Renewable Energy Sources Conference

The 15th November Estonian University of Life Sciences held their 9th coference on "Investigation and Usage of Renewable Energy Sources" in Tartu. I attended as part of the university, but mostly out of curiosity.

The conference had leading researchers in renewable energy from serveral countries and officials of the Estonian ministries. There seemed to be a strong focus on the countrys vast unused biomass and its applications. Estonia have a lot of unused agricultural land after U.S.S.R. occupation (3 hectar per inhabitant of which 200.000 hectar is abandoned), and a though they are not raping their huge resources of trees, firewood is a common heating source, and has been for hundreds of years. I could not help noticing that firewood is part of the term "renewable energy", but I did not notice references to the enviromental implications, only the economical rentability.


The goverment did, not supprisingly, bring out that they wished to focus their funding, and welcomed researchers who volunteered to state outdated or fields with too low cost-benefit. They also asked for more structured or exact research, since the last 30 years in some fields had given little clarity of the situation regarding renewable energy. On the other hand researchers gave an official plea to the goverment for guidelines to what they should do. Little news there I guess.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications gave some interesting data on the status of different renewable energies, but focused on the use of forest resources (biomass conversion, direct energy production and waste uses). I could not help raising a few questions on heat pumps. I asked if they had considered using deep sea water for heating Tallin like the plan in Stockholm? It had not been considered, but they had noticed that the last 5-10 years the sales and use of heat pumps were doubling every year in Estonia. They could not answer why most of the deep ground energy heat pumps were rejected in most cases in Estonia, but speculated it could be due to protection of ground water ressources.

I know that Tartu already has a great initiative that makes heat and ventilation to a house - basically ground heat that does not use electricity. But it is one of these initiatives that has an modest inventor with humble ambitions. So I think very few will see this technology - like others. I will write about the Geothermal Air-conditioner later.

Several fine initiatives were presented at the conference. The best in my opinion was a German initiative by Michael Wachendorf and his team, who focus on using the increasingly abandoned German farm lands. The abandonment is against EU regulations (which is worth a thought), but the farming is no longer financially sound in some areas. So in their initiative they harvest the wild plants growing and converted them into biofuel. I liked this project because it not only tries to produce sounder energy, but also invoveld a growing problem caused by a changing culture.

Estonia is third in Europe (following Lithuania and Finland) in use of renewable energy resources (including firewood) with a set goal of 5.1 % for 2010; a goal that has already been surpassed. Unfortunately this kind of statistics, I think, probably would not change the fact that Estonia is also one of the most polluting countries in EU. So I left with the feeling that the focus was on "renewable" rather that "greener" or perhaps just "sounder" energy. No leaping for Estonia, but small safe steps with the crowd.

Further reading:
 

Political Blocks - Big Boss Says No!

The Danish newspaper Politikken wrote today on their website about how the Danish gas compagny DONG attempts to hinder plans of green energy in local areas. Decades ago the Danish goverment invested billions (DKR) in establishing a national gas network (DONG), and planned whole regions to be gas dependant to make it rentable. This now clash with the current reality and initiatives of Danish counties that wish to build houses with greener energies such as sun and biomass fuel. These initiatives have lately grown forward to meet the goals of reducing CO2 and protecting the environment, also specified by the goverment. It is another dillemma, or Catch-22, of a goverments long term planning including law regulation that now disharmonize with new regulations of reducing the use of energy and the effects on the environment.

I post this example because it is a good example of how strongly govermental planning, both short term and long term, blocks what I like to think of as more stable development and generally innovative thinking. One could think of the goverments compagny, DONG, thinking as backward thinking.
As an example we already know that we use enormous amounts of energy building and maintaining houses (it is a good sales pitch for selling more products), but law often hinders the possibility of developing and using alternatives. Examples of these are isolation - where a there are minimum demands for new houses, but there are also strong regulation on using only existing materials. Using collected water for flushing toilets are regulated by demands as well in Denmark. And in Estonia using a circulating system to the ground water beneath the house as a heating is rejected in about 90% of the cases because of theoretical possebility of damaging the ground water. But the same system is very common in Swedish houses. Naturally these regulations and laws are often to protect from damage or harm, but a general manipulation with what is possible have side effects that stops more intelligent alternatives. And as long as money is involved the process of altering the laws is slow - just look at how fast the alternative to the car is regulated.

So, depending on the contry, the political law regulations seems to work as breaks on on innovative development initiatives in general. Laws could work the opposite way, but unfortunatly they are normally designed to be protective rather than progressive.