DIY Renewables Anyone?

Want to do your bit for the environment but can't justify the cost of installing things like solar panels and wind turbines? Then I may have the website for you.

BuildItSolar provides you with free advice, information, plans/designs, instructions, and software tools for building any of a range of projects for your home, local school, or community for a fraction of the cost professionals would charge.

It covers things like energy and water conservation, solar heating, solar electric, biofuels, and even solar cooking.

Of course, you'll have to be a bit practical, up for a challenge, and need to be aware of any building regulations that might affect your project. But it could be the way to do your bit for a lot less, and save you money in reduced fuel/water bills in to the bargain.

Let me know how you do.

Osborne: Now Businesses Say You're Wrong

Really, George?

The UK Chancellor, George Osborne, is all for a second dash-for-gas as the solution to Britain's energy gap. This, despite the fact that it would result in us missing our legal commitments on carbon emission cuts of 80% by 2050.

Environmentalists don't like what he's saying, nor do the government's own parliamentary Energy and Climate Change Committee, and now 50 businesses and organisations have just written to him saying the same.

Those businesses include Alliance Boots, Asda, Aviva, British American Tobacco, EDF, Microsoft, Marks & Spencer, PepsiCo, Philips, Sky and the Co-operative.

Their message is basically this: Set an emissions target for 2030 to show your government's commitment and give investors the long-term confidence to transform the electricity market and boost the economy.

At the moment, the government is giving the opposite impression with recent statements about going all-out for new gas-fueled power stations. This would undermine renewable and nuclear energy investment and cripple one of the few areas of growth in our economy: Green businesses (who provided a third of UK growth in 2011/2012).

Even the CBI estimate that the current policies (or lack of them) could lose the UK £400m in exports in 2014/2015 alone.

Come on Osborne, wake up! You want to revive the economy, and green business could lead the way. Why don't you get it?

More background here.

German Greens Pave Way For Coal

Greens, as a rule, don't like nuclear energy. It may be renewable, it may have minimal carbon emissions, but they hate it anyway.

So when Fukishima happened, German Greens took the opportunity to turn up the pressure for closing Germany's nuclear plants. Never mind the fact that a Fukishima-style disaster (Earthquake followed by tsunami) could never happen in Europe. Logic doesn't apply here. They wanted nuclear out.

So, in the end, Angela Merkel (the German leader) gave in and promised to close down all 17 of the plants by 2022. Just 10 years time.

Of course, that leaves Germany with a problem. What do they replace them with? Nuclear provides 'base load' i.e. It's reliable and plentiful energy (Whilst renewables like wind and solar are intermittent). So, to replace like-for-like, that basically means gas- or coal-powered stations. Both of which DO emit carbon. Raising the nation's carbon footprint.

And since Germany is under economic pressure at the moment, they may be forced to plug the majority of that gap with coal-powered stations. Which give the worst possible carbon emissions of all fuels.

Oh dear, looks like the Greens haven't been looking at the wider picture and shot themselves in the foot.

Worse still, the coal for those stations is likely to come from outside Germany (who are no longer a major producer themselves), most likely Poland. So that's raised emissions, millions paid for foreign imports they wouldn't actually need had they kept nuclear, AND that money is going to the country that is vetoing all attempts by the EU to raise emission targets.

Great. Well, that really worked out didn't it?!

(More here)

Our Family Carbon Footprint

This last year's been a time of great change in our efforts to reduce our footprint.

Electric

We had to come off the green tariff (where all our electric effectively came from renewable sources). The reason being that the power companies all hiked their prices by 20% last year and we were looking for savings. For some reason, green tariffs are now 10% more than their non-green counterparts. Clearly the  energy companies were taking us for mugs, so we moved.

That unfortunately meant that our electric usage now appears on our footprint. The good news is that we've been cutting our electric usage anyway and we've had solar panels fitted. As a result, the 2.71 tonne footprint for electric has come down to 1.69. The panels would have accounted for about .6 of that 1.02 reduction.

Gas

This has come down from 3.4t to 2.7t in the last year, mainly due to our new loft insulation.

Clearly all this reduction in carbon footprint is also saving us money. In fact, we're paying less for our duel fuel bill than before the power company raised their prices. They even had to give us a refund and cut our direct debits. Result!

Travel

Switching jobs (not by choice) means I have to travel further to work. I decided to use the bus instead of the car but the increased mileage has pushed the footprint up here. The car usage total is 2.59t which is down slightly because I'm using the car less, however the bus adds .081t. So our total there is 3.4t, up from 2.63t (a difference of about .8t).

Solar Panels

The total saving from our panels is 1.63 tonnes. At the moment, we probably only use a third of the electric it generates, the rest goes back to the grid, which offsets 1.09t.

Secondary Footprint

This reflects our lifestyle choices and doesn't really change from year to year. It's unchanged at 4.0t.

Summary

Our total carbon footprint is 10.7t or 2.675 per person. If we left out the middle-class bling like our solar panels and the Prius, our footprint would be 13t or 3.25t pp. That's still considerably down on the average UK footprint of about 10t pp. Keeping our footprint this low is not only better for the climate but it saves us a fortune on energy bills.

If you want to calculate your footprint, try here.

More detail about how we do it.

The Occupy Movement, Capitalism, and Climate Change

Occupy Wall Street

Remember the Occupy protests?

Late last year, thousands took to the streets in cities across the world to protest against social and economic inequality. Their basic message was that big companies had too much influence on government, which undermines democracy, and the growing gap between rich and poor in society needed to be addressed.

The movement grew out of the general public resentment at the time that financial institutions had brought the world economy to it's knees but had suffered no repercussions as a result. Also, that seemingly nothing had been put in place to stop it happening again.

So how were these institutions allowed to screw things up in the first place? Well, in many countries (the U.S. and U.K. included), governments largely leave them to regulate themselves. Possibly because the financial sector adds billions to many countries' balance of payments. It may also have a lot to do with the very friendly relationship politicians have with corporate leaders in general.

Yup, money talks. So those companies had a free hand to do what they liked, coming up with riskier and riskier ideas in the pursuit of profit. The rest is history.


Of course, nobody objects to companies making a profit. Profits mean jobs, wages, and help the economy. It's what capitalism is all about, and capitalism is the only game in town.

But if the financial crisis has shown us anything, it's that the pursuit of profit at any cost just doesn't work. Yet, profit-at-any-cost is exactly how capitalism works lately. All because large corporations have too much influence on government.

So the Occupy Movement was right about that, even if the right-wing politicians and media tried to dismiss the protests as a bunch of anti-capitalists (Probably some of them were, but there's no doubt in my mind that the majority were just concerned citizens).

Whilst the world financial crisis is the most noticeable unwanted effect of letting large corporations do what they like, there are others. For example: Environmental pollution; the obesity epidemic; deforestation; third world labour exploitation; and, yes, climate change.

Capitalism has failed us and it needs fixing. That process needs to start with governments/politicians ending their cosy relationships with business, especially where it concerns funding election campaigns.

At the moment, business practically runs government, That's undemocratic. WE voted the politicians in, not some board of directors, so it US they should be listening to. If they do otherwise, then we should vote them out.

Attack Of The Power Adaptors

Power adapters, those blocky lumps you find somewhere on the power cables of most small electrical devices, are everywhere. Printers, routers, laptops, games consoles, mobile phone chargers and so on. There are currently 6 to 10 billion of them in use around the world with 1 billion sold every year. That's an awful lot of adapters.

So many, in fact, that, in the U.S. alone, they consume $17 billion worth of electric, or 6% of their national electric bill.

The problem is that many of them are very inefficient. Have you ever noticed how hot they can get? That's because the manufacturers are often more interested in making them cheap rather than efficient. All that heat is effectively just wasted electricity. So the manufacturers save money and you pay for it on your electric bills.

There are standards for adapters of course, good ones, but they're not compulsory. A shame really: Analysis from the University of California says that ""Even with modest gains in market penetration (from Energy Star standards [A U.S. energy efficiency rating], they would) save a cumulative 24 billion kWh of electricity by 2025. With slightly higher market penetrations and the additional impact of California standards, savings increase to 64 tWh through 2025. Adding a U.S. national standard could save 180 tWh over the same period.".

Imagine if the whole world had such a standard? In fact, why doesn't the world have such a standard? It would be such a simple thing. All that electric saved, the savings on people's bills, and the reduction in carbon emissions. Funny how such simple measures never happen.

Source article here.

UK Energy Bill: A Trojan Horse

The draft Energy Bill, due to go before Parliament some time over the next 12 months, is the British government's opportunity to sort out a number of problems:

• How to keep the lights on when so many power stations are coming to the end of their useful lives.

• How to meet the UK's legal obligations on carbon emissions and help meet the challenge of climate change.

• How to get energy security for the country (i.e. So we're not dependent on foreign energy).

• How to stabilise energy prices when so many people are already in fuel poverty, and fuel prices are going nuts (Nearly 20% increase last year).

All big problems, worthy of a well thought out bill you might think. A once-in-a-generation chance for a BIG solution, and renewables could play a significant role in that solution.

Sadly, it's the way of our current government to think small.

You'd expect something in the bill about energy efficiency, which would be the cheapest and fastest way to reduce household bills, emissions, and the number of new power stations required. But there's nothing.

Maybe they're hoping the much delayed and highly criticised 'Green Deal' will do that for them when (if?) it finally comes out. That'll be the scheme that, by the government's own admission, will cut the number of loft insulations being carried out from the current rate of 800,000 a year to just 100,000. Hardly inspiring.

Even more worrying is this: The bill itself says that, to reach it's legal commitment to cut 80% of the nation's CO2 emissions by 2050, it's electricity generating plants will need to be largely de-carbonised by 2030. That means our electric must be producing no more, on average, than 50 grams of CO2 emissions per kW hour. However, the bill sets a limit on new power stations of 450g per kWh! 9 times the required level.

This might be okay if you balance the high output stations with a lot of low emmision ones but there's nothing in the bill to suggest that's the aim. Instead, the aim seems to be to build a few nuclear stations and a lot of gas powered stations (That currently create a little under 400g per kWh).

You might expect the government to insist on carbon capture and storage (CCS) on all new builds to reduce the difference but they seem to have all but given up on CCS, so no such insistence is made.

Clearly, the government have given up on emission targets.

Further proof of this can be found in the bill's attitude to coal fired power stations. These are the worst emitters of all and far exceed the bill's limit 450g per kWh, so you might expect them to be prohibited. No chance. You see, even though the govt. don't believe in CCS, the bill says that new coal stations can be built if the owners say that they will "demonstrate" CCS on the plant at some stage in it's life. It doesn't have to be successful or last for any length of time, it just has be "demonstrated". What a cop out!

So that's the trojan horse: A government that claims to be the "greenest ever" presents us with an energy bill that conceals the inevitable demise of the UK's emission commitments. They should hang their heads in shame.

To paraphrase an old saying: Beware of conservatives bearing energy bills.

More here.

Which Is Greener: An eBook Or Paperbacks?

Having recently bought a Kindle (because my home is overrun with the books I read), I began wondering if the Kindle was greener than buying books.

I've looked through a number of articles online, and it seems that eReaders are only greener if you use one for reading a minimum of 23 books but, in reality, probably more than 60 (to cover all environmental impacts, not just the carbon footprint). That's 60 books over the lifetime of the eReader, not per year.

For those interested in how this is worked out, a good, in-depth, 6 page summary pdf can be found here.

Of course, you could just go down the library for your books. That's always going to be greener....as long as you don't drive there ;)

Arctic Ice Hits Record Low: Beginning of the End?

This week, NASA announced that Arctic ice has reached it's lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979 and the melt season hasn't finished yet. This continues a trend of 13% loss per decade over the last 30 years.

Add in the fact that the average thickness, as measured by submarines, has dropped by 40% since the eighties, and it's thought that the current summer ice volume stands at just 30% of what it was back then.

It's a worrying situation. The less Arctic ice there is, the faster existing ice melts as the Arctic Sea is  warmed up. Which, in turn, accelerates global warming, because the Arctic is increasingly absorbing heat during the summer (via the darker water) rather than reflecting it back into space (via the ice).

The rising polar temperatures are also threatening to release huge quantities of methane (a powerful greenhouse gas) currently locked up in permafrost, which could further reduce ice extent in the future by adding to climate change. Some scientists warn that we may have an ice free Arctic during the summer before 2020.

In a few decades time we may be looking back on all this and saying this was a tipping point that marked the beginning of the end for the world's climate.

More here.

Update: The melt continued all the way up to the middle of September. In the end, the minimum extent was 50% below the 1979-2000 average. Ice core evidence suggests the current melt is unprecedented in the last 1500 years. Many scientists believe it has no precedent since the last Ice Age.

Welcome to the future.