Peer-to-Peer Energy

This week my son came up with the observation that the world's biggest hotel company does not own any hotels and a company has launched a peer-to-peer delivery service.  In both cases, the common element is the software that links the service provided with the consumer.  The government also announced that it was withdrawing subsidies for new onshore wind farms.  Do these events have anything in common; probably not, but there maybe an idea which is worth exploring.

Subsidies is often difficult to discuss.  The concept is that a government provides an incentive to for someone to do something useful which would otherwise be uneconomic and recovers the cost from the tax payer or the consumer.  The downside of subsidies that they can become subject to the doctrine of unforeseen consequences which are painful to rectify.  An example is agricultural subsidies, after the second world war European governments wanted to stimulate food production and a system of subsidies evolved and people got fed but a few decades later, the system is producing "butter mountains" and "wine lakes" as supply and demand become unbalanced.  This leads to policy reform and farmers have to diversity and buildings that once sheltered cows become holiday homes for economists.  Maybe, a better designed policy could have given agriculture a smoother path.  We all eat, so why can farming be unprofitable.

Supporting sustainable energy is a good thing, part of the support is intended to increase the proportion of energy which is produced from sustainable resources, however, in the author's opinion, the object should be to lower total emissions.  To lower emissions you need a policy which encourages energy management and storage.  Wind energy comes in pulses a few days apart, these pulses are stronger in winter when the sun does not shine brightly and it does not shine at all at night.  My perception is that investment in sustainable sources is driven by the system of FITs and strike prices and that investments in sustainable generating capacity do not displace fossil/nuclear sources.  Incorporating a few kwh of storage into a household's energy economy could become a game changer.  Ignoring seasonal variations, the peak energy demand in most homes is morning and evening, in the morning people are showering and breakfasting and in the evening they are cooking and staring at screens, the peak of solar energy generation is at solar noon.  At present, most of this imbalance is mopped up by gas fired turbines.  The availability of solar power during the day allows them to be throttled back and powered up when the lights go on in the evening.  Maybe with a few kwh of storage per household, you can retire some existing fossil/nuclear capacity by storing wind and solar generated electricity when it is available.  I have not studied this in detail, but I think that it is only Germany which has some support for storage.  The shadow of subsidy cuts raises the fear of job losses in established industries which are painful, could a better policy created a more balanced industry.

Assumptions are always dangerous, but I need to make at least two.  My perception is that people fear rising bills and don't care too much where their energy comes from if their lifestyle remains unchanged.  Without being obsessive and using LED lights we have trimmed our electricity consumption by about 25%.  I am intrigued by the internet-of-things, I may be weird, but I am prepared to share the management of my fridge if I get to share the savings.  Add some storage and there are some interesting ideas to explore.

Roof-top PV is well established and there are a couple of reasonably sized wind turbines withing cycling distance of where I live.  One of these is owned by an opera house, this is not an obvious form of diversification but their land includes an ideal bit of Downland ridge.  Consumers and producers are linked by the grid creating at least a theoretical basis for peer-to-peer energy.  For the concept to work there has to be some economic realism, the price offered by the consumer has to make sense to the producer.  Ideally, green energy would have a premium which would offset subsidies.

Despite having spent much of my life writing software, I'm ashamed to say the my mobile phone skills are poor compared with those of my children.  They run whole chunks of their lives with their phones, objects for which there is only a transient need for are traded on eBay, cheap fares are found on off-peak trains and friendships are maintained across continents.  At present energy is not an obvious addition to this array, but................

London Filth

A year ago I knew little about Victorian rubbish, however, in the course of home renovation I've had some personal contact with it.  Coal was the dominant fuel of the Victorian period and the first part of the 20th century with millions of homes burning it, there was a lot of ash to get rid off, not to mention the manure from the horses which which provided the motive power for much local urban transport.  I've found ash mixed with mortar in walls, as a filler in retaining wall cavities and in the bricks used for internal walls.  So far, no horse dung, but I have found some wooden paving blocks which were intended to minimize the noise of horse's hooves.  I have attempted to recycle some old bricks and hardcore and become aware that there are people seeking out the sites of ash tips.  The most exotic thing I found in my personal stash of the stuff was a broken egg cup, but some people find the lure of finding bottles and pot lids too strong to resist.  Then my son turns up with a book entitled:  "Dirty Old London - The Victorian Fight Against Filth". by Lee Jackson.

This book is well researched but wears its scholarship lightly and is an entertaining story about something that you might not want to contemplate at bedtime.  I'm only a short way into the book, but I now have a better understanding of my own rubble.  Around the middle of the 19th century, there was something which, with some stretch of the imagination, be called a virtuous circle.  At the time London was growing and this growth created  a demand for bricks, this in turn created a demand for ash, thus for a time, household rubbish had some value and its collection could be self financing.  Ash was useful for two reasons, the first because it was cheaper than clay (I'm assuming this) and secondly because it contained some un-burnt fuel which assisted the firing process.  As a personal observation, bricks with a high ash content are generally poor quality and me one wonder about building standards at the time.  Horse dung could be sold to farms and market gardens.  At that time brick making and market gardening were local industries and transport costs would have been reasonable, as London expanded, this ceased to be the case and domestic rubbish became a problem for local government.  Some innovative councils came up with the idea of using domestic rubbish as fuel for electricity generation which was a growth industry in the latter part of the 19th century, this was a nice idea, but coal did the job better.  As an aside, I spent half of  one of my teenage years on floating school on the lower reaches of the Thames, each day,  barges owned by the London County Council passed by on their way to dump rubbish at some point far enough away that it would not be returned with the flood tide.

As part of what I loosely call my day job, I'm messing with a cloud sky model for solar irradiance, part of this involves making an estimate of what the solar irradiance would be if the sky was clear.  Clear sky irradiance is influenced by atmospheric conditions.  Two significant variables are the quantities of aerosols and water vapor in the atmosphere.  Aerosols are fine particles, some are the result of natural processes like sand been blown off deserts in the dry summers and volcanic activity and some are due to human activity such as burning fossil fuels.  A gross over simplification would be, that all else being equal, you feel warmer/hotter under a dry, clean sky than under a dirty damp one.  Whilst attempting to understand some of variance between datasets, I downloaded some material from the NASA Earth Observatory (NEO) and plotted it on Google Earth.  The NEO is a wonderful resource for learning about the environment, it is a good combination of data, explanation and guidance for research.

Treat this plot of Aerosol Optical Depth for June 2011 with caution, the shading scheme is somewhat arbitrary and chosen to accentuate difference within a small sub-set of the data, my code could be buggy and human life is finite.

The aerosol content is higher in the dark squares than in the light ones and London stands out as a high spot.  This plot was an distraction from task in hand, but like the pot lid hunters I could not resist poking around.  In some way, it is a continuation of the story of urban filth.