CarbonTracking

i was reading the EPA's National Inventory Report for Greenhouse Gas Emissions the other day. Some may say that I should get out more but these reports are real pageturners.

Anyway, rather that talk about the report, I'm just going to mention one particular chart that I saw which piqued my interest. On pg 39, we have Figure 2.4 Vehicle Numbers and Population 1990-2008.


What we have is the red bar chart showing the increase in car ownership and then the line showing the increase in population over the same period. So far, so simple.

Now at a first reading, the eye sees the level of vehicle ownership increasing at roughly the same rate as the increase in population. Good on you, Ireland, nothing to be reprimanded there.

The tricky bit though is that the population line uses a different scale, the scale on the right, the one that starts at 3 million and goes up to 4.5 million. Now you can argue that different scale is needed to make some sense of the chart, but the scale chosen is curious in that it makes the two trends, vehicles and population seem pretty much equal.

Now if we really wanted to compare trends then we should use a comparable scale, for example the % increase over a given time, i.e. if vehicle ownership goes up by 10% in the same time as population ownership goes up by 10% then we can safely say that nothing strange is going on.

So lets make a chart doing just that



Now that chart seems to tell a whole different story. Between 1990 and 2008, population increased by roughly 25% while vehicle ownership increased by a relatively whopping 140%.
So, caveat emptor, you've just got to watch out for what someone is trying to tell you in a nice chart.

Remember, the numbers never lie, once you have access to the real numbers. Its the use of the numbers that brings the spin.

Here's a quickie.

The Nissan Leaf, heralded as the first mass-market electric car with real world performance, comes to Ireland in 2011. Stunning specs and all that but lets have a look at the emissions, shall we ?

It's fuel consumption is 24 kWh/160km, that's right instead of measuring in liters or gallons, we're measuring fuel in kilowatt-hours, the things you see on your electricity bill.

So, 0.15 kWh per kilometer, that's to actually push the car forward, i.e. coming out of the battery pack. But battery packs are at best 80% efficient so you need to put 0.1875 kWh in per kilometer.

Now electricity in Ireland has an emission intensity of ~533 gCO2 / kWh. This means that your 0.1875 kWh per kilometer will produce ~100 gCO2/km.

This puts it in joint fifth place in the list of the most efficient cars in the Irish market. Not exactly ground-breaking is it ???

Still, I think its a great idea, will help do things like providing grid backup, peak-load shedding and all that and of course, as our % of renewable electricity increases, the emissions drop.

P.S. The govt. is giving a €5000 grant to anyone buying an electric car, and it is exempt from VRT ( which would be 14%). The Leaf will cost €29,995 after the grant and VRT exemption meaning that the tax-payer will have subsidised it to the tune of €9,900. Would be nice if someone explained the value for public money aspect of this.

The Irish Govt. has announced that it has "set a target of 10% electric vehicles by 2020".

This is brilliant, of course, I'm a big believer in electric vehicles, far more efficient that internal combustion, less emissions etc. and you know that once electric cars take hold that warp-drive buttons in those cars are the next logical step.

But lets think about the source of the electricity for this new e-vehicle sector. Ideally we'd like the electricity to come from renewable sources, like wind, which we have in stacks.

But how much wind energy would we need to fuel the 10% e-vehicles ?

The SEAI tells us that in 2009 the road transport sector, private and freight, used 3285 ktoe. Now a ktoe is a "Kilo-Tonne of Oil Equivalent" its a standard unit used to compare energy inputs at a national level i.e. to compare energy supply from coal, gas, peat, oil etc.

One thing to take into account is the different efficiencies of internal combustion engines ( petrol and diesel ) and the electric motors of e-vehicles. ICE engines have efficiencies of around 25% , i.e. 25% of the energy in the fuel is used to push you forward, the rest is lost in noise/heat,exhaust, vibrations and all that. Pretty lousy efficiency but we've built our world on that. The e-vehicles have efficiencies of around 80%.

Now back to the figures, lets get our ktoe in kilo-watt hours, the thing we count electricity in. One ktoe is equal to 11.6 GWh so we can say that the road fleet in Ireland uses (3285 ktoe * 11.6) 38106 GWh every year. Now the real energy required is only 25% of that, i.e. 9548 GWh.

We'd like 10% of this to come from wind energy, so now we want 955 GWh extra to come from wind turbines.

Now we mentioned that e-vehicles are ~80% efficient so to get 955 GWh of useful energy out we'll need to put ( 955/0.8 ) 1192 GWh of energy in. Also, we have to account for ~10% losses on the transmission network so that figure now rises to 1324 GWh/year.

And how many turbines will it take to generate this much electricity. Well, in the case of a 3MW wind turbine, the biggest that is installed onshore in Ireland, it will produce its 3MW for about 25% of the year, that's referred to as its capacity factor, and 25% is an accepted industry average. So one turbine will produce 3MW * 8760 jours * 0.25 = 6.57 GWh/year.

At 6.57 GWh/turbine and us needing 1324 GWh, that means we need ~200 turbines.

So 10% electric vehicles = 200 3MW wind turbines.

2010 it is then. Here's a resolution :

Enough warm fuzzy environmentalism, 2010 is the year for boring numbers.

This is what the worlds NGO's and media were having us expect from Copenhagen, wasn't it ? All talk about "firm targets", "verifiable reductions" etc. Very straightforward, we all agreed.

Didn't quite work out, did it ? Oh, the beating of chests that followed, the grinding of teeth. How could they, those evil politicians, have let us down, us being the planet. It was the lobbyists, it was big business, it was the Chinese, the Saudis, it was everyone else, but it wasn't us.

Or was it ?

Apparently we asked them to start managing global emissions, that means measuring where they stand now and taking action to control and reduce the level of emissions into the future. As the leaders of the world gathered in Copenhagen, I have a suspicion that someone spoiled the party by showing that one emperor has no clothes.

The people do not care.

Not only do the people, i.e. the majority, not care, but those who claim to care the most, the environmentalist movement, well I don't think they care either. Now don't get me wrong, they are deeply concerned by the risks of climate change but I don't see proof that they care to the point of actually doing the boring management work that needs to be done, the exact same work that they demand of our political leaders.

The boring work means counting energy usage and associated emissions for everything we can, and that starts on a personal level. I'm not aware of any CC-NGO's that communicate their own energy and carbon footprints. it would seem like the obvious thing to do. They all keep asking everyone else to calculate everyone elses but don't feel the need to measure and report their own. Take Greenpeace for example. They have 2.9 million supporters (of whom I am proud to be one) 2,400 staff and an annual budget of €196 million(all lifted from their 2008 Annual Report). But they don't appear to have a carbon footprint.

I'm not singling Greenpeace out here, they do fantastic work. We've got to back to the individual level. Where are the signs that the 2,400 individual staff members are doing the boring stuff, that at least some of the 2.9 million supporters are, that the staff and supporters of all other CC-NGO's are ?

Its not that difficult to do, you know, once you want to. Or once you know you need to. Because, if the people who expect our political leaders to take a specific action are not willing to do so themselves, not willing to walk the walk, then you know what messages is being sent to out political leaders.

To hell with the planet.

Its not us, its them. Hmmmmmmmmm

Forget GDP, GNP and all that economic blather. What's important is happiness, isn't it ? And some bright sparks in the New Economics Forum have been working on measuring just that.
They've recently published the Happy Planet Index 2.0 which compares the, well, happiness of different countries. They use three indicators to measure this:

• Life Expectancy
• Life satisfaction
• Ecological Footprint

The global winner is Costa Rica with a score of 76.1/100. Not bad for a country without an army, eh ? Ireland is well off the podium in 78th position with a score of 42.6/100. We do well on life-expectancy, very well on life-satisfaction (self-expressed in a Gallup poll) but terribly on the ecological footprint.
If its any consolation, we beat the pants of the Yanks who finish 114th mainly due to their dire footprint as well.

Those Brits have done it again. One day after announcing their vision for a low-carbon future they now announce the beginning of a process to define a feed-in-tariff for renewable energy and its not too shoddy as the table below shows.
A feed in tariff is the price the government will pay you if you put up PV panels on your roof, or a wind turbine etc. and sell the electricity back to the grid. The original document in which the table is roobed from can be found on http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/consultations/elec_financial/elec_financial.aspx and go for the "Quantative Analysis of the Design of Feed-in Tariffs " link at the bottom.