Energy efficiency

Battelle has a corporate programme promoting to bike to work.

The programme saves employees costs, gives them a workout and offers bike racks upfront near the office entrance. A few 100 people have entered the programme and use bicycles regularly to work.

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Energyville is another simulation game allowing players to qualitatively explore tradeoffs in the choices we make for our energy system.

In the game, you need to ensure the energy needs (not just electricity, but also transport and heating) for a city of 3.9 million people, with a 2030 time horizon. And of course, you need to keep citizens prosperous and minimise impact to the environment.

This game is a bit mroe crude than Electrocity, which should not matter, since anyway the simulation is at best a rough approximation. The learning cycle is much faster, and play much easier, but at the expense of the higher resolution offered by Electrocity.

If you have 5 minutes, try Energyville. If you can spare half an hour, go for Electrocity.

A small eBook with overview of the most relevant articles this summer on Leonardo ENERGY.

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IEEE Spectrum's special issue on Megacities

Cities need to import the materials, food and energy they consume, and have a footprint which is much larger than the area they occupy. For example, Tokyo's footprint is 60% larger than all productive land available in Japan.

Paradoxically, because of their concentration, cities offer a potential to rething transport, eliminate cars, use cogeneration, recycling and remanufacturing. Compact enclosed dwellings near a place of work can be heated efficiently. But we're not yet using cities in this manner.

Cities' inefficient design, combined with the relatively higher incomes of urbanites increase the footprint of the urban environment well beyond what it could be.

The perfect city could very well be sustainable. Since 3 decades, Paolo Soleri is promoting the concept of the lean linear city, which aims to combine quality of life with a low footprint.

In China, where major greenfield cities are mushrooming, the concept of a sustainable city design is being developed with the city of Dongtan, a new urban development which will eventually be home to half a million people.

Popular posts this month on a novel application for street lighting, and an original action to demonstratethe passive concept - the ice challenge. A reference information source on solar troughs and a technology with the prospect to halve the cost of solar energy. The carbon market is booming and carbon prices are expected to rise near year. But beware of the carbon cowboys! Finally, several island communities realise that renewable energy makes a lot of sense.

The UK Government has published its new white paper on energy. As a progressive country leading the fight against climate change and a paradigm shift towards sustainable energy, it's worth having a look at the concrete measures proposed.

Typical for this kind of roadmap, a wide range of measures in various stages of development and covering all sectors is listed. A few highlights.

Energy saving, whether in industry, services, households, transport or the public sector is the first frontier. Interestingly, reduction targets are phrased in terms of carbon rather than energy saved, which makes sense: when including renewable energy flows, there is plenty of energy to go around, and its carbon emissions in use become the limiting factor.

Since the European Council meeting last week, we now have a 20% target by 2020, or actually 3 targets: 20% reduction in greenhouse gasses, 20% primary energy savings against baseline and a binding 20% target for renewables for the EU. However, it's the member states, not the EU who will build this renewable capacity. The 20% renewable target is a grand aggregate of national targets, using various technologies, none of which have been defined except for the clause that national targets can be differentiated.

In the energy sector, we have prior experience with the EU Council adopting a binding target for its member states as a group through the burden-sharing agreement in the Kyoto protocol. According to the European Environmental Agency in its report on Greenhouse Gas Emission Trends, the EU is actually set on a course to meet its 8% Kyoto target by 2010, but if we look at the numbers, the EU-15 will have reduced its emissions by 4.6%, with a further 0.8% coming from sinks and 2.6% from acquiring emission reductions outside the EU, primarily through the Clean Development Mechanism. The fact that one can meet an 8% binding reduction target by an actual reduction of 4.6% demonstrates the flexibility offered by aggregate targets.

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And if you're a national of one of the countries participating to this IEA agreement, you may very well be entitled to free access to it all.

Filling up at the gas station will cost around 50 €, and loads about 450 kWh of energy into the tank. A combustion engine will convert this energy into approximately 100 kWh of mechanical energy, to be used for propulsion, on-board electronics and airconditioning. Consuming this amount of fuel emits over 150 kg of CO2.

But now, electric vehicles are entering the market with battery charges of 25 - 30 kWh. This is still about a quarter of what a combustion vehicle has available. But the performance of electric vehicles can become similar or even better, bridging the gap through regenerative braking, the different torque-speed characteristic of the electic motor, and its very high efficiency to convert electric into mechanical power. And 30 kWh of electricity requires only 75 kWh of primary energy, and emits only 15 kg of CO2. This is a factor 6 improvement in primary energy use, and even a factor 10 in CO2 emissions. At night tariff, 30 kWh of electricity will come at about 2 euro.

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