Jim Harris, former Green Party leaders and columnist in the Financial Post, actually makes some good points in today’s column.

He is correct that most thermal power plants have efficiencies in the 33% range, rejecting two-thirds of the energy in the fuel as waste heat.  Newer plants, like Capital Power’s Genesee 3 near Edmonton which raise supercritical steam have efficiencies higher than this, approaching 50%.   Combined cycle power plants using natural gas can reach efficiencies nearing 60%.  But some of the fuel energy must leave the plant as waste heat.  The second law of thermodynamics demands it.

What Jim is proposing is that we utilize this waste heat (simply put, this is energy available at temperatures below 150°C).  One option would be to route hot water (or some other fluid) from the power plant around our cities to heat homes.  This is done in some parts of the world, and would be an option in some places in Canada.  The power plants at Pickering, Darlington and Nanticoke are in the middle of urban areas.  But the coal fired power plants at Wabamun, AB are 50 kilometres from Edmonton.  And Bruce is nearly 200 km from Toronto.   Pumping hot water great distances is going to cost a lot of money, which consumers will have to pay for.  So this won’t be free.  And the raw materials to build these distribution networks are going to consume a lot of resources…  Running 6-8″ hot water lines to every house is a lot more metal than the 1″ natural gas lines or 1/4″ copper wires…  But show me how much it is going to cost me, the consumer, and I will consider it.

Jim Harris gives some credit to industries that are already doing this.  But he should give credit to the industry that has perhaps done this on the largest scale – the oil sands.  TransAlta’s Poplar Creek cogeneration plant at Suncor uses the waste heat from power generation to heat the water needed for oil sands extraction.  This displaces the burning of other fuel to heat this water.  They can claim an energy efficiency of over 90% for this reason, and on a 356 MW power plant.  So Jim – how come you didn’t point to that one?

Jim also makes some good points about a Smart Grid for power distribution.  The technology exists to do this today.  I want it.  I also want my power consumption charged based on an instantaneous power price so that consumers will have an incentive to reduce power consumption at peak hours.   And so that if I put a solar panel on my roof I can get credit back from the power company when I’m not using the power.  Of course, I will have to pay for this technology – but smart technology just keeps getting cheaper.  So let’s do this now!

So much for all the talk, money and effort put into hybrid cars.  The LA Auto Show has awarded their Green Car of the Year award to a diesel for the second year in a row.

If diesel engines are so “green”, why the effort to build expensive hybrids, with their expensive batteries, risks of high voltage discharge in accidents, and uncertain disposal costs?   Just build more diesels.

An even better question – why aren’t hybrid cars built as diesel-electrics?  That would seem to improve the energy efficiency far more than the current gas-electric designs.

This could be a very good plan, depending on how it plays out.   Here are the reasons:

• The world wants to build more nuclear plants, but there is a problem – the availability of fuel (uranium) and enrichment capabilities may not grow as fast as demand, which could drive up the cost of nuclear power.  This could make it unattractive, but also creates opportunities.
• One solution to the uranium enrichment problem is to use natural uranium – which is only done commercial in Canadian designed nuclear power plants.
• Another solution to the nuclear fuel problem is to switch uranium reactors to plutonium cycle.  This has already been done using decommissioned nuclear weapons as fuel.  The problem is that there is concern about the availability of this fuel past 2013.
• The CANDU technology can be easily modified into a fast-breeder reactor, whereby non-fissile U-238 (the bulk of natural uranium) is converted to Pu-239/240.  This plutonium can be extracted from the spent fuel chemically, rather than via expensive centrifuge plants that separate U-235 from U-238.  Additionally, fast breeders produce U-233 that can be used again as fuel.  This modification was first done by India in the early 1970s, which produced the plutonium for their nuclear weapon test in 1974.
• India has recently produced an Advanced Heavy Water Reactor technology (son of CANDU?) that runs on the thorium cycle instead of uranium.  The possibility of running thorium cycle expands the nuclear fuel supply significantly, which makes nuclear more attractive in the future.

What Canada needs to do is figure out how to make AECL, in conjunction with the Indians, more competitive.  This is going to require an investment of public money to further develop the technology, but I’d rather we spend money on that than on subsidizing windmills.

Lawrence Krauss, the relatively well-known physicist and author of The Physics of Star Trek, has proposed in an op-ed piece in the Old Gray Lady that we change our mindset about sending people to Mars.  He thinks that perhaps it should be a one-way trip.

I think his proposal is perfectly valid.  The fact is, that even if we were to send humans to Mars and plan their return, we would have to be very prepared for the likelihood that they would not return.  The risks of sending people to Mars are orders of magnitude larger than going to the Moon.  The radiation, extended period in zero-gravity, solar flares, Martian dust, and simply the time (up to 2 years) where we would need the spacecraft and the crew to function extremely effectively with no failure that couldn’t be easily repaired make such an endeavour extremely challenging.

But what if we did what Krauss proposes?  Select people who know they won’t have much chance of return?  What if we design the spacecraft to give them the maximum opportunity to survive indefinitely on the surface of Mars?   While this wouldn’t be easy, it may very well be easier and cheaper than trying to send a small team of people to Mars and return them safely to the Earth.  Perhaps we send more people, one way.

Robert Zubrin, who proposed a reasonable plan for Martian exploration in the 1990s (Mars Direct) whereby we would send an automated spacecraft to Mars ahead of the humans.  This ship would be the return vehicle, as well has have the facilities to produce methane and oxygen (aka rocket fuel) from the CO2 in the Martian atmosphere and hydrogen brought from earth (because it’s light).  This significantly reduces the cost of a return mission.   Zubrin stated in his original book on the subject, made the very good observation – which has been adopted by NASA for the Design Reference Mission plan (my paraphrase):

If you have a problem in space and you are closer to Mars than the Earth, and on a trajectory to Mars, the safest place to go is Mars.

This is because space is really hostile to survival.  Mars isn’t much better, but at least there is a little gravity and a regolith underwhich you could find shielding from solar radiation.

A quick search of the net finds the Mars Homestead Project, which lays out a pretty interesting concept for the one way ticket idea.   Much like the people who set out from Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries for the Americas, don’t look back…  We should consider that the best option for such exploration is to colonize Mars sooner than later.

Lawrence Solomon has an excellent article in the National Post concerning the concept of carbon-capture and sequestration and the fact that the sequestration step is a problem that has not been shown to be particularly safe nor reliable.

Admittedly, CO2 has been injected into oil fields around North America in significant quantities to enhance oil recovery, and there has not yet been a major accident or release from these facilities or from the underground reservoirs themselves.   Additionally, facilities exist where a mixture of CO2 and H2S (itself highly toxic) have been injected into reservoirs for disposal to avoid having to make elemental sulfur from the H2S (which for many years was not economic).  Such facilities exist in Canada in  British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and in the United States in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico to name a few.

The problem is that most of these facilities are injecting a few hundred tonnes of CO2 per day at the most – not the tends of thousands or millions of tonnes of CO2 that will need to be sequestered in order to reduce emissions without restricting economic activity.   Additionally, the scale and location of many of these facilities are such that even if there was an incident, the population densities are low and are unlikely to result in casualties.

As an engineer, I would like to believe that we can design these systems safely – but I know that we cannot design them to be absolutely safe, especially considering all the unknowns about the geology we would be injecting CO2 into.  Geologists have a lot of good data – but they cannot have the perfect knowledge to know where every little fault is, or what effect increased pressures (and changes in water chemistry) will have on the rocks…  So this is a large part of the uncertainty.  I will admit that many old natural gas reservoirs have held high pressures for millions of years – but they didn’t have a lot of holes punched through their cap rocks, nor were they subject to a rapid (in geological terms) depressuring (natural gas production) and repressuring (CO2 sequestration) – so we cannot be certain that something horrendously bad could happen.

So the question of spending billions of dollars on a quest to achieve something to stop a problem we can’t be certain is even real (and that any sequestration will be far to small to be effective in any event) is one I think the answer to is obvious.  Don’t waste our money and don’t risk it.

While I am not involved in the specific field, I found the book “Why New Systems Fail: Theory and Practice Collide” educational.

This brief text is written in a casual style that makes it easy to read, while at the same time seeming less “professional” and less likely to be taken seriously by senior executives in corporations that might be about to make the mistakes the author, Phil Simon, clearly identifies.  But he does identify a lot of completely valid reasons why new enterprise software implementations are not the successes that are hoped for when they are begun.

However, based on my experience in the engineering and construction business, where we execute large, complex projects, many of the lessons are transferable (and in fact seem strangely familiar).  Failure to plan effectively, failure to consider that things will not go perfectly, failure to schedule with some slack or float to allow for recovery should things go off the rails during one stage or another.

Additional flags are about not selecting consultants or providers based solely on the apparently up-front cost – the idea of you get what you pay for appears to be as true in enterprise software as it is in heavy construction.

Having also spent some of my career trying to develop, implement and support data management software for engineering (not exactly enterprise class) and discovering that we had all the same problems – significant underestimation of the resources it would take to accomplish the task, failure to ask enough questions of the commercial-off-the-shelf software vendor about what the product could and couldn’t actually do (or how much customization it might take), and failure to sufficiently understand the problem we were trying to solve – which resulted in what Mr. Simon would call either a “Big Failure” or and “Unmitigated Disaster”.

Anywho – if you are interested in enterprise (or other) software development and implementation, or any manner of project execution – this is a good read.

This week, the G8 promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (mostly CO2) by 80% by 2050.  Now they didn’t commit to what datum point in time is (1990? 2009?) and didn’t really sign anything that would penalize a nation for failing to do so.  Which makes it kind of meaningless.

Canada’s environment minister, Jim Prentice, has said that 80% isn’t realistic as a hard target and that it’s more of something to aspire to.  I think what he really means is that he will be dead by 2050 and isn’t going to do anything anyway.

And the truth is – making promises 40 years in the future by politicians in their 50s and older is great political theatre – and nothing more.  Predicting the future is a charlatan’s game, ever the moreso the further out you try to predict it.

Back to the subject of CO2 reduction – perhaps Mr. Harper and Mr. Prentice would like to explain how we are going to achieve this reduction in CO2 emissions.  80% is a big number.  My math tells me that we will need to:

• Convert most transportation vehicles (cars, trucks, trains) to electricity
• Convert the heating of many buildings to electricity from oil or natural gas
• Close power generation facilities that consume coal, oil or natural gas
• Build dozens of nuclear power generation facilities in every province.  Utilize breeder reactor technology, spent fuel reprocessing and plutonium cycle power generation to extend the life of our uranium reserves.  Or pray that the ITER project (which Canada pulled out of) actually makes nuclear fusion feasible.
• Build additional hydroelectric dams, flooding more valleys, especially in BC and Labrador.  Perhaps dam the Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers (although the latter might take too long to fill a reservoir the size of western Europe…)
• Build lots of wind turbines and power storage facilities (using some technology that probably hasn’t been invented yet).
• Place solar thermal and photovoltaic cells on homes and business.  Allow homeowners to sell power back to the grid for a fair price.
• Since it is unlikely we could replace fossil fuels for aircraft, air travel would either need to be curtailed or allowed to be a major part of CO2 emissions.
• Shutdown most of the oil, gas and coal production in Canada.   Power generation using fossil fuels will only be feasible with carbon capture and sequestration, which has yet to be proven on a large scale (particularly sequestration).

And all of this is going to be expensive and reduce the standard of living of people in all G8 countries.  And probably will have little impact on the atmosphere or climate, particularly if China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa (and numerous other countries) continue with business and usual.

So again, I think the correct answer is adaptation to any change that might occur, rather than trying to engineer ourselves out of a problem we can’t be sure even exists or whether stopping it is even possible if it does.

There has been much talk of late (again) about the potential for high-speed rail, à la France’s TGV or Spain’s Avé, being built between Calgary and Edmonton, or from Windsor to Quebec.

In my opinion, neither of these makes a lot of sense, and doesn’t seem to me to be a good use of public money – since it doesn’t look at all like any private corporation is interested in such a mega-project.

My first problem with these dreams is that even if you could get 5000 people to take a train between Calgary and Edmonton every day, that might take 3000 cars off of Hwy 2.   Assuming most people drive during daylight, that is only about 200-250 cars per hour, or 2 cars per minute each way.  That doesn’t sound like much of a reduction based on my experience on that roadway and isn’t going to reduce the need to add lanes to Highway 2 in the near future.

Second, if the project costs a few billion dollars to construct, the ticket prices are going to have to be relatively high to recoup the investment and cover operating costs.  I don’t have all the numbers, but from what I’ve read and heard on the radio it seems to me that rail prices will be comparable to airline ticket prices – too high to get people out of their cars – so it will mostly steal customer from the airlines.

Finally – the public purse isn’t exactly overflowing with excess cash.  And if we want to spend public money on transportation that might actually reduce automobile traffic, I would think that improving public transit with more light rail / subway lines in Calgary, Edmonton and other cities across Canada would be far more beneficial than high-speed rail.

The only reason for politicians to support high-speed rail is that it sounds more exciting.  But that is not a good reason to waste my money.

This past week, the members of the Tsuu T’ina Nation voted 60% to reject a plan put forward by the City of Calgary and Province of Alberta to trade land on the eastern edge of the reserve for other lands to be named later.  The City wanted this land to build the southwest leg of the ring road around the city.

I can understand the Tsuu T’ina rejecting this, because of the concept of lands to be named later is pretty dodgy when you are dealing with politicians.  Additionally, most of the land adjacent to the reserve is either privately held or part of provincial parks and natural areas – so where exactly was the province going to get these lands?

Of course, I also think that the Tsuu T’ina were unwise to reject this plan. Read the rest of this entry »

The government of Canada has finally come to an intelligent idea: selling the CANDU business of AECL.  This is the right thing to do – because there is no reason for the government to be in the business of developing this technology, nor trying to sell and support the CANDU reactors around the world.  Free-enterprise can do a better job of any industrial activity, and there is nothing particularly strategic about having a “Canadian” nuclear technology.  If the CANDU technology is as good as some people claim, it should be able to compete on the world stage without assistance from the Canadian taxpayer.