India to kick-start the hydrogen age

[Bernie Gunther]

A study by Stefanie Böge of the Wuppertal Institute in Germany shows the potential in this direction. She took a very simple product, strawberry yoghurt, which can be made at home with milk and fruit from the immediate area, and worked out how far the industrial system meant its components had to travel before a small jar could reach the supermarket. The result? The surprising figure of 3,494km.

http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/sc5/dc5.html

 

[Bernie Gunther]

According to the Swedish Food Institute, 15.8 MJ of energy is needed by the industrial system to produce, transport and sell a 1kg loaf which provides our bodies with 10 MJ when eaten. Similarly, 1kg of frozen peas takes 22.6MJ to produce and distribute, ten times the amount of energy the peas contain. The figures for beef grown on fertilised pasture are similar: each kilo delivers 6MJ of energy when eaten but absorbs 64.2MJ of fossil energy in the course of reaching the shop. Fertilisers in fact represent about half the fossil energy required by conventional chemical agriculture and between five and ten per cent of the energy used in an industrial country.

In Britain as long ago as 1978, transporting food to shops accounted for a further 11% of national energy use. Since that statistic was calculated, there has been a 50% increase in the distance food travels to reach our plates so the amount of fuel used must have grown substantially. Putting everything together, as much as a quarter of all fossil energy could now be consumed by the food sector.

http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/sc6/c6.html

The linked text supplies detailed footnotes with the citations for all that stuff, I chopped them out of the quote above to make it easier to read.

 

[Crispy]

It does not show it. It's just says that localized food production will same energy. And that is simply a wrong assumption.
For example the amount of energy one needs to spend to produce the same amount of food differs in different areas (depending on soil, climate etc.). This could mean that one needs less energy to produce food in one area and move it to the place where it is consumed then to produce food locally.
The above is just one example of things you did not take into consideration

So importing apples from New Zealand, when British varieties are around is a good idea and not a waste of energy? That's an extreme example, but if there's a sliding scale from this at one end, to trying to grow dry, acidic soil loving plants in alkaline bogs at the other - there must be a cut off point, where the energy used to produce food is at it's most efficient compared to the energy gained.

 

[MikeMcc]

I came across some data on modern low-head turbines earlier (I was looking for something else) http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/sc5/c5.html

Thanks for that. I agree that, where possible, small scale generation should be used. This can use a wide variety of sources. But things like these low head turbines are quite inefficient and will have quite limited potential. In comparison we can have wind turbines like Swaffham I & II generating 3.3MW between them, enough to provide 75% of the electrical needs of the town. Just down the road there is the power station at Thetford run on chicken waste generating 38.5MW.

Personally I'd like to see more incentives towards greater insulation of premises, especially industrial units. More grants to bring in small scale wind generator in the 3 to 5 KW range and more use of solar water heating. There are a host of technologies that could be used that would help to reduce the load that needs to be supplied over the medium to long term. As pointed out, this is probably a more economically as well as environmentally more sound. I believe the figures that were being banded about were that for the same investment as one nuclear plant the size of Sizewell, that it is quite possible to generate an additional 50% of power using small scale local generators.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

There's a lot of very interesting stuff about working community level energy schemes in the online book that link came from.

Douthwaite's suggestion seems to be that community level food and energy security is highly desirable, for a range of reasons beyond simply doing something about climate change through efficient and renewable energy use. In effect he's arguing for it as part of a strategy for protecting quality of life and standards of living against the destructive effects of global capitalism (e.g. using local trading schemes to avoid competing with workers in China to see who can earn less, work longer hours and have weaker health and safety regulations) as well as various environmental problems.

He's also presenting a fairly decent case for it being do-able.

I'm naturally quite interested in this given that I'd sort of come to similar conclusions. What I hadn't really got my head around until I read that is how you actually finance it and provide the community level organisational structures to support it, based on real-world case histories. Very good stuff.

http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/contents.html

One of the key tricks seems to be to utilise a range of different approaches based on your local conditions, and to balance energy saving through good insulation, localising food and other forms of production wherever possible to reduce energy demand. Then meeting the demand you've got, using hydro if you've a river, biomass to feed CHP systems if you've got the space to grow it, biogas if you've got lots of silage, solar and wind working together to complement each other etc. Putting your surplus into the grid and using it as a backup when necessary.

I think hydrogen may have some potential for energy storage though, given that most of the renewable systems tend to be variable in output.

 

[Serguei]

there must be a cut off point, where the energy used to produce food is at it's most efficient compared to the energy gained.

There is a cut off point. It is called price. If the price of transporting apples from New Zealand was too high nobody would imports apples from there. Fuel cost is part of the cost of apples.
There is no other practical way of avaluating if it is worth to bring something from abroad unless you live in a communist state with state planning.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

But the price is what it is because fossil fuels are currently relatively cheap, this says nothing about the availability of energy or the impact of using that kind of energy in respect of climate change.

Optimising for profitability using price may be practical in the sense that the control systems of the global economy are set up to do that, but it doesn't mean that it optimises in any useful way for sustainability.

 

[Serguei]

But the price is what it is because fossil fuels are currently relatively cheap, this says nothing about the availability of energy or the impact of using that kind of energy in respect of climate change.

May be we should ask the government to increase taxes on petrol? And send the green lobby to break up lorry drivers' pickets ?
This all obviously will result in children from poor families not having access to fresh fruit, but who cares?

Optimising for profitability using price may be practical in the sense that the control systems of the global economy are set up to do that, but it doesn't mean that it optimises in any useful way for sustainability.

And what is the alternative? What would you do if you were a prime minister?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Relatively cheap fossil fuels mean that it makes sound economic sense to ship apples from New Zealand when we can grow perfectly good ones within walking distance of almost anywhere in the UK. Allowing profitability to be the sole basis of resource decisions like this is frequently going to cause us to do things that are completely stupid in sustainability terms. I can see no way to fix this while the economic needs of the global market takes priority over any other criteria.

 

[Serguei]

Relatively cheap fossil fuels mean that it makes sound economic sense to ship apples from New Zealand when we can grow perfectly good ones within walking distance of almost anywhere in the UK.

Why it is cheaper to grow apples in New Zealand?

Allowing profitability to be the sole basis of resource decisions like this is frequently going to cause us to do things that are completely stupid in sustainability terms. I can see no way to fix this while the economic needs of the global market takes priority over any other criteria.

This is the only practical way of making decisions unless you plan to create a new system similar to the USSR with a new dictatorship.

 

[poet]

Batteries > hydrogen. H2 is only getting pushed because it'll give esso something to sell.

 

[poet]

Renewables are great. The problem is that they will never be able to replace the need to burn oil, gas, coal or use nuclear power.

They'll fucking well have to mate - in case you missed it, we are actually going to run out of all those old favourites pretty quickly. Coal is cheap while we have lots of coal, but it'll become very expensive when the big opencasts bottom out. Same goes for gas and oil - while they're not set to run out for a very long time, they'll become more expensive than renewables far sooner than most people think, IMO in less than two decades. Nuclear ores will run out just as quickly as fossil fuels, but to add to the anti-nuclear argument, no-one has done it profitably in contrast to the legion farmers finding out that renting a hillside to a windfarm is more profitable than putting sheep on it.

 

[Serguei]

Nuclear ores will run out just as quickly as fossil fuels

Do you have any numbers about it or you just speculating?

BTW fossil fuels, although a lot of them have been spent, allowed us to get to the situation when we can afford to talk about producing electricity from wind and sun.
If humanity did not start burning coal and oil we would not have any technology and we would have burnt by now all forests and majority of us would go hungry each time the weather was not good enough to allow us to produce enough crops for a winter.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Do you have any numbers about it or you just speculating?
<snip>

I've linked to the relevant numbers at least twice in reply to your posts.

I presume from this that you don't bother reading evidence people provide?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Summary here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/2587.jsp#four

With a great deal more detail here

 

[poet]

BTW fossil fuels, although a lot of them have been spent, allowed us to get to the situation when we can afford to talk about producing electricity from wind and sun.
If humanity did not start burning coal and oil we would not have any technology and we would have burnt by now all forests and majority of us would go hungry each time the weather was not good enough to allow us to produce enough crops for a winter.

And where in my post did I take some primitivist stance? I am for renewables because fairly soon they will become our only option. It's iirrelevant, but your point about food security being dependent on fossil fuels is utterly invalid as numerous ancient civilisations had very stable food supplies (at least for the wealthy). Technological development was kick-started by fossil fuels but was not dependent on them. They're all big pointless what-ifs and historical nuance however compared to the reality.

Within (at the very latest) 200 years, we will have no more viable coal, gas, oil or useful radioactive ores. That's simple fact, any current challenge to that hypothesis is pseudoscience bullshit. We are about to run out of a finite resource that our entire world is based upon. We need answers as to how we move on, and neither denial nor apocalyptic hysteria are an ounce of good to anyone. The only future we have is renewables if we don't want to go back to peasant farming and dying in our forties. The question is not whether we use alternative power sources but what we use and how we get there.