Month: March 2012

My first reaction on hearing it, a year or two ago,  was that a link between climate and seismic activity seemed like utter, millennial, “pole shift”, Mayan calendar crazy talk.  However – I’ve come to realize that serious people are taking it seriously. Have not yet read the new book described here, Waking the Giant, by Geophysicist Bill McGuire – it’s not officially out yet – but its now on my list.

The Royal Institution: 

Twenty thousand years ago our planet was an icehouse. Temperatures were down six degrees; ice sheets kilometres thick buried much of Europe and North America and sea levels were 130m lower. The following 15 millennia saw an astonishing transformation as our planet metamorphosed into the temperate world upon which our civilisation has grown and thrived.

One of the most dynamic periods in Earth history saw rocketing temperatures melt the great ice sheets like butter on a hot summer’s day; (note: this is a little misleading – the glacial melt took 10,000 years – our own current forcing of the climate is proceeding on the order of decades and centuries, many times faster and stronger than ice age changes – PS) feeding torrents of freshwater into ocean basins that rapidly filled to present levels. The removal of the enormous weight of ice at high latitudes caused the crust to bounce back triggering earthquakes in Europe and North America and provoking an unprecedented volcanic outburst in Iceland. A giant submarine landslide off the coast of Norway sent a tsunami crashing onto the Scottish coast while around the margins of the continents the massive load exerted on the crust by soaring sea levels encouraged a widespread seismic and volcanic rejoinder.

In many ways, this post-glacial world mirrors that projected to arise as a consequence of unmitigated climate change driven by human activities. Already there are signs that the effects of climbing global temperatures are causing the sleeping giant to stir once again. Could it be that we are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one?

Author Bill McGuire is Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL. He was a member of the UK Government’s Natural Hazards Working Group, established in 2005 in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and in 2010 a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), addressing the Icelandic ash problem. He is a contributing author on the 2011 IPCC Report on climate change and extreme events. His current research focus is climate forcing of geological hazards. His books include: Natural Hazards and Environmental Change; A Guide to the End of the World – Everything You Never Wanted to Know; Surviving Armageddon – Solutions for a Threatened Planet; and Seven Years to Save the Planet. Bill presented the BBC Radio 4 series: ‘Disasters in Waiting and Scientists Under Pressure’ and ‘The End of the World Reports’ on Channel 5 and Sky News Channel. He has also made television appearances on BBC’s Horizon and Decoding the Past on the History Channel.

Engadget:

If you’re one of those worried about the battery on your expensive EV running out, look away now. Envia has unveiled a new cell that boasts a record-breaking energy density of 400Wh/kg (most currently offer between 100 and 150). It’s estimated that when commercialized, this could bring the cost of a 300-mile range EV down to as little as $20,000. The performance gains come from a special manganese-rich cathode and silicon-carbon nano-composite anode combination. The battery maker is also partly owned by GM, which unsurprisingly means we’re likely to see these very cells in its EVs in the future. Perhaps with the right choice of upholstery, we might see even better savings?

Daily Tech:

Envia Systems announced that it has made a cell with an energy density of 400 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg) that will be priced at roughly $125 per kilowatt-hour. This means that a $20,000 EV could travel about 300 miles on a single charge.

“In an industry where energy density tends to increase five percent a year, our achievement of more than doubling state-of-art energy density and lowering cost by half is a giant step towards realizing Envia’s mission of mass market affordability of a 300-mile electric vehicle,” said Envia Systems Chairman and CEO Atul Kapadia.

“Since the inception of Envia, our product team has worked tirelessly and logged over 25 million test channel hours to optimally develop each of the active components of the battery: Envia’s proprietary Si- C anode, HCMR cathode and EHV electrolyte,” said Dr. Sujeet Kumar, Envia Systems co-­founder, president & CTO. “Rather than just a proof-of-concept of energy density, I am pleased that our team was successful in actually delivering 400 Wh/kg automotive grade 45 Ah lithium­-ion rechargeable cells.”

Envia’s cells have already been put through independent testing by the Electrochemical Power Systems Department at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. The battery is expected to hit the market by 2015, and General Motors was named a key investor in the product, which could someday put EVs like the Chevrolet Volt in the top ranks and promote EV adoption.

If you care about whether your tax dollars are being well spent, note: “In 2009, Envia received $4 million from the Energy Department’s ARPA-E program to “develop lithium-ion batteries with the highest energy density in the world.”

Clean Technica:

A study finds solar lowered the price of peak electricity in Germany by up to 40 percent.

Solar produced about 3% of industrious Germany’s total electricity, but when it produced it matters more than how much, because of a utility ranking system for putting the most cost-effective power on the grid, called the Merit Order ranking, used in Germany and many EU nations to keep prices low.

The Fraunhofer Institute found that – as a result of the Merit Order ranking system – solar power had reduced the price of electricity on the EPEX exchange by 10 percent on the average, with reductions peaking at up to 40 percent in the early afternoon when the most solar power is generated.

Here’s how the Merit Order works.

Continue reading “How German Solar Has Made all Electricity Cheaper”

The video above tells the story of Amory Lovins and his famous 1976 essay  “The Road not taken”.

The essay has become a still-relevant prophetic classic of the environmental/renewable energy movement for its clear eyed assessment of the relative advantages of renewable energy – “The Soft Path”, versus the “Hard Path” technologies – fossil fuel and nuclear.
In the essay, Lovins pointed out the contradictions of a centralized grid in what he already perceived as a new age of networking and connectivity, and foresaw the implications of emerging climate science.

“The commitment to a long-term coal economy many times the scale of today’s makes the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentration early in the next century virtually unavoidabIe, with the prospect then or soon thereafter of substantial and perhaps irreversible
changes in global climate. Only the exact date of such changes is in question.”

What makes Lovins so compelling today is that his predictions of energy consumption growth, reviled as wildly beyond the pale when he first wrote them, have born out in the real world over 40 years.

Now Lovins is back in Foreign Affairs again,  with an assessment of where we’ve been, and where we are going in the ongoing transition from scarce to unlimited energy. Here are a few sample graphs.

Continue reading “Lovins: Farewell to Fossil Fuels”