Over a fifth of Europe’s energy was generated by solar panels and wind turbines in the first half of 2020. Solar and wind energy generation was higher in some European countries. Denmark came out on top, generating 64 per cent of its energy from these renewable sources, closely followed by Ireland (49 per cent) and Germany (42 per cent), according to the report from independent climate think-tank Ember. In a half-year review released in July by the think tank, all renewables - including wind, solar, hydroelectricity and bioenergy - were found to have exceeded fossil fuel generation for the first time ever. They produced 40 per cent of the EU’s power from January to June with fossil fuels contributing 34 per cent.
Globally, there is still widespread dependence on traditional forms of energy, and human and animal power still contribute a significant proportion of the energy used in the rural areas of developing countries. After biomass, they are the most important energy sources for their populations. On a global scale, the energy contributed by human and animal power is estimated to be twice that of wind power and 13% of hydro, the largest single contributor of the renewable energy sources. This paper therefore argues that human and animal power should be included in the ‘family’ of renewable energy sources of solar, wind, hydro and biomass. There are numerous opportunities to improve the efficiency (and output) of hand, foot and animal-powered equipment. Improvements in these technologies will help to reduce the drudgery and hardship of everyday life of those who do not have access to modern forms of energy.
Over a fifth of Europe’s energy was generated by solar panels and wind turbines in the first half of 2020. Solar and wind energy generation was higher in some European countries. Denmark came out on top, generating 64 per cent of its energy from these renewable sources, closely followed by Ireland (49 per cent) and Germany (42 per cent), according to the report from independent climate think-tank Ember. In a half-year review released in July by the think tank, all renewables - including wind, solar, hydroelectricity and bioenergy - were found to have exceeded fossil fuel generation for the first time ever. They produced 40 per cent of the EU’s power from January to June with fossil fuels contributing 34 per cent.
The ultimate limit of human endurance has been worked out by scientists analysing a 3,000 mile run, the Tour de France and other elite events. They showed the cap was 2.5 times the body’s resting metabolic rate, or 4,000 calories a day for an average person. Anything higher than that was not sustainable in the long term. The research, by Duke University, also showed pregnant women were endurance specialists, living at nearly the limit of what the human body can cope with. The study started with the Race Across the USA in which athletes ran 3,080 miles from California to Washington DC in 140 days. The study found a pattern between the length of a sporting event and energy expenditure - the longer the event, the harder it is to burn through the calories. So people can go far beyond their base metabolic rate while doing a short bout of exercise, it becomes unsustainable in the long term. The study also shows that while running a marathon may be beyond many, it is nowhere near the limit of human endurance. Marathon (just the one) runners used 15.6 times their resting metabolic rate. Cyclists during the 23 days of the Tour de France used 4.9 times their resting metabolic rate. A 95-day Antarctic trekker used 3.5 times the resting metabolic rate. During pregnancy, women’s energy use peaks at 2.2 times their resting metabolic rate. “You can do really intense stuff for a couple of days, but if you want to last longer then you have to dial it back,” Dr Herman Pontzer, from Duke University, told BBC News. “Every data point, for every event, is all mapped onto this beautifully crisp barrier of human endurance. "Nobody we know of has ever pushed through it.” The researchers argue the 2.5 figure may be down to the human digestive system, rather than anything to do with the heart, lungs or muscles. They found the body cannot digest, absorb and process enough calories and nutrients to sustain a higher level of energy use. The body can use up its own resources burning through fat or muscle mass - which can be recovered afterwards - in shorter events. But in extreme events - at the limits of human exhaustion - the body has to balance its energy use, the researchers argue.
In the spring of 2017, immediately after the release of the Australian band Cloud Control’s third album, Zone, the band’s keyboard player, Heidi Lenffer, was contemplating what their upcoming tour would cost. But this time she wasn’t just thinking about the money; she was thinking about emissions. Independent bands are used to running on a shoestring budget – a carbon-conscious Lenffer wanted Cloud Control to run a more environmentally efficient operation, too. She began asking climate scientists in the field, and connected with Dr Chris Dey from Areté Sustainability. Dey crunched the numbers for Cloud Control’s two-week tour, playing 15 clubs and theatres from Byron Bay to Perth. He found that it would produce about 28 tonnes of emissions – roughly equivalent to what an average household produces in a year. And that was just the national leg of an album tour that would take the band to the US three times. “I had suspected that all of this flying, and all of the energy that goes into tours, can’t be very good for the environment – but there was no solution that existed beyond carbon offsetting,” Lenffer says. Offsetting is essentially an attempt at equalisation: when you offset your flights, you try to compensate for the carbon by donating to a program to suck it out of the atmosphere, via tree planting or sequestration someplace else. Lenffer wanted to aim higher. Partnering with the superannuation fund Future Super, and the developer Impact Investment Group, Lenffer has established FEAT. (Future Energy Artists): a platform that officially launches on Wednesday and will allow musicians to build and invest in their own solar farms.
We are already seeing the devastating consequences of global warming, with ever-rising sea levels, extreme storms, prolonged droughts and intensified bushfires. Now, after two years of research and modelling, scientists have come up with a groundbreaking new framework for achieving – and even beating – the target of limiting warming to 1.5°C. The research by leading scientists at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the German Aerospace Center and the University of Melbourne, has been funded by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) as part of its new One Earth initiative. This model is the first to achieve the required negative emissions through natural climate solutions, including the restoration of degraded forests and other lands, along with a transition to 100% renewable energy by mid-century.
The climate challenge of this century encourages to rethink our mobility. Planes and individual cars, very energy-consuming, are used for a great portion of very-long-distance travels (more than 750 km). In order to progress towards modal shift to more ecological modes, massive investments for rail have been made since the 2000’s. They have been mostly concentrated on High-Speed-Lines (LGV, in French) projects. But in spite of these huge investments, these projects did not reduce of the emissions of aviation, which keep growing in France. What’s more, it is becoming very complicated to finance the expansion of the LGV network, as the most relevant lines – between metropolises separated by 400 to 750 km – have already been built. And nowadays passengers tend to prefer cheaper tickets to faster journeys. Besides, an other rail solution for very long distances, the InterCity Night train (ICN) sees its dismantling accelerated in 2016-2017. As for the classical railway network and the daytime Intercity trains (ICJ for “InterCités de Jour”), they have suffered underinvestment during all these years. Neglected for the last decades, the ICN offer now has problems of visibility, unattractive timetables, and too frequent delays and cancellations: it seems that its use has been – willingly or not – discouraged. SNCF and the French State have kept repeating contradictory justifications around the “alleged deficit” and “empty” night trains, but they have high occupancy rates. The ICN has in fact quite many advantages
In Europe, electric vehicles are not just a low-emission way of getting from A to B, they are also being built as mobile generators. Newly designed Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) models can both receive electricity from the grid and supply excess power right back during peak demand. Notably, the Parker Project in Denmark—carried out by grid integration specialists such as Enel, Nuvve and Insero, as well as automakers Nissan, Mitsubishi and PSA Groupe—has allowed V2G drivers to actually earn money just by parking the car at two-way charge stations. Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports that fleet operators in Denmark are earning up to $1,530 annually at these charge points.
“This paper estimates fossil fuel subsidies and the economic and environmental benefits from reforming them, focusing mostly on a broad notion of subsidies arising when consumer prices are below supply costs plus environmental costs and general consumption taxes.
Estimated subsidies are $4.9 trillion worldwide in 2013 and $5.3 trillion in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP in both years). Undercharging for global warming accounts for 22% of the subsidy in 2013, air pollution 46%, broader vehicle externalities 13%, supply costs 11%, and general consumer taxes 8%. China was the biggest subsidizer in 2013 ($1.8 trillion), followed by the United States ($0.6 trillion), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3 trillion). Eliminating subsidies would have reduced global carbon emissions in 2013 by 21% and fossil fuel air pollution deaths 55%, while raising revenue of 4%, and social welfare by 2.2%, of global GDP.”
A remote tropical island has catapulted itself headlong into the future by ditching diesel and powering all homes and businesses with the scorching South Pacific sun. Using more than 5,000 solar panels and 60 Tesla power packs the tiny island of Ta’u in American Samoa is now entirely self-sufficient for its electricity supply – though the process of converting has been tough and pitted with delays. Located 4,000 miles from the west coast of the United States, Ta’u has depended on over 100,000 gallons of diesel shipped in from the main island of Tutuila to survive, using it to power homes, government buildings and – crucially – water pumps. When bad weather or rough seas prevented the ferry docking, which was often, the island came to a virtual stand-still, leaving Ta’u’s 600 residents unable to work efficiently, go to school or leave their usually idyllic paradise. Utu Abe Malae, executive director of the American Samoa Power Authority, said Tutuila has subsidized Ta’u diesel shipments for decades to the tune of US$400,000 a year – and continually ran the risk of a serious environmental disaster if the delivery ships capsized during the notoriously treacherous journey.
Earlier this year our organization, the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), announced that it would divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies. We mean to do this gradually, but in a public statement we singled out ExxonMobil for immediate divestment because of its “morally reprehensible conduct.”1 For over a quarter-century the company tried to deceive policymakers and the public about the realities of climate change, protecting its profits at the cost of immense damage to life on this planet. Our criticism carries a certain historical irony. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, and ExxonMobil is Standard Oil’s largest direct descendant. In a sense we were turning against the company where most of the Rockefeller family’s wealth was created. (Other members of the Rockefeller family have been trying to get ExxonMobil to change its behavior for over a decade.) Approached by some reporters for comment, an ExxonMobil spokesman replied, “It’s not surprising that they’re divesting from the company since they’re already funding a conspiracy against us.”2 What we had funded was an investigative journalism project.
With the autumnal equinox upon us, Crap Futures is nearing its first anniversary. We began shooting ideas back and forth last September when James arrived in Madeira. Now, after a long, hot summer, it seems like a good moment to take stock and reflect on the past year whilst also making plans for what comes next.
In the post When the sun shines we gave an overview of our ongoing design project. This has been ticking along in the background since early 2016, with time spent articulating the research methodology, transforming the concept into funding proposals, and identifying and discussing with potential collaborators. Back in April we described the problem of using renewable energy sources on the island (and beyond), identifying some of the factors currently hindering their implementation - for example historical legacies. The project asks:
What might our energy infrastructure look like if it were not constrained by these outdated constructs?
A key motivation has always been to move beyond the discursive, the critical, the speculative and the fictional. As we wrote at the time: ‘With this project (unusually) we’re not interested in fiction.’ In retrospect this statement seems a bit rash. So before moving into the making phase, we thought it necessary to probe a little deeper into the relationship between
fact and
fiction. Or more precisely, What is the role of fiction when trying to make change - desperately needed change - in the real world?
To start with Bruce Sterling’s familiar definition:
‘
Design fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.’
There are several keywords here that demand closer examination. First,
fiction - in
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek describes the viewer’s reading (of cinema) by stating that, ‘if something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled in with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality - we have to fictionalise it’. This statement is helpful as it succinctly describes two states of being and the relationship between them: the nonfiction world, defined by the coordinates of reality, and its fictional counterpart (diegesis).
Second,
diegetic - from diegesis: the world in which the story takes place and for which the prototypes are designed. Through the manipulation of a particular set of coordinates, a fictional or alternative world can be constructed.
Third, a more complex issue is raised by the use of
design when combined with the term
change. The recent emergence of counter or oppositional forms of design (such as design fiction etc.) suggests that there are problems or limitations with mainstream design; for example, design’s affiliation with the market and the prevailing demands of consumption and innovation. These are the (normative) designer’s coordinates of reality: in practice experienced as constraints that limit the potential of design to make substantive change (see Future nudge). Designing for a carefully crafted diegesis can provide new constraints, in turn facilitating new solutions.
Fact and fiction should not exist as a dichotomy but rather an
elastic scope of possibility. Good design fictions do not shatter the coordinates of reality; they stretch and manipulate them in carefully crafted ways, hence the suspension of disbelief. But, and this is important, to what end? Sterling’s phrase ‘deliberate use’ suggests purpose … but what is the purpose?
In
Building Imaginary Worlds, Mark J.P. Wolf examines why authors find it necessary to invent other worlds. He concludes that the answer lies in ‘
the changing of Primary World defaults, to amaze, entertain, satirize, propose possibilities, or to simply make an audience more aware of defaults they take for granted’.
In his introduction to
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury offers some additional motivations:
‘Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it’s good to look forward, not back. Because we need to
illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.)’
In the closing sentence of his book
Technophobia! Daniel Dinello suggests that ‘At its best, science fiction projects a dark vision of the Technologist’s posthuman future that encourages us to create a better one.’
But does highlighting wrong paths lead us to preferable ones?
‘Do violent, dystopian visions ever lead to positive, substantive change?’
Design fiction futures, it is true, are often dystopian - this is one of several lines of critique aimed at design fiction projects. The upcoming Speculative Now! conference in Split, Croatia, for example, has chosen to focus debate on the role of speculative design in the ‘real world’. Similarly with our project we aim to advance the goals and practice of design fiction by defining positive paths. Our approach will bring fiction-based prototypes back into real life, seek to produce tangible societal outcomes, and work to turn (positive) aspects of fiction into fact. Design fiction can help us work toward ‘the future we actually want’, imposing our own agency in how the future happens.
In our next post we will examine
three stages of design fiction, explaining how a carefully contrived diegesis can provide the ideal framework for redesigning the real world.
Images:
Christian Schussele - Men of Progress [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; SAFEGE test track at Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, France (used in filming of Truffaut’s
Fahrenheit 451), via Wikimedia Commons
Talking about “peak oil” can feel very last decade. In fact, the question is still current. Petroleum markets are so glutted and prices are so low that most industry commenters think any worry about future oil supplies is pointless. The glut and price dip, however, are hardly indications of a healthy industry; instead, they are symptoms of an increasing inability to match production cost, supply, and demand in a way that’s profitable for producers but affordable for society. Is this what peak oil looks like?
In recent months, the Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York. The system cut power usage in the data centers by several percentage points, “which is a huge saving in terms of cost but, also, great for the environment,” he said. The savings translate into a 15 percent improvement in power usage efficiency, or PUE, Google said in a statement. PUE measures how much electricity Google uses for its computers, versus the supporting infrastructure like cooling systems.
In less than 10 years, Uruguay has slashed its carbon footprint without government subsidies or higher consumer costs, according to the country’s head of climate change policy, Ramón Méndez. In fact, he says that now that renewables provide 94.5% of the country’s electricity, prices are lower than in the past relative to inflation. There are also fewer power cuts because a diverse energy mix means greater resilience to droughts. It was a very different story just 15 years ago. Back at the turn of the century oil accounted for 27% of Uruguay’s imports and a new pipeline was just about to begin supplying gas from Argentina.
Subsidies for fossil fuels amount to $1,000 (£640) a year for every citizen living in the G20 group of the world’s leading economies, despite the group’s pledge in 2009 to phase out support for coal, oil and gas. New figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that the US, which hosted the G20 summit in 2009, gives $700bn a year in fossil fuel subsidies, equivalent to $2,180 for every American. President Barack Obama backed the phase out but has since overseen a steep rise in federal fossil fuel subsidies.
Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.
“Kiribati, as a nation faced with a very uncertain future, is calling for a global moratorium on new coal mines. It would be one positive step towards our collective global action against climate change and it is my sincere hope that you and your people would add your positive support in this endeavour”
Kyocera Corporation, K.K. GAIA POWER, Kyudenko Corporation, and Century Tokyo Leasing Corporation announced that the companies have made a joint investment in Kanoya Osaki Solar Hills LLC, a solar power operating company, to construct and operate a 92-megawatt (MW) solar power plant. Planned for construction on a site stretching across Kanoya City and Osaki Town in Kagoshima Prefecture, the project will become one of the largest solar installations in Japan.
Project planning began in January 2014, as the local community expressed interest in effectively using the project site, which had been designated for a golf course more than 30 years ago but subsequently abandoned. Covering a total of approximately 2,000,000m2 (approx. 494 acres), the site will accommodate 340,740 Kyocera solar modules, and is expected to generate roughly 99,230MWh annually — enough electricity to power approximately 30,500*1 typical households, offsetting roughly 35,730 tons of CO2 emissions per year
Meanwhile, Japan’s energy strategy in the aftermath of Fukushima calls for roughly doubling the amount of renewable power sources in the country by 2030. It is already building solar power plants that float on water. Perhaps inevitably, then, the nation has turned to building solar plants on old golf courses. Last week, Kyocera and its partners announced they had started construction on a 23-megawatt solar plant project located on an old golf course in the Kyoto prefecture. Scheduled to go operational in September 2017, it will generate a little over 26,000 megawatt hours per year, or enough electricity to power approximately 8,100 typical local households. The electricity will be sold to a local utility.
Alberta artist, Peter von Tiesenhausen, has effectively stopped oil corporations from putting a pipeline through his 800 acre property by covering it with artwork and copyrighting the top six inches of his land as an artwork. Realizing that mining companies can legitimately lay claim to any land underneath private property to a depth of six inches, van Tiesenhausen contacted a lawyer who drew up an intellectual property/copyright claim that said that if the oil company disturbed the top six inches in any way, it would be a copyright violation.
We didn’t stay long, unfortunately, but it felt like a scene from some black-market rewrite of Crash, rewritten for Indian readers in which holy accidents on various roads throughout the country are visited by over-enthusiastic tourists of the afterlife, intent on receiving ill-defined bursts of supernatural energy from celebrity collisions such as these. The U.S. might have its James Dean Crash Site & Memorial, and France might have the Pont de l'Alma Tunnel, but this machine-deification in the deserts of northern India showed what a rural folk tradition could do with the morbid significance of fatal crash sites and the often deeply unglamorous vehicles that enable them.
Europe’s drive toward a power system based on renewable energy has gone so far that output will probably need to be cut within months because of oversupply. Network operators are likely to curb solar and wind generation at times of low demand to prevent overloading the region’s 188,000 miles (302,557 kilometers) of power lines, Entso-e, the grid association in Brussels, said last month. Renewable output is poised to almost double to 18 percent by 2020, according to Energy Brainpool GmbH & Co. KG, a consulting firm in Berlin.
For the machine’s creators, this process—sparking and controlling a self-sustaining synthetic star—will be the culmination of decades of preparation, billions of dollars’ worth of investment, and immeasurable ingenuity, misdirection, recalibration, infighting, heartache, and ridicule. Few engineering feats can compare, in scale, in technical complexity, in ambition or hubris. Even the ITER organization, a makeshift scientific United Nations, assembled eight years ago to construct the machine, is unprecedented. Thirty-five countries, representing more than half the world’s population, are invested in the project, which is so complex to finance that it requires its own currency: the ITER Unit of Account.
Relating a Google search return to an equivalent expenditure of fossil fuels, or the fluctuation of pixels across a screen with the exploited labour of rural migrant workers in Shenzen, or topsoil loss in Inner Mongolia, is as remote and unattainable for the majority of users as is an understanding of the technical functionality of the devices themselves
Im zukünftigen Energiesystem werden die Stromverteilnetze eine zentrale Rolle spielen. Wenn der Umstieg auf Erneuerbare Energien gelingen soll, muss das Berliner Stromnetz schon heute darauf ausgerichtet werden. Außerdem erwirtschaften Stromnetze Millionengewinne. Diese sollen der Energiewende und den Bürgern zugute kommen und in der Region wirksam werden. Berlin gewinnt mit dem Stromnetz in Bürgerhand eine wertvolle Anlage der Daseinsvorsorge und der regionalen Wertschöpfung. Mit dem Kauf unseres Stromnetzes treiben wir die Demokratisierung der Energielandschaft voran, damit wir Bürgerinnen und Bürger über die zukünftige Energieversorgung mitentscheiden können.
Primecoin is the first scientific computing cryptocurrency, a project derived from Bitcoin but with novel non-hashcash proof-of-work that mines prime numbers.
OpenOil is an energy consultancy and publishing house based in Berlin. We are a transparency business, seeking market-driven solutions which produce better outcomes from the oil and gas industry for the people of producing nations.