As the latest climate change conference in Bonn draws to a close today, the full implications of commitments made at COP17 are beginning to sink in. The nations of the world find themselves united by a challenge that is both eye-watering and conceptually simple: hold the global average temperature increase below 2°C versus the long-term pre-industrial average, by taking actions that are consistent with our best understanding of science, while still meeting society’s development needs. The challenge is monumental because history has no precedent for the scale and rate of the transformation that is required in terms of how we organise ourselves and deliver essential goods and services. It is straightforward because the science tells us we can only hope to achieve this objective by engineering a zero carbon energy system by mid-century.
What does a zero carbon energy system look like? On the supply side, it’s very easy to visualise: if we insist on setting fire to coal, oil and natural gas to deliver our energy needs, we must capture and sequester the emissions. This is unlikely to be achieved unless we ensure that all combustion occurs in stationary plants. In any case, the total share of fossil fuels in the energy mix will diminish in favour of sustainable renewable energy that arrives free of charge from the sun, either directly via photovoltaic (PV) cells and concentrated solar power (CSP) plants, or indirectly via wind turbines and hydroelectric dams. On the demand side, save for a few niche applications around the margins, the global energy system will electrify. This is both necessary and inevitable – the only remaining question is how to expedite the zero carbon energy technologies by bringing down their cost. We can start by removing enormous subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels.
Where does this leave the transport system? It is the blood supply of our economic system, which is wholly based on the movement of people and things. Today, 93% of the primary energy consumed in transport is supplied by crude oil, increasingly disadvantaged due to its uneven geographical distribution – proven oil reserves are concentrated in the hands of a few relatively unstable countries – and geological fundamentals that force us to expend more and more energy to extract each successive barrel. Setting aside the climate change imperative, we still have a raft of convincing reasons for kicking our oil habit, not least the extraordinary extent to which our economic wellbeing has become hostage to political events in faraway lands over which we exercise little control.
Again, the solution is conceptually very easy: the transport system – at least, the surface transport modes – must electrify like everything else. The good news is that electric drive technology is spectacularly energy efficient: with existing technology, the combination of batteries and electric motors is twice as efficient as the theoretical maximum that internal combustion engines can ever achieve, or four times more efficient than today’s conventional vehicles. This means that even if electric vehicles are running on coal-fired electricity, their life-cycle carbon emissions are no worse than the very best of their mechanical counterparts. And of course, as the electricity supply decarbonises – as it must – electric vehicles get cleaner over time. The reverse is true of conventional vehicles as the liquid fuel supply gets successively more carbon-intensive.
Eliminating tailpipes means eliminating tailpipe emissions, not only CO2. The health burden of SO2, NOx and particulate matter – especially in crowded urban landscapes – represents a considerable drain on the fiscus. Electric vehicles connected to the grid when not in use also provide a distributed storage system that can help to balance the variable nature of renewable energy technologies. The entire energy system becomes more efficient as a result. Furthermore, every country on Earth is capable of generating electricity with domestic resources. The same cannot be said for gasoline and diesel, the costs of which are both high and volatile. As for biofuels, if we can manufacture them sustainably without compromising food and water supplies they will be required for aviation, which cannot do without the energy density that only comes in liquid form.
Electrification of transport is not limited to cars, which are still beyond the financial reach of many. China, for instance, has some 120-million electric bicycles on the road today, more than double the country’s automobile population. Electric buses – powered by batteries or overhead lines – ply the streets of many Chinese cities, and some 45 000 km of high-speed (electric) rail will be in place by 2015. The trends are clear: whereas the United States and Europe embarked upon their automotive revolution while oil was cheap and abundant – and the societal costs of burning it were unknown – China faces a totally different reality of expensive oil and an acute sense of vulnerability to climate change and urban air pollution. No wonder the Chinese government has identified transport electrification as a central pillar of the nation’s development.
As for South Africa, in many ways the national context is much closer to China than the US and Europe: a carbon-intensive energy system in urgent need of radical overhaul, a legacy of disastrous 20th century social policy, pressing inequality challenges, an enviable endowment of renewable energy resources (as yet untapped), no domestic competitive advantage in oil-based transport systems, and, perhaps most importantly, an optimistic forward-looking population. With per capita vehicle ownership only a fraction of that in so-called advanced economies, it is not too late for South Africa to select a different course and base its future mobility systems – and therefore its entire economy – on renewable electricity.
It is incredible how all the pioneers of the world developed their countries without electricity or refrigeration or running water.
What I would like to find time for is a “Sqatter Camp Cook Book” based on the old pioneer way of eating and eating well, with all the farmers unions of the countries of the world contributing.
Food was preserved in sugar or brine or fermented (like sauerkraut), bottled or preserved.
Refrigeration was done by evaporation of hessian cloths over food safes or waterbags made of skins.
Villages in Europe had central village ovens where everone’s food was cooked for them – no individual kitchens.
And the world has always had climate change – humans can do nothing to stop it. Long before carbon emmissions became the new mythology.
One volcano like the one that erupted some months ago in Iceland throws more dust into the air than humans can do in 30 years.
Good article Gary. With the political will South Africa could be 100% renewable energy in twenty years. We would avoid the hidden costs of dirty energy, and provide hundreds of thousands of sustainable new jobs to the job market.
Fracking in the Karoo must be abandoned. Leaking natural gs (methane) from fracking operations is far worse for climate change than coal or oil.
Although it must be terrified of being left behind on anything, I feel that state thinking is too fragmented. It sees fracking, for example as mining/energy and forgets that water is likely to become our biggest issue going forward. I’m not sure it prioritises correctly (not that I’d necessarily do any better), but we seem like kids in a candy store, determined to sample everything on the shelf.
The time it’s taking for transportation to evolve seems ridiculous considering that electric vehicles were all the rage in the early 1900s. We don’t all need to travel 1 000km/day or at the speed of light and price is all important for those who see themselves unable to afford new cars.
In short, pragmatic is seldom considered when it comes to planning.
@ Lyndall Beddy: great idea, but we are dealing with hotter-for-longer periods in SA. In Durban food goes off in a fridge in 12 hours without power. Whenever we have power cuts (the last on Wednesday for about six hours, after a surge), I begin a regime of what to eat first from the fridge. And it’s now not even high summer!
The ANC should take the advice of Paul Kruger – to keep from the past what is worth keeping, and abandon what is not.
The Romans had one of the most sophisticated Empires the world has ever seen – without electricity, but with brilliant engineers and lots of running water moving on the prinicple of gravity, including to move sewerage, and a system of roads so good many still survive today.
Romans did not have individual bathrooms but communal bath-houses which combined saunas with pools.
The Afrikaner townships built for the blacks were also on a village principle with a central communal area.
The original black civilizations, like in the Pacific, all had communal guest houses in their villages.
Properly planned townships, with such communal areas, including large community halls, which could perhaps include a guesthouse for victims of abuse, and a large communal garden would be so much better than what we have now, and save considerably on electricity which would be communal.
These would have to be built further out – which means nationalised transport – which every socialist state should have anyhow.
Why bother to nationalise Sasol and Mittal – which would cost too much anyhow – just copy them and build new ones. They don’t have a patent – and if they do, THAT can be legislated.
Rather nationalise the taxi industry.
‘[…]the combination of batteries and electric motors is twice as efficient as the theoretical maximum that internal combustion engines can ever achieve, or four times more efficient than today’s conventional vehicles.”
It would be interesting to know how you came to these conclusions, what you have decided constitutes ‘efficiency’.
The overriding parameter for effective transportation is ‘energy density’, i.e. how much energy is contained in a given mass of energy storage, i.e. batteries vs. gasoline.
Since electricity is being considered, a unit of Watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg) will give proper context, rather than Joules per kilogram.
A real car’s (Nissan Leaf) batteries have a density of 120Wh/kg.
The highest density batteries employing Li-ion technology yield about 245Wh/kg but costs way too much to be viable.
Envia have just achieved a ‘record breaking’ 400Wh/kg with an experimental battery approaching the theoretical maximum for electro chemical phenomena, but it will never achieve commercial viability.
Why?
Because petroleum exhibits an energy density of 12,000Wh/kg.
Pointing out differences in energy conversion efficiencies between electric motors and heat engines (which are ALSO improving) is moot…. The electricity must be generated by a thermal plant and incur substantial losses in transmission and storage, and lag in potential by an order of magnitude behind liquid hydrocarbons.
You end up ‘burning’ more energy at the end of the day.
Where fracking is beeing done elsewhere is where those countries either have lots of land still left or on non arable land. Fracking in areas of snow and ice will hardly produce a water problem, for example.
The Karoo is a very sensitive ecology, totally dependent on its water, and provides a third of the food of South Africa.
Besides, South Africa has more than enough offshore gas – which,unfortunately for Shell, belongs to Mossgas, and therefore to the people, and not to them.
@Perry Curling-Hope – thanks for your thoughts. The point about extraordinary energy density of petroleum-based fuel does explain why oil is overwhelmingly the favoured energy carrier for transport, but this has nothing to do with energy efficiency, which I define as the efficiency with which a unit of energy supplied is converted into the service of interest, in this case km (or more correctly passenger-km or freight tonne-km). Then there is the carbon content of the energy to take into account.
For the appliance (e.g. motor car) the energy efficiency can be expressed as kWh/km. The current crop of EVs have efficiencies around 0.15 kWh/km whereas the average passenger car (European fleet average sales) consumes about 0.6 kWh/km – there’s the factor of 4.
For energy supplied (e.g. gasoline or electrons) you need to know how much carbon comes with a unit of energy supplied, or gCO2/kWh. Gasoline and diesel at the pump is about 300g/kWh (factoring in upstream losses), while coal-fired electricity at the plug is about 1,000g/kWh (accounting for transmission loss).
To estimate your well-to-wheel (or mine-to-wheel) emissions, take kWh/km x gCO2/kWh to get your gCO2/km.
EV: 1,000 x 0.15 = 150gCO2/km (based on coal-fired electrons, not renewables)
ICEV: 300 x 0.6 = 180gCO2/km (based on conventional fuel, not coal-to-liquids)
You can play around with the numbers, e.g. assume ICEs get incrementally more efficient, and assume electricity gets cleaner over…
Perry, you bad person – you destroyed the Santa and Easter Bunny myth too. It is puzzling why people should punt technology that adds more inefficiencies to the already my guess of 40% odd best efficiency for a coal fired turbo alternator set up. The answer for SA is blindingly simple. Allow private companies to build high efficiency and best practice clean coal fired plants and compete for power sales. Add a good number of industries who have just been sitting on their potential power output (much of it from waste products) because of Eskom and Nersa silliness and the problem is solved; at least in the short to medium term. The current crisis peak is just another cadre deployment cock up.
Perry Curling-Hope,
Yes the internal combustion engine is fighting back, but it is a last-hurrah. Even car industry executives agree: 70% think the ICE will dominate over EVs for the next 10 years; only 18% think it will do so for 10-20 years.
http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=1355
Hi Gary, thanks for the reply.
To clarify.
A claim of a 4 to 1 efficiency ratio between EV’s and ICE vehicles is quit fair, it is just not too relevant in determining what people will buy.
In pursuit of a “service of interest”, it is ‘tank to wheel’ performance, i.e. ‘what can this vehicle do for me’, and at what price which determines choice, not by whatever ‘well to wheel’ efficiency can be demonstrated
What the vehicle can do is in a very fundamental way determined by what amount of energy the ‘tank’ contains, which is in turn determined by energy density of the primary ‘fuel’.
Given that the conversion efficiency of current IC engines is (still) rather poor, even by 4 to 1, that matters little if the energy content of the primary fuel is 2 orders of magnitude greater than any available alternative.
There is a reason why the Leaf is not sold en mass, and why our own SA ‘Joule’ could not attract investors.
You cannot tow a couple of Jet skies and quad bikes hundreds of kilometers over challenging terrain to a remote location, have fun and return by employing an electric vehicle, and believe it or not, people want to do these things, despite the guilt trip that Greens would have laid upon them for doing so.
If you’re affluent and can afford an additional electric runabout for the wife, so by making a ‘green’ statement, or purchase the breathtaking Tesla Roadster as a weekend toy, so be it.
Most of us must settle for one affordable all purpose…
Gas geysers, which we used in holiday homes not very long ago, were MUCH cheaper than either solar heating or electrical geysers. The pilot light stays on, but the water only gets heated when you turn on the tap and want to use it.
Hi again Perry,
Thanks for your follow up – I can’t disagree with any of your remarks. You’ve identified the primary reason why we are where we are: wedded to a transport system (and therefore an economic system) that is shackled to liquid fuels. This is why it’s very challenging to re-engineer, and why oil companies dominate the top of the Fortune 500 global list.
However, the main thrust of the article was as follows:
1) The UNFCCC process has set the boundary condition “stay below 2°C”, and take action according to what the IPCC says is required;
2) This essentially means zero emissions from fossil fuels by mid-century;
3) Conceptually this is easy: we electrify the entire energy system…
4) …including surface transport…
5) …while decarbonising the electricity system, of course;
6) And, electrified transport modes (cars, bicycles, trains, buses) also happen to be supremely energy efficient, much more so than primitive fire-based transport modes
This is not to argue that we can electrify the transport system while maintaining everything else more or less as it is today – clearly we can’t, not least for the reasons you identify (oil wins on energy density).
Conclusion: if we are serious about respecting the limit set by the UNFCCC process, we must eliminate CO2 emissions from energy by 2050, which means rethinking the system, how we access goods and services, how we design our urban landscapes, where we choose to live, how we move around…
If the sun is free, why is a solar panel costing me more annually to produce less electricity than my current coal, nuclear, and diesel generated electricity? and why isn’t hydro power not being considered in this renewable energy equation?
@lasco
Compared to the dirty energy disaster of fossil fuels and nuclear, the cost of solar panels is insignificant.
Hydro is (can be) part of the renewables equation, although a large hydro like they have planned on the Congo River (I think) is bad news, as such big dams release methane, which is many many times worse than CO2 for climate change.
To me a good form of energy 24/7 for 365 days a year is ocean wave, and tidal, and ocean current energy. We have a long coast line.