by Guy Dauncey
Welcome to another New Year! I have a sense that it will be an amazing one in which the ice-jam that has been blocking progress on global climate change will finally break – just as it is breaking in the Arctic and Antarctic.
I don’t think we’ll get a global breakthrough this year, but I think we’ll see rapid progress by various nations as their leaders finally register that the multiple health, social, environmental and economic benefits of addressing climate change far outweigh the costs – and that the costs, both environmental and economic, will be truly devastating.
Even Britain’s very conservative Daily Telegraph ran a story over Christmas showing that a 1 meter sea level rise – which is possible this century – would flood large areas of central London, including St Paul’s Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament.
To grasp what is about to happen, we need to remember that the energy infrastructure our world is based upon is only 100 years old – and that things change. There is a whole new energy revolution underway that will transform the way we use energy to travel, make electricity, farm, and heat our homes.
This energy revolution has the potential – if we act on it fast enough – to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels to almost zero, minimizing the risk of the disasters that global warming threatens. It will also clean the air, reduce the incidence of asthma, cancer and heart disease, remove fears about peak oil, and allow our cities to become quiet and pleasant. But only if we act fast enough.
There are only two real problems in the world today. The first is the sum total of all our social, health, environmental, economic, political and religious (etc) problems; the second is the belief that we cannot solve them.
So how will we travel in this new energy world? For flying, I see no real solutions – but that’s for another day.
For personal travel, expect to see very creative changes in the ways we use bicycles, public transit, light rail transit, ridesharing and teleworking – but that’s for another day, too.
For vehicles, there are three candidates. The first is hydrogen. It takes a lot of energy to get the hydrogen, however. If it comes from natural gas (CH4), it still produces CO2 emissions. If it comes from water (H2O) using solar or wind, you lose 65% of the energy in the process. The second problem is who’s going to buy a H2 car when there are no filling stations, and who’s going to build the filling stations when there are no H2 cars? The signs are not good.
The second candidate is biofuel, using ethanol or biodiesel. This is hot, with billions of dollars pouring into Iowa farms growing corn for ethanol. Studies show, however, that when you count the energy needed to grow and process the ethanol, the new energy produced is small, and the greenhouse gas emissions are still high.
Also, if the whole US grain harvest was used to make ethanol, it would satisfy less than a sixth of US demand and leave nothing to eat. Biodiesel from food wastes is fine, but it will never power many vehicles.
The calculations are better for cellulosic ethanol from plant and forest wastes, but this robs the soil of vital nutrients that are needed for future crops. There is a role for biofuels, but not as the main solution.
That leaves electric vehicles (EVs). These are powerful, efficient, and cheap to run – just $10 a month for an electric version of the Smart Car. The 2006 Mitsubishi MiEV has a top speed 130 kph. Its lithium batteries have a 150 km range, and can be recharged in 4 hours. If the US auto-industry had not tried so hard to kill the electric vehicle, there would be EVs all over the place.
And there will be, because of Plug-In Hybrids, which are generating lots of excitement around the world. You take a hybrid such as Toyota?s Prius, and add extra batteries. This allows it to run as an EV for shorter trips, with hybrid gas/EV for longer journeys.
This assumes the use of electricity as the main source of vehicle energy, supplemented with biofuels and/or hydrogen. So is there enough sustainable electricity to do the job?
Here in British Columbia, where we currently use 65,000 gigawatt hours a year, the BC Sustainable Energy Association found that we have the potential for an additional 84,000 GWh from various green sources (sun, wind, tidal, efficiency, etc), plus 55,000 GWh wind energy in the Hecate Energy Field. The electricity needed if the entire BC fleet went electric would be an additional 8,000 GWh, so there’s no problem with supply.
One of the problems with solar and wind energy is that it is intermittent. In BC this can be balanced by using the dams for storage, but the PHEV’s batteries can also be used to store power and send it to the grid when needed. A million “vehicle to grid” cars could generate up to 10,000 MW of electricity – the equivalent of 20 power plants.
The moral of this story is that we don’t need to suffer from a “creativity freeze” when it comes to solutions for a brighter future. They are everywhere.
++++
[sorry this link is no longer available]
http://www.pluginpartners.org
Guy Dauncy is author of “Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change.”
From Guy’s EcoNews Newsletter, a SustainableBusiness.com Content Partner.
Loading...