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Nice Dutch project using ‘waste’ heat and CO2 to increase greenhouse yields!

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Greenhouse

Photo credit przemion ?

Came across a great story on pressreleasefinder today via Twitter about a project in the Netherlands called WarmCO2.

What is WarmCO2?

It is a project which takes residual heat and CO2 from Dutch fertiliser manufacturer Yara and using infrastructure supplied by partner company Visser & Smit Hanab, pipes them to vegetable growers in the nearby Terneuzen commercial greenhouse project.

From the release:

WarmCO2 will be redistributing up to 84MW of residual heat and 70,000 tons of purified CO2 per year. The CO2 is used by growers to enrich the greenhouse atmosphere and encourage crop growth. Normally they would use a natural gas fired boiler to produce both CO2 and heat throughout the growing season, or a combined heat and power installation that supplies heat, CO2 and electricity, which is then fed back to the national grid.

As a result of the Terneuzen greenhouse project the redistribution of heat and CO2 from Yara via WarmCO2 will save some 52 million m3 of natural gas, which translates into a 90% reduction in fossil fuel consumption. This makes Terneuzen one of the most sustainable commercial greenhouse developments in the Netherlands.

This is being made possible by the “Green Projects” initiative of the Dutch ministries of Health & Environment, Agriculture and Treasury. This initiative offers fiscal benefits to ‘green’ investors and savers, which in turn allows banks to offer financial loans at lower interest rates. Under the Green Projects initiative a maximum of € 25 million can be made available per project.

ABN AMRO are the banking partner in this project and they stumped up the maximum €25 million (out of a total investment of €80 million in the project).

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Green Numbers round-up 10/23/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/23/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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To protect and serve who again?

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British riot police confront 'dangerous' protestor

I don’t get it. Really, I don’t.

Climate change is destroying the planet. Oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic, the glaciers and polar ice caps are shrinking faster then even the most pessimistic projections, South Sea islands like the Maldives are becoming inundated by sea level rise and we are in the middle of a man-made mass extinction event where scientists predict that one-half of all species of life will be extinct by 2100.

This is all pretty horrific to contemplate, right?

And yet, when people try to protest peacefully against the polluters who are damaging the planet beyond all recognition, when people try to highlight and bring a halt to this madness so we can save some shred of our decency, as well as some of the lifeforms on the planet, what happens? They are confronted by lines of police in riot gear, at best, or battered and thrown in jail on trumped up charges, or worse.

Look up civil disobedience in Wikipedia and you see a photo of Gandhi! Other famous proponents of civil disobedience are Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Henry David Thoreau.

Why then, when people are looking to better our planet and by extension our lives, are they attacked and frequently imprisoned by the police, the very force who are supposed to protect and serve us? Obviously it is not us whom the police are protecting and serving. Shame on them.

Then today, I see a report that the provincial government in Alberta, Canada is threatening to unleash its counterterrorism plan if activists continue using civil disobedience to protest the tar sands. No really.

From the report:

Canada’s tar sands will singlehandedly produce more greenhouse gas emissions than Denmark, Ireland, Austria or Portugal by 2020 if the development continues expanding at its current rate, according to a recent report written by award-winning business reporter Andrew Nikiforuk

However,

“We’re going to be working very closely with industry and our solicitor general will be reviewing all of the guidelines we have in place,” said a visibly irritated Premier Stelmach in early October.

Fred Lindsay, the solicitor general, went a step further, suggesting the province might use its counterterrorism plan against future protests.

Now people trying to protect life on this Earth are terrorists? Seriously, it should be the people extracting oil from the tar sands who are subject to counterterrorism plans, if anyone.

When will we see the forces of law and order arresting executives of mining companies for their lack of concern for human rights, or lack of concern for the planet?

Photo credit clearbrian

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/22/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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There’s gold in them thar bills!

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Graph of power consumption

Photo credit Urban Jacksonville

The output from smart meters is incredibly granular. Far more so than is obvious from the smart meter output graph above.

In conversations with Dr Monica Sturm (Director of Siemen’s Center of Competence, Metering Services) last November (2008) she confirmed to me that it is possible to identify individual devices in someone’s home down to make, model and year of manufacture by looking at their energy profile – the output of their smart meter.

This kind of information is absolute gold and don’t think the utility companies aren’t starting to wake up to the fact. They are, and they are not alone. Why else do you think Google have jumped into this space with their PowerMeter offering. Not to be outdone, Microsoft have also stepped in with their Hohm product.

It won’t be long before Apple joins the fray with a sleekier, sexier iHome application!

For the utilities themselves, there are data protection issues to be worked through but once they are (and they will be), the utilities will use this data to help make up for the earnings lost as customers become more energy efficient (consuming less expensive energy).

One revenue model you will start to see emerge is utility companies selling appliances (and possibly even cars!). How will it work?

Because the utility company will have full visibility of our energy consumption, they will see when your devices are inefficient/faulty. I can very easily envisage receiving a communication from my utility company in the not-too-distant future along the lines of:

Dear Mr Raftery (actually, as I am based in Spain it would be more likely to be Estimado Sr. Raftery but let’s stick with the English version),

We notice from your energy profile that you own a 2004 Indesit BAN12NFS fridge freezer. Our records show that in the last 3 months the compressor in that freezer has become much less efficient and it is now costing you €25 a month just to run that one appliance.

We have partnerships with service companies who could try to repair the compressor in that fridge freezer for you, or alternatively, we have a special offer this month on new energy efficient fridge freezers.

We can have a brand new fridge freezer installed in your home before the end of the week. We can take away your old one for responsible disposition. And all this will won’t cost you a penny, in fact it will save you €10* per month off your current bill!

So, to summerize, if you call our hotline now on 555-123 4567 you can save €10 off your monthly bill, have a brand new fridge-freezer installed free and reduce your CO2 emissions by 12kg a year.

What are you waiting for?

*We charge you €15 per month for the new fridge thus saving you €10 per month off your current bill. Terms and conditions apply.

That’s just one possible scenario of how the utility companies will make use of smart meter data to generate alternative revenue streams for themselves – can you think of others?

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/21/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Klaus Heimann espouses SAP’s smart utility of 2020 at International SAP for Utilities conference

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I attended the 7th International SAP for Utilities event in Munich last week.

Having attended the SAP for Utilities event in San Antonio last year, I had reasonably high expectations from this conference and I wasn’t disappointed. At the San Antonio event SAP talked very much about the ‘State of the Now’ talking up their, then recently launched, Energy Capital Management software. At this event however, Head of SAP Service Industries, Klaus Heimann keynoted introducing SAP’s vision for the utility company of 2020!

In what was a very forward-looking address, Klaus confidently predicted that:

In two years time this will no longer be a Utilities conference, it will be en Energy conference

This must have had a lot of the people in the room squirming in their seats because, as Klaus himself said, “Utilities are not known as being good at change!”

But change they must.

Just a few of the upcoming major changes utility companies are going to have to cope with include the growing imperative to move to a greater penetration of renewables in the generation mix, the impending explosion in the numbers of electric vehicles to be charged, and the need to roll-out smart grids and take in distributed generation.

Klaus’ vision for the utility company of 2020 is summarised in the video interview I conducted with him above, but briefly he talked of an energy market vastly more complex than today’s. An energy market:

  • where customers can be consumers and producers (via micro-generation)
  • where customers may have shares in a wind-farm which sells electricity to the local utility
  • where customers receive rebates on kWh’s saved during times of peak demand (compared to avg previous day’s use at same time, for example)
  • where utilities will have special renewable-only power offerings (I wish they had that now)
  • where utilities will need to be able to bill customers for energy used to charge electric vehicles, away from home (at the office) or even in different countries and
  • where utilities will need to be able to offer real-time consumption information, generation data and a control interface to the customer’s appliances

Nothing too earth-shattering in that list to be honest. But, when put against the types of changes utilities have gone through in the last 100 years, this is an enormous upheaval. This is probably a good time to be a change management consultant in the utilities sector 😉

For this vision to become real (and any utilities who don’t start to move in this direction can start writing their own obituaries now), there needs to be massive changes in utilities communications infrastructures and their data handling capabilities.

With big change, comes big opportunities so it is not surprising to see SAP are all over this and helping the utilities visualise where they need to go.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/20/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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19th October GreenMonk Energy & Sustainability show

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Ok, I moved the Energy and Sustainability away from Ustream a couple of weeks back to try out LiveStream as I had had a couple of complaints about the quality. Today I tried out a new microphone and judging by the comments it seems to have been a good idea!

Here is the chatstream from today’s GreenMonk Energy & Sustainability show:

03:31 Tom Raftery: Audio & video check?
03:31 Tom Raftery: Anyone seeing and/or hearing me?
03:32 PTreacy: Got you now… Info
03:33 peter: Seeing and hearing you clearly, Tom.
03:35 Tom Raftery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBzDZA1KCF0
03:37 Tom Raftery: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18000-we-will-be-billions-of-dollars-poorer-when-coral-dies.html
03:40 Tom Raftery: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10377561-54.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=GreenTech
03:42 Tom Raftery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1543798/US-funds-terror-groups-to-sow-chaos-in-Iran.html
03:44 Tom Raftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/oct/19/maldives-government-underwater-cabinet-meeting
03:46 Tom Raftery: http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=11
03:47 Tom Raftery: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/4980
03:48 monkchips: hello all!
03:49 Tom Raftery: http://www.survivalinternational.org/films/mine
03:50 Tom Raftery: http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2379
03:51 monkchips: you look very pale tom. but then i suppose, what else is new?
03:52 monkchips: pale and interesting, at least
03:52 marilynpratt: Sun in Vienna?
03:52 Tom Raftery: http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/15/the-biggest-loser-chamber-of-commerce/#more-12721
03:53 Patrick Treacy: I’ve lost you Tom – is it me or you?
03:53 Patrick Treacy: Back again…
03:53 monkchips: you’re good
03:53 monkchips: its the chamber of commerce thats been disconnected… from reality
03:54 Tom Raftery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
03:55 Tom Raftery: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/superfreakonomics-on-climate-part-1/
03:55 monkchips: found freakonomics VERY boring uninsightful myself
03:56 monkchips: most drug dealers dont make a lot of money. GENIUS INSIGHT! give me a ******* break. go to any major city, its pretty bloody obvious
03:58 monkchips: why the crap would we listen to economists on this? they are plonkers. they all said the world economy was in stable shape just three years ago
03:59 Tom Raftery: http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/18/error-riddled-superfreakonomics-stephen-dubner-says-romm-has-done-a-great-job-amazon-search/
03:59 monkchips: superficialnomics
04:00 Tom Raftery: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/10/19/climate-talks-india-appears-to-soften-stance-on-greenhouse-gas-emissions/
04:02 Tom Raftery: http://blogs.msdn.com/see/archive/2009/10/07/seattle-city-light-begins-offering-its-customers-consumption-data-for-use-with-microsoft-hohm.aspx
04:03 Tom Raftery: http://blogs.msdn.com/see/archive/2009/10/14/microsoft-launches-software-architecture-for-smart-grid-development.aspx
04:03 Tom Raftery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX0ivmRoZeI
04:03 marilynpratt: very interesting
04:04 Tom Raftery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5I8_mn1cbI
04:04 cgarvey: Cheers Tom!
04:05 Tom Raftery: Any comments etc?
04:05 Patrick Treacy: Great show thanks – I lost you a couple of times, but pretty sure it was me.
04:05 marilynpratt: daughter in law working with virus to kill coral fungus
04:05 Rich: Great show Tom
04:05 marilynpratt: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cmi.edu%2Fcollege_newsletter%2FJK2009%2FX-1-Sep2009.pdf&rct=j&q=ilil+atad+marshall+isl
04:05 cgarvey: all was fine from here
04:05 Rich: Fine with me
04:05 marilynpratt: great show Tom
04:06 marilynpratt: excellent connection
04:06 marilynpratt: Yah
04:06 Patrick Treacy: Yes, think it was my end. Sound is very good this week – I did notice
04:06 monkchips: much better
04:07 marilynpratt: worth it then – cool
04:07 Ren: blimey, that was a big one
04:07 monkchips: that was your vibrator? what does the mic look like?
04:07 marilynpratt: bad
04:07 Patrick Treacy: you definitely need a lock for that door so…
04:08 Tom Raftery: And we’re out, thanks everyone for the attention and interest