Help the government decide its long term Energy Policy!

Ontario is looking to change its long term energy policy, and is asking the public for input. How should Ontario meet its long term energy needs? Give your input!

The long term energy plan is up for review. Consultations with Ontarians are being held, and various topics are up for discussion, such as: natural gas, wind, solar, nuclear, and energy conservation. As the plan will be released this fall, a website has been set up for individuals to fill out the online questionnaire, get details on info sessions, and access the discussion guide.

Info sessions will be held in London, Windsor, Toronto, St. Catharines, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Barrie and Ottawa - dates are posted on the website.

Individuals and stakeholders from all facets of the Ontario community are encouraged to share their concerns and opinions.

Bill Gates on Energy

Bill Gates has left the IT technology field and focused his efforts on challenges facing the modern world. One of these issues is energy. In this talk from the ECO:nomics conference in May 2012, He speaks of five energy miracles that need to happen for future energy security without climate change: carbon capture, nuclear, solar, wind and bio-fuels. 

These energy miracles need to happen to make green energy economical. He mentions much innovation which needs to happen for this to become feasible (whether this is carbon capture, nuclear, or any of the technologies mentioned). With nuclear, he highlights his Terra power plant that burns both the fissile and fertile part of Uranium (both U-235 and U-238), drastically reducing waste. He focuses on Generation III and Generation IV plants - because nuclear safety and non-proliferation is key to any future in first world nuclear. The challenges he mentions with energy harvesting (wind and solar) are the usual ones of intermittent production (energy only produced when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining). Bill notes we don't penalize wind for the this economically right now - but ultimately we should. With wind or solar, we need to be investing in energy storage (whether it be batteries, pumped storage, flywheels, compressed air, etc). The key point here is that we are subsidizing the cost of installed wind power to a significant degree. Bill noted that although the natural gas boom is an economic blessing, any carbon gains with natural gas is easily negated if there is any leakage - the CH4 molecule (methane, or natural gas) is a much worse greenhouse gas agent than CO2.

There are various ways that we can get through these energy miracles - though Bill does not go into the depths of these issues. With carbon capture, one can use existing mine infrastructure capturing carbon from flue gasses at fossil plants, capture carbon with bio sources such as algae, increase membrane efficiency, or even capture carbon in the soil. I think carbon capture does have a future, but will not play a significant role until carbon taxes or some form of cost of carbon is factored in. Nuclear power will play a role in the future, but not in the 1st world, due to NIMBY (not in my backyard) attitudes. It is not anticipated that wind power will be economical in the future, while solar power is anticipated to become commercially feasible by 2018 (albeit it with only counting energy produced, and not taxing the fact of when it is produced). Natural gas will ultimately not bring us to the goal of stopping climate change - and we should be switching to other options. It is great for the economy - but its profits should be re-invested into green energy technologies.

Bill did not go into great detail in his talk, but did show a good comprehensive knowledge of the industry. All in all, I'm on the side of Bill, and hope his ideas come to fruition.

Environmentalists: Stop protesting pipelines - Start demanding green legislation

Last week, Kinder Morgan reported a leak of 12 barrels of oil. This week, Canadian Pacific (CP) rail reported a leak of 575 barrels of oil from a rail car. Why are we carrying oil on rail cars? Because environmentalists are derailing the construction of new pipelines.

Source: Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers

Oil sands oil is definitely one of the most dirty sources of oil in the world. The trouble is, Canada does not yet have an alternate energy plan. Consider Canada to be your household: Would you stop driving your car to work, and take a taxi each day, because your car burns more gas than the taxi drivers? This is, in essence, what Canada is doing. Harper has polarized the argument between pipelines and green energy so much that we are shooting our cash cow dead, and not developing a viable alternate economic plan.

What is an alternate plan? Consider our neighbors to the south. Last month, Tesla motors repaid their $465 million dollar loan from the US Government. Ford Motors and GM had multi-billion dollar loans from the US and have not repaid. Albeit the reasons for Tesla's profitability are no franchises (selling cars from Tesla-owned boutiques instead), and the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)  regulations for energy efficiency in cars. Under this regulation, manufacturers that cannot comply with the average fleet gas mileage can buy gas mileage credits from other companies. During the quarter that it posted profits, it made $68 million from CAFE credits, $17 million from GHG emmisions credits (another green energy program), and $91 million from selling cars - their profit of $11 million was not made by selling cars, but collecting credits.

A scheme like this this is exactly what Canada should do with its oil sands oil. We should definitely sell oil sands oil and shale oil. We should trim the profits from these companies and invest in viable green alternatives - Companies like Canada Lithium, a Canadian lithium mining company, and Canadian Solar, a Canadian solar panel manufacturer.

Protesting against oil pipelines actually causes Canadian companies to transfer wealth to American Companies. This is easily shown by the disparity between Brent crude and west Texas intermediate (WTI). Brent crude is the price from the North Sea. The spread between these two markers is predicted to spread to $12 for 2013. Basically, Canadian oil companies are paying $12 per barrel of oil to American companies for having a market to buy Canadian oil.

Why not build a pipeline to either Eastern Canada (for example, TransCanada's Energy East pipeline) or a pipeline to the West (like Kinder Morgan's twinning, or Enbridge's Northern Gateway), reap higher profits, and invest these profits into actually doing something substantive to change our lifestyles? Invest in greening our energy infrastructure - without shooting ourselves in the foot.

Now that's heat

Put one hand in cold water, and one in hot, then place both hands in the same container of warm water. The temperature of the warm water’s the same, but the sensation will feel differently to both hands. Take a fully inflated bike tire, and deflate it with your fingernail or a thumbtack – your fingers will get cold – in fact you may even get frostbite. Why did the tire knob get cold – where did all the heat go? With our sensation of  hot and cold so subjective, it raises the fundamental question: just what IS heat? And, an even more fundamental question: if we don’t know what heat is, why do we have so many references to it in our culture? (heat score, a dog in heat, take the heat, in dead heat)

An early way people attempted to come to grips with the concept of heat was by devising a system to measure it.  In 1714, G.D. Fahrenheit proposed a scale to measure the “hotness” of an object that placed a salt water-ice mixture at 0 degrees, and the usual temperature of the human body at 96 degrees. By this definition, even that shaggy beer-bellied uncle of yours is hot. 96 degrees hot, to be exact. A newer and improved Celsius scale by Anders Celsius (with 0 C referring to water freezing and 100 C referring to water boiling) was developed 10 years after.

After a while, we developed a more dynamic idea of heat with caloric theory. Joseph Black first defined the concept of heat capacity in 1760: the amount of calorie required for raising or lowering the temperature of a body by 1 degree Celsius. And what is 1 calorie? A reference "amount" of heat; that is, the amount required to raise 1g of water by 1 Celsius from 15.35 C to 16.35 C.

It was a century later with the theories of Maxwell and Boltzmann that heat could be understood from a quantum mechanical perspective. From this perspective, heat is how fast and how vigorously atoms are vibrating. Remember kinetic energy from my previous post? Well, when bunch of atoms that are vibrating very quickly (something hot) are brought close to slowly vibrating atoms, there are interactions that slow the faster atoms and speed up the slower atoms (whether it be directly, through radiation, or through other means).

Now that we’ve been able to measure heat, and define heat, then next thing us humans devised was ways of harnessing that heat to make our lives easier (well, less physically burdensome).

What is energy, anyway?

Everyone talks about energy as if it's going out of style, but what is energy, anyway?

Energy is the ability to do work.

Great! That's a simple enough... But what does that mean? I am young and capable - does that mean that I am full of energy? Well, in this sense, we are talking about mechanical work, and mechanical energy. To get to work and energy, we must first talk about force (from Newton's law):

Force (F)=Mass (m)*(a) Acceleration

The force required to move (accelerate) an object varies by the size of the object (it's mass). Well, given this, mechanical work can be so defined:

Mechanical Work (M)=Force (F)*(d) Distance

The mechanical work done on a system is the product of the force acting on it, and the distance it traveled  Here we have some interesting phenomena. You know how sometimes you feel that you are "spinning your wheels" and not getting any work done? Well, from the definition of mechanical work, you aren't: to do mechanical work, the object needs to be moved - and the amount of work done varies directly by the distance traveled! From here, we can talk about the two main types of mechanical energy.

Potential energy:

Ep = m g h

If you lift an object to some height, that object has energy in it proportional to its size (mass) and the height that you lifted the object to (h). We throw in g (acceleration due to gravity) for good measure - but this is fairly constant across the Earth's surface (g ~ 9.81 m/s^2).

Kinetic energy:

Ek = (1/2) m V^2

An object travelling at a certain velocity (speed, V) and a certain mass (m) has energy.

Fairly simple concepts - but you need them later to understand how we change between mechanical work and various other forms of energy (heat, electric energy, radiation, & chemical energy).

Carbon sequestration - using cattle herds.

Recently, developments in carbon sequestration and storage have been at the forefront of debates related to energy systems. During the recovery of oil and gas, cavities in the earth's crust are formed. These cavities can be used to pump carbon dioxide back into the crust, eliminating the negative effects of carbon dioxide on the outside environment. Another recent development also shows promise as a significant addition to carbon sequestration. Often, cattle are sourced as the cause of greenhouse gasses. Bovines release quite a bit of methane when consuming grass and feed. However, it seems that there is a delicate balance between animals and grasslands - the details of which we are just starting to understand. This idea has the potential to feed much of the third world, stop the desertification of much of the world's grasslands, and sequester enough carbon to reverse atmospheric carbon trends, let alone offset the affects of the added amounts of grazing animals. 

Triple win. 

Disclaimer: this is not my field of expertise, and I don't know the feasibility of holistic land management. That being said, based on some research which I've done, I'm confident that the idea is plausible.

  

What's wrong with you?

Imagine driving a very long distance: You're driving from Cape Town to Paris, to Beijing, and back. - You're only going to refuel the car - do no other maintenance. If you're lucky, you won't need to replace the windshield washer fluid. For the first 5000km, there is no problem. After, your oil starts collecting too much grit from gears rubbing together, and starts acting like a sandpaper grinding away your engine internals. However, you won't start noticing this for a long while. Your engine will just get progressively louder, almost un-noticeably so. After 20 000 km, your air filter will get clogged and you'll start wearing your engine faster. 30 000 km and your break pads could start wearing. With each missed milestone, your car will start feeling the slow affects of mal-treatment. One day, you'll be driving down with plenty of plans for the day. Bang! You will slowly roll to a halt. If ever someone would ask, you would say, "It's been like this forever, it really couldn't have been prevented."
This is precisely what we have been doing with the planet. We've been running it, but only looking at one or two of its symptoms. We need energy, or the fuel. CO₂ emissions are really only like the windshield washer fluid. There is a plethora of other symptoms that we need to look at. The most important of these are:

Waste & Consumption
Water & Oceans
Climate Change
Biodiversity & land use
Energy production, consumption, and transmission

Energy is inter-related into each of these issues, and is by no means the biggest issue currently on hand. However, we have quite a bit of control over it - and we can use it to drive change in each and every one of these other issues. Waning away from foreign oil now can solve an eminent economic crisis - but we need to diversify, and have an all of the above attitude now - with greater and greater investment in green and clean energy infrastructure, research, and development.
There is not going to be a secret to having greener energy management. We will simply have to look at the thousand of different ways that we need to change our point of view, and understand how each single change now will pay dividends in the long run.
We need to start changing our oil, tires, break pads, air filter, engine coolant, and start doing the regular maintenance necessary to extend the longevity of the earth. We may not know where we are going - we can't predict with great accuracy what will happen to the planet, with all its external influences, but we do know how to make sure we get there, and not break down along the way.