Amr El Beleidy

GreenPeace – always finds a reason to fight.

Yes, Greenpeace, I never did know much about what greenpeace does, I always assumed they were benign. Then as I looked at some of the things they said I realised that sometimes it just feels like they just want to argue against everything. They are just looking for reasons to protest. Sure sometimes their protests are spot on, sure someitmes they put things that were going wrong right, but they really damage their credibility when they just protest about everything. When they just talk imaginary ideas and when they are just not practical, and seem not to understand what they are talking about. And although they sound very reasonable, I think that sometimes they are not.

I took a look at their ideas about the electricity system and well, I disagree with some things, and I don’t like how they phrase certain thing to be misleading for the uninformed. I have no intention to do a fully referenced research paper on counter arguments to their full proposal, but I want to point out some things that maybe people should keep in mind when reading their arguments for Distributed electricity generation, using combined heat and power generators burning biogas.

First quick explanation to the jargon in the last sentence. Central generation is the production of electricity in massive powerplants and then distrubting the electricity over the wires to all the houses, offices, factories, etc… Distributed generation is generating electricity where it is needed, no need for all the transmisison cables and the loss that occurs as electricity travels far. Combined heat and power is generating electicity through a gas turbine and then using the heat that is produced in the process to heat up houses, offices, etc… Biogas is gas that has been produced from biological material e.g. plants or waste and not the gas we take out of wells in the ground.

So here it is the CHP plant in the middle of the district burning away gas and producing electricity and heat. The only reason it has higher efficeincy is because the heat that it produces is not wasted. But what happens when it’s summer time? What happens when we leave the house or office? Sure the heat will be used to heat up our houses still, but how useful is that? If you ask me, that is wasted heat. So during the summer CHP is just a normal small gas power plant. So the so-called 95% efficiency of some CHPs will go down the drain.

Now also think of the rural areas, it seems that everyone designs things with urban settings in mind. If the houses are far apart and only a few people live in every house, then you heating won’t go far enough and won’t heat the living space of many people. So CHP is not really a good idea in rural communities.

Burning biogas? Well where is your biogas from? Research has shown that biogas from plants tends to have a negative environmental effect rather than the positive carbon saving one we all are made to believe. It puts huge pressures on changing the use of land and burning down forests and this. in effect creates more carbon emissions than how much they would save. So biogasses made from waste I hear you saying. There is not enough. Personally I find biofuels full of issues and there is a lot of research out there that’s saying they do more bad than good.

The reason greenpeace wants to burn biogas in CHPs is not purely enviornmental, they want to decrease the dependance on foreign gas. Well if you are burning gas then you would still be dependant. There is not enough clean biogas (biogas from unharmful sources) and if you burn biogas you would still be dependant on foreign countries. Maybe those coutries no longer include Russia but you will still be dependant.

What about microrenewables? They are still not affordable and they carry a lot of technical issues with the grid because they provide intermittent power. Small generators are just that, too small to generate enough power, so while it helps it still doesn’t provide independance from thermal sources.

All this microgeneration will also require an investment in the grid infrastructure to be able to move power between different districts. Moving power of course means again that you losing it to transmission, although possibly less losses. You also need a management system to take care of which power moves where when and for how much.

So overall it is good that someone is putting pressure on politicans and governments to do something, but they are not alwyas very reasonable about it. So chill out greenpeace.