EuroWire July 2015

Transatlantic cable

decision-making about energy costs and technologies. Dr Davis advocates an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ approach that includes aggressive funding for innovation, e cient pricing of energy, and evidence-based environmental policies. He said: “We need e cient markets if we are going to stay cool without heating up the planet.”

by-product of a big quake: widespread power failures. Many cellphone towers have a battery supply that may last as little as four hours. A US Geological Survey report warned that power could be cut o for weeks should a magnitude 7.8 earthquake strike the San Andreas fault, which lies about 35 miles from Los Angeles. This could render swaths of the cellphone network useless.

That is the challenge for a warming world.

Energy

Slow to kindle to o shore windmills, Americans seem willing at last to put some ‘steel on the water’

Growing global demand for air conditioning will require extensive investment in electricity grids

More than 2,300 wind turbines twirl o the coasts of 11 European countries today, and the United Kingdom has just awarded approval for the world’s largest o shore wind farm. When completed, the Dogger Bank Creyke Beck project o the coast of Yorkshire will have installed 400 turbines across 430 square miles and be more than double the size of the current biggest o shore windfarm in the UK. Bobby Magill, a senior science writer at Climate Central (Princeton, New Jersey), invoked the embrace of wind energy in Europe to point up the contrast with the US attitude toward this source of renewable energy. While Americans debate the viability of wind farms o their coasts, Europeans have been in the o shore wind development business for decades. Climate Central is an independent organisation of scientists and journalists researching and reporting on climate change and its impact on the American public. Drawing on its work, Mr Magill believes that Americans may now be ready to shake o their tentativeness and follow the European lead on o shore wind energy. In Climate Central ’s journal of the same name, he reviewed a wind farm set to “break ground” in July o the coast of Rhode Island. With it, he said, o shore wind energy seems suddenly to have a future in America. (“‘Steel on the Water’ Critical for O shore Wind in US,” 11 th May) Mr Magill wrote: “If completed, the Block Island Wind Farm will be the rst o shore wind farm in the USA. If it is successful, it could prove that wind power generated by turbines o the coast is a viable enterprise similar to onshore wind farms, which generate about four per cent of America’s electricity.” That could, he said, set the stage for other o shore wind projects all along the East Coast as Washington opens up more waters to wind farm development. President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan includes o shore wind in the administration’s push to generate 20,000 megawatts (MW) of renewable power on federally controlled public lands and waters by 2020. This makes wind a major element in Mr Obama’s declared intention to counter climate change with low-carbon energy. † The 30MW, ve-turbine Block Island Wind Farm, which will sell its electricity to the utility National Grid, will be signi cant for the USA out of proportion to its size. “I think the Block Island project is a signi cant milestone for o shore

“In the United States, which uses more air conditioning than the rest of the world combined, most of the grid is sized to meet the few days a year when coolers are cranking at full blast under sweltering temperatures.” In IEEE Spectrum , published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, science writer Katherine Tweed went on to note that this has meant a grid that runs ine ciently most of the year. To help remedy this, some technologies for regulating demand – eg remote control of air conditioner compressors – have come into use in recent years. Such expedients must become standard procedure as air conditioning is more widely adopted around the globe. In China, sales of air conditioning units have nearly doubled in over the past ve years, with more than 60 million units sold in 2013 alone. According to new research from the University of California at Berkeley, reviewed by Ms Tweed, that trend will contribute heavily to greatly increased energy use in developing and middle-income countries even as it attens somewhat in the US and Europe. (“Electricity Use Could Soar as Global Middle Class Embraces Air Conditioning,” 4 th May) Using data from Mexico, researchers at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business studied air conditioning in relation to climate and income. Taking into account the likely rise in both household incomes and air temperatures, they project that air-conditioned interiors worldwide will rise from 13 per cent of residences today to more than 70 per cent by the end of the century. This is “mostly good news,” said Professor Lucas Davis, lead author of the Haas School report: “Air conditioning will bring relief to the more than three billion people who live in the tropics and subtropics.” But the growing prevalence of air conditioning will require intensive investment in electricity generation in places such as India and southeast Asia, where even meeting today’s needs is a strain. India’s demand for cooling is 12 times what it is in the USA, according to the Berkeley team; and Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines experience more “cooling degree days” than India. Within just a few decades, the Haas School model shows “near universal saturation” in air conditioning use. † Powering all those air conditioners will call for grids capable of generating adequate electricity. The UC Berkeley research strongly suggests that the time has come for

28

www.read-eurowire.com

July 2015