbs while the internal examiner, external examiner, the chair (an independent adjudicator not always present) and my primary academic supervisor all had a discussion about the viva.  I don't know exactly what went on there, but I understand that the examiners notes on my thesis were shared with my supervisor and any extenuating circumstances were discussed.  This means your supervisor already has a pretty good indication if you're about to enter a car crash exam or whether you're likely to pass.

I was then invited in, and my supervisor left.  This is optional - the supervisor is allowed to sit in on the viva, but they are not allowed to speak, so there's not really any help in them being there.  I believe you're actually allowed to have other people in the room too if you wish, but with the same rule - no speaking.  I wouldn't recommend it anyway; it could quickly turn into a circus.

The chair opened the session and introduced everyone, and from then on the viva was really led by the external examiner.  I was first asked to explain my research's industry impact, followed by my academic contribution to knowledge.  I was then asked a number of general questions about my research approach and why I had chosen it.  Another specific was what I felt the advantages and disadvantages of the EngD were over the PhD to my thesis.

We then moved onto more specific territory, with both internal and external examiners having tabbed and annotated copies of my thesis to challenge me on specific points or seek clarifications on others.  In my case they felt my initial chapters (1-2) set the scene very well and had no questions on them.  All the questions were really focused on my method and four core research chapters.  Some were testing my understanding of power electronics (e.g. I was asked how AC interconnectors work), some were quite direct (e.g. you did this approach... was it any good?), and a lot were just asking for clarification on various things. 

When they got on to my discussion and conclusions chapters (8-9) they said that these very well supported and critiqued and had no questions.  A specific commendation was given to the way my thesis was structured to very clearly identify my research questions at the start, then come back to these same questions at the end and explain my contribution to knowledge.

I actually found the discussion very enjoyable.  It did not feel high pressure, it was more of a casual chat about my research and why it was interesting.  If you go in there with a solid thesis, and you know your research, you'll really have nothing to worry about.

When finished I was asked to leave the room for a final short conferring, and then I was invited back in with my supervisor.  The external examiner then made a summary of their findings, saying lots of lovely things and informing me that I had passed.

I hope that settles some fears!

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Bombing for peace is like... fracking for renewables?

This article was an invited contribution to theconversation.com. The original article can be found here.

  Energy Minister Michael Fallon’s recent comments about the impact of fracking on communities in the leafy Home Counties (“We are going to see how thick their rectory walls are, whether they like the flaring at the end of the drive!”) has for many sharpened the debate about the necessity of shale gas extraction.

The process of fracking to access buried unconventional shale gas reserves has got people excited about its potential as a source of energy. The rapid growth of the shale gas industry in the US has caused gas prices to plummet, cut carbon emissions and turned the country into a net energy exporter.

In other words shale gas has, at least for now, achieved the energy holy grail: minimised costs, improved energy security and reduced carbon emissions.

Chancellor George Osborne has championed the idea of pulling off the same stunt in the UK, vowing to give generous tax breaks for shale gas exploration in his 2013 budget.

But fracking remains an emotive subject and positions become quickly polarised, as illustrated by the recent standoff between protesters and energy company Cuadrilla in Balcombe, Sussex. Environmental concerns are still raised regarding the chemicals used in the fracturing process, the generation of seismic activity, and the risk of contaminating ground water.

The “not in my back yard” (nimby) opposition of local communities draws some interesting parallels to those faced by the onshore wind industry in recent years. The result has been to shift government favour towards offshore wind, despite the higher cost.

Similarly, the shale gas industry might be pushed offshore. Many of the factors that made shale gas such a rapid success in the US don’t apply in Britain. Less favourable land ownership laws, a stronger collective European environmental conscious, different geology, and a much higher population density all make exploiting shale gas in Europe much more economically and practically challenging.

Britain faces a looming energy gap, where spare electricity generation capacity falls from 14% to 4%. Energy regulator Ofgem warns of an increased likelihood of blackouts. This is due to the shutdown of dirty fossil fuel power stations under the European Large Combustion Plant Directive, and also the decommissioning of many of Britain’s ageing nuclear power plants.

While renewables are growing quickly, they are not enough to meet the energy shortfall alone, leaving the government facing the lights going out. Dwindling North Sea conventional gas reserves leave the government exposed to the international gas market’s price volatility unless new shale gas sources are extracted closer to home.

Perhaps ironically, while a fossil fuel, shale gas may have an important role to play in the UK’s de-carbonisation targets and for the potential success of renewable energy.

After years of social, political and economic wresting between carbon capture and storage, nuclear and renewable electricity generation, the government has thrown in its lot with onshore and offshore wind energy backed by gas generation. The current government target is to meet 30% of electricity demand from renewable sources by 2020, driven primarily by a growth in wind generation capacity.

Wind turbines, particularly the smoothed output from wind farms that are geographically spread out, are able to provide reliable energy over a timescale of a year. But over timescales of minutes, hours and days, their variability is problematic for continually balancing electricity supply and demand.

Gas generation is a particularly suitable partner technology to wind generation, as it is able to ramp up and down its output to react to changes in wind generation output in minutes – much faster than coal fired generation.

Shale gas deposits therefore have an important supporting role to play in the UK electricity sector by keeping costs down, supporting de-carbonisation and increasing energy security. Drilling for shale gas will have to overcome nimby opposition and stringent environmental impact assessments, but ultimately it is too important to meeting Britain’s renewable targets to leave underground.

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What I do for a living

Taking inspiration from setinetchasketch's blog, I have decided to also have a go at explaining my job using only the 1000 most common words in the English language.  Original credit to Randall Munroe's "Up Goer Five" who does a remarkable job of explaining rocket science using just these simple words.

I look at wind power and how it changes with time in a place where there is going to be lots of wind power one day.  One day there will be lots of wind power in lots of places so this is important.

Sometimes wind power changes faster than we can respond. Fast wind changes can cause bad things like the lights going out.  Sometimes there is too much wind and we have to turn it off. Turning off wind loses money and makes the world hotter. I have been looking at these problems and finding answers to them.

Joining different places in the world together helps make wind power go up and down less. Changing the way we make power with dead animals out of the ground also helps to help match wind power going up and down. Using a box to store the power we get from wind and burning dead animals can also help.  Some of these things need money to happen and some of them need the people who run the places where we live to change the way we make power.

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Capability, not capacity.

The government plans for electricity market reform (EMR) in the UK are going full steam ahead and there is a growing clarity over the form it will take.  Contracts for difference are set to phase out and replace current legislation like the Renewable Obligation, forming a new support mechanism for nuclear and renewables.  The other major policy device is the introduction of a capacity market to ensure we plan a safe margin of back up generation to meet peak demand, given the looming cliff of generation from fossil fuel plants expected to close in the middle of this decade.

  The problem with the legislation in its current form is that it does not consider system operator needs.  National Grid, who have the responsibility for day to day balancing of the network, have little say over what kind of plant gets built to provide capacity in the proposals.  If, for example, we were to reinstate coal plant that provides 500MW of capacity but takes 10 hours to turn on, it is of very little value to the system operator for short term balancing to the system.  There is a danger that the capacity we provide is of the wrong sort for efficient system operation. 

  This may never turn out to be an issue given that the current plans are to auction capacity with a 4-year lead in time and at the lowest bid.  Such an arrangement weights itself heavily in favour of building combined cycle gas turbine generation, or for refurbishing mothballed plant (CCGTs are the most cost effective and quick type of generation to build at the moment).  It is worth bearing in mind though the decoupling of the capacity market and real time balancing may cause some problems.  The solution, if it does to turn out to be an issue, may be something that re-couples capacity requirements to flexibility requirements: a capability market.

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Don't hate the player, hate the game.

  Large banks take a lot of flak for, well, undeniably taking some risky decisions that are a contributing factor to the economic times of difficulty that we are today. It's easy to pick on them for other developments in the energy sector too, for example their reluctance to invest in renewables, and their role in investing in 'unconventionals' such as tar sand oil and shale gas. From the left, this causes protest and outrage. Aren't we supposed to be reducing our carbon emissions? Don't these techniques cause environmental concerns?

    Ironically, of course, this is all about the risk.  Renewables are 'new' and there's uncertainty surrounding the future of global energy. While the argument of climate change and impact on future generations is compelling, fundamentally the problem is a matter of economics and risk of a return on investment. If the fuels in the ground are economically extractable, someone will extract them. Call me a realist, but that's the primary factor that drives these investment decisions. If we want to change this we have to change the rules of the game.

  How?

      1)  Renewables and nuclear research.  Lowering the cost of alternative technologies reduces the competitiveness of oil and gas extraction. There are some technologies (solar in Silicon Valley) for example, that are already nearly at grid parity with conventional generation.

    2)  Carbon taxes. Recognising that emitting carbon is bad and applying a value to this. As a result, the economic value of extracting fossil fuels relative to renewables falls. The difficulty is implementing such a scheme fairly. The European emissions trading scheme set up to do exactly this has run into all sorts of teething troubles thanks to too many permits being issued (largely due to an unplanned recession - which does a splendid job of cutting down on our carbon emissions) and hence a very low carbon price which has not provided certainty and thus limited any investment in carbon reduction.  A higher carbon price floor would help in the future here, and we look to set to get this given that a £30/t floor is to be in place by 2020.

    3)  Regulatory certainty. The barrier to investment in renewables is often surrounding policy. Knowing that the government will not move the goalposts - the government's 2011unplanned change to feed in tariffs is a key example of this uncertainty and and how it can damage an industry.  Choose a plan, and stick with it.

    Resolve the above three issues, and you solve the fundamental problem with the energy game. If you can do that, the players will adapt.

  (If I lost you with the title of this piece, I thought of it in mind of HBO’s show The Wire.  Although quite a different type of political commentary of impoverished, drug rife communities in America, the show draws some interesting parallels to the energy challenge; how ‘players’ are mere cogs in a machine they have no control of.)

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Representing the TSBE centre at the official launch of the Association of Engineering Doctorates (Nov 2012).

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Michael Gove: Keep Climate Change in the Curriculum

  Just a short update to add this time - my attention was recently drawn to this by a colleague and I thought it worth sharing.  Michael Gove is planning on dropping Climate Change from the compulsory part of the National Curriculum.

  Climate change is a vitally important scientific topic for the next generation to grasp and understand the implications of.  It is frankly ridiculous that they should be able to pass through our education system without an understanding of the issues and decisions surrounding it and how it may affect them.

  If you've got 30 seconds and want to do something about it, I thoroughly encourage you to sign this petition, started by a secondary school student.

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SET for Britain competition finals

  Had an excellent but exhausting day at the Houses of Parliament for the SET for Britain research competition finals last Monday. The event gave me the opportunity to speak to many MPs including my local one(s) as well as various members of the House of Lords and tell them all about my EngD research and spread the message that renewable resource variability really is manageable. While on the subject I would like to extend my congratulations to the winners of the The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (aka the engineering Nobel prize) also awarded on the same day: it went to the ground breakers who invented the Internet. Hard to argue with that.

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Media games

This is a second (topical, as it turns out) post I’d like to make about how science is abused in the media. I'd like to say it's excusable, that it happens all the time, but really that shouldn't make anyone feel any better about it.

The subject of my annoyance this time (I'm not always this irritable) is an article in the Telegraph entitled: “Wind farms will create more carbon dioxide, say scientists.”

I’ll let you discover the article at your own pace, but to summarise it's a anti-renewable right-leaning piece which talks about “potentially devastating” research to be published in Nature relating to wind farms on peatland.  Forget about what the content of the study shows for the moment, because the issue here is on the crediblity of the report... the "say scientists" part.

Nature, for those of you not aware, is a very credible scientific journal. The inference is that this is a strong bit of peer-reviewed science, but the key point to note here is that nothing has yet been published. If you’ve not been published, you’ve not yet passed the peer review stage, meaning your method and results have not received a stamp of approval from the scientific community.

I hope most of you can see how this is open to abuse. I could write anything I want and submit it to Nature, good science or bad. I can then contact the media and leak the results early, thus generating publicity with sensationalist headlines like the one in the Telegraph. Now as no one can see the paper (difficult I’m sure you’ll agree, as it’s not published), it’s impossible for other scientists to respond to it critically and debunk it.

You tell everyone it’s “potentially devastating research” to be published in Nature, and people will remember reading about it. If in a few months the paper gets rejected, don’t expect to see equally sensationalist headlines like “We were wrong about the credibility of this research.” Instead, the story quietly gets dropped but the damage has already been done.

There's a possibilty that this is the last we hear of this research, but assuming in 6 months time we do see it published in an issue of Nature, then, and only then, can we get on with the business of actually examining what it says critically.

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Why renewables DO reduce CO2

I saw this tweet by Roger Helmer a while ago and thought was worth responding to, and it’s only a few months later that I’ve found the time to get round to commenting on it.  For those of you who don’t know Roger, he’s a European Parliament member, formerly of the Conservative party, but who switched to UKIP because of closer alignment to his views.  He's particularly outspoken on Europe and Climate change.

  A number of his tweets are on the subject of renewables, and whether by design or by accident are often factually baseless, misinformed or cherry picked.  There are certainly some significant challenges to overcome regarding the integration of renewable energy, and I fully acknowledge that.  As I research into this very area, I have a practical grasp of some of the political, economic, social and technical problems that need to be solved, but often not the ones that he informs his audience of.

  I’ve taken a relatively recent example in the above tweet – Roger links to a piece by the Global Warming Policy Foundation .  The GWPF is anti-renewable lobbying think tank, with a track record of producing reports that have subsequently been debunked.  While they make some seemingly valid points, their reports do not support strong statements like the one Roger paraphrases in his tweet.  The phrase "Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?" springs to mind.

  Let’s look at the accusation in that tweet that prompted me to write something.  Namely, that renewables don’t reduce CO2emissions.  I’ve dutifully done a bit of digging into the method and found that the relevant section of the GWPF report argues that:

  “Wind power is intermittent and requires backup sources of power – either gas or coal. These backup sources achieve much lower levels of thermal efficiency – defined as the proportion of the energy content of the fuel that is converted into electricity - than conventional power plants using the same fuel which operate all or most of the time.   The loss in thermal efficiency is even greater if the backup sources have to run for extended periods as spinning reserve, using fuel but not delivering power to the grid, in order to smooth fluctuations in either demand or supply from wind sources. Hence, the loss in thermal efficiency when plants run as backup sources may outweigh the reduction in the total amount of power generated from fossil fuels when wind generation is added to the system.”

  Now there is an underlying truth to this paragraph, but a lot of questionable content too.  I have previously covered why wind is variable, not intermittent, and that it doesn’t require dedicated back up.  So has a large body of literature by a number of authors, which I am happy to provide if interested.  So let’s start by not overstating the problem.  The spinning reserve on an electricity system is there to support all units on the grid, including other fossil fuel plants which can trip out and not just wind. 

  The observation about power plant thermal efficiency is entirely correct.  A power plant operating at a lower load (producing fewer MWs of electricity than its rated output) will be at a lower efficiency, and hence its emissions (measured by the standard metric of kgCO2eq) will be higher.  However “much lower…efficiency” is a qualitative statement which is used to underpin the argument that these will outweigh the savings from wind.  Astute readers will note that Dr. Hughes who wrote this report uses the word “may”.  This qualified version appears to have been lost in translation by Mr. Helmer when he tweeted it.  I wonder why.

  It is entirely possible that Dr. Hughes, who wrote the report, did not have the data to hand in order to calculate whether or not the emissions increase from part loaded power plants would outweigh the benefits of renewables.   I however, can.  So let’s go one better and quantify this and see if this is the case or not.

   <Warning, maths ahead… but its straightforward GCSE stuff, I promise>

  Below is the heat rate curve for a typical fossil fuel plant.  Power plant operators think of things in terms of heat rate and not efficiency, but a heat rate curve is fancy sounding way of describing the efficiency of a power plant at different levels of power production.  The thing to remember is that a low heat rate is good and equates to higher efficiency, and vice versa.

  The curve below shows how at lower loads, it requires more energy to produce a unit of electricity, and how a power plant is at its most efficient when it is close to its full generation output.  The difference between the heat rate at its minimum generation (110MW) and its average output (around 174MW)  is about 15%.

  Make sense so far?  In other words you require 15% more energy to generate a unit of electricity at this low load rather than the average load.

    Now, let’s qualify this with an example with and without wind.  The average grid carbon intensity of coal is around 1,015kgCO2eq/MWh., so when a coal plant is operating at 174MW its total emissions are roughly:

  1015kgCO2eq/MWh * 174MW = 177tCO2eq/h

  If this plant was held right back at its minimum generation of 110MW to make room for an additional 64MW of wind, the resultant emissions of the plant would increase 15%.  The net emissions of a system with this level of wind would hence be:

  1015kgCO2eq/MWh * 1.15 * 110 = 128tCO2eq/h

  In summary, despite the reduced plant efficiency, wind still has a net positive saving of 177-128 = 49 fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide being pumped up into the atmosphere every hour.  If we wanted to be really rigorous there are some very small emissions associated with wind production too, but not to a level that would significantly alter this outcome.

  So we can safely declare this tweet debunked.  Wind energy clearly does reduce CO2 emissions. 

  By way of PostScript to this blog entry, I would say there's a need to give scientists a platform to explain their research when the media grab a hold of something and misinterpret it.  Little exercises like the one I just carried out are really vital for debunking incorrect ‘science’ and it’s important that we see more of them.

  The problem is not so much lack of research or understanding, it is something really quite endemic in the media, where scientific studies are occasionally misinterpreted or skewed to support a particular view point, even when the original research may have a sound basis and be published in good upstanding peer-reviewed journals.  This is something Ben Goldacre has written in his book Bad Science and I strongly recommend giving it a read if you're interested in arming yourselves against some of the ways science is misused in the media.

[mlkubik]

What’s the fracking problem?

Shale gas has been hailed by some as a saviour to the European energy challenge, following the success of the US in dramatically driving down the wholesale cost of gas.  Improvements in the techniques of extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing (or ‘fracking’), together with the nature of land ownership laws in the US have meant an explosion of production from unconventional fossil fuels.  The question on many policy makers’ minds is whether this feat will be repeated in Europe and whether the US is likely to begin exporting some of its own production to European markets, potentially creating a second ‘dash for gas’ in the UK.

I have heard mixed opinions on these two issues, and I shall dutifully try to represent the comments that have been raised, drawing mostly upon panel discussion from the 9th Annual Global Energy Summit, held at the London Business School last month.  The statements made were largely anecdotal, but this is the nature of the beast when it comes to commodity speculation.

Chancellor George Osborne is certainly keen to explore the potential of shales, having promised a ‘generous tax regime’ for shale gas exploration despite a lack of evidence that it will reduce the cost of energy in the long run.  

The shale gas revolution in the US has been swift and strong, with the huge increase in production resulting in a complete reverse of the status quo; the US went from being a net fuel importer to a net exporter late in 2010.  This trend is expected to continue, with the US overtaking Saudia Arabia in exports by 2017 due in part to shale gas production and in part to rising efficiency standards under the Obama administration.

  The impact of this polar flip has already had global consequences.  The US is now on the trajectory to reduce its carbon emissions as it replaces its coal generation with gas fired power plants.   Resultantly the European market has been saturated with surplus American coal, depressing prices and keeping coal plant running.  Ironically, this is thought (at least for now) to be driving European carbon emissions up. 

However, the United States are not likely to turn into a significant net exporter of shale gas any time soon, in the view of oil and gas company Repsol.  Export permits for shale gas are difficult to negotiate due to US competition law; Shale gas is seen by some in the US as home turf advantage, giving American business an edge to create jobs and spur on growth, and exporting shale gas lessens this competitive edge. 

Private investment company Kepis & Pobe also believe there are questions as to how sustainable the current low prices are.  Shale wells characteristically decline much more quickly in their production output than their conventional equivalents, and this may doom this kind of production to boom and bust.

A further consideration is that much of the fracking in the US is from onshore wells, where ownership rights extend from the earth’s surface to its core, giving land owners a right to a share of the profits.  Europe in general tends to have a stronger environmental conscience, and particularly with a higher population density than much of the states, there are more difficulties in carrying out onshore drilling.

In the UK, the Crown Estate owns the land beneath our feet and the jury is still out on whether this will make it easier or harder to permit extraction.  Given the British public’s strong NIMBY* attitude to nuclear, renewables or new power stations, we can only suppose at the outcry against fracking below people’s houses might be perceived.  All this is likely to mean shale gas fields are likely to go the way of wind energy (which faced similar objections) and move progressively offshore, which will obviously influence the economics of extraction. 

As a result of the above factors, the growth of shale gas production in Europe is likely to be considerably more muted than in the US.   There is potentially a case for shale fuels, but the results are likely to be less dramatic than in the US. 

*not in my back yard!