Introducing ... the Ocean Source Heat Pump?

A few months ago I put up a post about how a Ground Source Heat Pump works. But here's an interesting twist on the same idea: the Ocean Source Heat Pump. *

As David Mackay has pointed out, the risk with ground source heat pumps is that you eventually extract enough heat to freeze the ground around you. Essentially, the ground is a good store of heat because of it's low thermal conductivity, but for the same reason it's also hard to replenish the store. Which means that if you're constantly take heat from the same hole in the ground, eventually you get to a point where you've taken it all.

Of course in the ocean you have a different situation, first of all because you're working with a liquid heat store, and secondly because you can more easily float your power station around to different locations. In the video clip I have linked to above, Dr Ted Johnson, Director of Alternative Energy Development at Lockheed Martin who are developing the prototype, says:

"I dream of thousands of floating OTEC ships, roaming the seas of the world and providing an inexhaustible supply of clean energy, fuel and water for all people of the world"

Well, it's a wonderful vision and I agree with that. But presumably the problem is how to store the electric power that the floating heat pumps generate, or more precisely how to do that without destroying the economics of the thing completely. Bear in mind that electric storage is REALLY expensive: even a small 24 KWh battery for a state of the art electric car costs about $10,000 - $15,000, and Ted is talking about ocean pumps with 10 or 100MW capacity. So even without having done the math on this (which at some level is against all my principles), I'd assume that the energy storage costs do this project in.

BUT, hang on a moment. Things would be different, wouldn't they, if you had something useful you could do with all that power right there in the ocean? And if you think for a minute about the applications of clean energy generation in close proximity to the ocean... well, it doesn't take long for desalination to jump to mind, i.e. the highly power-intensive conversion of salt water to drinking water.

Perhaps Dr Johnson has come up with something unbelievable after all, the answer to the world's water wars of the future. And clean water is of course, much easier to store and move around than clean energy.



* Of course, I noticed that this technology is not exactly a heat pump, but it's a close cousin. So let's get on with it and not be too pedantic.

Ask What You Can Do

From today, The Carbon Census has a new strapline - Ask what you can do.

Taken from the inaugural speech of President John F Kennedy (on 20 January 1961, exactly 50 years ago today) this phrase just seems to capture what we're trying to do with the Carbon Census. Ask not [what the politicians are ever going to do about climate change], ask what you can do!

And ask us, of course.

For more on JFK take a look at www.jfk50.org - and for more on uplifting public rhetoric, try watching this tribute video. Interesting cameo from a UK politician about half way through - can you guess which one? Well, we'd been wondering where he'd gotten to since May.

An unbelievable Christmas present

Happy Holidays! Over the past 2 weeks, every member of the US Congress (and every Governor's office around, and every state and local representative...) has received an unusual seasonal gift.

So what's the gift? A board game called This Way To Jobs. You can play it online, but let me save you a few minutes of your valuable time and tell you how it works.

Game Rules

• You choose a counter - CEO, Director, Entrepreneur, etc
• You roll the dice to move around the board - a bit like The Game of Life
• You start in a Ghost Town - tumbleweed blows across the screen
• Your goal is to get to Prosperity Park
• Dodge as many regulations as possible on your way around 
• If you get a regulation card, you move back 3 spaces, etc
• Look out for Financial Reform Falls, Labour Lagoon and Energy Edge ... regulation lurks at every bend in the road

Wow. A truly elaborate and creative campaign and targeting the Environmental Protection Agency in particular. Not surprising in itself, but guess who is behind this campaign, so out of tune with contemporary reality? Maverick Republicans? Big Oil? Swiftboat Veterans for Truth? No, the campaign is run by the US Chamber of Commerce itself. I am truly astonished. 

Have a look at some of the cards you can draw :

"Insulation is sexy" (Who said that?)

Somehow I managed to miss this whole thing, almost a year ago exactly today. So perhaps some of you had missed it too? If so, watch and enjoy!

(Hint: Use the slider to skip ahead to 1 min 50 secs and just watch the last 20 seconds or so. That's all you need!)

Snake Oil Awards will not help very much

Well, I used to enjoy David Mackay's Hot Air Oscars. So it made me chuckle to see that the US has come up with a bigger and better equivalent: Official 2010 Snake Oil Awards for Public Deception. Perhaps not surprising that BP is a nominee.

In general I am a fan of Repower America, the organisation behind the awards. But I wonder if what the clean energy movement needs right now is Corporate Villains? Clearly some movements for social change have benefited  from creating villains (e.g. anti-smoking), but others haven't needed to (e.g. road safety). Some  in fact have seemed to hold back on the blame game, even when there was more of a case for advancing it (e.g. Civil Rights, Quit India).

So what do we think? Is clean energy hard to deliver because Bad People in Big Companies have conspired to hide the truth from us (as perhaps was the case with smoking)? Or is it because we have behavioural habits that are deeply engrained (like speeding and drink driving)? I believe the latter, therefore Snake Oil awards, though potentially amusing, will not help much.

Watch the latest video from Al Gore

Interesting video from Repower America, the environmental campaign group backed by Al Gore. More evidence that US organisations of this type are far ahead of their counterparts in the UK, where 1 in 3 of us still believe the whole climate change thing is bunkum. Watch the video, and look out for a cameo appearance by Alec Baldwin (from The Departed) and a few other celebs you know. Kris Kristofferson is in there too.

Our electricity could be gone for months

Earlier this summer I blogged about High Impact, Low Frequency events, unlikely occurrences but which could knock out the power grid. It sounds fanciful, but it's a real issue - dangerous electro-magnetic pulses could be caused by solar flares, electro-magnetic storms or by man-made nuclear explosions at high altitude.

So, very pleased to hear  Radio 4's Today Programme covering this topic today, with an interview of Avi Schnurr at the EMP Coalition. It's a risk we face that didn't exist a hundred years ago. The interview has not been posted yet, but should appear soon on the i-player (but for UK internauts only I believe).

The oil is still there (under the sand)

A colleague in the US writes:

I was recently at a presentation of the damage that BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico. BP has spent $100 million on PR and is saying that the beaches are clean, that the oil has evaporated, been digested or otherwise dispersed.

However, finding the pollution is as simple as digging a couple of inches into the sand on the barrier islands, where you'll find about a foot of coagulated oil. [see photo] We're very concerned that BP is about to declare victory and avoid doing a full cleanup.

Well, I don't know exactly what to make of this - it certainly seems as though there's a lot of oil still out there. But in general I don't think bashing BP over the oil spill has helped a great deal - they drill for oil in the gulf because we buy it off them afterwards, so the problem of getting off fossil fuels (and away from the risks of drilling) is one that we all share responsibility for solving. 

Even so, the photos are striking. They are by Shawn Carey, a photographer who works for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and who is campaigning to extend the clean-up. 

Oil prices down 10% since the BP spill

We all know what the oil spill is doing to the environment. But have you seen what it's done to the market? I thought I'd take a look, and the answer is ... wait a minute, nothing at all??

The explosion was on April 20. On April 16, a barrel of light sweet crude cost $83. And 140 million spilled gallons later, it costs $75. Contracts for 2015 have also come down about 10% (see chart). 

How is that possible? The answer is: although the spill is massive, the market is massiver. I estimate that the spill so far is worth about 1% of 1% of the 21 billion barrels of proven reserves in the US alone. And of course Deepwater Horizon was an exploratory well, so the market never even knew this oil was there.  

I think traders are more interested in global economics. If prices have cooled off since April, it must mean the outlook for global growth has done the same. (Think public sector deficits, Greek debt crisis, Chinese currency appreciation ... ). 

All this makes sense, but there is one more observation. Prices for December 2015 are about $10 ahead of today's spot prices, so the market does expect oil to be more expensive in 5 years time. For most of June, this gap looked like it was rising to about $15, presumably because a proper approach to safety would make production costlier in the future. 

But in the last few days, the gap from spot price to Dec 2015 price has dropped back to $10 again. So much for talk of a safety premium. Happy 4th of July folks.

Energy prices are from the EIA and futures are from nymex.

High Impact, Low Frequency?

The BP oil spill has got us all thinking about low frequency, high impact events. But some people have been thinking about these things for quite a while, including the team at NERC - the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Who knew such an institution even existed? Their job apparently is to worry about unlikely events that would be really, really bad if they ever came about.

The latest NERC report includes a detailed section on geomagnetic storms:

The analysis indicates that the [geomagnetically induced current] in over 350 transformers will exceed levels where the transformer is at risk of irreparable damage...  Such large scale damage could lead to prolonged restoration and long-term chronic shortages of electricity supply capability to the impacted regions, arguably for multiple years.

In other words, a really big storm could roast enough components (70-80% of transformers in some states) to put the lights out for years. A version of this event happened in March 1989 and knocked out parts of the Canadian grid for most of a day. But since then, the grid has been developed in ways that make it more vulnerable than before: essentially, higher voltage transmission means geomagnetically induced currents can travel further and do more damage.

From a different angle, we could perhaps get a similar effect from a high altitude nuclear explosion. Here's a photo of the last time we had a go at one of those. This one was 400km in the air but the electromagnetic pulse was enough to blow out the streetlights in Hawaii, 1500km away.

(This is the 1962 Starfish Prime explosion.)