This is an easy, quick read and makes much sense - Freeman.
Howard Morrison looks at the efficiencies of power transmission and discovers the losses are significant. This lost is eliminated when power is generated on site, a process known as distributed energy generation.
Robyn Williams: Howard Morrison gets cross about waste. He's built a house for the future where he lives in central NSW. Like Ron Oxburgh, ex-chairman of Shell, he believes the present times are an opportunity.
Howard Morrison: In the world of global warming and peak oil, Australia can be the lucky country yet again, but first we have to turn a century of thinking of energy on its head. With 80% of our electricity coming from coal-fired power stations, we either isolate CO2 emissions from the atmosphere by geo-sequestration or stop combustion based electricity generation. Storing the current amount of CO2 emitted from the world's 8,100 largest producers would require tens of thousands of underground storage sites. If combustion-based generation continued globally for the next half century, hundreds of thousands of sites would be needed to store a projected 5,000 billion tonnes of CO2. The engineering and construction work required to achieve this would dwarf any project ever attempted on Earth. If a storage site failed and CO2 rose through the rock, through the surface, every living thing in the vicinity could be killed.
If there is to be any hope of reining in increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, combustion-based electricity generation will need to be in sharp decline. Lat month, the president of Japan's Sharp Electronics corporation stunned the world by saying that by 2030, fossil fuel electricity generation would be totally finished. Nuclear electricity generation is currently the only low-CO2 way of generating enough power to fill the gap and to keep the world economy going. Even so, per kilowatt of electricity, nuclear produces one-third of the CO2 of coal-fired electricity generation when mining, building and decommissioning of nuclear power plants are considered. New nuclear power stations, along with the current 440 worldwide, will exhaust the known reserves of high-grade uranium within three to four decades. After that, processing low-grade ore into fuel will become prohibitively expensive.
But now to the next lucky country's story, and here it is. Two facts we need to be perfectly clear about. First, demand for power is based on the grid supplying virtually all electricity. Demand is the upstream figure of how much electricity must be produced. The downstream figure is the amount of electricity it actually takes to run our electrical devices. These two figures are very different, and this leads to the little talked about second fact; the electricity grid is woefully inefficient. Take the typical Australian scenario; for every four tonnes of coal burnt in the power station furnace, only one tonne of that coal's electrical energy producing potential reaches the power point. Losses mainly in the form of heat make the grid 25% efficient at best. Inefficient lighting, motors and appliances reduce the overall efficiency of electricity to about 15%. Last century's answer to an industrialising world won't cut it in the 21st century.
So why transmit power through hundreds of kilometres of wire from power stations to users anyway? Every Australian coastal city can develop grids sized to their own high voltage applications, such as electric trains, high volume water pumps, large computer servers et cetera, using wave energy as the key renewable. Wave energy is the rough equivalent of an underwater wind farm but with a forever dependable breeze. On today's technology, a one-hectare wave farm can produce one megawatt of electricity. All other electrical devices can function perfectly well on low voltage or extra low voltage electricity, and this can be generated on site. On site electricity generation is called distributed energy generation, and in Australia it can be done anywhere with solar. Australia is the Saudi Arabia of solar, with more sunshine than any other developed country on the planet. Worldwide, solar is growing at 40% a year.
Advances in building materials and electronics have fostered much of this growth. Thermally efficient building materials can now reduce demand for heating and cooling to zero in well-designed buildings. Overall, building materials have improved more in the last 10 years than in the last 1,000. Building integrated photovoltaics is revolutionising how we design and build. Roofing materials in the form of roof sheeting and roof tiles now become rooftop power stations, while at the same time aesthetically enhancing the overall appeal of the building. Every rooftop power station can be linked to others to create mini grids to power neighbourhoods, industrial sites, shopping centres or localised facilities anywhere. But wait, there's more! Half of the roof area of a thermally efficient home with a roof power station will not only power your home but power that urban electrical vehicle you'll be driving around next decade. Solar's weak link has always been storing energy for when the sun isn't shining. That's being solved with new energy storage devices such as ultra capacitors. When incorporated in BIPV rooftop power systems, these devices can provide many decades of maintenance-free energy storage.
We are in the biggest paradigm shift in human history. From hunter-gatherer to agriculture took thousands of years. Agriculture to the industrial age, hundreds. Global warming is compressing the next shift into decades. Australia's energy future is building capacity through distributed energy grids, hundreds of thousands of grids across the country fed by solar and wave energy. Renewable distributed energy generation can do the same work as the existing grid but with only a quarter of the electricity. The key to being the lucky country yet again lies with us as individuals. There needs to be a very strong incentive to rebuild the system, to make distributed energy generation the primary source of power.
Robyn Williams: Howard Morrison, who's proving his principles on the design of his own house on the central coast of NSW.
Guests:
Howard Morrison Fassifern NSW
