Cheap, abundant, politically secure oil is no longer available. If you have ever thought your lifestyle whether you are rich or poor was comfortable long term, then please think again. Of late, there have been disparate predictions for our oil reserves, with some claiming that oil will last us for decades. In fact, the question is not: “When will there be no more oil left” but, instead: “When will global demand outstrip production?”, and that could happen sooner than most people realise. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘energy news’
If you thought solar panels were a bad idea, peak oil will change your mind
Monday, June 14th, 2010UK needs to take urgent action on peak oil
Monday, March 22nd, 2010Lord Hunt, the energy minister, is to meet industrialists in London tomorrow in a bid to calm mounting fears about the disruption that could follow a sudden shortage of oil supplies. Lord Hunt calls UK industrialists together to discuss government response to any early onset of decline in global oil production
In a significant policy shift, the government has agreed to undertake more work on whether the UK needs to take action to avoid the massive dislocation that could be caused by the early onset of “peak oil” – the point that marks the start of terminal decline in global oil production.
Jeremy Leggett, the executive chairman of the renewable power company Solar Century and a leading figure in the UK industry taskforce on peak oil and energy security, said the meeting, to be held at the Energy Institute, showed a welcome new sense of urgency.
“Government has gone from the BP position – ’40 years of supply left, the price mechanism works, no need to worry’ – to ‘crikey’,” he said. “BP and others are telling us that, but you lot, Virgin, Scottish and Southern, and others are telling us something completely different. We do not know who to believe. Let’s do a proper risk assessment with industry,” he said.
The meeting is expected to include executives from the taskforce members including Virgin, Arap, Stagecoach, Scottish and Southern Energy, and Solar Century as well as other industrialists.
The decision to hold the talks came after the UK industry taskforce on peak oil and energy security last month issued a provocative report, The Oil Crunch: a Wake-up Call for the UK Economy, in which it warned of the dangers of complacency.
Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, whose rail, airline and travel companies are sensitive to energy prices, warned then that the coming crisis could surpass the credit crunch. “The next five years will see us face another crunch: the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well,” he said.
The government had previously played down the risks arising from peak oil after the Wicks review in the summer in effect dismissed the idea that global demand for oil could soon outstrip supply.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change confirmed last night that Hunt and a range of energy-policy civil servants would be holding “private and behind-doors” talks at the Energy Institute. But she played down the significance of the session, saying the government had always taken supply issues seriously and met different parts of industry on a regular basis. “We do this all the time; it is just a normal stakeholder meeting,” she insisted, adding that there was no “marked” change in ministerial policy.
The issue of peak oil arose last November when whistleblowers inside the International Energy Agency alleged the problem had been deliberately downplayed over a long period. BP and other oil companies insist that there is little danger of the world running out of oil because new areas such as Brazil, and more recently Uganda, are always opening up to development. BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, believes demand will fall as prices move up., pushing back any major peak-oil dislocation.
But booming demand in China, India and the Middle East has pushed up the price of crude to more than $80 a barrel and UK petrol prices are close to record levels.
Amrita Sen, an oil analyst at Barclays Capital, believes the price of crude could pass $100 this year and reach nearly $140 by 2015. Francisco Blanch, of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has speculated it could hit $150 within four years.
Leggett says all these scenarios could be much too optimistic. He is convinced that Britain must prepare as quickly as possible for a situation when oil becomes so expensive that international trade is hampered and globalisation breaks down.
Peak oil used to be the preoccupation of a small minority, but a parliamentary group has been set up to follow the issue and an increasing number of industrialists have begun to worry about it.
Ian Marchant, Scottish and Southern Energy’s chief executive, is one who now believes global demand for oil is on the brink of outstripping the ability to produce it. At the launch of the Oil Crunch report, he said: “The west has been far too profligate in its use of oil and the price is going to say: stop it now and start using your oil as a scarce commodity.”
Original Source: The Guardian
Solar links
Heat my Home Solar Panels UK
Solar Panels and Solar Installers and Installations
Solar Panels in the UK
Green Energy Suppliers, Providers, Schemes and Tariffs
Solar Panels Forum
Solar Heating Panels Installations
The Latest Evacuated Tubes Solar Panels for the UK Climate
DIY Solar Panels Kits
PV Solar Panels Installations
Heat Pumps
The UK’s energy vunerability to Russia
Monday, January 11th, 2010The next cold war may well take place in a room that looks oddly like a scene from the last one. Along one wall of a spartan control centre in Moscow, a large map of Europe is projected on computer screens. Visitors have to pass through five rings of security to reach this spot, but the few outsiders who make it through are proudly shown a display of raw power.
From underground facilities deep inside Siberia, a series of trajectories are plotted on the computer screens – aiming west toward Europe’s largest conurbations. An engineer explains how easy it would be to turn out the lights in a foreign city with the click of a button on his desk.
Fortunately, this is not missile command but the control room of Gazprom, the world’s largest gas producer and a flagship of Russian capitalism. The plotted lines show the route of major pipelines – coloured green because they are full of natural gas flowing at more than 30km an hour. Yet the threat of plunging neighbouring states into nuclear winter remains a real one. This time last year, actions taken in this room threw much of Europe into panic. A dispute between Gazprom and Ukraine over unpaid gas bills culminated in a decision to turn off transit pipelines that also feed much of central and eastern Europe – shutting down heating and electricity generation for millions during one of the worst cold snaps for years.
Now, with the continent again in the deep freeze and running low on gas, the power of Russian energy companies is once more in the spotlight. Russia has already sparred with Belarus over oil supplies this winter in a dispute that also threatened to disrupt energy exports to Europe. Gazprom and the Ukrainian government are hoping to avoid a repeat of their 2009 pipeline brinkmanship for now, but critics claim Moscow is never far away from using its energy might to exert political influence over its neighbours.
Even Britain received a taste of how fragile Europe’s gas supply infrastructure can be last week when a drop in pipeline pressure from Norway forced authorities to suspend supply to certain designated industrial users to protect homes and offices. Our reliance on imported gas is set to rise rapidly as UK reserves near depletion in less than eight years at current extraction rates.
Increasingly, one company dominates not just existing European supply but, more importantly, its future sources. Gazprom has so much natural gas under the tundra of Siberia that its energy resources are equivalent to all the oil and gas fields owned by western energy companies put together. At 33.1tn cubic metres, its gas reserves are 55 times greater than Britain’s North Sea alone. In fact, only the Saudis, with their huge desert oilfields, can match Gazprom’s total energy reserves. Even then, oil exports from Russia recently overtook those of Saudi Arabia.
The geopolitics of energy are well rehearsed but relatively little is known about key corporate players such as Gazprom, which rarely grants access to foreign media. Today’s Guardian interview is the first in a five-part series published this week, which looks at some of the key international companies likely to shape world affairs over the coming decade. Some, like Gazprom or the mining giant BHP Billiton, control the dwindling raw materials most likely to prove strategic flashpoints.
Tomorrow we turn to China Mobile, straddling the two most powerful global trends: the rise of China and digital communications, while General Electric and Wal-Mart are examples of how powerful multinational corporations have survived the financial crisis to retain their global influence.
Not all are in good shape. 2009 was a torrid time for businesses everywhere. Gazprom has had a particularly bad year as its reputation for reliability plummeted after the Ukrainian shutdown and the recession caused Europeans to consume far less gas.
But as energy prices bounce back fast (oil, which acts as a benchmark for gas, has jumped swiftly to $80 a barrel again) Moscow is recovering the swagger of a city swimming in easy money.
A few miles south of its glitzy boutiques, the headquarters of Russia’s largest company is more forbidding: a chilly blue neo-Stalinist skyscraper known as “The Candle” houses a bureaucracy that serves as a constant reminder of Gazprom’s Soviet past. Still 50.1% owned by the Russian state, its managers are nonetheless at pains to stress its independence from government foreign policy. “We don’t do politics,” insists Vladimir Mikheev, an executive from the export arm who complains of the west’s “Gazpromophobia”.
But his boss, Gazprom’s official public representative, Sergei Kupriyanov, is blunt about why the state keeps such an iron grip: “Most of the territory of the Russian Federation lies in rather uncomfortable climatic conditions – much of the year it is freezing, which means any rupture of the gas supplies will immediately lead to catastrophe.”
Russia knows about energy’s strategic importance better than most. Its citizens rely on heavily subsidised gas from Gazprom’s monopoly and months of sub-zero temperatures make energy security a matter of life and death.
As last year’s clash with Ukraine showed, it also makes for an unusually powerful form of economic weapon. Opinion remains divided over who was really to blame for shutdown, but the show of strength appears to have worked: five years after Ukraine’s so-called Orange revolution, both candidates standing for election in next weekend’s presidential election are now broadly pro-Moscow.
Gazprom is more than just strategically useful, contributing 20% of Russia’s total state budget in taxes, and Kupriyanov stresses its benefits to other shareholders too: “We also have private investors who are expecting returns and that means we have to be transparent”.
Unfortunately, market rules do not always apply as evenly to foreign investors in Russia, who remain scarred by a series of assets confiscations and forced disposals. Only the vast riches at stake keep overseas money flowing to invest in vital new projects such as the Yamal development scheme in Siberia or Nord Stream pipeline to Germany. Chief executives from two western energy firms who agreed to speak off the record about Gazprom conceded that they faced little choice but to continue dealing with Russia despite misgivings about the reliability of its contract law.
Gazprom’s emphasis on “shareholder transparency” does little to clear up questions about its ownership either. Rumours persist that senior government figures have sizeable indirect holdings. “We haven’t seen any traces,” says Kupriyanov when asked whether Vladimir Putin has a personal economic interest in the company.
To Gazprom’s foreign shareholders, close links with the Kremlin are a mixed blessing: protecting their asset but holding back true reform. “The government is only interested in two things: political power and cheap domestic gas,” says one Moscow-based fund manager. “There is no incentive to make the business more efficient and profitable so they just take more for themselves.”
For the economy as a whole, energy may be too much of a good thing. Roland Nash, head of research at Moscow investment bank Renaissance Capital, warns that over-reliance on booming energy prices may hold back Russia’s otherwise strong prospects.: “The economic crisis was just the wrong length of time: long enough to undermine small companies and the emerging middle class but too short to force government into reform. Russia needs to diversify away from oil and gas.”
For now though, Gazprom is in the vanguard of Russia’s new energy imperialism. British consumers too may see more of “the big G”. Gazprom Marketing and Trading, its overseas arm, sells gas to commercial clients such as Chelsea football club and has a target of expanding its UK market share from 2% to 10%. Kupriyanov also reveals ambitions to sell to residential customers one day. “Yes, definitely,” he says. “The British market offers ample opportunities of developing downstream operations – we appreciate the fact that it’s a liberalised market and all of the infrastructure is in place.”
Last time Gazprom made moves on the residential market – by exploring a takeover of Centrica – it prompted intense political suspicion and even the threat of a UK government veto. Now it hopes its softly-softly approach with commercial customers will ease fears. “You all thought there would be bear scratches on the gas pipes but the headlines cried wolf,” says Kupriyanov. “Our entry to the UK market was exemplary.”
A bigger factor in containing Europe’s “Gazpromophobia” is likely to be whether the company cuts off any more pipelines. Will there be another crisis this winter? “We have good reason to believe crisis can be averted but it is never easy to give a 100% guarantee,” concludes the man from Gazprom.
Original Source: The Guardian
Solar links
Heat my Home Solar Panels UK
Solar Panels and Solar Installers and Installations
Solar Panels in the UK
Green Energy Suppliers, Providers, Schemes and Tariffs
Solar Panels Forum
Solar Heating Panels Installations
The Latest Evacuated Tubes Solar Panels for the UK Climate
DIY Solar Panels Kits
PV Solar Panels Installations
Heat Pumps
The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009The challenge of feeding billions of people as fuel supplies fall is staggering. And yet leaders’ heads remain stuck in the sand.
I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.
If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.
Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.
According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.
Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I’ve been bellyaching about the British government’s refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I’m beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.
The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to “approach a plateau” towards the end of this period, but there’s no hint of the graver warning that the IEA’s chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: “We still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau … I think time is not on our side here.” Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, “even today’s number is much higher than can be justified, and the International Energy Agency knows this”.
The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world’s new and undiscovered oilfields would have to be developed at a rate “never before seen in history”. As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that “the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now”.
Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the US were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn’t seem very likely.
Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift when the fields are depleted. So the assumption in the IEA’s new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen “to around one half by 2030″ looks unsafe. The UK Energy Research Centre’s review finds that, just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020″. Unconventional oil won’t save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only 5m barrels a day by 2030.
As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems that don’t need much labour or energy.
There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out.
The challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.
Original Source: George Monbiot
Solar links
Heat my Home Solar Panels UK
Solar Panels and Solar Installers and Installations
Solar Panels in the UK
Green Energy Suppliers, Providers, Schemes and Tariffs
Solar Panels Forum
Learn about Solar Heating Panels Installations
Learn about Evacuated Tubes Solar Panels Installations
DIY Solar Panels Kits
PV Solar Panels Installations
Learn about Heat Pumps
Solar panels have become financially viable
Tuesday, October 13th, 200960% rise in energy bills per annum over the next decade, Stuart Lovatt of Heat my Home adds; “The age of easy and cheap oil is coming to an end. It doesn’t suddenly come to an end; obviously it’s a gradual change, but we’re moving away from cheap oil at a much faster pace with increasingly difficult to extract oil and an outdated energy infrastructure here in the UK, which will push energy bills up further over the coming years.”
The UK Energy Research Centre has added, there is a ‘significant risk’ that global oil production will peak in less than ten years time. It also says that there is a growing consensus that discovery of new oil had peaked in the early 60s. Since then, new oil fields have got smaller and smaller.
The future of energy is unknown but what we do know is global reserves are finite, and global demand has increased, meaning there has to be a day when supply and demand rules dictate higher energy as a best case scenario or a global supply famine as a worse case scenario.
For those concerned about climate change, an unsatisfactory conclusion is that high oil prices resulting from a peak in production might encourage countries to start converting non-liquid fuels like coal to liquid fuels to plug the gap. These techniques are carbon intensive and will only put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, making climate change worse.
So how does all this make solar panels financially viable? With increasing energy pricing globally, this makes extraction of raw materials, manufacture and installing of such a system more and more expensive as the chronological clock ticks.
Stuart Lovatt of Heat my Home says: “We have promoted the use of solar panels when solar was still a green product and only bought by environmental orientated people. A lot has happened in the last 5 years and the UK is slowly waking up to the realities it faces with energy security, continued energy price rises and the global energy issue’s. Suddenly solar panels are a real financial benefit and are installed not just by green’s, but also energy savvy people with a longer term view.
Yes, quality is important when choosing a system but equally you have considered the costs. I see installing a solar panel system or solar tubes just like having a new kitchen or bathroom. You would not the let consider the cheapest quote because you run the risk of a poor tradesman and/or damage to your property due to poor workmanship. Exactly the same principle should apply when installing solar panels.
The way we see solar panels in the UK, is as a long term investment. Not in green terms although this in itself should be long term view, but because they have such a long lifespan, typically 30 years they are viewed as a long term investment financially as energy prices will forever keep rising, and/or increasing the value and sell ability of your home so a homeowner can benefit even if they decide to not stay in their current property.
Heat my Home has been promoting the use of solar and is educational, so people can find a quality solar system worth their investment.
Original Source: Heat my Home
Solar links
Heat my Home Solar Panels UK
Solar Panels and Solar Installers and Installations
Solar Panels in the UK
Green Energy Suppliers, Providers, Schemes and Tariffs
Solar Panels Forum
Learn about Solar Heating Panels Installations
Learn about Evacuated Tubes Solar Panels Installations
DIY Solar Panels Kits
PV Solar Panels Installations
Learn about Heat Pumps
UK energy suppliers say power, gas prices may rise
Monday, September 21st, 2009There are no immediate signals that would indicate a fall in retail prices for this winter,” Nick Horler, the chief executive officer of Scottish Power, said in a letter to the U.K. energy regulator Ofgem published today. There are “risks of an increase next year.”
Last month, Ofgem CEO Alistair Buchanan asked power and natural-gas suppliers to explain why consumer tariffs hadn’t followed a decline in wholesale rates this year. The regulator is scrutinizing utilities after lawmakers raised concerns that prices are too high. Buchanan is also reviewing network charges and the way market rules are changed.
Prices are on their way up, Phil Bentley, managing director of Centrica’s British Gas supply unit, said in a separate letter published today. They are “likely to remain at historically high levels, and in fact likely to increase as non-commodity costs rise ever upwards,” he said.
Centrica, Britain’s biggest energy supplier, said in the letter that “very recent falls in wholesale costs cannot immediately be reflected in the procurement costs for suppliers” because of hedging strategies for retail customers’ energy needs.
‘Grim Predictability’
“There’s a grim predictability about Britain’s energy suppliers,” independent watchdog Consumer Focus said today in an e-mailed statement. “In spite of increased margins and lower wholesale gas prices, there is the inevitable talk of higher domestic bills.”
Utilities are still distributing power and gas that they bought 18 months ago, when prices were higher, because the companies purchase energy through forward contracts, Horler said. “It will take until the end of 2010 for this effect to fully work through the system,” he said.
Britain’s six biggest energy suppliers, which also include Scottish & Southern Energy Plc, RWE AG, Electricite de France SA and E.ON AG, lowered household tariffs earlier this year after a slump in oil prices from their 2008 peak reduced wholesale costs.
U.K. gas for delivery this winter has fallen 45 percent this year and 69 percent from a record 110.25 pence a therm in July 2008 as the global recession erodes demand and the country imports more liquefied natural gas. The corresponding electricity contract has dropped 32 percent since Jan. 1, according to broker data compiled by Bloomberg.
‘Remain Volatile’
“Higher forward annual wholesale prices and higher distribution, environment and social costs all counter the recent falls in wholesale prices,” Scottish & Southern Energy said. The U.K.’s second-biggest energy supplier is seeking to “avoid an increase in 2009 and 2010, despite the fact that wholesale energy prices remain volatile.”
RWE is carrying out a 100 million-pound ($163.5 million) cost-reduction program, including a wage and recruitment freeze, and there’s no scope for price cuts, Guy Johnson, the company’s director of regulation, said in a separate letter.
EDF said it will consider reducing prices “if market conditions allow,” while E.ON said in a letter that there’s no “clear message regarding future wholesale cost movements that can be communicated to customers.”
Original Source: Bloomberg
Solar links
Heat my Home Solar Panels UK
Solar Panels and Solar Installers and Installations
Solar Panels in the UK
Green Energy Suppliers, Providers, Schemes and Tariffs
Solar Panels Forum
Learn about Solar Heating Panels Installations
Learn about Evacuated Tubes Solar Panels Installations
DIY Solar Panels Kits
PV Solar Panels Installations
Learn about Heat Pumps Installations
Six years away from an energy crisis
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009The good news for Britain’s energy supply is that the sheer scale of the recession has cut our electricity demand and carbon emissions. An impending energy security crunch has been postponed.
The bad news is that the recession will almost certainly delay investment in Britain’s energy infrastructure and encourage complacency.
Energy security is no longer something that we can take for granted. This week more than 100 people were arrested in Nottingham over a suspected plan to disrupt a nearby power station. Will there will be more disruptions at other coal-fired power stations or against new nuclear developments now that we know more about where they will be sited?
For the past two decades we have had ample reserves to absorb the shocks: now the margins are beginning to wear thin. Many of the existing power stations were built in the 1970s or earlier. All the coal-fired stations are more than 30 years old, as are most of the nuclear ones. They are all coming to the end of their lives and their reliability is inevitably beginning to suffer. Although significant numbers of gas power stations have been added, North Sea gas and oil supplies have been depleted at breakneck speed. After decades as an energy exporter, Britain now relies increasingly on imports of gas and coal.
Fast-forward to 2015 and the energy position could be precarious. By then the remaining coal power stations will be facing closure because of the pollution control requirements of the EU directive on large combustion plants. By then all except one of the existing nuclear stations will also be closed or facing closure. Having to replace so much coal and nuclear capacity in such a short period is unprecedented – except perhaps in wartime.
And at the same time because of the EU Renewables Directive the Government has committed itself to a crash programme to increase wind’s share of electricity generation from the current 5 per cent to perhaps 35 per cent by 2020. But not only will wind power do little to combat global climate change (the big issue is the projected increases in coal burn in China, India and developing countries), it is also expensive and may even reduce the security of supply. It is uncertain too. Few think that wind supply on this scale will be achieved – though, unsurprisingly, few politicians will admit this in public.
What will fill the gap and at the same time back up the intermittent wind? The answer appears to be gas, gas and more gas. We will be lucky if even a single new nuclear station comes on stream by 2020. The carbon emissions from new coal stations will need to be sequestrated underground, and that technology is not likely to be commercially available until well after 2020. So before 2020 it would have to be “unabated” coal – which sits uncomfortably with the climate change objectives.
The chances of enough gas stations being built on time are not looking good, so the gas will have to be imported, and at a time when across Europe everyone is dashing for gas too. The Russians are not increasing investment in new gas resources and doubts remain about their ability to meet Europe’s demand. Liquefied natural gas will be used to plug this gap, but the sources of supply are quite limited and again lots of other countries (especially the US and Japan) will want it too.
The scale of the investment required to plug the energy gap while pursuing renewables is enormous. The cost of building not only power stations, but also new transmission networks and gas storage facilities, fitting smart meters, developing an offshore wind industry and implementing energy efficiency measures will run to tens of billions, possibly more than £100billion in the next decade. Though the recession has brought a breathing space on the demand side of the equation, it has markedly worsened investment on the supply side. The credit crisis has made it harder and more expensive to finance investment; just when the investment is needed, finance has dried up.
This matters not only for customers – though they are likely to be paying a lot more. The rest of the economy depends on energy supply. Have a bit too much and we pay a small premium. Have too little and we pay a lot. These costs are the real burden on the economy and they are felt long before any physical interruption in supply. We should worry less about the lights going out and more about the costs to the economy of running our energy system on the edge.
Russia’s interruptions of its gas supplies to Europe for three weeks in January was another warning, as well as performance failures at our existing nuclear power stations. These may be isolated instances, but our vulnerability to such events indicates that all may not be entirely well with our energy systems.
Original Source: The Times
Solar links
Heat my Home Solar Panels UK
Solar Panels and Solar Installers and Installations
Solar Panels in the UK
Green Energy Suppliers, Providers, Schemes and Tariffs
Solar Panels Forum
Learn about Solar Heating Panels Installations
Learn about Evacuated Tubes Solar Panels Installations
DIY Solar Panels Kits
PV Solar Panels Installations
Learn about Heat Pumps Installations
Schwarzenegger’s optimistic solar panel forecast
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009THE world’s economy and its glaciers are experiencing a simultaneous meltdown for many of the same reasons. The solutions to our economic and climate change challenges are also intertwined, and present us with a fantastic opportunity for a century of unparalleled growth and prosperity for everyone — if we start by changing the way we think about energy.
Did you know that enough sunlight falls on the Earth every hour to power all of humanity’s energy needs for a year?
Or that there’s enough hydrogen in the water discharged by sewage treatment plants to power all of our cars, trucks, trains and aeroplanes?
Add to these the potential of biomass, geothermal, tidal power, wind and other renewables and it’s clear that there are enough clean, renewable energy resources — if only we deploy the technology to use them, especially technologies that make more of what we already have.
We’ve done it in California — for example, setting energy efficiency standards for appliances and buildings that now make us 40 per cent more energy efficient than average Americans.
Original Source: The Sun
Solar links
Heat my Home Solar Panels UK
Solar Panels and Solar Installers and Installations
Solar Panels in the UK
Green Energy Suppliers, Providers, Schemes and Tariffs
Solar Panels Forum
Learn about Solar Heating Panels Installations
Learn about Evacuated Tubes Solar Panels Installations
DIY Solar Panels Kits
PV Solar Panels Installations
Learn about Heat Pumps Installations
