Hanno's blog

Noticing that my old blog still gets considerable traffic and has a substantial number of people accessing its feeds, I thought I should announce a project I recently started.

When discussing climate change and solutions, we often consider actions like replacing coal power plants with clean energy sources. But while these are important, they are the easy part. There is a whole range of emission sources that are much harder to avoid.

Over a decade ago, I covered climate change for a German online publication. Due to the carbon capture and storage debate, I learned that some industrial processes have emissions that cannot be easily avoided. The largest and most well-known examples are steelmaking, where coal chemically reduces iron oxide to iron, and cement production, which uses carbon-containing minerals as an input material.

But while these are the most well-known and emission-wise most significant examples, they are not the only ones.

I eventually found this so interesting that I started my own publication about it in the form of a newsletter. Several things contributed to this: I wanted to discuss topics like these more in-depth and publish more in English, and I saw that multiple other journalists in the field of energy and climate started running their own newsletters, podcasts, or other publications.

If this sounds interesting to you, check the stories I already published. Some topics I have already covered include easily avoidable N₂O emissions in the chemical industry, an overview of CCS, issues with green electricity certificates from Iceland and Norway (another update on that one will come soon), an experimental, fully electrified steelmaking process, and most recently about methanol as an electricity storage technology. And if you find them interesting, please subscribe. If you prefer that, an RSS feed is also available.

I already wrote in the past that a couple of times that I'm worried about the insane high energy consumption of DSL and WLAN hardware that's supposed to run all the time.

Recently, I switched my internet provider from O2 to Kabel Deutschland and got new hardware. I made some findings I found interesting:

It seems very many power supplies today have a label on their energy effiency. If you find something called "EFFIENCY LEVEL: V" - that's it. V is currently the best, I the worst. Higher values are reserved for the future (so this is much more intelligent than the stupid EU energy label, where A stands for "this was the best when we invented this label some years ago"). I haven't tried that yet, but from what I read it seems worth replacing inefficient power supplies with better ones.

The cable modem I got eats 4 Watts. Considering that it's the crucial part that cannot be switched off as long as I want to be able to receive phone calls, I consider this rather high. The power supply had effiency level IV. If anyone knows of any energy saving cable modems, I'm open for suggestions.

I was quite impressed by the router I got for free. It's a D-Link 615 and it's using 2,4 Watts with wireless and 1,4 Watts without. That's MUCH better than anything I've seen before. So at least we see some progress here. (and for people interested in free software: it seems at least DD-WRT claims to support it and the other *WRT projects are working on it)

Though I still fail to understand why there can't be a simple law stating that every electronic device must put information about it's energy consumption on the package.

I'm currently in Scottland on a trip through the UK. I'm trying to get some contacts to the much more active environmental movement here. For those who don't know, the UK has probably the most active climate movement in the world. I just came from a gathering in the Lake District and now I want to visit a protest site against open cast coal mining in Mainshill.

Afterwards I'll visit the Climate Camp.

It's quite interesting to see discussions here. The main topics at the moment are the third runway at the heathrow airport (see e. g. Plane Stupid) and the building of a new coal plant in Kingsnorth (done by the german company e-on). I heared quotes like »we shouldn't wait till they build the new plant, they're burning coal every day in the existing ones«, which is a large difference compared to the discussion in germany.