Hooray for Capitalism

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The recent announcement that BPs quarterly profits were down as a result of providing for the Gulf of Mexico disaster hid the fact that BP is still making huge annual profits by anybody’s standards. Following this thought I looked up some financial results for other oil companies.

The top 10 oil companies in the world, on average in 2007/2008, cleared profits of around 0.25% of world GDP! This is even when you allow some adjustment for inaccuracy in reported figures for the Chinese and Iranian state owned oil companies. If you extrapolate these figures to total world oil production and include some guesswork for coal and gas then the global profits from fossil fuels could possibly be around 1% of world GDP. Anyway it is in that sort of region.

Now in his review, Sir Nicholas Stern suggests that the ultimate cost of living with a changed climate could be 5% – 20% of world GDP, but that the cost of mitigating climate change would be of the order of 1% of world GDP. Notice any similarity between these numbers?

From my brief investigation it looks a lot like the cost of paying for remediating the climate damage done by our thirst for fossil fuels is about the same as the profit that the oil companies make from it. So the answer has been there all the time, if we had re-invested the profits from fossil fuels in cleaning up the atmosphere over the last century we might well not be in this fix. Unfortunately the profits of a global resource have not been used to benefit mankind, but have instead lined the pockets of a few – hooray for capitalism.

Not a Glowing Record

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The Office of National Statistics has published the UK Carbon Dioxide emissions figures for 2009. They make interesting reading. Basically 2 years of recession has achieved a reduction in Carbon Dioxide emissions 8 times greater than 10 years of continuous change to environmental legislation by the Labour Government.

Whilst on the topic of the effectiveness of legislation, here’s an old piece of information that I haven’t posted yet. In March 2003 Labour created a piece of legislation that required minimum environmental performance standards from all new building work or renovations in the Government Estate. A report by the National Audit Office found that 80% of Government procured building works failed to meet their own standard.

It just goes to show that the power of the individual consumer (even those working in Whitehall) to mitigate carbon emissions through behavioural change is far greater than national governments can achieve by legislation. We must radically re-think the way we approach climate change mitigation.

Consult for Better Policy

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Chris Huhne’s first annual statement to Parliament on energy policy correctly identified that reducing demand is far more cost effective than building new generating capacity whether renewable, nuclear or burying the carbon problem in the ground. However, no mention was made of undoing some of the damage done by ill thought out legislation already on the statute books.

For example, should you be tempted by the forthcoming renewable heat incentive to invest in solar water heating, you will not be able to buy a washing machine that can use the carbon free hot water thanks to a botched piece of previous legislation (see here).

Before the Coalition Government introduces further tiers of legislation and incentives they really should re-examine the impact of previous regulations and develop a coherent approach to energy efficiency. We can make substantial inroads into our excessive energy demands through the application of some basic science to the design and refurbishment of buildings and their services. This will yield the desired results far more economically and without the unintended consequences that come about through manipulation of the market for low carbon technologies.

The Coalition now has the opportunity to reverse the approach of the previous Government by actually consulting with industry experts in order to examine the broader implications of their policy ambitions and so avoid such un-intended consequences. I do hope that they take it.

Kinetic Road Plates

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The issue of kinetic road plates came up again today. Doesn’t it sound like a great idea – harvest energy from cars passing over a compressible ramp in the road to drive a generator?  Free energy, as long as people keep driving cars.

But hang on – where is this free energy coming from?

Well, since energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it clearly must come from the car’s engine as the only power supply in the vicinity. In order to compress the ramp the vehicle must first drive up it’s incline. The increase in gravitational potential energy created by raising the mass of the car is then converted to kinetic energy as the ramp gently compresses and drops the car back down to road level, driving a generator to create electricity. But, in order to raise the car up the ramp in the first place consumes more fuel, exactly like driving up a hill.

So, rather than harvesting free energy, the kinetic plate is actually stealing a little bit of energy from each car passing over it. That energy must be replaced by burning more fuel; it’s just that the amount of fuel taken from each car is so small that you’d be unlikely to notice.

Now one of the first adopters of this technology is a national supermarket chain – very clever – the supermarket also sells fuel from its own petrol station, so they are onto a double winner. The store gets a free supply of energy from its customers and then sells more energy to the same customers to replace the energy it has stolen from them.

Unintended Consequences

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Someone mentioned to me the other day that it was next to impossible to find a new washing machine with both hot and cold fill. So how are we supposed to reduce carbon emissions from domestic laundry by using water from low carbon sources such as solar thermal?

To check whether this was true, I did a quick survey online. Of the 50 top selling washing machines from 13 different manufacturers, none has the option to fill with hot water. Yet all of these machines are A or A+ rated for energy efficiency. I wondered why this had come about, so I did a bit of further research.

The Energy Information (Washing Machines) Regulations 1996 is the UK enactment of the EC Directive on the energy labeling of domestic appliances. These explicitly state that “These Regulations shall apply only to appliances which are electric mains operated and unable to use other energy sources”

The second bit of this statement is the significant one. In order to deliver a universal rating system it must be possible to compare like for like. How could you compare the efficiency of an electrically heated machine with one that receives hot water from an external source of unknown quality. This little get out clause is clearly included to ensure that the energy efficiency ratings will be equivalent across the board. What this means in practice of course is that a washing machine with a hot fill cannot be given an energy label.

Now when it comes to heating water, even a conventional boiler will do it with less carbon emission than an electric heating element in a washing machine. Since energy labels are mandatory this little sentence, buried in the verbiage, creates a prohibition on what are potentially the most carbon efficient washing machines.

The washing machine manufacturers must have been delighted. As the sale of appliances without energy labels was prohibited they no longer needed to include a second set of water control valves in their machines, thus reducing manufacturing costs. I don’t suppose that the savings were passed on to consumers, but just try to get them to add back the hot fill now without putting the price up.

Then we have to factor in the fact that the energy label rating is based on a very specific wash cycle, whilst consumers apparently are tending to use more energy intensive quick wash cycles. According to a number of studies the electricity consumption for laundry is much higher than would be inferred from the energy labels.

In the UK, Building Regulations and policies like the Renewable Heat Incentive are designed to reduce carbon emissions in building services installations, including hot water generation. Washing machines are excluded from these policy instruments because they are already covered by the energy labelling regulations. But water heating is water heating and probably best dealt with as an efficient integrated system, not in isolation in your washing machine.

So, in drafting regulation which is supposed to promote energy efficiency the European Union scribes have actually written one that prohibits the most carbon efficient means of operation. Maybe one day our Governments will consult people who understand the issues before writing new laws.