Synergy Module

The central topic of this blog is demand response. However the two imperative drivers for DR are climate change and the economic fallout of peak oil. I don’t know which is going to affect my children more. What follows are two videos I watched this weekend, one on each topic.

The following TED conference speech, addressing what we need to do to avoid climate change, is unusual in that at the end we see the depth of emotion in the speaker regarding climate change.

If the above video addresses the fear of climate change then the following video, of Congressman Bartlett, speaks to the fear of the economic fallout of peak oil. This is the first in a sequence on YouTube. The entire set takes an hour to watch. It is worth taking the time.

On Thursday and Friday night, 17th and 18th of January, I saw the following advertisement on the main state sponsored television channel in Ireland, RTE 1.

I believe that this advertisement sets out to create a misleading impression regarding the effects of (burning) gas on our planet. Gas is a fossil fuel and, as with every other fossil fuel, if you burn it you release CO2. Gas therefore contributes to global warming.

Obviously, I have no problem with a company selling gas. It will take us a while either to replace fossil fuels or find ways to sequestrate the carbon after we burn the fuel. My problem is that this advetrisment creates the impression that burning gas has no negative effect. I think that in fifty years from now this advertisement will apprear to our grand-children as ridiculous as the advertisements of fifty years ago extolling the health benefits of cigarettes.

I have lodged a formal complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland.

My good friend, Aidan Lynch, asked an excellent question on my post about energy storage using pumped hydro. He asked, could you use surplus electrical energy from renewable sources to produce hydrogen and then use that as a fuel.

I am not a fan of Hydrogen as a fuel or as a way of energy storage. I am not well disposed to any fuel that burns the way Hydrogen does from a safety perspective. The efficiency of hydrogen production and consumption from power plant to wheel is around 22%. See the following report for an analysis.

http://www.efcf.com/reports/E04.pdf

And, this involves a new infrastructure and a new car technology. Electric cars and plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) cars offer far greater efficiencies. If you want to use electricity to produce fuel, then use it to support biomass derived diesel.

Watch this movie to get a taste for why I feel that the diesel-hybrid car is the car of the future. The speaker shares my distaste for Hydrogen and even makes a case that Ethanol is not the direction to go.

So in the future I see us having small electric cars for short distances and hybrid diesel cars for medium and long distances. Both types of car will be charged using energy demand managed electricity. The diesel will be produced from cellulosic materials (not food) via synth gas using energy demand managed electricity as the heat source.

The author of the above report and the speaker in the presentation share this view of the future.

This is the best video on efficient energy generation and use I have ever seen. I first found it on youtube about a year ago but couldn’t find it again until today when I stumbled across it again.