The wider world

11
Mar
2019

What could we do with $10-20bn?

A few weeks ago, Vanessa Harris asked an interesting question on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/technologypoet/status/1100102749541167104

I think that’s close to what Elon Musk thinks he’s doing, though I’m not personally convinced that most of his solutions are the ones we need. But naturally, it got me thinking about energy, and where private investment of that order – provided with a long-term view rather than the VC approach that’s caused so much trouble – might make a difference.

Let me caveat this by saying that this post goes waaaay beyond my actual areas of expertise. Consider it the idle musings of a slightly informed layperson. But here are some ideas:

  • Fusion: Too expensive, in the traditional big-project approach. And too far off to address the urgency that we feel at the moment.
  • Small / cheap innovative fusion: Still too far off, if we include time for rollout. And it’s already happening privately.
  • Traditional fission: Nope. This is mature, and the new ideas that are out there (Gen IV reactors, thorium reactors, etc) are too expensive for this sort of investment. Demonstrating uranium extraction from seawater would be interesting, but it’s unnecessary unless we have a massive nuclear rollout going on.
  • Small “modular” fission reactors: Maybe. I don’t know a lot about this, and how feasible and/or useful it would be… but I can imagine that $1-10bn might be the order of magnitude of the investment that’d be needed to make it work (or to show that it doesn’t).
  • Marine renewables: No individual idea needs this much cash; we’re used to “big” announcements in the $10m range. A few hundred million could do a lot in pushing a nascent technology to either being ready for commercial rollout or turning out not to work. For billions, we could adopt a scattergun approach of funding plenty of ideas, knowing that some would fail. There’s a chance of turning a profit, too!
  • Other renewables… don’t really need it any more, so far as I’m aware?
  • Energy storage: Maybe. Musk is already doing good things with batteries, but perhaps other routes.
  • Demand response: Difficult to see how cash would help; as I understand it, the difficult challenges here are social, regulatory, and to do with system integration – not technical in a way that money will necessarily help. Maybe I’m wrong, though?
  • Negative emissions technology: Yes. This feels as though it’s probably the right order of magnitude to develop CCS, and other techniques are probably worth a shot as well. Realistically, some way of pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere is going to be necessary when we overshoot the targets that the politicians are talking about.
  • Transport: One of the big questions in my mind is how to decarbonise things that batteries probably won’t be suitable for (many ships, most planes, IMHO). Hydrogen and fuel cells? Maybe. Some other fuel synthesised with electricity? Maybe. Crop-sourced biofuel? Maybe. Most of the specific projects I can think of are either too cheap or too expensive, but it’s not my field, and making significant progress in figuring out how to decarbonise transport would be a worthy use of the cash.
  • Reducing agricultural or industrial emissions? I’m not convinced that that this is something that it’s useful to throw money at (except for CCS for some industries).

Most of the ideas above are about getting necessary technologies ready to go. Many of them would need either large corporate or state-level support in place to make them actually happen at a commercial scale; but if the development is done, then the big-money investment is relatively low-risk.

I can’t help feeling that I’m being blinkered, though. Energy is what I do, so energy is what I think about… would there be better bang-for-the-buck, in terms of effect on climate change, to invest in something completely different? For example, how much impact could this sort of money have on women’s health and education – the improvement of which tends to reduce birth rates? What other interventions might be viable at this sort of scale? Somebody on Twitter suggested that the most effective investment multiplier is to “buy” US senators, but I’m trying to avoid that level of cynicism here…

Posted by simon in The wider world
06
Jan
2019

New ideas in fusion

This is an interesting, if light-on-details, article about the new wave of private research in fusion power. Some are looking at new ways of building tokamaks, some at stellarators, and some at exotic new ideas. Some of them claim that they will achieve first power in 2030.

I’m not competent to judge these claims – although I will observe that the use of VC funding in the renewables industry has led to rather optimistic forecasts – so I remain hopeful, yet cautious. I’m really glad that there is a sprouting of new ideas around fusion.

However: No matter how well it goes, fusion is not going to help with our immediate mess. Even if somebody has a working reactor in 2030, and even if it has the potential to become economically viable, it’ll be decades more to optimise it, reduce the cost, and build a significant number worldwide – not just in rich nations. We need to decarbonise now, not after 2050, and for the moment that means renewables and, probably, fission.

Fusion is quite possibly the future, and it should be funded; but at the moment, it cannot take any attention away from shorter-term solutions.

Posted by simon in The wider world
07
Oct
2018

The problem with acknowledgements

Academia doesn’t have a way of acknowledging contributions short of authorship that matters.

Yes, we have Acknowledgements sections, and I try to be very comprehensive in who I include, but while it feels good to be featured there, it doesn’t actually matter from a career perspective; nobody is going to sit in an interview or review panel and say “They didn’t author any papers this year, but they were acknowledged on seven really good ones, so they clearly did some good work”. Indeed, because acknowledgements aren’t indexed in the same way as authorships, nobody is likely to even know.

If somebody, say, allows use of a dataset that’s already been written up elsewhere[1], or is a technician involved in an analysis, their work has been important in enabling the study to be conducted, and thus should undoubtedly be acknowledged, and more so than a polite thank-you at the end of the paper that nobody will remember… and so they end up becoming authors, despite not having made the intellectual contribution that should mean authorship of the paper. And this is one of the causes of author inflation, and also of this sort of thing.

It makes me wonder if we need a third way. Let the authors just be the people who wrote the paper, or (perhaps) otherwise made intellectual contributions to the study. Leave the “acknowledgements” section for funders, companies, public data providers, whimsical mentions of friends, and so forth. Set up a new list of “Contributors” or some such, indexed as authors are, for people who need to be able to point to what they’ve done on PURE or Google Scholar.

 

[1] The move towards citable datasets that have their own DOIs should help here.

Posted by simon in Reflective, The wider world
11
Nov
2016

CFD news

Two men in suits shaking hands across a large amount of money

Photo: Pixabay user Geralt; CC0 public domain.

Amidst all the attention that has been (rightly) focused on the US presidential election, the UK government has published something that has been long-awaited by the renewable energy industry: Details of the next round of Contract for Difference (CFD) subsidies. For anybody who wants to read the details themselves, they are here.

The first thing to note is that this is a very short-term measure; while the previous round, in 2014, covered the six-year period of 2015-2021 (that is only six – they’re financial years), this round is for just two more years of support from 2021-2023. So after all the uncertainty leading up to this announcement, we’ll still be begging for info again in not all that long.

In terms of technologies, onshore wind is gone as expected (and as per the Conservative manifesto commitment). There had been talk of making an exception for Scottish islands, and this hasn’t been totally abandoned, but it has been kicked into the long grass with another consultation. Offshore wind is in, with a strike price of £105/MWh that reduces to £100 later. That’s good – it’s the price that the offshore wind industry has been publicly aiming at, and they show every sign of meeting or exceeding it.

Tidal is in there as well, at £300/MWh (reducing to £295), which is probably a reasonable price… but there’s a catch. In the earlier round there had been a certain amount of capacity that was reserved for the more expensive, less-developed, technologies, but this time that is gone. There’s a total budget for payments of £290m/year, and if sufficient generators apply to use this up then the contracts will be auctioned off to the lowest bidders; and there’s no way that a tidal scheme can hope to complete with offshore wind on price right now.

I’m not sure exactly how this calculation is done, given that the subsidy costs of a development will depend both on the amount of energy generated and the market price for electicity at the time (remember that the government only pays the difference between the market price and the agreed price, not the whole lot), but in a very rough back-of-an-envelope sort of way I reckon that around 2-3GW of offshore wind capacity could use up that annual pot and leave nothing for tidal. That eventuality would be bad news, but even that possibility is probably bad news – because it means that rather than tidal developers and investors having certainty from the announcement date, they won’t know whether they have viable projects until the auction is held. I’m not sure whether any date for that has yet been announced.

Posted by simon in The wider world
21
Oct
2016

Renewable liquid fuels – No silver bullet, but perhaps important.

Over the last few days I’ve seen a number of tweets appear like this

and like this

The story is one about a paper in Science which goes way over my head, but which appears to talk about a new catalysed method of sucking CO2 out of the air and using it to produce ethanol. A number of people have reacted as though this will solve all our problems. They are wrong. This is not a clean fuel source that will solve all our energy problems, because the process will require an energy input greater than that which is released by burning the ethanol. I’m no organic chemist, but if that wasn’t the case it would be bucking some of the most fundamental principles of physics. This isn’t free energy, and it isn’t going to make climate change go away.

However, it may still be important. If the round-trip efficiency is good enough, it may provide a useful means of long-term storage of energy. Even if the efficiency is relatively poor, it may still be important as a sustainable way of producing an energy-dense liquid fuel for those transport applications, such as aircraft, ships, or heavy trucks, that don’t show any prospect of being electrified any time soon. In this way the new technology is in competition with other ideas for producing methanol, ammonia, or (beloved of many) hydrogen. If the new catalyst makes this more efficient, all the better.

Posted by simon in The wider world