Green energy - defined

No agenda here (much), just an attempt to explain what 'green energy' means in reality. There's no point in dismissing or embracing it unless you know what it means, in my opinion. It has become a political, global football but I think you need to know what it is before you decide on its merits. For what it's worth, I think sustainability - in the true sense of the term rather than the way in which it is being used to take control over people as part of the Agenda 21 nonsense (more here) - is a good thing.

But it's about balance, having a rounded approach to meeting our ever-growing energy needs and making use of the resources at our disposal. You wouldn't not eat some food today because people in 30 year's time would therefore not be able to eat it. In many ways that is what we're saying about fossil fuels: I know that they will not 'go off' or disappear like food would over that time period, but shutting down (for example) the coal industry including extraction and the power stations that burn the stuff makes it much more difficult and costly to ever go back and make use of it again.

We certainly shouldn't, in my opinion, do such things rashly or with a gun at our heads just because of some scaremongering and unproven science about man-made global warming (more here). That would just be plain stupid and as we are already seeing, vastly expensive and damaging to our current prosperity. If you close down a working coal mine, for example, even though there are usable (commercially viable) reserves available, and you stop maintaining the thing, pumping out the water etc., it quickly becomes flooded and extremely difficult if not impossible ever to bring it back on line. And, in that instance you have effectively 'sterilised' the works and lost the valuable resource. Which seems a pretty stupid thing to do in my view. The same is true of oil when we have the massively expensive infrastructure in place now, to enable us to make us of this valuable and extremely reliable source of energy.

Anyway some (layman's) details about green energy and the options and alternatives, just if you're interested.

Nuclear energy: Is essentially harnessing a chemical reaction which creates heat and power to drive turbines which turn that energy into usable electricity. It's clean, there are few if any emissions of CO2, but it is relatively expensive to harness, creates dangerous waste and is volatile and somewhat vulnerable to miss-use as it can create unhealthy by-products like bomb-making materials. It is also potentially vulnerable to the elements as we have seen in Japan and also, possibly, to acts of terrorism. But for reliable (and that is a key term in all of this debate) power supply it has to be part of a modern, joined-up energy policy. There are also some exciting new developments in nuclear technology such as Thorium reactors but you can google that. Nuclear fusion technology is also advancing and is perhaps the ultimate holy grail. A bit like perpetual motion. But a potential long term solution in my opinion. More here.

Solar: is plentiful, is probably the ultimate answer to our energy needs, but it is not efficient in the latitudes where the decisions are made and most efficient in areas of the planet where conflict and corruption abound. Distribution of solar power is a major issue - transporting the energy from Africa (for example) where it can be efficiently produced, to northern or southern areas where it is used, is a major issue. If we can crack this - and we must eventually - we'll have solved the world's energy problem forever, to a very large extent. 

Biomass: Is fuel crops essentially, growing plants that produce fuels that we can use (burn) for energy. What's not to like? We can grow our own petroleum and not rely on fossil fuels? From a green perspective the theory is that the plants consume CO2 and then release it when burned, in an environmentally balanced way. Wouldn't that be perfect? Except, unfortunately it doesn't stack up. The plants would have to grow for a hundred years or more in order to 'fix' the same amount of CO2 that burning them releases into the atmosphere in order to achieve a neutral balance. Whereas biomass cops are grown in a single season and then harvested, just like food crops. There are some good examples of trees being grown for biomass and in a sustainable way, but they are quite land-intensive and not really a major solution for that reason.

In many ways coal is biomass, just over a much longer time-frame: It's 'dirty' if you consider this issue in the short term, but the trees that became coal probably did, during their lifetimes, 'fix' the same amount of CO2 that burning them releases now, but that was millions of years ago. Coal is essentially biomass. But not fast enough for our current times.

The other thing about biomass is that we might be able to grow enough fuel crops to keep us warm, but there'll be nothing to eat because we've devoted our land to producing fuel instead of food. So it's not really a major long-term solution.

Wind energy. Not exactly a new thing - we have been using wind energy for centuries to grind corn into flour for our bread. Wind is a natural resource - essentially a free resource although harnessing it seems now to have a massive cost associated with it. On a relatively small and local scale it is a fantastic thing to harness. But it's not reliable enough to guarantee power at all times which is the way we need it these days. So it is a potentially valuable secondary source but difficult to control or rely on. Windmills of the scale we're now seeing kill birds and bats and take up massive areas of land for a relatively inefficient power source. The reliance we're currently placing upon wind power is quite mad in my opinion.

Water or 'Hydro': Is much more reliable than wind, but again costly to harness. But rivers do flow, tides ebb and flow and that movement can be harnessed to generate very reliable electricity. Funnily enough I spoke with someone today who was involved in the major hydro electric scheme at Niagra Falls in the 50s. As part of that scheme they used the power to pump water 'uphill' into storage during off peak times of the day and then released it for 're-use' during peak demand periods. That makes sense to me but you need big rivers and big storage reservoirs to make it commercially viable.

The proposed Severn Hydro scheme which was binned earlier this year would have cost less than HS2 (£30billion) and provided around 5% of the UK's current energy needs for 125 years (at least), but it would have been inconvenient for a few wading birds it seems. If only these birds had some way of travelling a couple of miles further upstream? If only they could fly..oh, wait.. Hydro should be a major part of the answer if we're serious about sustainable and reliable power.

Ground source, air source and geothermal energy: You may be aware of this stuff? Taking energy out of the ground or the air and making it available for our use? It's essentially about harnessing the differential between two places or 'states' in temperature, putting that differential through a heat exchanger and multiplying that difference into warmth - or cooling - depending upon what you want to achieve. It's good and it works. But it is basically about energy efficiency rather than renewable energy.

Many people talk about this technology in terms of 'geothermal' energy. It isn't. Unless you're lucky enough to be living next to a natural thermal 'spa' in Iceland or someplace similar where the earth's heat is bubbling up and you can tap into it, it is not 'geothermal'. What it is, is using the fact that if you dig down into the earth for about 1.5metres the temperature doesn't change much, whatever the weather is doing. There can be a hard frost on the ground (surface) but the temperature of the earth 1.5 metres down will be the same as it was in summer. And you can use that differential to draw the relative heat out of the earth, through a heat exchanger to multiply that differential, and deliver warmth into the building or your environment. You can, theoretically do the reverse and achieve cooling in the summer months.

But its not 'creating energy' it's using differentials to enhance what you have. And it takes significant amounts of electricity (to power the heat exchangers) to do so. So your gas bills go down considerably, but your electricity consumption goes up. It has a role to play in efficiency but is not a strictly 'renewable' solution.

Energy From Waste (EFW): This is, in theory, a very attractive option given that it helps to address two major issues - energy requirements and the massive amounts of waste we produce. Many landfill sites in the UK and around the world use gas engines to burn the methane produced and turn it into electricity. And that's very positive, but it is 'shitty' gas (technical term) and wreaks havoc with the massive and very expensive engines and shortens their effective life considerably.

Burning waste as a fuel is also a potentially positive option but no-one wants an incinerator near to where they live and there are some credible scare stores about the release of dioxins and carcinogens into the atmosphere. I think filtering could well make these things viable but they're very high on the NIMBY's 'no go' areas.

Anaerobic digestion is another option that is starting to gain some ground in the UK. This is the use of micro organisms to speed up the decaying process of carbon-based waste - food and garden waste generally speaking - in a sealed environment to produce gas which can be used as a fuel in the usual way (power station way rather than fuel-in-you-car way obviously). There are some (albeit fairly small) viable plants already operating in the UK.

Although not strictly 'green energy', energy efficiency also has a major part to play in all this, but not necessarily on an individual domestic basis. Yes you can insulate your home to the nth degree, install efficient boilers, combi boilers, condensing boilers etc; double glazing etc., although I'm personally not convinced that an hermetically sealed house is a particularly healthy environment, but hey ho, it's certainly less expensive to keep warm. And we should do (some of) this, but on a house-by-house basis it's relatively expensive when compared to the cost/energy savings achieved (with, typically a 25+ year payback period); it adds about £40,000 to the cost of a new build house (Eco Homes standard) and is considerably more expensive to achieve the same level for the retrofit of an existing house.

Much more economically viable are district heating schemes where electricity is generated locally and used across a largish housing, office or mixed use development. But it's not simple to achieve since you will have to install traditional boilers & systems into the first 1,000 or so homes until you reach the required scale for the district heating system to be viable. And then you have to persuade Mrs Smith (x 1,000) to give up her trusty boiler...

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is another potentially efficient option - using the heat produced in a manufacturing process (for example) to heat local homes and offices. Heat that would ordinarily just be voided to the atmosphere. But like many of these options it is fiendishly costly and difficult to retrofit and really needs a green field plan in order to design it in to the finished development.

And there you have it. Green Energy. Boring as fuck I'm sure you'll agree, but quite important to our future. Reliability is the key really. Which is why Nuclear, hydro-electric and EFW are key elements, used alongside our existing fossil fuels - why would you simply waste that fantastic resource we already have available to us when there is no credible evidence that CO2 emissions are causing harm to the planet? Reliability is also why wind is a bit-part player in the solution and will never replace other energy sources despite what Mr Davey et al are trying to tell you.

If we had a proper, intelligent, grown up and long-term energy policy that might help too. But heck you can't have everything. It might just stop us being royally ripped off by the piss-taking profiteering of our current energy industry too. More here. 

Ultimately it will all come down to solar - an inexhaustible supply of energy from the sun, which is, incidentally (but quite importantly) the thing that controls the temperature on our planet, not our CO2 emissions. How Canutesque of us to think it's us and even more absurd that we can control it! Madness.

So now you know.

Thanks for reading.