Upgraded street lamps become EV charging points

A German company has developed street lighting technology that allows Electric Vehicles to be charged at adapted street lamps. When street lighting is upgraded to low energy LED technology, the cables that supply the lamps with power are effectively under used. This is where the EV charging technology comes in. Ubitricity can install the EV charging technology in any style of lamp post, retro or modern.

Once a street lamp is installed all an EV owner has to do is to sign up with Ubitricity, the owner then receives a special cable from Ubitricity which monitors electricity usage of the owner. The user is then debted the cost of the electricity. The cable has an inline small box with buttons and a display, so I presume that it is password protected to prevent possible mis-use. However I assume that if the cable were stolen, it could be reported and the account suspended until a new cable were supplied.

No additional load is put on the local electricity cables because they were originally designed to take a bigger load than the LED lighting puts on the system.

Robert L explains in this video how it works and interviews the local council that has installed the lamps as well as a representative of Ubitricity.



https://www.ubitricity.com/en

Tory Government defeated at court twice in one week

Defeat No. 1

Environmental lawyers (ClientEarth) won a battle with the Tories in court over air pollution in our cities and urban areas. The court ruled that the governments plans were inadequate and would not bring down pollution to legal limits. This is frankly a classic Tory case of ignoring a part of government duties and only focusing on duties that fit with their ideology, the part they are ignoring is of couse the environment and long term outcomes.

What have they been doing for the environment?

Closed DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change), basically the department had the words Climate Change in it's title so it had no chance at all with the hypocrites taking over the Tories.

Closed the Energy and Climate Change Committee (because DECC closed).

Cut support for renewable energy and increased support for fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37847787

Defeat No. 2

 The Tories have tried to dictate the way they operate within our democracy and have said that they don't need to consult our elected MP's about the Brexit details. It's bad enough that the referendum vote was marginal across the nation, but the Tories wanted to force their ideas on us and parliament, ideas that would be permanent. Looks like they might have to do the job they are employed to do, that is to slug out the details in a democratic and transparent manor.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37857785

So how long before the government is defeated on their climate change policy?
Today the UN accused governments of failing to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently, missing the 2030 target by 23%.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37849862

Government gets an environmental Red card

The Environmental Audit Committee has heavily criticised the government on it's environmental record. In response the government strongly disagreed with the findings.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29210467

I commented here in 2010, pointing out that far from being the greenest, it's record was already going distinctly brown:

http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/coalition-government-starts-going-dirty.html

It didn't get any better later:

http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pork-pies-and-pickles.html
http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/keep-fortnightly-bin-collection.html
http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/chris-heaton-harris-continues-to-tilt.html
http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/why-chris-heaton-harris-is-wrong-about.html
http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/will-fracking-and-dash-for-gas-cut-uk.html
http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/uk-biodiversity-offsetting-modern.html

Will fracking and the dash for gas cut UK carbon emissions?

When George Osborne announced his grand plan to build as much as 37GW of gas fired power stations, I decided to set up a spreadsheet to try and calculate the overall CO2 emissions that would result from the scheduled closing down of coal, oil and nuclear powers stations and the added emissions of the 37GW gas fired power stations.

I assumed that only Sizewell B would be kept running and spent hours to check which coal and oil fired power stations would be closed (many are to be closed by 2015 because they opt out of the EU Large Combustion Plants Directive).

It's actually quite difficult to calculate yearly/monthly emissions but not so difficult to calculate hourly carbon emission rates on a like for like basis.

The current total nuclear capacity is about 9.2GW with 8GW to be decommissioned, leaving 1.2GW from Sizewell B remaining (ignoring the recent Hinckley Point announcement). The total CO2 emissions from Sizewell B is about 20247 gCO2/hour and the reduction in emissions is about 136136 gCO2/hr.

The total existing oil/coal power plant is about 18.9GW, of that about 8.4GW is to be decommissioned by 2015, leaving 10.5GW, some of which will be biomass conversions. The approximate reductions in CO2 emissions from that change is about 950400 gCO2/hr.

Adding the two reductions together you get approximately 9524247 gCO2/hr reductions in CO2 emissions.

Now if you calculate the emissions from running the Osborne gas plants (37GW).
You get an additional 14245000 gCO2/hr from those new power stations.

So the resulting net change in emissions per hour would be 14245000 - 9524247 = +4720753 gCO2/hr

The CO2 break even point would be (9524247/14245000)x37 = 24.7GW of gas fired power generation.
Progressively reducing that new 24.7GW of gas fired generation capacity to something less would start reducing the carbon emissions.

Notes:

CO2 emissions accounted for by nuclear power stations is mainly in construction and mining of fuel.

Emissions assumptions:
Nuclear energy = 17 gCO2/KWh
Gas = 385 gCO2/KWh
Coal/Oil = 900 gCO2/KWh
Because there are very few oil fired power stations and they are/were rarely operated, I lumped them in with coal emissions to simplify calculations.

So would using more gas cut UK emissions?

It depends on how it was used and clearly the creation of 37GW of power stations that will be under the political guidance of a changing democratically elected government, would mean it would be difficult to guarentee the new gas fired power stations would be used sensibly.

Building 37GW of gas turbine power stations and then running them as a base load would actually increase carbon emissions. Note though, I have not done any calculations regarding the remaining 10.5GW of fossil fueled power stations. We know that half of Drax is/will be converted to biomass.

Basically if something is waiting there to be used, would you just leave it to idle? Especially if political parties are squabling over votes and using energy prices for ideological purposes. The temptation will be to use the full 37GW of new gas plant.

The probability is that the dash for gas in the UK would not reduce CO2 emissions by any significant amount and the anti-science political types would exploit the power station capacity they have to hand.

At least with wind turbines, solar energy, nuclear energy etc. you don't give politicians a tool that can be made to create unsustainable CO2 emissions.

The Great Depression MkII

In 2008 when the full extent of the banking crisis began to sink in, I was convinced that there would be some kind of depression for about 10 years.

We are now in the 5th year of the Great Depression MkII and things are looking just as bad as they were when it started. Despite the spin, PR, lies and delusional statements offered by economists, journalists and politicians. Despite the economy allegedly picking up twice then falling like a brick. Despite this alleged third 'upturn' and promises that eventually the economy will pick up. All the pointers are that the Great Depression MK11 will continue for a few more years yet, in fact my decade prediction is looking good.

It will be interesting to see what journalists and econmists will say when it is all over. Maybe something like:
"Well, no one could have predicted it would take Britain over 7 years to pull out of an economic decline, even the most experienced economists could not have predicted that..."

The fact is no ecomomist or politician can create the conditions to replace the massive vacuum caused by the banking crisis. The Labour party decided to borrow money to bail out the banks, this effectively made the fall of the economy a long slow one to the bottom instead of a fast one.

What makes things far worse is the current government ideology of ignoring the prosperity of future generations in favour of a fast buck today in an attempt to win approval of the electorate. Bit by bit, those that network with the current government are imposing a Big Brother style regime on the nation, whilst pretending to reduce red tape.

This week we have seen Big Brother attempts to re-write the Geography curriculum for Key Stages 1 to 3, removing any mention of climate change and hence deleting important science and knowledge from the curriculum. This is one of many intrusions and manipulations of peoples lives.

Yesterday Osborne arrogantly announced in the budget statement that it was for people that wanted to work own a home and had aspirations, as if the majority that were unemployed didn't want a job or had no aspirations! Previously Iain Duncan Smith had suggested that Geology students should 'aspire' to become supermarket shelf stackers. Clearly government ministers are in conflict with each others goals.

Osborne announced this on the day that unemployment rose and the young in particular suffering the most in this respect. He also announced subsidies for the last dregs of fossil fuel gas to be exploited via fracking, prolonging the emissions of carbon dioxide and handing future generations expensive climate change problems.

The governments 'green' record so far:

1. Removed carbon/climate public information films (despite approving others)
2. Reduced support for renewable energy
3. Investment in high carbon projects massively out weighs any investment in green low carbon projects
4. Removed/removing climate change from the school geography sylabus
5. General opposition to onshore wind farms
6. Increased subsidies for high carbon energy such as gas fracking and other fossil fuels

Locally, councils have:

1. Banned wind turbines from council land
2. Opposed solar farms
3. Approved biodiversity wrecking housing schemes on farm land
4. Failed to make good use of brownfield sites for building homes
5. Failed to support electric vehicle charging points
6. Generally paid lip service to green issues

That is just a few issues that I can think of. When added up, the government has been chipping away at it's promises to green issues. The failure to take green issues seriously not only hinders the economy, it also passes on serious problems to future generations.

Some links about the 2008 banking/financial crash:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932008
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmtreasy/416/416.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/08/creditcrunch.marketturmoil
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/09/30/us.bailout.timeline/index.html