Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Energy and climate change;
climate change and energy
This topic focuses on energy's impact on climate change and vice versa.
Energy production is climate change's main cause, and the transition to a
low-carbon energy economy is a necessary one. But the changing climate
will have other impacts on energy - less remarkable perhaps, but also less
remarked upon.
For climate change threatens existing methods of energy production in
very real, physical ways. Even if we were short-sighted enough to deter-
mine to keep our current energy-production methods just the way they
are, we would still have to acknowledge how vulnerable they are to the
extreme weather that climate change is likely to send our way.
Across all Arctic zones and the tops of mountain ranges, the melting
permafrost will cease to be a reliable foundation for energy infrastructure.
In other words, the existing oil and gas pipelines are vulnerable, and it
will become necessary to rebuild them entirely or in part; it will certainly
become harder to move heavy equipment across any Arctic tundra that is
thawing. This is obviously a problem for the main Arctic coastal states -
the US, Canada and Russia.
Climate change will also alter wind resources, but it is impossible to
say how, because wind depends on the differentials in temperature and
solar radiation - not on any
precise
level of them. It is also likely to see
an increase in extreme weather and storms, which will have immediate
effects on offshore energy facilities in places such as the Gulf of Mexico.
The impact of climate change on water supplies will have an immediate
effect on hydroelectric plants especially those mainly dependent on gla-
cial melt as in the Himalayas, Andes and Alps or on seasonal rainfall (such
as the Indian monsoon) which may become less predictable.
Water shortages will also affect the cooling of conventional thermal
and nuclear power stations, which are usually placed on coasts or rivers
to draw water for cooling. Spain's prime minister has given shortages of
water for cooling reactors as one of his reasons for not reversing his coun-
try's phasing-out of nuclear power.
Countries such as the UK which have placed virtually all their nuclear
reactors on the coast face an opposite threat - too much water from rising
sea levels. The UK Met Office has done some scenario planning which
shows that by 2100 there could be increases in sea-surge heights ranging
