Monthly Archives: February 2018

Hereford By-pass

As renewables are replacing coal, carbon emissions associated with the generation of electricity are falling in the UK and in most countries. That’s the good news. The bad news is that progress in the transport sector, in the UK and globally, has been woefully slow. Transport is now the UK’s biggest source of carbon emissions. It is also the source of most of our nitrogen oxides and particulate matter pollution, both known carcinogens, causing much ill health and death. Over the next few weeks I’ll explore what could be done to lower carbon emissions, pollution, prevent accidents and to generally improve things.

Many cities around the world are acting to limit the use of cars, investing in walking, cycling and better public transport. Barcelona, Copenhagen and Freiburg are all making excellent progress. Sadly many other cities are still building roads in the mistaken belief that they are the future of transport. Hereford, where I live is one such place. The new link road has recently opened allowing better car access to the northern part of the city centre, but at an unnecessary financial and environmental cost. The Tory cabinet are determined to build a by-pass. Some of us have been active in our opposition to this for decades. We managed to stop the Eastern route on environmental grounds back in about 1991. Now the council have seven alternative routes for a Western by-pass and are running a consultation process. Please fill-in a form, available from Hereford Library or from the council website (and do so before the consultation closes on 20th March). Also do please sign the 38 degrees petition against the by-pass.

On Wednesday 28th February, as part of the Left Bank’s weekly politics, ethics and environment sessions the Green Party are hosting a public debate on the by-pass. If you live in Herefordshire, please come and join-in: 7.30pm, this Wednesday, all welcome and free admittance.

Here are a few recommendations I’d like to explore.

How can we improve access and permeability for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users, while decreasing it for cars?

How to make safer routes so children can walk and cycle to school?

Which roads would we like to see pedestrianized?

Lowering urban speed limits would help: by how much and where?

Could we introduce a congestion charge or toxin tax as has been done in London?

Could the council impose a parking charge on people using supermarket car parks?

When might we see battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses, trams and cars replacing fossil fuelled ones in Hereford? (This is beginning to happen in some places, and will be the subject of another blog in a few days time).

Open Letter to Malcolm Turnbull PM

Highbury Quarry

Tilt renewables want to turn the old Highbury Quarry into a pumped storage facility.

The Australian power company AGL plans to close the huge Liddell coal fired power station by 2022, and replace it with renewables and storage. The Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently pleaded with them to keep it open saying “You can’t run an electricity system just on solar panels and wind farms. You can’t.” Well, Mr Turnbull, you are wrong, and you are holding back the Australian economy with your outdated understanding of emerging technologies. Let me explain.

Australia could use the power of the sun and wind for all its energy needs, for electricity, heating, cooling and transport, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There would be many advantages in doing so. Obviously there would be the environmental advantages of cleaner air and plummeting carbon emissions. What is less well understood is that now there would be enormous economic benefits. The costs of renewable energy and of storage technologies continue to fall as repairing old coal fired power stations rises. With renewables, once the equipment is up and running the ongoing costs are minimal, whereas with fossil fuels, as they are burnt, there is the ongoing cost of fuel. With every year that passes the balance tips further in favour of renewables and storage.

Understanding storage is of critical importance. Batteries are the best known form of storage, and in 2017 the number of home energy storage batteries in use in Australia tripled as their cost tumbled, and as costs are projected to keep falling people will keep buying them to back-up their rooftop solar photovoltaic panels. There is now a cumulative capacity of 170MWh in all these domestic scale batteries, and this is bound to keep rising rapidly.

A few months ago, with much fanfare, Tesla opened the world’s biggest battery adjacent to the Hornsdale wind farm in South Australia. It brings another 100MWh of storage onto the system. Many more batteries are planned, both domestic and industrial in scale. In Adelaide there are plans to install solar panels and batteries to 50,000 homes, which would in effect add a virtual power station with 250MWh of storage.

However it is not just batteries that will be used to store all the cheap, clean, wind and solar energy. Tilt renewables are planning a new pumped hydro storage facility in an old quarry in the Adelaide suburbs, with a capacity of 1350MWh storage. They are also planning on adding a 44MW solar array and a 26MWh battery to their 368MW Snowtown Wind Farm, which all taken together with their pumped storage, will greatly increase the usefulness of the wind farm.

Solar Reserve expect soon to start construction of the 150MW Aurora concentrating solar thermal power station, just north of Port Augusta, also in South Australia. This will have eight hours full load thermal storage, thus adding another 1200MWh of storage.

As transport systems switch to hydrogen fuel cells and battery electric vehicles they will soak up vast quantities of surplus solar and wind generated electricity. Hydrogen, methanol and other storage gases and liquids will be used as more ways of storing energy, to add to the batteries, pumped hydro and thermal methods of storage. A 100% renewable energy economy should be every bit as reliable as the existing infrastructure, as well as being less polluting and cheaper.

South Australia has elections coming up on 17th March 2018 and energy policy is a central issue. In 2012 I wrote a blog called ‘Repowering Port Augusta’, where I argued for building renewable energy facilities and then closing down the dirty and decrepit Northern and Playford B coal power stations. Unfortunately these obsolete power stations were closed before the renewables were rolled out, compounding mismanagement and leading to a shortage of electricity, chaos, blackouts and price hikes across South Australia. Jay Weatherill’s Labour Party and Nick Xenophon’s SA Best Party have both now come to understand the need to switch to a renewables based economy. Please Malcolm Turnbull and Steven Marshall get your Liberal Coalition Parties up to speed with what is now technically possible and what the advantages might be for the Australian economy. Please help roll out the whole raft of renewable and storage technologies as fast as possible, ideally before obsolete old Liddell closes in 2022!

New YouTube video channel

I’ve now got a YouTube channel! A few months ago Elwyn Lear filmed me giving a talk in Leominster, Herefordshire. He has kindly and skilfully edited the film and created a YouTube channel for me. This film is one hour and five minutes long. We are hoping to create more films to put on the channel over the coming months, most of which we envisage being very much shorter.

In the current film the question I seek to answer is ‘Can we feed 9 billion people sustainably?’ To which basically I say an emphatic YES, but with some pretty big ‘ifs and buts’. We need to change global income distribution to eliminate poverty, probably via a global universal basic income. We need changes in diet and in farming systems, which probably need to include a decrease of 70 or 80% in global meat consumption. We need to use the best of modern technology, which includes greenhouses with integrated renewable energy for heating, cooling and, where appropriate, desalination. (Genetic modification seems something of a red herring: there is very little evidence that it helps sustainably increase productivity.)

In the film I talk about a dozen or so farms that I think are showing the way to go. They are a very diverse bunch, emphasizing that there is no one single solution, but indicating that with many more farms like these, we could indeed feed 9 billion people and do so incredibly sustainably. As most of the farming systems I focus on produce vastly more food per acre than is the norm there should be a vast increase in space for rewilding. Also as these systems use few if any chemical inputs on-farm biodiversity should also flourish.

This is rather a long film at one hour and five minutes, which is quite a long time to listen to me chunttering on. If you do get around to watching it, please send me any comments you like. I always find the feedback useful.

The film is here.