Fusion!
Can I just say that £6.8bn would buy a heck of a lot of solar panels? I realise there are all sorts of likely benefits for physics and materials research but the main headline about the new investment in nuclear fusion is certainly all about the theoretical energy potential:
“Take the lithium from the battery of a single laptop computer, add half a bathtub of water, and it can give 200,000 kilowatt hours of electricity – the same as 70 tonnes of coal. That’s enough to power one person in the UK for 30 years… This says to me that you have to give it a go. You’ve just got to give this thing a crack!”
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, head of the UK’s fusion research programme in Oxford Today
Sounds great but others aren’t so enthusiastic, saying the idea is “as discouraging as it is expensive”. Even if you listen to the most optimistic proponents, they say it might work in 50 years time (provided oil prices make the economics attractive). In the meantime, it’s still consuming more electricity than it generates.
It seems that fusion research in the past has been plagued by “unrealistic expectations regarding our abilities”. Doesn’t this sound familiar? It’s just like electricity from nuclear fission going from being too cheap to meter to costing the taxpayer £70bn (and counting) just to clean up the mess.
I would love to see a full cost-benefit analysis comparing the investment of this money in fusion and microgeneration. Any takers?
Small is visible
When most people think about electricity, it’s likely that one of three things comes to mind: the services electricity provides (e.g. lighting, refrigeration, TV, computers, etc), its steadily increasing cost (thanks to that friendly monthly or quarterly reminder from your utility), or – in my case at least – a not-so-fond memory of trying to get over an electric fence.
But I think you would hard pressed to find someone in the general public who would immediately say anything about how electricity is generated. Apart from seeing the occasional cooling tower or transmission pylon, the generation and distribution of electricity is largely hidden from view. Turn a switch, pay the bill, and the rest of the system does the rest.
In many ways, this is a great strength of centralised electricity systems. The end user doesn’t have to see the 300 railcars worth of coal per day rolling past their door on the way to supply a modern power plant. However this invisibility represents a distance between users and producers, hiding us from the costs of electricity production. Or more specifically, making it difficult for us to see how our demand for electricity might lead to acid rain, climate change, radioactive waste and other impacts.
The appeal of microgeneration is that it makes these impacts visible. By generating electricity in the home (and aided by a monitoring device), a household can see whether they are generating enough electricity to meet their needs and if not, they know that this difference must be provided by the grid. This gives microgenerating households control: you choose how much electricity to use and when to use it, making the most of the clean electricity in your home and avoiding the side-effects of grid-supplied electricity.
In other words, small is beautiful because small is visible.
PS. It probably goes without saying but I highly recommend reading E.F. Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful
.
Supply-side obsession
Tony Blair is giving a big speech tonight to representatives of British industry and is taking the opportunity to less-than-subtly hint that nuclear power is back on the agenda. The reaction from green groups has been predictably critical and it’s certainly easy to be cynical about whether or not the Energy Review was a done-deal from day one.
The Number 10 website has a few key slides (PDF) to back up the speech and quite rightly they should scare a prime minister into action. There is going to be a large supply side gap once aging nuclear plants close and increased dependence on foreign gas supplies isn’t a great idea either. But this gap could much smaller, if not zero, if more effort was placed on the demand side. Instead the graphs show a ‘if we build it, they will come’ type logic, suggesting that demand will be x and policy must build appropriate supply.
Indeed, only after nuclear and renewables does Blair’s speech mention even energy efficiency – this is completely backwards. Demand side should come first. For example, projects like the 40% House show that the energy and carbon gaps can be all but closed through the use of existing energy-efficiency and microgeneration technologies. Whether or not government still decides to replace existing nuclear power stations is a valid question (which will probably get completely lost in the upcoming media furore), but it should only be considered after a serious effort to reduce demand. After all, “waste not, want not”.
Edit: A great interview at the Guardian with an ex-minister about the importance of demand side management and some great insight into the government’s poor grip on the economics of nuclear:
“The reality is that economically the risks are great and the returns are low. No private-sector company is going to take on the long-term risks, the costs of decommissioning, the storage, reprocessing and the responsibility for the waste.”
Fun with Pajek
I’m working on the conclusion chapter of my thesis at the moment. It’s meant to sum up the results presented in earlier chapters and then discuss wider questions in the literature and for policy. There are a couple ideas I’m working on, such as an ideal tariff for microgenerators and clarifying PV’s place within the context of other household energy conservation measures, but a basic concern is sorting out how PV households interact with other stakeholders within the PV industry.
I wasn’t really sure how to start answering this question until a friend told me about Pajek. It’s a bit of software that can be used to analyse large social networks and it will perform all sorts of calculations. The options can be a bit confusing though so I thought I’d start simple. I entered some data from my interviews and you can see the resulting plot below. The size of the dots represents the ability of each node to control the network (inverse of dyadic constraint if you’re interested).
This is only a first draft but reassuringly, some basic things like a strong connection between PV households, electricity suppliers and PV installers can be seen. It also seems to show that the DTI and Ofgem play a major role behind the scenes, framing the interactions of other stakeholders. This came out of the interviews as well but the advantage of the network graph is that it’s immediately clear that there is no direct link between households and these government agencies. So, for example, if we want PV households to become more active participants in the electricity network – i.e. exporting electricity at times when it’s good for the grid or generally reducing demand – then the graph suggests that perhaps a link between DTI, Ofgem and the households needs to be built. This might be achieved by developing a pilot programme with innovative metering and monitoring technologies, working in conjunction with the electricity suppliers and PV installers. As it happens, there has actually been talk of doing just that!
That’s a pretty rough sketch of course but I’m keen to play with Pajek a bit more and see what I else I might be able to find out.