Energy: – Facts & Fiction – James Smith

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Energy: – Facts & Fiction – James Smith

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energymyths

My talk for Horsham Skeptics in the Pub

On Github Floppy / energymyths

Energy:

Facts & Fiction

James Smith

@floppy / http://floppy.org.uk

#1: Renewable power is driving up my energy bill!

Energy bills to rocket by £300 Daily Express, August 7, 2012 Image from Front Pages Today

There has been story after story over the last year about renewable policies pushing up the price of energy. Most are cherry-picked in some way, and blame increases of £3-400 (and up to £1000 in one example in the Mail) on renewable energy and efficiency policies.

Makeup of energy price rises

Household energy bills, The Committee on Climate Change, 2011 Figures via The Carbon Brief.

The Committee on Climate Change published a report in late 2011 digging into rise in energy bills. It found that over the last few years, gas price increases have had a much larger impact than green policies, and that they will still have a larger impact over the next few years to 2020.

Estimated bill split in 2020

Household energy bills, The Committee on Climate Change, 2011 Figures via The Carbon Brief.

Estimated bill in 2020 is around £1250 per year, 15% of which is because of support for green policies.
Wind farms to increase energy bills by £178 a year

Daily Telegraph, Nov 22, 2012

Most recently, it was claimed that bills will go up by £178 over the next two decades, a figure implied in the press to be because of recent legislation in the Energy Bill.

Estimated bills with and without green policies

Estimated Impacts of our Policies on Energy Prices, DECC, 2011 Figures via The Carbon Brief.

In fact, this is just a prediction of trends, not the impact of the Energy bill. Taking DECC's actual figures, in 2020 the Energy Bill should be saving people 7% of the cost without the various measures proposed.

Figures from the IEA, via The Guardian Datablog

Globally, we give 5x as much subsidy to fossil fuels as to renewables. Renewable subsidies vs Fossil subsidies http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2012/jan/18/fossil-fuel-subsidy

#2: Wind turbines make you ill!

Are wind farms saving or killing us? James Delingpole, Daily Mail, Sep 8, 2012 Original image mirrored by Michael Liebreich

The Mail published a story on Wind Turbine Syndrome, claiming that 'thousands' of people are falling sick near wind farms. Shown is the original picture used for the story, which appears to be a wind farm in Mordor. Astute observers may notice that the wind turbines shown appear to be mirror images of each other, and that the one on the right is sort of floating in the air. Anyway, the Mail's photoshop department notwithstanding...

Wind Turbine Syndrome

dizziness; balance problems; memory loss; inability to concentrate; insomnia; tachycardia; increased blood pressure; raised cortisol levels; headaches; nausea; mood swings; anxiety; tinnitus; palpitations; depression Delingpole has personally heard 'dozens' of these accounts.

Carl V. Phillips, 2011

A paper by Carl Phillips in the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society. The paper contains no numbers or analysis, and mainly seems to be an argument that we should take seriously the many self-reported 'adverse event reports', and that this adds up to 'overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems'. The only mentions of "wind turbine syndrome" are in this paper, and on a *lot* of anti-turbine websites. Carl Phillips seems to spend most of his time working on 'Tobacco Harm Reduction'. All in all, one has to suspect that wind turbines make you ill if you're predisposed to get annoyed at wind turbines.

#2A: Wind turbines kill birds!

Image from Changhua Coast Conservation Action on Flickr. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

US figures, half a million birds killed by wind turbines per year, which sounds like a lot.

"The Avian Benefits of Wind Energy: A 2009 Update" Benjamin Sovacool, 2012, via Wikipedia

To compare, 50 to 100 million are killed by vehicles, 100 million to 1 billion a year killed by hitting buildings. The big killer though are the cats, with estimates ranging from 200 million to 3 and a half billion. Each turbine kills an average of 4.27 birds a year. Even with an 10-fold expansion of wind power, it would still be less dangerous to birds than cellphone towers are. The RSPB estimates that cats kill 55 million birds a year in the UK - even with a million turbines in the UK, this figure would be nowhere near.
Climate change poses the single greatest long-term threat to birds and other wildlife With the right strategy ... renewable targets can be achieved without significant detrimental effects on birds"

RSPB Wind Turbine Policy

#3: Renewables are too unreliable!

Rainclouds by Paul Kohler. Creative Commons BY-NC.

The sun doesn't always shine. The wind doesn't always blow. To listen to some, you'd think that nobody had ever realised this and that they'd dealt a knockout blow to renewables.

Demand for last 24 hours, National Grid

Scale in MW, goes from 32GW to 47GW through the day. And, people want to use power when they want it, not when the wind happens to be blowing. Currently, we have spare capacity on hand to spin up when this happens. In a renewable-powered grid, how could we do that?

Solutions

  • Wide variety of sources
  • Pumped storage
  • Interconnects
  • HVDC supergrid
  • Electric vehicle batteries
Fortunately, this is an engineering problem, not a fundamental limitation.

#4: Nuclear power is dangerous!

Nuclear power scares people, and the debate around it can get pretty silly, with people losing a grip on basic facts. Fortunately, there's plenty of science that's been done, and there are plenty of ways we can look at this. First, which would you rather live next to, a nuclear plant or a coal plant?

Coal Combustion ORNL Review Vol. 26, No. 3&4, 1993

Nuclear plants may release a small amount of radioactivity into the environment during their normal operations. Coal plants don't run on anything radioactive though, so surely they can't! Coal, however, contains Uranium, Thorium, and all sorts of other things. These don't burnm very well, so they end up concentrated in the ash. Research in the US indicates the following: Nuclear plants: 4.8 person-rem/year Nuclear full fuel lifecycle: 136 Coal: 490 At best, coal ends up releasing 3.6 times more radiation into the environment than nuclear, but we don't worry about that.

http://xkcd.com/radiation

This graphic from XKCD is endlessly fascinating here. You get the same radioation from eating a banana as you do from living within 50 miles of a nuclear plant for a year, which is 10% of the normal background dose for a day. The extra dose in Tokyo following Fukushima was 40 micro sieverts, the same as a single flight from New York to LA.

Hidden Costs of Energy, National Academies Press, 2010 via Forbes

Another really interesting way of looking at the safety of power is by looking at the number of deaths for the amount of energy produced. This is a logarithmic graph; otherwise you wouldn't see the bottom end at all. Here we can see that globally, coal is the worst killer, mainly through the effects of particulates. Number at the top is global, at 170k. China pushed this average up - their stat is 280k, but in the US it's only 15k. Biomass is really high, with many people being killed by smoke effects in the developing world. Nuclear is nowhere to be seen among the big killers; in fact, it's the lowest, even taking the worst-case figures for accidents like Chernobyl. Even wind is higher than nuclear, because sometimes an engineer falls off a turbine during maintenance.

UK Nuclear waste volume

(per person per year)

  • Low-level: 760ml
  • Intermediate: 60ml
  • High-level: 25ml

Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air p170, David MacKay, 2009.

Low level is precautionary, and contains at most small amounts of short-lived radiation. This is not a problem, and is often incinerated. Intermediate is a bit nastier, with shielding required in some cases, but it's only the high-level waste that's really radioactive, and takes about 1000 years to reach the same level as natural Uranium ore. Lifetime supply of high-level waste for the whole country would fill 35 swimming pools. To compare, in the UK we produce 86kg of 'hazardous' waste per person per year.
Fusion energy - if it would ever operate - would create a serious waste problem, would emit large amounts of radioactive material and could be used to produce materials for nuclear weapons. A whole new set of nuclear risks would thus be created.

Greenpeace press release about ITER, June 28, 2005

Anyone spot the obvious mistake here? Anti-scientific bullshit does not help anyone, from either side. The fact is that there are plenty of reasons to be wary of relying on a new generation of nuclear power in this country, ranging from the long lead time, a shortage of industrial capacity, and even the supply of Uranium, but safety is really not one of them. This sort of thinking even gets applied to new nuclear designs, such as Thorium reactors, which are even safer than the last generation.

#5: Shale gas is clean

US CO2 emissions 1990-2012, EIA Energy Outlook 2012, via Forbes.

US emissions are about where they were in 1995. Primary reason is the shale gas boom, which has produced cheap gas that displaced coal.

Shale gas boom sparks EU coal revival, Financial Times, Feb 3 2013

However, the coal doesn't go unburnt. Instead it gets cheaper, and so gets exported to the EU and China. Everything we pull out of the ground will get burnt.

David McCandless on the Guardian Datablog, Dec 2012 Workings and sources at http://bit.ly/CO2gigatons

Amount of carbon in known reserves. We already have more than enough to kill ourselves. Hit 2 degree budget in 13 years.

James Powell on DeSmogBlog, Nov 15, 2012

More!

  • Smart meters will save you energy
  • We'll always keep finding more fossil fuels
  • Leaving heating on is better than heating from cold
  • CCS will save us
  • We can use "clean coal"

Further Reading

Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air by David MacKay. Free to download from withouthotair.com

MacKay

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see it at http://floppy.github.com/energymyths

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James Smith

@floppy / http://floppy.org.uk