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In my last blog on the future of carbon emissions targets http://www.carbonneutral.com/knowledge-centre/company-blog/an-update-on-climate-politics-in-the-uk/ , I discussed the latest report on global greenhouse gas emissions and Christiana Figueres’ view on progress towards a low carbon economy. The headline metric – that global greenhouse gas emissions were the highest on record in 2010 set a rather gloomy scene. The score-card on market-based solutions to GHG emissions wasn’t all that healthy (stagnant), and of course we know that progress towards an international agreement is going backwards. But despite that, the prevailing mood was coloured with optimism -- and a commitment to build on sound foundations which have endured through difficult economic times and to draw more deeply on innovations which can break through the many barriers to progress.

Figueres, the present head of the United Nation’s Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) has committed herself to forging effective partnerships between public and private finance – and that’s a great start. Yvo de Boer, the previous head of the UNFCCC, bruised, battered but still standing after his gruelling experience of trying to get ~190 countries to agree an effective framework to address global climate change, is using his new-found freedom to champion the role of NAMAs as a pragmatic approach to coordinating national efforts for international progress.

NAMA stands for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions. What it really means is that each nation is free to design and implement its own plans to deliver emissions reductions based on its own particular circumstances. A small group of us was discussing this over tapas in Barcelona – musing on whether NAMAs could be the silver bullet. One of our party likened it to an orchestra, where every individual player makes a contribution which adds up to a symphony (indulge me with this analogy for a moment). We all got the individual players bit, and as we looked around the world, we could see some strong and gifted players tuning up their instruments and taking their seats in the orchestra pit, including...

•China with its next 5 year plan including energy efficiency targets and carbon trading
•Korea, Thailand, Chile developing national cap and trade platforms
•South Africa with its proposed carbon tax and renewable energy feed-in tariffs
•The UK with its new-found focus on energy efficiency, clean coal, and nuclear power
•The EU and New Zealand with their emission trading schemes
And, we noted that while the US hasn’t exactly joined the orchestra yet, it is practising in the background with its Clean Energy Standard, and letting California jam away with market-based approaches.

This set me thinking about a rather remarkable recording of the song “Stand By Me” which you should watch now here at vimeo.com http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2539741 . You see what’s going on here? A song originally written and performed years ago by Ben E. King now with over 400 recordings including versions by John Lennon, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix and Elton John, is the score. The musicians are scattered all over the world, play in isolation, but are brought together through the technical artistry and orchestration of the insignificant guy in the black Nike baseball cap. Together they create one of the most moving renditions of the song I have heard. I think that’s a workable demonstration of what the NAMA approach could deliver.

So, back to our discussion on the power of NAMAs – we soon got to asking the really important questions: Is the score written? Who’s conducting?

The UNFCCC is conducting – but it hasn’t been able to get the musicians to make any music yet. Is it up to the task? Does it have a good score to work from? The scientific community has an early draft, but it’s rather a dark piece and hasn’t really inspired our individual and collective creativity.

The thing is though, that hasn’t stopped the individual musicians – governments, businesses and individuals -- from warming up in expectation.


Jonathan Shopley – The CarbonNeutral Company


If you like this blog and want to receive notification of new posts, then please register for our free email newsletter http://www.carbonneutral.com/carbon-copy/ . You can also read other CarbonNeutral Company blog posts http://www.carbonneutral.com/knowledge-centre/company-blog/ and download our free carbon management whitepapers http://www.carbonneutral.com/knowledge-centre/white-papers/ .

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I think that hoping that our governments will ever do anything about green house gasses is pretty much like the one world government pipe dreams they currently are heading towards , it just wont happen.

attacking the global warming or climate change issue will only begin when the people themselves take up arms against the problems.

and those arms will be the way that they themselves use energy.

deciding that a geothermal cooling system is cheaper than a conventional air conditioning system even though it cost more money is the type of thinking that will win the war against global warming.

buying solar pannels and smart designed homes or even having your current home redesigned to take advantage of newer more efficient ways to heat and cool your home.

40% of all carbon comes from our homes and buildings.

apx 20% comes from the vehicles we drive , so between the two the people have an oppurtunity to decrease greenhouse gasses by 60% , and as far as I can tell there really is no real attempt by any government to try and make this a reality although it should be a priority.

so its in the peoples hands and not the governments.

if we were to wait around for our governments to respond we would be too late.


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Originally Posted By: paul

if we were to wait around for our governments to respond we would be too late.


I tend to agree. However people won't do it themselves either. If they would then they'd allow their (elected) governments to as well. It's the big majority who doesn't want to spend anything which is preventing government from acting.

I think that at the end of the day, global warming will happen and we'll just deal with it as it comes. It's not the end of the world the way activists make it sound. More storms, bigger deserts, flooded seaside towns. These are things that have been happening throughout history. We never tried to control the climate before, we just adapted our lives around it. Same will happen with global warming.

But we better start preparing in time. It's a shame to see so much effort going into attempted prevention, which may be 100% futile, but nothing being done to prepare for the actual problems that are predicted to occur.

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Quote:
But we better start preparing in time. It's a shame to see so much effort going into attempted prevention, which may be 100% futile, but nothing being done to prepare for the actual problems that are predicted to occur.


you know just a simple thing like a small swimming pool sitting in a shaded area that is used to cool down your home using pex tubing that circulates water from a heat exchanger in your home to a coil of pex tubing inside the pool can greatly reduce the amount of electricity you use.

the earth will absorb the heat from the water in the pool that comes from inside your home.

or a sawdust heating system that circulates heated water from a decomposing pile of sawdust in the same fashion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFsfK4hJU_c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKb10wrd-Tw&feature=related

the really interesting thing about these water heating
ideas is that they will heat water 24/7 day and night
even if the sun isnt shining or the wind isnt blowing
or the power is cut because of all the floods and huricanes and tornadoes that are the result of climate change or what ever causes them , perhaps they are caused by the great purple hippo or by people eating free lunches , who knows.


caution the sawdust must be kept moist.

these types of things can both cool and heat your home and water.


saving you possibly thousands per year in electric bills
and removing the carbon that you would have normaly caused by using current heating and air systems.

heres a great example of what we use energy for.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXbGLK8yOzU

wouldnt it be much better to just build a shade canopy over the pool !

it could also keep leaves from falling in the pool and wouldnt cost 8 kw per hour to cool the pool.

the shade is normaly 10-15 degrees cooler.

so you would expend 8 x 15 = 120 kwh or $14.40 at .12 cents per kwh to get your pool to the temperature it would be at if the pool were in the shade or under a canopy.

but if you really want a cheap way to cool your pool even better , just dig a 5 ft x 5 ft pit in your yard
(shaded or not) put in about 300 ft of 3/4 pex pipe
cover it with the dirt you took out then use a 50 watt circulation pump to circulate water from the coil in the pit through a 300 ft coil in your pool.

this will keep the water in your pool to around 65 - 70 degrees.

depending on the ground temperature in your area.

and will cost you about 1.2 kwh or apx 14 cents over a 24 hour period.














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Well, I think there are a lot of ideas out there, and some of them might work. But then I saw an article in Wired Magazine. They had an interview with Bill Gates. He says that things like photovoltaic arrays on roofs are for the rich. We may be able to get a lot of them going in the rich part of the world, but they won't cut it in the 3rd world, because the people can't afford them. One of the things that he claims is that we don't need car batteries as much as we do grid batteries. Something to store power for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, for major solar power centers and wind farms. Then they can use the efficiencies of scale to bring power to low income populations.

Of course then there is the article in yesterday mornings Tulsa World news paper. The story is about rural India, where there is no electric service, and no real prospect of any. But many places are getting the benefit of electric power through solar arrays. The residents aren't really paying for the power though. They are available through grants from various people and companies. So in a way Bill may be right, it is just that that some of the rich are coming to the help of the ones that can't afford it on their own.

Bill Gill


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Quote:
Something to store power for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, for major solar power centers and wind farms


the reason there are no bulk storage systems is simply because there isnt enought money in it or they are affraid that the batteries could be made by anyone with a shovel some rubber and some electrolite.

afterall what is a battery?

a little plastic (rubber) insulator
a little electrolite.
and some lead.

I think the lead allows for even distribution and retrieval of stored electricity.

the electricity is stored in the electrolyte.

I have often wondered when someone would build a huge battery that is charged by lightning , but I suppose
theres not enough money in it.











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You say, "What is a Battery?", then describe a simple lead acid storage battery of the type that is used in a modern car (not an electric car). The problem is that a simple lead acid battery is extremely difficult to scale up to the gigawatt scale. The charge and discharge rates are going to be tremendous. And when we are talking about storing energy for the power grid that is what we are talking about. There are people working on that type of storage device, but I'm not sure that there is much emphasis on it. Development costs are high and right now where the money is going is into batteries for electric cars, with some going for alternative fuels, such as hydrogen. Now it might be that a hydrogen economy with megawatt fuel cells would do very well. But of course right now generation, transport, and storage of hydrogen are still problematic for the amounts we need.

And by the way, lead acid batteries of that scale would require enormous amounts of lead, which is a toxic metal and would probably produce more hazardous waste areas, such as we have here in Oklahoma from the decades of lead mining up in NE Ok. The government finally stepped in and bought out the whole town of Cardin, because of the serious health hazard the chat piles pose.

In fact there are a huge number of possibilities for power generation and storage, and there may be some real ways to do it that somebody has observed, but that need to be recognized before development can begin.

And to try to forestall a long pointless discussion: No Paul I am not talking about the false idea of free energy, and I won't discuss it.

And I mentioned the article about solar power in remote places in India. I would point out that the reason it is being used is because it is what there is available to work in such areas. And it doesn't run to the kind of power we in the developed world use daily. It doesn't run to air conditioning, which I am assured we would all die without here in Tulsa, since we have been having a record breaking heat wave.

Bill Gill


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I wasnt talking about car batteries !

Originally Posted By: Bill
we don't need car batteries as much as we do grid batteries


I was talking about grid batteries , bulk electricity.

and are you certain that you would need massive amounts of lead or would you only need lead at the terminals?

Quote:
The problem is that a simple lead acid battery is extremely difficult to scale up to the gigawatt scale


BTW , as I said there probably isnt enough money in it.
how many appliances do you have that require a gigawatt?

suppose you had a swimming pool sized battery you built using a swimming pool , filled with electrolyte.

do you think that charging the electrolyte would require you to fill the swimming pool with lead?

or wouldnt you only need lead
(or some other electricity conducting material)
where the electricity being charged into or drained from the electrolyte needs to contact the electrolyte?

sorry to hear that you guys are having a heat spell , would have been nice if you were a little better prepared.

what will you do next year and the following year and every year after that while the temperatures are increasing?

tell people there ideas are worthless while your sitting there in 130 degree temperatures!

me , Im using a few simple things to heat and cool my home , we dont have 120 degree temperatures yet but hopefully by then I will be ready for that.

recently we have only had high temperatures around 105 degrees.

but my electric bill has reduced from around $250.00 a month to apx $85.00 a month.

and I only use the heat pump when my system isnt working properly.

remember it is our homes and buildings that use 40% of the electricity.

cars only use 20%.

I think it would be more wise to tackle the big problems first , then smooth out the edges later.

first off even if you did find a really good electric vehicle that was affordable by a average person , you still have all the hundreds of millions of gasoline powered vehicles being used today , people will still want to use there old gas burner until it dies probably.

that is if there really is that much gas left.

the U.S. using its reserves tells its own story.


Quote:
And to try to forestall a long pointless discussion: No Paul I am not talking about the false idea of free energy, and I won't discuss it.


I never brought it up , Bill.

Quote:
which I am assured we would all die without here in Tulsa, since we have been having a record breaking heat wave.


an interesting point there Bill, remember back in 2003
in europe

More than 40,000 Europeans died as a result of the heat wave.

wasnt it the metal roofs that caused alot of the deaths?

roofs that were designed for a cooler climate.

which proves a point about home design that incorporates the newer ways of heating and cooling your home.

and in France the trees even started expelling carbon and retaining the oxygen.

making the problem much worse.




















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Originally Posted By: paul

the reason there are no bulk storage systems is simply because there isnt enought money in it or they are affraid that the batteries could be made by anyone with a shovel some rubber and some electrolite.

It's the 1st option.

There isn't enough money in it because they're useless for conventional power generation. They're also useless for places that already have a conventional power grid and just a little bit of supplementary solar/wind. There's no need to store any power, just close the throttle a little on the boiler when demand is low.

If you had a region solely dependent on solar or wind power, then storage would be a requirement for 24/7 availability. But if people can do without power at night they won't bother spending money on batteries.

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Originally Posted By: Bill
The problem is that a simple lead acid battery is extremely difficult to scale up to the gigawatt scale. The charge and discharge rates are going to be tremendous.


That doesn't really make sense. If the discharge rate is too high, you can just add more batteries to reduce it. A lead acid battery can be charged or discharged in hours. So you could discharge them overnight easily enough.

I suspect the problem might just be the cost. That spongy lead probably isn't cheap, and then it only lasts a few hundred cycles.

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The problem with lead acid batteries is that they just don't work that well for large applications. If you have a UPS on your computer or TV system you may have had to replace the battery. They usually use lead acid based on price. But the battery in your system probably only runs for 10 to 15 minutes when the power fails. And you have to replace the battery every couple of years. Figure out how big a battery it would take to run your whole house for 12 hours. Building and maintaining a lead acid battery to accommodate the entire power grid for a reasonable sized area is a formidable task.

I think that some sort of a fuel cell may be a better system. Don't quote me as an expert on that, what we finally wind up with may be something I have never heard of. That's one of the fun things about science and technology. Every so often somebody will come up with some kind of an off-the-wall idea that turns things all on their heads.

Bill Gill


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Originally Posted By: Bill
The problem with lead acid batteries is that they just don't work that well for large applications. If

They just don't work that well for anything. It's not about scaling. They aren't even used to power toy cars, except the ride-on ones where cost and lifetime have to be very low just so people can afford them at all.

Quote:

kind of an off-the-wall idea that turns things all on their heads.

Something I just discovered, which seems to be one of the preferred battery types for large scales is "flow batteries". It sounds a lot like what Paul was saying with the swimming pool full of acid and just a small set of electrodes. Well they still require a lot of large electrodes but the capacity can be increased arbitrarily without adding more electrode material.

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Originally Posted By: kallog
"flow batteries".


I didnt know that they were already using that type of
thing , I will have to do a search on it.

here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery

so why cant we just pump electrolyte into our electric cars tanks vs gasoline?

the service stations could pump out the old discharged electrolyte and replace it with charged electrolyte.

the electrolyte could be recharged at the service station and resold.










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Well, the flow battery looks kine of interesting. That ability to recharge just by replacing the spent electrolyte is certainly interesting. I checked Paul's link to the Wiki article. Then I came up with some problems, not necessarily with the system, but with my lack of knowledge. The energy density of the electrodes appears to me to be rather low, the highest appeared to be about 2500 W/m^2. I'm not sure that is as big a problem as it looks like at first, because with modern technology a 1 m^2 plate may have an active area that is much larger than 1 m^2, using various techniques to make the plate more of a mesh or sponge. I'm also not too sure about the energy density of the electrolyte. I don't know if the quoted energy densities are low or high. That would impact the use of flow batteries in cars. You have to have a high enough energy density that you can haul enough energy to get you where you need to go. And recharging the electrolyte at a filling station might require some large, complicated and expensive system.

So there are some questions about it. They may all be answerable, but I expect that it will take some engineering to come up with good answers.

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the chart on the wiki page states that the
zinc-cerium has a output of 2.43V at 1200-2500W/m2

I don't know how thick the plates would need to be but
there should be plenty of room for them on any of todays cars.

anyway a single plate would produce 2.43 volts
to get the average 240 volt to run a electric motor
you would only need to add more plates.

say you needed 80 Kw at 240 volts

80,000 watts / 1200 watts = 66 plates

this set of plates or cells would give you 80,000 watts
at 2.43 volts.

then you would need to step up the voltage from 2.43 volts to 240 volts.

240 volts / 2.43 volts = 98 sets of 66 plates

a total of 66 x 98 = 6468 plates

the nissan leaf uses a 80,000 watt motor and its battery
is only a 24 Kwh battery.

what you would have above would be a 80 Kw battery and I
suppose that the hours you could run the motor would depend on the amount of electrolyte you could squeeze into the tanks on the car and the amount of charge you could put in the electrolyte.

a car is apx 2 meters x 5 meters so the area that the battery would occupy could be apx 20 meters ^2

6468 plates / 20 meters^2 = 323 plates per square meter.

the height of the battery would depend on the thickness of the 323 plates.

there are 500 sheets of paper in a bundle so if the plates were as thin as a sheet of paper and the area between the sheets were as thin as a sheet of paper then the battery could be only apx 4 inches tall.

then you could put the electrolyte wherever there is empty space.

It should be a workable car and you could drive across country as long as you had available refueling stations.

but to get back to the grid usage it would definetly be workable , the above battery could be used to power at least 10 8000 watt homes.


and I have read that some of the newer home designs only use apx 35 watts !!! total.

so the above battery could power 2285 of these homes.

our energy and climate problems are mainly how we use what we have , its not that we dont have enough of it.







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Paul, you have some interesting numbers there. I think though that you are not figuring quite right. First you are figuring the number of 1 m^2 plates based on 1 m^2 of surface per plate. They don't build flat plate batteries nowdays. They use various configurations that give much more area than just measuring the size. A 1 m^2 plate would have many square meters of surface area, so the actual number of plates might be considerable less.

Another possible problem with your calculation is that you assumed a very thin separator for the plates. That might not work for a battery where the electrolyte has to flow through it. Of course this might be taken care of by configuring the plates so that the electrolyte actually flows through holes in the plate or some such. So your calculations do show some promise for getting enough power to run a car.

The biggest question is about the energy density of the electrolyte. In the Wiki article the highest energy density of any electrolyte listed is 75 Wh/kg. The energy density of gasoline is 12.7kWh/kg. That means that gasoline has over 150 times as much energy as the electrolyte. That makes a big problem for cars, the amount of electrolyte you would have to haul around would be enormous.

However, for a fixed facility such as a solar or wind backup there would be some advantages. You could regenerate the electrolyte when energy was available, and use it to supply power to the grid when it wasn't.

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Bill

theres always a little drawback to new ideas until you work out the problems and smooth out the edges.

your weight of the electrolyte caused me to have a look into it.

first off I used a 80,000 watt battery and then compared that to the nissan leaf.

then I stated that the nissan leaf uses a 24,000 watt hour battery.

so lets see how much the electrolyte would weigh if we use the same sized battery that the nissan leaf uses.

24,000 Wh battery / 75 Wh/kg = 320 kg = 705 pounds.

the nissan leaf weighs in at 3,354 pounds and its battery
weights in at 440 pounds

http://www.allcarselectric.com/news/1033848_2011-nissan-leaf-batteries

Quote:
At 440 pounds, the battery pack isn't light, but thanks to weight savings created by the car's full EV architecture the battery will provide enough power for the LEAF to achieve a top speed of 87 mph and a range estimated by Nissan at 100 miles


so, so far theres a difference of apx 250 pounds in the
weight of the flow battery electrolyte and the weight of the nissan leaf battery , not counting the remainder of the weight of the flow battery which would include the plates and housings.

the battery still has the same amount of wattage and hours of use.

I dont see the enormous amount of electrolyte your talking about but there would be additional weight which would convert into less power and range.

but you could stop at a service station and replace your electrolyte anywhere along the way , which is something you just cant do in a nissan leaf.

but that doesnt mean that nissan isnt already considering alternatives to the lithium battery
that must undergo a lenghty re-charge period.

they certainly have already looked into this flow battery as an alternative I would think...


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