Great article here by Amie Tsang in the weekend's FT on Heritage Paints.
It all started when Farrow & Ball launched a National Trust range in 1991. F&B have grown from strength to strength on the back of this and last year had a turnover of £42m, and they now export to France, USA, Germany and Holland. Then along came Patrick Baty who runs Paper & Paints and who started Little Greene, a me-too business which aligned itself with English Heritage.
Then Crown and Dulux got in on the act — look for Heritage ranges — and then Fired Earth, Sanderson, Zoffany and Designer's Guild. Oh God, I'm getting lost. There's more here in a Telegraph article from 2006.
So what's the deal? Well, they cost about twice as much as ordinary paint — the going rate seems to be around £50-£60 for 5lts — but they are better made in that they have more pigments in them. At least, that is, according to Kevin McCloud. But then he has lent his name to the Fired Earth range so he just might not be a reliable reporter on such matters.
What about authenticity? Well it's here that Amie's article begins to sing because she has taken the trouble to interview a number of experts who all end up saying much the same thing. Which is pretty much that they don't really know how authentic the colours are because everything tends to fade. She quotes Helen Hughes, a paint archaeologist — there's a job I never knew existed — who says "traditionally, it was just a man with a bucket, mixing on site." Now that's how I used to make cement!
So what we get is a modern take on what we imagine traditional paints were like, but without the lead and arsenic and other nasties that were commonly used.
Does it matter that they are not authentic? Of course not. It's all a marketing exercise. What you are buying here is taste. Use these and you are unlikely to make a horrible mistake with your colour schemes. Whereas in the bad old days we used to slap on magnolia everywhere because you'd never go wrong, now you can pay the premium and use a heritage paint and it'll look cool. I'm surprised John Lewis haven't got in on the act. To date, they only sell Sanderson's paints.
20 Feb 2012
16 Feb 2012
Pathways to Darkness?
My interest in the energy debate knows no bounds. I have recently dedicated at least four lengthy train journeys, pouring over my trusty iPad, to reading two newly published pathways and trying to make sense of them.
I feel I deserve a medal. This stuff is not easy going and, as I look around the carriage at other people reading novels or magazines, or staring vacantly at the passing countryside, I sometimes wonder why I am doing this. I'm certainly not getting paid for it and every now and then I get overcome by the urge to doze off. Nevertheless, it is interesting, sort of, and I have a feeling that if I don't do it, no one else will.
First out of the traps is the delightfully named Less is More which, as has already been pointed out on Twitter, weighs in at an ironic 282 pages. The document - it's basically an ebook - has the imprint of the AECB. It has a foreword, an executive summary and then, on page 22, a preface by AECB chairman Chris Herring. It's principal author is David Olivier, who I have known for 30 years, and the whole project has the feel of being his magnum opus. It's full of fascinating insights and little-known facts. For instance, did you know that:
Energy efficiency measures can reduce a tram's electricity consumption by some 75% from 4 to 1kWh/vehicle.km, although doors are opened so often that winter space heating is likely to take another 0.5kWh/vehicle.km, even with reversible heat pumps.
or that Chaudes-Aigues in Central France has had geothermal district heating since the 14th century?
Less is More is full of these little teasers that make energy wonks like me trill with delight, and make you marvel at a life spent collecting such gems. But this great strength is also its weakness because somewhere in all these pages you become aware that the bigger picture is getting lost and that our pathway through the woods has become obscured by all the fascinating discoveries we have made along the way.
Because the destination of the pathway is to get to 2050 with the lights on, our homes warm and almost no carbon getting released and, in this respect, Less is More doesn't convince. It's future is something pretty similar to the one that Denmark has mapped out — there are lots and lots of references to Denmark — which involves no nuclear power and not that much in the way of renewables, but lots and lots of energy efficiency and piped heat networks. But nowhere is there an explanation of why Denmark's pathway is the one we should follow and nowhere is there an examination of whether Denmark has got it right.
Nuclear power is dismissed because the risk of an accident is uninsurable and therefore this constitutes a hidden subsidy which makes it, in turn, uncommercial. I'm not convinced by this argument either. But it's arguably beside the point, because the whole thesis is based on the idea that we simply don't need very much energy by 2050, and certainly not very much electricity. The government line — broadly speaking that espoused by David Mackay and the 2050 calculator project — is that we should decarbonise the grid and move everything towards electric powered this and that. Less is More doesn't buy into this, and pushes towards using a combination of waste heat, liquid fuels derived from surplus windpower and concentrated solar power, and a world dedicated to energy efficiency. Or negawatts, to borrow a term from Amory Lovins.
Less Is More sets out to show that negawatts are cheapest and best, and is at its strongest when describing how a future built environment might work. But negawatts will only get you so far and, for one thing, you can't really do a convincing pathway without dealing with the transport sector. If you don't electrify transport, it's hard to see where you will get the carbon savings from. Transport does get dealt with in the appendix, but the electricfy-it-all option is dismissed in favour of making what we have more efficient.
The reason for our coming to this view is that none of the post-oil options for road, sea and air transport appear attractive.
Maybe this is true, but a pathway still has to deal with this. And if it's not a complete pathway, what is exactly is it all about?
The same criticism applies to Achieving Zero, which emanates from Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, although it too bears the hand of an author, Brenda Boardman, who will be familiar to all who trawl these areas. Achieving Zero is subtitled Delivering Future-friendly Buildings so you can at once see that, like Less is More, its solutions will be somewhat skewed towards buildings — transport doesn't even get a look in here. It's also been supported by Greenpeace which may have helped with the production costs but doesn't do a great deal to establish its independence.
Not that it's slavishly following a Greenpeace line. Like Less Is More, its future scenario is non-nuclear, but it doesn't make a big thing about it because the emphasis is all on energy efficiency in our buildings. Where it differs from Less Is More is in its emphasis is on policy levers, such as using Energy Performance Certificates as both carrots and sticks to encourage building owners to undertake refurbishments. And there is an examination of Personal Carbon Allowances which just about everybody interested in this field sees as a really good idea but politically would seem to be a complete non-starter.
Achieving Zero falls into the trap of assuming that the existing housing stock can be upgraded easily. "Beyond 2025, the need for any space heating will disappear as properties are made low-energy or brought up to Passivhaus standard." I wish. This is no mean feat and I fear it would take rather more than the odd council tax rebate or stamp duty holiday. It would be simpler and possibly cheaper to demolish and rebuild every house in the UK - at a rate of around 750,000 houses per year. (Last year we built just 100,000 new homes, by way of comparison.) Methinks she underestimates the size of the task in hand, let alone the complete impracticability!
The main problem with both these publications is that they are painting a nuclear-free, energy constrained 2050 when it's now beginning to look that this may not be such a great idea. If you replace difficult to manage renewables (farmed electricity) with a steady flow of low carbon nuclear power, then the actions needed to meet 2050 obligations change drastically and the scope and depth of energy efficiency measures becomes much more manageable. With nuclear, we don't have to dig up every road in the country, we might not have to rebuild every house, we may even get away without carbon rationing. Whilst it may not be what green builders want to hear, the nuclear option is beginning to look far more achievable, far more acceptable. To my mind, this is now the big question to address and any pathway that choses to ignore it is starting in the wrong place.
I feel I deserve a medal. This stuff is not easy going and, as I look around the carriage at other people reading novels or magazines, or staring vacantly at the passing countryside, I sometimes wonder why I am doing this. I'm certainly not getting paid for it and every now and then I get overcome by the urge to doze off. Nevertheless, it is interesting, sort of, and I have a feeling that if I don't do it, no one else will.
First out of the traps is the delightfully named Less is More which, as has already been pointed out on Twitter, weighs in at an ironic 282 pages. The document - it's basically an ebook - has the imprint of the AECB. It has a foreword, an executive summary and then, on page 22, a preface by AECB chairman Chris Herring. It's principal author is David Olivier, who I have known for 30 years, and the whole project has the feel of being his magnum opus. It's full of fascinating insights and little-known facts. For instance, did you know that:
Energy efficiency measures can reduce a tram's electricity consumption by some 75% from 4 to 1kWh/vehicle.km, although doors are opened so often that winter space heating is likely to take another 0.5kWh/vehicle.km, even with reversible heat pumps.
or that Chaudes-Aigues in Central France has had geothermal district heating since the 14th century?
Less is More is full of these little teasers that make energy wonks like me trill with delight, and make you marvel at a life spent collecting such gems. But this great strength is also its weakness because somewhere in all these pages you become aware that the bigger picture is getting lost and that our pathway through the woods has become obscured by all the fascinating discoveries we have made along the way.
Because the destination of the pathway is to get to 2050 with the lights on, our homes warm and almost no carbon getting released and, in this respect, Less is More doesn't convince. It's future is something pretty similar to the one that Denmark has mapped out — there are lots and lots of references to Denmark — which involves no nuclear power and not that much in the way of renewables, but lots and lots of energy efficiency and piped heat networks. But nowhere is there an explanation of why Denmark's pathway is the one we should follow and nowhere is there an examination of whether Denmark has got it right.
Nuclear power is dismissed because the risk of an accident is uninsurable and therefore this constitutes a hidden subsidy which makes it, in turn, uncommercial. I'm not convinced by this argument either. But it's arguably beside the point, because the whole thesis is based on the idea that we simply don't need very much energy by 2050, and certainly not very much electricity. The government line — broadly speaking that espoused by David Mackay and the 2050 calculator project — is that we should decarbonise the grid and move everything towards electric powered this and that. Less is More doesn't buy into this, and pushes towards using a combination of waste heat, liquid fuels derived from surplus windpower and concentrated solar power, and a world dedicated to energy efficiency. Or negawatts, to borrow a term from Amory Lovins.
Less Is More sets out to show that negawatts are cheapest and best, and is at its strongest when describing how a future built environment might work. But negawatts will only get you so far and, for one thing, you can't really do a convincing pathway without dealing with the transport sector. If you don't electrify transport, it's hard to see where you will get the carbon savings from. Transport does get dealt with in the appendix, but the electricfy-it-all option is dismissed in favour of making what we have more efficient.
The reason for our coming to this view is that none of the post-oil options for road, sea and air transport appear attractive.
Maybe this is true, but a pathway still has to deal with this. And if it's not a complete pathway, what is exactly is it all about?
The same criticism applies to Achieving Zero, which emanates from Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, although it too bears the hand of an author, Brenda Boardman, who will be familiar to all who trawl these areas. Achieving Zero is subtitled Delivering Future-friendly Buildings so you can at once see that, like Less is More, its solutions will be somewhat skewed towards buildings — transport doesn't even get a look in here. It's also been supported by Greenpeace which may have helped with the production costs but doesn't do a great deal to establish its independence.
Not that it's slavishly following a Greenpeace line. Like Less Is More, its future scenario is non-nuclear, but it doesn't make a big thing about it because the emphasis is all on energy efficiency in our buildings. Where it differs from Less Is More is in its emphasis is on policy levers, such as using Energy Performance Certificates as both carrots and sticks to encourage building owners to undertake refurbishments. And there is an examination of Personal Carbon Allowances which just about everybody interested in this field sees as a really good idea but politically would seem to be a complete non-starter.
Achieving Zero falls into the trap of assuming that the existing housing stock can be upgraded easily. "Beyond 2025, the need for any space heating will disappear as properties are made low-energy or brought up to Passivhaus standard." I wish. This is no mean feat and I fear it would take rather more than the odd council tax rebate or stamp duty holiday. It would be simpler and possibly cheaper to demolish and rebuild every house in the UK - at a rate of around 750,000 houses per year. (Last year we built just 100,000 new homes, by way of comparison.) Methinks she underestimates the size of the task in hand, let alone the complete impracticability!
The main problem with both these publications is that they are painting a nuclear-free, energy constrained 2050 when it's now beginning to look that this may not be such a great idea. If you replace difficult to manage renewables (farmed electricity) with a steady flow of low carbon nuclear power, then the actions needed to meet 2050 obligations change drastically and the scope and depth of energy efficiency measures becomes much more manageable. With nuclear, we don't have to dig up every road in the country, we might not have to rebuild every house, we may even get away without carbon rationing. Whilst it may not be what green builders want to hear, the nuclear option is beginning to look far more achievable, far more acceptable. To my mind, this is now the big question to address and any pathway that choses to ignore it is starting in the wrong place.
13 Feb 2012
Problems with cavity wall insulation
One of the first blog pieces I ever wrote, in November 2005, concerned cavity wall insulation (CWI), and examined the likelihood of there being problems. At that time, my blog got published in two different places which wasn't the cleverest idea I ever came up with as my own blog piece on this topic never got a single comment, whereas the other one gleaned no less than 85. If you Google cavity wall insulation problems it still comes up on the first page, despite being six years old.
This morning I sat down and read all the comments and tried to make sense of them. Most of them are observations and anecdotes, a few are pretty desperate cries for help and mixed in here and there are around a dozen cases of people getting mould or damp problems which they attribute to CWI. In every case, they have then received short shrift from both their installers and the guarantors. The issue seems to be that it's not possible to say definitively that their problems result from having CWI installed and so the buck is easily passed. But surely the chances are that they can't all be making it up, or jumping to the wrong conclusions. Something mouldy is going on here.
Now my article starts out with a dig at Jeff Howell who is the Telegraph's building agony uncle and who maintains a website with extensive articles containing his thoughts and observations. Had I known what comments would follow on from my blog, I wouldn't have been so critical of Jeff because it seems that he has genuinely tapped into a pool of discontent about CWI and, as he says, he is just about the only person giving it a voice.
Behind this are some big questions. What percentage of homes that have had CWI have gone on to report damp or mould problems? How can you tell which as yet untreated homes are likely to suffer problems? Have we adequately assessed the risks?
At the tail end of last year, DECC published the results of a study into CWI, looking at the issues with the many as-yet-unfilled cavities and how best to address them. It could have looked at issues with already-filled cavities but chose not to. Is this because this would have been off message — i.e CWI is a good thing, so why point out that it might not be? Or is the problem with damp and mould so minute that they feel it's not worth worrying about?
If it's the latter, then they could greatly strengthen their case if they were to publish the numbers of complaints received about problems resulting from CWI, rather than pretending that they are irrelevant. The internet (and Jeff Howell's postbox) is full of dark rumours, and it's high time we shed some light.
This morning I sat down and read all the comments and tried to make sense of them. Most of them are observations and anecdotes, a few are pretty desperate cries for help and mixed in here and there are around a dozen cases of people getting mould or damp problems which they attribute to CWI. In every case, they have then received short shrift from both their installers and the guarantors. The issue seems to be that it's not possible to say definitively that their problems result from having CWI installed and so the buck is easily passed. But surely the chances are that they can't all be making it up, or jumping to the wrong conclusions. Something mouldy is going on here.
Now my article starts out with a dig at Jeff Howell who is the Telegraph's building agony uncle and who maintains a website with extensive articles containing his thoughts and observations. Had I known what comments would follow on from my blog, I wouldn't have been so critical of Jeff because it seems that he has genuinely tapped into a pool of discontent about CWI and, as he says, he is just about the only person giving it a voice.
Behind this are some big questions. What percentage of homes that have had CWI have gone on to report damp or mould problems? How can you tell which as yet untreated homes are likely to suffer problems? Have we adequately assessed the risks?
At the tail end of last year, DECC published the results of a study into CWI, looking at the issues with the many as-yet-unfilled cavities and how best to address them. It could have looked at issues with already-filled cavities but chose not to. Is this because this would have been off message — i.e CWI is a good thing, so why point out that it might not be? Or is the problem with damp and mould so minute that they feel it's not worth worrying about?
If it's the latter, then they could greatly strengthen their case if they were to publish the numbers of complaints received about problems resulting from CWI, rather than pretending that they are irrelevant. The internet (and Jeff Howell's postbox) is full of dark rumours, and it's high time we shed some light.
31 Jan 2012
2050 calculator: the limits of arithmetic exposed
Regular readers will be aware of Prof David Mackay and his book Sustainability Without the Hot Air, which was published to rave reviews at 2008. It's also available free online as a pdf.
In it, he runs through the numbers needed to get the UK off fossil fuel and in one chapter (27) he outlines five different plans which would enable us to do this. Now, David is very careful not to stick his neck out on a limb here and say which one he thinks is best, but it's hard not to conclude that his money is on Plan E, the nuclear option. He has already given nuclear a big thumbs up (in Ch 24) and in Ch 27 he prefaces Plan E by stating:
E stands for “economics.” This fifth plan is a rough guess for what might
happen in a liberated energy market with a strong carbon price. On a level
economic playing field with a strong price signal preventing the emission
of CO2, we don’t expect a diverse solution with a wide range of power-
costs; rather, we expect an economically optimal solution that delivers the
required power at the lowest cost. And when “clean coal” and nuclear go
head to head on price, it’s nuclear that wins.
In other words, the nuclear option is safe, clean and the cheapest option of the five presented. What's not to like? If Apple produced an iNuke, we'd be lapping them up. But Apple don't do nukes, and there is a certain amount of consumer resistance here, especially in Germany and Japan.
Fast forward three years and David Mackay finds himself the Chief Scientist at the Department for Energy and Climate Change, in charge of a project called the 2050 Pathways Calculator which is used to inform the government's Carbon Plan for the years between now and 2050 when (the plan is) to reduce our CO2 emissions by 80%.
Now the 2050 Pathways Calculator is based on a vast Excel spreadsheet and consequently it's very difficult to comprehend, especially as its populated by so much interactive data. But at heart its mission remains very similar to what was set out in Ch 27 of David's book - namely to come up with some plans or pathways to get the UK off fossil fuels by 2050.
The front-end of the calculator (i.e. the bit we see) is not that difficult to comprehend. The choices are split into two parts: firstly, how to decrease demand (for all energy) and, secondly, how to increase supply of low-carbon energy. We are invited to take control and see how we would pilot the mothership.
Twiddling the controls, it quickly becomes apparent that we can't do this by demand reduction alone. Our legacy infrastructure is so wasteful of energy that it's inconceivable that we can bring about an 80% reduction in the amount of energy we consume in the UK, especially as these models take for granted that we still have economic growth at around 2% per annum and a rising population.
After much gnashing of teeth, it becomes apparent that about the best thing we can do on the demand side is to switch everything as we can think of over to electricity. So houses should switch to heat pumps, cars to batteries and industrial processes to anything but fossil fuels. Insulation and behaviour change help a bit, but they are basically second order effects — insignificant in the great scheme of things.
Which leads us onto part 2 of the calculation, the supply side, or how the hell are we going to create all this low carbon electricity. The calculator permits you to choose four options for each technology. In each case Option 1 is basically do nothing and Option 4 is the Max Out button. You can jiggle and you can jaggle and you can find dozens of ways of producing enough juice to get the overall CO2 emissions down by 80%, provided you have done some demand reduction and you add it a little biofuel. There is something for everyone here and the green pressure groups are delighted because it shows (once and for all) that we can get there without a drop of nuclear energy, which is now the German option.
But of course, we are still faced with the economic logic of David Mackay's Plan E. Surely, when all is said and done, Plan E, the nuclear option will be the cheapest?
Well you wouldn't know it to behold the latest version of the 2050 Calculator which now has costs attached to it. It's still in beta, but it's available online, complete with some sample pathways to check out. The closest option to Plan E is the one labelled Higher Nuclear, Less Energy Efficiency, although why these two should be paired isn't explained. The point is that's it's not the cheapest option and even if you tweak it so it's higher nuclear plus lots of energy efficiency, it's still more expensive than the best in class, which is known as Markal 3.26 (don't ask!).
Markal 3.26 is as bit of a mish-mash, using a bit of everything including carbon capture and storage, lots of wind, some waves, some biofuel, and a bit of nuclear. In other words, almost exactly what David himself had warned us wouldn't be the cheapest option when he introduced Plan E in his book (see the quote in italics above). History tells us that when there is a race to develop competing technologies to carry out the same task, then pretty quickly one wins out. But the 2050 Calculator is sitting on the fence, not picking a winner or even indicating what the cheapest option might be.
Now buried deep inside this version of the Calculator is a wiki which lists all of the cost assumptions used to make the latest version. The project boasts of being open source and anyone can come along and edit the wiki, which sounds like a great idea. Except that hardly anyone has bothered (few seem to know of its existence) so that around 98% of the entries are from the DECC staff members charged with populating the calculator with data.
Dig around the wiki and you'll find an interesting item called the Worry List and on the list is an interesting item called Are We Going To Try And Answer The Really Big Questions:
• What is the cheapest pathway?
• Is it cheaper / how much more expensive is it to tackle climate change than to not?
• What are the biggest costs in tackling climate change?
• What are the biggest sources of uncertainty in tackling climate change?
• Is it cheaper to be more energy efficient or to build more capacity?
• Is nuclear cheaper than wind or CCS?
In theory, the costed version of the Calculator should answer all these questions but in practice the various pathways turn out to be very similar cost-wise, even the cost of doing nothing at all about climate mitigation. Which has surprised some right-wing commentators (cf Worstall, Booker). And it also surprised me. I was expecting a clear winner, not a photo-finish.
It's at this point that I begin to suspect that politics may be overriding arithmetic, and that the 2050 calculator has been tweaked to give the answers that the government wants to hear — i.e. that it's on the right track, and that what it proposes in its Carbon Plan is the best way forward. Far from challenging conventional wisdom on sustainable energy, the Calculator results seem to re-infoce it.
I wonder what David Mackay thinks? Has his baby been hijacked by political expediency? Or were his original back-of-the-envelope style calculations simply wrong? Because what has emerged from the 2050 calculator exercise looks very different to what he set out in Chapter 27 of his book.
In it, he runs through the numbers needed to get the UK off fossil fuel and in one chapter (27) he outlines five different plans which would enable us to do this. Now, David is very careful not to stick his neck out on a limb here and say which one he thinks is best, but it's hard not to conclude that his money is on Plan E, the nuclear option. He has already given nuclear a big thumbs up (in Ch 24) and in Ch 27 he prefaces Plan E by stating:
E stands for “economics.” This fifth plan is a rough guess for what might
happen in a liberated energy market with a strong carbon price. On a level
economic playing field with a strong price signal preventing the emission
of CO2, we don’t expect a diverse solution with a wide range of power-
costs; rather, we expect an economically optimal solution that delivers the
required power at the lowest cost. And when “clean coal” and nuclear go
head to head on price, it’s nuclear that wins.
In other words, the nuclear option is safe, clean and the cheapest option of the five presented. What's not to like? If Apple produced an iNuke, we'd be lapping them up. But Apple don't do nukes, and there is a certain amount of consumer resistance here, especially in Germany and Japan.
Fast forward three years and David Mackay finds himself the Chief Scientist at the Department for Energy and Climate Change, in charge of a project called the 2050 Pathways Calculator which is used to inform the government's Carbon Plan for the years between now and 2050 when (the plan is) to reduce our CO2 emissions by 80%.
Now the 2050 Pathways Calculator is based on a vast Excel spreadsheet and consequently it's very difficult to comprehend, especially as its populated by so much interactive data. But at heart its mission remains very similar to what was set out in Ch 27 of David's book - namely to come up with some plans or pathways to get the UK off fossil fuels by 2050.
The front-end of the calculator (i.e. the bit we see) is not that difficult to comprehend. The choices are split into two parts: firstly, how to decrease demand (for all energy) and, secondly, how to increase supply of low-carbon energy. We are invited to take control and see how we would pilot the mothership.
Twiddling the controls, it quickly becomes apparent that we can't do this by demand reduction alone. Our legacy infrastructure is so wasteful of energy that it's inconceivable that we can bring about an 80% reduction in the amount of energy we consume in the UK, especially as these models take for granted that we still have economic growth at around 2% per annum and a rising population.
After much gnashing of teeth, it becomes apparent that about the best thing we can do on the demand side is to switch everything as we can think of over to electricity. So houses should switch to heat pumps, cars to batteries and industrial processes to anything but fossil fuels. Insulation and behaviour change help a bit, but they are basically second order effects — insignificant in the great scheme of things.
Which leads us onto part 2 of the calculation, the supply side, or how the hell are we going to create all this low carbon electricity. The calculator permits you to choose four options for each technology. In each case Option 1 is basically do nothing and Option 4 is the Max Out button. You can jiggle and you can jaggle and you can find dozens of ways of producing enough juice to get the overall CO2 emissions down by 80%, provided you have done some demand reduction and you add it a little biofuel. There is something for everyone here and the green pressure groups are delighted because it shows (once and for all) that we can get there without a drop of nuclear energy, which is now the German option.
But of course, we are still faced with the economic logic of David Mackay's Plan E. Surely, when all is said and done, Plan E, the nuclear option will be the cheapest?
Well you wouldn't know it to behold the latest version of the 2050 Calculator which now has costs attached to it. It's still in beta, but it's available online, complete with some sample pathways to check out. The closest option to Plan E is the one labelled Higher Nuclear, Less Energy Efficiency, although why these two should be paired isn't explained. The point is that's it's not the cheapest option and even if you tweak it so it's higher nuclear plus lots of energy efficiency, it's still more expensive than the best in class, which is known as Markal 3.26 (don't ask!).
Markal 3.26 is as bit of a mish-mash, using a bit of everything including carbon capture and storage, lots of wind, some waves, some biofuel, and a bit of nuclear. In other words, almost exactly what David himself had warned us wouldn't be the cheapest option when he introduced Plan E in his book (see the quote in italics above). History tells us that when there is a race to develop competing technologies to carry out the same task, then pretty quickly one wins out. But the 2050 Calculator is sitting on the fence, not picking a winner or even indicating what the cheapest option might be.
Now buried deep inside this version of the Calculator is a wiki which lists all of the cost assumptions used to make the latest version. The project boasts of being open source and anyone can come along and edit the wiki, which sounds like a great idea. Except that hardly anyone has bothered (few seem to know of its existence) so that around 98% of the entries are from the DECC staff members charged with populating the calculator with data.
Dig around the wiki and you'll find an interesting item called the Worry List and on the list is an interesting item called Are We Going To Try And Answer The Really Big Questions:
• What is the cheapest pathway?
• Is it cheaper / how much more expensive is it to tackle climate change than to not?
• What are the biggest costs in tackling climate change?
• What are the biggest sources of uncertainty in tackling climate change?
• Is it cheaper to be more energy efficient or to build more capacity?
• Is nuclear cheaper than wind or CCS?
In theory, the costed version of the Calculator should answer all these questions but in practice the various pathways turn out to be very similar cost-wise, even the cost of doing nothing at all about climate mitigation. Which has surprised some right-wing commentators (cf Worstall, Booker). And it also surprised me. I was expecting a clear winner, not a photo-finish.
It's at this point that I begin to suspect that politics may be overriding arithmetic, and that the 2050 calculator has been tweaked to give the answers that the government wants to hear — i.e. that it's on the right track, and that what it proposes in its Carbon Plan is the best way forward. Far from challenging conventional wisdom on sustainable energy, the Calculator results seem to re-infoce it.
I wonder what David Mackay thinks? Has his baby been hijacked by political expediency? Or were his original back-of-the-envelope style calculations simply wrong? Because what has emerged from the 2050 calculator exercise looks very different to what he set out in Chapter 27 of his book.
10 Jan 2012
HS2: bonkers?
I've just been listening to Transport Minister Justine Greening announcing the go-ahead for HS2, the high speed line to connect London with Brum, Manchester and Leeds. She's sounded so upbeat, so full of promise. But every time I hear about this project, my own heart sinks. There have been hundreds of thousands of words expended on this subject already, mostly by people with a far better grasp on rail travel than me, but I feel like unloading my take on it. That's what a blog is for, isn't it?
Firstly the amount, widely reported as being around £33b, roughly three times the cost of the Olympics (don't get me started on that). Except there don't appear to be any sponsors or private investment. If it's that good a deal, why aren't private investors coming forward, like they did when the Victorians first put railways in place? Why is the government suddenly acting like a Soviet republic? Could it be that no one much cares about the few minutes shaved off journey times? No one wants the higher fares this will involve, and no business is daft enough to stump up?
And compare this to how stingy the government have been over Feed In Tariffs. As you may well have sussed by now, I'm no fan of FiTs, but the total subsidy is still small beer compared to HS2. Not to mention the fact that the government wasn't actually paying for FiTs - it is coming from everyones' electricity bills.
If the government were to replicate the same way of producing funds for HS2 as they have for FiTs, then the £33b could be spread amongst the 1.35billion passenger rail journeys made each year. If you added £1 to all of these journeys for the next 25 years, that would pay for HS2. Of course, only those travelling along the HS2 would benefit, but that's pretty much how FiTs are designed to work, so why not?
I'll tell you. Because the outcry would be so great that every right wing paper would have a fit of a very different variety — think stealth tax — and the plan would be dropped before you could say Justine Greening.
So no, instead the money is coming from the CapEx section of general expenditure, no doubt spread out over 50 years to make it look small. But it's a bollockingly large amount of money. It's £500 each. How many of us would elect to pay £500 for HS2 to be built? Now we have no choice.
What really browns me off is the point that I hear Christian Wolmar often making. That the rail network could badly do with a make-over and this £33b won't get spent on it because it's all going on HS2. To get from my home town, Cambridge, to Manchester by train takes 4hours. From London, 50 miles further away, Manchester is just 2hrs 10min, with a service running every 20 minutes.
Birmingham is worse still. 2 hours 40 mins from Cambridge by train — a distance of just 97 miles. In contrast, London is 118 miles distant but the journey takes just 1hr 25m. OK, Cambridge is a small town, but you could just as well substitute Bristol, Southampton, Cardiff, Swindon, Derby, you name it: the trains to them will all go at half speed or less than the London connections.
Our trains services always have been very London-centric and it seems absurd to me to be making them even more so. If we really want to get more people out of their cars and into a train, then how about improving cross country services?
Firstly the amount, widely reported as being around £33b, roughly three times the cost of the Olympics (don't get me started on that). Except there don't appear to be any sponsors or private investment. If it's that good a deal, why aren't private investors coming forward, like they did when the Victorians first put railways in place? Why is the government suddenly acting like a Soviet republic? Could it be that no one much cares about the few minutes shaved off journey times? No one wants the higher fares this will involve, and no business is daft enough to stump up?
And compare this to how stingy the government have been over Feed In Tariffs. As you may well have sussed by now, I'm no fan of FiTs, but the total subsidy is still small beer compared to HS2. Not to mention the fact that the government wasn't actually paying for FiTs - it is coming from everyones' electricity bills.
If the government were to replicate the same way of producing funds for HS2 as they have for FiTs, then the £33b could be spread amongst the 1.35billion passenger rail journeys made each year. If you added £1 to all of these journeys for the next 25 years, that would pay for HS2. Of course, only those travelling along the HS2 would benefit, but that's pretty much how FiTs are designed to work, so why not?
I'll tell you. Because the outcry would be so great that every right wing paper would have a fit of a very different variety — think stealth tax — and the plan would be dropped before you could say Justine Greening.
So no, instead the money is coming from the CapEx section of general expenditure, no doubt spread out over 50 years to make it look small. But it's a bollockingly large amount of money. It's £500 each. How many of us would elect to pay £500 for HS2 to be built? Now we have no choice.
What really browns me off is the point that I hear Christian Wolmar often making. That the rail network could badly do with a make-over and this £33b won't get spent on it because it's all going on HS2. To get from my home town, Cambridge, to Manchester by train takes 4hours. From London, 50 miles further away, Manchester is just 2hrs 10min, with a service running every 20 minutes.
Birmingham is worse still. 2 hours 40 mins from Cambridge by train — a distance of just 97 miles. In contrast, London is 118 miles distant but the journey takes just 1hr 25m. OK, Cambridge is a small town, but you could just as well substitute Bristol, Southampton, Cardiff, Swindon, Derby, you name it: the trains to them will all go at half speed or less than the London connections.
Our trains services always have been very London-centric and it seems absurd to me to be making them even more so. If we really want to get more people out of their cars and into a train, then how about improving cross country services?
9 Jan 2012
The God Species
Mark Lynas has a not-so-new book out, the God Species, and I've been taking post-Xmas read. Lynas is now identified as one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-greens who have turned their backs on traditional environmental thinking and embraced science and technology as the way forward. Bring on more nukes, lots of them please, and don't get hung up about GM foods or, for that matter, over-population. It's both refreshing and thought provoking and I look forward to reading more.
The basic premise of the book is that there are a number of planetary boundaries which we cross at our peril. Lynas identifies nine of them and devotes a chapter to each. Now this concept is a variation (a significant one) on the One Planet theme developed by WWF and others, and the original Limits to Growth style thinking dating back to the 1970s.
Each chapter follows a pattern. Lynas starts by describing the science surrounding the boundary and then moves on to reflect on how we should best deal with the problem. Thus the work is part pop-science, part polemic, and the book as a whole develops a roller coaster feel to it: we chug slowly uphill as we work through the facts and then let go for a breath-taking ride as we consider what the hell we should do about it. Generally, the polemic side is much the easier read, especially when it comes to refuting his previously held (green) convictions. This mea culpa aspect lends the book something of a confessional feel which makes it highly personal and consequently very accessible, something of a triumph for this subject, which despite its importance has been seen as just a little nerdy and very male - just why are there so few women writing about climate change and planetary boundaries?
So is Mark Lynas right? Is his position midway between traditional greenery (anti nukes, anti capitalism, anti progress) and gung-ho economic conservatism ("it's all an excuse to raise taxes so bugger off and leave us alone") the answer? He has my vote and there are an increasing number of influential commentators who line up in this camp, notably George Monbiot and Stuart Brand, not to mention a large number of scientists who traditionally steer clear of policy and are therefore reluctant to put their heads above the parapet.
But whether we like it or not, the debate has become highly politicised and just because Lynas is talking sense doesn't make the way forward any easier. For me, the most interesting chapter is the one dealing with the ozone layer - planetary boundary No 9 - and the way we appear to have solved the problem. It turns out the 1986 Montral Protocol, which addressed CFC production worldwide, was not the shoe-in I'd imagined it to be and that it took an enormous amount of cajoling and political manoeuvring to get it in place. The businesses which stood to take a pasting - principally American - dragged their heels and applied spoiling tactics and the Europeans were particularly obstructive. The key to its success was American political involvement and yet this all took place during the Reagan years. America simply threatened everyone with a big stick if they didn't comply and the rest of the world meekly fell into place. And within a few years, the world has learned to cope without CFCs and the ozone layer was on the road to recovery.
It all makes for a painful contrast with the Kyoto Protocol which was negotiated ten years later. Here the Americans, despite being led by Clinton and Gore, played a wrecking game and refused to sign up to anything meaningful. Climate change negotiations have never recovered from this setback. As a trusted advisor to the president of the Maldives, Lynas had a ringside seat at the Copenhagen summit and describes graphically what happened in the final hours of negotiation - all rather depressing.
But Lynas points out that our planetary problems are all solvable and that technically it is not even that difficult. We don't have to return to the dark ages and we don't have to restrict ourselves to a one child policy. We can house, feed and heat 9 million on this planet if only we can agree a few basic house rules. We don't even have to abandon economic growth, as long as we don't transgress a number of scientifically defined boundaries. We are, as the title implies, in a position to manage the planet, but right now we seem to lack the resolve to do so.
Thus it's both an uplifting read, in that it points a direct route out of the morass we've created, but a sobering one as well in that it draws a blank on how exactly we might get there politically.
The basic premise of the book is that there are a number of planetary boundaries which we cross at our peril. Lynas identifies nine of them and devotes a chapter to each. Now this concept is a variation (a significant one) on the One Planet theme developed by WWF and others, and the original Limits to Growth style thinking dating back to the 1970s.
Each chapter follows a pattern. Lynas starts by describing the science surrounding the boundary and then moves on to reflect on how we should best deal with the problem. Thus the work is part pop-science, part polemic, and the book as a whole develops a roller coaster feel to it: we chug slowly uphill as we work through the facts and then let go for a breath-taking ride as we consider what the hell we should do about it. Generally, the polemic side is much the easier read, especially when it comes to refuting his previously held (green) convictions. This mea culpa aspect lends the book something of a confessional feel which makes it highly personal and consequently very accessible, something of a triumph for this subject, which despite its importance has been seen as just a little nerdy and very male - just why are there so few women writing about climate change and planetary boundaries?
So is Mark Lynas right? Is his position midway between traditional greenery (anti nukes, anti capitalism, anti progress) and gung-ho economic conservatism ("it's all an excuse to raise taxes so bugger off and leave us alone") the answer? He has my vote and there are an increasing number of influential commentators who line up in this camp, notably George Monbiot and Stuart Brand, not to mention a large number of scientists who traditionally steer clear of policy and are therefore reluctant to put their heads above the parapet.
But whether we like it or not, the debate has become highly politicised and just because Lynas is talking sense doesn't make the way forward any easier. For me, the most interesting chapter is the one dealing with the ozone layer - planetary boundary No 9 - and the way we appear to have solved the problem. It turns out the 1986 Montral Protocol, which addressed CFC production worldwide, was not the shoe-in I'd imagined it to be and that it took an enormous amount of cajoling and political manoeuvring to get it in place. The businesses which stood to take a pasting - principally American - dragged their heels and applied spoiling tactics and the Europeans were particularly obstructive. The key to its success was American political involvement and yet this all took place during the Reagan years. America simply threatened everyone with a big stick if they didn't comply and the rest of the world meekly fell into place. And within a few years, the world has learned to cope without CFCs and the ozone layer was on the road to recovery.
It all makes for a painful contrast with the Kyoto Protocol which was negotiated ten years later. Here the Americans, despite being led by Clinton and Gore, played a wrecking game and refused to sign up to anything meaningful. Climate change negotiations have never recovered from this setback. As a trusted advisor to the president of the Maldives, Lynas had a ringside seat at the Copenhagen summit and describes graphically what happened in the final hours of negotiation - all rather depressing.
But Lynas points out that our planetary problems are all solvable and that technically it is not even that difficult. We don't have to return to the dark ages and we don't have to restrict ourselves to a one child policy. We can house, feed and heat 9 million on this planet if only we can agree a few basic house rules. We don't even have to abandon economic growth, as long as we don't transgress a number of scientifically defined boundaries. We are, as the title implies, in a position to manage the planet, but right now we seem to lack the resolve to do so.
Thus it's both an uplifting read, in that it points a direct route out of the morass we've created, but a sobering one as well in that it draws a blank on how exactly we might get there politically.
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