Waking Up to Climate Change Action

Something extraordinary is happening.

After endless debate about whether climate change is occurring and whether we should think about doing something about it, the conversation has shifted.

After decades of refusal by the largest polluting countries to tackle their greenhouse gas emissions, the policy debate is moving forward.

After years in which climate change was relegated to a few pages in companies' CSR reports, businesses have changed their approach.

At every level of society, people are waking up to the fact that climate change is happening, and recognizing that doing nothing is a losing option for nations, businesses and communities.

The headlines tell the story, in no particular order:

• 19 June 2013 - Utility-scale PV costs in the U.S. drop to $3/Watt, and are expected to reach $0.36/Watt by 2017.  This compares to $2.20/Watt for onshore wind, $1.00 for combined-cycle natural gas, and $8/Watt for the coal-fired carbon capture and storage plant under construction in Mississippi.
• 19 September 2013 - Russia urges discussion of geoengineering in upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
• 11 September 2013 - UK Astronomer Royal calls for research into geoengineering options as worry grows about the pace of carbon reductions.
• 15 September 2013 - the UK's Liberal Democrat party makes a controversial vote in favor of nuclear power to fight climate change.
• 20 September 2013 - Many electric utilities have looked to carbon capture and storage as a reason to keep building fossil fueled power plants in a carbon-constrained world.  Now that the Obama Administration is rolling out rules limiting emissions, lobbyists are changing their tune.
• 12 September 2013 - Overall Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse emissions have fallen 14% since 2009 at the 500 largest listed companies, even as performance lags for the most energy-intensive firms, according to the CDP.  Importantly, more and more companies include a discussion of climate change risks and opportunities in their annual investor report, instead of in their less-read CSR reports.
• And then there's fracking.

A few themes jump out from these, and many other headlines in the news.

First, the economics of clean energy increasingly make for unlikely bedfellows.  Utilities are arguing against CCS while supposedly "green" political parties are voting in favor of nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing.

Second, serious and respected thinkers are beginning to advocate increasingly desperate measures to address climate change - up to and including radical geoengineering approaches.

Third, the business world is increasingly split on their approach, with one influential group racing ahead to capture the opportunities presented by a lower-carbon economy.

There is an influential, large and ever-growing group of people and organizations that "get it" - they know climate change is a fact of life and are thinking seriously about how to respond.  This is an extraordinary turn of events, and one that will lead to major shifts in how we do business in future.

The message from this steady drumbeat of news headlines is clear.  The need to reduce emissions and tackle climate change is a fact of life, now, not for some point in the hazy future.  Those businesses that have yet to build a robust climate change response into their corporate strategy are missing an opportunity to reduce risk and to build business value.

The Shale Gas Panacea (Part 2) - Does the UK have '43 Years of Gas'?

In a recent blog post, I provided a canned summary of the reasons shale gas has become such a burning issue.  That previous article covered issues surrounding potential environmental impacts, the relative attractiveness of shale gas compared to coal, and the potential for fugitive methane emissions.

In this post, I want to explore what exploitation of shale gas might imply for our efforts to transition to a low-carbon economy.

As a thought experiment, if we were to suddenly replace all the UK's coal consumption with natural gas, we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 42 million tonnes, a saving of nearly 10% from the national footprint total of 458 million tonnes CO2e.

Leaving aside the potential environmental impact of extracting this much shale gas, could we do it?  One would think so, judging from breathless headlines like this one in the UK from The Times:

Let's dig into that "43 years" statistic.

The Times article summarizes the findings from a British Geological Survey (BGS) report on the Bowland-Hodder Shale Formation in northern England.  According to the BGS, the mid-range estimate for the total gas in place in the Bowland Shale Formation is 1,329 trillion cubic feet (37.6 trillion cubic meters).  However, not all of that gas will be recoverable at a reasonable price using foreseeable technology.  A reasonable guess might be that 10% will be recoverable - call it 130 trillion cubic feet.

2012 gas consumption in the UK was approximately 3 trillion cubic feet - a figure that has actually declined slightly since 2000, as utilities burn more coal to produce power.

Divide the recoverable gas estimates (130 tcf) by current consumption (3 tcf/year) and you get 43 years. Not exactly cutting edge analysis, but easy to explain.

But is this number useful for anything besides headlines?

The first assumption we might question is that gas consumption will remain constant for the next four decades.  In the U.S., an influx of cheap gas has encouraged utilities to reduce coal consumption and shelve plans for new coal-fired generation; gas consumption increased by one-third in less than a decade.  If, as we expect, shale gas in the UK is cheaper than conventional gas supplies, gas consumption will rise to displace at least some of the UK's coal-fired power plants.  If gas were to completely replace coal and energy consumption otherwise stays flat, natural gas use could rise by nearly 50%, as indicated in the EIA chart below:

If, as expected, electric vehicles make significant gains over the next few decades, then natural gas use could rise still further as gas-fired electricity displaces petroleum.  Even this simple analysis shows that natural gas use could rise dramatically - even if overall UK energy demand does not increase.

However, the Office of National Statistics expects the country's population to rise 30% over the next four decades. Without significant efforts to improve reduce energy demand and shift to renewable energy sources, this projected population increase makes the assumption of constant gas demand even more untenable.

At this point in the analysis, we are piling guesses on top of guesses.  Coming back to our original question, yes, we could completely displace UK coal consumption and drive significant emission reductions, but not for as long as the headlines would have you believe.

And what happens once we've used up that shale gas bounty? Either we lurch back to a heavy dependence on coal, causing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution to skyrocket, or we switch to lower carbon sources of power like PV, wind, wave, and geothermal - or nuclear.

Interestingly, it would likely take 15-20 years to fully build out renewables on a truly massive scale, along with the electricity transmission and smart grid infrastructure required to make best use of decentralized and intermittent renewable resources. Likewise, it would probably take 20-30 years for nuclear power to stage a significant comeback in the United Kingdom. Whether we employ renewables, nuclear or both is an important debate, but on for another day.

The shale gas revolution, should we choose to exploit it, has the potential to buy us some time.  If we can resolve the far-from-trivial environmental and other challenges facing hydraulic fracturing, we can achieve significant greenhouse gas emission reductions today, even as we build a longer-term low-carbon energy infrastructure for tomorrow.

Carbon Capture and Storage: What's the Big Deal?

The U.S. Department of Energy has released the North American Carbon Storage Atlas (NACAS).  The atlas is a compendium of geologic sites across Canada, the United States and Mexico where it is theoretically possible to store CO2 produced from stationary sources like power plants, cement factories and the like.

The idea is that this atlas would be used to find and evaluate carbon storage sites close to big greenhouse gas emitters across the continent.  This, in turn, would help to improve the economics of carbon capture and storage (CCS) by reducing the logistics costs associated with transporting millions or billions of tonnes of liquified CO2 long distances.

Carbon capture and storage is one of a number of potential tools we can wield in the fight against climate change.  The technology has many variants, but the basic approach is to use chemical or mechanical systems to capture CO2 from exhaust gase. Another approach is to chemically remove and capture the CO2 from the fuel before it is burned. In either case, the CO2 is then liquified under pressure, transported to a geologic storage site, and injected into underground basins, where it intended to remain for hundreds of years.  After all, CO2 from burning fossil fuels only contributes to global warming if the gas is released to the atmosphere.

NACAS researchers estimate a potential storage capacity of 136 billion tonnes of CO2 in oil and gas fields (where CO2 injection can also release the last remaining oil, which ironically will release more CO2 when burned); 65 billion tonnes in coal fields; and 1.7trillion tonnes in saline reservoirs.

How does that compare to current emissions?  In 2010 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were approximately 6 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent, with 2.25 billion tonnes from electric power plants. So there is enough potential storage in oil, gas and coal fields to storage 88 years of CO2 from power plants, at today's rates of emissions.  If coal consumption increased as a result of population growth, economic activity or the lack of viable alternatives, this storage potential would not go as far.  And while saline reservoirs have the potential to hold several centuries' worth of CO2, appreciable injection rates can only be achieved at present with hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking"), a process that has caused tremendous concern when used to extract shale gas.

The North American Carbon Storage Atlas therefore serves a useful role in highlighting the theoretical potential of CCS in the fight against climate change.  However, it is still not clear whether CCS can play a practical role.  One rule of thumb is that commercial-scale CCS would consume approximately 20% of a power plant's output, which means that each unit of electricity sold to end users would be that much more expensive.  That figure does not include the cost to transport the liquid CO2 to the injection site and pump it into a storage reservoir 3 kilometers deep.  These cost considerations raise doubts about the potential of CCS at a time when wind and other clean energy technologies are falling rapidly in cost, and with governments unable or unwilling to invest billions in pilot schemes to perfect the technology.

The debate over CCS has now shifted to the U.N. Clean Development Mechanism, where proponents are exploring the use of carbon credits sales to help overcome the financial and technical barriers to implementation. Work continues on this front, with the CDM in its CMP 7 report in Durban agreeing to explore ways to develop acceptable rules governing long-term liability, site safety, permanence of the emission reductions, and a host of other issues.

I generally advocate a team approach to carbon reduction, where we pursue multiple emission reduction measures at the same time.  However, CCS is potentially so big that, despite its challenges it bears watching closely.  Stay tuned.

Low-Carbon Energy: Not Just for Treehuggers

Not so long ago, few organisations would have invested in renewable energy systems to power their operations.  Those that did, like HSBC or Google, did so for largely for publc relations or CSR purposes, or because senior managers were also committed environmentalists.  Rarely was it possible to make a more traditional business case for such investments.

How times have changed.

As the New York Times reports, the U.S. military, not known as a bastion for tree-huggers, has embraced renewable energy on its largest bases.  Fort Bliss, the largest Army base in America, is as large as a small state, and recently completed a $1 million investment in solar photovoltaics. Next year will likely see the start of construction on a new 20 MW solar farm, enough to power an entire town. This system is part of a longer term plan that includes wind turbines, heat pumps, and waste-to-energy systems.  All of these, together with aggressive energy efficiency measures, are intended to help the base achieve "net zero" energy consumption, as well as net zero water and waste, by 2018.  It shares this goal with Fort Carson in Colorado, but Fort Bliss faces a special challenge, with the number of troops stationed at the base expected to triple by 2015.

The U.S. Army is not investing millions into renewable energy for the corporate social responsibility benefit.  It is not doing so for stakeholder engagement. Rather, these technologies simply make financial and operational sense.  Renewables have higher up-front costs than fossil fuels, but have considerably lower running costs.  With fuel prices likely to continue rising into the future even as budgets shrink, renewables represent a long-term investment in financial cost management by the military.  What is more, using renewable energy on a widespread basis on the country's largest bases gives soldiers and staff operational experience using these technologies.  Military planners expect renewables to become more useful in field deployments in future, so the more comfortable soldiers are using them before they head overseas, the better.

The military is not alone in their newfound appreciation of renewable energy. As the cost of PV panels has fallen, the justifications for going green continue to multiply.  Renewable energy systems not only help to achieve CSR and staff engagement goals, but they can also ensure reliability of supply and provide long term price stability to help the finance director sleep at night.

Times have changed.  The greener option is increasingly the option that makes the most business sense.  Just ask the U.S. military.

New Source Performance Standards: The Start of U.S. Climate Change Regulation?

Back in 2007, the United States Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act.  That ruling gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to issue an "endangerment finding" if the agency determined that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and the environment.

This was a particularly tricky issue, because the health and environmental impacts from increased greenhouse gas concentrations are indirect, as opposed to pollutants like ozone, which directly harm living organisms or sulfur dioxide, which acidifies lakes and streams.  Nevertheless, in 2009 the EPA issued just such an "endangerment finding", opening the door for direct regulation should Congress fail to pass legislation reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, five years after the original Supreme Court ruling, the EPA is finally preparing to exercise its authority to regulate emissions from power plants.  The agency is expected today to issue New Source Performance Standards that limit carbon dioxide emissions from newly constructed power stations to 1,000 pounds per megawatt-hour of generation.  For those more accustomed to metric units, that's about 0.45 tonnes CO2/MWh. A combined cycle natural gas power station can have emissions below 0.40 tonnes CO2/MWh and so is not likely to be affected by this regulation.

Other fossil fuels will face greater challenges.  If the rule stands, it means no new traditional coal-fired power plants will be built in the United States.  A typical coal-fired power station releases can release 0.90 tonnes CO2/MWh, or more.  To operate within the New Source Performance Standards, such a plant would have to generate half its power with renewable biomass fuels (physically possible for no more than a handful of power stations).  Otherwise they would need to employ carbon capture and storage (CCS) - a technology that may yet take decades to beome commercially viable - to bury the CO2 deep underground.

The EPA's New Source Performance Standards would grandfather existing power stations, and allow them to keep operating and undergo  retrofitted even if they exceed the emissions thresholds.  However, they still serve a useful purpose by setting a timeline for the gradual phaseout of these plants.  A power station can operate for 50 years or more, so the investment decisions we make now lock us into a decades-long emissions path.

When it comes to climate change, we're already at the bottom of a deep hole.  The EPA's new ruling is a signal to power plant operators that we need to stop digging.

Renewables and Nuclear: Different Signals from Germany and Britain

On 11 March, one year on from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan, Germany has reaffirmed its decision to abandon nuclear power.  The Germans shut down their eight oldest reactors shortly after the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and reactor core breach, and pledged to shut the remaining reactors by 2022.

In the short term, this has meant an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power stations in Germany and neighboring countries.  Over the longer term, however, Germany's leaders want to replace the country's nuclear output with renewables.  Critics doubt the nation's electric grid can transport power from new renewable energy generators to power-hungry factories hundreds of miles away, but the initiative has the support of 76% of the public and Chancellor Angela Merkel has pledged to redouble her government's efforts.

The very next day, the Guardian newspaper reported that the British government wants to reduce the relative priority given to renewables over nuclear.  The Guardian reports that the UK has proposed to the European commission that explicit renewable energy targets for 2030 be dropped in favour of targets for "low carbon power".  This label would allow countries to choose whether they wish to reach climate change - related power targets with renewables, nuclear power, carbon capture and storage or a combination of the three.  While this change doesn't necessarily mean the British government would back away from its support of renewables, it leaves the door open for such a move.  In fact, this policy pressure would not make sense otherwise.

Just the possibility could have a chilling effect on investment in renewables in the UK.  Most renewable energy technologies are characterised by high capital costs and low operational costs.  The cost of renewables-based electricity can be cost-competitive or even superior to f that from ossil fuels, but only when those up-front costs and long-term savings are averaged over many years.  Without certainty that government will maintain its support for years or decades, investors are less likely to provide the millions, or even billions of pounds required to bring renewables to market on a large scale.

Nuclear power generates significantly lower carbon emissions than fossil fuel fired power stations and - despite Fukushima - it is a proven technology with a global track record.  However, it is by no means certain that the government will be able to overcome long-term opposition to nuclear power and nuclear waste in time to ensure that nuclear can play a significant role in Britain's lower-carbon future.

It would be unfortunate if government policy shifts damaged commercial support for renewables without providing sufficiently for a viable alternative.

Making Renewables Work: Energy Density

Most discussions about renewable energy are rather abstract.  Analysts talk about increasing the share of renewables-based electricity generation from 3% to 15% of the national total, or installing a million solar roofs.  The renewable energy industry, meanwhile, talks about product specs: 250-Watt solar panels and 750 kW wind turbines.

But what does that mean for the average household or business user?  How can we make the potential of renewable energy accessible to the average person?

Energy density provides one useful way to think about the contribution that renewables can make.  Put simply, every power generation technology requires a certain amount of land (or ocean) area, whether it is a wind farm, solar PV panel, hydropower plant or coal-fired power station.  Dividing annual energy production by that land area gives us a rough measure of energy density, measured in kWh per square meter per year.

According to an analysis performed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on 172 large windpower projects, average power density on these windfarms averaged 3 megawatts per square kilometer, including the area around the turbines, access roads, and the like.  Because wind is intermittent, annual energy output averages only around 30% of the theoretical maximum.  This means these 172 wind farms had an average energy density of approximately 8 kWh/m2 per year.

In the UK, each square meter of ground receives around 1,000 kWh of solar energy per year.  Solar PV panels convert this to electricity with an efficiency of around 10%, giving an energy density of 100 kWh/m2 per year.

The old Sizewell A nuclear reactor in the UK, by contrast, comprises a 99 hectare (990,000 square meter) estate, and had a rated power output of 427 MW.  With a 90% annual availability and a electricity conversion efficiency of 35%, this boils down to an energy density of a bit more than 1,000 kWh/m2 per year.

To summarize:

• Large wind: approx. 8 kWh/m2 per year
• Solar PV: approx 100 kWh/m2 per year
• Nuclear: approx 1,000 kWh/m2 per year

One of the things energy density tells us, then, is that we need more than ten times the land area to generate the same amount of energy each year from wind than from solar power, and we need ten times the land area to generate the same amount of electricity from solar than from nuclear power.  Nuclear power is significantly more energy dense than renewables.

That isn't the whole story, of course.  The land area used for wind farms isn't completely consumed by the turbines.  Wind turbines may be sited on farmland, or even in the open ocean and the area around them can continue to be used - by cows, fish, and the like.  Similarly, the "land" consumed by PV panels actually may be the roof of a house or office building - not places where one would typically site a nuclear power plant and its supporting infrastructure!

Looking at the consumption side helps to make energy density an even more useful tool for understanding the potential contribution renewables can make.

According to the Energy Saving Trust, electricity consumption in UK households averages 3,300 kWh per year.  (Gas consumption averages 20,500 kWh, but we'll focus on electricity for now.)  With 76 m2 of useable floor area in the average house, this gives us 43 kWh/m2 per year of electricity consumption. UK offices average between 85 and 350 kWh/m2 per year, depending on age and layout.

Of course, we don't consume electricity across every square meter of our homes and offices.  Most of that is used by a handful of power-hungry appliances.  A highly efficient A+ rated fridge-freezer, for example, typically consumes 292 kWh of electricity per year, and takes up 0.25 m2 of floor space - or about 10% of a household's energy consumption on only 0.3% of its floor space.  This gives an energy density of consumption of 973 kWh/m2 per year - almost as high as the production energy density from that old nuclear power station!

These types of calculations help us understand how much space we need to produce and consume electricity in different ways.  It is clear that a refrigerator-sized solar panel will not power a refrigerator over the course of a year, but a house-sized solar array might provide enough electricity to power a house with a refrigerator (assuming it were a one-storey house, the array was properly oriented and one had a battery big enough to store the electricity for use when the sun was not shining).  The rule of thumb in the UK is that you can generate about half your electricity with solar panels on the south-facing half of your roof, which sounds about right for a typical two-storey house.

And under the proper conditions, solar PV just might be enough to power an entire office building, despite the higher energy consumption per square meter. The image below is an artist's conception of Seattle's Bullit Center, an office building that is planned to be energy self-sufficient:

Pretty nifty, isn't it?  As you can see, the solar panels cover significantly more area than the building itself.  From our energy density calculations above, this looks about right.  The building is multi-storey, but designed to be highly energy efficient, so overall electricity consumption might be equivalent to a building of only one or two storeys.  The panels cover a footprint approximately twice that of the building, so from even this initial check we can determine that this scheme might just work.

Making the most of renewable energy, then, is a two-way street.  We can continue to push for technical advances that improve the energy density of power generation systems, through more efficient wind turbine blades, advances in solar cell manufacture, more careful siting to improve the amount of wind or sunlight we can capture and more.

We can also get a better balance between production and consumption by reducing the energy density of our homes, offices and appliances.  In some cases that means redesigning how we use these items so that they require less energy in the first place: bigger windows to reduce lighting bills, deciduous trees on the south facing side of buildings to allow more of the winter sun to strike the building, etc.  In other cases it means increasing efficiency by insulating buildings, switching to less power-hungry appliances, and optimizing their use.

At Carbon Clear, we support the development of ambitious emission reduction targets to combat climate change.  As the discussion above shows, the energy density of cleaner renewable energy sources is sufficient to meet many end users' needs.  Their potential is likely to grow as we continue to pursue energy technology improvements and we drive further efficiency gains where we live, work and play.

Carbon Clarity

If you do an internet search for the phrase "carbon management", you will find a range of companies offering their services.  Rather worryingly, a number of these appear to have some confusion as what carbon management really is.  For example, one company seems to suggest it is basically a quick carbon footprint measurement followed by carbon offsetting.  Another seems to think carbon management is basically energy management with an emissions coefficient thrown in to get an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

Climate change is one of the most important issues facing the planet, so the more people engaged in carbon management the better - so long as they're doing it right.  Doing it wrong risks wasting time, energy, and money, and potentially delaying the transition to a low-carbon economy.

In this post, we'll discuss what carbon management is, what it isn't and why that difference is so important.

At Carbon Clear, carbon management is all about clarity. Carbon clarity means having the right information and using that information to make good decisions.

More specifically, we view carbon management as a systematic process to identify and address the risks and opportunities presented by climate change.

The basics of our approach are straightforward enough.  As they work through the process, clients who engage our services learn:

• What is my climate change exposure?
• How will my business be affected by climate change?
• How can my business adapt to gain commercial advantage?
• Will my processes need to change in a low-carbon world?
• Are we prepared for these changes?
• What can I do now? What do I need to do?
• What do my stakeholders expect and how can I address them?
• How do I measure success?

So far, so good - nothing that should surprise anyone who has worked with us before.

But there's a difference between saying and doing.  There are a lot of tools out there and a lot of specialist providers who have a hammer in search of a nail.  It's the first part of the definition that gives our approach to carbon management its clarity and power.

Note in particular the use of the phrase "systematic process".  At Carbon Clear we find that it is often counter-productive to pre-judge where a company's greatest exposure to climate change risks and opportunities will lie.  Perhaps the greatest risk is their exposure to energy prices that incorporate a rising cost of carbon.  Perhaps the risk lies in supply chain disruptions caused by increasingly severe weather.  Perhaps the risk is reputational, as the news media, customers and investors punish climate laggards and reward pioneers.

Limited tools can result in limited thinking.  Many larger companies already employ half-hourly energy meters and legislation like the UK's CRC Scheme means the number of meters in use is growing.  Companies can therefore deploy software that enables them to track energy consumption and engage in long term energy planning and targeting. Despite their power, however, these tools are not enough. As we have pointed out before, carbon management involves people throughout the company, from energy managers (the natural users of these software tools), to the HR director, the chief financial officer, and the communications manager. Each of these players will process information in a different way and have a different definition of a successful outcome.  At best, this diversity makes an energy-focused software tool a difficult sell.  At worst, it potentially leaves a company blind to all the other greenhouse gas emission sources in their business and to the other ways that climate change can affect them.

Similarly, unless we understand the resources and constraints available to the company, it may be premature to specify in advance the actions they should take to tackle those risks and opportunities.  Just as a physician will discuss all the options before sending a patient off to surgery, a carbon management professional should help a company understand the choices and trade-offs available to them.  The universe of possibilities is vast: should they invest in energy efficiency, renewable energy, demand management, supply chain optimisation, fuel switching, improved transport management, employee and customer engagement, corporate restructuring, new product development, etc, etc...? The answer, of course, is "it depends".

And within each of these categories lies a potentially bewildering number of specific approaches.  Within the category of energy efficiency should the focus be on improved metering, lights, motors, insulation, load management, user behaviour or some other solution? What's the trade-off between investing to optimise existing equipment and undertaking a retrofit before the current equipment has reached the end of its useful life?  And who decides?

Carbon clarity means using clear, systematic thinking to cut through these complex variables to find the right carbon management solutions for your company.  As the examples above illustrate, carbon management isn't a single tool.  It isn't just a carbon footprint, and it isn't a gadget you can buy.  And while carbon credits may play a role, carbon management isn't just (or even mainly) about carbon offsets.

At Carbon Clear, we're your carbon management partner.  We provide carbon clarity to help you change climate change from a risk to an opportunity. And we help you choose the tools that will translate those opportunities into results.

(Carbon Clear homepage)

Going Local with 'Home-Grown' Power

This article was originally published on 20 September 2010, in issue 104 of the IEMA journal 'the environmentalist'.


A shift from large-scale energy production overseas to smaller local energy supply and distribution is underway in the UK and US.  In the UK, one of the main drivers for this change has been the establishment of a set of five-year national ‘carbon budgets’ intended to achieve a 34 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

In the US, meanwhile, the overarching driver has been a move towards more secure domestic energy sources, which tend to have more immediate financial benefits and fewer associated environmental and economic risks than imported fossil fuels.

Despite these differing rationales, households, businesses and communities adopting local renewables stand to  reap similar types of benefits:

• reduced fossil fuel consumption and therefore reduced dependence on imported resources;
• improved security of supply and consequently less vulnerability to price shocks;
• more local job creation than with large-scale power plants;
• cleaner energy from renewable sources and less environmental damage, and in particular a reduced carbon footprint; and
• financial benefits to households, companies and other adopters due to reduced electricity bills, government subsidies and feed-in tariffs.

Tipping point
More people are realising that the costs and benefits of renewable energy are not only financial. Indeed, recent events have highlighted the increasing costs of our continued reliance on non-renewable fossil fuels.

This past summer, extreme weather events have occurred across the planet. Temperatures in Moscow reached 40 degrees Celsius for the first time, resulting in thousands dead and widespread forest fires. The heatwave decimated wheat crops and sent global cereal prices soaring. Meanwhile, the Indus River reached its highest level in 110 years causing catastrophic flooding in Pakistan. The misery in Pakistan coincides with major flooding in China, North Korea, Niger, Sudan, Ethiopia and Guatemala.

While no single event can be directly attributed to climate, their occurrence is consistent with the predicted impacts of global warming. The World Bank estimates that developing countries will need between US $70-$100 billion each year to adapt to anticipated climate change impacts on agriculture, infrastructure and human health between now and 2050. When coupled with increasing international competition for limited global petroleum and gas reserves, it becomes abundantly clear that the model for economic development based on fossil fuel consumption is unsustainable.

Betting on renewables price stability
One of the main obstacles to increased use of renewables – high upfront costs despite low to zero cost for the fuel – is increasingly one of the technology’s main attractions. The economics of oil – uncertain and unpredictable – are making renewables a safer bet for many end users. OPEC spot prices spiked in July 2008 at $137.18 per barrel before plunging to $35.48 in January 2009, only to start creeping up to $76.91 by December 2009. This extreme volatility makes it difficult for households, companies and governments to set long-term budgets, and increases financial uncertainty in the midst of a severe economic downturn. For those who can afford the initial investment, renewables can offer the reassurance of long-term price stability needed to plan for the future.

Not only climate change, oil prices and the prospect of dwindling supplies dampened enthusiasm for fossil fuels, but also, in recent months, more immediate environmental and safety risks. The recent BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill was splashed across front pages around the world. This oil spill, surpassing the Exxon Valdez as the worst in US history, ensured increased attention to spills from the coast of Indonesia to the Niger Delta. This negative media attention has helped spur the search for local energy alternatives.

Local power generation – then and now
In the past, electricity generation at the household or building level has generally meant running a diesel or petrol (gasoline) generator. These generators tend to be noisy, polluting, and more expensive than simply buying electricity from an electric utility. As a result, they tend to be kept on standby and used only in emergencies. The recent growth in local generation comes from renewable energy technologies – especially wind, geothermal, biomass, solar thermal and solar photovoltaic (PV).

While small petrol and diesel generators tended to produce more pollution per unit of electricity than utility power plants, most renewable technologies are significantly cleaner, producing (with the exception of biomass) practically zero ambient air pollution at source.

Renewables and regional recovery
Local clean energy is seen as potential source of recovery from the current economic recession. Rebuilding the economy by creating a new energy system is widely predicted to create more jobs. A 2009 report found that renewable energy investments are estimated to generate roughly three times more jobs than an equivalent amount of money spent on fossil fuels.(2)

As Greg Barker, UK Climate Change Minister, commented last month, “Our homes, businesses and communities can become dynamic players in the new energy economy by producing their own green electricity and selling it back into the national grid. New feed-in tariffs – a system of financial incentives to encourage households and communities to produce their own electricity – are at the heart of our efforts to ‘green’ Britain and empower consumers and to create a more local, decentralised energy system.”(3)

While job creation tends to be a lagging economic indicator, the British and American governments have made financial incentives available directly to UK households, companies and other renewable energy adopters  through government subsidies and feed-in tariffs. In the UK, the feed-in-tariff system introduced in April 2010  guarantees a payment of up to £0.42 per kilowatt-hour for renewably generated electricity. A PV installation for a moderately-sized household in London might cost £15,000. Thanks to reduced utility bills and payments from the government feed-in tariff, this investment would produce over the next 20 years a guaranteed annualised return of approximately nine per cent. Few other investments available to households in this economic climate could do as well. Lured by the feed-in-tariff, a number of firms are now offering to provide and install solar panels for free; the firm claims the feed-in-tariff and the property occupant benefits from a lower electricity bill. And as electricity prices are predicted to rise in the near future, the financial benefits only increase.

Planning for renewables
While world leaders from India and China to the US have trumpeted the macroeconomic benefits of renewables, local issues regarding land-use planning can still be a concern. NIMBYism has not gone away, and residents continue to protest against large wind farms ‘in their backyards’. However, the smaller scale and partnership approach employed by local renewables projects can increase acceptance. Moreover, local companies (rather than distant multinationals) are more likely to get community buy-in with ‘home-grown’ and power projects that provide energy at the local level.

“Planning is the big unknown in renewable,” says Ryan Law, founder of Geothermal Engineering Ltd (GEL). “Communities object to mega-projects which supply the whole country, but if people realise they can have a direct stake in local schemes I think this is the key to it. Geothermal is Cornwall’s resource, not a project dumped on the county from outside,” said Law.(4)  After two years of planning with Cornwall County Council, GEL has been granted planning permission to develop the UK’s first commercial geothermal power plant at its Redruth site.

The challenge
The extent to which governments can continue to prop up their economies with large renewable energy  investments remains to be seen. The cost to governments will start to add up quickly as more and more companies and households take advantage of generous tax credits and feed-in tariffs. Most governments have anticipated this issue by gradually reducing the amount the feed-in-tariffs will pay to new adopters in subsequent years.

There are also technical challenges as large numbers of small generators are linked to the grid of electric utilities. While the overall generation from baseline power plants may go down as local power generation rises, utilities will have less control over when and how much electricity will be available, necessitating an investment in additional back-up generation capacity from more expensive power plants. On the positive side, a technical fault or downed power line in one location will not necessarily plunge an entire region into darkness. The more technologically and geographically diverse the local generation systems in place, the less the utilities should need to bring their back-up systems online.

On balance, the benefits appear to outweigh the challenges. There are synergies across the various benefits that extend from the local to the national level via job creation, diversification, and financial savings which could lead to greater spending and investment in the local economies instead of purchasing imported fossil fuels. As we noted in a previous 'Energy and Business' article (‘From credit crisis to carbon crisis’, Issue 68), governments were quick to step in when the global financial system was on the brink of meltdown.

All in all, these investments in renewables should lead to greater energy security and reduced climate change risks in an uncertain world. Given these benefits, local renewables need more – not less – support.

Suzy Hodgson AIEMA is a Principal Consultant and Jamal Gore MIEMA, CEnv is Managing Director at carbon management company Carbon Clear Limited.

In BOB We Trust

One of the most common criticisms of renewable energy sources is that their electricity is intermittent.  Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels only produce electricity when the sun is shining, and wind turbines will only generate power when the wind is blowing at the right speeds - not too gently, and not too hard. This intermittency makes it more difficult for households, companies or electric utilities to precisely match supply and demand when using most renewable energy sources.

If we want to use electricity from renewables at other times, we need storage.  I've written in the past about different storage technologies, including "virtual storage on the electric grid".  It seems a town in Texas has taken things more literally.

Electric Transmission Texas recently announced completion of a 4 MW sodium-sulfur battery in Presidio, Texas.  The battery has been nicknamed "BOB" - short for "Big Old Battery" - by local residents.  And big it is.  BOB is the largest battery of its kind in the United States and the first in Texas.  It is designed to reinforce the local electricity supply while a replacement for the existing 60-year old long-distance transmission line is constructed between now and 2012.  In the event of a power outage, BOB can supply the city with continuous power for up to eight hours, until grid power is restored.

At a capital cost of around $25 million, BOB certainly isn't cheap, but neither is the $44 million cost of connecting Presidio to the regional electricity grid 60 miles away.  For that cost, the city could build around 10 MW of solar power generation, or around 20-30 MW of wind power - assuming local wind conditions were favourable.

ETT and the city of Presidio are clearly planning for the future.  BOB has a planned opertaional lifetime of 15 years, but ETT expects the upgraded transmission line to be complete by 2012.  After that date, BOB will be available as a facility for other utilities that need to store electricity (presumably from intermittent renewables) to match consumer demand.  Depending on the rates they charge for this service, BOB's owners could generate handsome profits from their giant battery system.

BOB is an example of the technological innovation that is making low-carbon renewable energy a realistic option for providing reliable power around the world.  At Carbon Clear, we're working to support innovations in the supply of sustainable energy.  We're eager for you to join us.

(Carbon Clear website)

"Wasting" Energy

Is there a downside to saving energy?

The New York Times reports that transport authorities in several U.S. cities are concerned about the safety implications of their rapid switch to low-energy traffic lights. These traffic lights, which uses LEDs instead of incandescent bulbs, consume only a fraction of the electricity of traditional lights. Incandescents, after all, lose about 90% of their energy as heat. When it comes to reducing emissions from the hundreds of thousands of traffic lights around the country, the switch to LEDs is good news.

But what happens when it snows? When snow falls on a traditional traffic light, the heat from the bulbs can usually melt the snow, keeping the light visible. LEDs, by contrast, are much cooler and much less snow melts away. As the Times reports, snow-covered LEDs can pose a safety hazard - last April, one person died and four others were injured when a pickup truck ran through a snow-obstructed LED traffic light and struck another vehicle.

Thousands of miles away in Nepal, households are confronting a related issue. Their new, energy efficient stoves waste less heat. This means householders can cook with less fuel and reduce costs and labour burdens. In the winter, however, their houses can get colder than normal - all that "waste" heat had been keeping the room warm.

There are many other examples where "waste" energy from appliances and equipment actually serves a useful purpose. Without careful planning, the more efficient alternative may neglect this service.

This does not mean that we shouldn't continue implementing energy efficiency programmes and cutting carbon wherever possible. However, it does highlight the importance of careful planning to anticipate these potential trade-offs and taking action to reduce their severity. This is already happening with LED traffic lights. Rather than reverting to incandescents, officials realised that the waste energy only provided an extra snow-clearing service for a handful of days each year, and that there were other alternatives available:

"Transportation officials have been dispatching workers with brooms to clear the lenses[...]They are also experimenting with a solution that is less labor-intensive and more permanent, outfitting some of the lenses with sloping snow shields to make it harder for snow to stick."

The transition to a low-carbon economy means we have to do things differently. Careful planning can help ensure a smooth shift and deliver maximum benefit.

(Carbon Clear website)

Breathing Room

Most of the news that comes to us from the climate change front lines is alarming. Over the last few years greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures have continued their upward trend. Emissions have risen so much over the past decade that what used to be considered a worst-case scenario is now our most probable future.

But the future is not cast in stone - at least not yet. As reported in the Financial Times, the International Energy Administration (IEA) has found that global CO2 emissions had fallen faster in the past year than any year over the past four decades.

In one sense, the IEA report is a good-news-bad news-story. CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for a hundred years or more, so lower emissions mean a lower overall concentration of greenhouse gases. And that means less warming in the future. The bad news is that much of the reduction we are seeing is due to economic pain.

Emissions fall when factories reduce output, businesses go bankrupt and workers lose their jobs. As we noted in a blog post several months ago, the last thing we want to do is reinforce the perception that lower CO2 emisisons means financial misery. It is this perception that makes it so hard for governments to negotiate a climate change treaty that will help us achieve the ambitious global cuts that are needed to forestall dangerous warming in the future. The recent reductions are not nearly enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change, so a global agreement remains the order of the day.

There has, however, been another effect from the economic recession. Not only have existing factories and power plants reduced their output, but a large amount of new construction has been put on hold. New coal-fired power plants have an operational life of fifty years or more, so a decision to launch a new fossil fueled power station would lock us into decades of carbon-intensive energy production - at a time when we should be moving in the opposite direction.

Postponing construction of these power stations gives us some breathing room. We're not committed yet. There's still time to choose an alternate path, preferably one that doesn't lock us into a worst-case scenario of spiraling emissions and environmental misery.

Many renewable energy and energy efficiency investments have also been hit by the economic crisis, but not everything has ground to a halt. We continue to learn more about how our carbon emissions affect the climate, and about the likely impacts of climate change on planet and people. We continue to learn more about promising technologies and approaches that reduce the tradeoff between helping the environment and securing a decent quality of life. And we learn that governments are taking climate change seriously - regulations will force businesses to factor the cost of carbon into their business decisions. Each new piece of information reinforces the knowledge that we can and must do more - not less - to cut emissons.

So one possible silver lining to the recent economic pain is that it has given us an opportunity to make more informed decisions and hopefully avoid making long term decisions we might eventually come to regret.

The future is not cast in stone. As the economy recovers and the investment climate improves, let's use what we've learned to re-evaluate our options and make faster progress towards a lower-carbon future.

(Back to the Carbon Clear website)

The 230 MPG Car

According to the news reports, General Motors has done the impossible. The NYT and hundreds of other press sites have covered the auto maker's announcement that the forthcoming Chevy Volt hybrid car will run 230 miles per (US) gallon of gasoline. Given our interest in low-carbon solutions, that was enough to make the team at Carbon Clear sit up and take notice.

The announcement was a shot across the bow of Toyota, which sells the best-selling Prius hybrid car, and generate more buzz around the long-anticipated Volt. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency's fuel economy website, the Prius gets 48 mpg in city driving, better than anyone else, but pathetic compared to the Volt's 230 mpg.

General Motors based their claim on the fact that the Volt is a plug-in hybrid that can run for 40 miles in electric-only mode, and the battery can be recharged overnight from a household electrical outlet. The gasoline (petrol) motor only kicks in to recharge the electric batteries when the car is driven more than 40 miles in typical conditions. Since the typical American car only travels 33 miles per day and the battery gets recharged overnight, argues GM, the gasoline engine will rarely get called into service. The car might travel on average for 230 miles before an entire gallon of gasoline is consumed.

Voila, 230 mpg.

I can see how this number might be technically accurate. But does it tell customers what they really need to know?

The Volt is expected to cost between $30,000 and $40,000 - considerably more than a conventional car of the same size. I can think of four reasons why people would spend the extra money:

1. They have money to burn and are caught up in the hype,
2. They want to reduce consumption of imported fossil fuels,
3. They want to reduce CO2 emissions from driving,
4. They want to spend less on fuel.

Let's set aside the first rationale, as it falls outside the normal scope of this blog. How does the Volt rate on the other three?

Rationale #2: Most of the electricity in the United States comes from coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydropower. The coal, gas, and water, and (much of) the uranium are sourced domestically. So a car that gets mosts of its power from grid electricity rather than gasoline wins on this count. If the 230 mpg figure is accurate, then the Prius uses nearly five times (okay 4.79 times) as much gasoline compare to the Volt. Winner: Volt.

Rationale #3: How does the Volt compare on greenhouse gas emissions? According to the GM press announcement, the Volt can typically travel 40 miles on electricity alone, and its built-in battery has a useable capacity of 8.8 kilowatt-hours. So its daily energy consumption is 8.8 kWh for 40 miles of travel. That's 0.22 kWh/mile.

Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity vary widely depending on the fuel source, but on average the emissions from electricity consumption in the U.S. average 599.9 grams CO2 per kWh. Multiply that number by the Volt's 8.8 kWh daily electricity consumption and we get 5,279 grams of CO2 emissions per day. That's about 132 grams CO2 per mile, or 82 grams CO2 per kilometre. (These are what the carbon reporting standards call "Scope 2" or "energy indirect" emissions: you're using the energy, but the CO2 is coming out of someone else's pipe.)

According to the UK's Car Fuel Data website, the Prius emits 89 grams CO2 per kilometre. Winner: Volt, but not by nearly as wide a margin.

We can look at the CO2 data another way. Let's see how much petrol would have to be consumed to release the Volt's 82 grams CO2 per mile. The US Energy Information Administration says that a gallon of gasoline emits 19.567 pounds CO2/gallon. Converting to metric makes the math easier and gives us 2,346 grams CO2 per litre of gasoline.

Now we have Chevy Volt grams of CO2 per mile, and gasoline grams of CO2 per litre. Manipulating the numbers gives us an equivalent fuel economy of 67.5 miles per (U.S.) gallon. The US EPA says the Prius gets 48 miles per (US) gallon. The UK says the Prius gets 72 miles per (UK) gallon - equivalent to 60 miles per (US gallon). Winner: Volt.

Rationale #4: How much does it cost to drive the Volt? According to the US Energy Information Administration, the average cost of electricity in the year to April 2009 was 9.09 cents per kWh. From our earlier calculations, we learned that the Volt uses 0.22 kWh per mile. So the Chevy Volt's energy costs 1.9998 (let's call it two) cents per mile.

How efficient would a gasoline powered car need to be to achieve the same per-mile fuel costs? The handy US Energy Information Agency website tells us that the average US gasoline price in the week ending August 10th, 2009 was $2.65 per gallon. With two cents (the Volt's per-mile energy cost), we would be able to buy a whopping 0.0135 gallons of gasoline for our car. And if our car were to travel a mile on that amount of fuel, it would need a fuel economy of 75 miles per (US) gallon. Using the larger UK gallons, we would need a fuel economy of 90 mpg to match the driving cost of the Volt.

By comparison, the Prius gets a US EPA rating of 48 mpg, and a UK VCA rating of 72 mpg. Winner: Volt.

Summary: If GM's driving distance and battery capacity numbers hold up in the real world, the company appears poised to take the green consumer car title away from Toyota (and push Honda from second place down to a lowly third). My calculations show a significant greenhouse gas and fuel cost saving compared to the latest model Toyota Prius. The Volt gets the equivalent of between 67 and 75 mpg, depending on whether you're looking at CO2 emissions or dollars per mile. The advantage over the Prius is nowhere near the five-fold difference being trumpted in GM's press releases, but it is real.

• CO2 emissions per mile: 40% lower using EPA figures for Prius (8% lower using UK figures)
• Energy cost per mile: 57% lower using EPA figures for Prius

GM has thrown down the gauntlet. I'm eager to see if Toyota and other car producers will rise to the challenge and produce even more efficient vehicles.

(Carbon Clear website)

More Hot Summers - More Air Conditioning?

(This article was originally published in issue number 80 (June 2009) of the IEMA journal the environmentalist.)

One of the main challenges in the fight against climate change is dealing with unexpected feedback effects. In many cases, a warming globe creates impacts that lead to even more warming. In this article, we explore the feedbacks between climate change and building heating and cooling systems, and discuss some of the options available to environment managers.

The Met Office has predicted a sweltering summer for 2009. According to the UK’s Chief Meteorologist, “….we can expect times when temperatures will be above 30°C, something we hardly saw at all last year.”

Hot summers are becoming more common as climate change takes hold. While summers in 2007 and 2008 were cooler in many northern latitude countries, the summer of 2003 was the hottest in Europe for at least five centuries and in the UK, six out of the seven warmest years since 1659 have occurred since 1990.

And it’s not just a European phenomenon - eight of the past ten summers in the USA have been warmer than the average for the 20th century.

Climate Change and Building Energy

These hot summers have energy implications: according to Government figures, the USA's residential energy demand was approximately 10 percent higher than what would have occurred under average climate conditions for the season, and it is likely that in the UK, electricity consumption will rise as a result of an increase in air conditioning. Since most of our electricity in both countries comes from fossil fuels, increasing air conditioner use makes it more difficult to meet challenging emissions reduction targets.

In the USA 65% of commercial buildings have air conditioning, compared to 27% in Europe, although a higher percentage of buildings constructed after 1991 rely on air conditioning. One rule of thumb is that a 2°C temperature increase translates into a 25% rise in air conditioning loads. If summers continue to get hotter, will the UK adopt the Continental tradition of afternoon siestas to deal with the heat, or follow the USA’s heavy reliance on round the clock air conditioning?

An indication of what might lie in store for the UK can be gained from looking at air conditioning trends in New England. Historically, electricity demand was greater during the region’s snowy winters due to heating demands and a greater reliance on electric heaters. In summer demand would drop as residents relied on windows and fans to keep cool. But around 2000, peak electric loads shifted to the summer due to the increased use of- and the perceived need for-air conditioning. Now, even in northern New England, peak load has shifted to the summer due to more regular use of air conditioning, and a switch away from electricity for winter heating.

Making matters worse are the unpredictable shoulder seasons of autumn and spring. Lag-times in heating and cooling mean gas-fired heating systems may be competing with air conditioners in those months where cool mornings transition into warm afternoons. Simultaneous heating and cooling is not uncommon, especially in small and mid-size buildings which do not have active management and may not have been properly commissioned. Increasingly variable weather during these seasons due to climate change may mean even greater energy consumption.

Can these trends in increased summer electricity demand be reversed, or will our hotter summers continue to be accompanied by a rise in air conditioning and the related emissions from electricity production? Can we take action to break this positive feedback loop?

Small buildings and air conditioning use

Historically, smaller buildings had a single boiler and thermostat. Now even modest buildings of 4,000 square feet (372 square meters) typically include heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems and automated controls with numerous control devices. These systems are generally design/build – meaning the same firm that designs them, installs them. This approach may result in a lack of independence and transparency in the set up and deployment of the building controls.

Typical problems in small retail and office premises can include:

• Lack of documentation (i.e., no sequence of operation or controls wiring diagrams)
• Comfort problems (intermittent overheating in the winter or overcooling in summer)
• Loss of original intent as subsequent contractors modify the system with limited understanding of existing functionality (e.g., programmable thermostats not set properly for use)

This problem of proper commissioning and air conditioning use can be illustrated in an ongoing project evaluating a 4,200 square foot (380 sq meter) office building in northern New England. A review of the monthly consumption of purchased electricity showed that this building’s electricity usage was 40% higher in August than in January due to air conditioning use even though 2007 was not a particularly hot summer in New England The annual electricity usage amounted to 31,850 KWh causing almost one tonne of CO2e emissions . This indicated an average electricity energy intensity of 8.5 kWh per square foot. Regional best practice indicates an average electricity energy intensity of half this amount, 4.12 kWh per square foot. . Optimization of controls could reduce the building’s electricity usage by at least 15% overall - in this case, cutting annual greenhouse emissions by approximately 150 kg of CO2e.

The Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems of small and mid-size commercial buildings typically do not work as effectively and as efficiently as they might. The deficiencies can result from a lack of expertise in control system diagnostics and operations in the staff and in contractors who typically are on site to perform routine maintenance. In particular, smaller buildings and companies often cannot afford to maintain a facilities manager or employee with facilities management expertise.

These results are not unique to the US. A pilot study in the UK evaluated 20 retail premises for temperature and relative humidity. The results showed that higher summer thermostat settings could improve both thermal comfort and the energy efficiency of air conditioning units. However, despite increased energy costs and the public’s mounting concern over climate change, few UK retail outlets have any plan for managing air conditioning use.

These deficiencies lead to on-going costs, lost personnel time due to comfort problems, increased operating costs as contractors are brought on site to address comfort issues, energy waste, and avoidable carbon emissions.

The building as a system

While proper operational control of energy use is often the starting point for making cost-effective improvements and reducing carbon emissions, it is also helpful to recognize a building as a dynamic system – with energy consumption influenced by its site and orientation, building envelope micro-climate, occupant behaviour and landscaping and the surrounding vegetation.

For example, ground soil and groundwater are both warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than ambient air temperature. Ground source pumps use these temperature differentials to pre-cool incoming air and reduce the energy requirement of air conditioners in summer, and do the reverse in winter.

Construction materials can play an important role: masonry has a higher thermal mass than glass and steel, and therefore maintains a more even temperature. The lag time between heating and cooling can be used to maintain interior temperatures and reduce air conditioning loads.

Building occupants can be motivated to reduce internal heat gains in the summer by ensuring lights, computers, printers and other electrical equipment is turned off when not in use. Meanwhile staff can be encouraged not to overcool buildings simply because air conditioning is available – many companies are already encouraging casual wear on hotter days to reduce cooling requirements.

Landscaping can provide a shade canopy in the summer, lock up carbon through photosynthesis, and reduce ambient temperatures through evapo-transpiration. Broad-leaf deciduous trees in particular have canopies which reduce passive solar gain in the summer while allowing it when needed in the winter.

This type of holistic view is easier for new-builds, where such considerations can be factored in at the planning stage. Options for cost-effective improvements are more limited with existing buildings. However renovation does present real opportunities to improve the building envelope to manage heat flow. Natural ventilation can be improved by considering the placement of internal partition walls that do not impede cross ventilation, and windows can be retrofitted to make better use of nighttime cooling to lower cooling requirements during the day.

Conclusion

Nearly every human activity has an effect on the climate. Buildings occupy a critical role in modern society, and climate feedbacks threaten to amplify their impact. However, with careful planning, we may be able to break the link between buildings and global warming.

Suzy Hodgson AIEMA is a Principal Consultant and Jamal Gore AIEMA is Managing Director at specialist carbon management company Carbon Clear Limited.

From Credit Crisis to Carbon Crisis

The original version of this article appeared in the November 2008 (No. 68) issue of The Environmentalist

As governments across the globe find a new role shoring up troubled financial institutions, those of us who advocate bold moves towards a sustainable energy transition have taken notice. The USA and the UK committed more than $700 billion and £400 billion, respectively, to the financial bailout. Consider the benefits if equivalent amounts were committed to securing a lower-carbon future.

When the Invisible Hand Gets it Wrong
There has been a major upheaval in the relationship between government and the private sector. The worldwide financial crisis has been sudden, systemic, and severe. The deep-seated belief that competition and free markets led by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will promote society’s interests has been shaken.

What happened? Economists argue that the invisible hand does not do a good job handling externalities – situations where private actors pay the cost and society benefits, or vice versa. In these situations government needs to step in. This was the case during the lending freeze, with banks afraid to lend to one another and the credit market on the brink of collapse. With no other solution in sight, governments stepped in to try and rescue the world’s financial system.

While the financial meltdown has been sobering (or punitive depending on your personal stake), the policy flip side is that we have witnessed how quickly events can catapult governments into concerted and coordinated action.


Past Precedents
The energy sector is no stranger to support from governments. Nuclear energy currently comprises about 17% of the UK’s electricity mix, and serves as an interesting example.

Put plainly, the economics of nuclear power would be questionable without governments’ financial support. In both the US and the UK, governments have artificially limited private companies’ legal liability for nuclear accidents. Despite concerns in some circles about another Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, in the US a nuclear power plant’s annual insurance bill might only run to $400,000. This is because Government shoulders much of the burden for catastrophic accidents.

Similarly, the cost of disposing of waste from the UK’s existing nuclear reactors is likely to cost £74 billion, discounted over a whopping 130 years (that's easily more than half a trillion pounds if you don't discount the cost to future generations). These environmental costs clearly fall outside of the time horizon for private sector investment. As a result, most nuclear power plants would never have been built without governments’ pivotal role taking on future liabilities.

Climate change is another area where governments have a critical role to play. Climate change - a “negative externality” from fossil fuel use - has been partially addressed through emissions-trading schemes that allow CO2 to be priced in a regulated market [see our article “Emissions Trading – Going Global?” in the environmentalist issue 60, 16 June 2008].

However, global emissions continue to rise, evidence that the market price of CO2 is not yet high enough and stable enough to encourage significant private investment in abatement measures. Similarly, renewable energy remains a small percentage of the UK’s and America’s energy mix, even though there are compelling environmental reasons and a strong economic basis to increase its use.

According to the Stern Review, the cost to limit severe temperature increases is estimated at 1% of global GDP. Inaction has far greater costs –Stern estimates damage costs from climate change exceeding $70 trillion over time. At an estimated $3.5 trillion, the cost of the global financial bailout looks like loose change in comparison. But private firms lack the incentive and ability to make the required investments on their own.

Investing in a low-carbon future
What would it look like if we could invest even a fraction of the global bailout amount into rapidly building a low-carbon economy? Here are just a few hypothetical examples of what could be done.

In the USA, about 40 million households rely on electric water heaters. For a $282 billion investment, the US government could replace all of these inefficient electric heaters with solar water heaters at no additional cost to homeowners. This investment would reduce CO2 emissions by 48.7 million tonnes each year. Moreover, each household would save about $220 per year, pumping an additional $9 billion per annum into the economy. These savings would likely increase as the price of electricity rises over time.

In the UK, the government has made a commitment to expand the use of wind power to generate electricity. Installing 33 GW of offshore wind would meet 20% of the country’s electricity needs. This measure would cost about £30 billion – a fraction of the British financial bailout – and reduce the need for a new generation of coal fired power plants. Government funding would mean firms would not need to raise expensive venture capital, and could pass the savings on to utility customers in the form of lower electricity bills. Moreover, with most renewable energy projects employing more people per GW of installed capacity than coal and nuclear power plants, such an initiative would boost jobs growth and provide broader benefits to the UK economy.

For an investment of just over $740 billion (1/5 the cost of the global bailout) the US government could target all families earning less than $35,000 and replace half their old vehicles with plug-in hybrids – for free . This investment would reap huge environmental, economic, and social benefits. Each family would save about $840 annually in petrol costs. Fuel savings from this initiative would total nearly $24 billion each year, and would be recycled into the economy. In addition, it would reduce annual CO2 emissions by over 65 million tonnes. With this level of increased household income and reduced emissions, such a government investment provides a reasonable pay-off, while achieving other sustainability objectives.

Meanwhile, in the developing world, two billion people – roughly 400 million families – cook over primitive wood stoves. For an investment of less than $10 billion (about £6 billion), we could replace every traditional cook stove in the world with efficient and cleaner burning models. This move would reduce labour burdens, improve health, help protect the world’s forests and reduce global CO2 emissions by over half a billion tonnes each year.

Conclusion
For these examples, we assumed that governments would pay the entire cost and give the product – electricity from wind turbines, household solar water heaters, hybrid cars, and cook stoves – away for free. We chose this assumption to show that even such radical measures cost less than the recent financial bailout. In reality, even partial subsidies could drive a massive shift towards a low-energy future.

In today’s challenging economic climate, the private sector has neither the resources nor the appetite to even contemplate this scale of investment. Nevertheless, the public benefits - cost savings, job creation, combating climate change, and reduced dependence on imported fossil fuels - are huge. Because governments enjoy a longer time horizon, they can realise these benefits by acting creatively on a grand scale.

The financial bailout was justified because the threat to private banks put the entire global economy at risk. But we face other threats as well. The social, environmental and economic risks from climate change are vast. The measures we have proposed here are merely illustrative, but they show that we have the means to make fast and meaningful reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions.

What we need now is the will.

Suzy Hodgson, AIEMA, is a principal consultant and Jamal Gore, AIEMA is the managing director at specialist carbon management company, Carbon Clear Limited.

Yesterday's Technology

Yesterday's Financal Times included a story about increased pressure to develop and build clean electric vehicles. These cars emit no pollutants from the tailpipe (in fact, there is no tailpipe), and have a potentially important role to play as we transition to a low-carbon future.

Most people think of electric cars as either boring, tiny golf carts or racy space-age vehicles like the Tesla pictured here. But the most interesting point in the FT article was the observation that this technology is nothing new.

The first electric carriage was invented between 1832 and 1839, and electric vehicles were widely used in Europe and the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In fact, they held many land speed records during this period, and the wives of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford drove electric vehicles. Here's a photo of Thomas Edison with an electric car in 1913:


Sixty-seven years later, an electric car built in 1980 could travel up to 70 miles per hour for 70 miles without recharging. A widespread switch to electric vehicles could drastically reduce our dependence on petroleum, and lead to a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And there's no technical reason we can't achieve this goal. As one of the people interviewed in the FT story notes, "They could make these yesterday. They could stamp them out if they had to."

The same goes for many other low-carbon solutions. Reducing emissions is not rocket science. At Carbon Clear we're committed to helping companies identify proven, practical emissions reduction approaches, and then rolling them out in a cost-effective way.

UK Announces New Department for Energy & Climate Change

Britain's Labour Government on Friday announced the creation of the Department for Energy and Climate Change. The new department, to be headed by Minister Ed Milliband, is the result of a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Many environmental groups have hailed the formation of the new government department, noting that until now one agency had responsibility for sourcing the nation's energy and a separate agency was responsible for dealing with the resultant emissions. The hope is that putting both priorities under one roof will help to align incentives and spur faster action towards a lower-carbon future.

I share their hope, but the simple fact is that climate change is not just an energy issue. Nearly every activity generates greenhouse gas emissions - transport, construction, farming, and the like. One could just as easily argue for a Department for Transport and Climate Change tasked with helping to ensure that the development of the nation's transport infrastructure (third runway at Heathrow, anyone?) was aligned with government greenhouse gas emission targets.

At Carbon Clear, we've found that the most effective approaches to climate change build emissions reduction strategies into every aspect of business or household activity. Our aim is to help companies reduce greenhouse gas emissions wherever it makes sense.