Articles – Page 111

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Giant gravel batteries could make renewable energy more reliable

Isentopic claims its gravel-based battery would be able to store equivalent amounts of energy but use less space and be cheaper to set up. Its system consists of two silos filled with a pulverised rock such as gravel. Electricity would be used to heat and pressurise argon gas that is then fed into one of the silos. By the time the gas leaves the chamber, it has cooled to ambient temperature but the gravel itself is heated to 500C.

After leaving the silo, the argon is then fed into the second silo, where it expands back to normal atmospheric pressure. This process acts like a giant refrigerator, causing the gas (and rock) temperature inside the second chamber to drop to -160C. The electrical energy generated originally by the wind turbines originally is stored as a temperature difference between the two rock-filled silos. To release the energy, the cycle is reversed, and as the energy passes from hot to cold it powers a generator that makes electricity.

Isentropic claims a round-trip energy efficiency of up to 80% and, because gravel is cheap, the cost of a system per kilowatt-hour of storage would be between $10 and $55.

Howe says that the energy in the hot silo (which is insulated) can easily be stored for extended periods of time – by his calculations, a silo that stood 50m tall and was 50m in diameter would lose only half of its energy through its walls if left alone for three years.

To demonstrate how much less infrastructure his system requires, Howe uses the example of the Bath County Pumped Storage hydro-electric dam in Virginia, US. This is the biggest energy-storage system in the world, with two reservoirs covering 820 surface acres can store up to 30 GWh storage capacity. An Isentropic gravel battery of the same capacity would occupy 1/300th of the area, according to Howe.

John Loughhead, executive director of the UK Energy Research Centre, said that the novelty of the Isentropic system lay in using cheap materials as the heat store, thus making a normally expensive and mechanically complex process very simple. But he said demonstrators would need to be built to prove the idea actually functions. “The question is, does it work? From an engineering standpoint, the temperature differences they mention, +550C to -150C are initially credibility-stretching for a single-pass cycle, and the potential for gravel particles to pass through the engine and damage or clog the inevitable cooling and lubricating systems seems high.”

Howe is in the process of designing a small pilot plant that could store 16MWh at full capacity – enough for the electrical needs of thousands of homes. That energy could be stored in two silos of gravel that are 7 metres tall and 7 metres in diameter. There is no reason why multiple units could not be connected together to store much more power, Howe says several gigawatt hours.

Howe says he is in talks with what he refers to as “a large utility company” to sponsor the construction of a full-storage demonstrator system, something around the 100 kilowatt scale.

Isentropic was selected recently by the government-sponsored Technology Strategy Board for a trade mission to meet Silicon Valley investors, one of around 20 of the Britain’s most promising clean technology startup companies.

David Bott, director of innovation programmes at the Technology Strategy Board, one of the sponsors of the 2010 Clean and Cool trade mission said: “Isentropic have done something very exciting, by revisiting scientific theory and coming up with a new technology that answers the need to match the generation of electricity with its use. For instance, the system could enable the more efficient use of wind power, by storing the energy generated by a turbine until it is needed. We need ways to store the energy we generate when we have a surplus, so that it can be used when we need extra and this innovative new system could provide the answer.”

Population in Australia: 2050 versus 1950?

In roughly the same span and timeframe of Carr’s time as premier, Paris has gone from a bike-unfriendly city to one of the best cycling cities in the world, cemented in 2007 — after a decade creating cycling paths and retraining their super-aggressive car drivers — with the Velib free bike hire scheme, which has been a phenomenal success. We do not need to recount here what has happened to Sydney in the same timeframe under Carr but it does make one’s jaw drop reading his article.

In citing the Intergenerational Report that “migration does not reverse the ageing of the population” Carr is correct in that one cannot “outrun” population ageing with immigration, but the reality is that among developed countries, Australia has one of the lowest age profiles, and consequently will have a longer delay before the onset of population ageing effects, because of only one reason, immigration. Our median age is 37.1 years compared to 39.5 for Canada and 36.7 for the US compared to more than 40 for most European countries and 44.2 for Japan.

All of this would be significant if our population was high in any relative sense but on any basis we are underpopulated. Australia’s overall population density is less than three people per square kilometre. At about 46 people per arable square kilometre we are a bit denser than Canada at 38 but both countries are in a completely separate league to most developed countries such as the UK (837), France (332) Japan (2,570) and one quarter of the USA (163). Canada has the highest per capita immigration rate in the world.

The big difference between Canada and Australia is that the latter has been preparing for this growth for the past five decades. In the 1960s Toronto decided to invest more in public transport rather than adopt the US road-based city transport paradigm. The city also has a strong cycling culture. Along with Montreal and Vancouver these Canadian cities are studied as models of how to cope with a growing population against a strong tendency to be car-based.

Carr claims that for our east coast cities all development plans are based around public transport. The problem is that not one of these cities has a plan that anyone takes seriously. Sydney has no end of plans for upgrading its inadequate rail transport — several in just the past year alone.

By his statement “our cities will be more congested with 36 million, no matter how much goes into public transport” he is confusing crowded versus congested. He left the city in the latter state. All large cities with even the best public transport still suffer crowding at peak hours but people still get to their destination in a consistently predictable time. On the other hand congestion prevents people (and goods) getting to their destination on time and is predicted to cost the Australia economy up to $30 billion per year as soon as 2020. That is just the tip of the iceberg of a business-as-usual strategy.

Sydney may well have the highest proportion of commuter journeys using public transport in Australia but at 23% it is still woeful compared to 54% in New York (all five boroughs, much higher on Manhattan), 80% in London, 52% in Paris, 78% in Tokyo (57% in Greater Tokyo). And not just in those very large world cities (which actually Sydney and Melbourne like to compare themselves) but also in comparable sized cities such as 90% in Hong Kong, and 32% (plus 16% cycling) in Toronto.

Bob Carr could also claim increasing use of public transport during Labour’s rule but the problem is that it has nothing at all to do with improved public transport but entirely to do with increasing road congestion. Not only could his government not implement any serious program for expanding the rail network but it managed to waste $95 million on a failed integrated travel smartcard. The same company awarded the Sydney contract, ERG, is responsible for the highly lauded Hong Kong Octopus card system, the first such card in the world. London’s Oyster card is similar, as is Brisbane’s Go card.

In Melbourne and Sydney the politicians and transport supremos could not accept the notion of simplifying zone/fare structures and thus brought certain disaster. It defies the imagination how Melbourne can spend $800 million on the Myki card system and still it is dysfunctional. Sydney went back to the drawing board and finally, in Kristina Keneally, NSW has a premier with enough common sense to replace the antiquated complicated fare structure. Our politicians need to have enough common sense and backbone to over-rule the bureaucrats, nitpickers and bean counters with their false economic models.

This author has elsewhere countered the argument about water as the limiting resource for our cities where I wrote:

“In the case against further population growth many cite Brisbane’s experience in the recent prolonged water concerns. Yet it shows the exact opposite: people responded beyond expectations in going from about 300 to 140L/cap/day. No new dams, desalination plants, pipelines, recycling or rainwater harvesting were needed to get us through one of the worst dry spells in our history”

Two days after Carr called for an inquiry into population and Australia’s carrying capacity, Tony Burke was appointed federal Population Minister. It is not yet clear what a “population strategy” will encompass. The problem of trying to determine Australia’s carrying capacity will be in defining the key parameters. If one uses our current practice and simply extrapolates our lamentable infrastructure, then yes it is clear that we are probably beyond the limits.

Stopping immigration will not be enough to rescue our unsustainable way of life. But technological progress, particularly in clean energy, water conservation strategies and smarter infrastructure spending such as in urban planning, city transport and inter-city transport can have a profound impact. Do Carr and many other commentators seriously think we should just stand still? Stick with this 1950s mindset that only Australia and America persist with? In that case his prognosis is self-fulfilling defeatism.

A few weeks back Lindsay Tanner made some common sense remarks on some of these panic scenarios re population. The message was in the title: “Issue is profligacy not population”. Unlike almost all of his fellow ministers Tanner appears to appreciate the true issues and solutions and is willing to explain the ugly truth in public:

“We have been very profligate in how we’ve managed our environment, our water resources, the development of our cities and how we’ve managed our economy in general in recent decades. Regardless of what our population is in 2050, for Australians to continue enjoying the quality of life we currently do, that profligacy has to stop.”

Bob Carr appears to very Australian in his near-total pessimism and complacency about our ability to change to meet future challenges. His only “idea” is to shut the door on immigration, the only thing that has stopped us — just — from being the most boring place in the known universe. Instead of being Cassandra he should be part of the solution, but then he never did that when he held power. Being from the boomer generation he should remember the saying, if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem.

Michael R. James is an Australian research scientist, writer and former Parisian cyclist. He addressed some of the issues of population growth in a recent three part series: 1. Population and Transport; 2. Population and Housing/Urban Planning; 3. Population and Resources

Population and resources: She won’t be right, mate

While most political attention is focused on things such as health and education — despite the fact that we have among the best health care and education systems in the world — the medium and long-term national issues always get second-class treatment. Energy, transport, urban planning, water and environment (indigenous species loss, feral-pests, salination, loss of soil fertility, forests) are some of the major challenges we face.

Energy is one of the most important but it is implicit in any scenario that by 2050 we should have largely solved the energy issue. There is really no excuse because solar and geothermal technologies only need investment to deliver on their promise in that timescale. Supplemented by other renewables (wind, tidal, biofuels) our dependence on fossil fuels, especially coal, will be under control by then. Although there are huge opportunities for Australia, the government remains extraordinarily tardy — a much delayed $153 million investment in solar and geothermal technologies compares to a subsidy of $150 million on a single brown-coal plant for Victoria, not to mention billions on the fake promise of “clean coal”.

Water is perhaps the issue most worrisome for both the experts and the public. Yet for cities it is also one of the most exaggerated. And unlike pessimism about the complacency of the Australian public, in this case city people have shown they can respond admirably. In the case against further population growth many cite Brisbane’s experience in the recent prolonged water concerns. Yet it shows the exact opposite: people responded beyond expectations in going from about 300 to 140L/cap/day. No new dams, desalination plants, pipelines, recycling or rainwater harvesting were needed to get us through one of the worst dry spells in our history. (Southern readers should be in no confusion on this — much of this infrastructure is being built but none were in operation before the water crisis easing.)

The interpretation of this is incontestable. With just some of these actions — say pipelines for redistribution, recycled water (if only in industry who are profligate users of potable water) and much greater domestic rainwater collection — a twofold increase in population for South East Queensland will not be a problem.

Although not so long ago most Brisbane homes had rainwater tanks, among capital cities today it is has the lowest percentage of homes with installed tanks. In addition long-term rainfall patterns have been delivering less rain to dam catchments and more to coastal urban areas making it an imperative to capture that water. Industry is not a keen supporter of this because it cuts them out of their preferred rent-seeking “solutions” such as expensive desalination plants for which they extract government agreements to purchase, at 10 times the cost of rainwater, the full output of the power-hungry plants even if the water is not required.

These simple and low-tech solutions are applicable in all east-coast cities to definitively solve the water problem. Very few houses use rainwater for toilet and laundry, which account for about 50 per cent of household water use. In Melbourne, Stuart McQuire, using rainwater capture and recycling, has reduced his daily use of articulated water to four litres per person. His house is a net exporter of electric power to the grid. Currently solar photovoltaic cells are too expensive to promote or prescribe widespread domestic deployment but this will certainly change in the next 20 years if not 10 years. The coming revolution in energy generation will itself save significant amounts of water, which today’s coal-fired generators use profligately.

The final part of The 7.30 Report’s investigation was an extended discussion with a panel of demographer Bernard Salt, eco-warrior and former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, Australian Industry Group CEO Heather Ridout and director of Griffith University’s Urban Research Program director Brendan Gleeson. This was a high quality panel and a high quality discussion. But in their summation the panel made the most blatant discombobulation.

They all professed great faith in the Australian people and that we would pull through. This is the equivalent of “She’ll be right, mate” and is a de facto endorsement of business as usual. It was hardly surprising in the week of Australia Day but is a damning indictment of our inability to take the hard truth or any criticism. The panel members could not rise above the tyranny of public opinion that attacks anyone who is willing to state the truth — that Australians are an extremely complacent people.

This is exactly the reason why our politicians are so spineless. On all the issues listed at the beginning of this article — energy, public transport, urban planning, rivers and water policy, environment — the Australian record is not just average, it is appalling. And the evidence for our current trajectory is all in the wrong direction.

Australians also seem not to be able to join the dots. We have almost $1 trillion in debt on property loans that have been encouraged by poor tax policy that amounts to middle-class welfare. Instead of tying up so much of our wealth in this totally unproductive property bubble we could have been spending on infrastructure. Every dollar invested in public transport, energy and urban planning will be repaid for decades into the future in a virtuous circle of improved energy use, better economic productivity, better health and fitness and overall better quality of life. By comparison we could spend our entire GDP on our current form of health care, with its focus on hi-tech intervention, hospital care and expensive pharmaceuticals, with very little true improvement in health metrics — indeed in all likelihood a vicious circle of medical dependency rather than preventive measures.

In contrast to the ABC panel, David Marr was closer to the truth when he said that Australians are a timid and fearful lot, but that if given strong leadership with appropriate action, they can be accepting and adaptable. He was speaking last year in the context of boat people, which contrasts to the success of our multicultural society, one of the few home-grown aspects of Australia that we can be unequivocally proud of.

Australians need to understand that our lifestyle is unsustainable. Until they truly accept this and convince politicians they are serious it is a copout to just blame politicians for what is essentially a mirror reflecting our own intransigence. It is a form of denial to think that we do not have to change our extravagant and destructive lifestyle if we simply freeze our population — which in any case is not possible unless plagues and wars descend upon on us.

The 7.30 Report’s host Kerry O’Brien asked if our system of government is up to the job of implementing the necessary changes. An equally valid question is whether Australians are up to the challenges.

Michael R. James is an Australian research scientist and writer.

Climate change programs lack creditability

The harsh assessment of Australia’s climate change programs comes as a meeting of ministers from the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters failed to agree how global climate talks should proceed after the failure of last year’s UN meeting in Copenhagen, and downplayed the chances of reaching a deal at this year’s talks in Mexico.

The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, said she believed the Copenhagen accord – the political agreement thrashed out in the Danish capital last December – was ”the best international consensus to date and the key to getting international action on climate change”.

But the Major Economies Forum meeting she has been attending in Washington was downbeat and the US climate envoy, Todd Stern, said afterwards that agreement in Mexico in December might not be possible.

The audit report was also scathing about the greenhouse gas abatement program set up under the Howard government and continued in the early years of the Rudd government, a competitive grants program similar to Tony Abbott’s planned ”direct action” climate change scheme. A previous audit had criticised the first two rounds of the scheme, but yesterday’s report found the third round was not any better.

The three projects funded were ”technically ineligible” because they did not meet the criteria, only one produced any greenhouse abatement at all, and even that project only reduced emissions by a third of the amount it had promised.

The Greens senator Christine Milne said the report ”should give Tony Abbott and [the opposition climate spokesman] Greg Hunt pause for thought”.

”Clearly the approach they have taken is not an effective or efficient way of delivering emissions cuts. We know we need to do a lot more than throw a few grants around if we are to stimulate the huge growth in green technologies we need,” she said.

The report also criticised the original rebate scheme for solar roof panels, saying it achieved greenhouse gas abatement at a cost of about $447 each tonne of carbon, compared with the estimated costs in the early years of an emissions trading scheme of about $20 or $30 a tonne.

It also found that the impact of federal and state government measures had caused their greenhouse gas abatement impact to be revised down by 15 per cent over the past two years.

Dick Smith: gold-medal winning population growth not winning us friends.

You suggest we risk generating “resentment” and being “out of sync” with our neighbours if we reduce our immigration even a little. Really? In fact it’s our current people-hungry policy that is doing damage to our reputation. I am currently making a documentary on population issues and am just now returning from Asia, having spoken to experts working at the two extremes of the population question: Bangladesh and Singapore.

Bangladesh has made great strides in reducing it’s population growth, but it’s still a crushing 160 million, five times the population density of China. In central Dhaka, I stood in the huge tent erected in the car park of the International Centre for Diarrhoea Disease Research where a thousand patients a day are being admitted for emergency treatment. Dhaka’s water table has now fallen to 60 metres below the city, and its 16 million citizens suffer from a desperate lack of clean water, exacerbated by the daily power black-outs. Australian Dr Kim Streatfield has been here for 18 years studying the impact of demographics on disease and poverty. Surrounded by dozens of suffering people, he told me how difficult it was to keep his trained staff. Doctors, nurses, IT specialists and analysts have all been poached this year. One of his most experienced doctors told me she’d be willing to “get a boat” to come to Australia. Dr Streatfield said he considered Australia’s policy of sucking out the best trained locals as immoral, undermining Bangladesh’s ability to escape extreme poverty. I agree with him, and our selfishness will not be forgotten here or in other developing nations we seem all too willing to plunder.

Singapore, on the other hand, has stabilised its population at five million and expects to keep it there, though it’s also struggling with the balance between immigration and natural increase. Professor Gavin Jones is another Australian working on population at the Asia Research Institute. He’s been researching demographic trends across the continent, and it’s ageing rapidly, presenting a far more serious problem for East Asia and China than it does for Australia. There will inevitably be a human arms race for the world’s best and brightest, and looking at the incredible development going on along Singapore’s waterfront, it’s only a matter of time before Asia returns the favour and starts luring our own professionals for salaries we may not be able to match. We can survive the loss of a few hundred currency traders and even a few cosmetic surgeons, but when they start coming for our local GPs there will be trouble.

Instead of relying on imported skills, we need to address the appalling lack of training of our own workforce. Julia Gillard recently received a shocking report from Skills Australia — all but ignored by most media commentators — showing that 4.7 million workers don’t have the literacy or numeracy levels to participate fully in a modern workforce.

In other words almost half the workforce is functionally illiterate! This is a tragic indictment of our government and educational planners and a recipe for disaster. We currently offer adult literacy education to just 1% of those who need it. Meanwhile our TAFE system is in serious trouble, with the numbers of local students enrolled having stagnated for a decade. We ran down our higher education system by greedily trying to turn foreign students into permanent residents. And the Asian students who feel ripped off will not forget the experience in a hurry. Madness!

I suspect Minister Gillard is one of the few politicians who recognises the danger all this represents for our future prosperity. Countering Kevin Rudd’s “Big Australia” argument, she has warned that we are squeezing out Australians because of our addiction to imported skilled labour and foreign students, which she has said “is not in Australia’s best interests”.

The growth cheerleaders in the Murdoch press, who have suddenly discovered the population issue, continue to harp on about mysterious skills shortages and missing the resources boom. Funny, they never admit that the mining industry employs just 1.5% of our workforce and that the overwhelming majority of new arrivals head straight to Sydney and Melbourne where they add to the infrastructure and housing crisis rather than helping it.

Would Crikey please go back to the government and strategic thinkers its been talking to and tell them the so called “policy dilemma” is in their imagination. They’ve been looking down the wrong end of the telescope and it’s our current high growth policies that are undermining Australia’s role in the region.

Australia’s Population Challenge

There are five issues to be addressed.

First is limiting families to two children and not encouraging excessive family size through government subsidies or other means. Most developed societies have reached this state – just look at some European countries’ declining birth-rates.

Second is understanding the impact of individuals and populations on environmental services in order that we can all take greater responsibility for, and be mindful of, our footfall on the planet. This will help in the process of changing behaviour and bringing about political change.

Third is changing the economic model so that it is not predicated on the simplistic notion of economic growth and is instead built on wellbeing growth – wealth creation based on social cohesion, resilience and life satisfaction.

The fourth issue is to change the whole debate. The predicated upheavals that will be caused by climate change and overpopulation mean that debates about a few hundred or thousand migrants will inevitably become decisions concerning hundreds of thousands in the next few decades.

We need to think and plan now for these eventualities.

Fifth because much of the current growth debate is based on needing more people in employment to support an aging population we need to rethink the balance between birth, growing up, learning, working, belonging and dying.

If we see life as a continual learning process and work as rewarding and enriching then learning and working will become continuous interplays throughout life rather than segregated activities with rigid endpoints.

Research being carried out in the Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise at Griffith Business School shows that the world is slowly, much too slowly probably, moving towards a low carbon sustainable enterprise economy model based on these principles.

Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world and significant population growth is already leading to a range of pressures in many cities. This is also the case across developing and advanced economies and includes public services, infrastructure, housing, energy, food and water supplies, and, under current policy, Australia is faced with significant population growth in the foreseeable future.

A recent report commissioned by Griffith University’s urban research program suggests that South East Queensland is receiving an additional 1500 residents each week and is expected to add another 1 million by 2026.

Melbourne’s population growth has recently been predicted to grow by 1.8 million by 2036. Sydney assumes that its population will grow by 1.2 million by 2031. Perth expects to double its 2001 population to 2.2 million by 2031.

A significant proportion of this population is likely to grow internally, thanks to the Australian government’s baby bonus policy. There will also be a resurgence of new immigrants from Asian countries mainly through skilled and family migration programs.

This also needs to be seen in the context of added pressures from climate refugees from low-lying countries in Asia and the Pacific region due to the likely threats of global warming and sea level rise.

The existing transport systems are already struggling under the strain of new growth. Congestion problems in many parts of Australian cities, while far less than in many other cities around the world, has become enormous issues for local government.

There is no doubt that the flows of traffic and passengers within Australian cities are expected to surge with a growing population.

Population and migration issues cannot be dealt with at the state or national level but must become central issues in international agreements if we are to tackle our greatest success – that we have bred like flies and consumed the Earth’s small resources with very significant exponential growth over the last two hundred years.

Now is the time to acknowledge our success as a species and move forward with the idea that every child born should have the right to live in a safe, healthy, fulfilling community.

Population is fundamentally a human rights and environmental rights issue but there seem to be few, if any, politicians willing to accept the leadership baton and step forward.

Malcolm McIntosh is a professor and director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise at Griffith Business School. Tapan Sarker is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith Business School. Rose Boyd is a PhD Scholar at Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith Business School