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Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

bbc.com

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Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#71

Anyone watch the documentary planet of the humans on YouTube? After watching that, I’m no longer sure what renewable energy even means anymore, which no longer gives these accomplishments any meaning. Can someone help with my disillusionment?

I just watched this and was left feeling rather disillusioned. I’ve not yet found any credible counter arguments to the case the documentary presents against biofuels.

For those that haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a watch[0]. The side story of YouTube taking it down because it contained 4 seconds worth of supposed copyright infringement is silly. It had roughly 8,000,000 views before this take down happened.

[0] https://youtu.be/MrOcBdnC3kw

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#72
post #47
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason wood is considered neutral is, that most of the wood is used for construction and other stuff. If you burn it and happen to burn fossil fuel as well, nothing is neutral.

No, it's considered neutral because you plant more of it to replace the trees you cut down (not because you are trying to save the world, just because you have some land that's suitable for growing a sustainable commercial forest). Over the life cycle of the tree from planting to burning, it's carbon neutral, though the shape of it for any given tree is 20 years of carbon sequestration followed by 20 minutes of carbo…

The issue with that is two-fold:

1. Not nearly enough trees are being planted to offset the ones being cut down.

2. Neutral on a scale of 30 years doesn't much matter when we have to reduce the degree to which we're accelerating a highly non-linear climate change process right now.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#73
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. 'Waste wood pellet' power plants are a con job. 2. There is not nearly enough wood waste from construction sites/etc to operate them. 3. They have to be supplemented with wood cut down from forests. 4. There aren't nearly enough forests in the UK to operate these plants sustainably. 5. So, the wood they burn comes from cutting down Canadian forests, trucking them down logging roads, loading them onto barges, and s…

> By the time you're done with all that, the carbon footprint of your wood pellet plant is greater than that of a coal plant. Could be true. Are there numbers/sources backing this argument?

I don't have a source that's likely to satisfy you - for two reasons.

1. Nobody has actually done a through, scientific carbon audit of the supply chain for these plants. You have napkin arguments in film, or on the internet, that you can trivially search for, that conclude this one way, or another, depending on their politics.

2. The carbon cost of running them is incredibly dependent on local conditions of the precise bits of wood that were sourced.

I can expand on the latter.

The hardest part about logging is getting your equipment to the logging site, building the roads to it, and then using those roads to get the logs out. I guess those are the three hardest parts about logging.

If you can cut down your logs, truck them only a few miles, toss them in a river, and then pick them up a hundred miles downstream, to load onto a barge, your carbon footprint is minimal.

If, on the other hand, you have to truck them 15 miles down logging roads, and then 90 miles down a freeway, your footprint greatly expands. (And has to include factors like building the logging roads to begin with.)

Unlike with mining, building logging roads is much harder than building roads to a mine - because you have to cover a lot more ground, to get an industrially useful amount of wood - compared to something like a pit mine. You have to use heavy equipment to drag logs over incredibly difficult, unroaded terrain, so that they can be loaded onto trucks that will go down the roads.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#74
post #30

This is a good discussion of the accounting of biofuels, with a guy called Tim Searchinger (there is a transcript if you don't want to listen): https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/11/manifold-podcast-23-ti... One takeaway is that you should think of farming trees as fuel as a competitor for land use. If it displaces growing food crops, then they will be grown elsewhere, possibly in newly cleared rainforest. Even if no…

That doesn't pass a smell test to me. Land which is used for forestry is usually not suitable for growing crops. Usually because it's on too great a slope and on poor quality soils.

[deleted]

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#75

Hummm, not sure wood pellets are carbon neutral. I think the UK has just offshored its CO2 emissions to the US. Great video below explaining in more detail. https://youtu.be/6RP-jYDgiMg?t=100

Wood pellet burning is a temporary distraction and distortion caused by regulation that allows it to be counted as "renewable". I believe you can make a reasonable argument wood burning is carbon neutral. Unfortunately, land used for growing forests of fuel represents a terrible opportunity cost - you could grow food or let the forests absorb atmospheric carbon, provide animal habitat, re-wilding, etc. However, there…

Wood pellets are at least a useful transitional resource. I'm not sure how pellets compare as a coal replacement, but for residential heating a pellet stove is a big improvement over a split log fireplace or stove, in efficiency and air quality.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#76
post #50

The wood pellets are interesting —- if we were growing forests at the same rate as we consume them via the pellets, would it be close enough to a closed loop system?

I saw a documentary a while back related to the Netherlands, where they traced lots of these wood imports as coming from the US, mostly bought from private land owners cutting down pristine forest.

The margins on that must be awful. A simple tax on imported wood would probably resolve the matter by rendering it commercially infeasible to import wood as fuel.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some back of the envelope maths, he said it takes an area 18 miles by 18 miles every year to produce 7% of the UKs electricity demand. Pine trees are harvested around 30 years old (ignoring thinnings deliberately here). So to set up a 30 year rotation of 300 square miles you are looking at an area roughly the size of Wales. That seems pretty unsustainable from a UK point of view but obviously there are less densely p…

The UK already has around 12,000 sq miles of forest, which is about 13% of the area. Half of the UK's land is owned by 1% of the population - a mix of aristocrats, wealthy individuals, and corporations. There is no practical issue with mass reforestation contributing to energy self-sufficiency, but there would be huge political issues.

And huge environmental issues. Forests of 30 years old pine are not the same as ancient forests.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#78
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's considered neutral because you plant more of it to replace the trees you cut down (not because you are trying to save the world, just because you have some land that's suitable for growing a sustainable commercial forest). Over the life cycle of the tree from planting to burning, it's carbon neutral, though the shape of it for any given tree is 20 years of carbon sequestration followed by 20 minutes of carbo…

The issue with that is two-fold: 1. Not nearly enough trees are being planted to offset the ones being cut down. 2. Neutral on a scale of 30 years doesn't much matter when we have to reduce the degree to which we're accelerating a highly non-linear climate change process right now.

I'm not sure about in Britain, but in the U.S. we do sustainably farm trees used for timber and have done so for the past 100 years.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#79
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason wood is considered neutral is, that most of the wood is used for construction and other stuff. If you burn it and happen to burn fossil fuel as well, nothing is neutral.

Growing a tree removes carbon from the air. That's carbon-negative. Cutting it down and using it in construction is still net-negative for the wood itself. (Though probably not when you take other energy usage into account.) In the very long run, the building might be torn down and the wood might rot or burn bringing things back to zero again. Growing a tree, cutting it down, and burning the wood is carbon-neutral. B…

> Growing a tree, cutting it down, and burning the wood is carbon-neutral

It isn’t though. A lot of energy is used planting then maintaining a forest for 30 years, cutting it down, processing it then shipping it. When timber is used in the building industry it’s a bit better but it is still notoriously wasteful. A lot of material goes to site and is binned - offcuts, wastage, over order and material in the wrong place.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#80
post #8

And nuclear . Because Brits know that you can't rely 100% on renewables (30% is about the maximum for most countries; "wood pellet" isn't actually renewable, it's forest mining).

Solar and wind are getting so cheap that you could feasibly overbuild to deal with low production times. And no, 30% is nowhere near the max, especially with storage
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