WIN £250 PLUS £250 FOR YOUR SCHOOL

Enter our climate change competition and you could win £250 to spend as you wish PLUS a further £250 for your school.  Winning entrants (plus one parent / guardian) will also be invited to the prestigious Institution of Mechanical Engineers - Midland Region Annual Dinner to be held at the Burlington Hotel in Birmingham in November where they will receive their certificate of achievement.

Closing date for entries is 31^st August 2023

Competition rules

1. The competition is open to all students in full time school / academy education aged between 14 and 18 as of 30^th September 2023.
2. The written article must be original work undertaken by the student.
3. The author shall not retain any copywrite on the article submitted and the article, or parts thereof, may be re-printed in the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) publications.
4. The article will be between 10 and 12 pages in length, using Calibri 12 font, and including any pictures, graphs, etc. but excluding the title page and the bibliography.
5. The content of the pictures, graphs, etc must not be more than 40% of the complete article.
6. Students are encouraged to undertake research to establish facts and information and make reference to this.All such references must be fully identified within the bibliography.
7. Closing date for receipt of all entries by email will be 31^st August 2023 without exception.
8. All articles will be judged by a panel comprising members of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers – Midland Region and C4FF.The judges decision is final.
9. Winners will be notified by 31^st September 2023 and winners names and pictures will be displayed on the IMechE Midland Region website.
10. No correspondence will be entered into.
11. All entries must include the name, date of birth, personal photograph and school / academy name.
12. Two winners will each receive a personal payment of £250 plus a payment made to the winners’ school / academy.Each will also receive a personal invitation for themselves plus one parent / guardian to the IMechE Midland Region Dinner to be held at the Bulington Hotel in Birmingham on Friday 17^th November 2023.Invitations are non-transferable.

Now – continue for the competition ……..

Professor Dr Reza Ziarati – Chair, Centre for Factories of the Future (C4FF) – is trying to write an article on climate change.  He has compiled a series of notes in preparation for the article but now needs your help to bring all this together, undertake some deeper research and compile a suitable article for publication. 

Your article must include all the key points identified by Professor Ziarati and much more additional information you may be able to find by research. Please include relevant pictures, graphs, diagrams and other such data which will make the article become very useful to the reader.

The target readership for this article will be both the specialist engineer / scientist / environmentalist as well as the general public who will have an interest in this subject – very relevant in today’s world.  Therefore, your article will need to contain some good technical detail but also be very readable for everyone.

Professor Reza’s notes

Energy cannot be produced or destroyed but can be transformed from one form into another.

Higher temperatures have negative effects, and the higher CO2 emissions the higher is the atmosphere’s temperature. We need to bring CO2 emissions to Zero if the global atmospheric temperature is to remain unchanged.

USA is major user of energy. The average price of Electricity in US dropped from $2.5 in 1900 to $0.1 in 2020 ($ per kWh at 1990 prices). In fact the average price of electricity has dropped rapidly in the Western world and in many countries worldwide albeit not at the same rate as in the West. Yet, global carbon emissions from energy transformation have gone up from Zero in 1850 to almost 35 Gigatones in 2020. There has been almost an exponential rise in CO2 level. This is alarming. 26 billion tons of CO2 per year; more tons/person in the West/developed world and a lot less tons/person elsewhere, on average 5 tons per person worldwide. This is unacceptable.

CO2 emissions are directly proportional to world population (P), CO2 per unit energy (C), Services per person (S) and Energy per service (E), namely:

CO2 = P x S x E x C

If P goes up S will go up too but although E may drop and this may lead to a lower C, the anticipated increases in population and current upward trend for greater need for Services would mean huge increases in CO2. So far CO2 levels have not been falling and we need a miracle to reduce CO2 level to maintain a safe global temperature.

There are no easy solutions. Wind, Solar and Hydrogen have huge problem of transmission and storage but the cost of transformation of free wind and solar energy to clean and usable energy is falling. One solution could be Nuclear and use of small, safer and highly efficient units spread over the globe rather a few numbers of huge power plants. In any case, Nuclear energy has its problems of cost, safety and long term storage. Another partial solution is carbon capture and its storage which poses serious engineering challenges of affordable cost, suitable locations and long term stability.

One method suggested by me was conversion of wind energy to potential mechanical energy (Reza’s Coil) and its storage. This one potential area which can have a huge potential as it removes the storage problem of wind energy.

On electrical energy all the batteries on earth can store about 30 minutes of the world’s energy needs.  There is a great deal about cars. Toyota which is the world’s largest automakers, recently reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet. Just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. There are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota selling 81% of its cars in the US warns that the grid and infrastructure simply are not there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars. £300 million cars are still a drop in ocean and who is here in 20 years time.

Transport is a major polluter. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Hence the reason for success of Hybrid. Read my award prize winning and national diploma award paper to know why the time for hybrid vehicles is with us - http://www.c4ff.co.uk/history/papers/Emerging_transportation_system.pdf and compare what I and others are now saying https://www.marifuture.org/Publications/Papers/imeche-transport-hierarchy-report.pdf. The latter paper is very pro rail and does not see any reasonable solution to existing aviation fuel.

With regard to UK Government actions:

• The impact of global energy supply disruptions have led to a surge in household bills and slowed economic growth across the globe. To this end, the UK government has intervened to mitigate these effects by covering around half of the typical energy bill.
• It plans to expand the use of renewables, revive nuclear power and build new industries such as carbon capture, which is expected to create jobs across the country, provide new opportunities for British businesses at home and abroad, and endure the UK intention of reaching net zero by 2050.
• The emphasis is on accessing cheap, abundant and reliable energy as the foundation for a thriving economy hence the new focus on Energy Security but trying to accelerate the move to cleaner, cheaper, and home-grown energy through strategies such as the Green Finance Strategy.
• The government has already announced a series of measures aimed at bolstering its efforts to boost the UK’s energy supply, cut carbon and drive bills down. Among the key initiatives are a commitment to carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) and a £160 million fund to support port infrastructure projects to kickstart investment in the UK’s emerging floating offshore wind industry, while the first tranche of green hydrogen production projects is set to receive backing under the £240 million Net Zero Hydrogen Fund.
• This together with the fifth round of the UK’s Contracts for Difference scheme, aimed at incentivising investment in renewable electricity, will be backed by a budget of £205 million and the new competition to select the best small modular reactor technologies will, it is said, help the UK towards the set Net Zero targets in 2030 and 2050.
• In parallel the government is speeding up the planning process to attract investment, reforming it to enable the building of more energy infrastructure, including solar power and offshore wind projects, more quickly.
• Other measures include more support for energy efficiency by reducing reliance on fossil fuels to heat buildings with a £30 million Heat Pump Investment Accelerator as well as boosting the UK’s electric vehicle charging points and infrastructure with an investment of over £380 million.
• The most potent tool is the UK Export Finance provided with an extra £10 billion capacity to boost exports, including from the UK’s world-leading clean growth sectors.

The big question is, “are all these efforts going to reduce carbon emissions by 68% from 1990 levels by the end of the decade as pledged in the Paris Agreement?”

Maybe your article will help to answer some of these questions.

OR

Maybe your article will bring up even more unanswered questions which need to be addressed

When your article is complete, please send a copy by email to:

reza.ziarati@c4ff.co.uk

and

john.butler276@btinternet.com.

Please check carefully the competition rules and ensure that your article complies.

All entries will be acknowledged so if you have not received confirmation of receipt within 7 days of submission, please contact us further.

We look forward to hearing from you.