How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again
lowtechmagazine.com
lowtechmagazine.com
This is probably the key take-away:
"Coppicing cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels"
Then the kicker is the last paragraph:
"These numbers confirm that it is not biomass energy that’s unsustainable. If the whole of humanity would live as the 40% that still burns biomass regularly, climate change would not be an issue. What is really unsustainable is a high energy lifestyle. We can obviously not sustain a high-tech industrial society on coppice forests and line plantings alone. But the same is true for any other energy source, including uranium and fossil fuels."
So, we ramp down our energy use by a couple of orders of magnitude.
That's not going to happen.
When the article says "two-thirds of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested sustainably" it's also saying "one third of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested unsustainably." Even the very low energy consumption per capita of biomass-reliant populations is not sustainable at modern population densities.
Biomass is a very low efficiency method of converting sunlight to energy useful to humans. That's why mainstream scientific and environmental organizations are more interested in solar photovoltaic technology; PV can provide 50 times more useful energy per hectare than biomass. The "high tech" approach is not just fashion-driven technology for technology's sake.
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Biomas...
We need to stop looking for One Weird Fix. It’s not out there, and /or we keep breaking it by changing the conditions. You will be looking for hedges, and some of those hedges will have stacking functions.
I'd agree with that. Low Tech Magazine keeps promoting One Weird Fix of "use less complicated technology." In early issues it highlighted a few simple old technologies that were plausibly equal or superior to modern complicated technologies. But it rapidly exhausted plausible candidates.
Recent Low Tech Magazine articles are good branching off points for exploring historical technologies but poor at conceiving solutions to the energy and environmental problems we face in the 21st century. They keep highlighting ideas that barely touch on today's largest energy demands or that require far too much land per person. I have a bunch of energy crisis books from the 1970s and they also frequently dreamt of a more rural existence than is now possible for Earth's billions of people. They kept invoking past lifestyles, ignoring how many fewer people there were in the past. The mismatch is even more severe in 2020 than it was in 1974.
The more we automate the creation of food, water, clothing, and shelter, the fewer people we need to keep the rest of us from starving or freezing to death. What do the rest of us do for a living? Why do we keep going?
A very careful dose of pastoralism can address part of that problem. Locally produced goods also tend to have a smaller carbon footprint, so there's something there as well. There are people who think we can fix all of our problems that way, and so far I've carefully avoided having to tell any of them they're wrong.
Related to pastoralism is a bigger category: Stewardship. We could keep a lot of people in meaningful work by doing all of the deferred maintenance we're neglecting as we industrialize. Every time we find a new way to Go Fast and Break Things, we should be fixing what we break. Looking at sustainability and lifecycle costs.
There's a PR problem with becoming a glorified gardener. It's a janitor with a better class of filth but a higher risk of injury. The hype you see is, fundamentally, trying to raise the 'station' of a whole raft of professions and hobbies. Romanticizing them.
Why would the few remaining workers elect to work only to provide for others?
Even if you manage not to sink into an existential pit of despair, some rabble rouser may incite the means of production to rebel against you, introducing an external existential threat. So the dignity you’re looking for may save your life, twice.
How do we do that, outside of intentional work slowdowns or Futurama suicide booths? Ever escalating consumption is the answer since WWII, but we are killing ourselves doing that. What else is there? You can start by doing all the things we never find the time to do. I don’t know how we solve that problem for the great grandkids, though. Probably involves space colonies. Mars would be a ridiculously massive jobs creation program.
OTOH, if the alienation of capitalism is really the problems you want to address, Mars is an extremely expensive way to solve it, even temporarily, for a very small slice of the people who are afflicted by it.
Has great storage efficiency though.
> That's not going to happen.
It'll need to happen in order for the escalating effects of climate change to be curbed to any meaningful extent. The focus on renewables and other abstractions away from fossil fuels is a distraction from this fact.
Storage and transmission still have room for improvement, but generation by PV is already so cheap that all we have to do to “win” that part of the race is continue the last 30 years of trends in PV deployment for roughly 12 more years.
As a result, switching to renewables needs to be combined with reducing our energy use, so that renewables can meet our needs without causing the emissions that we are seeking to eliminate on a very short timescale. Reducing energy use, as you might imagine, is a very complex subject.
One difficulty is the Jevons Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox If you rely too heavily on the technological solution of energy efficiency, people just use the technology more and energy usage isn't actually reduced. Low-Tech Mag mentions the example of more efficient LED lights leading to the popularization of digital billboards, which use more energy than a regular billboard (but less energy than a digital billboard would have used before LEDs). https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-...
As China is now the leading producer and consumer of PV, I suggest this is self-correcting, and that their PV production will naturally become greener — the more units they make and install the greener each subsequent unit becomes to make.
- energy demand is increasing
- solar panel production + installation creates emissions, and may have been a net negative at some times/places in the past
- we can't spend our entire carbon budget on solar panels
- yet we must dramatically increase renewable energy very quickly to avoid climate catastrophe
Personally I'm hopeful that technology like Heliogen's solar oven will help solar panel manufacturers eliminate fossil fuels from production, by achieving very high temperatures sustainably: https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/19/business/heliogen-solar-energ...
But I fear that if there is not enough awareness of or investment in the issue, we will blow past our carbon budget due to not carefully considering exactly how we execute the transition to renewable energy.
The first unit of PV that you build in an all-coal economy will necessarily be a very CO2-intensive manufacturing process; a unit of PV made in a PV-only (electric mining equipment also) economy will have none.
The power output of that first particular unit can supply enough energy over its lifetime to build between 10 and 60 more of the same unit depending on which estimates I use for lifetime and energy cost per unit.
China is heavily dominated by coal, I think just under 2% PV by actual generation? So yes, very dirty. But their growth over the last decade was about x670, more than enough to turn the dirty production green in the next decade. (Far too much even for that, which is why I think their rates of increase have gone down in the last few years).
Do they want to bring back slavery, or serfdom?
"How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" (1919)
[0] 10.1016/j.biombioe.2014.11.019
Then again, perhaps that's what the author is actually advocating . If so, it's not so surprising. There are a lot of cheerleaders for civilizational and especially institutional destruction these days, often just as a means to replace them with some other system more appealing to their personal preferences, whatever those are.
Renewables like wind and solar are hardly radical solutions for energy production anymore, despite the narratives coming out of fossil-fuel aligned political groups. They are just the obvious incremental next step in the evolution of harnessing solar energy. Yes, they are complicated enough technologies that, unlike biomass, they can't realistically be harnessed today without a dependency on global supply chains. If you consider that a problem, then well, that's a different topic altogether.
Very few want to return to agrarian society, but some want to use a reversion as a pretext for controlling industrial society toward illiberal ends.
We can't go back without a massive reduction in population.
And it would take a huge population reduction (either up front, of through starvation after the shift to agrarian lifestyle). It would quite likely take rolling back the industrial revolution altogether - because it would be next to impossible for a reduced population of farmers to sustain current level of technology; all tools and things supported by it, including industrial chemistry and material science, would just degrade over coming decades and it couldn't be recreated. All of that is hard to imagine for someone with shallow understanding of how the world and technology behind it works.
"There are several ways to escape from the parallel universe of energy efficiency. First, while energy efficiency hinders significant long term reduction in energy demand through the need for equivalence of service, the opposite also holds true – making everything less energy efficient would reverse the growth in energy services and reduce energy demand"
"Likewise, if an “energy inefficiency policy” were to mandate the use of inefficient central heating boilers, heating large homes to present-day comfort standards would be unaffordable for most people. They would be forced to find alternative solutions to achieve thermal comfort, for instance heating only one room, dressing more warmly, using personal heating devices, or moving to a smaller home."
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-...
It almost reads like marketing copy from the oil industry.
A far more sensible way to handle this is not to return to 1960s ICEs for cars and oil powered central heating boilers for heating (with all their associated local pollution damage), but rather to price renewable electricity appropriately to ensure efficient consumption by having rapidly increasing price tiers for higher usage consumers and time-of-use pricing based on supply and demand. This already happens in many places. This should also satisfy the requirements of those who wish impose a type of "noble hardship" upon the population, as it still subjects them (via pricing correlated with weather events) to the vagaries of nature, including weather (want to set your AC to 65 at 4PM during a heat wave, without a medical requirement? No problem, that will be $0.80/kWh).
Also, remember that the cost of producing renewable electricity is not based on the the marginal cost of generating it, but on the capital cost of building and financing it. That cost will drop, but it isn't going to zero any time soon. What is needed is for renewable+storage to drop in cost below the that of fossil fuels. We're almost there.
I found the rest of the article and website very thoughtful and detailed with extensive sources, so I forgive the handful of batty positions taken because I find everything else to be useful data, historical research, and exercises in lateral thinking. It's clear to me that most people do not take the climate crisis seriously enough and seem to believe that we can continue acting exactly as we always have, while mere technological innovation will solve it. Low-Tech Mag generally advances solutions that are/were designed for a world where energy is expensive, and I find that quite compelling because that is the world we now live in, whether people realize it or not.
Like all practices, you have to consider the entire living system, and not just a technique in isolation. Coppicing reduces the available habitats for birds, which weakens the overall ecosystem.
In permaculture design, a site would be divided into different zones. There would be a zone (zone 3 or zone 4) set aside for coppicing, and there would be a zone (zone 5) set aside as a wilderness preserve that is not coppiced. Additionally, the site might be designed in such a way that the trees set aside for coppicing are planted in a way that forms a living hedge, acting as both windbreak and privacy.
Burning biomass, usually at rather low temperatures, is terrible for air quality. One fireplace produces pollution comparable to a few thousand natural gas heaters.[1]
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bay-Area-pollution-ag...
Burning organic matter means half of the nutrients in the material float away with the wind, so you don't want to combust it for any reason (and especially not for disposal, which is currently my biggest beef with the show).
So I like biomass, and I don't like biomass. As I understand it, you can limit your losses in that respect by separating your ramial (young) wood out. It's higher protein and nutrient content, suitable for composting if done correctly. But most of your coppice is going to be ramial wood, so where's your sustainable harvesting angle?
The only tech I know that completely avoids that problem (Super Critical Water Oxidation) requires pressure vessels and very high tech ceramics. Last I checked it was so expensive they only used it for superfund site cleanup. Turns out salts become highly corrosive at high pressures and temperatures, and there's a triangle of heat, pressure and corrosion for ceramics, so you need ceramic composites to build a reaction chamber with any sort of durability.
You wouldn't want one of these in your basement, let alone your kitchen.
As for pollution, no-one can deny that, but the rocket stove bunch claim much reduced emissions compared to even modern wood stoves (which I personally find hard to believe). But still, billions of people are still using wood to heat their homes; that's not going to change soon. Reusing that to produce electricity as a byproduct is something that some people call 100% efficient.
open fires is terrible for air pollution because the temperature is indeed quite low, which leads to a lot of material not burning and ending up in the air, but you can easily[1] build a stove which burns way better.
Then regarding electricity production, a fireplace insert usually produce 5-15kW of thermal energy around 800°C, which you can pretty cheaply convert to at least 1kW of electricity. That's way more than what you were talking about.
Coppice and pollard give you long straight shoots, which you can use for building and crafting materials, or the greens can be used as fodder in colder climates.
Some of the oldest trees in England are apparently fallow pollards (pollarding, like bonsai, can extend the life of the plant, rather than shortening it as you might expect).
Like so many of my other side projects, though, it is still in the "research" phase.
Ironically, I mentally lump the people who want nuclear powered steam generators as the only power source into the same general bracket. It all seems a bit quaint and inefficient compared with PV.
Yes, if you only need to have electricity during shiny day.