Archive for February, 2009

Can Energy-Service Companies (ESCo) actually work?

February 9th, 2009

Speaking with some friends about the whole concept of transforming the energy utilities into energy service companies, or in fact having new companies acting as energy service companies got me thinking. Is there really a business opportunity for ESCos? A quick look at the wikipedia article shows that those type of companies had boomed in the 70’s, when energy was getting expensive. So of course when everything is going well no one has time to deal with this sort of stuff. But then when the money coming out starts going up and the money coming in starts going down you start thinking again.

So can it really work? You go to a house, you have a big smile on your face and you say Good Evening, I would like to take care of your energy consumption please. I will make sure you get your washing done, your house heated and your lights lit, and you don’t have to worry about your electricity metre. All you have to do is just pay me a bit less than what you already pay now. Oh and don’t forget, you will be helping save the planet. I wonder how many times you would get the door shut in your face. “Honey! Some guy wanted to control our heater and tell us when to wash our clothes” will probably be said straight after.

Changing people to accept energy service companies will require a lot of time and effort. Setting a precedent is also going to b e crucial. People will not believe you because you will be making money out of it, and today anyone will say anything to make more money. So you will rely on word of mouth to push your business around and get more people signed up to your services.

People don’t like change. It’s difficult to change and it’s such a hassle. We have always done it this way, what’s wrong with it now!!!! Why do I have to go through all that. So if you want to really make a difference you have to be a trusted community member, someone who people will actually listen to. If you are not then find someone who is, talk to them and explain to them. If they believe you then you are half way there.

Changing the way people think about energy is not going to be easy, but someone out there has to do it. Good Luck!

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Decarbonising the electricity system is a piece of cake

February 4th, 2009

Interesting ideas were bounced off today in one of our lectures. Although we all know those ideas, we sometimes lose focus of where the problem really lies when we are looking at decarbonising the electricity system. NASA has put a man on the moon about 40 years ago and compared to that decarbonising the electricity system is a piece of cake. If we really want we can just build loads of renewables and it’s done. The problem is the cost.

I can hear you already, well of course the cost is a problem, we all know that. And yes we do, but we must remember that. You hear a lot of discussions on how difficult it is to decarbonise the system and you think if only we can find this new breakthrough technology. The technology of course is there, all our efforts are concentrated on making it cheap.

There is therefore much more work to be expended on financial and policy issues then technological issues. Spending on R&D might be a good idea but we must start taking action and start learning by doing. If you spend on R&D you do increase your chances of finding that cheap efficient technology but is you spend on demo projects, you get something at the end plus the actual output of the project.

Learning by doing has always been a cornerstone of human advancement. The cliche example of edison and his light bulb applies here. At the end of the day if governments really attached a high value to the enviornmental issue as they do to banks, we can just pay our way out of it. So in risk of repeating myself, focus on the cost and learn by doing.

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CARMA – Which power plant is doing what to our climate?

February 1st, 2009

I was looking for information on the Australian electricity markets when I stumbled upon www.carma.org . This website will provide you with very useful data on how much electricity is generated and how much carbon is emitted for over 50,000 power plants across the world. It also comes handy that you can download the data in a .csv format and then manipulate it in Excel or other spreadsheet software that you might like.

CARMA, which stands for carbon monitoring for action, is the product of the efforts of the Washington DC based think tank Centre for Global Development. A very good effort indeed.

However the blog post would not be complete without pointing out some shortcomings of the data, and suggestions on how to improve it. The most striking piece of data that is missing is the type of power plant. While you could sometimes guess from the name of the power plant or the company running it, it is not always easy to say and it is difficult to manipulate the data using this criteria.

Another important aspect to point out is that some of this data is estimated based on models. To quote their website

“For non-reporting plants, CARMA estimates emissions using a statistical model that has been fitted to data for thousands of reporting plants in the U.S., Canada, the EU, and India. The model utilizes detailed data on plant-level engineering and fuel specifications.”

Does this not mean that they do have the data on what type of plant it is and which fuel it uses, not to mention the detailed data on plant-level engineering? It would be nice if we can also see this data. The more data the better as long as we can easily process it. We should also take the estimated data with a pinch of salt. There is an underlying assumption here that all power plants in the world are the same and operated in the same manners. The model has already decided that US, Canada, EU and India are representative of the whole world. Using the data to try and find abnormalities in a non-reporting country is therefore futile as the data has been estimated assuming normality. We would go in circles.

Overall the data comes in very handy and is potentially very useful, however it would be nice to see less modelling and more hard data. The efforts that went into this must have been enormous, and they are appreciated.

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