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News & Views From the Front Line
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Glen Bennett, EAE Ltd
Yesterday I interviewed Glen Bennett, founder and MD of EAE Ltd, a Scottish leaflet marketing business. This video, made by young people as part of a wider project, shows some of the achievements he has made on his objective of making the company zero carbon.
What the video doesn't show is the trials and tribulations Glen went through. The wind turbine took them 2½ years to get installed - they had to work with 22 different organisations to do it. Many were clearly not up to the job - one planner asked what ‘kWh’ stood for, another tried to kill the project at the last minute for (unnecessary) noise testing.
Then, as soon as it was installed, EAE were hit with a business rate increase as the turbine counted as a business improvement! That levy has now been removed, but only after Glen ran a media campaign to point out the stupidity of the situation. Excess electricity from the turbine is simply dumped onto the grid for free as the current set up for charging would cost more than it would generate.
Why is this not easier? Why should pioneers like Glen have to go through the modern day equivalent of the 12 tasks of Hercules to cut his company's carbon footprint? The recent Government strategies will lower some of these bureaucratic barriers, but Glen's story shows that it ain't always easy being green.
Labels: carbon footprint, eae ltd, glen bennett, renewable energy, wind turbines
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
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Friday, 10 July 2009
A thought for Friday: Do you think...
... when this was built in 1770, did people complain about shadow flicker, bird strikes or aesthetic impacts, or did they just see at as an essential energy source?
BTW, this one, in Bruges, is still grinding corn. Don't think the steps would meet modern building regs tho!
Labels: wind turbines
# posted by Gareth Kane : 10:11
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Monday, 1 June 2009
"Nice idea, but it will never work"
There is a lovely story (probably apocryphal*) of a student taking a design proposal to the head of Cambridge University Engineering Department. The Prof looked at the plans and said"Nice idea, Whittle, but it will never work."
The student was of course Sir Frank Whittle and the design was for the jet engine.
Whether or not exchange really happened, there is a whole cadre of such eminent thinkers, either retired or in the twilight of their careers, who regularly try to throw similar sticks into the spokes of green/low carbon technology. Letters regularly appear in the press from these chaps, typically saying:
"Before everyone rushes to embrace wind power/the hydrogen economy/electric vehicles/biomass (delete as appropriate), a few simple sums show that to replace all electricity/gasoline vehicles/domestic heating systems would require [something impossible/very expensive]. This headlong rush to do [X] is foolhardy if not downright dangerous".
Those simple sums usually assume that the technology involved is intended to replace its conventional equivalent entirely, without any change to usage patterns, without any evolution in the technology concerned and at current prices. They ignore the immutable laws of technological development - as technologies mature their costs plummet, efficiencies improve, synergies emerge and user behaviour changes to suit. But you have to start at the beginning of that cycle, you can't just parachute into the maturity phase.
The annoying thing for me is that these would-be Cassandras know this better than anyone. I don't know if they're just stuck in their ways, need to feel important and relevant, or whether they just resent the world passing them by. But given all their knowledge and experience, the world would be a better place if they would open their minds and become part of the solution, not part of the problem.
* The Cambridge angle to the story doesn't seem to match up with Whittle's biog, but he did apparently meet such resistance in the RAF.
Labels: biomass, hydrogen economy, technology, wind turbines
# posted by Gareth Kane : 05:47
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Wednesday, 19 November 2008
As seen on TV...
I spent yesterday lunchtime shivering my extremities off and squinting into the sun on Blyth Quayside while being interviewed for BBC TV's Countryfile programme. The gist of the programme was the trade off between impacts of energy projects in local habitats vs the need to tackle global climate change. My argument was that it wasn't that simple - if climate change goes unchecked, the local habitats will suffer anyway.The previous interviewee was Prof Ian Fells, a well known media figure, who had recently written a policy paper on UK energy supply, which he had been discussing. The most controversial statement in this document is its first statement "Security of energy supply must now be seen as taking priority over everything else, even climate change." Interestingly the rest of report demonstrates a low carbon energy scenario based on nuclear which could go a long way to tackle climate change - in other words security vs climate is a false choice. I suspect this sentence is designed to grab the headlines.
The central thesis of the paper is to change everything to electrical energy (road transport and domestic heating included) and use nuclear plus the Severn barrage and a bit of wind to supply that electricity. But the issue of uranium reserves is not tackled - other estimates of the security of that supply suggest that they could run out in less than a decade under a high-nuclear scenario (eg Paul Mobbs in Energy Beyond Oil). Overall it is a good read, but very partisan - wind is described as 'highly subsidised' but the levels of subsidy to the nuclear industry not mentioned etc.
I made a few comments to this end, but I don't know if they'll make the final cut. The piece will go out on the morning of Sunday 30 November on BBC.
I made a few comments to this end, but I don't know if they'll make the final cut. The piece will go out on the morning of Sunday 30 November on BBC.
Labels: energy, nuclear, terra infirma, wind turbines
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:23
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Monday, 17 November 2008
Weekly Tip #34: Blowing in the wind
This is the latest of a series of tips extracted from the forthcoming Green Business Bible e-book:Wind is currently the most cost effective source of renewable energy, but you should tackle planning permission and community concerns on wind before investment. The small microturbines are useless in urban environments.
Labels: renewable energy, tips, wind turbines
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:16
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Wednesday, 5 September 2007
Blowing in the Wind?
Last week I saw a presentation from a representative of the New and Renewable Energy Centre, NaREC. They've been testing a Windsave micro-wind turbine on the roof of their building in Blyth, Northumberland. The results were not good.The turbine was rated at 1.5kW, but the operational curve showed that this output would only be achieved in a Force 6 wind. Typical windspeeds in Blyth were about a third of this, meaning the output was closer to 300W. This isn't great, but not as bad as it might sound - according to my meter, our house consumes about this or less when we're not using the oven, toaster or anything else with an element.
The problem is that the operational curve is based on ideal laminar wind conditions. Being low down in a built up area, the turbine in Blyth was achieving less than half of what it should be as turbulence caused by other roofs caused it to oscillate from side to side on its vertical mounting, spilling the wind.
Apparently the manufacturer is adding some extra damping to reduce this effect, but I can't help thinking it would probably be better leaving wind power to the big guys for the time being.
Labels: wind turbines
# posted by Gareth Kane : 13:47
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Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Global Wind Turbine Shortage
According to the Guardian, there is a world shortage of wind turbines, which the paper is "blaming" on George Bush giving tax credits to stimulate the US wind industry. You will rarely hear me defend the current US Pres, but this must be one of those times. The shortage is pushing up prices (and threatening the viability of projects in the UK), but this can only be a good thing in the medium-long term as demand will increase supply - although there are worries that the tax credit scheme might not last for long.Wind is currently the most cost effective form of renewable electricity generation, but will always be controversial due to the visual impact of turbines. There has been much debate over the years about their output and the length of time they take to generate more power than they consumed during their construction. Estimates for the latter range from 3 months to never. For a comparison a modern gas fired power station will take 7 years make up for their embedded energy. The problem for the wind industry is that output is highly dependent on location and weather, which doesn't affect fossil fuel plants.
The energy market is so political that it is hard to determine who is telling the truth on these figures - you tend to find that research tends to back the interests of those who commissioned it.
Labels: renewable energy, wind turbines
# posted by Gareth Kane : 12:18
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