Where's all the butter?

I thought it may just have been a supply chain problem to my local supermarket, but there was no butter in the Watahan across town either. I just checked when I was over there getting some wood for some shelves but that's another story.

They were doing that trick where they move the mirror at the back of the fridge further forward, so it doesn't look like it's half empty. And even when there is butter, there's a sign saying that people can only get one pack at a time. They have milk and cheese so it's not all dairy products. And they have cream too, so it's not a luxury issue. I'm not exactly sure of the process, but I thought milk, cream and butter were like fractions of raw milk. If the yields of milk are low, then you'd expect shortages of dairy products in general.

Or maybe butter is the result of cows going jogging, and the cold winter has meant they stay inside. 

I'm sure the reason is more to do with human economics than bovine ergonomics. 

Butter was one of the first edible commodities. Pliny the elder mentions it is "the most delicate of food among barbarous nations" and while it would quickly go off in the warm climates of the civilised mediterraneans, in Northern Europe butter would keep well, and the Scandinavians were exporting it from the twelfth century.

As well as trade it has a long history of being stored, most interestingly as "bog butter", in firkins buried in medieval Irish peat bogs. Some still survive.

Weight for weight it contains roughly the same energy as coal. So with a relatively long shelf life and high energy per weight, it has long been a tradable commodity.

So where is it going or where has it gone, and should we be worried?   

Does it have anything to do with the "guns and butter curve"?

There seem to be wide fluctuations in the price of butter on this graph based on US Bureau of Labor statistics. Although the most worrying part of it is that healthy food prices are going up while unhealthy food prices are going down. Perhaps butter is confused as to whether it is healthy or not?

According to Dairy Reporter the US prices in September 2014 were at an all-time high, so perhaps that's where all the butter was going? Japan ranks 8th among the world's butter consumers, but 11th among its produces, with Australia producing twice as much, and New Zealand almost ten times as much. Perhaps this pacific butter changed course and headed stateside for a better profit. 

Anyway, butter has been traded internationally for over 800 years and they still haven't got steady prices and a constant supply worked out, so that should tell us something about the economic model we are using. 

Also it's a good thing to have a few packs of in your fridge. I'm not sure whether we need to start burying it in peat bogs again just yet. 

Put your ear to a Shell and what do you hear?

Just been reading a speech by Ben van Beurden calling for the oil industry to be less aloof and more assertive. Not sure whether to become more complacent about this, or switch my view of the oil industry from exasperation to fear. I couldn't make it to the actual speech as it was for the International Petroleum Week dinner for the Energy Institute and they didn't invite me. 

The general tone seems to be one of business as usual: let's keep meeting increasing demand for oil and let's keep searching for more oil. There are suggestions about capturing carbon from power stations, apparently removing up to 90% CO2 with CCS technology, and switching from coal to gas. If I can compare this with the tobacco industry, this is a bit like adding filters and switching to low-tar. 

As Upton Sinclair said, it's impossible to make somebody believe something if his salary depends upon him not believing it. We're not likely to get the oil industry suggesting we use less oil any more than we could expect the tobacco industry to encourage people to give up smoking.

A couple of specific things he talks about grated a little. One was the idea of them delivering energy to the poor of the world, in the interest of human rights. Of course this makes complete sense if you're in the fossil fuel industry. But if you are living in a village with no electricity, would you prefer solar panels, windmills, or generators and a long term commitment to buy oil for them? 

He also said "provoking a sudden death of fossil fuels isn’t a plausible plan."

The idea of the death of fossil fuels is really interesting. For a start they're already dead. They're fossils, right? And second, aren't they less dead left in the ground than taken out and burnt?

"In the meantime, however, the world’s energy needs will underpin the use of fossil fuels for decades to come. "

I love the way the grammar of this statement seems to put using fossil fuels as the priority, and world energy needs as something that help this along.

Another interesting piece of information here: "production from oil fields typically declines at a rate of at least 5% a year." No suggestion that they should be reducing their output by 5% a year so that these oil fields will last for ever.

At the same time, Shell is investing and researching heavily into renewables, for example using oil rig technology to build platforms for offshore windfarms. 

They are still a few billion years behind on solar energy though, relying on sunshine from the paleozoic period.

Vienna plans world's tallest wooden skyscraper (Guardian)

It's 84 metres tall and built of wood to reduce carbon emissions. The fire brigade is a little worried though. Read the Guardian article here.

More details and insight in Wooden skyscrapers could be the future of flat-pack cities around the world, which mentions "plyskyscrapers" around the world. It makes no mention of Japan, home of the world's oldest and for a few hundred years the world's biggest wooden buildings, both in Nara. This is surprising for a country with such a massive building industry and huge forest, as well as great pride in woodwork. You may think it has something to do with earthquakes, but the article mentions wooden buildings being used in rebuilding Christchurch, New Zealand, after the quakes of 2010 and 2011. Maybe that's another area where the image of Japan as a high-tech utopia is at odds with reality.
And if you want more information and some worked examples, here's a 200-page book by Michael Green: The Case for Tall Wood Buildings  

Smart grid - maybe smarter if not everything in it is smart

On the other hand, if you're looking at a neighbourhood with lots of houses with solar panels on their roofs, you may not want them all to be at the optimum angle and orientation. If they're all the same, you're going to get one peak generation, probably around lunch time.

If some are pointing more to the east, and some more to the west, then each will peak at a different time, helping to balance the supply. A roof at the optimum angle will produce the maximum output over the year, probably peaking in May and September when the angle of the midday sun is close to the average for the year. Shallower roofs will produce less in the winter and more in the summer, so a range of angles may also help to balance the supply.

And there may be more levelling of the emerging grid with different kinds of panels, with their performance depending on the weather conditions. For example mono crystalline will produce more electricity than other panels in low light and in high temperatures.

So thinking of the bigger picture, and thinking long term when solar panels are so cheap that people can't afford not to put them on their roofs and they want to switch the big power stations offline, all those arrays at non-optimal angles make a little more sense. And anyway, going fifteen degrees either way from the ideal due-south 35 degree inclined plane is not going to make a huge difference.

Low Energy Building - a fifteen week course

From October I'm teaching a course on low-energy building, ninety minutes a week for the fifteen-week semester. I just submitted a syllabus and am waiting for some comments and corrections to come back. It went something like this:

Buildings use over one third of all energy consumed in Japan, as in many other developed countries. In a world of increasing population and limited fossil fuel reserves, reduction in building energy consumption is important. As well as drastically reducing consumption, low energy buildings can be more comfortable, more healthy and cheaper to run. 

This course will introduce students to the principles, practicalities, and the future of low-energy building. 

...

The course will introduce some simple scientific principles and their effect on buildings. We will also look at the design process, and compromise, optimisation and guesstimates. 

Here is an outline of the course. This may change depending on the needs and interests of the class.

1. What is a low-energy building?
2. What is energy?
3. Insulation and thermal envelopes
4. Windows
5. Energy standards and low-energy building around the world
6. Economics and ecology, Embodied carbon and Life Cycle Analysis
7. Thermal bridges and thermography
8. Ventilation and airtightness
9. Heat and moisture
10. Some examples of low-energy buildings
11. To zero energy and beyond: Buildings as solar generators
12. Heating, domestic hot water and other energy hogs
13. Retrofitting and the future
14. Calculation, simulation and measurement
15. Review

I was going to add this lesson: "Policy making around the world" but it looked a bit boring. 

Also in the syllabus I wrote something about the class being in English, but that questions, presentations and homework in Japanese would be fine. I'm hoping that the class will attract students who are good at English, and students who are interested in low-energy building, but worry that there may be a vanishingly small group who are both! 

And the class is going to be open to members of the local community as well as students.

In the first lesson, I hope to discover the knowledge, preconceptions and expectations of the students. Also I'll introduce the key concepts of low-energy buildings and main factors affecting energy use. 

There are another few months to think about the other fourteen lessons.