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anonymous

Ch 15 Page 90: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • This river of reading material and advertising junk pouring through our letterboxes contains energy. It also costs energy to make and deliver. Paper has an embodied energy of 10 kWh per kg. So the energy embodied in a typical personal flow of junk mail, magazines, and newspapers, amounting to 200 g of paper per day (that’s equivalent to one Independent per day for example) is about 2 kWh per day.
  • A new car’s embodied energy is 76 000 kWh – so if you get one every 15 years, that’s an average energy cost of 14 kWh per day. A life-cycle analysis by Treloar, Love, and Crawford estimates that building an Australian road costs 7600 kWh per metre (a continuously reinforced concrete road), and that, including maintenance costs, the total cost over 40 years was 35 000 kWh per metre.
    • anonymous
       
      Can we scale this for trains? 400x bigger vehicles / 2x usable life / total numbers deployed (or required?) vs 33 million cars. And the rail network... Did I miss a discussion of train production and infrastructure elsewhere?
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    Energy cost of junk mail and newspapers - 2kwh/day - half what we use to light ourselves.
tony curzon price

Energy group read, week 5. Heat, hydro and light (oD) - 0 views

  • We use about as much to heat and cool ourselves (in Britain) as we use to move around in our cars, while lighting uses onlu a graction of that energy - especially using low energy fluorescent bulbs or the new generation of LED lights. Hydro-electric power in Britain, however, even with generosity from the wet Highlands, will only deliver about one third of the small amount of energy we use to light ourselves. How unfortunate that such accidental power-concentrators as mountains and streams are not more plentiful, and not just, maybe, for the energy benefits.
tony curzon price

Group read, energy, week 4. Will solar energy let us fly to the sun in winter? | open D... - 0 views

  • Feb 7 2009. Join the Group Read. Chapters 5 and 6. Flight and Solar Will solar energy technologies allow us to sustainably take those long-haul flights to get our winter dose of sunshine? On the way, we discover that flying intecontinentally once per year has an energy cost slightly bigger than leaving a 1 kW electric fire on, non-stop, 24 hours a day, all year, despite the fact that modern planes are twice as fuel-efficient as a single-occupancy car. It may be no surprise, therefore, that Airline businessman Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, has developed a Swiftian the solution to the problem: " The best thing we can do with environmentalists is shoot them."
tony curzon price

Energy efficiency of transport nodes - gr8 graph: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • Figure 20.23. Energy requirements of different forms of passenger transport. The vertical coordinate shows the energy consumption in kWh per 100 passenger-km. The horizontal coordinate indicates the speed of the transport. The “Car (1)” is an average UK car doing 33 miles per gallon with a single occupant. The “Bus” is the average performance of all London buses. The “Underground system” shows the performance of the whole London Underground system. The catamaran is a diesel-powered vessel. I’ve indicated on the left-hand side equivalent fuel efficiencies in passenger-miles per imperial gallon (p-mpg). Hollow point-styles show best-practice performance, assuming all seats of a vehicle are in use. Filled point-styles indicate actual performance of a vehicle in typical use. See also figure 15.8 (energy requirements of freight transport).
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    Beautiful graph of the energy efficiencies of different modes of transport. Bicycle and train make for such a good combination --- why not stick to that?
tony curzon price

Balance: thinly spread and unpopular | Energy group read - 0 views

  • March 30th 2009. Join the Group Read. Chapter 18. A first balance (Instructions on how to join are at the bottom of the original post) This is the first chapter attempting to balance-up consumption and production. While the story told so far of the raw energy potential from renewable sources shows an ecouragingly close race to maintain our rich lifestyles with sustainable energy sources, a little digging provides much disappointment. Between the potential and the realisation lies a factor of over 100! From a production potential of 180 kWh per day per person, we get to an actual production figure of just 1 kwh/d/p and a "realisable" estimate of 18 kwh/d/p---a full ten times less than our consumption. Looking at the heart of the physics problem, David MacKay points to the geographically diffuse nature of renewables: each person needs a huge amount of land, tidal exposure, wind per person to make the sums add up. The sustainable potentials, as David emphasises, need "country-sized solutions". "To get a big contribu- tion from wind, we used wind farms with the area of Wales. To get a big contribution from solar photovoltaics, we required half the area of Wales. To get a big contribution from waves, we imagined wave farms covering 500 km of coastline. To make energy crops with a big contribution, we took 75% of the whole country." Yet protection of species, habitats, nature, beauty etc. all move the same people who want to reduce fossil fuel dependency to limit the installations. Something will need to give to balance our energy ...
metalthrax

Alternative Energy Journal - 0 views

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    Green DIY Energy can be defined as energy that is created using the earth's most common energy sources and converting them to electricity. In most cases, the sources of energy present on the earth are the best to be used in our lives.
anonymous

Ch 15 Page 92: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • Figure 15.8. Energy requirements of different forms of freight-transport. The vertical coordinate shows the energy consumed in kWh per net ton-km, (that is, the energy per t-km of freight moved, not including the weight of the vehicle). See also figure 20.23 (energy requirements of passenger transport).
    • anonymous
       
      According to http://www.freightonrail.org.uk/FactsFigures.htmrail freight carries 12% of the national total. How far can this be increased?
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    The railway can be added to the bicycle as a real miracle of efficiency
anonymous

How To Save Energy Using A Smart Strip Power Strip - 0 views

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    How smart power strips work to save energy.
tony curzon price

Ch 15 Page 93: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • Dieter Helm and his colleagues in Oxford estimate that under a correct account, allowing for imports and exports, Britain’s carbon foot- print is nearly doubled from the official “11 tons CO2e per person” to about 21 tons. This implies that the biggest item in the average British person’s energy footprint is the energy cost of making imported stuff.
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    Energy cost of imports are large. This introduces the WTO issue of discriminating goods on the basis of how they are made
tony curzon price

Group Read. Energy without hot air. Wave and Food | open Democracy News Analysis - 0 views

  • In which we learn that to get by on wave power you need to be very very insular -- that is, have a small number of people per unit length of exposed coastline (sounds like a nice place to me, but the British Isles don't fit the description) -- and also that our food habits, especially for red-blooded carnivores with meat-eating pets -- amount to more than half our driving habit in energy. There is a real energy case to be made for vegetarianism (approximately twice as efficient) and even more for veganism (another doubling).
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    Chapters 12 and 13 - Wave and food.
tony curzon price

Ch 13 Page 80: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • The typical diet has an embodied energy of roughly 6 kWh per kWh eaten. Coley (2001) estimates the embodied energy in a typical diet is 5.75 times the derived energy. Walking has a CO2 footprint of 42 g/km; cycling, 30 g/km. For comparison, driving an average car emits 183 g/km.
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    The bicycle - what an invention!
tony curzon price

Ch 11 Page 68: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • All the energy saved in switching off your charger for one day is used up in one second of car-driving. The energy saved in switching off the charger for one year is equal to the energy in a single hot bath.
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    The phone charger myth
David MacKay

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 3 Page 30 - 0 views

  • It’s been estimated that making each unit of petrol requires an input of 1.4 units of oil and other primary fuels (Treloar et al., 2004).
    • tony curzon price
       
      Just to be clear: this means that if I have 2.4 units of "primary fuels" (whatever they are), then I can expect to get 1 unit of petrol out. Quetion -- those 1.4 units ... are they _consumed_ in the refinery process, or are they partly bye-products that can be used for other things?
    • David MacKay
       
      No, not 2.4 units, 1.4 units!
  • The total amount of car travel in the UK is 686 billion passenger-km per year, which corresponds to an “average distance travelled by car per British person” of 30 km per day.
    • tony curzon price
       
      I tried to do a quick compare with France. This very attractive site: http://sansvoiture.free.fr/index.php?menu=textes&sousmenu=autodecroissance claims 14,000 km per car per year average. At one person per car, driving 250 days per year, we get to 56km per day on average. I was hoping to say: "High Speed Trains were planned for in 1974 in France; more than 30 years later, their logic becomes clear..." even if this is true, the averages here don't scream it out ...
  • I want to estimate the energy consumed by someone who chooses to drive
    • Ché Duro
       
      I like the idea here; I agree that 'averages' are abused. Somehow similar to everyone believing that they have above average driving skills. However it seems that in using a km/person/day value 66% greater than the average, the calculations later regarding necessary energy production are all suspect (because the total production is simply averaged to a kwh/person/day value). Considering how large a portion of our energy is used by cars, this choice is significant.
tony curzon price

Jan 30 - Cars and Wind. "Energy without hot air" Group Read - 0 views

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    Jan 30th - Car and Wind. In which we learn that a car eats (the energy equivalent of) half a kilo of butter per day on a typical commute, that although "Britain's onshore wind energy resource may be "huge," it's evidently not as huge as our huge consumption."
tony curzon price

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 2 Page 27 - 0 views

  • But electrical energy can also be converted to chemical energy. In an alternative world (perhaps not far-off) with relatively plentiful electricity and little oil, we might use electricity to make liquid fuels;
    • tony curzon price
       
      Good reminder that "energy conversion-efficiency ratios" are a part of the technology/economic detail that are actually contingent on social and environmental choices. Imagine we were to sink a huge amount of capital into sustainable electricity sources that have about zero operating costs. We'd quite likely then be in the situation David describes with respect to chemcial/electric conversion multipliers.
Charles Moore

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 1 Page 3 - 0 views

  • This heated debate is fundamentally about numbers.
    • tony curzon price
       
      It is also a political issue of trust in the government. There is a great write-up of the politics of the last UK energy review over here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom-theme/paul-dorfman/2008/11/07/nuclear-consultation-public-trust-in-government There are 2 distinct issues: the truth of the matter (the numbers, what we are looking for in EWHA and the communication of the truth and value judgements based on the numbers. There has certainly been failure in the latter.
  • if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.
    • tony curzon price
       
      I have to disagree: some social effort aggregates. We all pay a bit of tax, but it amounts to quite a lot in the collective purse. Just one obvious example.
    • Charles Moore
       
      It depends on how each person's "little" is determined. If you make it a percentage of energy use it would be quite significant. If you take as your starting point a low income person changing to low energy light bulbs and extrapolate that up you would have quite a few people giving up intercontinental flights and maybe the odd Range Rover..
    • Michael Hunt
       
      Isn't the point that it makes sense to quantify the climate reduction impacts of actions so that when one alters one's behaviour in some respects, hoping to do "a little", that little has x% impact and not 0.00x% impact.
    • tony curzon price
       
      Both Charles' and Michael's points are about presentation of numbers, not impacts. I took David to be talking about changes to the physical world, not to the world of opinions. The logic of the "Tragedy of the commons" is that each person can take actions which individually seem harmless - or very low harm - but, when everyone performs them - add up to something substantial. Take throwing away litter as a (trivial but obvious) example - as someone said in NPR phone-in today ... despite all the good sentiment about collective action at the Obama inauguration, Washington was still covered in rubbish by the end of the day !
  • BP’s website
    • tony curzon price
       
      And remember that BP stands for "Beyond Petroleum" ... from the school of spin that says "if accused of x, simply assert that the opposite is the case".
dave woolcock

Ch 14 Page 87: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • Many tidal energy extraction systems are just extracting energy that would have been lost anyway in friction.
    • anonymous
       
      But what's the consequence of harvesting A LOT of tidal energy, aside from the Earth's rotation slowing down at a slightly higher rate. Smaller tides?
  • over 30 years.
    • anonymous
       
      Great case for the longevity of the technology.
    • dave woolcock
       
      I've been there and stood on it whilst waiting for the boats to pass through the lock :-) My French wasn't good enough to read the signs explaining how it works.
tony curzon price

Low Carbon Transport: Bicycles, trains, electric cars and nuclear ships | open Democrac... - 0 views

  • Electrify transport. There's not much to beat trains+bicycles, and any government looking for a Keynesian stimulus should find lots of infrastructure opportunities here. David MacKay comes down softly on the car---which shows great realism---and finds that electrification is the only real solution there. He debunks hydrogen as a good energy carrier. Flying is a really tough case---there is not much that can be done to reduce its energy intensity. (I was sitting in an easyjet plane the other day that tried to convince me of its greenery by saying: "Flying contributes less CO2 than driving to the atmosphere" ...). Batteries are the way to go---though just wait for the peak lithium scares. David has an interesting aside on nuclear ships. If we could make the (political) world safe for small-scale nuclear power, maybe there's more than ships that could benefit.
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    Electrify transport. There's not much to beat trains+bicycles, and any government looking for a Keynesian stimulus should find lots of infrastructure opportunities here. David MacKay comes down softly on the car---which shows great realism---and finds that electrification is the only real solution there. He debunks hydrogen as a good energy carrier. Flying is a really tough case---there is not much that can be done to reduce its energy intensity. (I was sitting in an easyjet plane the other day that tried to convince me of its greenery by saying: "Flying contributes less CO2 than driving to the atmosphere" ...). Batteries are the way to go---though just wait for the peak lithium scares. David has an interesting aside on nuclear ships. If we could make the (political) world safe for small-scale nuclear power, maybe there's more than ships that could benefit.
dave woolcock

Ch 18 Page 108: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • It’s been estimated that the average person’s lifestyle consumed a power of 20 kWh per day
  • I am partly driven to this conclusion by the chorus of opposition that greets any major renewable energy proposal. People love renewable energy, unless it is bigger than a figleaf.
    • anonymous
       
      This is key: how to balance local and national interest. Which one trumps and after what process? The populist urge is to give in to local objections. It's also partly about just getting used to things.
    • dave woolcock
       
      Exactly ! Something like a real 70s energy crisis would quickly change opinions though. At the moment it is far too easy to agree in principle with renewables, yet oppose them everywhere.
  • completely forested the country
    • dave woolcock
       
      sounds like a good investment for any otherwise non-productive land
tony curzon price

Ch 15 Page 89: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • As for a 500 ml water bottle made of PET (which weighs 25 g), the embodied energy is 0.7 kWh – just as bad as an aluminium can!
  • Computers Making a personal computer costs 1800 kWh of energy. So if you buy a new computer every two years, that corresponds to a power consumption of 2.5 kWh per day.
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    plastic bottles, cans and product life cycles
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    raw material and production costs of a computer - 2.5kwh/day
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