Category Archives: Politics

North Sea Oil, DECC and Climate Change

This week DECC (that’s the UK Government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change) opened the 27th round of offshore petroleum licensing. This is a process of offering licences for offshore oil and gas exploration and production in the UK administered part of the North Sea.

photo: Creative Commons / Genghiskhanviet

The associated press release described this as “new opportunities for UK oil and gas exploration” … which “ensures the UK gets maximum benefit from our resources.” The Energy Minister Charles Hendry said “With around 20 billion barrels of oil still to be extracted, the UK Continental Shelf has many years of productivity left.”

Given the UK’s commitment to carbon dioxide emission reductions and the global agreement to limit warming to 2°C, do we need to spend time, money and energy exploring for more oil and gas to extract from the North Sea? If the limits imposed by the Earth system and our political system’s response establish a total amount of future emissions, isn’t it quite likely that existing, already discovered reserves of fossil fuels are more than sufficient? If in fact it would be very unwise to burn all the current reserves, why bother looking for more? George Monbiot made a similar point as the Government were approving new coal mines: Leave It In The Ground

It strikes me as odd, that neither the press release nor any of the other documentation associated with this new licensing phase even mentions the carbon dioxide emissions associated with the production and inevitable combustion of the newly discovered oil and gas they are hoping for. This omission leaves DECC looking schizophrenic, with one hand attempting to meet onerous emission reductions whilst the other simultaneously desperately scratches out the last remaining fossil fuels available.

A Lot of Hot Air? David Mackay Fudges the Figures in Favour of Nuclear Power

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Last week I had the opportunity to attend a lecture at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute given by Prof. David MacKay, chief scientific adviser to DECC (UK Government Department for Energy and Climate Change). There were two main focuses of his lecture: firstly, a discussion of various sources of energy and secondly, an introduction to DECC’s 2050 pathways tool.

The pathway tool I like and I would encourage anyone interested in the UK’s future energy system and associated carbon emissions to have a play with it. All I would say is that, like many scenario analyses, it is too narrow. The whole point of carrying out scenario analysis is to explore the possibility space. The DECC tool assumes both population and GDP growth. These parameters may be “out of the scope of consideration”, but I would have liked the energy and emissions tool to allow the exploration of steady-state and also economic contraction scenarios. I got the impression MacKay would also have liked to include this flexibility but he said Westminster wouldn’t allow it.

I did not like his comparison of energy sources though. He promotes the use of a single metric to compare energy sources: power density. This means the amount of power delivered per unit area, expressed in watts per square meter [W/m²]. The lecture focused on wind and nuclear power but the analysis can be done for solar power, energy crops, or fossil fuelled power stations.

The headline results were that wind has a power density of 2.5 W/m² whereas nuclear delivers 1000 W/m². Sounds good for nuclear and not so good for wind! But the difficulty is that MacKay is comparing apples and oranges.

In order to compare things quantitatively as MacKay is attempting to, it helps if units are the same. MacKay’s m² of wind farm are not the same as his m² of nuclear power station. There are three main problems with this analysis:

Layering
Time
Externalities

Layering

Cows in a wind farm

The square km of land underneath a nuclear power station is 100% used up. There is nothing else that land can be used for. However, with many renewables the land isn’t used up in a comparable way. Solar panels can be installed on the top of existing buildings requiring none of the underlying land to be used up. Wind farms use around 5% of the land under the turbines, leaving the remaining 95% available for other uses (such as livestock or crops). This 5% compared to 100% improves the power per unit area of wind turbines by a factor of 20.

Time
MacKay made no allowance for the time dimension. He just divided the power of a wind farm or power station by its area. This fails to consider that the nuclear power station took at least 10 years to build before its ~40 year generating lifespan, followed by a ~100 year decommissioning period. In contrast, the wind turbines are generating within months of build commencing and decommission can be similarly swift. This results in the nuclear power station using up the land for around three times longer than the period of time it is generating for, which effectively reduces its power per unit area by a factor of three.

Externalities
MacKay also made no allowance for the land requirements outside the perimeter fence of ether the nuclear power station or wind farm. This discounts the land required for the uranium mine, the uranium processing, the water required for cooling and importantly the waste storage. The wind turbines also required an iron ore mine, steel foundry and factory. I am not able to quantify the differences in land requirement but I expect the nuclear power station’s “invisible footprint” to be larger, especially when multiplying up the area used for waste storage by the duration for which the land is required (potentially many thousands of years) as described above. Finally, nuclear power stations have a non-zero probability of catastrophic failure, then requiring exclusion zones of hundreds of km² for decades (Chernobyl, Fukushima).

A Comparable Analysis?
A comparable analysis would consider the fractional land use (layering) of an energy source, the total duration for which this land was used (time) and the land required beyond the immediate installation (externalities). That MacKay’s analysis doesn’t consider these aspects, and that they impact the final results by many factors suggests to me that this metric of comparison is oversimplified. I do not object to the use of the power density metric but would like to see it done properly; otherwise it is comparing apples and oranges and is not useful information.

I don’t doubt that MacKay has considered the points raised above. I am worried that the seemingly-deliberate omission of these factors is presenting an overly political bias towards one source of energy.

According to the above back-of-the-envelope estimates, I would therefore amend MacKay’s comparison of nuclear (1000 W/m²) and wind (2.5 W/m²) to the more realistic 300 W/m² (accounting for time) and 50 W/m² (accounting for layering). These adjustments reduce the difference between nuclear and wind from 400- to 6-fold. A further unquantified adjustment to account for externalities is likely to reduce this still further.

Of course, in the final analysis the total land area that is needed is reflected by the naive energy densities MacKay calculates – to generate most of our power from wind (or solar, or biomass) would indeed require vast proportions of the countryside or sea surface to be utilised, and this is an important consideration. However, given the above considerations, it is clear that the headline numbers MacKay is promoting are unfair to renewables, and overly generous towards nuclear.

Coalition of the Willing

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Back in December, after the Copenhagen climate conference I wrote a quick post about China’s awkwardness. I suggested a ‘coalition of the willing’ comprising of those governments that were willing to make emission reductions should just get on with it, without the rogue states.

Today I’ve come across Coalition of the Willing, a fantastic little film about addressing climate change without the illusive unanimous agreement between governments.

Coalition Of The Willing from coalitionfilm on Vimeo.

‘Coalition of the Willing’ is a collaborative animated film and web-based event about an online war against global warming in a ‘post Copenhagen’ world.

‘Coalition of the Willing’ has been Directed and produced by Knife Party, written by Tim Rayner and crafted by a network of 24 artists from around the world using varied and eclectic film making techniques. Collaborators include some of the world’s top moving image talent, such as Decoy, World Leaders and Parasol Island.

The film offers a response to the major problem of our time: how to galvanize and enlist the global publics in the fight against global warming. This optimistic and principled film explores how we could use new Internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures to combat climate change. Through analyses of swarm activity and social revolution, ‘Coalition of the Willing’ makes a compelling case for the new online activism and explains how to hand the fight against global warming to the people.

To find out all about the project and to join our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, or get the iPhone App visit:
http://coalitionofthewilling.org.uk/

New UK Energy Minister and the Continuing Decline in Energy Production

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This post was first published on The Oil Drum. Read there for comments.

The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published their quarterly Energy Trends document last week. It covers up to the first quarter 2010. The key points:

Total energy production in Q1 2010 was 6.5% lower than in the first quarter of 2009.
Oil production fell by 6% compared to the first quarter of 2009.
Natural gas production was 9% lower compared with the first quarter of 2009. The UK was a net importer of gas in the first quarter of 2010 by 155 TWh compared with 106 TWh in the first quarter of 2009.
Coal production was 12.5% lower than a year earlier.
Nuclear’s supply increased by 1% on the first quarter of 2009.
Wind, hydro and other renewables supplied 6.5% less electricity than in the same period last year, with hydro down 44% as a result of less rainfall.
Final energy consumption rose by 4% between the first quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010, with rises in all sectors except transport which fell mainly due to the adverse weather conditions.
Gas demand was 13% higher than a year earlier.
Electricity consumption was 2.5% higher in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the same period last year.

It’s a familiar story: every year the UK’s primary energy production declines significantly. Today, primary energy production is almost half what it was at the peak just a decade ago. Has any other country, let alone major economy experienced such a speed and magnitude shift in its energy system outside wartime?

The rises in the demand data above are largely due to the colder winter and a degree of recovery from the recession. One could argue the decline in indigenous production played a role in the recession. If it did, I suggest it was a small role.

Data from DUKES 1.1-1.3.

The annual energy deficit in 2008 was 57.5 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe). That’s a lot of energy to import. The breakdown of this deficit in 2008 was 42% coal, 36% gas and 19% oil. Let’s just make a quick estimation on how much this is costing:

Fuel	Percentage	Deficit (mtoe)	2008 Cost/toe (£)	Total Cost (£bn)
Coal	42%	24.15	115	2.77
Gas	36%	20.70	191	3.95
Oil	19%	10.92	287	3.14
Total				9.86

UK Energy Deficit 2008. Energy data from DUKES 1.1-1.3. Prices from QEP 3.2.1.

In 2008 the gap cost the UK approximately £10 bn. Fuel prices were a little lower in 2009 (especially coal and gas at -17% and -15% respectively) and the recession closed the gap from 57.5 to 53 mtoe. A few years ago the energy sector was a net source of income for the UK. No longer. The government deficit and the growing debt is receiving the media attention, this energy deficit, now it its fifth year remains largely ignored.

Following the May election, the UK now has a new Energy Minister:

Chris Huhne MP, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

On the 24 June 2010, Huhne gave a speech to the Economist UK Energy Summit, it can be watched here: VIDEO

Did he address the chart above, our energy deficit in the same way chancellor George Osborne had addressed the fiscal deficit in his emergency budget earlier in the week? Well no, not directly. Economic recovery, energy security and climate stabilisation were identified as the key challenges. He isn’t a politician to question growth but did address the type of growth. “…dependence on fossil fuel would be folly. It would make us vulnerable to oil price spikes and volatility.” He called for a decarbonised economy stimulating growth and delivering on climate change and energy security. Sounds good but surely it is having one’s cake and eating it?

After stressing the urgency and seriousness of climate change Huhne addressed energy security. “It is vital we make the most of our domestic oil and gas assets…” indicating at least 20 billion barrels oil equivalent remain in UK waters and that we must continue to invest in exploration. His first mutually exclusive objective of delivering growth through decarbonising is now joined by his second of addressing climate change whist continuing to explore for new fossil fuel resources.

£200 bn of energy investment was said to be needed over the next decade, largely to replace existing assets. On new nuclear, Huhne stressed it will go ahead, but only if it can do so with no public subsidy. In my opinion this all but rules out nuclear as there is little precedent for wholly privately funded nuclear, but we shall have to wait and see. Whatever happens, it will be late with respect to the decommissioning schedule of the existing fleet of nuclear power stations.

Efficiency was described as the fourth energy resource (relegating nuclear and renewables to 5th and 6th?)–the cheapest way of closing the energy gap between demand and supply – “the Cinderella of the energy ball”. Smart meters and grids received a nod but he focused mainly on the existing aged housing stock. “Most of the homes in use in 2050 have already been built … we used more energy heating our homes than Sweden, where average January temperatures are 7 degrees Celsius lower than ours.” Addressing existing homes will be Huhne’s flagship programme. He’s talking about insulating millions of homes. It seems the improvements will be funded at least in part through the energy savings and recovered directly from household utility bills.

“The era of cheap energy is over. …tomorrow’s energy bills will undoubtedly be higher”

When asked about the lights going out, he ruled out wind and nuclear coming to the rescue due to the timeframe, but he stated gas fired power stations can be built in 18 months and assured us the lights wouldn’t go out on his watch. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) was described as vital to meeting climate objectives whilst keeping the lights on.

So in summary, Huhne didn’t address the fundamental peaking of energy supplies which surely should be the key driver for national energy policy today. The inconsistencies of shooting for growth whilst reducing energy use along with addressing climate change (by which I can only assume he means reducing carbon emissions) while encouraging future exploration for oil and gas are glaring. Meinshausen et. al. showed in their Nature paper last year the world has more than enough proved fossil fuel reserves already from a climate change point of view without having to discover more. His enthusiasm for CCS is also worrisome and I would see as largely incompatible with energy peaking scenarios. His focus on energy efficiency and especially domestic energy use is positive though. However there was no mention of transport at all.

New government, new minister but we still seem little closer to recognising the challenges ahead.

UK Carbon Cuts ‘on track’

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That was the headline today as the Government published its emissions score card for 2008 and so demonstrated that carbon dioxide (equivalent) emissions had fallen in line with the Climate Change Act’s carbon budget. The equivalent term just means that a whole bunch of greenhouse gases (inc. methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride) have been aggregated into units equivalent to CO2.

This is a good news story. Climate Change Minister Joan Ruddock is quoted in the press release:

Today’s emissions score card shows that the UK’s climate change policies are working and that we’re on track to meet our carbon targets.

We’re putting in place policies to make the low carbon transition by supporting investment in clean energy, in insulating homes and creating green jobs.

Call me a spoil sport, but I don’t buy it. One has to be careful when thinking about correlation and causation. I put it to you that the 1.9% decline in UK CO2e emissions from 2007 to 2008 was not in fact due to the “UK’s climate change policies” as Ruddock would have us believe but an inevitable result of the recession the country entered that year.

The Quarterly national accounts for 4th quarter 2008 (published 27th March 2009) can shed some light on the matter. The following charts show UK GDP growth, then the separate performance of the manufacturing and service sectors as we entered recession in 2008. Note the vertical scales are different.

Whilst total GDP growth for 2008 was still just positive for 2008 at 0.5% (the declines didn’t really manifest until the 2nd half of the year) this hides the fact that the relatively energy and carbon intense manufacturing sector was disproportionately hit by the recession.

I’m disappointed by the disingenuous (at best) way the Government is presenting the emission data. Claiming responsibility and credit whilst not recognising the surely highly significant role the recession has played in reducing UK emissions.

Looking forward, what can we expect? 2009 is very likely to show a further decline, strongly influenced by the continued decline in the economy. It is as I highlighted in a post a few months ago, economic collapse (as seen by the Soviet Union) is a tremendous way of cutting CO2 emissions.

I don’t think that is the climate change policy Joan Ruddock has in mind!

Why The Tories Won’t Win The 2010 Election

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Any day now Gordon Brown will announce the 2010 election. Following the discussions and analysis in the media one might be forgiven to wonder why we’re even bothering with an election. The expectation is for a clear Tory victory. The bookies have certainly made their mind up offering odds of just 1/12 for a Conservative win and 6/1 for Labour. However this may be as much a reflection of perceived public opinion as the book makers expert opinion of probability.

Houses of Parliament, Chris Vernon 2008

I don’t buy it. Whilst the Labour and Conservative parties receive similar coverage on the media, giving the impression of equal standing, the electoral reality could be quite different. Due to the vagaries of our first past the post electoral system and constituency boundaries, approximately equal share of the public vote doesn’t come close to delving approximately equal numbers of seats.

There are 646 Members of Parliament today, rising to 650 in 2010. To form a government David Cameron would need a majority, 324 seats of the old parliament, 326 in the new. He currently has 193 so needs a minimum net gain of 131 seats (68% more than today) based on the current 646, 133 in the new. Labour currently have 352 seats. Quite why we need four more MPs, which I guess will cost around a million pounds a year between them escapes me.

In 1997 Tony Blair’s Labour party overturned an 18 year Conservative government with a landslide victory. Labour won with 418 seats the most they had ever held and the Tories were left with just 165, the least they had held since 1906. This dramatic result came about as Labour won 147 seats and the Tories lost 178. Percentage wise, Labour only increased their seat count by 54% though. Before the 1997 election, the Labour Party was a lot stronger than the Conservative Party is today.

Ignoring the additional four seats, in the 2010 election Labour will lose the majority if they lose 29 seats. Quite possible. For the Tories to win however, they need 131 more seats. Far trickier. Adding to the Tory challenge is that independent candidates are likely to win more seats than usual as celebrities and local heroes stand against members damaged by the expense claims fiasco. National parties (like SNP and Plaid Cymru) are also likely to do better than before as part of a broader backlash against Westminster.

Of today’s 646 seats, 30 are are held by national parties, small parties or independents. I expect this figure to rise, reducing the pool available to the big three parties from which to achieve their overall majority.

Since the 2nd world war, the party of government changed seven times:

1945 Conservative to Labour, Labour gaining 239 seats (+155%)
1951 Labour to Conservative, Conservative gaining 22 seats (+7%)
1964 Conservative to Labour, + 59 seats (+23%)
1970 Labour to Conservative, + 69 seats (+27%)
1974 Conservative to Labour, + 13 seats (+5%) Hung parliament, Labour short of majority.
1979 Labour to Conservative, + 62 seats (+22%)
1997 Conservative to Labour, + 141 seats (+54%)

The Tories have a mountain to climb. 131 additional seats, 68% more than today (just for unworkable majority of one), in an environment where the main parties are likely to suffer relative to smaller parties and independents. I think a Tory victory is unlikely. However, Labour maintaining their majority with only 28 seat buffer also seems unlikely.

In my opinion the most likely outcome of the 2010 election is a hung parliament with no party holding a clear majority. Whether Cameron or Brown will have the most seats is harder to say but I would guess Brown’s Labour might just hang on to form a coalition government. I also believe this to be a good thing. The challenges ahead of us are too large to get bogged down in party political squabbling. A coalition government might be able to see past the relatively minor differences between parties and better face the extreme, economic, environmental and energy problems we face.

My analysis above is certainly simplistic. The bookies (with millions of pounds riding on it) seem to come to a very different conclusion, no doubt after far more sophisticated analysis but I just have a hard time believing it.

Only time will tell.

After COP15: Boycott China

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Now that life has returned to normal on the streets of Copenhagen and we have had time to consider the Copenhagen Accord it’s time to work out what to do next. Here’s my take on it.

Mark Lynas wrote an interesting piece for the Guardian from an almost unique position he found himself in last week. He was one of only ~60 people in the closed doors heads of state meeting at the end of COP15. Media were not allowed, Lynas was there as part of the Maldives delegation. There won’t be many reports from this meeting.

It has emerged that China (with a degree of backing from India and Saudi Arabia) were chiefly responsible for the failure at COP15. The majority of the rich nations, including America wanted a much tougher deal but China vetoed it.

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”. The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

So we have a situation where a large proportion of the world does want a tough and legally binding deal on climate, but the unanimous nature of the UN’s COP15 process does not allow that to be recognised. This need not be a cause for despair though as it’s not a unique situation.

There are many situations in the world where unanimous agreement cannot be reached. Rogue states exist.

Two relevant examples are the current situation with Iran’s apparent nuclear ambitions and historically South Africa’s apartheid regime. In each of these cases we have one state doing something that the majority of the world has agreed not to do. There’s the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which although Iran is a signatory is also in non-compliance with the safeguards. The US maintains sanctions with wider adoption under discussion.

The first UN resolutions addressing apartheid were passed in the early 1960s and by the early ‘80s many countries had placed various trade sanctions on South Africa.

The situation with China and climate change is similar. It’s one ‘rogue state’ going against the global consensus. A unanimous agreement is currently impossible (as it also seems to be regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions and was with the apartheid regime in the ’60s). I believe the solution is for a ‘coalition of the willing’ to form (comprising of the EU, US, Australia, most of the developing world…), for it to construct a legal framework delivering emission cuts of ~20-30% by 2020 and ~50-80% by 2050. These kinds of numbers do seem politically feasible when China and friends are excluded.

Part of the coalition’s approach to meeting the targets might be carbon intensity import tariffs, to penalise China’s exports. The role of civil society, environmental groups etc. is to lobby for such legislation and to campaign for a boycott of Chinese goods. The two approaches cover the top-down and bottom-up angles, they penalise the Chinese high carbon economy and promote lower carbon, locally produced products. Win-win?

Is there evidence of boycotts actually achieving things in the past? Nestlé is widely boycotted but seems to be doing okay.

Maybe I should start a Facebook group? Seems to be the way things are done these days!

Intermittency of Renewable Energy

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One of the common complaints levelled against the deployment of renewable energy like wind and solar on the national grid is that of intermittency. What good is a source of energy if you can’t rely on it to be there when you need it? Intermittency is managed today by ensuring that intermittent sources only provide a tiny fraction of the total supply or by keeping reserve generation capacity ticking over in the background ready to step in on short notice as the wind drops.

This situation isn’t ideal and isn’t necessary. Today you and I sitting at home in front of our grid-connected computers expect the moon on a stick, we expect to be able to use any and all of our electrical appliances for as long as and whenever we want. This grade of service is difficult to maintain and will become impossible as we decommission our ageing nuclear fleet and burn through the last of our indigenous North Sea gas. In the future we will be left reliant on more intermittent sources of energy leaving us with the challenge of maintaining our comfort and utility from this new source of energy.

We must adjust our energy consumption is such a way that we don’t all, up and down the country, make demands on the grid at the same time or when the wind isn’t blowing.

My first (and totally impractical but I mention it here to illustrate the point) idea of how this could be accomplished involves having two circuits in the home, a red circuit and a green circuit. The electricity to each circuit would be metered separately and charged at different rates, for example the ‘red electricity’ might be 10 pence per kWh and ‘green electricity’ might be only 2 pence per kWh. The difference between the two would be reliability. The red circuit would be virtually 100% reliable, into this circuit you would plug the freezer, fridge, some lighting, central heating pumps etc. The important appliances. The green circuit would be less reliable, it might regularly cut out at times of peak load, advert breaks in Coronation Street, unusually cold weather or when the wind wasn’t blowing. The important point here is that really important appliances wouldn’t be lost when there wasn’t enough power. A power cut on the green circuit wouldn’t really matter that much, we would be more tolerant of the intermittent supply than we are now where a power cut means lights out, game over.

Of course no one actually wants two circuits in the house and just having two circuits doesn’t provide a very smooth response. What we really need is for demand to automatically shape itself to match instantaneous supply and we want this to happen without us even noticing. Not possible? Well maybe it is. This is where Dynamic Demand and appliances that can continuously monitor the condition of the grid and adjust their usage accordingly come in.

To quote straight from their site:

Dynamic Demand aims to promote the introduction of “dynamic demand control” technologies on the UK power grid by advocating institutional change and stimulating research and discussion.
Demand control technologies could provide significant stability and peak demand management for the electricity network. This could lead to significant carbon dioxide savings and may help facilitate the connection of greater amounts of intermittent renewable energy generation, such as solar and wind power.

This is a snapshot of a meter monitoring the power balance of the UK electricity grid (click the meter to see the live status of the grid).

The meter shows the grid’s “frequency”, which is related to the speed of rotation of generators all over the country. When there is too little power available, the whole grid “slows down” and the needle moves to the left.

This can be measured from any power socket by any electrical appliance; the appliance would know the instantaneous imbalance on the grid. These dynamic demand appliances would react to this information, switching on and off or just adjusting their consumption with respect to how much power was available.

Millions of such devices acting together would act like a huge, fast-reacting back-up system mitigating the problem of intermittency.

What is happening?
There is Early Day Motion 388 tabled by Colin Challen MP and the “Management of Energy in Buildings” Bill which introduces dynamic demand is being introduced by Alan Whitehead MP.

There is information on how you can ask your MP to support Dynamic Demand here.

Dynamic Demand looks to me to as a fantastic way to address the inevitable problems facing our electricity supply and the enabling technology for greater use of renewable intermittent energy sources whilst avoiding the threat of complete blackouts at peak load. Maybe at peak load your Dynamic Demand electrical shower, oven or hair dryer wouldn’t work but losing the utility of a few devices like that for a short while is far better than the alternative of widespread blackouts.

Mainstream Peak Oil Film: The Deal

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Today I heard about a new film that was released in the States on the 17th June 2005. It sounded like a run of the mill corporate, political, espionage affair but it was about oil and there aren’t very many mainstream films about oil so I thought I’d investigate a little further.

The film is called The Deal with the strap line To The Victor Goes The Oil.

One point of note is that the film was written by a former vice president of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in collaboration with the former head of the Goldman Sachs Oil and Gas department. Again we are hearing from the old timers, okay I don’t know how old they are but it sounds like they are no longer in those high profile roles. Maybe through this film they are able to offer a glimpse into what really goes on behind the scenes of these major organisations.

The official blurb goes like this:

In the near future, as war rages in the Middle East and U.S. gas prices top six dollars a gallon, ambitious investment banker Tom Hanson (Christian Slater) finds himself at the center of a $20 billion takeover bid for a Russian oil company. It’s a deal some people would kill for – literally, as it turns out. As Tom and an idealistic young associate (Selma Blair) each separately uncover the truth about the transaction, they soon realize that there’s far more at stake than money and fossil fuel.

Things got interesting however when I clicked the After The Show link. Here they suggest that watching the film is only the start, things get interesting after the lights go up. The websites lists around a dozen questions to ask one another such these:

Who do you think is closer to telling the truth about our energy situation-the government or a film like this?
Do you believe that we are on the brink of an oil crisis?
How should we balance environmental concerns with economic ones?

There are also a list of facts presented such as:

Oil production is already falling in 33 of the world’s 48 largest oil producing countries, including 6 of the 11 members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
World demand for oil will likely exceed world supply of oil by 2010 (The Futurist, World Oil)
Drilling in Alaska would produce no oil for 10 years and will ultimately produce only 6 months worth of US oil consumption in total (US Geological Survey). It represents only 0.3% of the world’s oil supply, and will ultimately reduce our dependence on foreign oil by only 1-5%.

Their true colours really shine through with their book (how many film websites have book lists!) and website lists including:

Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy – Matthew R. Simmons
High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis – Julian Darley
The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World – Paul Roberts

www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
www.energybulletin.net
and even www.peakoil.com!

I haven’t seen the film yet, I don’t know if it’s any good. But it looks like we have a mainstream film, playing in hundreds if not thousands of theatres, based on peak oil. It scares me sometimes just how fast peak oil awareness is growing.