Electric vehicle fleet

A tonne of Government vehicles could be run on batteries and electricity for a number of reasons (this on conservative/out dated notions of what electric vehicles can do):

• short trips within urban areas (let’s assume electric means short range.. a myth but hey.. Let’s be conservative)
• idle time spent in other government spots or depots (which could easily have, or already have, electric outlets handy)
• large fleet purchasing power to kick the arses of the car manufacturers to stop stalling with proper electric cars (see “Who killed the electric car” if you want to get mad about it)

If nothing else the government could throw some money and give a big boost to the efforts of groups like Better Place who are rolling out electric vehicle infrastructure in Australia and other parts of the world (go to their site and get a bumper sticker if nothing else).

Electric vehicle street park-and-charge

Imagine never having to go to another petrol station again. Smelly, dirty places based around pumping stinky, dirty fuel into your vehicle. I’ve spent plenty of time at service stations while touring (I managed to make one video of that journey before I got distracted by work/life/play etc)

Sure, perhaps a way to win over the fuel supply guys would be to have removable battery packs (I’ve been talking about this for years..) and make removable batteries the equivalent of “fuel”:

That could work too.. But whether that’s done or not: Government car spots could have re-charging stations built in just as easily as they build in parking meters (and there are a growing number of those around aren’t there??). Hell, you could make it via induction plates on the ground hooked to some sort of RFID on the bottom of the car I’m sure wouldn’t be too much of a technological stretch.

At a minimum to support the move to an electric fleet any reserved parking spots for government vehicles should have recharge points. Then you could make certain public spots “electric only” (not to suggest it’s like a disabled parking spot.. far from it!). I have heard some rumblings that this is starting to happen for hybrid vehicles in some parts of the world. It’s an ok start, but we really need proper electric cars and infrastructure. Hybrids are always going to be a half arsed attempt to get away from oil. Plug-in hybrids are better, but really: we should just cut our losses (we’ll be paying off that environmental debt for some time now) and revel in the clean air in our cities as we push on with solar.

I only hope the car companies don’t pull the same shit that resulted in some perfectly good (and loved by owners) cars getting crushed rather than serve as a reminder that we could have ditched coal a long time ago. The idea of not selling but leasing electric vehicles smacks of that sort of thing all over again.

Businesses will get away with using as much energy, polluting as much as possible unless there is a cost attached to doing so. More than that actually, they have a duty to their shareholders actually to continue to pollute as much as possible while ever it is free to do so. So CO2, like any number of pollutants that had a cost attached via regulations/fines/taxes needs to have a cost associated. If you look back in time you’d see that any number of things have gone through this transition:

• lead
• asbestos
• CFCs
• DDTs
• etc

Prior to the health or environmental impact of the above triggering change it was the wild west type situation for businesses. Lead was in paint, added to petrol (gasoline for the yanks), smelters didn’t have to worry about minimising the contamination of ground water/soil around refinery/smelter operations. Then when the science and medical research came rolling in: it was either banned, phased out or required to be cleaned up (e.g. a fine last year for lead contamination). That made lead expensive to pollute with because it had to be treated with consideration to the impact on children etc.

Same deal with asbestos. It was (and still is) great for a number of things: heat proofing, building materials (the old version of “fibro cement” with asbestos was superior to the current cellulose variety (which is nowhere near as durable, strong, fire retardant or flexible.. seriously, asbestos is magic stuff). But while not as good in some ways, it doesn’t get into your lungs and cause nasty growths/cancers that will slowly kill you.

But back to global warming/climate change. What if we’re wrong about it?

I think the following cartoon sums up my thoughts on the matter:

The "horrible consequences" that await!

So I’ll take the argument from point of apathy: the “do you REALLY care” option.

• Does anyone care if they drive a petrol or an electric car if they both get you to and from your destination (assuming they start making them look half decent)? What if the electric one can be charged from the sun and doesn’t pollute the air around population centres?
• Would you care if you plugged in the car or dropped in a battery pack vs filling up with petrol? Battery packs should stink less and service stations look a bit cleaner (without run-off into drains etc).
• Does anyone care (or know for that matter) whether the electrons running your monitor that you’re reading this come from sunlight via solar cells or wind via wind farm or kite or does it HAVE to come via burning fossil fuels like coal? e.g. does your ability to put food on the table depend on energy being generated from fossil fuels, and if it does: could you possibly do one of the many new jobs away from coal?
• Would anyone notice if the hot water for the morning shower was heated via a solar hot water unit on the roof or is burning coal necessary for a good scrub temperature?
• Do you care if there are millions of new jobs in green industries created as environmentally dirty jobs are phased out?
• Do I care if my amazing Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle is superseded by something sexy and electric like the MotoCzysz E1pc?

If you don’t really care about stuff like the above then keep your coal industry fibs to yourself, shut the hell up and let the people pushing for those things get on with the job. The absolute worse thing about these misinformed twits is that they are campaigning against improving the world for no other reason than because they want to go with the “do nothing and let everything get more polluted for our kids” option.

Want to see where we’re headed worldwide: take a look at China’s worst polluted spots for some hints (it isn’t pretty).

Yeah: what if it is (by some hugely unlikely plot by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists) a hoax and we end up with a world that doesn’t care about oil or coal. A state of being where we can let that shitty, dirty internal combustion technology retire into being another of those strange oddities in a transport museum (along with the coal fired steam engines and those planes with flapping wings failing on takeoff). If we lose the car noise and smoky exhaust smell in the cities and have the whir of electric driven wheels (or better yet trams/trains or electric buses) instead.

I would hope that certain jobs go quietly into the night and were replaced with many others:

• coal power plant technician
• oil rig drilling engineer
• internal combustion mechanic

Working in heavy dust, Chinese migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

Perhaps “replaced” with:

• solar array technician
• recycling engineer
• electric vehicle mechanic

But I suspect the anti-green Luddites and the climate change deniers will be digging in hard for many years to come.

The report, prepared by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, finds the cost increase to coal electricity generation if fully-fledged clean coal technology is installed will be up to 78 per cent.

78 percent! Assuming of course they can actually do it at all. To me it still smells like good old snake oil:

Premium quality clean coal snake oil. Guaranteed to prolong the inevitable.

So all that bleating about “nuclear is expensive” or “solar is expensive” is garbage. The alternatives are only expensive because their manufacturing waste needs to be dealt with rather than just puffed up the chimney into the atmosphere (well, unless it is pollution in China I guess.. Then it all probably ends up in the air, land or river regardless). It’s assuming there are the magic clean coal breakthroughs that allow the long term storage of carbon dioxide such that it won’t just float back up (I wonder if the cost of developing a brand new technology factors into this figure?).

The Government will spend $2.4 billion over nine years developing two to four commercial scale carbon capture projects.

It’s money spent on what will have to be dead technology. I mean it’d be great to have some magic process for capturing the CO₂ but I’d have to think the energy/resources that go into that will be so high as to be a waste of time in the long term.

I think we can do almost anything if we exert enough money, manpower and energy (hell, that’s why I want widespread renewable energy to have oodles of energy to do crazy stuff like desalination to overcome drought and remove pressure on rivers.. if you have the electricity for “free” then you can do that sort of thing AND repair the environment). But at some point you start making so little energy that it isn’t worth doing or you compromise on your original goal. I suspect coal companies will settle on a massive compromise. Like a small dick Hummer driver recycling a softdrink can and proudly proclaiming they are green, the coal industry will settle on locking away some small fraction of emissions or in such a way as to be non permanent. Perhaps it will be enough to deflect opponents sufficiently to milk another few decades.

Money spent on solar or wind generation is money on a real technology that works now and has many large scale installations worldwide. Carbon sequestration technology today (as far as I can tell) has no real viable option to long term lock away the gas. The closest we have to “capture” is pumping it into oil wells (to help squeeze more oil out). That notion of using it to help get out more carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels seems to me to not really be helping reduce overall emissions (e.g. “oh look, the coal’s emissions are buried to help us get hard to get oil which is then burnt in cars”).

The Glowing Green Green
I’d say if we’re going to have money spent on currently theoretical but likely looking: go the new generation IV reactors I reckon. We know that nuclear power generation works, because it powers big chunks of the population around the world. It’d power even more if not for the scaremongering.

Generation IV Nuclear reactor timeline. If we only get over demonising nuclear!

The advantage of some of these designs are that they can run off what we currently call waste, unlocking some of the large amount of remaining energy thus making use of the current stockpiles of waste from aging nuclear facilities.

But let’s get back to renewables.

Ideal “best” approach

The ideal best solution overall would be a combination:

1. using less energy to begin with
2. re-using things rather than endless/mindless consumption
3. solar
4. wind
5. geothermal/tidal/hydro/whatever other clean energy sources there are available for the locality

I think massive amounts could be attained via the first 4 of those things which require no new technology (next gen nuclear or magical as-yet-no-working-scale carbon dioxide capturing).

The first is definitely achievable as an article today “Pull the plug, it’s socket science” says:

ALL over the world, electrical appliances are blinking away on standby – and burning so much energy they need 60 coal-fired electricity stations a year to power them, analysis by the International Energy Agency has found.

And they go on to say that “efficiency is the fastest way to cut greenhouse gas emissions” and discuss the role of legislation (since market forces aren’t usually enough):

Dr Jollands believes legal standards on energy efficiency are important where the market is failing to deliver reform and cited the example of set-top boxes for pay television, which are usually switched on all day, every day.

In most homes and offices, set-top boxes are supplied by a company that has no incentive to make them energy efficient because the electricity bills are paid by the consumer. An analysis by the energy agency found that in the United States about 150 million switched-on set-top boxes burned the equivalent of six supertankers of oil a year.

Dr Jollands said there was a cultural aversion to regulation in some parts of the world, but if the market was not working, regulations could be effective without imposing additional costs.

I agree we need legislation to push this stuff forward. History has shown that left to their own devices things do not progress past the “what ever is cheapest”. You have to put a cost or penalty on polluting in order to get things cleaner.

Consumption is not success

The second thing (reusing and cutting back on consumption) would require a major shift in how we view a successful economy. This is probably a topic that requires its own blog, the idea of banishing consumption driven measures. But basically I think that consumption should NOT be the primary measure of success as it is currently because it largely consists of rewarding inefficiency and celebrating unnecessary buying of items. Consider the reuse of something in a consumption based economic model: bad! Bad because no new products are consumed, thus no new jobs making stuff, delivering stuff, stocking shelves, retailing etc.

Consume! Consume!

Should goods cost a bit more to be made robust, repairable and reusable? Hell no: that’s going to damage consumption down the track!

But back to clean coal: it’s no surprise the cost estimates are high because they’re just subsidised by society at large copping the pollution. Naturally when they start adhering to environmental standards they, like every other industry subject to environmental controls, will start to cost more. We already force other types of polluters to wear the costs of filtering, processing or otherwise dealing with waste: coal should have to do the same.

Although my current job is a little lacking on presentations, I’ve ended up over the years with a bit of an appreciation for presentations (that’s why TED talks are pretty interesting to see various styles).

I liked his presentation for the part with the paper plane as a “prop” then a very real world way of comparing the energy output of different sized kite wings. Lots of good linking with analogies. Not the world’s best speaker (I still rate Bill Clinton for impeccable noise word free delivery), but the end effectiveness of the talk is the sum of the parts.

I’ve talked previously about China possibly solving global warming. It’d be fitting if they did this in part with one of their inventions: the kite.

Australia plans to build the world’s largest solar power station with an output of 1000 megawatts in a A$1.4 billion (US$1.05 billion) investment, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Sunday.

Finally! maybe this will be the boost that is needed to get solar over the tipping point from the niche “isn’t that a shiny expensive novelty” to something substantial. Or at least to the “isn’t that a shiny expensive widespread thing”.

Always good to compare things to the rest of the world:

“The government plans to invest with industry in the biggest solar generation plant in the world, three times the size of the world’s current biggest, which is in California,” Rudd said.

I think solar has enormous potential in Australia to cut down the amount of coal we’re burning for daytime things like air conditioners, factory equipment, aluminium smelters etc. Particularly when (as I’m still enjoying the novelty after the UK) we get so much bloody sunlight:

It’s a bit of a pity we’re also blessed with oodles of coal, which means Australia can afford to be lazy and polluting and still have enough electricity for everything.

As an aside: here’s an interesting quote from the long dead Thomas Edison from way back in 1931:

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

Incidentally, he was talking to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.

For practical solar hitting the mainstream: I’d like to see more use of dead space as solar collection areas. We’ve lots of roads/railway lines/rooftops that could surely be feeding back into the grid. Lots of space you can run strips of metre wide solar cells for long distances. All we really need is for the cost per unit and the ability to plug back into the grid without too many $$$$.

Anyhow, good to see a proven real technology like solar getting such a chunk of cash, rather than more bleating on about the hopes and dreams of a clean coal fantasy land. I’m hoping we get to a point where we just leave the coal in the ground and it becomes just another geological feature because we just don’t need it.

Oh and here’s another one:

and a cutesy cartoon one explaining the “science”:

More science:

Scary thing is that there are a tonne of serious ones from the coal industry making grandiose claims about technology that simply does not exist.

• ability to lay down the law
• massive market to apply new technology to
• lots and lots of money

So let me start by saying China is a horribly polluted place. The type of polluted that makes bushfire haze a clear day and makes effluent outfall water look like Evian spring water. Not only horribly polluted, but possessing some messed up socio/economic habits. An example of this is the willingness to trade in their environment, quality of life and ability to not have 3 headed babies for a quick buck.

There’s an overwhelming attitude problem that if something looks “kinda close enough”, then that’s good enough or that dumping pollution into rivers/land can be take place without consequence.

Some particularly shocking examples of this came up while I was living just over the border in Hong Kong:

• baby food that looked and smelled ok, but had zero nutritional content. Result: 50 to 60 dead kids who starved to death while the poor parents tried in vain to feed them with milk powder that was pretty much sawdust. (See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/10/health/main616432.shtml )
• Use of a carcinogenic red dye (called sudan red) in duck eggs because the redder the yolk, the more they can sell ‘em for (see http://french.hanban.edu.cn/english/health/189567.htm ) and also in sauce (http://www.china.org.cn/english/health/209080.htm)
• Benzene slick down the river. This stuff causes leukaemia upon exposure! (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4545502.stm )
• Major pollution of the rivers, such that freshwater dolphins are now gone. (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6935343.stm)
• Fake medical supplies (see http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/08/content_10625425.htm and  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jul/05/china.internationalnews1 )

Those are just some of the cases that spring to mind. This one kinda sums it up though:

Pollution from China blows out to sea. Image courtesy of NASA.

Anyhow, on to how this environment and how they might (kinda) fix it.

So China has the balls, ability and pliable population who are well trained to accept blanket decisions necessary for the massive change in lifestyle, technology and society that tackling climate issues demands. If coupled with blanket decisions that yield a good environmental outcome: they may well drag the necessary technologies from niche upper-middle-class-with-expendable-income to mass produced for peasants affordability.

An example of this ability to execute mass bans or decrees is the decision to ban motorcycles in Guangzhou (http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200611/14/eng20061114_321188.html). Now I don’t happen to think that this is going to necessarily have a good environmental outcome (more likely the opposite if people get cars instead), but it shows the sort of scale of sweeping authoritarian powers that China can swing into action. Try that in USA, UK, Australia and see how far it gets you. If you dig further and look into the darker areas where China has flexed its muscles: censorship. So successfully implemented (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/internet/sidebyside.html) that uni students fail to recognise perhaps the most famous and powerful photograph of political protest and indeed of China (see http://www.stwr.org/india-china-asia/the-tank-man.html)

A survey of uni students in China revealed censorship to have been very successful. Most thought it was from another country.

The Chinese government has in various degrees stomped on, arrested, imprisoned, “disappeared” and executed countless people for disagreeing with the party lines or expected behaviours.

So that’s the “balls” and execution aspect (no pun intended).

The motivation for China is that world prices for resources are going up, as is their internal needs as well. This will continue to rise most likely exponentially. Their energy needs (to fulfill the USA, Australasia and Europe’s increasing desire for plastic trinkets to show self worth) are going through the roof. So short of military action to secure supplies of diminishing oil/gas/coal: they’ll have to look elsewhere. This elsewhere is likely to be from renewable energy.

Wind energy not just hot air in China

An article (see http://ecoworldly.com/2008/07/03/energy-experts-say-chinas-wind-energy-could-grow-1667-by-2020/) talks of how China is exceeding their targets for wind energy and are likely to increase their wind energy sources by 1667% by 2020. Another article (see http://www.cleantech.com/news/3815/china-drives-global-wind-energy-supply-market) says that China has the fastest growing wind energy market. The rest of the world is struggling with NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) or pseudo environmentalism bullshit, government apathy and planning hurdles to the point where they’re almost crippled when it comes to actually executing on plans for renewables or affordable nuclear over coal fired power stations.

I predict it won’t be long before China’s dabbling in electric bikes turns into enforced decrees about electric/hybrid cars.

Meanwhile we’ll have the same old stories of misdirected consumer/voter energy as ridiculous ideas like “reduce the tax on petrol/gasoline” are the best we can come up with elsewhere. Want to live in a huge house, buy lots of shit we don’t need, eat 10 kilos of meat a day followed by a 2Litre bucket of coke while driving a hummer h2 with 1 mile per gallon fuel efficiency, but expect both the cost of living and quality of life to improve as well as the environment sort itself out? Get ready for a severe reality check. But hey, maybe reducing taxes will put off that reality check by a month or two while we pointlessly worry about plastic bags instead.

So while the stream of coal, oil will continue into China at increasing rates, when the crunch time comes China will have massive investments in the “other” options that the industrialised nations are putting off because they can (with a bit of whinging) withstand because they can afford them.

It can’t NOT go green

In short China can’t afford NOT to cut itself off from oil/gas/coal as soon as possible. It has money, sure, but thrift is the name of the game when you’re talking a billion or so citizens wanting refrigerators and transport.

Want a car? All cars in China must be electric. The only whining allowed is the whine of an electric drive train.
Want a house? You’ll have to put 5 square metres of Mao’s best solar cells on the roof and a little red transformer box or it’ll be bulldozed.
Need a job? We need a million workers sticking propellers on small scale wind generators, and another million sticking the “made in china” stickers on the propellers.
Don’t want a wind farm, nuclear plant, tidal generator or solar farm in your backyard: tough. Protest and you’ll disappear like all those before you.

How will this help? Well it’ll hopefully bring down the price of technology, give other governments a kick up the arse when they get left for dead as China becomes the world’s super power while the rest of the developed world struggles to support an industry nearly entirely dependent on oil and coal.
Sure, China will have by that stage pretty much guaranteed their people will be unable to drink clean water, eat food free of countless carcinogens or see 10 metres down the road on most days due to the street level nature of the cloud in “The land of the great white cloud”: but they’ll have main-streamed the solar/wind/nuclear technology and mass produced it for 5 bucks a pop which will (I hope) give the rest of the world some viable options to fix their problems while they debate on the colour of the promotional fridge magnets for members of the community consultation committee for deciding the font to be used in the applications for the environmental impact statement studies for a trial wind farm project.
That’s if China hasn’t experienced the (quite justified) mass uprising against the big brother nature of their existence. If so: they can join the rest of us in our paralysis of social freedoms as the end grows ever nearer.

I’ve heard suggestions involving burying, sticking in oceans, filling mines with it, blowing it into oil wells. While the oil well option sounds like it might work a bit (they currently pump salt water into a lot of ‘em to keep the flow going): I don’t really see how you can capture all (or even a significant portion) of the CO2 and stuff it in there (last time I checked the oil rigs weren’t exactly near to power stations either). None of these options sound like a particularly permanent solution or likely to be able to account for a decent chunk of the emissions.

Here’s a novel idea: if you want the CO₂ back in the ground so much: don’t dig the bloody stuff up in the first place! Yet still the politicians believe this will surely work, yes that’s right they have lots of faith in this energy industry quackery. It’s akin to the cigarette industry saying people don’t need to stop smoking because one day there’ll be a cure for cancer soon enough.

Whatever the solution it’ll most likely be expensive, require large changes to infrastructure and require quite a bit of energy to do. Yet it has widespread professed support from the energy industry, you know: the same industry that baulks at anything other than coal (e.g. solar, wind, tidal, nuclear) because of the above reasons (too expensive, requires new infrastructure and still requires energy to build everything).

A Time article by Bryan Walsh points out another issue with Coal fired power stations: the ash left over after you burn it (and have the goblins and fairies take away the CO₂ in little balloons or something) is pretty nasty stuff. In an accidental spill of coal ash/water a power plant in Tennessee Valley, USA has “released 100 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez disaster“, wiped out property and polluted the waterways with all of the nasty stuff that still lurks in coal after it’s been converted into airborne pollutants and power for those flat screen TVs and air conditioners we all know and love.

So not only do you have massive amounts of this toxic slurry to get rid of still but the information has been floating around for years that coal power stations release more radioactive substances into the atmosphere than nuclear ones, and the ash also contains the nasty radioactive stuff. To what extent that is true is a bit trickier to figure out due to the battle of misinformation that went on back a few decades ago. Given anything dug out of the ground tends to have radiation of some sort (e.g. household bricks leak small amounts of radiation) it stands to reason that coal would have that too, difference is that it is getting burnt (so would release that into the air in some quantities) but the real problem is the heavy metals and other “hostile to humans” stuff in the ash by the sounds of it.

I found a fact sheet that has an analysis of some coal from the USA and what it typically contains (from Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash:
Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance). Their conclusion:

Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm. The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks. This observation provides a useful geologic perspective for addressing societal concerns regarding possible radiation and radon hazard.
The location and form of radioactive elements in fly ash determine the availability of elements for leaching during ash utilization or disposal. Existing measurements of uranium distribution in fly ash particles indicate a uniform distribution of uranium throughout the glassy particles. The apparent absence of abundant, surface-bound, relatively available uranium suggests that the rate of release of uranium is dominantly controlled by the relatively slow dissolution of host ash particles.
Previous studies of dissolved radioelements in the environment, and existing knowledge of the chemical properties of uranium and radium can be used to predict the most important chemical controls, such as pH, on solubility of uranium and radium when fly ash interacts with water. Limited measurements of dissolved uranium and radium in water leachates of fly ash and in natural water from some ash disposal sites indicate that dissolved concentrations of these radioactive elements are below levels of human health concern.

I don’t think having the water/ash mix free and easy through the waterways would really constitute an environment that you’ll be able to control the pH or final destination of the particles much. Subsequent human/animal ingestion of said particles probably won’t be great either, but seems fairly upbeat about the danger it poses “below levels of human health concern”. So perhaps the radiation won’t kill you, but all the other nasty stuff might.

Regardless of how nasty and in what way the ash is, I think everyone knows coal is a dirty industry. Deadly if you consider how many people die in coal mines worldwide. We built our modern world on burning whatever crap we could (wood, dung, peat, coal, oil, gas) and now we need to clean our act up. While we continue to be stuck burning things to release their energy there’s likely to be stuff pumping into the atmosphere that we can’t sensibly prevent (at least not without using a significant chunk of that energy we’re trying to produce in the first place) so the best course of action is simply not commit ourselves to having to burn the stuff in the first place.

Containing and collecting gasses will always be tricky or require energy to convert them into something that won’t just float on up to mess up the climate so how about something a bit less aesthetically challenged and which we know works:

Renewable energy is much prettier huh? (in Germany, near border of belgium. )

Perhaps then we’ll spend less time on CO₂ pie in the sky solutions and more on something real,
Nathan