While the industrial-scale production is lacking in Australia, the residential production is doing a bit better. About a year ago, Australia had about 200,000 households using solar PV panels for electricity production, and that figure is increasing rapidly. Many, many more households have solar hot water systems in place. Both systems enjoy significant government incentives which unfortunately are being slowly scaled back.

Anyhow, to satisfy my curiosity and desire to understand in detail how the residential-scale systems work, I read the Solar Electricity Handbook – 2011 Edition by Michael Boxwell. This is a book that covers residential solar deployments in quite some detail, but focuses purely on residential PV panels. Now, one can be forgiven to think solar is easy – after all, how complicated can it be slap a panel on a roof and plug it in? Turns out it can be surprisingly complicated and the Solar Electricity Handbook is there the show you how.

The book basically covers pretty close to everything you need to know when planning, dimensioning, selecting, installing and operating a solar PV system for residential use. Some of the more interesting things to note for me were the various inefficiencies introduced by a number of the system components and features (batteris, MPPT, inverters, temperature etc), the numerous complexities introduced by systems with battery storage and the inherent dangers in solar panels.

Even such basic things as making sure the roof can handle the panel loads – and remembering that there can be a significant upwards lifting loads on the panels in windy conditions – easily slip the minds of a “layperson” such as myself, so it was interesting to learn about such details. Other news to me was the somewhat disappointing revelation that the vast majority of grid tie-in systems will shut down if the grid shuts down – grid fallback systems, on the other hand, continue to operate if grid power is lost. Also, it’s essentially impossible to switch a solar panel off – hence the connections and circuit breakdown conditions need to be managed carefully or they can easily lead to overheating or even fire. On a positive surprise-side, some people have occasionally complained of poor carbon payback times of the panels due to high production emissions; turns out the panels, depending on the method of manufacture, have carbon payback times of only 3-5 years – considering the panels have a lifetime of 20-30 years or even more, that’s a pretty good figure I think.

Solar in Australia is a no-brainer. Finland, however, seems like a pretty useless place for solar electricity when you first think about it. I was, however, surprised to find out that where the irradiance levels of Melbourne in December is 6.24 kWh/m2/day, it reaches 5.74 kWh/m2/day in Helsinki in July; so the output during the best times of the year do not radically differ between Melbourne and Finland. The story is obviously quite different in the winters, with Melbourne having irradiance levels of 4.07 kWh/m2/day even during the worst month (May), whereas the Helsinki winter level in December is a downright pathetic 0.66 kWh/m2/day. An additional complication to having any significant solar electricity generation take place in Finland is that the peak power usage occurs in exactly the opposite time of the year than peak production, whereas the peak production & consumption times align much better over here.

What comes to the Solar Electricity Handbook, it’s a great resource for planning and installing residential solar PV systems. It covers all the basics and the quirks introduced by different systems, and the online resources at http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/ are very useful. It does not, however, cover the most recent developments in any great depth, such as Solar Edge‘s technology of distributed maximum power point tracking, but the handbook definitely provides a good, solid foundation for anything thinking of installing PV solar systems.

In this post, I will make the argument that the world should organize for a large-scale switch to organic agriculture – as much and as soon as possible. This is somewhat at odds with how many think the food production problems should be approached, and also with the excellent recent Economist special report on food production that argued that GM crops and other sophisticated methods are necessary to feed the increasing world population.

If there’s one country ahead of others in the transformation, it’s Australia – it has a disproportionately large share of organic food production. Measured in terms of acreage, Australia has as much as 38% of the entire worlds’ organic agricultural production. Even compared to Europe – a very health-conscious continent in terms of food, and the only one having banned GM crops – this is a 57 times more organic production per capita. Quite amazing, really.

Of course globally organic agriculture accounts for only a tiny fraction of total production. And that needs to change.

Why go organic?

There are several reasons why organically grown food products are better than “traditional”, or conventional, methods. First there’s the consumer-side of the equation; while scientifically proven results on organic foods being healthier than non-organic foods are still relatively few, some organic foods (such as tomatoes and milk) have already been proven to be better in their nutritional values. Organic milk, for example, has more anti-oxidants, omega 3, CLA, and vitamins than non-organic milk.

Then there’s also the taste-factor; it has for example been shown that the use of hormonal growth promotants have “a negative influence on the tenderness and eating quality of beef”, i.e. organic beef tastes better.

Then there’s the production-side of things, with organic farming resulting in at least 50% lower expenditure on fertilizer and energy and 97%-100% less pesticide usage. With many modern fertilizers being produced from petrochemicals, inevitably increasing oil prices will affect conventional agriculture more – and not only from the fertilizer-perspective, but also because the transportation distances involved in the industrial agricultural production tend to be far longer than with organic products. With organic methods, the soil also remains healthier and has less erosion compared to conventional methods.

What about yields?

On a global scale, all talk about health benefits, improved soil conditions, better taste or reduced pesticide/fertilizer use is eclipsed by yield – if organic agriculture cannot achieve sufficient yields to feed the world, it’s clear the world can never entirely transition to it.

This – low yields – is precisely the claim that is often made; that industrial agriculture is needed to feed the world because organic farming cannot achieve similar yields. If organic agriculture produced much lower yields than other methods, that would indeed be a big problem given that most of the productive land is already cultivated and deforestation is a major problem globally. But does it?

Luckily, a number of scientific studies have investigated this very issue. A Cambridge University meta-study of 293 data sets concluded that:

organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base

It has been shown that organic systems on average produce 92% of the yield produced by conventional agriculture in developed countries. While this represents a modest yield reduction, organic methods have also been shown to produce 80%-300% more than conventional farms in developing countries. Globally, therefore, the effect of shifting to organic production would mean significantly increased yields. This is also important in the sense that many Western countries have no problems producing enough – indeed, more than enough – calories for their needs, whereas many developing countries are struggling to produce sufficient amount of calories for their population.

Resilience

Even in developed countries, the equation may not be so simple. Climate change is expected to make extreme weather events such as droughts and hurricanes more frequent and more severe, so it is worth asking whether the organic and conventional systems differ under stressful situations.

Interestingly, the difference between organic and non-organic production under such adverse conditions is quite dramatic; organic farms are far more resilient to adverse weather conditions, yielding up to 70-100% more than conventional farms during drought conditions. Furthermore, a study after Hurricane Mitch showed that organic farms retained 20-40% more topsoil after the hurricane than conventional farms, enabling them to recover much faster. So with advancing climate change, it can be expected that the yields-scale will tip in favor of organic farming.

Win-win?

Taking into account all the points above, it should be fairly clear that organic agriculture should have a bright future – and the growth is rapid, but more needs to be done to ramp up organic production. One challenge is that where traditional industrial agriculture is pesticide- and fertilizer-intensive, organic farming is knowledge-intensive – and training farmers in organic farming practices takes longer than shipping them a bag of fertilizers or a barrel of pesticides along with instructions on how much to spread.

As a consumer, I have been ramping up our organic purchases continuously, and will continue to do so. Luckily, thanks to the relatively huge organic production, it’s easy here in Australia with plenty of availability of pretty much organic anything – there are even services such as Organic Empire, Organic Direct, Organicfood.com.au and Organic Meat Supply that will bring all that organic goodness straight to your home. Couldn’t be easier.

** Update April 2nd, 2011 **

Late March 2011 saw the latest results from the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial (FST), which Rodale calls “America’s longest running, side-by-side comparison of conventional and organic agriculture.”. Rodale has been comparing crop yields and taking soil samples on these test plots for 27 years. Their latest findings? The three systems have produced equivalent corn yields over the years, while “soybean yields were the same for the manure and conventional system and only slightly lower for the legume system.” Further, the drought resistence was confirmed again, as “In 4 out of 5 years of moderate drought, the organic systems had significantly higher corn yields (31 percent higher) than the conventional system.”

Resources:

• Vasilikiotis, C: Can Organic Farming “Feed the World”? [University of California, Berkeley]
• Hunter, R.A.: Hormonal growth promotant use in the Australian beef industry [Animal Production Science, CSIRO Livestock Industries]
• Badgley, C. et al: Organic agriculture and the global food supply [Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, Cambridge University Press]
• Rodale Institute Farming System Trial
• Lotter, D: Organic Agriculture [Journal of Sustainable Agriculture]
• University of Michigan: Organic farming can feed the world, U-M study shows
• Wikipedia: Organic Food
• Wikipedia: Organic Farming
• Health Benefits of Organic Foods

The last time oil spiked at $140/bbl, it quickly came down as the global economy went down the drain. And despite the reasons for the rise being real enough, the price has again rising for the wrong reasons.

So what is the “right reason” then? The problem with the explanations why oil price is going up now is that they assume that the [price/supply] disruption will be temporary. The situation is handled, in media and elsewhere, as something that can and will be resolved before long.

But it won’t. Because supply is inherently limited due to Peak Oil, prices will in the long (or even medium) term come down only when there is demand destruction. And, as the world is currently structured and due to oil consumption patterns, demand destruction will happen only when the economies contract. And, thanks to the importance of oil in the way the world is structured, high oil prices are well placed to set off such contraction, creating a vicious circle and highly volatile prices.

The oil price spikes of 2008 and now in 2011 could, and should, be thought of as warning signs of things to come, rather than a fleeting supply phenomenon that just needs to be somehow fixed. The supply issues run much deeper and are much more fundamental than the general media is leading us to believe. The world must learn to reduce demand in a way that does not bring about chaos, economic or otherwise.

That, however, is a tall order. Especially when the true reasons and the inevitability of very high oil prices in the medium/long term are ignored.

By “best” I mean the cheapest option that is versatile enough to create an all-around comfortable and functional indoor lighting environment. Cheapest off-the-shelf price is misleading at best so I like to instead look at the total cost of ownership-type of figures. So, let’s take a look at the long-term (25yrs) total costs (bulbs + electricity used) for different lighting types.

CFL = Compact Fluorescent lamps, LED = Light-Emitting Diodes. Assumptions used to make the above chart: average usage 4hrs/day, 365 days per year. Bulb prices from http://lightingpro.com.au/, http://www.lightbulbsdirect.com/ and http://www.lc-led.com/, electricity priced at constant $0.20/kWh, lumen efficiencies as quoted by the manufacturer / vendor or averaged from figures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy where not available. Bulb prices averaged per year based on expected lifetime, future bulb purchases assumed at today’s prices. Includes only “mainstream” technologies suitable for residential indoor lighting; gas discharge and arc lamps have been intentionally omitted.

Based on this, standard (large) fluorescent tubes typically used in commercial buildings are by far the most cost-effective means of lighting a space. Residential houses usually aren’t designed to take advantage of this form of lighting (though nothing says they couldn’t be) as the primary lighting source. If one looks at the graph further, you will see that LED lights have roughly equivalent electricity costs to fluorescent lamps. Once the LED lamp costs come down – and they are continuously decreasing, unlike the mature technology of fluorescent tubes that are already cheap – LED lamps are likely to become the #1 choice in the next few years.

As the chart assumes unchanged electricity prices – which obviously is not going to be the case – it makes sense to look for the lighting type with the lowest possible “electricity cost” component. This would also point towards LED lights and fluorescents, the Top 2 in total cost as well.

In researching this, there were a couple of surprises:

• Even though the LED light efficiencies are an order magnitude more than with incandescent bulbs, their efficiency is still only a maximum of 20% or so. Considering my trusty old “chili-growing” HPS (high-pressure sodium) lamp matched that efficiency 10 years ago, I’m a bit disappointed.
• I was also somewhat surprised to discover that LED lamps are already, even at their high unit prices (as much as $80 for a “standard” lamp), very competitive. Given that long fluorescent tubes are not always an easy retrofit and not applicable everywhere, LED lamps already lead all other lighting types in terms of total costs. As residential lighting is a very new application for LEDs, this is surprising.

One should note that as this was a pure efficiency / cost calculation, no externalities were taken into account. For example, CFL tubes are hazardous waste and still take a while to reach full luminosity when turned on – both clear disadvantages.

Another major negative externality has to do with halogen bulbs. I used to like halogen bulbs. I liked their compact size, relatively long lifetime (5x of incandescent bulbs) and even the modestly higher efficiency compared to incandescent. And when recessed into the ceiling, as many modern Australian houses do, they look good – and therein, it turns out, lies a major problem. Halogen lamps get exceedingly hot, meaning they need plenty of ventilation – open air around them. This means that large holes need to be cut through the ceiling insulation, often dramatically lowering the R-value of the insulation. This is a big “no no” and makes recessed halogen lighting a very bad choice, unless one uses an expensive dual ceiling construction.

In conclusion, I thought LED lamps were the future #1 choice for residential lighting. Instead it appears that for many, if not most, homes they are the #1 choice today, even at the high initial costs.

The Transition Handbook lays out in quite a bit of detail the suggested steps into making your community a “Transition Initiative” which as they define it is a community-led response to the pressures of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and increasingly, economic contraction, drawing many elements from permaculture. This book is essentially the “official” guidebook for the Transition Initiative and is divided into three parts; first, it outlines why peak oil and climate change mean that smaller, more resilient communities will be necessary in the future. The second part covers the importance of a positive vision; I wholeheartedly agree with this, as too much of the debate focuses on all the negative aspects of things to come – and I am also guilty of this. Finally, part three contains details on how to go about getting the transition started.

The book has plenty of practical advice and case studies from some of the hundreds of Transition Initiatives globally. The advice is, however, more focused on the process of getting the transition movement started and organizing it rather than advice on specific issues. This means that it does not tell you how exactly to introduce local money or grow more food locally – there are other resources that go into the details of specific actions. What it does give you is several tools to organizing successful community meetings, dealing with the PR side of the initiative, how to teach people about the Peak Oil concept etc. All very good tools, many of which can also be utilized in other settings.

The Transition Handbook, quite appropriately, ties together the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change, but I think it misses one important, connected point. While the highlighted connection is that the actions described also help to limit climate change, it lacks the recognition that one of the greatest benefits in increased resiliency is the fact that a resilient community will also help it adapt to and survive the climate change that is already inevitable. That omission is not as much a fault than a missed positive point; yet another reason to start the transition, not an argument against it. Some other minor shortcomings included a huge amount of quotes in the sidebar, detracting from the main reading experience, as well as some pretty cheesy pictures, including “fake future” article clippings and some overly repetitive pictures & diagrams. The case studies, also, are very UK-focused but that’s simply because the movement started from there and the book is a couple of years old.

These shortcomings are very minor. The Transition Initiative is tremendously important and the Transition Handbook is a great book, and one that in its positive message is likely to be much more effective and better received than the doom-mongering books that do tend to leave a sense of helplessness in their trail. It’s a decidedly hopeful book, one that offers a compelling – and practical – vision of how communities could be put on the correct road to begin to shield them from the most disruptive of challenges.

Visit the Transition Network website to find out more.

And yet, that’s exactly what the world is doing right now – letting a serious crisis go to waste. The crisis, of course, is the Global Financial Crisis that the world is just beginning the long recovery from. The opportunity stems from its impacts. There are many, but let’s highlight just one: thanks to slumping demand, there was/is a lot of idling factory capacity that could have been put to good use – for example, retooling the idle car assembly lines to produce wind turbines instead. Was any of that done? No.

None of the spare industrial capacity that the world suddenly had was put to good use – and that is a tragedy. You may ask why it is a tragedy; after all, reduced production at least means reduced pollution. It’s a tragedy because it was likely the last time the human society, thanks to the economic slump, had significant quantities of surplus energy to expend on something. As the global economy picks up, all spare capacity will soon be consumed.

With Peak Oil likely having already been passed, there will no longer be such substantial energy surpluses in the future. And when the actual shortages begin, all existing resources will have been committed to meet existing needs – and there will be no energy left on easing the transition to more sustainable energy sources; whatever energy will then be spent on those will not only be expensive, but will come at the cost of existing needs, further exasperating the crisis.

It would have been much better that the world had the energy crisis before the financial crisis; now with the GFC most countries are under budget pressures as it is, and the mounting debts leave little room for necessary investments as well as lower capacity to deal with the inevitable energy crisis. Yet even so, there was an opportunity to kick-start the fatally delayed response to the energy crisis – an opportunity which looks like will be entirely squandered.

Anyhow, here are also some random thoughts of the day that I thought are good to write up about:

Ready for another recession? And gas prices of 2 euros per liter?

There is an important topic that has been sorely missing from mainstream media; once we get out of this recession and oil demand rises, so will the prices since supply cannot – and never again will – keep up. However, most of the world cannot afford prices of $150 or $200 per barrel, so the increasing energy costs will drag the world economy into another recession. And so it will continue until alternative energy supplies will be scaled up to make some meaningful impact; let’s say 20 years minimum.

As a consumer in Finland, this means gas prices (and the prices of everything else, too, for that matter) will rise soon enough. They may even hit 2 euros per liter or even higher, whereas in many other parts of the world the relative impact will be even greater “thanks” to our tax structure. Now would be a good time to start tracking and comparing prices at the pump with crude prices as the general feeling is that companies always hike prices when crude prices go up but “never” lower them. Might make for an interesting graph in a few years’ time.

Elsewhere, this and related topics have been covered nicely lately. I recommend at least:
• The Oil Drum: The trouble with energy
• Resource Insights: Which matters most? The size of the tap or the tank?
• Peak Oil News: Peak Oil Crisis: stifling a rebound

Swine flu making its rounds

So it seems swine flu is quickly becoming established pretty much everywhere. Even here in the remote Northern parts of the world, there has been the first confirmed “local” infection. The good news, of course, is that the strain is proving to be a very mild one indeed – reportedly even milder than “normal” influenza, which is great. But the worry remains that it might mutate into something significantly worse while it’s making its rounds.. so perhaps it’d be better to catch it now and be done with it? Maybe a swine flu infection now would offer immunity even against the potential new mutations? Or not.

Another thing I wondered was whether there have ever been studies on whether people using public transport get more (or less) influenza infections than people driving private cars? It might seem that people on a bus are in a greater risk, but they might also have better resistance to bugs in general due to broad exposure of all kinds of viruses. Anyone know of any studies to this regard?

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people. From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.

First to go – immediately for some people – is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly – delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites – but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. “From the surveys I’ve done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more,” says Kappenman. “A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two.”

Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.

Read the article and the report for more. But all this provides some serious food for thought; isn’t a society that could collapse within days or weeks just a little bit too reliant on electricity? Shouldn’t we be better prepared for events like these?

You bet – and I bet we aren’t even thinking about it in the right places.

Resources / further reading

• New Scientist article: Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe
• Space Studies Board of National Academy of Sciences (NAS): Severe Space Weather Events–Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts (read online for free!)
• A semi-related book: Electric Universe (my review here)

However, I think the main point is more appropriately captured by this photo, the original author of which I unfortunately don’t know:

Just think about that next time you fill up and whine about the gas prices. Or if you represent a company in the biofuels business, you may want to think again whether promoting 1st generation biofuels is all that great after all, as I pointed out just a couple of posts ago.

Of course, none of this is news to those keeping an eye of what’s been happening. It has for years been known that 1st generation biofuels compete with food production. In essence it puts the person filling up the tank of his or her car in direct competition with some of the poor people in the world buying food to feed themselves.

It will not be – and is not – a pretty situation for the poorer counterpart.

And it’s the way things are going to be, too. Fuel prices will continue to rise, despite of and actually especially in the face of lunatic energy policies globally until significant demand destruction takes place. Of course, there are different degrees of lunacy; in many (or most) countries consumers cry for easing fuel taxes or any way of bringing down the fuel costs. The fact that some governments are caving in is bad enough, but then there’s one country that’s contemplating suing OPEC for limiting oil production. They won’t, of,course, but the mere gesture is so outrageously ridiculous it’s hard to understand. Peak Oil, anyone? Hello? Doesn’t ring a bell?

The era of cheap oil is OVER. Permanently, irrevocably over. Just how difficult can that be to understand? Just get over it. Does it hurt to fill up so often? Drive less. You “have to” drive since your commute is 50km each way with no access to public transport? Move. Who told you to live far out in the proverbial suburbia anyway? At least pressure your county/town/city to build some public transport infrastructure. Life’s full of choices and the rising energy price is hopefully forcing people, corporations and governments alike to choose a bit more environmentally friendly options in all walks of life.

Check out this great post by Richard Heinberg. In the end, it really does come down to this:

We will drive less, we will fly less, and we will grow our food more locally with fewer inputs. But these changes will go far more smoothly if we plan for them, rather than being forced into them at the nozzle of an empty gas pump. There is a cliché in action films: “We can do this the hard way, or we can do it the easy way.” Blaming OPEC while doing nothing to rein in our domestic demand for petroleum only ensures that we will be adapting to Peak Oil the hard way.

Indeed. Calling for tax cuts and whining about fuel prices while doing nothing to conserve fuel, failing to look for alternatives with any serious effort and neglecting to improve the public transit infrastructure are also ways of insuring we do it the hard way.

Links

• The Market Traders: Foreign Oil Dependency and Political Lunacy
• Peak Oil News / Richard Heinberg: Have we really hit peak oil?
• An example of just how wrong analysts can be; CNNMoney.com on “Why oil won’t hit $100″ from less than a year ago.
• Energy Bulletin: The illusion of vast undeveloped U.S. oil resources
• The Oil Drum: Countdown to $200 oil
• Jamais Cascio: The suburban question
• The Economist: Double, oil and trouble
• The Oil Drum: Why oil costs over $120 per barrel (excellent overview)

Ps. As a sidenote, it’s generally agreed that there is only one oil-producing country in the world that is not (or may not be) pumping flat out as it is – Saudi Arabia. And contrary to popular opinion, them not taking into use the modest reserve capacity they have or may have is a very good thing. If even they pumped at full capacity, the world oil supplies would be even less resistant to disruptions and Peak Oil itself would come that much sooner. What we really need is to implement a controlled, predictable decline of global oil production.