EcoRadio

Author: admin

  • Renewables Impact on the Grid? Answers from Telecom History

    A Familiar Concern

    The concerns expressed today regarding the impact of widespread deployment of distributed renewable energy resources, also known as Distributed Generation (DG) on utility operations parallel anxieties expressed by AT&T when the first third-party telephone instrument and the first computer with modem were sought to be attached to their network. AT&T’s Bell system, having overall responsibility for the regulated, end-to-end network, asked: “A computer with a modem connects to the telephone network. Should it therefore be regulated? Should all computers be regulated?” Further it wondered, “How to distinguish between harmful and nonharmful interconnection … to protect the ratepayers’ network?” Will customers be “casting blame on the telephone company from the Bell system” should something go wrong?

    AT&T developed an interface device called the “protective coupling arrangement (PCA)” to control potential harm to the network. Despite the concerns, and with the famous Carterphone decision and FCC rulings, the courts and regulators allowed interconnection. Temin’s The Fall of the Bell System describes this in fascinating detail.

    The altered interconnection rules opened up the telephony network to new equipment, third party networks and new business arrangements. Eventually, the network itself was broken into administratively distinct pieces that have since remolded together in a new pattern. The telecom industry presents a gripping story of shifts in industry structure, innovation, technology mutations, parsing and recombination of network elements, and absorption of new technologies that led to the emergence of wireless telephony, data services, entertainment and the Internet. The modularization and re-assembly in new ways, like Lego blocks, is among the sources of the industry’s innovative vitality. The changes have been disruptive, and have occurred in overlapping phases. The aggregate effect is rise of the center-less, or multi-centered, converged yet diverging hybrid that is the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry today.

    Encouragement from the State

    The California Public Utilities Commission’s July 2009 solicitation for projects for funding details the risks of adding third party energy sources to the grid, and seeks the research and business community’s assistance to address them. It states, “Utilities lack understanding and familiarity with how PV systems will impact grid operations. Utilities are especially concerned about potential grid impacts associated with high penetration levels of PV that are likely to occur at the distribution level with increased PV market growth.”

    Will some areas require and deploy more PV arrays than others? Will fluctuations in power amount and quality affect grid operations and economics? Will the PV or wind turbine deployments be a resource for the utility to offset peak demand, or be a costly headache? The solicitation continues, “To date, distributed PV systems operate within the grid but their operations are not integrated into the electricity system and they are not treated like conventional power plants [emphasis mine]. Due to their small size and historically low market-penetration levels, distributed PV systems have fallen outside the scope of most utility planners and engineers. … In addition, due to the unexpectedly rapid growth in distributed PV systems, utility grid operation models and planning tools lack the ability to account for distributed PV generation technologies and resources.”

    Tipping Point

    Just like telephony infrastructure once was, the electric energy infrastructure appears monolithic to a telecom observer. It appears to be poised to confront similar issues with about a twenty-five year lag. But if telephony history is any guide — and the analogies that we recognize only go so far — all of these issues will not only be satisfactorily resolved, but rather will lead to innovation and growth, perhaps greater than what occurred in telecommunications. The operators of microgrids, renewable energy resources and DG are the equivalent of telecom pioneers of the past, like MCI, but they are not the only pioneers.

    The possibilities for Schumpeterian innovation by “combining things differently” are numerous — variety and quality of energy sources, use of creative financing like solar PPAs, new areas for scientific advance from LED lighting to thin films, new network topologies to aggregate “edge” generation sources, information overlays like the SmartGrid, and the inter-working of low emission automobiles with the electric infrastructure — all of these innovations, coupled with a favorable global and national policy, could lead to incredible leaps for the industry and mankind. Even to think of distributed PV systems, community power plants with “islanding” and “parallel” operations, is bold.

    For innovation, “distributed” or “edge” grid elements in large numbers matter; imagine the world of telephony without Blackberry, iPhone and Pre, and only stodgy display-less desktop telephones manufactured, distributed, and managed by a handful of companies in a regulated context.  A green social contagion is loose, of such sweep and of such collective focus that many operational, technical, scientific and political problems will be confronted and solved over the coming years.

    In the face of this wave of innovation, what option exists for utilities but to acquiesce, to find accord with the new social force? Joseph Campbell memorably said or quoted with Irish wit, “if you are falling, dive.” Co-opting Renewables and DG actively is the better part of valor, and good business strategy.

    Mahesh P. Bhave, LEED AP, is an engineer from IIT, Delhi, and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University.  He is the founder of a communications start-up in San Diego. 

  • Personal carbon trading: the next step in tackling carbon emissions?

     

    Government resistance
    Despite initial enthusiasm for a Personal Carbon Allowance (PCA) from former Environment Secretary David Miliband, Government support has now waned.

    Under such a scheme, every individual would be given a set allocation of carbon credits, which they could use to ‘pay’ for purchases like home energy usage and petrol.

    Those with low carbon usage would be able to sell their surplus credits on a carbon market, whilst those with high carbon consumption levels would have to buy credits.

    Having initially muted the idea, Defra then just as quickly dismissed it. A report published in 2008 said it was too costly.

    An RSA trial published at the end of 2008 has since contradicted this judgement saying it would be, ‘relatively quick and easy to automatically capture and report personal carbon emissions for all UK citizens.’

    But, David’s brother Ed Miliband who took over the climate change brief last year indicated it was more about public acceptability, saying it was ‘an idea for the longer term’.

    Psychological issues
    But by dismissing the idea has the Government given up a vital tool for engaging the public in tackling climate change?

    ‘One of the obstacles to feeling responsible for climate change is that it is so removed from individual experience,’ says Stuart Capstick, who has been researching PCT at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University.

    ‘PCT has the ability to make this connection between climate change and the individual by showing us what is a fair amount of carbon for each of us to use.’

    An organiser from the 10:10 said making carbon visible and tangible to individuals was one of the main reasons behind their campaign.

    ‘We’re trying to take peoples’ minds off long-term targets like 2020 and focus on the immediate need for action on climate change. Instead of worrying or feeling guilty, individuals can to do something about it,’ said the organiser.

    ‘Voluntary individual action is never going to be enough on its own but we’re trying to get the ball rolling for the transition to a low carbon economy. Something the government for all their talk have not yet started.’

    The 10:10 campaign is not the first scheme to trial out voluntary individual carbon cutting.

    A report earlier this year from the UK Energy Research Centre on the experience of people involved in Carbon Rationing Action Groups (Crags) showed that carbon allowances could be successful in reducing carbon emissions.

    However, it did also raise issues some concerns, including whether children would have their own carbon allowances, whether some people would be unwilling to get involved in trading permits and the difficulties of carbon budgeting, which would have to be resolved before any scheme was introduced.

    A Plan B for government?
    The Government may not be keen to tackle these issues now, but a major report due out next week will say they might have to use PCAs in the future to reduce emissions.

    Plan B? The prospects for personal carbon trading, to be published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) this Friday, says existing measures on reducing individuals’ carbon impact, such as smart meters and the Low Carbon Buildings Programme should be given time to succeed.

    ‘But if those policies don’t deliver then the Government may have to reconsider personal carbon allowances,’ concludes the IPPR.

    The biggest danger with all this talk about PCAs, voluntary or compulsory, says WWF change strategist Dr Tom Crompton, is that it could take the focal point off government action.

    ‘Voluntary action is an important step but we have to be cautious that individual action doesn’t detract from what government still needs to do at Copenhagen and beyond.

    ‘As well as taking individual action we people to make more vocal demands on government by lobbying their MPs and protesting,’ he said

  • Elimination of food waste could lift 1 bn out of hunger , say campaigners/

     

    Tristram Stuart, author of a new book on food waste and a contributor to a special food waste issue of the Food Ethics Council’s magazine, said: “There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America. In a globalised food system, where we are all buying food in the same international market place, that means we’re taking food out of the mouths of the poor.”

    Stuart calculated that the hunger of 1.5bn people could be alleviated by eradicating the food wasted by British consumers and American retailers, food services and householders, including the arable crops such as wheat, maize and soy to produce the wasted meat and dairy products. He added that the production of wasted food also squanders resources, and said that the irrigation water used by farmers to grow wasted food would be enough for the equivalent domestic water needs of 9bn people.

    Food waste costs every household in the UK between £250 and £400 a year, figures that are likely to be updated this autumn when the government’s waste agency WRAP publishes new statistics. Producing and distributing the 6.7m tonnes of edible food that goes uneaten and into waste in the UK also accounts for 18m tonnes of CO2.

    But Tom MacMillan, executive director of the Food Ethics Council, warned that reducing food waste alone would not be enough to alleviate hunger, because efficiency gains in natural resources are routinely cancelled out by growth in consumption. “Food waste is harmful and unfair, and it is essential to stop food going into landfill. But the irony is that consumption growth and persistent inequalities look set to undo the good that cutting food waste does in reducing our overall use of natural resources and improving food security,” he said.

    MacMillan explained that the land and resources freed up by cutting food waste would likely be put to producing and consuming other things, such as growing more resource-intensive and expensive foods, bio-energy or textile crops. “Now is the moment all parties should be searching out ways to define prosperity that get away from runaway consumption. Until they succeed, chucking out less food won’t make our lifestyles more sustainable,” he said.

    In addition to cutting down on waste, experts suggested food waste that does end up in bins could be dealt with in more environmentally friendly ways.

    Paul Bettison, chair of the Local Government Association environment board, wrote: “Many councils are now giving residents a separate bin for their food waste. Leftovers are being turned into fertiliser, or gas to generate electricity. In some areas, in-vessel composting and anaerobic digestion are playing a key role in cutting council spending on landfill tax and reducing methane emissions.”

    But there are obstacles to generating energy and producing compost from food waste, he warned. “Lack of infrastructure is holding back the drive to make getting rid of food waste cheaper and greener. Councils do not want to collect leftovers without somewhere to send them, but nobody wants to build the places to send food waste until it is being collected.”

    Writing in the magazine, the retail industry defended sell-by and use-by dates, which were criticised as confusing by environment secretary Hilary Benn in June. Andrew Opie, director of food and consumer policy at the British Retail Consortium, wrote: “Certainly, some customers aren’t clear about what the different dates mean but getting rid of them won’t reduce food waste. Customer education will.”

    Last month, the government also criticised supermarket “bogof” offers (buy one get one free) that encourage shoppers to buy food they don’t need and which ends up unused in bins, adding to the UK’s food waste mountain.

    The renewed push for action on food waste comes comes as a National Zero Waste Week by online campaigners and bloggers gets under way, encouraging individuals to go one day without putting anything in their bins.

    Food waste tips from the web

    • Don’t fall for “three for two” deals on fresh food unless you’ll definitely use them – Susan Smillie, Guardian food blogger

    • Plan weekly meals and stick to shopping lists – Susan Smillie

    • Keep your fridge at 1-5 degrees to make chilled food last for longer – lovefoodhatewaste.com

    • Remove bad apples! One bad apple can spoil the barrel, so separate fruit which is ripening faster than the others – Womens’ Institute

    • Just chuck your leftover veggies into a stockpot to make a delicious stock for soups – Thomasina Miers, MasterChef winner and food writer

    • Use your eyes and nose as a guide and ignore the sell-by date – Guardian user “hrhpod” on the Word of Mouth blog

    • Watch your portion sizes and make sure plates are being completely cleared at mealtimes – Annette Richards on lovefoodhatewaste.com

    • Make sure vegetables are stored correctly, with root vegetables kept in cool dark locations rather than refrigerators – “leuan” on Word of Mouth

    • Leave most vegetables and fruit in the fridge until a day or two before you’re going to use them: you could extend their life by a fortnight – lovefoodhatewaste.com

    • Make DIY frozen ready meals by freezing excess food, such as mashed potato, into portions – Sarah Beeny

    Share your tips for avoiding food waste on our Green Living Blog and you could win a £60 composter

     

  • Sun shines in China thanks to feed-in tariff

    Sun shines in China thanks to feed-in tariff

    Wednesday 9 September 2009

    The world’s largest solar power station – a massive 2 gigawatts – will
    be built in China thanks to the Chinese adoption of a renewable energy
    feed-in tariff, it was announced overnight.

    The Rudd Government has repeatedly refused to embrace the feed-in tariff
    Private Member’s Bill introduced by Australian Greens Deputy Leader,
    Senator Christine Milne. The Government claims its policies are
    sufficient, even though all the evidence points to a stagnating
    renewable energy sector in Australia.

    “Australia is the sunny country and the clever country, but Mr Rudd and
    Senator Wong want us to remain coal country,” Senator Milne said.

    “The gross feed-in tariff, which guarantees a fair market for renewable
    energy, is delivering gigawatts of zero emissions power and hundreds of
    thousands of jobs around the world, but in Australia the Government
    prefers photo ops to real policy.”

    The massive 2 gigawatt solar power station announced overnight in China
    will be built by US company, First Solar. First Solar’s CEO, Mike Ahearn
    said:

    “The Chinese feed-in tariff will be critical to this project.

    “This type of forward-looking government policy is necessary to create a
    strong solar market and facilitate the construction of a project of this
    size, which in turn continues to drive the cost of solar electricity
    closer to `grid parity` – where it is competitive with traditional
    energy sources.”

    Senator Milne said “I couldn’t have put it better myself.

    “The Rudd Government recently cut the hugely successful Remote Regional
    Power Generation Program because it ran out of its allocated funding.
    Communities in remote parts of Australian keen to clean their air and
    water by getting off dirty diesel now can’t do so.

    “The Rudd Government’s Solar Flagships program is increasingly being
    seen by industry as a classic ‘Hollow Men’ idea without any policy
    backing. It has been delayed for 18 months and is attracting criticism
    for being unworkable from the very companies it is supposed to support.

    “Embracing the gross feed-in tariff for all renewable energy in
    Australia would go a long way to making sure we see massive solar
    developments coming to the sunny country instead of solar innovators
    going bust or going offshore.

    “Why won’t Mr Rudd and Senator Wong embrace the feed-in tariff?”

    Several States in Australia have introduced Claytons feed-in tariffs
    which support only net generation from small-scale rooftop solar power.
    It is critical that a feed-in tariff is national and supports all energy
    produced from all renewable energy technologies of all sizes.

    Tim Hollo
    Media Adviser
    Senator Christine Milne | Australian Greens Deputy Leader and Climate
    Change Spokesperson
    Suite SG-112 Parliament House, Canberra ACT | P: 02 6277 3588 | M: 0437
    587 562
    http://www.christinemilne.org.au/| www.GreensMPs.org.au
    <http://www.greensmps.org.au/>

    PROTECTING THE CLIMATE IS A JOB FOR EVERYONE

    Sign-up to GreensMPs <http://greensmps.org.au/stay-informed>
    GreensBlog <http://greensblog.org/>
    Twitter <http://twitter.com/GreensMPs>

    Please consider the environment before printing this email.

    —
    Another message from the Greens Media mailing list.

  • Food bowl faces stark future

    Prominent advisors such as Professor Mike Young are suggesting that parts of the landscape should be sacrificed to the desert so that other areas can be saved. People talk about moving Australia’s agriculture to the tropical north, essentially giving up and walking away from the Murray Darling Basin.
    What we are looking at is the mass failure of Australia’s food production. We could well become a nett importer of food.
    Two years ago the government faced the choice of evacuating Bendigo, Ballarat and Horsham or pumping water to those towns from the Murray Darling Basin. Now the Goldfields Superpipe speeds up the death of the Murray and Ballarat has been lifted of water restrictions.
    Two months ago, the premier, Nathan Rees, and the industry Minister Ian McDonald told journalists that coal is more important than food and farmers of NSW’s food bowl, the Liverpool Basin, were expendable. These statements will resonate historically with Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake.” The only problem is that “Let them eat coal” does not even have the benefit of naïve belief.
    In Victoria the options are using recycled water from Carrum, which is politically difficult; building a desalination plant, which takes some time; or taking the water from the Murray Darling. That plan came unstuck in parliament last week.

    Teasing out the truth

    “Give a farmer a megalitre of water and they will produce food, give a city a megalitre of water and they will produce sewage” said Greg Hoadley, a grazier on the western Darling Downs. It is true, farmers do recapture water that runs off their land and use it again. Compared to the cities, which use water once and then flush it out to sea, they consider themselves as very efficient users of water.
    Allen Gale, technical manager for Goulburn Water sees it differently. “Yes, farmers are productive but industry actually produces much more value for each megalitre of water they use and they do not lose water through evapotranspiration. Domestic users account for a very small portion of water use,” he said.
    In fact, leaks in urban water supplies use more water than domestic users in some Australian cities. In 2007, Perth significantly reduced the pressure in its water mains to reduce the quantity of water leaking out of the system. Some European cities have such leaky water supplies that they turn them off at night, relying on roof top water tanks to supply people in off-peak periods.
    Agriculture uses about 80 per cent of the water that is captured in Australia. Our agricultural use of water has increased significantly since water trading began. Water trading is the ability for a farmer to sell the water that he was allowed to take from the river, or irrigation system, to another user on another farm.
    As you can imagine, especially if you have seen the film Chinatown, it is a very complex and highly politicized issue. Many farmers express concerns that water trading allows large companies to buy lots of cheap land in remote areas and buy water rights from better quality land further upstream.
    Farmers are selling their water rights because times are tough and it is the one tradeable commodity that they have.
    Orchadist and cattle farmer in Shepparton, Gary Godwill, believes this is the beginning of the end for small farmers in Australia. He said that the pattern is identical to what happened with the farmers cooperative over the last two decades.
    “The cooperative was set up to provide marketing muscle for local farmers but when it became a public company it opened the doors to any grower and farmers began to sell their shares for extra cash,” he said.
    After the two largest fruit processors in Shepparton, Ardmona and SPC combined, the company was bought by Coca Cola Amatil. “Now there are truckloads of imported fruit coming in from China, sometimes in shinys (already canned), and the local farmers cannot compete. We are being driven off the land in the name of globalization,” Godwill said.

    What is this thing called modernisation?

    Deb Bertalli is a fourth generation grazier in Yea, Victoria about an hour out of Melbourne. She was arrested for obstructing the construction of a pipeline on her farm. “This farm has had permanent water for all of my lifetime and has been flooded two or three times every year. In the last ten years we have had no floods and for two years have not been able to cut hay. I wonder why I had children when I think about the future we face,” she told me.
    She has been a vocal opponent to a pipeline that will pump water out of the Murray Darling Basin to supply the city of Melbourne. “Melbourne has options, the river does not,” she said.
    The North South pipeline is being built as part of the Food Bowl Modernisation Project a project that will make irrigation in Victoria much more efficient.
    The basic concept of the Modernisation project is that better equipment will reduce the amount of water lost in the irrigation process and give the water authorities spare water to decide what to do with. The figures prepared for the Victorian government indicate that up to 225 billion litres of water can be saved each year through this process.
    Victorian water Minister Nick Holding has been busy since the government lost the vote to redirect the water to Melbourne pointing out that the plan is to direct one third of the saved water to Melbourne, return one third to the environment and give one third to the irrigators.
    There are a number of problems though.
    Everyone from the politicians, through the water authorities down to the local farmers accepts that changes to the irrigation system will drive many small farmers off the land. The difference is that some people think that this is the inevitable march of progress, others see it as the destruction of a way of life.
    From the river’s point of view, the supposed savings are meaningless.
    Victoria’s water minister Nick Holding has fallen for bureaucratic blather, according to lifelong water engineer turned river advocate, Steve Posselt.
    “I think he genuinely believes that the Food Bowl Modernisation project will save water but he needs to understand there are no savings. It is all funny numbers made up by water engineers to fund a multi-billion dollar project,” he said this morning.
    “The reason that farmers and greenies have united on this cause is because they are on the ground and have applied common sense,” he said.
    “You can’t just lose water. It goes into the ground or into the river, where it belongs. What the bureaucrats mean is that they have lost control of the water,” he said.
    Posselt has built irrigation control mechanisms and sewage treatment plants for 35 years. He has also traveled seven Australian Rivers from end to end in his unique, wheeled kayak.
    “It took me a long time, but I finally understand what a river system is,” he wrote in his recent book, Cry Me a River.
    Posselt was galavanised into action after paddling to the mouth of the Murray to find that it does not even reach the barrage built to prevent sea water flooding back into the fresh water Lake Alexandrina. “The river system is dying from the mouth up and now they are proposing to take another 750,000,000 litres out of it each year.”
    The Food Bowl Modernisation Project is predicated on figures provided to the state government that lining irrigation channels, replacing simple mechanical metering equipment and preventing water from flowing over the banks of irrigation canals (known as outfall) will save 225 billion litres of water every year. These are the figures referred to numerous times in the media today by Nick Holding, according to Mr Posselt.
    “From the river’s point of view, not one of those things produces more water,” he said. “Lining the channel stops the water leaking into the ground, remetering means the irrigation authorities keep a bit more water in the dam instead of giving it to the farmers, and preventing outfall simply stops the water going back into the system to be used by the next person down stream. None of this makes more water, it simply keeps it out of the environment and in the control of the irrigation authority. That does not help the river one bit”
    Posselt said that if the authority let all that water go back into the environment then we would be exactly where we are today, “well and truly stuffed.”
    “I hate to think where that puts us if any of the independent politicians who voted this down yesterday gets pressured into letting them go ahead,” he said.

    Future Options

    With the hard evidence from people on the ground that Australia’s food bowl is drying out and governments are indulging in knee jerk reactions that do not even take full account of the problem, people are desparate for more options.
    Farmers like Peter Andrews, featured prominently on Australian Story, or winner of NSW young farmer of the year, Graham Finlayson and many others have adopted practices that return permanent water to the landscape, eliminate the need for expensive external inputs and drought proof the property.
    “Farmers only listen to other farmers,” said Deb Bertalli. These farmers who are adapting to the reality of the landscape need to be promoted as heroes.
    People in cities need to understand that if they allow their government to pipe water from other areas, then those areas will dry out. Once the landscape changes, it is very difficult to get it back.
    In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond describes the demise of the Easter Islands. He writes that they cut down the forests and the water disappeared. Before they evacuated their only source of liquid was sugar cane that caught the mists coming from the sea. The corpses of the last generation of Easter Islanders all show major dental decay from this unsustainable diet.
    Australian’s may want to consider how we face the same crisis, before it is too late.
    Giovanni Ebono is an author, publisher and broadcaster. His Generator News can be heard on many community radio stations at 12.20pm on Tuesdays.

  • One dollar rent for homeless

    Soldier settlement schemes in the twenties and industry decentralisation in the seventies are two of the higher profile failures. Victoria successfully resettled thousands of mature long term unemployed in rural areas using housing grants that allowed welfare recipients to buy their own home. Unfortunately, their welfare payments support the local economy, rather than their industry.

    In the long term, Australians – like humans everywhere – drift to the cities where the services are. Australia is one of the most urbanised nations in the world, partly because we exploited the land so recently we have no rural tradition holding people to the landscape. We also fail to understand the land.

    This drift to the city is because our civilisation extracts resources from somewhere else to make cities comfortable and convenient. Fundamental as this principle is, the long term well being of civilisation, though, depends on reversing it.

    We have to find ways to localise our economies. We have to build small self-sufficient communities based on housing with a much smaller footprint than our current MacMansions. The members of those communities have to be productive so they are independent of both the global economy and state taxes.

    This project involves a pincer movement. On one hand, we need to ramp up the thirty year old movement to create ecologically-sound communities. We did not drop out, we simply saw the future earlier. On the other, we desperately need to help those stuck on the debt treadmill to unplug from the global slave-trade and adopt a sustainable lifestyle.

    One way to do that is to help the people who fall off the treadmill by giving them the dignity of their own roof and a productive role. If we do this at a local level we might just avoid the traps of grand schemes hatched by boffins in the cube farms of Canberra. Of course, we have to understand the land to make that possible.