For most people in New Brunswick, the idea of time-based pricing of electricity seems pretty foreign. We’re used to a flat rate per kilowatt-hour for the electricity we use. However, just like any other product we use, the cost of generating that electricity varies quite dramatically based on how it was made – we just don’t see it at our end.

At certain times we are paying significantly more than it costs to generate, and at other times, we are paying significantly less – i.e. the utility is losing money selling it to us.

Unlike other products though, we can’t (yet) economically store electricity in large quantities, so it has to be produced as and when it is needed. During the year, we tend to use more electricity in the peak of summer and the peak of winter for air conditioning and heating than we on a mild September day. In the course of a day, we go through cycles too – people tend to get up, go to work, eat, and go to bed at roughly the same time – and so the electricity demand curve mirrors our personal activity levels.

Using Ontario as an example (publicly available data), we can see that in 2009, electricity demand was 10.7GW at a minimum and 24.4GW at a maximum – an increase of over 125 per cent. The larger that the margin becomes between minimum and maximum, the more expensive our electricity becomes, as we have to recoup the building cost for these power stations that aren’t used very often.

In fact in 2009, while Ontario had enough installed capacity to be able to supply the 24.4GW of electricity, the electricity demand only exceeded 20GW for approximately 20 days during the year.

By flattening the electricity demand curve we would be able to operate fewer power stations more frequently, and thus reduce (or at least limit increases to) the cost of our electricity supply.

One method of doing this is through time-based pricing. When electricity demand is low, our electricity is generally produced from sources that are the cheapest to run (such as nuclear and coal), and so the cost of generating that electricity is low.

As demand increases, increasing expensive to operate power plants are brought online to meet the temporary need, such as natural gas and oil. Time-based pricing would see that the price we pay for electricity more accurately reflect the cost of generating it – so using power in the middle of the day in August (peak period) would cost more than using power in the middle of the night in September (off-peak period).

This would accomplish two things. First, people and companies would start to shift their behaviour patterns to match the new pricing profile. Dishwashing or laundry could be saved until the late evening or early morning.

Power-intensive industries could reschedule certain activities to obtain cheaper electricity. This would have the effect of lowering the peak demand, and increasing the off-peak demand. Second, it would hopefully reduce overall energy consumption. Air conditioners and heaters might get adjusted a couple of degrees during the day when no one is actually in the house, due to the higher cost of electricity.

Some new technologies are needed, and some are on their way, such as smart metres, capable of recording the amount of electricity and time of use, which would also be capable of displaying the current power rate to consumers to aid in decision-making. Smart appliances are on the horizon, such as washers and dryers that automatically run when electricity is at its cheapest, and fridges that will delay compressor cycles at peak price times.

Future electric vehicles have the potential to charge themselves during off-peak hours, and re-sell electricity to the grid during peak hours for a profit, thus acting as a giant national battery of sorts.

Jurisdictions such as California and Ontario have already rolled out time-based pricing, with 3.6 million customers in Ontario expected to be on the new system by mid-2011. Ontario has three price bands for electricity (not including transmission and distribution) – On-Peak at 9.1 cents per kWh, Mid-Peak at 7.6 cents, and Off-Peak at 4.2 cents. Without wading into the NB Power debate here, it would be interesting to know how the deal will affect the future of time-based pricing in New Brunswick, regardless of which way it goes.

Watt is a word most people have seen – from their electricity bills to the labels on many electrical appliances – but it is also a word that many of us don’t have a good understanding of. We can’t pick one up, like a kilogram; or walk one, like a kilometre.

We just have to trust that the light bulb we put into the light socket really does consume 60 watts of electricity. So what is a watt?

The watt is a unit of power, which means it tells us how quickly we are using (or producing) energy. For electricity, we measure energy in Joules, and so 1 watt means that 1 Joule is being used every second.

Energy can be stored in many forms, and the energy in your food is just as useful as the energy in a lump of coal, or in the water stored behind a dam.

The energy stored in all three of these things can be converted into more useful forms of energy such as heat, light, sound, movement, and even more food – we just need different machines make it so.

The coal needs to be burned, the water dropped, and the food eaten. So if we could relate the watt to the amount of food we eat, it might become a little easier have a physical understanding of just what is in a watt.

A healthy adult body will burn about 2,000 calories in a day. The calorie is just another unit of energy, and is equal to a little over 4,000 joules – so it takes roughly 8,000,000 joules of energy a day to run an adult body.

That means on average, a typical North American uses about 100 joules a second, or 100 watts.

All things considered, that is a surprisingly small number. Before the advent of CFL bulbs, many people had (and some still do) several 100-watt bulbs in their house. Each of those bulbs was using the same amount of energy that a typical human requires to go about their daily business.

Add up all of those light bulbs in your house (and all the other users of electricity), and all of a sudden we see that the average Canadian house uses enough energy to support about 35 people – and that’s just your house.

It can be a little overwhelming to realize just how quickly and easily we can use up massive amounts of energy, without giving it a second thought. I’ll admit to borrowing (and adjusting) this fact from David Hughes of the Geological Survey of Canada.

If you took the average New Brunswicker and put them on a treadmill, and asked them to start walking to generate electricity, they could probably manage to generate 100 watts of electricity. If you paid them to do that for 40 hours a week, with two weeks of vacation and statutory holidays, it would take almost nine years to generate the same amount of energy as in a barrel of oil, and you’d have to pay them $140,000 even at minimum wage.

Makes you realize that even $100 a barrel, oil is still a pretty amazing deal – especially considering the average Canadian puts the equivalent of almost nine barrels of oil into their vehicle each year.

So what do we pay for different forms of energy?

For gas, we pay about $0.03 for a million joules of energy. It costs pretty much the same to buy that amount of energy in electrical form.

However, in food form, it costs roughly 11 times as much ($0.35) to buy that energy in potatoes, and 130 times as much in chicken ($4).

It’s easy to forget just how cheap the energy really is that we use in our homes and our cars – it just seems like a lot because we use such astronomical amounts of it. Most of the energy we use has been converted to and stored in its current form for millions of years – and we are consuming it an alarming rate, primarily because it is so cheap and readily available.

It’s staggering to think that in the last 25 years we have used as much oil as the rest of human history combined. I know, this is not a good news story for this festive time of year, but understanding is the first step to making a change.

In recent years the topic of energy efficiency and the role it will play in reducing our energy use and carbon dioxide emissions has become increasingly popular.

There is a societal belief that if we make cars, appliances and houses more fuel and energy efficient, then we are doing ‘our part’ to combat climate change.

The challenge is that we really need to focus on reducing the amount of energy we use, and unfortunately, improving energy efficiency does not always lead to energy reduction. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, so let’s look at some interesting statistics.

I found a car advertisement dated Oct. 20th, 1983. It was taken from The Daily Telegraph – a British newspaper – and advertises the ‘new’ Peugeot 205. This vehicle seems rather unremarkable at first – very 80’s – and does little to grab your attention until you start to read. This car was capable of getting 60 MPG (or 3.9 L / 100 km) on the highway, and 43 MPG in the city (5.4 L / 100 km). By today’s standards that is phenomenal. It is on par with today’s best performing hybrids, and far exceeds the fuel economy of most conventional cars available at present.

So what happened? Did we forget how to build fuel-efficient cars? Actually no, we didn’t. In fact, since 1983 we have made huge strides in improving fuel efficiency.

In 2007, the average car being sold in the United States used almost exactly half the amount of fuel per horsepower compared with cars built in 1983. Unfortunately, that same car weighs over 25 per cent more than it did 1983.

We’ve dropped the average 0-100 km/h acceleration time from 14 seconds to less than 10 in the same time period, and most importantly – to make our heavier cars go faster – we’ve more than doubled the horsepower in the average car, from 107 to 223.

So while our scientists and engineers worked hard to make our engines twice as fuel efficient, we also decided to double the size of them. The end result is that our average vehicle today consumes about the same amount of gas it did over 25 years ago.

Unfortunately, this problem isn’t just limited to cars – it applies to our homes as well.

Between 1990 and 2006, the energy used by the average refrigerator sold in Canada dropped by a staggering 50 per cent; dishwashers by an even more impressive 64 per cent; electric stoves by 31 per cent; and the list goes on.

In that same time period, however, total energy use in Canadian households actually increased by five per cent.

Why? Population growth is part of it – but what is more concerning is that we started to build bigger houses (up four per cent), and then started to put fewer people inside each of them (down eight per cent).

It is for these reasons that, despite all the talk we hear about energy efficiency and conservation, the World Energy Outlook still predicts a nine per cent increase in the amount of energy used in North America between 2006 and 2030.

We have an incredible amount of talent in this country and around the world to make massive gains in terms of energy efficiency, but we need to be careful not to negate those gains by always demanding bigger and better. Buying a new energy efficient fridge is a progressive step – but not if you put your old one in the basement to keep your beer cold!

Energy efficiency is important, but it’s critical that it go hand in hand with maintaining or reducing the size and power of the goods we consume so that our total energy consumption begins a downward trend.

So next time you’re out buying a vehicle, ask yourself whether you really need 225 horsepower, or whether 150 (or less) would do just fine.

Conventional wisdom would say that with all the technological breakthroughs that humankind makes on a regular basis, and the rate at which we see technology become obsolete through newer, faster, more efficient devices, that the fuel economy of our vehicles would be constantly improving.

Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. The photo included in this post is from a car advertisement in the UK at the peak of the 1980’s energy crisis. This ad, for a Peugeot 205, claims that it is able to get 72.4 MPG at a steady 90km/h, only dropping to 56 MPG at 120km/h. This isn’t a hybrid. It’s not some fancy prototype. It’s just a run of the mill production car from 1983 that uses less gas than even the most fuel efficient car on the market in Canada in 2008.

The problem is that we haven’t been incentivizing our car manufacturers in North America to produce fuel efficient vehicles. Since we drive pretty much the same vehicles as our neighbors to the south, I’m going to talk about US fuel economy standards, as it is their standards that really drive our fuel efficiency (in fact, Canada currently does not have binding fuel efficiency standards, just voluntary ones).

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations in the US require manufacturers to meet an weighted average fuel economy, or else pay a fine. The weighted average means that if a company sells 10 cars that get 20 MPG, and 5 cars that get 30 MPG, then the weighted average of that car company is:

[(10 x 20) + (5 x 30)]/15 = [200 +150]/15 = 350/15 = 23.3 MPG.

In 2008, that average value had to be equal to, or above 27.5 MPG. For every 0.1MPG below that, the manufacturer must pay $5.50 per vehicle to the government. The problem is that is has been at 27.5 MPG for the last 18 years.

In 1978, the US Government enacted these standards to reduce dependence on foreign oil. In just 7 years, passenger vehicles were required to become 50% more fuel efficient. And guess what? They did. Auto manufacturers were able to meet that challenge because there was a penalty for not doing so. Since 1985, the US has mandated less than a 2% increase in fuel efficiency in passenger vehicles.

The result was that manufacturers didn’t have to focus on fuel economy any more. We made technology breakthroughs, and our cars became better, and even burn less gas per kilogram than before, but they have become heavier, faster, more powerful, and unfortunately no better in terms of gas mileage.

Both Japan and Australia have implemented fuel economy standards that will require vehicles to be almost 30% more efficient than those in North America for 2010. Europe goes even further, with standards in place that will make cars over 50% more fuel efficient my 2012.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a process where carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) is captured from the gases leaving a fossil fuel burning site, compressed into a liquid, and stored indefinitely in underground geological storage. It allows industries that burn fossil fuels (such as coal fired power stations, oil and gas facilities, cement factories, e.t.c) to continue burning fossil fuels while greatly reducing the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air.

There are a variety of different ways to do this, from chemical absorption processes, to combustion of fuels in pure oxygen, but all of them have the same effect: approximately 90% removal of carbon dioxide from the gases being emitted to the atmosphere.

Why hasn’t anyone heard of it?

Well, while the technology has been around to do this for decades, there is simply no economic reason to do so at the moment. Adding CCS to an existing combustion plant will increase the operating cost of the facility dramatically. A coal fired power plant would expect to see a 20-30% drop in output as a direct result of implementing CCS, meaning less electricity to sell to the public.

A few demonstration plants have sprung up around the world, showing us that it can be done, such as in Weyburn, SK, or Sleipner in the North Sea, or even In Salah in Algeria. The UK government has committed to building the worlds first coal fired power plant with commercial scale CCS, while Norway and the province of Alberta have also committed significant funds for large scale demonstration projects.

Many of these initial projects are driven by enhanced oil recovery, where injection of carbon dioxide assists in the recovery of oil. These projects are useful in the early stages of CCS technology, as the additional revenue from the oil makes CCS more economically attractive, so the technology gets developed; however, in the long term CCS will hopefully be used purely for carbon dioxide storage, and not to increase oil production.

Is it safe?

Carbon dioxide is an inert gas, meaning it doesn’t really react with anything under normal conditions. The idea is to inject the gas deep underground (we’re talking km here), into old, empty oil and gas fields, or even saline aquifers (underground water formations too salty to drink). With correct site identification, we should be confident that these sites can safely contain carbon dioxide indefinitely, since the same rock formations that held oil and gas in place for millions of years will hold the carbon dioxide in place. Obviously there is a need for prudent regulation, to ensure that projects that are developed are safe both for society and the environment.

Isn’t this just like pretending we don’t have a problem?

In a way, yes. It allows us to continue burbing fossil fuels, without having to search for alternative, inherently cleaner forms of energy. However, it does give us the opportunity to act now. I personally see it as a temporary solution. It allows us to take drastic action now to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions at a reasonable cost to society, while giving us perhaps another 50-75 years (hopefully sooner) to find a better long term solution. There is plenty of room out there though, with the US Department of Energy stating that there is potentially enough underground storage capacity in the US and Canada to store 900 years worth of our current emissions from large emitters.

The primary purpose of this meeting is to make progress on what will be the successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, and was the international agreement under which 37 industrialized nations committed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to and average value between 2008 and 2012 of 5.2% below 1990 levels. It allowed for many different flexible mechanisms for industrialized countries to achieve these targets such as emissions trading as we see in the EU, or the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) or Joint Implementation (JI) which allowed them to make greenhouse gas reduction investment in developing countries.

Canada committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990, although we have failed to live up to that target with our countries emissions instead spiralling to 22% above 1990 levels in 2006.

There were many criticisms of the original Kyoto Protocol, many of which were fully justified. These included:

• Lack of greenhouse gas reduction commitments for developing countries (such as India and China)
• Failure to include emissions from airplanes, ships and deforestation among others
• The ease with which free-riders obtained CDM or JI credits (projects which received funding for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that would have gone ahead without the funding)

However, the criticism of these issues often overshadows the importance of the Kyoto Protocol. It represented the first major international collaborative attempt to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The task of solving climate change is a gargantuan one, and one that we will not be able to solve instantaneously. It is going to be a step-by-step process. Kyoto was the first step. Hopefully, this conference in Poland is going to be another step.

In 2012, the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end, and we need another international agreement in place to succeed it. Ideally, we can address many of the problems that Kyoto had, but probably not all of them. In order to have something in place for 2013, the international community will need to have finalized discussions by the end of next year so that individual governments can start planning.

Let’s keep the pressure on our governments to keep working hard towards a solution.

While there is an almost unanimous awareness of climate change (or global warming as they tend to know it), there is a definite lack of understanding of the causes and effects. A majority of students appeared to associate climate change with the depletion of the ozone layer, and many seemed to believe that climate change was a result of things such as garbage as opposed to greenhouse gases. That’s a concern to me, as for Canadian’s to be engaged to the climate change debate, they need to understand not only the problem, but the solutions on offer.

What really surprised me though was the level of insight of the questions that the students asked. I briefly discussed carbon capture and storage, purposefully not going into the details because I thought it would be too technical and not capture their interest, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. All three groups I talked to latched onto it immediately. They posed questions which I have never heard adults in the general population ask me before, and are exactly the type of questions we need all Canadians to be asking.

“How much carbon dioxide can we store underground?”

“Is it a gas or a liquid that we are storing?”

“What are the chances of it leaking?”

“Is there any risk to other plants or animals, or some other long term problem that we haven’t thought about?”

We hope to focus our programs on critical thinking skills, teaching students how to think around a topic, not just take it at face value. It was encouraging to see that kids are not only able, but very interest in having a conversation like this.

With the environment becoming a bigger and bigger issue by the day, many consumers are demanding to know the environmental impact of the things they buy. And businesses are beginning (slowly) to respond.

The concept it to label consumer goods with something similar to a nutritional label, but for the environment. Tesco, a major grocery reatiler around the globe, has made commitments to make the carbon footprints of it’s products as easy to compare as their nutritional information or their price. The photo on this post is from a Tesco store, showing the carbon footprint of one brand of juice and comparing to others available for sale.

While displaying a carbon footprint is one step, it’s possible to take this idea even further. Products could clearly display information such as the amount of:

• Carbon dioxide released
• Water consumed
• Raw materials used
• Waste sent to landill

We would be able to clearly identify which products were better for the environment, rather than having to rely on often misleading marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Unlike food, the environmental impact of a product is largely external, while nutritional information is internal. That means that for nutritional labels, we simply have to look at what is in the food, while for environmental labels we have to look both inside and around it.

We need to look at the raw materials that were used, and the methods used to extract them. We need to consider the factory where the product was built, and how it was powered. We need to consider how the product is used (a car for example, emits carbon dioxide as it runs). And we need to look at how the product is disposed of, as well as everything else in between.

It quickly becomes a case of ‘where do we draw the line’.

Until we have some sort of accepted standard in place, it will be hard to compare one product to another, as we don’t know whether they have included the same things.

Fortunately, some standards are being developed. The Carbon Trust in the UK now certifies products for the carbon dioxide emissions, with the certification being removed if a product increases its emissions per unit from year to year.

It would be easy for a bystander to take these arguments on board as scientific fact; however, each and everyone one of these arguments I have heard has actually been rejected by the vast majority of the scientific community. I’m planning to go through the biggest climate change myths over the next few months, trying to seperate the truths, the partial truths, and the outright lies. Keep in mind, that it’s not only the climate change deniers who are guilty of exageration; sometimes the advocates of climate change are just as guilty of distorting the truth to get their point across.

So, in the words of Campbell Brown, we’ll be taking a ‘No bias. No bull’ approach.

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is often cited as an example of a time when the earth went through a period of global warming, and temperatures escalated above their climatic averages. Usually, I’ve also heard that the average global temperature during the MWP was higher than it is today.

This is a case of a partial truth. There was indeed a Medieval Warm Period (from about 900-1300 A.D), and temperatures were indeed higher than their climatic averages for the time. However, was it global, and were the average temperatures higher than todays? Evidence suggests otherwise.

The initial research into the MWP was done using data from the North Atlantic/European region, where the effect was most clearly observable.

Northern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstruction (0-2000 A.D)

However, by looking at other regions of the world during the same time period, we can that climate patterns opposite to those occuring in the North Atlantic and European region were happening elsewhere. We have to remember that what we are faced with now, is the prospect of global climate change, not regional, so we have to look at what was happening on a global basis during the MWP.

So how warm was the Medieval Warm Period?

By looking at tree rings, and ice core sample, scientists are able to draw up an approximation of a regions climates. As temperature is a regional phenomenon, each sample can only tell us about what was happening in that region. As I mentioned earlier, the MWP is thought to have been most prominent in the Northern Hemisphere, yet even there, the warmest period during the MWP is thought to have been 0.35C cooler than the average temperature from 1970-2000.

So in conclusion?

Yes, there was a Medieval Warm Period, likely caused by natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate (like El Nino, increased volcanic activity).

But, it was likely only regional, and even at it’s peak, still cooler than the global average temperatures we are seeing today.

The current level of global average temperature is unlike those ever witnessed by humankind, and it is still increasing. We have moved beyond natural climatic cycles, and into man-made climate change.

So what exactly is The Gaia Project?

Well, the hope is that The Gaia Project will grow into a social enterprise, offering for-profit environmental services, that will in turn fund our educational out-reach programs. We’re looking at the possibility of green event planning, and carbon auditing as possible for-profit services in the future, but right now, we’ll be starting things off with our charitable, educational programs.

We’re going to go to schools and deliver an interactive, project based, and continually engaging program to students to encourage them to take their interest in climate change beyond recycling. As we develop these programs more fully, I’ll be posting some updates here on the website.

And the website is for….?

The website could become many things, and I’m hoping to hear from all of our readers what they think about the current layout, and what they would like to see on here in the future. Current plans are

• Articles posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday covering climate change news, ideas and solutions
• Information on our educational programs, including additional resources for students and adults alike
• Forums, where you can get together and voice your opinions, ideas, and explain why you have given up showering to save the planet (or at least that’s what you’re telling people!)
• A home page for our future business endeavours

So what makes The Gaia Project different?

Climate change is not a new problem. We’ve suspected something has been going on for decades, yet we haven’t done anything. There are a number of reasons for this, but I believe that one of the big ones is that so far, the voice of the realistic environmentalist hasn’t been heard.

I’m not asking people to abandon their fridges like Green as Thistle. I’m not asking you to cut yourself off from the electricity grid like Greenpa. I’m not saying that we need to make wholesale changes like No Impact Man. These people’s efforts are admirable, and can serve as lessons to us all, but let’s face it, cold showers aren’t most peoples idea of a good time!

I’m hoping that The Gaia Project can fill this niche. We recognize that we’ll keep consuming energy at an ever increasing rate, and that conservation isn’t going to get us to where we need to go. We realize that people are willing to make small sacrifices, but don’t want to see wholesale changes in their quality of life. And we understand that fighting climate change can be done from within a (relatively) free market system. We’re non-partisan realists, not idealists.

So let’s make the small changes where we can, and force our governments to start the type of institutional level change we need to maintain our quality of life at a lower cost to the planet.

All I am asking for us to do a little better.