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  • Sea Power, Part 1

    August 3, 2009

    Sea Power, Part 1


    No, not fleets of warships — this power comes from warm and cold running water. Part 1 of our 3-part series.

    by Mason Inman

    Washington, DC, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]

    “The current energy crisis is fueling a worldwide search for power. Energy explorers are discovering that the largest reserve of potential energy covers more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface—the oceans.” Replace “energy crisis” with “climate crisis,” and these words could be pulled from the websites of any of several companies that are now looking to generate clean electricity from the heat stored in the oceans.


    But to get much juice out of a system like this requires veritable rivers of both warm and cold water. A 100-megawatt OTEC plant (about one-tenth the size of a typical coal-fired power plant) would need several thousand liters of water flowing through it per second.





    But these words were actually spoken nearly 30 years ago in a video showing the deployment of a vast plastic pipe, first snaking along a Hawaiian beach and then being towed out to sea. This pipe was a crucial part of the first power plant of its kind to tap into the energy in the seas, through a process called ocean thermal energy conversion.


    In 1979, when this power plant was built, oil prices were near an all-time high and the United States had been searching for alternative sources of energy for almost a decade. The main goal then was energy independence: U.S. policymakers wanted to ensure the country’s energy supply rather than rely on oil bought from hostile countries.


    “We might very well have had a fleet of ocean thermal plants by now,” says Robert Cohen, who in the 1970s was the first manager of the U.S. Department of Energy’s research on ocean thermal energy. “We were headed toward that under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. But the Reagan administration was not friendly to renewables, especially ocean thermal. They pulled the rug on our funding.” Since then, plans for harnessing this technology have lain largely dormant. As Cohen puts it, “It’s become an orphan technology.”


    But now the orphan is finally being adopted. With growing awareness of the vast amounts of clean energy that the planet needs to keep the global economy spinning while avoiding a climate catastrophe, companies and governments are again at work on harnessing ocean thermal energy. But this time these efforts are backed by new technologies—many from a seemingly unlikely sector, the offshore oil industry—that may finally make it practical and affordable. “Ocean thermal could become a big source, possibly the biggest global source of renewable energy,” Cohen says.


    Estimates of the size of this energy source vary widely, but even a conservative tally figures it could sustainably produce more electricity than the whole world consumes today. The technology has some spin-offs that are already commercially viable, and others that could become so soon, including low-cost air conditioning for buildings, desalination for turning seawater into drinking water, and fish farms fed by the nutrient-rich water from the deep.


    But ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) still has to prove itself. So far it has been tested only in small pilot projects, and no one has built a commercial power plant. Now, with a few plants in various stages of planning, OTEC may finally get a shot at competing with other sources of clean energy (such as solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal) to show whether it can match up, or even beat them.


    Simply Difficult


    In some ways, harnessing ocean thermal energy requires only the simplest of gadgetry: plastic and metal plumbing for carrying the water and exchanging heat between the warm and cold streams, and turbines for generating electricity. Yet in practice, building a robust power plant — one that can stand up to corrosive salt water, hurricanes, and microbial scum that seems to grow everywhere — requires a lot of ingenuity, patience, and money. Gérard Nihous, an ocean engineer at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, says, “The principle is elementary, but the practical application is a headache.”


    The energy behind OTEC is sunlight. The oceans’ surface waters absorb it in prodigious amounts and store the energy as heat. In hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons, this pent-up heat comes pouring back out in spiraling convulsions of wind and rain. To harness the energy for useful ends, OTEC systems need not just heat, but a way to make that heat move in a controlled way. That’s where one of the great challenges of ocean thermal energy conversion comes in: it requires large amounts of cold water as well. OTEC systems tap into a store of cold water that’s available around the world (see map, below).



    “Here in Hawaii, it’s miraculous that if I drop a few hundred meters, it is so cold,” Nihous says. “It shouldn’t be. It’s only because of this deep circulation,” a vast current that winds around the whole globe, known as the great ocean conveyor. By sticking a very long pipe down into the conveyor’s depths, its cold water can be pumped up to the surface. When the cold and warm water are piped separately through a device called a heat engine — basically, a refrigerator that runs in reverse — it generates electricity.


    The most likely way of doing this is the so-called closed system, in which the stream of warm surface water flows past a system of tubes containing some kind of refrigerant — a liquid that boils somewhere close to room temperature, such as ammonia. Shallow water in the tropics is warm enough to boil the refrigerant, producing a jet of vapor that pushes through a turbine, spinning it to generate electricity. Then the cold, deep-ocean water runs past the vaporized refrigerant to cool it and turn it back into a liquid, recycling it so it can run through the device again and again.


    But to get much juice out of a system like this requires veritable rivers of both warm and cold water. A 100-megawatt OTEC plant (about one-tenth the size of a typical coal-fired power plant) would need several thousand liters of water flowing through it per second. According to Nihous’s estimates, producing electricity at the rate it’s used worldwide today — about 2 terawatts, or 2 trillion watts — would require a flow of cold water more than 10 times greater than that coursing down all of the world’s rivers combined. And in the future, if development continues at the current fast pace and the world moves from dirty fuels to green energy, we’ll need dozens of terawatts of clean electricity.


    In part 2 of this article, we’ll look at some pilot OTEC installations around the globe.


    Mason Inman is a freelance science journalist currently based in Karachi, Pakistan.


    This article originally appeared in World Watch Magazine May/June 2009 and is reprinted by permission.




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  • Don’t desert us, say sinking pacific islands

    Don’t desert us, say sinking Pacific islands






    Rowan Callick, Asia-Pacific editor | July 30, 2009


    Article from:  The Australian


    THREE of Australia’s biggest non-government organisations are hosting competing visits by Pacific Islanders to urge Kevin Rudd to do more to combat climate change – and especially rising sea levels.


    The delegations’ visits ahead of next week’s Pacific Islands Forum summit in Cairns, which the Prime Minister will host, come as Australian experts warn that although climate change does appear to be a factor in changes in sea levels, there are also many other reasons.


    These include tectonic plate movements, El Ninos and the effects of fast-rising populations, including the use of groundwater and deforestation.


    Experts predict that the sea around the Pacific islands will rise by about half a metre by the end of this century.


    At this rate, Tuvalu – often cited as especially vulnerable to rising sea levels – would survive geographically for 1000 more years, although the atoll nation would become uninhabitable well before then.


     


    Bill Mitchell, who manages the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that provides the only observed data for the region, said its records only extended to almost 20 years.


    “It is not clear yet what contribution long-term climate change is making to sea levels, but we are getting there,” hesaid.


    The islanders’ visits are timed to place pressure on the Pacific Islands Forum to act more urgently and to press Australia and New Zealand to spend much more on helping islanders adapt.


    AusAid is already spending $150 million on such a program over three years, but Oxfam says in a new report that Australia and New Zealand should urgently commit up to $668m.


    Australia should also spend $4.3 billion a year to finance emissions cuts and longer-term adaptation efforts in developing countries, Oxfam says.


    By 2050, 150 million people may be displaced globally because of climate change, half of them in the Asia-Pacific region.


    “The potential for climate displacement is especially a concern for low-lying atoll nations in Polynesia and Micronesia,” it says. “With land areas just metres above sea level and narrow strips of land just 50-100m wide in some atolls, there is no retreat to higher ground from the ravages on the coast. The potential for forced displacement among the Pacific islands population of about eight million people demands urgent debate.”


    The Oxfam report does not, however, cite the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, which is run by Australia’s National Tidal Centre, based at the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide, which operates the only Pacific-wide equipment to measure sea level rises.


    The centre installed, mostly from 1992 to 1994, sophisticated tidal gauges in 12 of the 14 island states, leaving only Palau and Niue unmonitored.


    These have revealed that the Pacific countries – especially those in the west and nearer the equator, mostly Melanesian and Micronesian islands – are seeing sea level rises of about 5mm a year, compared with an average global rise of about 3mm.


    These figures are further complicated by satellite altimeter measurements, which, the National Tidal Centre says, “show evidence of a decadal slosh of Pacific sea level, with sea levels having risen in the southwest Pacific and fallen in the northwest Pacific since 1992”. Tuvalu, an atoll nation of 10,000 Polynesian people to the north of Fiji, has a land area of 26sqkm and a maximum height of 5m.


    Sydney University geography professor John Connell has explained, though, that other factors besides global warming that have probably affected Tuvalu’s vulnerability include the construction of new roads between islands, the sealing of an airport runway, removing vegetation, land reclamation, sea wall construction and mining for sand used in construction.


    The first islands to organise an evacuation are the Carterets, eight hours by boat to the northeast of Bougainville in eastern Papua New Guinea.


    Ursula Rakova, 43, who grew up on the Carterets – six tiny atolls around a lagoon 25km across– is visiting Australia with the Australian Conservation Foundation.


    She says 2700 people are still living there, after about 200 years of human occupation. But half of the land — whose highest point is only 1.2m — has already been lost within her lifetime.


    She acknowledges that a contributory factor is that the islands are located on top of an underwater volcano, which is steadily subsiding, but says she believes climate change is another factor.


    “We have very high tides, strong waves, much more powerful currents, and more storms, with plenty of rain,” Ms Rakova says. “We can paddle canoes where we used to walk.”


    She has already established a new home for her family in Arawa, the capital of Bougainville, and the first 50 people are now shifting to Tinputz on Bougainville’s east coast under a voluntary evacuation program drawn up by the PNG government, for which it allocated about $1m for 2007.


    “But we have not seen a single toea (cent),” said Ms Rakova, who runs Tulele Peisa, an NGO assisting the relocations.


    “For us born there, we’re losing everything: our identity, our culture, our connections to the islands, our whole life.”


    Oxfam and Greenpeace are hosting a visit about the impact of climate change from Pelenise Alofa Pilitati, managing director of a Kiribati NGO; Reverend Tafue Lusama, chairman of the Tuvalu Climate Action Network; and Marstella Jack, former attorney-general of the Federated States of Micronesia.

  • India sets out ambitious solar power plan to be paid for by rich nations

    India sets out ambitious solar power plan to be paid for by rich nations


    India plans to generate 20GW from sunlight by 2020, putting green energy targets of developed nations in the shade





    India has decided to push ahead with a vastly ambitious plan to tap the power of the sun to generate clean electricity, and after a meeting chaired by the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, it wants rich nations to pay the bill.


     


    Although India has virtually no solar power now, the plan envisages the country generating 20GW from sunlight by 2020. Global solar capacity is predicted to be 27GW by then, according to the International Energy Agency, meaning India expects to be producing 75% of this within just 10 years.


     


     


    Four-hundred million Indians have no electricity and the solar power would help spark the country’s development and end the power cuts that plague the nation. It would also, say some analysts, assuage international criticism that India is not doing enough to confront its carbon emissions. It is currently heavily reliant on highly polluting coal for power.


     


    The plan provoked prolonged discussion at a meeting of the national climate change council in New Dehli yesterday, which resulted in major changes from early drafts. The draft document had envisaged a government subsidy of around $20bn (£11bn), and falling production costs, in order to achieve a long-term 2040 target of 200GW of solar power.


     


    But experts pointed out that a large government subsidy contradicted the Indian government’s stated position in the negotiations to agree a treaty to fight global warming. India, along with China and others, has demanded that the costs of clean technologies should be carried by developed nations, which have grown rich through their heavy use of fossil fuels.


     


    Under the revised plan, India’s solar mission will seek to achieve its targets by demanding technological and financial support from the developed nations. “In order to achieve its renewable energy targets, the Indian government expects international financing as well as technology at an affordable cost,” said Leena Srivastava of the TERI energy research institute.


     


    The move suggests New Delhi could use its solar energy plan as a bargaining chip at the forthcoming climate change summit in Copenhagen. The government reaffirmed its hardline position last month when the environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, told the visiting US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton: “There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emitters per capita, [have] to actually reduce emissions.” If rich nations do fund the solar plan, the aim of both sides – economic growth for developing countries but with low-carbon emissions – will have been met.


     


    Nonetheless, the plan’s optimistic cost projections were debunked at the meeting, leaving it unclear how much money the 2020 target would need. “In terms of vision, it’s a very good plan,” said Kushal Singh Yadav of the Centre for Science and Environment. “But the nuts and bolts will remain uncertain until we get a fix on how much money is needed, and where it will come from.”


     


    Yadav pointed out that India has taken significant strides in wind energy production thanks to a shift in government policy.


     


    Spain, for instance, added 3GW of solar power capacity in just one year in 2008.


     


    In another significant policy shift following the meeting, solar thermal power (which heats water) will be given as much importance as photovoltaic (which generates electricity).


     


    The Tamil Nadu government has already asked for New Delhi’s assistance for setting up a 100MW solar thermal plant in the southern state.

  • Pacific nations push for emissions cut

    Pacific nations push for emissions cut

    Updated: 15:16, Tuesday August 4, 2009


    Pacific nations among the most at risk from climate change will lobby Australia and New Zealand to almost halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.


    Leaders and representatives from the Pacific’s smallest island nations met in Cairns on Tuesday at the start of the three-day Pacific Islands Forum.


    Small Island States (SIS) chairman and Niue Premier Toke Talagi said the seven-nation alliance would push Australia and New Zealand to agree to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2020 and by 85 per cent by 2050.


     


    ‘We understand the difficulties that developed countries have with respect to the changes that are needed,’ he told reporters in Cairns.


    ‘(However) we must make a strong stance with respect to greenhouse gas emissions and advocate the small island states’ view in respect to climate change.’


    Many of the seven nations who make up the SIS, such as Tuvalu, lie just a few metres above sea level and are considered among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.


    The Australian government has said it is working towards a five to 15 per cent cut on 2000 emission levels by 2020 while New Zealand has set a 50 per cent reduction target on 1990 levels by 2050.

  • How do you solve a problem like the Nimby’s

    How do you solve a problem like the Nimbys?


    The familiar pattern of wind farm objections, Nimby protests, planning difficulties, and investment set backs have returned to the UK this week. By James Murray, from BusinessGreen.com, part of the Guardian Environment Network





    Anyone familiar with the two steps forward, one and three quarter steps back world of the UK’s renewable energy industry is unlikely to have been surprised by the past week, but that does not stop it being teeth gnashingly frustrating.


    Just a fortnight on from the release of the government’s much vaunted Low Carbon Industrial Plan and the familiar pattern of wind farm objections, Nimby protests, planning difficulties, and investment set backs has returned.


    The most high profile slap in the face for the sector comes in the form of Vestas’ plans to close its wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight, despite the brave efforts of staff to oppose the decision by staging a sit in at the plant, jeopardising any chance of redundancy payments in the process.


     


    There have been plenty of suggestions that Vestas’ decision to close the plant is short sighted and that the government should step in to nationalise the facility. But while the issuing of dismissal letters inside a food parcel sent to the protestors was crass in the extreme, it is much harder to fault the commercial logic behind the decision to close the plant.


    The factory was building blades that were then being exported to the US. At the same time, the company has a plant in the US capable of delivering the same blades at lower cost. It makes sense from both a commercial, and indeed an environmental perspective for turbines for the US market to be built in the US.


    Vestas did look at converting the Isle of Wight factory to produce blades for the UK market, but decided that the risk that demand for the new turbines would not be forthcoming was too high. Was this an unreasonable decision?


    Well, The British Wind Energy Association is right to point out that up to 2,700 new wind turbines are expected to be erected by 2012 with over 700 under construction and nearly 2,000 having secured planning permission. Meanwhile, the additional £1bn of financing announced by the government this week should ensure that those projects that have planning permission are indeed built.


    And yet Vestas would be forgiven for arguing that it has seen such predictions in the past, only for the pipeline of new projects to be blocked time and again by local objections to planning applications, followed by long winding appeals that in many cases ended in disappointment.


    It could point to Greenpeace’s recent report showing that between December 2005 and November 2008 Tory councils blocked 158.2MW of wind energy projects, approving just 44.7MW, while Labour councils fared only a bit better rejecting 62.6MW, while approving just 68.3MW.


    If it wanted more timely examples, it could highlight the news today that the RSPB is to formally oppose plans for the UK’s largest onshore wind farm on the Shetland Islands, after previously indicating it would support the proposal. Or the decision by RES to cut the number of turbines at its planned Minnygap wind farm in Scotland from 15 to 10 in an attempt to win planning approval. Or Ecotricity’s recent appeal against a decision that saw plans for a 12MW wind farm in North Dorset rejected despite planning authorities recommending to councillors that the proposals should be approved. The list goes on and on.


    It is horrible for the workers involved, but you can understand why Vestas has decided that it has had enough operating in an environment where the market it serves is at the whim of a small minority of locally-fixated Nimby protestors and popularity courting councillors. If staff, trade unions and green groups want to protest against Vestas’ decision, it is the government, and in particular wind farm blocking councils, that should be the target.


    The fact is Nimbyism is at the root of most of the clean tech industry’s problems, and what’s more it is only going to get worse. The conservationist campaign against the proposed Severn Barrage is already gathering momentum, the anti-wind lobby is if anything getting more vocal and has substantial support on the back benches of a Conservative party that looks destined to form the next government, objections to biomass and waste-to-energy plants are increasingly common, and if the recent opposition to planned carbon capture and storage plants in Germany and the Netherlands is anything to go by, even this technology could be hamstrung by people worried about living above carbon sinks.


    Thus far the response from the renewables industry has tended to be one of impotent rage. Talk to anyone involved in trying to gain planning approval for a wind farm opposed by local parish worthies and they are often engaged in an scarcely concealed internal battle to resist an attack of apoplexy.


    They can’t understand why, when surveys have shown the vast majority of people like wind turbines, when the reality of climate change means they are trying to invest in a project that is essential to the continuation of our way of life, when the government is pretty unstinting in its support for low carbon technologies, when the latest turbines are ghostly quiet and governed by stringent planning rules that keep them a good distance from buildings, small numbers of people complaining about changes to their view can effectively torpedo an entire industrial revolution.


    But while it is always fun to have a bit of rant, it is never going to solve the problem – in fact, it tends to exacerbate it by making local opponents to wind farms feel bullied.


    So what is the answer?


    The first step has to be to understand where the opposition to these developments comes from. Opponents of wind farms like to dress up their objections in vaguely technical (and easily countered) arguments about the efficacy of wind and the damage turbines can do to bird life, but in most cases the root of the opposition invariably comes down to visual impact.


    The government recently undertook a major survey that found that the vast majority of people like the look of turbines, and almost everyone agrees they have more architectural value than a coal-fired power plant. But the vocal minority’s opposition to wind farms is based not so much on aesthetic judgements but a deep-rooted conservative, with a small c, mentality (although given their councillors’ record maybe that should be with a large C too). My guess is that opponents to wind farms simply don’t like change, pure and simple.


    So how do you win them round? The rigours of democracy quite rightly ensures that the totalitarian approach of telling them to lump it and evicting anyone who protests too loudly is out of the question. As a result, the renewables sector needs to get much better at the gentle art of persuasion.


    Wind farms that do secure approval tend to engage in genuine and lengthy consultation and engagement exercises with residents, while the practice of donating funds to local community projects has become increasingly prevalent. But such engagement exercises are only going to have limited success when faced with a deep rooted fear of change.


    Perhaps the answer is to be found in one of the few mechanisms proven throughout history to help people get over their fears: money.


    My Godfather lives near Sellafield. Not near enough to see it, but near enough to know that if anything ever goes badly wrong his health insurance claim would make for interesting reading. As a teacher with impeccable left-leaning, anti-nuclear credentials and a life long love of the surrounding countryside he always said that he did not like having a power plant in the back yard, but he was fully aware that without it he would most likely be out of a job and an area with an already pretty precarious economy would be tipped over the edge.


    Unfortunately, this economic rationalism will not work quite so well with wind farms, when you consider that once they are built the employment prospects are pretty minimal. Consequently, the onus has to be on developers to make the economic case more explicit, and if that means paying local residents some form of reparations or annual stipend then so be it.


    The financial rewards might still not be sufficient to convince those with an irrational hatred of wind farms, but I’m guessing their opposition would soon be drowned out by those who quite fancied the idea of the local wind farm paying for their holiday each year.


    • This article was shared by our content partner BusinessGreen.com, part of the Guardian Environment Network

  • Higher annual rainfall tipped

    Higher annual rainfall tipped








    NB (Read this article carefully, there will still be drought periods in Southern Australia)





    Brendan O’Keefe | August 04, 2009


    Article from:  The Australian


    AUSTRALIA’S annual rainfall will increase by an average 8.4mm by 2099, according to results from computer models that have been brought under the one roof for the first time.


    Two academics from the Australian National University, Michael Roderick and Wee Lo Lim, have crunched the numbers from 39 models run by organisations such as Australia’s CSIRO and its equivalents in France, Canada, Germany, Japan, the US and Britain to produce a downloadable book that shows all their predictions individually and averaged.


    The book and e-book, An Atlas of the Global Water Cycle, will be launched today at the university.


    Dr Roderick and Mr Lim calculated that, by 2099, Australia’s nationwide rainfall will have increased by an average of 8.4mm. But include an extra 11.2mm of evaporation across the country and the final result is a loss of 2.8mm.


     


    Globally, rainfall is predicted to increase by an average of 46.9mm.


    The Australian averages hide wider predicted regional variations. According to the data, by 2099, the Top End will be receiving 50-100mm more rain than the 1970-1999 average.


    All of Victoria, and most of South Australia and Western Australia, will receive up to 50mm a year less than now.


    Eastern Tasmania will receive up to 50mm less and the western half of the state will receive 50-100mm less.


    One Japanese model predicts 149.7mm more rain by 2099 across Australia and one German model predicts 128.1mm less per year. Australia’s long-term, nationwide rainfall average is about 450mm a year.


    Dr Roderick said the compilation of the data was an objective work. “There’s no interpretation,” he said. “This is straight out what they (the models) say.”


    He said scientists did not (openly) put more stock in some models over others but “the science is being done at the moment” on which model made the best projections.


    All 39 models predict more rainfall across the globe, over land and sea.


    Dr Roderick said the information could be useful for people such as farmers and water engineers. “(This work) will allow people to see all the individual runs of models,” he said.


    “Here you can see for yourself and people can download a digital copy for free.”