Tag: sustainability

A note on industrial decarbonisation

Industrial decarbonisation refers to the transition of the industrial sector from the use of fossil fuels to less carbon intensive sources of fuel, as well as for their processes to release fewer greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. This will help minimise the impact of the industrial sector on our planet and reduce negative externalities. An externality is a positive or negative consequence of an action that affects someone without affecting the person who did the original action. In this case, pollution caused by industries negatively impacts planetary warming, health outcomes, biodiversity, etc. causing poor outcomes and imposing costs on people and other living beings. Externalities are not reflected in costs to the entity that executed the original act, but either benefit or impose costs on bystanders.

Industries emitted 4.1 GtCO2-eq or 24% of global emissions in 2019. This figure does not take emissions from their use of power and heat, which raises the figure to 20 GtCO2-eq or 34%. However, direct fuel use emissions from industrial activities were found to have decreased to 7 GtCO2-eq, 50% of direct industrial emissions (of the 4.1 GtCO2-eq) in 2019.1

The authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 6th assessment report had high confidence that “Net zero CO2 emissions from the industrial sector are possible but challenging”, and stated that while energy efficiency will continue to be important, switching production to less energy intensive processes is vital. The report further states that industrial emissions have been growing faster since 2000 than emissions in any other sector, driven by increased basic materials (raw material, such as those extracted through mining or forestry, etc. used in the industrial sector) extraction and production1

Innovation and accounting are the backbones of decarbonisation, and any sustainability strategy, here are some available to those wish to pursue decarbonisation:

i. Energy efficiency – Reducing energy consumption reduces emissions, and happily, reduces production costs.

ii. Using low carbon energy sources – Using clean energy sources for all or part of the production process, such as equipment powered by electricity rather than traditional fuels (think gas burners vs. induction stove tops- the latter removes fossil fuel from the equation, except for what is used at source to produce the electricity).

iii. Greater supply chain accountability – While addressing Scope 3 emissions are egregiously challenging, organisations taking care of their S1 and S2 emissions while working with their supply chain partners to address their S1 and S2 emissions will help minimise S3 for the entire chain.

iv. Targeting Scope 4 – Any industrial decarbonisation strategy must embrace innovating to increase S4 emissions, which are emissions avoided that would otherwise have been made if the current prevalent technology, was used. For example, if a motion triggered lighting system in hospital corridors is more energy efficient than one which is left switched on the entire time. The emissions avoided due to the development and use of motion sensing lights are an example of S4 emissions. Work from home, or using video conferencing technology instead of working daily from office, or traveling for meetings are other contemporary examples.

v. Reducing energy losses – According to the USEIA, more than 60% energy is lost to conversion.3 When fuel is burnt for producing heat, which is then used indirectly to produce electricity- for example, burning coal (level 1 – stored chemical energy to thermal energy) to heat water to produce steam (level 2 – thermal energy used to change the state of water from liquid to gas) to power turbines (level 3 – thermal energy to mechanical energy) to run a generator rotor to produce electricity (level 4 – Mechanical energy to electricity) – energy is lost to various inefficiencies such as incomplete chemical conversion of the raw material to heat, friction, heat loss, transition losses, electrical losses, and so on. These losses are significantly reduced when renewable energy is used to power turbines, but grid dependent industries will receive their electricity after transmission and distribution (T&D) losses.

Industries can help address this by using better captive technologies such as Trigeneration, also known as Combined Heating Cooling and power (CHPC), which uses natural gas as a fuel source (I know) to produce electricity, and uses the waste heat to produce heating (say for heating buildings or for process heating) and refrigeration (through vapor absorption refrigeration systems) as required. Of course, this way the organisation will have greater control over its power source, and low grid-dependence- and no T&D losses.

v. Using artificial intelligence – artificial intelligence can identify redundancies in our systems, and find where and how we can reduce emissions through our industrial supply chains. Whether the suggestions are usable or not is for humans to decide once the computers have done their work.

Lastly, I’ve seen a lot of content advocating for Carbon Capture and related technologies/ processes, but I don’t quite understand them yet, and I do think abatement is better than storage. Also trees already do capture and use carbon, and perhaps we can just increase the global natural forest coverage.

I’d love to go into industry specific strategies in further posts, so stay tuned for those posts.

Sources:

1. IPCC AR6 Chapter 11

2. World Bank data on global T&D losses, 2014

3. More than 60% of energy used for electricity generation is lost in conversion

Understanding Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS)

I’ve worked on four appliance MEPS projects (colloquially also known as ‘Energy Star Rating’), one of which was approved for implementation by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE).

MEPS are a comparative rating system through which appliances are rated on their energy consumption. It’s called Minimum Energy Performance Standard because anything that is rated below 1 star is not allowed to be sold in the India any longer. Each star symbolises a bin, or interval scale, indicating energy consumed by appliances. The most efficient appliances find themselves in the highest bin, and the least are in the lowest.

The first stem while creating an MEPS is to choose the appliance. If the appliance is not widely used, or generally does not consume too much energy, the impact on national energy consumption statistics will be limited (think bread toasters). The next step is to understand the market itself. A thorough market survey of the products in the market for a particular appliance- for example, if the appliance is an air conditioner, what are the kinds of air conditioners being used? Air conditioners are primarily sold to households, so the the right people to collect data from for this appliance are the companies that make and sell them. If the appliance is used primarily by commercial entities, such as a Visicooler, a comprehensive primary research of the brands, models, usage hours, product lifecycle, whether it has any inbuilt energy saving mechanisms (such as automatic sleep mode), and other relevant data points is the way to go forth. Also, BEE does not care about any feature of the product that does not relate to energy consumption- so if your refrigerator deoderises its insides, or your fan can play music- these extras are not relevant to the star rating process (but they will consume more energy than the same product without them). A systematic literature review of other jurisdictions who have regulated the energy consumption of the product is beneficial at this stage- it makes sure we don’t miss anything important, and also allows us to learn from their work.

Once the data is available and sorted, we can find the range for each level of capacity for all the products- for example, a 36 inch television will have a lower range of minimum and maximum rated energy consumption (as provided by the brand) when compared with a 52 inch television of the same type- Since the greater the resolution of a television, the more energy it will consume, on average. This is why the same scale cannot be applied to all devices of a particular type of appliance.

Electrical appliances have outputs, and for producing the output they use electricity. For example refrigerators (of any sort) deliver cooling per unit time, and use electricity as fuel to do that. To find out how much energy a device consumes, we divide the electricity used by the time the device was used for. Nota bene, not every appliance is run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year- but some certainly are- a refrigerator will usually run the entire 24 hours, daily, but a an air conditioner is a seasonal product and will be used only in summers. Consequently, to estimate the energy consumed by the average device of a particular type of appliance, we will also have to estimate the number of hours they will be used. A year has (24 hours a day x 365 days a year) 8,760 hours. If we assume that the appliance we are regulating is used for 5 hours a day daily on average in all households, then it is on average used for 1,825 hours every year. So the formula for finding out the average energy consumed by a particular type of device, say, an LED television of 40 inches by Brand A is:

Average annual electricity consumed = electricity consumed through the year/ time used through the year

We find this number out for each device in the market. How would we get the information? Well for an organised market, the manufacturers usually have an idea (whether they advertise it or not, or whether that product is regulated or not). To understand the kind of products I mean here, think of walking into a snazzy consumer durables store- most products there (laptops, geysers, most types of space conditioners, etc.) are too sophisticated to be manufactured by back alley producers. On the other hand, products like water coolers or desert coolers are easier to put together, and finding enough small manufactures is a skirmish with listings on websites like India Mart. Finding enough manufacturers is vital to understand the size of the market, the types of devices being sold, the energy they consume, etc. Since in such cases small manufacturers are unlikely to know the annual energy consumption of the units they sell, a test at an NABL certified laboratory for the same is part of the picture.

Once all this information is received and processed, the next step is to estimate the growth of that product’s market in the next ten years, and make the star rating table. The table will naturally disqualify some devices from being sold, since anything under 1 star will not be allowed in the market any longer – which is another reason it’s important to have an inclusive table of manufacturers rather than just the large corporations: it affects livelihoods. Further, the government may find ways to offer such small businesses compliance aid, or decide to make the rating discretionary for a few years. The rating scale selected is usually one where most devices in the market fall within 2 stars and 4 stars. Over time, usually every 1 – 1.5 years, the scale is shifted so that what was once a 5 star becomes a 4 or 3 star, and the baseline energy efficiency in the market increases (since what was once a 2 or 3 star product is now rated 1 star, anything less energy efficient will be retired from the market).

Once the scale is selected, we can multiply the current sales data for each device with the projected sales data for the next 10 years and the average energy consumed for each star rating bin (accounting for upward shifts in the rating scale), and we will have an estimate of the energy saved by the implementation of this policy for the time period.

I hope this blog post inspires you to always purchase a 5 star energy rated product, since a lot of thought, effort, and money goes into making sure your devices consume as little electricity as possible.

Ecosystem services- how humans utilise unpriced planetary resources

Ecosystem services are all the benefits humans derive from nature. Whether directly or indirectly, human societies derive all their economic and non economic resources from nature, but that is not all we can attribute to it.

Ecosystems are formed when organisms interact with the physical space they occupy on the planet. It consists of biotic and abiotic components (biotic: anything that is or was once alive, abiotic: was never alive), and deliver various functions, such as:

i. Providing energy – Animals cannot convert our Sun’s heat and light to nutrients. When plants do that, and are consumed by herbivores, who are then consumed by other animals, they enable animal life and activity on earth. It is the ancient Sun’s bounty we use when we consume fossil fuels, for they are nothing but dead and buried plants and animals of several ages.

ii. Providing habitat – Life usually has a type of space it prefers to live in: a certain temperature range, an amount of humidity it can tolerate, the land it grows in, where its prey lives. These preferences are evolved over millennia and organisms that belong to a certain area have a distinct evolutionary advantage in that type of region.

iv. Providing planetary cycle regulation – Ecosystems and their interactions regulate all the biogeochemical cycles of our planet. Whether directly or indirectly, they produce most of the resources present in nature. Examples include fresh water, oxygen, seeds, and biomass decomposition which leads to richer soils and removal of dead creatures.

v. Providing commercial raw material – nearly every molecule on our planet comes either directly or indirectly through the ecosystem production factory. Even synthetic molecules are completely or in part sourced through this production cycle. Think of anything you own, anything you use, anything you want to possess- it was created by the planetary ecosystem in one way or another. Even synthetic molecules require humans to formulate them.

vi. Providing rehabilitation services – Humans use nature for exposure to beauty, companionship, relaxation, spiritual experiences, and cognitive enrichment. Nearly none of the revenue generated by industries based on the participation in these activities is reinvested in preserving or enhancing the ecosystems that support them.

Our empire of commerce and poverty is rooted in the soil we stand on, and everything that made it.

Is it possible to price these activities? Of course. The easiest ways are to simply add up what can be traced to nature in our global GDP… which is everything (Since we have not yet started mining extraterrestrial worlds, so at the moment nature simply means our own home). However, what about pricing the services that save us from spending money? When a bee pollinates a flower so we don’t use human hands to do it, or when a bird eats an insect that would otherwise eat our crop, so we don’t require insecticides, how do we count that? One way to do that is to simply destroy all ecosystems, and see how everything is priced with only humans and human food alive. A less dystopian way is perhaps to understand the services provided by the ecosystems as thoroughly as we can, and invest in them so that they become both, healthy and self sustaining, and replace the parts of our economy that are dedicated to being nature-substitutes, as well as enhances it (and we can later compare how much we are saving).

It’s important to understand that not all nature based solutions are harmless to nature itself. Of course fossil fuels are the greatest examples- because yes those are as natural as they come, but even more direct sources of energy, such as using solar energy requires the use of mining for rare earth metals; Hydroelectricity can devastate large land areas and damage life in the fresh water source used for it; Restoring apex predator population (as much as we are able) will inevitably lead to conflicts between those predators and the local human population. Even so, on balance, the scale is very much tipped to one side in favour of choosing solutions that restore ecosystems.

So how do we build our solar punk paradise? Here are some suggestions:

i. Education – Early and continuous instruction in what ecosystems are, the local ecosystems, their safeguarding, and their sustainable uses will help society as a whole understand how to live as part of ecosystems, and use them for human benefit (monetary and otherwise) without depleting them.

ii. Investment in Ecosystems – Large swathes of the planet have been left in desolation due to human economic activities. These devastated lands are in need of restoration, and investment in such restoration will help nearby areas by resulting in more predictable weather, and a nicer place to live, among other rewards.

iii. Payment for ecosystem guardianship – There is absolutely no reason communities who traditionally maintain ecosystems as part of their culture should do that work for free. First, it must be recognised as work, and next, it must be valued fairly and paid so that they are compensated for their efforts, and are also able to continue their cultural planet nurturing practices rather than joining the conventional economy.

iv. Creating safe zones – Humans are everywhere. Creating ecological hotspots without human settlements will help many species of flora and fauna thrive. Such areas can be sustained through tourism.

v. Policy interventions – Coordinated government action at the local, national and multinational levels which may include policies, regulation, taxation, market controls, or other intercessions in partnership with local and regional bodies at every level to drive change forward and bring people together.

Financing climate solutions – I

Climate oriented finance is often a nebulous, not-quite-defined cloud of international funds, bilateral and multilateral agreements, public and private initiatives. It’s an ever changing landscape, and several trillions of United States Dollars are required as of date to truly combat the ever escalating events 1, 2, 3 so there is no one way to pinpoint its exact components, but here is a first primer on climate finance.

Money used to help adjust to the effects of climate change (adaptation finance), reduce the future burden attributable to climate change (mitigation finance), and/ or help change our current ways of working that contribute to the perpetuation of climate change towards a low (or lower) carbon intensive economy (transition finance) is classified roughly as climate finance. Additionally, money used for capacity building or educating people about climate change and how we can adjust to or tackle the situation in the shorter and longer terms is also part of the money bag.

There are various mechanisms used to activate financing for climate change related projects, such as:

i. Multilateral Funding – money provided by a group of countries for a project.

ii. Bilateral Investments – Funds invested by one country into projects in another country.

iii. Global or Regional Climate Funds – These funds may operate at any geographical level. Some global examples are the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the Adaptation Fund.

iv. Blended Finance – using more than one source of funds in a way that different funding agencies take up different different risks depending on their own risk appetite, as well as different rates of returns. For example, a government agency may not require any rate of return on a project, but a private entity is likely to have a base requirement. These bodies will also have different capacity for risk. using a combination of such sources will allow for projects that may otherwise be difficult to fund. These sources of funds may be sovereign funds, private grants, loans, scholarships, crowd sourced, etc.

These funding sources use a variety of instruments to distribute money among various deserving projects. Financial instruments are a monetary contract that promise to transfer value from the giver to the receiver. A bank note is an example of a financial instrument. These instruments may be:

i. Debt, such as climate bonds or loans.

ii. Equity, such as investing in companies that work directly on climate solutions (for example, a company that researched how to produce electricity from non fossil fuel sources).

iii. Climate projects may also be financed through what I think of as ‘Indirect Financing’ or ‘Risk Financing’, such as providing guarantees for the funding of higher risk projects, in which case the guarantor is not providing the money to run the project directly, but instead assuring the financier that if they do not meet the required return, the guarantor will meet the deficit.

iv. Climate Derivatives are a type of instrument in which a party takes on the weather related risk associated with a particular event or project, and depending on the outcome, they may keep the premium paid to them to cover the risk, or they will have to pay for the weather damages.

As mentioned previously, climate related finance is a complex subject, and while this is a pithy overview of the basics, in the next articles in this series I’ll take up these topics in greater detail.

How to build an energy efficient building

I worked for 5 years in an architectural firm working in the energy efficiency/ sustainability space. Here are some things I learnt while working there about making buildings that are comfortable to live in, and have reduced energy consumption in comparison to buildings that do not incorporate such measures.

There are two types of building energy efficiency strategies- active and passive. Active strategies are those used to make buildings more comfortable or reduce energy bills after the construction is finished- for example, using air conditioning to make an office cooler, or installing solar panels to reduce energy consumption. Passive strategies are those that are incorporated into the design and construction of your structure.

I’ll write about passive strategies.

Constructions made with passive design strategies are automatically more comfortable to live in, since they are planned to be climate responsive to the area in which they are situated. For example, a house built in cold climate will be snug if it is well insulated, thus keeping the house warm. At the same time, a well insulated house in an area with hot weather will also do well with insulation, so that external temperatures do not make the living spaces warm.

Airflow

Designing openings in buildings such as fenestration, or doorways that allow air flow into and out of the room at body height helps removing carbon dioxide and harmful chemicals released by the various paraphernalia kept inside the building as well as wall paints, tiles, etc., body odors, other smells, and make the room cooler. Try to place the openings so that air circulates around the room before it exits. This can be done by not placing openings exactly opposite each other so that air does not come in and leave in a straight line, or placing them too close together so that air does not exit before circulating the room.

Light

Design your structure so that you need as little artificial light as possible, while also minimising the loss of internal temperature.

In cold areas, sunlight is at a premium, and large glass façades allow light inside the house. Glass also facilitates a greenhouse effect, which will also help capture any warmth into the construction.

In hot climates, make sure you get indirect sunlight into the house by bouncing direct sunlight into the building, rather than having a large glass section in the building envelope that allows direct daylight in, thereby heating the space (thus requiring artificial space cooling), and dazzling people’s eyes (thus requiring window drapery to block the light, and artificial lights to illuminate the space).

Overhangs are horizontal shades above the opening, and fins that may be vertical or horizontal will help with shade. Using extensions under windows that receive direct sunlight, which then bounces off them and into the room, allows indirect sunlight to illuminate the interior. Such construction design can be used in combination to help protect your building interiors from direct sunlight, while also reducing the use of artificial lighting during daytime.

Orientation

In the northern hemisphere, buildings that have windows or living spaces in the East or West directions will be uncomfortably hot in warmer climes, either seasonally or through the year- especially those in the West, as that region will have the hot afternoon Sun. North facing windows allow glare free light into the structure, while south facing windows also allow heat into the structures, great for geographies that are usually cooler.

In the southern hemisphere, our Sun occupies the northern sky more than the southern sky, therefore fenestration facing the south will allow for a cooler house, and therefore be better for warmer climates.

Building Envelope

The building envelope is the entire wrapping around any building- just like a pig’s skin keeps the pig together, the building’s envelope defines where the building is, and includes the outside walls, windows, doors, and the roof.

Make your building so that it keeps the insides of the building inside as much as possible- that is, use material that will last the test of time as well as any disastrous events (natural or otherwise) as well as release as few harmful fumes as possible, use good quality weather proofing such as insulation so that the temperatures on the inside are comfortable through the year (especially in regions with large differences between indoor and outdoor temperatures), water proofing that protects the building from dampness and mold, build in slants into the roof to help remove precipitation from it, and in hot zones, use cool roof techniques.

Neighbourhood

If your structure is short, surrounded by tall buildings, it will be naturally shaded. In case it is the opposite, you’ll benefit from Sunlight. Given the average climate in your geography, either can be great, or not so great.

The number of trees in the neighbourhood will also help cool the area, as well as slow down the wind (both, the hot summer winds and the cold winter ones).

If you’re situated downhill and in a heavy rainfall area, your basement and ground levels may flood easily.

Researching all the above points before you invest in your structure, either by building one or buying an already built construction will help you make the right decisions.