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dave woolcock

Ch 10 Page 63: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • We also learn, moreover, that traffic kills one million birds per year in Den- mark. Thirty-times-greater horror! Thirty-times-greater incentive to ban cars! And in Britain, 55 million birds per year are killed by cats (figure 10.6).
    • dave woolcock
       
      ermmm - where do these figures come from? are they just someone's guesses?
  •  
    The windmill/bird controversy ...
tony curzon price

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 2 Page 23 - 0 views

  • United Kingdom
  • focus too much on economic feasibility and they miss the big picture.
    • tony curzon price
       
      This is a _very_ important point. I spent a long time as an economist working on energy and environment issues - but the detail often obscures rather than elucidates. The question to focus on for energy policy is what kind of world to aim for - one of radical simplicity, or one supporting the "moderately affluent lifestyles" that David takes as a benchmark. The economics can follow once the broad lines are set.
  •  
    I do keep coming back to the question of the UK focus of the book. Here are some questions: - is the UK's case generalisable? (what would be the point of finding out the UK can live sustainably if the rest of the world can't?) - is this intended simply to make the numbers mean something more directly? - so ... I keep coming back to the question of how to get this book localised. Maybe, rather than having a blank wiki for each country, a wiki with the current text and all the national references highlighted, so it would be easy to know what numbers to go and work on ...
anonymous

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 1 Page 14 - 0 views

  • The UK has made it onto the winners’ podium. We may be only an average European country today, but in the table of historical emitters, per capita, we are second only to the USA.
    • anonymous
       
      Past polluting is a distraction: 125-year emissions estimates are debatable; the message is clear based on today's actual and forecast emissions; and it's hard to moralize about a time when nobody foresaw the consequences. Should we apologise to the world for Victorian factory smoke?
    • tony curzon price
       
      The point of view from China is this: "there was 400ppm of CO2 concentration to "safely" get to; the early birds to the party eat up 90% of the cake; they are asking us not to eat much of the remaining 10% on grounds of equity..." This is a powerful argument from fairness, it seems to me. The point is not that the best place to cut emmissions is China, but rather who should pay for the cut. Tony
tony curzon price

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 1 Page 8 - 0 views

  • 26, 440, and 330
    • Ceilidh Stapelkamp
       
      Could we have the source of these correct data somewhere (for readers who like to triangulate information)? [apologies if this comes later, I haven't got far]
    • tony curzon price
       
      try footnote 8 page 20
David MacKay

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 1 Page 17 - 0 views

  • but you should find it easy to redo the calculations for whatever country or region you are interested in.
    • tony curzon price
       
      so ... how would we localise the book? presumably by hacing a wiki version where the numbers and countries could be changed.
    • David MacKay
       
      The book has indeed already got a wiki, with a page for every country, for anyone who wants to contribute country-information or country-calculations. www.withouthotair.com
    • tony curzon price
       
      got it - it is here: http://www.withouthotair.com/Wiki.html it would be great to see this happening. Tony
tony curzon price

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 1 Page 15 - 0 views

  • using a world population of six billion
    • tony curzon price
       
      Is this an average population over the period? Population is forecast to rise, no? Why not base the trajectory on a 9 bl population?
  • 1 ton per year per
    • tony curzon price
       
      1 ton Co2e per year per person for 6 bl people can probably be sustained
tony curzon price

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 1 Page 13 - 0 views

  • Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.
    • tony curzon price
       
      Here is the essence of the outrage felt by emerging econmies that _they_ ought to be bearing a cost.
tony curzon price

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 1 Page 4 - 0 views

  • With numbers in place, we will be better placed to answer questions such as these
    • tony curzon price
       
      just as a placemark, before reading the book, my answers are 1.yes, 2.no, 3.yes, 4.not literally, 5.no, 6.maybe, 7.yes, 8.no ... yours?
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".
tony curzon price

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 1 Page 18 - 0 views

  • “Okay – it’s agreed; we announce – ‘to do nothing is not an option!’ then we wait and see how things pan out...”
    • tony curzon price
       
      So common ... :)
tony curzon price

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Ch 2 Page 24 - 0 views

  • One kilowatt-hour per day is roughly the power you could get from one human servant. The number of kilowatt-hours per day you use is thus the effective number of servants you have working for you.
    • tony curzon price
       
      This speaks vividly to the social liberation made possible by the taming of energy!
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.
anonymous

Ch 6 Page 41: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond the bounds of plausibility in so many way
    • anonymous
       
      What efficiency level is needed to give worthwhile returns from an acceptable coverage of land? If the max plausible efficiency and land use don't stack up, we should forget it.
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

Ch 8 Page 56 Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • Loch Sloy’s surface area is about 1.5 km2, so the hydroelectric facility itself has a per unit lake area of 11 W/m2. So the hillsides, aqueducts, and tunnels bringing water to Loch Sloy act like a 55-fold power concentrator.
  •  
    Lovely piece of reasoning
dave woolcock

Ch 7 Page 52: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • A more modest luxury is an electric blanket. An electric blanket for a double bed uses 140 W; switching it on for one hour uses 0.14 kWh.
  • patio heaters
    • dave woolcock
       
      now all too common outside pubs since the no-smoking rules... what a waste!
  •  
    Mayeb we should generalise this -- I write during a chilly London winter -- with generally plug-in clothing
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."
David MacKay

Ch 7 Page 53: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views

  • my own domestic gas consumption
    • Keith Bradbury
       
      What size house and how many occupants?
    • David MacKay
       
      88 square metres, 3-bedroom semi, one single occupant (GSOH, WTLM similar...)
tony curzon price

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

  •  
    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."
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.
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