(Energy) Horizons
On Thursday I took advantage of one of the perks of working for the University of Cambridge: a free place at one of the regular Horizon conferences. This one was about Energy and Environment, and provided a nice overview of some of the issues, whilst of course beautifully showcasing the best academics in the field.
Professor Dame Ann Dowling kicked things off, as newly appointed head of the Department of Engineering. She presented the work of the Energy Efficient Cities programme, taking a holistic look at the connected areas of buildings, transport and energy. In cities, it's all about tradeoffs (even just in the engineering space - once you pull in the socio-economic factors too, it's worse again). Low density buildings mean you can use natural convection, vegetation for shade, distributed power and so on; but they may increase the demand for heating and transport. There is a need to consider local air quality, as well as climate change effects, and the layouts and green spaces within cities are critical. The programme hopes to answer questions such as "is telecommuting good for climate stability - or not?" with better understanding of the tradeoffs, and city planning requirements.
She reckons that most new build will take 40 years (of energy savings compared to an equivalently functional existing building) to compensate for the energy used in construction. This, and the existing city structures we have, point to the need to look at retrofit as well as new build technologies.
Key research around transport for cities, in descending order of importance, is to do with smaller, downsized vehicles (this being much more important than lighter weight materials, although they play their part, coming next in line), real time information about traffic and vehicle systems, fuel systems, and integrated power supplies.
In energy, the programme is looking at combined heat and power, fluidised bed gasifiers, fuel cells, wind, and district-level solar electricity. Buildings research is all about sensors and smart systems, surface treatments, heat and ventilation flow engineering, phase change materials, heat pumps, LEDs (I assume for lighting), and photovoltaic roofs.
Julian Allwood was up next with a lively and energetic talk. He shared his energy 'map' - showing where energy comes from, how it is converted, and where it goes - and illustrated how many commentators muddy the waters with double-counting of "energies" (McKinsey being singled out as repeat offenders in this regard). The map is illustrative and helpful, especially as one starts to consider a predicted doubling of demand by 2050; but, as some of the audience noted, the map's disregard of efficiency and conversion losses could lead to some confusion. With 90% of energy lost in the fuel-to-device conversion (where fuel energy becomes heat, motion, or other forms), this is a substantial missing factor.
When discussing where efficiency savings might be made, Julian identified heated spaces, and road transport, as being key areas with great room for improvement, whereas trains and planes are already close to their optimum efficiencies. Two major challenges will be how to make super lightweight vehicles safe, when some people will still be driving round in Chelsea tractors, and how to retrofit homes with better heating/insulation in a feasible way.
(At this point, Julian spoilt his otherwise excellent talk with an aside, that he couldn't comment on practical matters, as he "works in a university for a reason", which offended me unreasonably, particularly when he was discussing practical matters, and so were the other academic speakers).
Steel and cement production volumes are unbelievably huge at present, having risen through the Asian construction boom since 2000. The world produces over 2000 megatons of cement, and over 1000Mt of steel, each year. This consumes - unsurprisingly - a great deal of energy. It is interesting to note that if demand for steel doubles by 2050, and if everyone puts in place every energy efficiency measure as regards steel production and reuse that we know of, we can keep the CO2 emissions related to steel the same as they are today. But this is extremely unlikely to happen. We need, said Julian, to find strategies for living with less primary material production.
An aside here revealed that UK (or Western?) clothing purchases per year increased threefold from 2000 to 2005! Also, since Lotus7 gets great performance and works at 500kg, a 300kg car should be feasible, although its 0-60 time might be less impressive.
Julian has a couple of mildly eccentric sounding projects underway. One looks at how we might make photocopiers which could erase already-printed paper for reuse (since people often are not printing for long term storage, but to read, and then the paper can be reused in the office). Another involves primary school children using their own physical efforts to recycle drinks cans into a bicycle frame (aluminium cold bonding, for the engineers out there). Splendid stuff, and he's also bought a URL where you can find out more: wellmet2050.com.
The next speaker was Glenn Vinnicombe, who I can remember lecturing my undergraduate course many years ago. He talked about feedback networks, particularly as they relate to the smart grids which will be needed to manage more complex and distributed power consumption. Glenn asks the question: do we need big, complex models to understand these systems? Or, can we predict global properties from local interaction characteristics? Luckily, the answer seems to be yes, and there are even design rules which can be applied to make sure a smart grid works well.
The world of smart grids (technically graphs, not networks) was illustrated with a Lego Mindstorms Segway, which can be built using entirely linear maths. Apparently Glenn uses this in his control theory lectures - an innovation which must be much appreciated by today's undergraduates. It was hard going on the blackboard and OHP only in my day.
The final speaker of the morning was from Cambridge IP, and began by asking what role universities should play in low CO2 energy innovations. Unfortunately, the talk did not answer this. We learnt a little about the current IP landscape around renewable technology - over 80% of patents in some renewable areas are owned by big corporates - but were left unsure whether this was a good or bad thing, and whether it signifies much in any case. A few suggestions for innovation in IP itself - such as the creation of publicly-backed IP pools - were made, but overall there was no strong conclusion. There is a report from Chatham House about this, which I have not yet been inspired to read.
After lunch, we were plunged into three talks from excellent speakers, all of which unfortunately rapidly descended into technical depths beyond me, and I suspect beyond most of the audience. Professor Neil Greenham spoke about printable solar cells, Prof Chris Howe (a Corpuscle, like myself) about the potential of algae as a renewable energy source, and a slightly jetlagged Prof Clare Grey about battery technologies. All three were accomplished speakers, but it was mildly interesting to note that the style of presentation favoured in Web circles (of a single photo/image on each slides, and no bullet points) does not dominate in these scientific fields, where to my mind somewhat dated "busy" slides, with primary coloured graphics, mixed fonts, and jumbled photomontages are still the stock format. I can imagine that it is easier to reuse one's existing tricky molecule images, even if they look old-fashioned, but I was surprised that the overall slide layouts stuck with a somewhat confusing and bemusing format.
After a much-needed tea break, we were back to the bigger picture, with Professor David MacKay reprising his Without The Hot Air talk (yet again - at least he had the grace to apologise, as many of the audience must have heard this at least once before). Newly appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department for Energy and Climate Change, David apologised that he could no longer talk about politically contentious issues, but of course, that's OK, as energy policy isn't contentious at all... He did mention that the installation of some energy systems available today, such as domestic heat pumps, is likely to be supported by DECC in future - these do not attract any incentives today.
David's main point was that almost all countries are moving up a scale of population density multiplied by energy needs per person. The varying positions of different countries suggests we could import solar and biofuel power from other nations. On a UK scale, David's speciality, we saw one energy plan "that adds up" which draws energy from a diverse range of sources, with new energy in every area of the country. He pointed out that because Scotland is historically anti-nuclear, this plan populates the highlands with wind farms; the going rate is 2,000 wind turbines or one Sizewell B equivalent.
Finally, we were given a real "practical" view - that of a young engineer working at W S Atkins, a large engineering consultancy. Carbon is now a major driver (alongside time and money) in all of their projects, with around 80% of their business having it as the main component. They apparently need to retrain their entire workforce to handle this effectively; this seems reasonable, until qualified with a comment about how at least carbon is nice and measurable, unlike other environmental concerns that are too subtle for Atkins engineers to understand (I was rather sad to hear this, as it didn't give me a great impression of my generation of graduate engineers!). A lot of their work concerns embedded carbon calculations.
Overall, a few useful points came up during the day. Firstly, carbon is not the same as sustainable, but it is increasingly treated as such. The language around carbon isn't helping any more - it's so confused now that it blurs the real situation, and hinders clear thinking, discussion and decision-making. We also heard that climate change mitigation now strongly clashes against other sustainability and conservation - the Severn Barrage being a case in point here.
The final remarks noted that if an organisation of smart people (such as Cambridge) was given a nominal £1bn to spend on energy and the environment in the UK, the reflections on what we would do with it could be far more useful than the numerous small projects being tackled independently today - a good reflection of the emphasis on the holistic approach needed.
Professor Dame Ann Dowling kicked things off, as newly appointed head of the Department of Engineering. She presented the work of the Energy Efficient Cities programme, taking a holistic look at the connected areas of buildings, transport and energy. In cities, it's all about tradeoffs (even just in the engineering space - once you pull in the socio-economic factors too, it's worse again). Low density buildings mean you can use natural convection, vegetation for shade, distributed power and so on; but they may increase the demand for heating and transport. There is a need to consider local air quality, as well as climate change effects, and the layouts and green spaces within cities are critical. The programme hopes to answer questions such as "is telecommuting good for climate stability - or not?" with better understanding of the tradeoffs, and city planning requirements.
She reckons that most new build will take 40 years (of energy savings compared to an equivalently functional existing building) to compensate for the energy used in construction. This, and the existing city structures we have, point to the need to look at retrofit as well as new build technologies.
Key research around transport for cities, in descending order of importance, is to do with smaller, downsized vehicles (this being much more important than lighter weight materials, although they play their part, coming next in line), real time information about traffic and vehicle systems, fuel systems, and integrated power supplies.
In energy, the programme is looking at combined heat and power, fluidised bed gasifiers, fuel cells, wind, and district-level solar electricity. Buildings research is all about sensors and smart systems, surface treatments, heat and ventilation flow engineering, phase change materials, heat pumps, LEDs (I assume for lighting), and photovoltaic roofs.
Julian Allwood was up next with a lively and energetic talk. He shared his energy 'map' - showing where energy comes from, how it is converted, and where it goes - and illustrated how many commentators muddy the waters with double-counting of "energies" (McKinsey being singled out as repeat offenders in this regard). The map is illustrative and helpful, especially as one starts to consider a predicted doubling of demand by 2050; but, as some of the audience noted, the map's disregard of efficiency and conversion losses could lead to some confusion. With 90% of energy lost in the fuel-to-device conversion (where fuel energy becomes heat, motion, or other forms), this is a substantial missing factor.
When discussing where efficiency savings might be made, Julian identified heated spaces, and road transport, as being key areas with great room for improvement, whereas trains and planes are already close to their optimum efficiencies. Two major challenges will be how to make super lightweight vehicles safe, when some people will still be driving round in Chelsea tractors, and how to retrofit homes with better heating/insulation in a feasible way.
(At this point, Julian spoilt his otherwise excellent talk with an aside, that he couldn't comment on practical matters, as he "works in a university for a reason", which offended me unreasonably, particularly when he was discussing practical matters, and so were the other academic speakers).
Steel and cement production volumes are unbelievably huge at present, having risen through the Asian construction boom since 2000. The world produces over 2000 megatons of cement, and over 1000Mt of steel, each year. This consumes - unsurprisingly - a great deal of energy. It is interesting to note that if demand for steel doubles by 2050, and if everyone puts in place every energy efficiency measure as regards steel production and reuse that we know of, we can keep the CO2 emissions related to steel the same as they are today. But this is extremely unlikely to happen. We need, said Julian, to find strategies for living with less primary material production.
An aside here revealed that UK (or Western?) clothing purchases per year increased threefold from 2000 to 2005! Also, since Lotus7 gets great performance and works at 500kg, a 300kg car should be feasible, although its 0-60 time might be less impressive.
Julian has a couple of mildly eccentric sounding projects underway. One looks at how we might make photocopiers which could erase already-printed paper for reuse (since people often are not printing for long term storage, but to read, and then the paper can be reused in the office). Another involves primary school children using their own physical efforts to recycle drinks cans into a bicycle frame (aluminium cold bonding, for the engineers out there). Splendid stuff, and he's also bought a URL where you can find out more: wellmet2050.com.
The next speaker was Glenn Vinnicombe, who I can remember lecturing my undergraduate course many years ago. He talked about feedback networks, particularly as they relate to the smart grids which will be needed to manage more complex and distributed power consumption. Glenn asks the question: do we need big, complex models to understand these systems? Or, can we predict global properties from local interaction characteristics? Luckily, the answer seems to be yes, and there are even design rules which can be applied to make sure a smart grid works well.
The world of smart grids (technically graphs, not networks) was illustrated with a Lego Mindstorms Segway, which can be built using entirely linear maths. Apparently Glenn uses this in his control theory lectures - an innovation which must be much appreciated by today's undergraduates. It was hard going on the blackboard and OHP only in my day.
The final speaker of the morning was from Cambridge IP, and began by asking what role universities should play in low CO2 energy innovations. Unfortunately, the talk did not answer this. We learnt a little about the current IP landscape around renewable technology - over 80% of patents in some renewable areas are owned by big corporates - but were left unsure whether this was a good or bad thing, and whether it signifies much in any case. A few suggestions for innovation in IP itself - such as the creation of publicly-backed IP pools - were made, but overall there was no strong conclusion. There is a report from Chatham House about this, which I have not yet been inspired to read.
After lunch, we were plunged into three talks from excellent speakers, all of which unfortunately rapidly descended into technical depths beyond me, and I suspect beyond most of the audience. Professor Neil Greenham spoke about printable solar cells, Prof Chris Howe (a Corpuscle, like myself) about the potential of algae as a renewable energy source, and a slightly jetlagged Prof Clare Grey about battery technologies. All three were accomplished speakers, but it was mildly interesting to note that the style of presentation favoured in Web circles (of a single photo/image on each slides, and no bullet points) does not dominate in these scientific fields, where to my mind somewhat dated "busy" slides, with primary coloured graphics, mixed fonts, and jumbled photomontages are still the stock format. I can imagine that it is easier to reuse one's existing tricky molecule images, even if they look old-fashioned, but I was surprised that the overall slide layouts stuck with a somewhat confusing and bemusing format.
After a much-needed tea break, we were back to the bigger picture, with Professor David MacKay reprising his Without The Hot Air talk (yet again - at least he had the grace to apologise, as many of the audience must have heard this at least once before). Newly appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department for Energy and Climate Change, David apologised that he could no longer talk about politically contentious issues, but of course, that's OK, as energy policy isn't contentious at all... He did mention that the installation of some energy systems available today, such as domestic heat pumps, is likely to be supported by DECC in future - these do not attract any incentives today.
David's main point was that almost all countries are moving up a scale of population density multiplied by energy needs per person. The varying positions of different countries suggests we could import solar and biofuel power from other nations. On a UK scale, David's speciality, we saw one energy plan "that adds up" which draws energy from a diverse range of sources, with new energy in every area of the country. He pointed out that because Scotland is historically anti-nuclear, this plan populates the highlands with wind farms; the going rate is 2,000 wind turbines or one Sizewell B equivalent.
Finally, we were given a real "practical" view - that of a young engineer working at W S Atkins, a large engineering consultancy. Carbon is now a major driver (alongside time and money) in all of their projects, with around 80% of their business having it as the main component. They apparently need to retrain their entire workforce to handle this effectively; this seems reasonable, until qualified with a comment about how at least carbon is nice and measurable, unlike other environmental concerns that are too subtle for Atkins engineers to understand (I was rather sad to hear this, as it didn't give me a great impression of my generation of graduate engineers!). A lot of their work concerns embedded carbon calculations.
Overall, a few useful points came up during the day. Firstly, carbon is not the same as sustainable, but it is increasingly treated as such. The language around carbon isn't helping any more - it's so confused now that it blurs the real situation, and hinders clear thinking, discussion and decision-making. We also heard that climate change mitigation now strongly clashes against other sustainability and conservation - the Severn Barrage being a case in point here.
The final remarks noted that if an organisation of smart people (such as Cambridge) was given a nominal £1bn to spend on energy and the environment in the UK, the reflections on what we would do with it could be far more useful than the numerous small projects being tackled independently today - a good reflection of the emphasis on the holistic approach needed.