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UK Hits Clean Energy Milestone: 50% of Electricity From Low Carbon Sources (theguardian.com)
Half of the UK's electricity came from wind turbines, solar panels, wood burning and nuclear reactors between July and September, in a milestone first. From a report on The Guardian: Official figures published on Thursday show low carbon power, which has been supported by the government to meet climate change targets, accounted for 50% of electricity generation in the UK in the third quarter, up from 45.3% the year before. The rise was largely driven by new windfarms and solar farms being connected to the grid, and several major coal power stations closing.
Wood burning can be considered clean in this context because the CO2 that is released was captured from the air in the first place.
So no additional CO2 is released when burning wood.
Um, no. According to the article the main driver was Natural Gas and Nuclear. Solar/Wind barely budged. Another mdsolar deceptive article.
The problem is that the coal/oil reserves underground came from tens of thousands of years (if not longer) sequestration process. We burn through it in a fraction of that time. So in the long-term it may return to equilibrium, but in the short term we are putting a shit ton more CO2 in the air than would be there otherwise.
Firewood comes from treesthat take decades to grow (if not longer) . We burn through it in a fraction of that time.
Even then you are assuming that new trees are planted to replace the old ones; in the UK where I am they are not. As it happens I have a large garden by UK standards, about an acre with 25-30 large trees. Three blew down in a storm two years ago; these were ~ 30 ft trees, ~ 15" diameter trunks. I do have a wood burning stove and I have already burned their wood. At the rate trees grow you would need several acres of woodland for every house to achieve a steady state just for heating. Most houses have nothing like that, not even mine, and certainly not in the UK.
Back when dinosaurs where stomping about there was a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere than now and the world was a lot hotter (good news for giant reptiles obviously). Over millions of year the carbon from this CO2 ended up in fossil fuels (hence the name) and the average amount in the atmosphere went down and it was in this environment that mankind evolved. The name of the game to fight global warming is to keep this fossil carbon in the ground and not in the atmosphere or at least reduce the rate of release to one where society can adapt to the changes.
Burning 'modern' wood is a different matter. If you leave wood lying around most of it won't turn into coal and anyway not in a useful timescale. It will rot and the bacteria and fungi involved will release the carbon back as CO2 anyway. So you might as well burn it, extract the energy and thereby leave in the ground some fossil carbon which you would otherwise have released.
I'm rather skeptical as well (I'd hate to see wood burning become a long term "solution" to coal), but this should answer some of the questions in your post: http://www.pelletcouncil.org.u...
The source is likely to be biased as it's the uk pellet council, who have a vested interest in the fuel, but it does provide *some* useful information.
It looks like trees *are* replanted in the UK. It also seems that wood pellets are a tad different from tree wood, so you can't really compare your wood burner to an industrial burning plant. You may well still be correct about the fuel, but some of your post looks mislead.
Silly rabbit
The only way this logic makes sense is if those trees were planted by humans for the primary purpose of burning.
Look up the Drax biomass generators;
The wood pellets used as biomass fuel at Drax are made from low-grade wood such as forest thinnings, tree tops and branches, as well as residue from sawmills and agricultural waste such as straw and seed husks.
[...]
If you burn wood pellets from the waste cuttings of the timber industry in a converted coal-fired power station, it should be possible to produce electricity that is largely carbon-neutral, provided the carbon of wood fuel is replaced by the carbon of growing trees – which Drax insists is the case.
What? Greenhouse gasses are fungible. It doesn't matter if the carbon was captured recently or (as with coal) in the distant past.
When the carbon was captured is not the issue, the issue is whether there is a net release of carbon. It does not matter whether the trees were planted specifically for power generation, what matters is that the wood is replaced at the same rate that it is used, as would be the case with wood from sustainably managed forests existing in many developed countries. This obviously wouldn't be practical on a huge scale, but there might be scope for a few projects like Drax, converting a coal plant to a renewable (or largely renewable) wood burning biomass plant.
Oh no... it's the future.
I never said he had the power to do it. Just that he would promise it. You may have noticed that politicians promise all kinds of things that they are actually unable to do. And Trump is very bad about promising all kinds of things, and then walking back from those statements.
Hell, Trump _did_ promise coal miners that the jobs would come back. And they won't, for the reasons you mentioned.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
And where do you think the carbon in coal and oil came from?
They came from plants and animals that died millions of years ago. That carbon has essentially been taken out of circulation. By digging it up and burning it we are adding it back to the ecosystem. Burning wood is roughly carbon neutral if you are not burning it faster than the wood grows because it just circulates carbon already in the ecosystem.
Firewood comes from treesthat take decades to grow (if not longer) . We burn through it in a fraction of that time.
We can but we don't have to. The trick is to burn it at a net rate no faster than it grows. That is a choice we make. If we burn the wood faster than the sources of it grow then it is no longer carbon neutral.
what matters is that the wood is replaced at the same rate that it is used
You can artificially tie together those two things and call it "carbon-neutral", sure. And you could also plant trees after burning coal (let's say on a small scale) or running your car and claim that coal and gasoline are carbon-neutral as well.
This is missing the point. We're almost certainly not going to be able to grow enough trees or other plants fast enough to recapture all of the carbon we release through all of our hydrocarbon combustion. The ability to do this with wood burning is a consequence of its much smaller footprint as compared to other fossil fuels.
(There is another possible exception here that just occurred to me regarding forests that are prone to cyclical fires, but I suspect this excludes most of the UK.)
sustainably managed forests existing in many developed countries.
What else would they have done with that wood? To get a proper accounting, you have to compare this to the counterfactual situation where there is no wood burning. Some trees (fewer, one assumes) are felled for wood and replanted. People who clear land of trees can't sell them for burning, so it's either wood or whatever other means of disposal one uses for trees. This is an intrinsically carbon-negative state of affairs.
I'm not arguing wood burning is a huge issue; on the contrary, it's precisely due to its small-scale usage that this artificial accounting of carbon-neutrality could be realistically claimed.
The difference being that burning wood is burning carbon that is still actively part of the carbon cycle, whereas burning coal and oil releases CO2 that was removed from the carbon cycle millions of years ago, and in fact is releasing millions of years worth of sequestered CO2 in the space of a few centuries.
Conversely, this is why claims of "greening up" due to higher CO2 PPM in the atmosphere isn't solving the increased emissions problem; simply because the vast majority of plants release the CO2 they've captured relatively quickly after they have absorbed it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sigh. Of all the moronic talking points the pro-fossil fuel crowd bring up, this is somehow the dumbest and most infuriating. Dumbest because human civilization didn't exist 80 million years ago, and in fact only arose during the climate conditions found in the last 10,000 years or so, and infuriating because once you've adopted this idiotic statement, you've basically admitted we're fucking things up very badly, but are just trying to spin it as a positive "You see, the dinosaurs liked it!!!!"
I'm going to be charitable and suggest you're just doing a bit of trolling, and aren't in fact one of the most retarded human beings alive.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
However, don't forget that the Sun's habitable zone continues to move further out into space because the Sun's solar output is slowly increasing over millions of years. This triggered the thermal runaway of Venus due to the CO2 greenhouse effect. This means that as time goes by on Earth, the threshold level of the thermal runaway of the CO2 greenhouse effect slowly decreases. This means that for Earth to remain habitable, the CO2 level must be decreased to stay below the threshold. In others words, in the past a higher CO2 level was permissible as a bigger greenhouse effect (non-runaway) was needed to maintain global temperatures. We have 1 billion years left on Earth before the Sun is too hot and the Earth turns into a planet like Venus.
If I burn X amount of coal or gasoline, leading to one metric ton of CO2 entering the atmosphere, and then plant enough trees to recapture one metric ton of CO2... that is no less carbon neutral than the above.
Sure, if you did plant enough trees. But in fact globally forest extent is shrinking and nobody is talking about offsetting coal with re-forestation. That's because coal wouldn't be economically competitive if you had to pay for the cost of offsetting the pollution it emits. It's barely hanging on as is.
You can argue for anything if you imagined that we did things that (a) we aren't doing and (b) we aren't doing because they aren't economically practical.
Timescales don't matter.
Economists and financial analysts would beg to differ. So would chemists, physicists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Time is literally the most important factor there is in just about every calculation we make. There's a big difference between a 4% ROI in a month and a 4% ROI in a decade. There's a big difference between a 4 degree warming in a century and a 4 degree warming in ten thousand years.
It used to be believed that gas equilibrium with the oceans would prevent any increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. That's why the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, which was proposed in the 1890s, wasn't believed by most scientists prior to the International Geophysical Year in 1958. In that year the oceanographer Roger Revelle demonstrated that the rate at which the oceans could absorb CO2 was physically limited. In other words the timescale of natural carbon sequestration was too long to prevent an increase in atmospheric CO2.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Please, for the love of god, would you ppl QUIT DOING SOLAR FARMS. Building this over land is about as stupid as it gets. Do it over parking lots or roofs. Those sites convert light into heat. Lands convert light into sugars. If you are worried about AGW, then you need to reduce the FUCKING HEAT. If you are not worried about it, then quit subsidizing solar.
Fucking idiots.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Wow, look at that. Someone saying something good about nuclear power for once. Of course they will if it let's them hit a milestone like this. I thought nuclear was expensive, dangerous, and if you look at it wrong it will explode and melt your face off.
Here's the milestone I see, nuclear power is being recognized for what it is, carbon free, inexpensive, plentiful, and safe. This is a big deal to me because it is so rare to see anyone say anything good about nuclear power. With this announcement they may not say explicitly that nuclear power is safe and cheap but it is implied, at least they recognize it as carbon free.
I've done the math and it would be exceedingly difficult for any nation, especially one as small as the UK, to be energy independent without nuclear power. I've read some rather crazy claims that we can put solar panels in Africa to power the UK but at the same time we cannot build nuclear power in the UK. Well, if nuclear power is too dangerous to put in the UK then put them out in the African desert and run the wires to the UK, that way you'd get your energy night and day and not have to worry about looking at it wrong and it exploding in your face.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Please, for the love of god, would you ppl QUIT DOING SOLAR FARMS. Building this over land is about as stupid as it gets. Do it over parking lots or roofs. Those sites convert light into heat. Lands convert light into sugars. If you are worried about AGW, then you need to reduce the FUCKING HEAT. If you are not worried about it, then quit subsidizing solar.
I've often wondered if we could put solar panels along the highways here in the US. There's a lot of places where the median between lanes is 40 feet or so, and a lot of those stretches have guard rails on both sides. Some stretches have 40 feet or more of guarded dales along the sides, up to a chain link fence.
I once estimated that to supply the entire country's electrical needs (simple, back-of-the-envelope thing without taking into account peak load and other issues) we'd need solar panels along about 5,000 miles of highway, given some assumptions. We currently have about 45,000 miles of highway, and many of those lead straight into or through cities and towns, so power cable routing and right-of-way shouldn't be that bad.
(To compare power cable losses, consider how far high tension lines already have to go to bring electricity to places.)
To take an example, I80 or I70 through Nebraska and Kansas go through (or near) multiple small towns and has a very wide median. All of the bridges have wide, sloping expanses with guarded sections that could host a solar panel already.
Is there any reason we shouldn't just be planting solar panels along highways?
Burning wood releases a lot of CO2 and should not be considered clean.
You are correct, at least to a point. If not done correctly burning wood can produce soot just like coal. Depending on the quality of the land it can spread heavy metals into the air. If burning wood is such a good idea then I know of a place in the Ukraine with a lot of trees, near a place called Chernobyl I think. The CO2 released is just time delayed by a few years from what it took out of the air if we burn it. We have better uses for wood than energy though.
I remember someone that believed CAGW was a problem suggesting that we should grow trees and use them for lumber to sequester carbon. That person was run out on a rail for even suggesting anyone cut down a tree. It made sense to me. Seems like trees are very efficient in converting CO2 into a carbon dense material that we call wood, that is until it is mature. Grow trees to maturity, cut them down, plant more. The wood from the trees can be used for structures and the carbon is sequestered in the houses, barns, sheds, etc. Burning them doesn't help. It might not hurt either but if we use trees to sequester carbon then we gain.
To get our energy we can use carbon free nuclear, hydro, and wind, and we'll be carbon negative in no time. To replace oil we can synthesize hydrocarbons from seawater like the US Navy has been experimenting with. The synthetic oil wouldn't be carbon negative but carbon neutral, to make it negative we'd have to be pumping that synthetic oil into old oil wells or something and leaving it there.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I advocate a carbon tax, because I believe free markets can solve the problem. But when fossil fuel profits are effectively subsidized by not having the damage they're doing factored into the price of their product then that's corporate welfare. Maybw youre the communist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.