Version 3 of the 2050 Pathways Calculator

In December 2011, DECC published the Carbon Plan and version 3 of the 2050 Pathways Calculator.

As before, this open-source engineering-based tool is intended to support grown-up conversations about our possible energy futures. The user can choose any combination of demand-side and supply-side actions over the period to 2050, and the calculator computes and displays various consequences - energy flows, areas of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and some security-of-supply indicators. The significant new feature in version 3 is the inclusion of costs, for the first time. Version 3 of the calculator also includes an air-quality calculator, which, like the costs calculator, is under development. Expert feedback is welcome.
Future costs are uncertain, and there are a range of views of the future costs of key technologies such as building insulation, low-carbon vehicles, nuclear power, wind power, carbon capture and storage, heat pumps, and energy storage technologies, and key fuels such as oil, gas, and energy crops. These ranges are reflected in the calculator's cost sensitivity visualizer by allowing the user to change the costs from the default values to higher or lower values, consistent with the ranges that DECC has found in the expert literature. The user can also visualize the consequences of cost uncertainty by selecting the Uncertain choice for any of the costed items. The calculator then shows the range of possible costs for the user's chosen pathway.
All the cost ranges, and the original sources, are explicitly detailed in an open wiki, to which experts are encouraged to contribute updated data. You can click through to the relevant bit of the wiki from any row of the cost-sensitivity page of the calculator. The wiki contains superb interactive visualizations of the cost ranges from the literature. Here's the Offshore Wind Costs Data visualization, for example.

In the 2050 Calculator, you can compare the costs of your chosen pathway with other pathways, for example a handful that DECC has published, or those of experts. In the "Costs compared" view, you can compare all the pathways' costs simultaneously. In the "Cost sensitivity" view, you can compare your pathway in detail with one other comparator, which you can choose. In the web version of the calculator, costs are expressed in pounds per person per year. These are whole-energy-system costs, not people's home energy bills. For example, the costs of vehicles, building retrofit, and industrial infrastructure are included. Don't forget, the cost difference between two pathways depends on the cost assumptions. You can use the default cost assumptions if you want, but you can be sure that those costs won't turn out to be exactly right! So I encourage users to use the cost-sensitivity feature; taking into account the cost uncertainties will give you a more reasonable picture of future possible cost ranges, and ranges of cost differences.
For me, one key message from this tool is the importance of innovation support to bring down the costs of all the technologies that may be important in the future.
Media coverage - The Carbon Plan and the 2050 Calculator have had a little bit of media coverage in the last month, including a nice mention in an editorial in Nature magazine.
Some of the coverage has been so inaccurate, however, that one is forced to conjecture that the authors of two recent pieces in the Telegraph made little effort to check their facts. For example, Christopher Booker perpetuates the twaddle of a blogger who invented the assertion that the 2050 calculator 'had been designed on the assumption that, with wind power, Britain would require much less energy, because we would have become more “energy efficient”, by insulating our homes and so forth'. This is complete twaddle, as anyone who takes the time to actually look at the open-source calculator can confirm. The user is perfectly free to combine any choice of energy-efficiency measures with any choice of energy-supply mix. Yes, the government's published pathways combine "green" energy sources (eg nuclear and wind) with energy-efficiency choices. But the calculator does not 'assume' or 'force' this choice. You can easily make high-fossil-fuel pathways with strong energy-efficiency action, if you want. It's all up to you, as the user. I think it's an awesome piece of "open-source policy development", and I'd like to congratulate the civil servants who did it, and thank all the hundreds of experts and volunteers who have helped them in their work. I really hope this open, factual tool can now be constructively used by politicians and opinion-formers to help public engagement with the issues of long-term energy security and climate-change action.

Come and work at DECC!

DECC is advertising roughly a dozen posts for engineers and scientists. Here's the advertisement for 7 grade-7 engineers and 1 grade-6 engineer and 1 SEO. The closing date is 30 September 2011. More jobs are advertised here, including science/engineering specialists to work in the Office of Renewable Energy Deployment. Come and join us, it's a great place to work!

Public debate about 2050 Pathways

DECC is running a public debate, using the new 2050 Calculator, at blog.decc.gov.uk. The debate was opened by eight experts (Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth; Dustin Benton, Campaign to Protect Rural England; Prof Nick Jenkins; Mark Brinkley, Housebuilder's Bible; Duncan Rimmer, National Grid; Dr David Clarke, Energy Technologies Institute; Keith Clarke, Atkins; Mark Lynas, author), who presented and discussed their preferred pathways within the calculator. It's now open to the public to join in. In a couple more days, the opening panel will wrap up their conversation; it'll be interesting if they can achieve consensus on one or two pathways.

The panelists and their pathways

Mike Childs: demand highly curtailed and very high renewables
In Mike’s pathway, 20% of primary energy will be imported and emissions will be 80% below 1990 levels in 2050.
Mike’s pathway in more detail

Dustin Benton: demand highly curtailed and high renewables
In Dustin’s pathway, 33% of primary energy will be imported and emissions will be 81% below 1990 levels in 2050.
Dustin’s pathway in more detail

Professor Nick Jenkins: maximum electrification of homes and industry
In Nick’s pathway, 54% of primary energy will be imported and emissions will be 82% below 1990 levels in 2050.
Nick’s pathway in more detail

Mark Brinkley: lots of bioenergy
In Mark’s pathway, 66% of primary energy will be imported and emissions will be 79% below 1990 levels in 2050.
Mark’s pathway in more detail

Duncan Rimmer: mix of CCS, nuclear, renewables and all cars electrified
In Duncan’s pathway, 60% of primary energy will be imported and emissions will be 81% below 1990 levels in 2050.
Duncan’s pathway in more detail

Dr David Clarke: mix of CCS, nuclear and renewables
In David’s pathway, 56% of primary energy will be imported and emissions will be 81% below 1990 levels in 2050.
David’s pathway in more detail

Keith Clarke: high electrification of transport, homes and industry
In Keith’s pathway, 58% of primary energy will be imported and emissions will be 77% below 1990 levels in 2050.
Keith’s pathway in more detail

Mark Lynas: lots of geosequestration
In Mark’s pathway, 78% of primary energy will be imported and emissions will be 80% below 1990 levels in 2050.
Mark’s pathway in more detail

Version 2 of the 2050 Calculator

On Thursday 3rd March, DECC is going to be publishing version 2 of the 2050 Pathways Calculator, along with an updated version of the calculator that runs in your browser - now including energy flow diagrams and maps showing land areas and sea areas.

We're also publishing a simplified "My2050 simulator", aimed at engaging a wider audience in this open-source conversation about energy policy.
To celebrate these publications, I'll be on a live Guardian blog on Thursday 3rd March at lunchtime.

Downwind faster than the wind

In July 2009 I wrote a post about wind-powered vehicles that travel directly downwind faster than the wind, giving links to videos explaining why this surprising idea is in fact possible.
I've now noticed that in July 2010 a fantastic team of enthusiasts fasterthanthewind.org indeed demonstrated a single-person wind-powered vehicle that goes more than twice as fast as the wind, directly downwind. Don't you just love engineers?!

Science, Engineering and Technology Award for DECC 2050 Pathways Team

At the Civil Service Awards last month, the Science, Engineering and Technology Award was won by the DECC 2050 Pathways Team for their work, which I highlighted in July.
From right to left, the photo shows Gus O'Donnell (Cabinet Secretary) giving the award to Katherine Randall, Tom Counsell, Clare Maltby, and James Geddes at Buckingham Palace. (To their left are two staff from the Government Office of Science.)

Now available in Japanese! - "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air"

Many thanks to Katsunori Muraoka!

持続可能なエネルギー—「数値」で見るその可能性 [単行本]

Making numbers stick - desalination, melting, and boiling

I'm always looking for new ways to make physical numbers memorable.

• One method is to use a picture (eg nuclear waste, per person, per year) [page 170, SEWTHA]
  
• Another general rule is to choose units such that the answer to be remembered comes out between "1 unit" and "200 units", because smallish numbers are easier to remember.
  
• Another idea is to reexpress the quantity in completely different units, which may be more familiar and more memorable, as illustrated in this earlier post where I converted an incomprehensible 20 x 10²² J into a hopefully more human-friendly ocean temperature rise of 0.2 degrees C.
  

I'd like to give a few more examples of this trick, all converting unmemorable numbers in awkward units into temperature rises.
Example 1: the cost of desalinating sea water. [This method of making it stick came from Jim Gill, Chancellor of Curtin University, via Sam Wylie.] In SEWTHA (p 93), I report that desalination has an energy cost of 8 kWh per m³. A nice way to make this number more meaningful is to work out what temperature rise you would get if the same energy were put directly into heat in the same volume of water. The answer is ((8 kWh) / (1000 litres)) / (4.2 ((kJ / C) / litre)) = 7 degrees C.
This result brings home that if the desalinated water is going to be used for a shower or for cooking, the energy cost of the desalination is fairly tiny compared to the energy that will be used later in the water's lifecycle.

Example 2: melting ice. The latent heat of melting of ice is 6 kJ/mol, or 333 kJ per kg, a quantity I have never been able to memorise... until now! Using the same trick as above, we can convert this into an equivalent temperature rise, by dividing by the heat capacity. The answer is "the latent heat of melting of ice 'is' 80 degrees C".
I don't think I'll forget that number! It really brings home why mountaineers spend so much time melting snow. The energy to melt the snow is roughly the same as the energy to bring the melted snow up to boiling point!
Example 3: vaporizing water. We can apply the same trick to the heat required to vaporize water (2258 kJ/kg). The answer is (2258 kJ/kg) / (4.2 kJ/kg/C) in C = 538 C. This number violates the "should be between 1 and 200" rule, so it is not super-memorable, but it is quite striking, isn't it - whereas near-boiling water is 373 degrees above absolute zero, the energy required to actually boil it is equivalent to another 538 degrees of temperature rise! Maybe the best way to obey the "1-200" rule is to reexpress this heat once more, comparing it to the energy required to bring the water from 0 to 100 C. It is bigger by a factor of 5.4. So "the time for the kettle to boil itself dry is about 5 times the time taken to bring it to the boil".
Here ends the lesson.

'smart ways of seeing numbers' - the BBC like the 2050 Calculator!

In The BBC News Magazine, Go Figure, Michael Blastland says:
"If you've somehow missed it elsewhere, the DECC 2050 energy calculator is worth looking up."
Hurray!

New Energy Future

There's a new video on the Independent's website, made with the support of Channel 4 and Shell. It's one minute long, and, as seems to be traditional now, features me talking about energy and lightbulbs.
There's also a linked article in the Independent by Steve Connor, on "why achieving a cleaner energy economy involves a series of difficult choices", which quotes Sustainable Energy - without the hot air.

The 'zero' charger's footprint (Hot Air Oscars nomination, greenwart)

Here is a nice blog post by Blue Lyon, discussing the energy cost and money 'savings' offered by AT+T's recommendation to Turn your iPhone green with a new ZERO Charger.
Blue Lyon works out that the charger, which claims to use less power on standby, might pay for itself in 44 years, assuming it was displacing an old charger using 0.26 W, left plugged in all the time.
The makers of 'ZERO Chargers' are therefore nominated for the Hot Air Oscar for flagrant exploitation of gullible consumers.
One way to think about this is simply to look at the energy cost of delivery alone, assuming that the delivery involves one van making a 5-mile trip. Typing this into my firefox browser
5 miles / (13.1 miles per US gallon) * 10 kWh per litre in kWh
gives 14 kWh of transport energy to deliver the greenwart. That corresponds to the energy used by leaving the old charger in for 6 years.

2050 Calculator Tool at DECC

I'm delighted to report that the Department of Energy and Climate Change has published the 2050 Pathways Analysis, which illustrates six possible energy pathways to achieve secure and affordable energy supplies in the UK while still hitting the 2050 target of reducing emissions by 80 per cent on 1990 levels.
These pathways were constructed with the engineering-based 2050 Calculator, which is now available as an online tool, and as a monster-spreadsheet that you can download, play with, and improve.
The Department is encouraging people to enhance this open-source tool, ideally before October 2010, so that it can in due course be used to engage civil servants, politicians, and the general public in 'grown-up' conversations, as Chris Huhne puts it.
The tool allows the user to explore the consequences - in terms of security-of-supply indicators and greenhouse gas emissions - of any combination of demand-side choices and supply-side choices. The intention of this 'play Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change' approach is not to imply that the energy system could or should be centrally planned, but to help people understand the range of possibilities that are open to us; the trade-offs; the common themes shared by energy pathways that add up; and the scale of action required.
Here's one journalist's reaction to the tool [Independent]. And the Guardian. To understand what's going on behind the simplified front-end, please read the 2050 document and dive into the monster spreadsheet.
I'd like to praise James Geddes and Tom Counsell for their outstanding work in producing this tool, along with Jonathan Brearley, Graeme Cuthbert, Jan Kiso, Katherine Randall, Clare Maltby, and the whole 2050 team at DECC.

Ocean heat content, and useful units

The recent post at realclimate about measured increases in ocean heat content has an interesting graph whose y-axis is labelled in spectacular units, 10²² J. Even exajoules are not that big! (1EJ = 10¹⁸ J)...
One comment on that blog suggested it would be good to re-express in other units that are more familiar - say degrees Celsius, or watts per square metre.
Here goes...
The graph shows the ocean heat content increasing by about 20 x 10²² J in 40 years.
First, let's express the change in heat content as a average rise in temperature of the top 700 metres of the ocean (which is what was actually measured to make these graphs!).

Temperature rise = (Heat content increase) / (Volume of water) /
                         (Heat capacity)
                 = 20 x 1022 J / 
                   (350 x 106 km2 * 700 m) / 
                   (4.2 x 106 J/K/m3)
                 = 0.19 K (or 0.19 degrees C).

Second, let's express the rate of increase in heat content in terms of a net power per unit area required.

Power per unit area = (Heat content increase) / Time / Area
                    = 20 x 1022 J / (40 years) / 
                      (350 x 106 km2)
                    = 0.45 W/m2.

This can be compared with other things measured in the same units - see for example pages 20 and 170 in Sustainable Energy – without the hot air.
Hope this helps!

SEWTHA online - Index added

I've added an alphabetical index page to the html edition of Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. I hope this helps! This index is identical to the version in the paper edition of the book, except that the page-numbers are clickable hypertext links.

Wind farm wakes

I'd like to highlight a stunning photograph and an interesting paper.

The image shows clouds forming in the wakes of the front row of wind turbines of Horns Rev wind farm.
The paper, Wake effects at Horns Rev and their influence on energy production, by Mechali, Barthelmie, Frandsen, Jensen, and Rethore, describes measurements of the effects of these wakes on wind power production.

The message of the paper is interesting. The downstream wind turbines lose 20% or 30% of their power, and sometimes even more, relative to the front row. The spacing of the turbines is 7 diameters.

'withouthotair' - Alternate website

The website withouthotair.com has gone down today (5 Jan 2010) and I am not sure why... anyway, there is a backup website at www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/. (Also known as tinyurl.com/sewtha.)
Thanks to friendly people for pointing out the problem.
Apologies for any inconvenience!

Late entry by The Times for the 2009 Hot Air Oscars

In July 2009, I nominated two newspapers for the Hot Air Oscar for Most inaccurate numbers in a right-wing newspaper.
A late submission has arrived, nominating The Times for their laughably inaccurate statement about solar power.
The US Energy Department has calculated that a 62-square-mile (160 sq km) parcel of the Mojave [desert]... receives enough sunlight to power the entire country.

Anyone who has seen SEWTHA page236 will know this statement is wrong. The average power of tropical desert sunshine is about 250 W/m² [see page 46]. Multiply by 62 square miles and you get 40 GW. That is far smaller than US power consumption, which is about 3700 GW (if they mean power in all forms) or 420 GW (if they mean electricity only).
Being more realistic, we should use a power per unit area of 15-20 W/m², since that's what real solar power stations offer. At that power per unit area, 62 square miles would give you just 2.4-3.2 GW.
What is it about journalists, areas, and squares? One of the ealier nominations for this Hot Air Oscar also featured an incorrectly reported area!

Eat bacon and ride a bike!

About 8 months ago, I made a short video with the help of Cambridge University, called "how many lightbulbs" [1]. This week, Cambridge University has published another 6-minute video in the same series - it's fantastic, and it's called Professor Risk. ← click this link to go to the movie in its own page.

The Energy Game

Some super people have been developing ways of presenting energy numbers and engaging the public and policy-makers in consensus-building conversations.
The next 'Energy Game' will take place at the Science Museum in London at the Dana Centre on 3 Dec 2009 at 7pm-9pm, organized by Serious Change.

How to boil water - the sequel

One year ago, I wrote a blog titled how to boil water, which linked to a short essay, "how much is inside hot water?". Over the subsequent 12 months, a flood of emailers have requested that I answer their follow-up questions: "does it make any difference if the lid is on the pan?" and "how does a microwave compare with the pan and the kettle?". Dutifully, I did experiments this Sunday, and this link describes the results in full.
The conclusions are that keeping the lid on the pan while boiling water saves about 3%; and that the microwave is a hopelessly bad way to boil water for making pasta.

Challenged by Carbon

I'm reading Challenged by Carbon: The Oil Industry and Climate Change by Bryan Lovell.
Bryan Lovell is a geologist who has worked in academia and the oil industry for decades. This is an unusual book, intertwining two stories, one of them 55 million years old, and one less than 55 years old. I've not heard either story told before, and both are fascinating.
For the older, slower story, Dr Lovell delves into the details of the geological history of Iceland, the North Atlantic, and the North Sea. He describes how local heavings of the planet's stomach have caused a sub-ocean ridge between Scotland and Iceland to slightly rise and fall, having knock-on effects on ocean circulation and global climate; how slight variations in the average intensity of sunlight in the Northern hemisphere cause changes in climate on a timescale of 20,000 years which can be detected in sedimnetary rocks; and, crucially, how a large natural rapid release of carbon into the atmosphere, 55 million years ago, led to an enormous global warming event, raising the temperature of the water at the bottom of the ocean by more than 4 degrees C within roughly 10,000 years.
The younger, rapidly-moving story is the `insider's view' of how the oil industry, in the last 15 years, changed its mind about human-caused climate change. Starting from positions of climate inactivism (by which I mean "yeah, it may be true, but there's lots of uncertainty and there's no point doing anything, and we oppose greenhouse-gas-reduction treaties") or outright denial, the big oil companies, driven by the science, changed their tunes. First, in 1997, Shell and BP, then, in 2004, ExxonMobil came round to the view "that there is a big problem and that urgent action is required". Lovell knew all the key players well, he was there at the dinner-table discussions where this "Atlantic divide in Big Oil" heaved to and fro, and he hints at the bruising personal conflicts that took place as the oil experts argued about the science. Lovell identifies a particular BP-ExxonMobil debate held by the Geological Society's Petroleum Group in London in 2003 as a turning point in the argument, and describes at length this conversation, whose backdrop was the start of the 2003 Iraq war.
The two stories are connected in multiple quirky ways: the ancient global warming event was probably associated with an uplifting of Scotland that led to the deposition of the North Sea oil fields, from which the oil-folk derived much of their recent wealth; and, more significantly, Lovell describes the 55-million-year-old global warming event as one of the pieces of evidence that helped swing the climate-change argument: oil-men believe what they see in the rocks, and those rocks give uncomfortable evidence for what happens when a large amount of carbon is suddenly released into the atmosphere.
Both stories have the feeling of incompletely-solved detective mysteries. Where did the carbon come from in the ancient global warming event? Was it methane hydrates? Volcanoes? Or some other form of carbon deposit? Was it Iceland that precipitated the global transformation? As for the present-day conversion story, Lovell leaves the reader wondering whether the detective story is yet over - yes, some oil companies greened up their public facades in 2003, but have they reverted to business as usual behind the scenes? And what about the rest of the oil industry?
In the second half of the book, Lovell indicates how he hopes the drama will unfold: "government intervention is essential" in relation to the transition to the low-carbon economy; "concerted action" is required from all oil companies; oil companies should turn their remarkable technical skills to a new waste management business: capturing and storing carbon, especially carbon from coal power stations.
Now, I love physical numbers, so let's recap some of the key numbers for carbon capture. A standard unit of carbon capture and storage is "the Sleipner": thanks to Norway's implementation of a carbon-emission tax of $55 per tonne of CO<sub>2</sub> (which can be compared to today's EU market price of 14.10 euros per tonne), StatoilHydro is storing 1 Mt CO<sub>2</sub> per year in the Utsira saline aquifer under the North Sea. A 1-GW coal power station, running all the time, produces roughly 7 Mt CO<sub>2</sub> per year. So every 1-GW power station would require roughly 7 Sleipners, and the cost to the consumer for electricity from that source might be in the ballpark of an extra 4p per kWh of electricity (similar to the present subsidy for wind power in the UK). The scale of the waste to be stored is worth mentioning. The volume of 7 Mt CO<sub>2</sub> (the approximate annual waste from 1 GW coal power station), after it's been compressed to the same density as water, is three times the volume of the great pyramid at Giza. If Britain were to build, say, 33 GW of `clean coal', the volume of compressed waste that would have to be pumped through pipelines and into rocks under the North Sea would be 100 great pyramids per year; or, to put it in personal terms, 13 litres per day per person in the UK, every litre of this waste CO₂ having the same weight as a litre of water.
This book is fascinating reading.
David MacKay, 18 October 2009