Here's a picture from a National Grid document about their own energy future scenario modelling. It illustrates why planning investment for the UK National Grid is such a complex problem, and increasingly so as the number and variety of energy generation, storage and usage nodes and volumes alters (and direction of energy flow sometimes switches).
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Here's a fuller summary of the scenarios from the 2009 Ofgem Project Discovery report. It's worth giving the main caveat here, that the Discovery scenarios represent a series of diverse, but plausible and internally consistent, futures that will allow us to test current arrangements and possible future policy responses. The scenarios
are not meant to represent forecasts and many other possible outcomes can be envisaged. Here's the very summary description of the scenarios in the Ofgem Project Discovery, highlighting the main drivers they modelled in their analysis: In their 2009 report on this project, from which the above is an excerpt, Ofgem explores a number of scenarios for the UK energy system, with the objective of informing policy decisions for delivering secure and sustainable energy supplies. They go on to say: " Delivering secure and sustainable energy supplies means in broad terms that:
There are a couple of factors that seem to be omitted (unless they're buried in the details and I haven't spotted them yet) - the effects of Distributed Generation and Storage on the demands on, and nature of, the National Grid for electricity and gas transmission and distribution. This grid has largely, to date, been built around the existence of a relatively small number of very large power (generation) stations. With many low carbon technologies presenting opportunities to have a very large number of much smaller generating plants, with these being very widely distributed, and with the prospect of future storage solutions reducing the need to transfer as much energy via the grid, this could significantly alter how people envisage the future configuration and design of the transmission grid. I attended this event last week. The picture is of Miriam Kennet (co-founder of the Institute) with Clive Lord, who was receiving an award. The conference was an amazingly diverse collection of people from all corners of the World. What united participants was their concern for how to respond to the challenges of supporting planet, people and all other species in a World where traditional economics seems to be struggling to find viable answers. This is where Green Economics is increasingly gaining support in challenging traditional views and using inclusive approaches to expand the dialogue and seek new answers to old questions. Miriam was kind enough to ask me to be one of the speakers at the conference and I was delighted to do so. My talk was entitled "Reflections from a sustainability newbie" - attached below.
Met some great people at this excellent event, and heard about some fascinating ideas and ambitions from fellow 'green entrepreneurs'. Just one example to illustrate - Agripod. There's an extensive discussion of the main roof technology incorporated into the Agripod here, including comparisons with the Vertical Farming concept of Dickson Despommier.
More information about the bootcamp can be found here. This report from NEF leads the way towards using measures other than GDP to drive a more sustainable form of human progress. Some excellent statements, for example: "In Bhutan, the government has committed itself to pursuing Gross National Happiness, a notion that is also catching on in Brazil." The main core concept of the report is the calculation of: Happy Planet Index = Experienced well-being x Life expectancy Ecological Footprint A summary map of the 2012 scores is shown below. Green shading means a good score, anything else is average or bad, meaning there is much to be done in those countries. PV Performance on our house - latest stats - June was a poor month (one of the rainiest on record)10/7/2012 “Green Growth” is a bit of an oxymoron, in the context of limits to growth, unless the “green growth” is associated with “non-green shrinkage” in some way. If it involves substitution, then I’m inclined to support it when it has the right kind of impacts on supply and usage chains. For example, for new businesses to be truly worthy of the tag
‘green’ they must be providing alternative products/services/choices which substitute for existing products/services/choices and which have more sustainable total lifecycle chains than those existing products/services/choices (taking into account both upstream of the point of supply/choice and also downstream) and sufficiently so to take us closer to long-term sustainable equilibrium positions. They should take into account all the impacts of that substitution (positive and negative) in arriving at this ‘calculation’. A case in point is the current mini-goldrush for solar PV in the UK domestic sector – it’s good that this results in some non-fossil-fuel energy generation substituting for grid-supplied electricity (at its current mix of fossil-fuel and non-fossil-fuel energy). However, there is a downside to the inherent inefficiencies of lack of scale for each individual installation, and an ecological footprint resulting from the manufacture of the panels (mostly in China, using a high proportion of coal-fired energy) and extended supply chains for transportation of the PV panels over large distances to get to the installation site. I haven’t seen the total life-cycle impact analysis for a typical installation, but I certainly hope it is a positive ‘eco-NPV’ (if I could call it that) – and a lot more eco-friendly than small domestic wind turbines which, by reputation, have a very poor total lifecycle eco-calculation. Anyway, such an eco-NPV, if calculated, could provide the basis for saying that the ‘green growth’ in the solar PV manufacture and supply chain was a good thing, because of having a positive net eco-effect after considering the alternative national grid energy substituted. Of course, these benefits aren’t as great on a short-term marginal basis as they are in the longer-term, when for example it might be possible to avoid building an oil or gas power station (or decommission an existing one sooner than previously planned) because of the number of PV installations up and down the country at that time - that’s the point at which the benefits are most visible. However, at that point there is a big negative if the real substitution going on is the substitution of a new coal-fired power station in China for the oil or gas power station not built (or decommissioned) in the UK! Although it's good to see DECC providing incentives to increase uptake of green energy generation, more needs to be done to tackle the deep-rooted deficiencies, barriers and inertia in the existing financial and economic paradigm. The following is from Paper 1 on the Green Economy from RIO+20 in June 2012: "Attempts merely to overlay ‘green growth’ onto the finance driven model of economic globalisation, will be like setting freshly spawned fish to swim against a flood tide. The proposers of the Green New Deal dwelt on finance so much, precisely because it is the rock upon which sustainability repeatedly flounders." More information about Green New Deal at: (link). The following is a particularly good paragraph, from the same paper, setting out the challenge to the existing growth paradigm: "Stop assuming that all GDP growth is good, and a panacea for all other objectives. Firstly it isn’t, there is jobless growth, growth with rising inequality and growth that masks qualitative decline within an economy. Secondly, continual GDP growth is incompatible with acknowledging inescapable planetary boundaries. Work by nef [New Economics Foundation], the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research and others have demonstrated this. No one has successfully demonstrated the opposite. Time and again, growth swamps gains from efficiency and technological innovations. Instead, start from the explicit premise that the economy must operate within given environmental parameters. Also, begin with a vision of what the economy is for, namely, to deliver the chance of relatively long and happy lives for everyone on the foundations of social justice for all. The current growth paradigm, even with heroic levels of ‘green innovation,’ cannot, without reduced overall consumption, on its own keep within environmental limits and deliver poverty alleviation and greater equality. This is not to say that necessary economic activity in some sectors and in many parts of the world will not contribute to GDP and localised growth. During transition to a low carbon, lower consumption economy, sectors that are key will expand. " I've been reading "The economics and politics of climate change" by Dieter Helm and Cameron Hepburn. I find the chapter about Behavioural Economics fascinating, in terms of its relevance to the titanic struggle we currently face in squaring so many competing beliefs in relation to sustainability in general, climate change in particular, and what we need to do about these issues. One snippet that is notable is the following, from page 122:
" ... there is much evidence suggesting a confirmatory bias, ie a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and to avoid information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs ..." Another related psychological aspect appears a couple of pages earlier: " ... there is also much evidence in favour of what psychologists term 'cognitive dissonance' ... which suggests that inconsistency between beliefs and behaviours causes an uncomfortable psychological tension, sometimes implying that people change their beliefs to fit their behaviour, instead of changing their behaviour to fit their beliefs (as is conventionally assumed)." This is a significant aspect of human behaviour. It potentially explains why it took such a long time for climate change to become a generally held belief, in the same way that it took a long time for the belief that the Earth was flat to be replaced with a generally accepted belief that it is round. (I classify this as a belief, because there is only a miniscule proportion of the Earth's population who have actually travelled away from the Earth far enough to be able to come back and say "yep - it's round alright" - the vast majority are largely relying on believing those who have done it, and from scientists who say it is the case, not from their own direct experiences of it). It potentially explains why, despite decades of mounting evidence about the inability of the planet to sustain the projected future human population and its activities, we seem to be inexorably bound up in a socio-economic and political path of (practically) unconstrained growth and resource exploitation. These effects have arguably resulted in the current inertia preventing many people from re-imagining the way we could run our economies. It means we are fighting a hard battle if we want to, for example, build a global balance sheet, including using human wellbeing as a measure of the success of nations rather than continue to focus so much on the 'profit and loss' mentality of GDP (where both the income and the costs are counted as positive economic activities). Politicians of almost all ideologies (and their electorates) see economic growth as the way out of our present-day problems of national debt, poverty and unemployment. The existing capitalist paradigm seems, at times like this, to be like an unassailable and unquestionable castle holding the strategic ground and driving the way our world works, preventing change in the timescales that are needed. However, when faced with a seemingly immovable object (for example a tree-stump I need to remove in the garden), I'm usually reminded of the irresistible force paradox. If I want something to move, I re-imagine myself as the irresistible force, and deploy the argument that the resolution of this paradox is that the object is overcome by the force. (However, there are obviously other resolutions imaginable - I'm sometimes in a position of wanting to be an immovable object, so take the alternative resolution as my means of tackling the situation psychologically). Back to the topic of sustainability - In order to avoid falling into traps of taking up entrenched, extreme positions at either end of the spectrum of views, I frequently find myself reflecting on and challenging the bases underlying my positions on the various aspects of sustainability, which often comes down to establishing or verifying a belief system. This is because of the inevitable impacts and cross-overs between economics, politics and social ethics in dealing with this subject. I commend this approach to others, so that we can, together, provide bridges between extreme views and avoid debates deteriorating into polarised and immobile, sterile 'comment tennis'. |
About the BloggerI'm David Calver - an Accountant with a passion for sustainability. Categories
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