The unexpectedly venerable history of concentrated solar power (CSP)

These are images from a CSP power station built in Eypt by the British nearly 100 years ago. Originally published in a long defunct electrical engineering magazine, they are now reproduced on an alternative energy website (which also appears to carry details of some rather unscientific or at best unproven ideas). The site reproduces the full article from the original magazine. I stumbled on these via Joseph Romm’s highly recommended Real Climate blog.

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SA firms ‘not preparing for climate change risks’ – Business Report

Ingi Salgado writes in Business Report that:

Law firm Webber Wentzel, a sponsor of the South African Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), is warning companies that climate litigation has started to become a reality – and is likely to increase as the effects of climate change become more acute.

Webber Wentzel partner Johann Scholtz said potential claimants included individuals whose health had been affected, those who had suffered property damage or economic loss, NGOs and local and national governments.

“An analysis of these lawsuits shows that they comprise actions against regulators for failing to have adequate standards, challenges to the application of laws and regulations, cases alleging liability for the costs of combating and adapting to climate change and cases based on the failure to curb emissions, including class actions, actions against directors and product liability cases,” he said.

The rest of the article is here.

Why nuclear energy is just another quick fix that will make things worse in the long run

I have mixed feelings about nuclear energy. Part of my rational mind sometimes says maybe there’s a place for it in an interim energy mix before we shift to renewables. But my gut doesn’t like it at all. And my gut reaction is only strengthened by reading articles like this one in today’s Guardian, which outlines the potentially devastating impact of uranium mining on the Kalahari. (And explains that when the UK has tallied up the likely carbon footprint of its combined nuclear-coal-renewables strategy, it has completely excluded the carbon footprint associated with extracting and transporting the uranium that strategy will demand, much less its impact on the Namibian environment.)

Let’s not forget that the UK’s own Sustainable Development Commission carefully considered the virtues and disadvantages of nuclear energy, and recommended against it. Which means some hard questions need to be asked about why that government is proceeding against the advice of its own experts (though since it rather makes a habit of doing this, we must conclude that expert advice is solicited only in the hope that it will sometimes lend support to whatever policy has already been decided).

The problem with nuclear energy is that using it as an alternative to coal is a bit like switching to from heroin to methadone. It mitigates some of the damage associated with the addiction – without actually ending the addiction.

Until today, if you’d asked me why I consider nuclear energy to be unsustainable, even setting aside the problems of its carbon footprint and nuclear waste disposal, I would have said, well, the problem with nuclear is that it will allow us to continue a model of growth-based, energy intensive economic development which is disastrous in many other ways. It will fuel an economy which makes ever greater demands on other resources; with it, we will be able to postpone switching to a steady-state economy that acknowledges the strict limited water, land, biodiversity and other natural resources at our disposal.

Despite the fact that alternative economies are receiving very serious attention from very serious people, most can’t quite imagine any model other than grow, grow, grow.

But it seems there’s another argument against nuclear energy of which I was not aware. A slam-dunk argument engraved in the very laws of physics themselves: the second law of thermodynamics. Browsing through New Scientist this evening, I stumbled on an essay by the physicist Eric Chaisson of Tufts University, Massachusetts. In this article, he points out that human activity itself has a global warming effect, and that because of this, if populations and economies continue to develop along present lines, “the likely outcome is that a 3 degree C rise will occur in about 300 years, even if we manage to sequester all greenhouse gases”. ( A big “if”, I would say.) Here’s the abstract from his original paper, explaining why:

Even if civilization on Earth stops polluting the biosphere with greenhouse gases, humanity could eventually be awash in too much heat, namely, the dissipated heat by-product generated by any nonrenewable energy source. Apart from the Sun’s natural aging—which causes an approximately 1% luminosity rise for each 108 years and thus about 1°C increase in Earth’s surface temperature—well within 1000 years our technological society could find itself up against a fundamental limit to growth: an unavoidable global heating of roughly 3°C dictated solely by the second law of thermodynamics, a biogeophysical effect often ignored when estimating future planetary warming scenarios.

“Of course there is a way out,” writes Chaisson in New Scientist. “Renewables, which come directly or indirectly from solar energy, are already accounted for in the thermal balance of our planet and their use would not additionally heat Earth’s environment. Nor, incidentally, would energy derived from from solar-driven wind, water and waves.”

Chaisson’s insight, of course, also rules out nuclear fusion, one of the pet loves of the technological fantasists, as a viable future energy source. (“We can carry on destroying the planet using coal because soon we’ll be able to switch to destroying the planet with unlimited amounts of ‘clean’ fusion energy.”) My reasonably educated guess is that it would also rule out space-based solar energy (beaming electricity down from satellites). I am not sure what might be the implications for the use of geothermal energy; my suspicion is, not good.

$500m for clean energy in South Africa

A media statement from the Department of the Environment:

$500 MILLION INFUSION GIVES SOUTH AFRICA CRITICAL BOOST TO MEET AMBITIOUS CLEAN ENERGY GOALS

Clean Technology Fund endorses South African plan to scale up grid-connected renewable energy, solar water heaters for a half million South African households, energy efficiency

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 05, 2009 – On Tuesday, October 27, developed and developing countries endorsed a Clean Technology Fund (CTF) funding envelope of $500 million for South Africa’s CTF Investment Plan (IP). This paves the way for South Africa to move closer to its vision of generating four percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2013, improving energy efficiency by 12 percent by 2015, and providing 1 million households with solar water heating over the next five years.

South Africa’s Long Term Mitigation Scenarios (LTMS) have allowed for the development of a national climate policy based on what is required by science to limit temperature increase to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In response to the LTMS, the Government has adopted mitigation strategies that focus on accelerated energy efficiency across all sectors, ambitious low carbon technology research and development, new clean energy sources and behavioral change, as well as regulatory mechanisms and economic instruments. As a result of these strategies, South Africa’s emissions would grow at a reduced rate in the short term, plateau by 2030, and decline thereafter. In support of the Government’s strategies,

Creating new habits

We’re not going to create a more sustainable civilisation, unless we change our habits. And changing habits is not the easiest thing to do.

Here then, some links and thoughts from those who consider these matters. A New York Times article entitled Can You Become A Creature of New Habits discusses a Japanese technique…

… called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements.
“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”

Kaizen seems interesting to me because of the scorn that that, for example, more energetic environmentalists often direct at some of the more trivial lifestyle changes recommended in popular articles on ‘How to go green’, which may (for example) talk about unplugging cellphone chargers but neglect getting a smaller car, or just consuming less. Perhaps there is indeed a place for these seemingly trivial adjustments in a bigger continuum of change.

Personally, I find the deluge of news about climate change and other planetary disasters, to which I expose myself, often overwhelming and depressing. One of my antidotes to this despair is keeping a list of websites that make me happy, and visiting them quite often. And one of those sites is Zen Habits.

Which covers some very useful ideas about habits, and how to change them:

How to Establish New Habits the No-Sweat Way
13 Things to Avoid When Changing Habits

“Solar power from Sahara a step closer” – The Guardian

A $400bn (£240bn) plan to provide Europe with solar power from the Sahara moved a step closer to reality today with the formation of a consortium of 12 companies to carry out the work.

The Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII) aims to provide 15% of Europe’s electricity by 2050 or earlier via power lines stretching across the desert and Mediterranean sea.

The German-led consortium was brought together by Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, and consists of some of country’s biggest engineering and power companies, including Siemens, E.ON, ABB and Deutsche Bank.

It now believes the DII can deliver solar power to Europe as early as 2015.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/nov/01/solar-power-sahara-europe-desertec

“Hurricane Katrina Victims Have Standing To Sue Over Global Warming” – Law Blog – WSJ

Big carbon on its way to becoming big tobacco?

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/10/19/hurricane-katrina-victims-have-standing-to-sue-over-global-warming/

Hope for the planet as energy producers start fighting amongst themselves

From the The New York Times:

As the Senate prepares to tackle global warming, the nation’s energy producers, once united, are battling one another over policy decisions worth hundreds of billions of dollars in coming decades.

Producers of natural gas are battling their erstwhile allies, the oil companies. Electrical utilities are fighting among themselves over the use of coal versus wind power or other renewable energy. Coal companies are battling natural gas firms over which should be used to produce electricity. And the renewable power industry is elbowing for advantage against all of them.

“Trends in Carbon Dioxide”

If you want to see the latest figures for the state of our atmosphere, the Global Monitoring Division of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory is a good place to start. They consolidate data from a huge global network of monitoring stations.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Select your greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide – CO2, methane – CH4, nitrous oxide – N2O) and watch the graphs climb. We’re perhaps used to seeing graphs for carbon dioxide, so for the sake of a little variety in your gloomy global warming news, here’s a graph for increases in nitrous oxide.

Otherwise known as “laughing gas” or “happy gas”, nitrous oxide is somewhat less amusing in increasing concentrations in large swaths of atmosphere. Over a hundred year period, it is 298 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. At the moment, it apparently accounts for 6% of the human-related warming effect. It’s released by industrial activity, burning coal for example. Also released by tropical soils and from the oceans, human activity has till recently been thought to account for 30% of what’s now in the atmosphere. But it appears releases from nitrogen-based fertilisers may have been greatly underestimated. Overall, atmospheric levels have increased 15% since 1750. It’s also an ozone-depleting gas – in fact, it’s now the key ozone depleting gas.

Paul Gilding thinks there’s hope. Do you?

In his most recent blog post, Australian sustainability notable Paul Gilding writes optimistically that:

I think we have recently seen a number of developments that, taken together, indicate a profound shift is under way. When such a shift takes hold, it will rapidly accelerate – with significant implications for campaign and business strategy in this area over the years ahead.

And:

The goal posts are also shifting in the science. An increasing number of scientists are coming to the view that the global CO2 target should be closer to 350ppm rather than 450ppm.

And:

At a deeper level, [Sir Nicholas] Stern also lent his considerable intellectual weight to the debate on economic growth, stating what was previously heresy – that economic growth itself must now be questioned.

Gilding’s older post on how Australia is likely becoming the poster child for the unpleasant effects of climate change is also well worth a read: “It is, sadly, probably too late to save much of Australia”. Apparently, Australians are in steadfast denial about what’s happening to them. (Hey, we can do that denial thing too, we’re South African! We’ve got form.) In fact – I suggest you read the Australia post first, then come back to today’s. You’ll enjoy the rest of your day more that way. Particularly if you’re Australian. (So much for the chicken run.)