As you’ve probably noticed if you’re reading this, I have a new website. It’s very much like the old website, except that (a) it’s on up to date versions of everything, from WordPress to the underlying database, and (b) it works. The theme powering the old site – a theme which I liked very much, and which I paid money for years ago – had been unmaintained for a long time, and a recent WordPress update broke it beyond my capability to bodge.
Rather than just sub in a new theme, I took the opportunity to rebuild it from scratch and thus get rid of some of the background cruft from 2016. One result is that some old posts might not quite look right, or in a very few cases might actually have missing images, due to plugins that they depended on being gone. If you find anything missing, rather than just ugly, please let me know. Similarly, if you find anything that looks wrong on the main pages, please tell me about that too. If you mostly want to complain about the kerning of one or two of the Google Fonts that I’m using, join the queue – the “SIMON WALDMAN” title text has been tweaked manually and it still doesn’t look quite right. I’ll probably get used to it.
On the plus side, everything should hopefully be a bit more maintainable now. And I might even get around to writing up one or two of the posts I have drafted. Maybe. If I have time. Perhaps.
I haven’t been following the negotiations at COP26 very closely. And I haven’t examined the eventual agreement in great detail, instead following the insight of commentators I trust. It seems, from what I’ve read, that while there are some incremental steps forward in the detail – strengthening of language, and so forth – mostly the parties have agreed to kick the can down the road another year. If readers have better insight and want to contradict that, they are most welcome to do so, but I think it’s fair to say that any climate summit that ends in its president apologizing and breaking down in tears is not what the world wanted to see.
On social media people have noted that the commentators who, two weeks ago, were talking about a “last chance for humanity” are now praising the small steps forward. Greta Thunburg has, of course, summed up her view with eloquence:
The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah.
@GretaThunberg / Twitter
Twelve years ago, before I had even started studying renewable energy, I wrote a blog post on another site entitled “After Copenhagen”. That was the first COP that was a mainstream media event, and the first one – thanks partly to Barak Obama’s involvement – that felt as though it might get somewhere. In the end it achieved little for various reasons, and there was a temptation to give up. I did a lot of thinking back then, and this is what I concluded:
“I’ve spent a certain amount of time thinking “If I think that the cause is hopeless, why am I wanting to work in the renewable energy and/or energy efficiency fields?”. The answer is that… every little still helps. Yes, low-lying countries are almost certainly doomed. Yes… wars will be caused and exacerbated, many will starve or die of disease… but for every bit that we can reduce our emissions, less of this will happen. The fact that the situation is so terrifying, depressing, and hopeless, even to those of us who probably won’t suffer the worst (or at least the first) of the direct effects, doesn’t mean that we can’t try to lessen it.”
I still believe this. We missed the 350ppm and 400ppm targets that were talked about at Copenhagen. It seems very likely that we will miss the 1.5°C target that is increasingly believed to be important. But it’s still worthwhile to make things better than they otherwise would be. If global efforts get us to 2.6°C, as is suggested by the current NDCs, that’s bad, but it’s better than it could be. As I wrote in some internal training materials recently, under the heading “A note about missing targets”,
“It’s too late to prevent climate change – it’s already happening. It’s probably too late to keep to 1.5°C, and 2°C looks hard as well. But this isn’t a binary thing: it’s wrong to say “we missed the target, may as well give up”. 3°C is better than 4°C, which is better than 6°C. Some harm is locked in, but we can minimise how much more.”
That’s the thought that keeps me going now, as it does on a regular basis away from the COP cycle. In the words of Mary Heglar, “home is always worth it“.
As UK readers will know, much of the country is currently suffering a fuel shortage. While there is, as I understand it, a small supply deficit due to a lack of tanker drivers, the main problem is that when people heard about that deficit they all filled up their cars at once, causing a large spike in demand (which will be balanced by low demand for a couple of weeks as everybody has full tanks).
I’m not here to talk about Brexit, HGV drivers, or fuel crisis management. I’m not even here to be smug about driving a partly electric car. What I want to point out is the light that this throws on an argument we sometimes see against EVs:
Sometimes one hears people saying that if everybody in the UK went electric, the grid couldn’t cope because of the load of all the cars charging at once. And that would be a reasonable concern, if we were talking about first-generation EVs that needed charging every night.
But to within a factor of two, today’s EVs have the same range as petrol cars. Most petrol cars aren’t filled every day, and there’s no reason that most EVs will be either. The grid doesn’t have to be able to cope with this eventuality, and this is demonstrated by the evident fact that the petrol network also cannot cope with this eventuality.
There’s a… not quiet, but also not mainstream, debate raging at the moment, about how we’re going to heat our homes in the future. Actually it’s about how people who live on the gas grid will heat their homes, but that is the majority, and it includes most journalists.
An important caveat
I’m not an expert here – if I was, I would be writing a journal article rather than blathering on my blog – and I haven’t done the maths. I welcome correction by people who have.
From 2035 (earlier for new builds) people won’t be allowed to install new natural gas boilers in homes in the UK. There are a few possible ways of replacing them.
One approach, as with most things, is “electrify it, then use low carbon electricity”. In the case of the UK the answer to this is electric heat pumps, which are basically air conditioners run in reverse, to move heat from outside the house to inside it. They’re more common on the continent than here, but they’re reasonably common here in commercial premises and are becoming better known as a domestic option. Heat pumps are stupendously efficient[1], doing between 2.5 and 4 times better than a basic electric heater.
There are some disadvantages to heat pumps: firstly, that they’re not a direct drop-in replacement for a boiler. You need to find somewhere to put the unit that goes on the outside of the building, and because they don’t deliver water at such a high temperature as a boiler, poorly-insulated houses will need to be insulated better. In some cases they may need to have larger radiators fitted. The UK has a lot of poorly-insulated houses, although many would argue that insulating them better is one of the first things we should be doing anyway… Another difficulty is that we’ll need more low carbon electricity to power all these heat pumps, and we might need some grid reinforcements to deliver that power to where it needs to be.
The other approach that’s being talked about is using hydrogen, produced using electrolysis with renewable electricity. Replace gas boilers with hydrogen boilers – at worst a drop-in replacement, at best a simple adjustment – run hydrogen through the old gas pipes, and bingo, low carbon heating without much cost or disruption, and because we’re still sending the energy via the gas grid there’s no need for electricity grid reinforcement.
There are a couple of downsides to this plan. One is that it’s much, much, less efficient. The total amount of energy needed to produce the hydrogen and transport it is (very roughly) 4x the amount you’d use in a heat pump that was doing the same job.
Image: ICCT
The second problem is that renewable energy is a scarce resource. We’ll struggle enough to find enough to power all those heat pumps in the short or medium term, so we’ll struggle even more to find four times that much to electrolyse all that water into hydrogen.
And this is where it gets controversial. Instead of finding enough renewable electricity to produce hydrogen by electrolysis (so-called “green hydrogen”), we could make it from natural gas. The “blue hydrogen” concept is to continue extracting natural gas, and split it into carbon and hydrogen when it gets ashore. Put the hydrogen into the gas grid, and bury the carbon back under the North Sea using carbon capture and storage (CCS). It’s quick, relatively cheap, and uses existing infrastructure. It’s not forever, of course, because both natural gas and carbon sequestration space are finite resources, but it’ll tide us over until we can produce enough green hydrogen. Right?
The strongest proponents of this plan are, unsurprisingly, the natural gas industry (fascinating scholarly report from UKERC). The next strongest are politicans who have good relations with the natural gas industry, and would like to minimise disruption. There’s a lot of lobbying power there, and this is a tempting proposition. Some people look at this and say “it’s a way for the natural gas industry to keep going with business as usual, and lock us in to a whole new gas infrastructure in the process”. Blue hydrogen champions say “but what choice is there? You can’t build renewables fast enough otherwise”. They’re usually using a straw man of building renewables fast enough for green hydrogen, rather than simply electrification, but they might be right about that too – I’m no expert on build-out rates and supply chain limitations.
But if they’re right, and if they’re speaking in good faith, then surely there’s a way to get the same stopgap benefit as blue hydrogen without locking us into the hydrogen route in the long term? Use natural gas, and use CCS, just like with blue hydrogen – but when the gas comes ashore, don’t make hydrogen with it. Burn it in a CCGT power plant, with carbon capture, and then supply electricity. Sure, you lose 2/3 of the energy in the power station, but the efficiency gains in using heat pumps rather than boilers roughly cancel that out. In the future it’s easy to let renewables replace the CCGT+CCS, at which point we’re left with a much more efficient system. And in the short term the gas companies get to keep extracting – but without locking us in for the long haul.
I don’t see anybody recommending that. Maybe it’s because it still leaves the supply chain “problem” (people will argue problem vs opportunity), in how quickly we can get homes converted to heat pumps. Maybe it’s because it will still require electrical grid reinforcement. Maybe because the whole argument for blue hydrogen is being made in bad faith.
I honestly don’t know which. It could be all of the above! Or it could be something that I haven’t thought of.
[1] Pendants and physicists are correct that this isn’t actually an efficiency, it’s a Coefficient of Performance – and hence it doesn’t break any laws of thermodynamics for it to be over 100%.
During this academic year, as well as teaching through a pandemic, I have been working on a PCAP course (Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice). A few months ago, as part of the assessment of this, I had to write a number of reflective case studies about my work. These were linked together with a reflective introduction which was quite heartfelt, looking very briefly at the experience of pandemic teaching as a new starter in the context of established theories/models about early academic life. I’m not wholly ashamed of that introduction and I thought it might be of more general interest, and so I’m posting it here with minor edits. It is, of course, very basic: I am no expert in this area and make no claims to novel insight!
The early years of a lecturer’s first permanent role are generally expected to be hard, for multiple reasons: the new academic is coming to understand their new role and identity (Simmons, 2011, Wilkinson, 2018) while also learning the systems of their new institution and, often, developing a large amount of new teaching material. Kugel (1993) described new lecturers initially focusing on self, and then subject. Only later do they shift to considering students, and hence transition from a teaching-led to a learning-led way of thinking – which in turn leads to consideration of more sophisticated pedagogies.
Covid-19, and the resulting emergency shift to online teaching, has added to this load. Watermeyer et al (2021) speak, based on a large survey, of “academics bruised by their experience of emergency online transition… A story of trauma in the face of… profound professional and personal disruption… Of self-concept on trial and in tatters”. The emergency introduction of blended learning has upended Kugel’s progression by forcing staff who are in their first year of teaching, who are still developing self and subject knowledge, to engage very firmly with learning-led approaches. It is not clear whether this is beneficial for students, but it has surely increased the level of rapid adjustment and assimilation of ideas that Simmons and Wilkinson described.
This research feels quite pertinent to my own situation as a new starter. Much of the material that I have been adapting for emergency online learning is material that I have never taught before, and I have been learning to navigate the systems of a university in flux without any knowledge of how those systems work in normal times.
Goffman, as cited & described by Wilkinson (2018), discussed university teaching through a theatrical metaphor. He described “backstage” contexts in which lecturers can stop performing, and “stage talk” where they discuss performance techniques with colleagues. Wilkinson discussed differences in how much backstage space is available for a woman in a male-dominated field, but it is also interesting to consider how these concepts may differ – and how this might affect the development of professional identity – in a year when lecturers are working from home, and are connected to students and peers only during clearly designated periods when their webcams are on.
