New host is live

Well that was interesting.  Ok, so howtopowertheworld.com is now no longer hosted with Sitesell.com, but rather with 1and1.co.uk.  First of all, I'm really impressed with the speed and helpfulness of their customer service team - makes Sitesell - SBI! - look a tad slow.

So the site should be exactly the same as it was before, but my contact forms may look a little different, but otherwise business as usual.

Now begins the fun of redesigning the site.  I've learned a lot about what I want to do with it, and it's only taken 2 years....  Still, a learning curve is a learning curve.

Google have recently updated the PageRank of the site to 2, which is pretty good, so I'd like to leave as much of the existing content there as possible, preferably on the same pages.  Since I'm now getting almost 200 unique visitors per day, I'd rather not have them/you land on empty pages.

What I'm going to try to do is combine the easily update-able blog platform with the static information behind it.  So, say I write a "blog post", i.e. an interesting bit of news I want to discuss etc.  I can then link to all the relevant articles I may have, or will yet write, about that topic.  This allows me the best of both worlds, and gives the most value to you, dear visitor.

Now to work out the best way to do it.!

Gulf stream not slowing

A little while ago I posted an article about how cold the UK was at the time, and suggested that the kind of weather we experienced at the time resembled what the climate of the UK would be without the effects of the Gulf Stream. (http://blog.howtopowertheworld.com/2010/01/its-very-cold-in-britain-is-it-climate.html)

Happily, recent research suggests that the Gulf Stream shows absolutely no sign of slowing.  Please bear in mind that films such as The Day After Tomorrow are complete fantasy.

There is no significant trend in overturning strength between 2002 and 2009. Altimeter data, however, suggest an increase of 2.6 Sv since 1993, consistent with North Atlantic warming during this same period. Despite significant seasonal to interannual fluctuations, these observations demonstrate that substantial slowing of the AMOC did not occur during the past 7 years and is unlikely to have occurred in the past 2 decades.  

Willis, J. K. (2010), Can in situ floats and satellite altimeters detect long‐term changes in Atlantic Ocean overturning?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L06602, doi:10.1029/2010GL042372.

Hurrah.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8589512.stm

The UK's new feed in tariff

As of yesterday (2010-04-01), electrical micro generation receives a guaranteed sum for each kilowatt hour generated, the aim to promote the installation of such technology.

How does it work?

Imagine you're a homeowner (in this day and age?) or run a small business.  You can install solar PV panels, a wind turbine, or even a small hydroelectric turbine if you happen to have a stream nearby.

You generate electricity.  You get paid by your supply company for every kWh (kilowatt hour, aka a "unit") you generate and use at home (electricity which displaces the electricity you would have otherwise bought) and if you're really lucky you can export electricity back to them and get paid for that too, though that rate is much smaller.

This is guaranteed for a fixed term, and the rates are index linked for inflation.  This should provide a return on investment of around 5-8%.  So, if you have a spare £30k lying around to install the technology, it seems a fairly risk-free investment.

This is great news, on the whole.  Micro generation is a step towards distributed generation (lots of small generators instead of or complementing a few centralised plants) and it's exploited a resource which otherwise wouldn't be used.  As the technology is so expensive at the moment, investing without the support of a feed in tariff would be more risky, and it would certainly be almost impossible to pay back the capital expenditure of installing the technology in the first place.  The feed in tariff removes the uncertainty of how much will be paid per unit, so the only variable is the energy resource (wind, sunshine etc).

In the UK, this scheme caps at installations of 5MW (more than you'd ever have at home - this amount would be a small onshore wind farm.)  In other countries, for example Germany, the feed in tariff does not cap, and is available to all generators, including the owners of large wind farms.  In the UK we have a different, more complicated method for large renewable generators known as the Renewables Obligation (which I'll describe in another post).

Where does the money come from?

If you have micro generation, you receive money for it from your supplier (the utility company).  So, the money comes from the pockets of the utility.  But, of course, it doesn't.  The utility will pass on the costs to its customers through the bill.  Since those with micro generation probably won't buy much electricity in the first place, the bills of those who don't have micro generation will pay for those who do.

You may have a problem with how fair this is.  Remember that it costs a considerable amount to gain access to the investment (to install solar panels or a wind turbine), so the people who do so will probably be fairly well off already.  Those who cannot gain access to it are those without the money to invest: the poorer.  So, the poor are essentially paying a little extra to pay for the wealthy, who make money out of the process.

Thus, the cost of the tariff is socialised.  Remember, though, that there are also social benefits.  Micro generation reduces the burden on the central power system, and can even generate to the grid, so it's not as simple as taking from the poor to give to the rich (those truly vulnerable to price increases would be protected, and given that the few people who will install micro generation will be small compared to all the customers of the utility, the cost will be tiny when spread out.)

The feed in tariff applies only to electricity: this time next year will hopefully see the introduction of the "Renewable Heat Incentive", which promises the same function for micro generated heat.

More information is available at http://www.fitariffs.co.uk.

Another new direction

I should be revising, so naturally this is the time when I write a blog post.

My "energy term" is coming to an end.  Frankly, there's so much information to be known, I'll be digesting it for a very long time.  But it has led me to think about the nature of this website.

For a long time I've not been happy with the structure of the main site.  For those of you who are not familiar with "Site Build It!", the host and quasi content management system I use, it very much pushes the builder towards a static website full of articles.  This is great in some circumstances, but in this particular "niche", I've often just felt like I'm writing a not so helpful version of Wikipedia.

I'd like to make howtopowertheworld.com into a fully functioning blog, probably Wordpress based (sorry, Google).  I'd prefer to discuss news articles, current affairs, speculate, and do all that discussion-based stuff which is very difficult when every page in a website has to be a "keyword focussed content page".

The blogging platform is just easier, more familiar and more in line with my aims for the site.  I'd like to continue to educate and share my views, but the website as it stands feels more like "this is a wind turbine" than "this is what I think of the new UK feed in tariff."  Both are useful, but Wikipedia is certainly better at the former, and there's no need to reinvent the wheel when there's so much else to be done.

This blog illustrates the kind of thing I mean.  It's an excellent blog, and I fully recommend reading it.

I'm not sure what I'll do with the existing articles.  I may recycle useful bits into blog posts, I may decide to just store them on my hard drive until I feel able to beat Wikipedia!

I welcome your comments on what you'd like to see, the topics to be discussed, and so forth.

Actually, I think I've just worked out something major my site currently lacks: participation.  I want you to comment on my posts, to challenge me, to engage me, to make me think, to ask questions.  Discussion is far more useful to everyone.

This format will also allow me to post more regularly, as in the current system writing a page takes an absolute age (rhyme unintentional).

The current website package expires in June.  I'd like to have made the switch before that, but if not, there will be a new site from June onwards.

Michael

It's very cold in Britain. Is it climate change?

As those of you living in Britain might have noticed, it's very cold at the moment.  At 9am today it was -3 degrees at a weather station not far from me in the south east of England.

I realise that to many of you around the world, this is nothing, but it has brought with it a significant amount of snow which is making transport difficult.  I know, that other parts of the world experience far worse conditions than this, but we're not used to it here as these are unusual events.  The impact of an event is inversely proportional to its frequency, remember: we don't have vast amounts of grit or a fleet of snowploughs.

Anyway, what's causing it?  Climate change?  The usual order of things here is that we receive westerly winds (from the west), which are warmed by the Gulf Stream. It comes straight over from America.

So what's happening now?  There's currently a high pressure system sitting over the North Atlantic.  It's barely moving, and it's causing the normal winds to move around it.  This sort of high pressure system is called a "blocking high".

The image above is taken from Metcheck.com: the activity of the westerly winds on 7th January.  I took a screenshot from here, but the picture will update daily.

You can clearly see the fast moving westerly winds being diverted around Europe. (Red is fast, blue is slow)


This blocking high means that cold air is being brought down from the north east: Scandinavia and the Arctic.  Put another way: this is what our climate would be like without the Gulf Stream, the warming effects of which are being partially removed temporarily by this high pressure system.

So, is this climate change?  No.  We can't say that any isolated weather events are caused by climate change unless we notice that they happen more and more frequently year after year for example.  This is just weather.

What we can say is that if the Gulf Stream weakens, as some have theorised with melting ice caps causing a reduction in salinity of the oceans, then we can expect more of this kind of weather with climate change.

Note:  I am no expert on ocean salinity, and I'm not claiming that the Gulf Stream is likely to shut down with climate change.  I'm merely going with what could happen if that particular claim is true.

Update:  The BBC recently released this picture on their news channel and website, which I think is "pretty cool"!

This photo taken from BBC News

This train has new car smell

I’m sitting on the first high speed train in the UK, leaving St Pancras International station in about two minutes.  The service only started on the 13^th, hence the smell of the nice new trains.  Hopefully, I’ll be travelling at a top speed of 140 mph, so I must type quickly!

Anyway, I’m fully aware of my lack of updates of late, and I duly apologise.  Let me tell you what I’ve been up to.

The last eleven weeks have been an absolute whirlwind of new experiences and knowledge.  I’ve just finished the exams for the “core” term of my MSc in Environmental Technology at Imperial College London.  The last exam was on Friday, and today is the first time I’ve felt mentally able to reflect upon the last eleven weeks.

So, what have I learned?  Well, let me give you a flavour of the courses I took:  ecology; environmental economics; environmental law; environmental policy and management; pollution management and control; risk assessment and statistics.

This probably explains my previous post a couple of weeks into the course: the environment is an interdisciplinary subject, something I understand so much better now.  When the exams rolled around, I found myself using information and techniques learned from all aspects of the course in each specific topic. 

I know how river water becomes drinking water, how the interactions between predators and prey work in an ecosystem, the differences between an Environmental Impact Assessment and a Strategic Environmental Assessment, the application of Tort law in the UK and Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning elucidation of how a community can successfully manage a commons. 

And now I also know just how little I really know.  The topic is huge.  There’s no way to be an expert in “the environment”. I’ll never be an ecologist, economist or lawyer, but at least now I’ll be able to talk to the people who are, in their own language.  Let’s hope it makes it easier for me to explain to you how everything fits together.

Next term, by the way, will be entirely about energy.  So that should be more relevant to the website!

Apologies for the lengthy pontificating, but I feel my absence deserved an explanation!  As I reflect upon the term and file away my notes, I’m sure plenty of what I’ve come across will filter into this blog and the website.

Have a very merry Christmas, wherever you may be, and remember: in the wake of the Copenhagen conference going somewhat awry, in the aftermath of a global recession and feelings of general discontent, just take a walk outside and realise the miracle going on around you.  It’s more amazing than you’d think.

Thanks for reading,

Michael

The need for interdisciplinary thinking

"There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat.  This is an area of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.  It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged."

These are not my words, but those of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, published in 1962.  She was talking about pesticides, but these words hit me so hard I stopped and read them few times.  It seems her words transcend time and circumstance.

In this respect, the world has not changed.  We suffer terribly from tunnel vision when it comes to our own spheres of experience and influence.  Take a problem, show it to to ten people with different specialties and you get ten different solutions to slightly different versions of the original problem.

So why is this a bad thing, and how is it relevant in the context of our modern issues?  Take climate change as an example.  The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is too great, and this could lead to bad things.  We have to balance this with the need to continue to produce energy.  We turn to experts to help us.  What is the result?

Physicist:  Well these are the raw numbers: we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2020 and reduce global energy consumption by 40%.  Off you go then.

Economist:  By making the non polluting options cheaper and punishing those who pollute with fines we can rely on the market to remove the heavy polluters.

Politician:  Well we have to make sure that we can afford it, we avoid impacting the public too much and we continue to be voted into power.

Oil Tycoon:  We can keep using oil if we research carbon capture; and we can always invest resources in unconventional sources of oil like sands and shale to keep the world running.

So you can see the difficulties we have here.  They all accept climate change is happening (for the most part - even if the oil tycoon fails to believe it, he still plays along now that he has no choice), but they see different problems.  Due to different problems, we get different solutions.

The physicist is stating the problem exactly, but he misses that what he suggests may not be possible.  The economist understands the problem, but defines the solution in terms of his knowledge.  The politician is very concerned, but feels he has to juggle too many things, tries to please everyone and goes nowhere. The oil tycoon wants to stay in business.

These people need to talk to each other.  The politicians have the power, but they simply cannot be expected to know everything to come to a completely informed decision.  They turn to experts.  Does this help?  Well as we have just seen, the diversity of the experts chosen is as important as the quality of the experts.

Everything is connected in this field.  The days of the expert are gone: time to herald the days of interdisciplinary thinking.

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Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.  Penguin Classics.  Quoted text on page 29.