After David Mackay

[fivemack]

Every other day, I have a bath.

It is 50cm wide, 130cm long, 15cm deep, say 0.1 cubic metres or a hundred kilos - the water weighs slightly more than I do - and made of water at 40C, heated to that temperature from the 15C at which it arrives in the house.

So that's about ten megajoules - about three kilowatt-hours - of heat that had to be applied to the water. I've got a reasonably modern boiler of say 60% efficiency, the energy content of natural gas is 37 megajoules per cubic metre, so I'm using about half a cubic metre of gas to heat the bath, say twenty moles of methane. I've turned it into twenty moles of CO2 - 880 grams.

So my bathing habit produces 160 kilos of CO2 annually. Easyjet produces 100 grams of CO2 per passenger-kilometre, so my bathing habit is equivalent to an annual return flight to Berlin.

One ton of CO2 emission is equivalent to three hot baths a day for a year - that's a nice human-scale unit.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to hope that, as civilisation progresses, everyone in the world would be able to share my bathing habits. That would be a billion tons of CO2 annually, slightly under 4% of current planetary CO2 output and a little under the present output of the Chinese cement industry; not entirely unreasonable.

It is, however, also three billion cubic metres of natural gas a day, or say a round trillion a year (about 30% of the planetary consumption of 2.819Tm^3/year from reserves of about 200Tm^3); if the water was heated electrically, it's thirty petajoules a day - a third of a terawatt, three times the output of all the nuclear power stations in France, or the power produced by covering Luxembourg in solar panels.

This sounds as if the world can have a bath every other day in an entirely sustainable fashion for an infrastructure input of around fifty billion dollars a year (nuclear power stations costing $3 per watt and lasting twenty years); large but doable. I'm glad of this, I didn't know at the start of the calculation whether my ablutory habits alone would be enough to make my lifestyle unsustainable on planetary scale.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

[Correction]

Or one could gather solar energy on the roof without bothering about conversion to electricity at considerably less expense, probably, than using nuclear-generated electricity. Naw...

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

You could gather solar energy on the roof, but when something goes wrong with the secondary-loop heat exchangers at Sizewell B nuclear power station, there are teams of engineers on the premises at the Suffolk coast ready to fix it at a moment's notice, and there are twenty more power stations ready to ensure that the supply of electricity to England isn't much interrupted.

When something goes wrong with the primary-loop solar heat exchangers on my roof, I need to take time off work to pay personally for people with ladders and spanners to come and fix it, I go three days without a bath and possibly with water coming out of the ceiling, and I still need the gas or electric heating to cover the common case on rainy Wednesdays in January when there wasn't any solar heat for the exchangers to collect, so I need a small plumber's nightmare of storage tanks and interchange valves too.

I don't think it's unreasonable to prefer one mighty plumber's nightmare of inconel tubing and directional-solidified nickel turbine blades in Suffolk to one small kludged-together plumber's nightmare of plastic pipes assembled by the lowest bidder in my house and every other house in the street.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Nuclear power is a decent way to generate electricity, if we really need that much, but using electricity to heat water is usually a hugely wasteful practice. I suspect that when all costs are tallied your nuclear-electric water heater is a lot more expensive than gathering solar energy and using it to heat water. If you still want to spend some extra money on your heating system, you can lease 24x7 maintenance on your local system, and probably still save money overall.

Better than using plain electricity is to use electricity with heat pumps

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/presentations/SEWTHA11/mgp00088.html

I like using solar hot water heaters, but if you want a solution without local plumbers and leaks on your roof, go for a japanese-made heat pump, which is 4.9 times more efficient than a plain electric water heater.

David MacKay

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

I don't think that is a fair criticism of solar water heating- my parents have had a system for 15 years now which has had precisely no maintenance (bar some boiler work not directly related to the solar heat exchanger) and replaces nearly all our water heating energy use in the summer, quite a lot in autumn and spring, and a little bit in the winter. They're extremely simple devices (especially the ~80%* of the world's total installation which is on Chinese roofs). Professionally, I have never heard that high maintenance is a problem with solar passive panels, but then I am usually speaking with industry people who would say that.

Not that I'm especially anti-nuclear, or that I'm arguing with your point really, but I suspect you could cut your estimate in half by using solar passive sensibly and then need fewer nuclear power stations.

*ESTIF, Chinese National Development & Reform Committee

[naath.livejournal.com]

Where are these objects bought from? (and are they currently a reasonable price?). Not that I own a house I could attach one to :-( (yet another flaw of renting).

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

You would buy from an installer - the manufacture of these things is quite easy and so the manufacturing industry is very fragmented. My parents' cost (iirc) £6k and they got a £2k grant under the Clear Skies programme, which has been replaced with the Low Carbon Buildings Programme, here:
http://www.lowcarbonbuildings.org.uk/home/
for which the applications process is apparently a nightmare, with relatively low caps for total applications processed each month. The site gives the standard cost of a system as £3,200-4,500, with a 10-year warranty and the suggestion of a yearly check by householder and a professional check-up every 3-5 years.

The best way to find an installer is probably by looking at their 'certified installers' list, or at the Solar Trade Association, http://www.solar-trade.org.uk/

It's hard to tell if these are expensive. Depends on far too many factors (for example how many people are taking baths or showers, how good you are about taking cool showers when it's only a bit sunny, whether you quit with the dishwasher etc). My parents think it's probably paid for itself, but are not really sure.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Oooh, cool. Thanks.

I'm sure I read somewhere that dishwashers use less hot water than washing up manually does. I guess it depends how much water you use...

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

This may very well be true; however, dishwashers (at least the one my parents used to have - this is somewhat limited market research!) heat their own water as they use it, like power showers, instead of taking it from the hot water tank.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah right, yes. And obviously that doesn't use the handy hot water...

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Ooh, excellent, I didn't know that. I had an uninformed belief that plumbing wasn't very reliable, and I was wrong.

I suppose I have had a luxuriant bath using solar-heated water in Scotland in May - admittedly after a quite clement day in May.

I rent, which makes a lot of these permanent house modifications (even insulation) somewhat impractical. I've found a seller of solar-water-heating-panels who will charge four thousand pounds for a set, including installation, but I don't think that breaks even in under a hundred years.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that it takes practically as much energy to heat your water from 15 degrees Centigrade to 20 degrees Centigrade as it does to heat it from 40 to 45 - so even if you let the solar do the basic legwork and then give it an hour-long blitz with the electric heater when you get home, you are saving relative to using electricity the whole time. This means you effectively do get some heating on a chilly-but-sunny winter's day, as long as the whole family times their showers nicely so the water temperature in the bottom of the tank is more than 5 degrees below the temperature in the collecting tubes (there's an electric display in the airing cupboard) for the longest amount of time. Of course electricity vs gas is another question, electricity seems quite an inefficient way to heat water to me!

I point out that a grant from the Low Carbon Buildings Programme would reduce the payback period considerably, and I'd happily bet on gas price hikes over the next 20 years. In short, I'd probably apply for a grant for my own solar passive water heating if I owned a house with a suitable roof (unlike photovoltaics, I don't think the price of solar water heating systems is going to fall dramatically in the next 2-3 years), but of course I'm renting too. And renting, with all the sharing of space and heat and such, is possibly more environmental and economic than owning.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I agree that electricity is less efficient than gas for heating water, but there was an implicit 'carbon-free' in my argument. I don't know how likely it is to be sensible to have fossil-carbon-free gas coming through the pipes into the house to be burned for heating water directly, so I think that means the choice is between {nuclear, hydro, wind, tide, solar}-generated electricity heating resistors heating water, or sun heating black pipes heating water. The sun has it.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

when something goes wrong with the secondary-loop heat exchangers at Sizewell B nuclear power station, there are teams of engineers on the premises at the Suffolk coast ready to fix it at a moment's notice

Interesting choice of example (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/28/power.cuts), Mr. W. *resists unprofessional comments about British Energy*

there are twenty more power stations ready to ensure that the supply of electricity to England isn't much interrupted

...typically at the very reasonable price of £420/MWh. (Working-day baseload currently trades (http://www.prebonenergy.com/mkt_ukpower.aspx) at about £90/MWh.)

People predicting gas price rises have good reason to do so; currently Winter '08 is trading at about a pound a therm.