Energy news – emissions trading and China

In any discussion of carbon or climate change, there’s always one factor that should be remembered: China.

China’s pace of change means that in terms of carbon output, it makes our own seem rather slight, after all, their population is twenty times ours, so no wonder.

It’s reassuring therefore that China has very real plans to cut emissions. And among these plans is the brilliant idea to introduce a carbon market. Essentially what emissions trading does is put limits on carbon output, but it does so in a dynamic way that can actually change things without laying down a strict law that applies to all in the same way. It makes green competitive.

And when a country as mighty as China gets involved in something like emissions trading, you can bet that the rest of the world will take notice.

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The electricity value chain, renewables and storage

The same question always arises with wind power – what do you do when it’s not windy?

One of the challenges that the national grid has is making sure there’s enough power to mee demand, but not overproducing. It’s not like you can pour excess electricity into a big plastic jug for the next time you need it.

In the US, the Energy Storage Council state on their website that the ‘old’ electricity value chain ran like this:

FUEL/ENERGY SOURCE>>GENERATION>>TRANSMISSION>>DISTRIBUTION>>DELIVERY

The new value chain factors in storage meaning that not unlike telecommunications loop unbundling, it changes the nature of the game and makes it more commercially competitive.

When will we see viable storage options for electricity? It’s anyone’s guess. A giant Duracell battery in every town, about the size of a watertower, with weird crackling plasma lighting up its surroundings like a bust neon? probably not.

But the one thing that the renewables industry would benefit from is mass storage devices. When tyhey start to appear we’ll know that we have truly come to live in the future.

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Green milk

I’d seen milk sold in bags a while back, and it never really made any sense. Like, why would anyone buy milk in a bag? They looked like extra large mozzerella packages, except without the mozerella.

But I was missing something. According to this report from greentech – the idea is that you jug the milk when you get home using a one of these containers.

As well as being green (using 75% less packaging than conventional milk cartons) the milk bags cost 6p less for two pints.

My local supermarket is listed as one of the ones participating in the scheme, so I may well give it a go and report back. My only concerns are:

1. While I think bagged milk is a great idea, I can’t help but worry that sooner or later I’ll be the victim of some kind of milk catastrophe. I have visions of being on the train home with a full two pints escaping a burst or leaky bag, soaking into whatever else is beside it in the groceries – bread, newspapers, cereal boxes. Then spilling out all over the flor of the train. But that’s just an OCD worst case scenario and not enought o put me off of giving milk bags/ JugIt a try.

2. My second concern would be that once the milk is jugged it’s no longer date-stamped. Way too easy to wake up one morning and be met with sour milk going over the cornflakes.

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Gas, electricity savings. How to?

I’ve been looking into ways to reduce my use of gas and electricity.  In an electricity and gas household it’s sometimes easy to concentrate on ways to save on the former and forget the latter. Gas and electric suppliers will often offer tips on energy efficiency, and that’s a good place to start in looking for information.

The biggies in terms of saving on gas use are generally the ones requiring most financial outlay – making sure you have a modern boiler, and adequate insulation. Although what with the recent boiler scrappage scheme and some government help towards insulation available in certain circumstances, it sometimes isn’t too much of a stretch.

But what I’m thinking about is the more day to day stuff:

• get an energy monitor. These will do until we all have smartmeters. Electricity only.
• never use ‘standby’ functions
• limit use of the oven and the tumble dryer
• don’t just turn the heating up if you’re a bit chilly. Try warming up by doing stuff instead.
• never put warm or hot food in the fridge or freezer. It’s not good for the machine and causes it to have to work much harder
• use draft excluders

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towards sustainable events

When you think of the amount of corporate and academic events that take place, the carbon cost of them must be enormous. And one part of events management that we rarely think about is the sustainability aspect. Having (briefly) been involved in events management myself in the past, I can tell you that it’s not only a job that is pressurised in many different ways, but a job that is, in an important way, thankless – if it all goes off without a hitch, that’s thanks enough. That, and the amazing sense of relief that the lighting rig didn’t fail and the audio-visual set up didn’t go haywire.

So… it’s no surprise that in the mad rush of events managements tasks that the sustainability aspect is often obscured by the flurry of tasks needing dealt with. It was very encouraging, therefore, to chance upon this blog post about the Sustainable Events Summit in The Greening Events project blog. Basically greener events is something that people have started to think about, and now that there’s actually a greener events event, hopefully the word will spread.

Hopefully I’m doing my bit in spreading the word here today – I think it’s definitely  one of the smartest ideas I’ve heard this year.

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Green living and the older generation…

On the way to work the other morning I saw an elderly man staring contemplatively into a greenbelt area just by the footpath that goes under the thundering motorway bridge. It was a strange moment – the noise and (let’s be frank here…) smell of the traffic overhead, and suddenly there’s this little pocket of bucolic calm at the edge of the city centre. I don’t know what the elderly man was staring at in the green area – maybe he’d spotted a rabbit or some other wildlife.

The man must have been about the same age as my grandmother, who passed away recently. It got me thinking about her generation and their attitude to sustainable living – not that there was anything that went by that name in her day! My grandmother’s generation were thrifty folks – they’d never think about throwing socks away because of a hole. They’d fix the hole and (sorry) darn well keep wearing the socks.

Foodwise, there was very little waste. In the war and post-war years folks didn’t have much on the table, and even though people tried to have meat on every dinner table, towards the end of the week when money was tight the main meal would be a fried egg with some chips (to anyone from USA reading, in the UK a ‘chip’ is like a french fry, except thicker and not crispy).

Carbon-wise again, granny’s generation were pretty light – they used public transport, and sent the kids out to pick up the groceries (or ‘messages’ as they called it). And the groceries that they bought were before the days of african potatoes and celery from far-off foreign lands. This stuff had to be local.

So, all in all they were a pretty carbon-light bunch. The fact that about three generations back my family pretty much all mined or sold coal is just a light irony here.

But they could have improved. They had some pretty daft ideas about the nature of heat and cold. They would drink scalding hot tea (NEVER coffee) in the belief that the heat was ‘doing them good’. Ouch. They’d also boil the life out of cabbage at Sunday dinner – maybe they thought the scalding was good for cabbage too?

And they would heat the house in the belief that they were keeping the cold out. I can see the logic in this, but it’s of course inverted logic. Insulation, double glazing keep the warmth in, not the cold out. How much money that generation must have lost prior to the days of modern doors, windows and lofts.

And the current older generation? Well, they’ve got more choice available than ever before, but I think it would be good to see more sustainable/ green products aimed at them, and more material produced with the aim of educating them. And since being green often means saving money, it would be of real benefit to all parties.

Thankfully it’s not just me that this has occurred to. A fascinating read here on one of the Kingston University blogs. “Many of the people we have been speaking to have experienced rationing during the wars and the energy shortage in the 1970s and have maintained these non-wasteful habits throughout their lives.” See, the older generation do know a thing or two.

With so much information available, and Scottish power companies now committing to the ise of more renewables, this green revolution is one for all ages.

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o)))

Interesting story here in the Surrey Comet – harvesting sunshine can lead to tax breaks – and rightly so!

But given the high cost of photovoltaic cells, I think most of us will continue to use an electricity and gas supplier for our majority energy needs for a good while yet.

Do any of you use PVs? Or are you the same as me, using bought in energy and trying to find the most appropriate provider in terms of the green quotient/

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Crunching the carbon numbers

There is, rightly, a lot of talk about carbon in the newspapers these days. But what do you think of free-association style when you hear or read the word carbon?

Well, most people will think (again, rightly) about carbon emissions. They may disregard the fact that the newspaper itself is made of carbon, and so is the human being reading it. The stuff is abundant with a capital A. It’s the  fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Now, that’s a LOT of carbon. What I’m trying to say here is that carbon is, of itself, not the enemy here. It’s what we do with the stuff, or more precisely what it does as a result of what we do. Forgot to switch the television off? On a personal scale, no matter. On a global scale, every forgotten switched-on appliance is adding to human  Earth’s carbon output.

And never mind just the personal day-to-day stuff. On an industrial level, the amounts are so big that they are difficult to imagine in terms of the scale. We can talk about tonnes of carbon, not knowing what a tonne of carbon would look like, or what kind of space it would take up, or what its precise eventual effects are on the environment. As people differ – (one man’s bicycle is another man’s BMW, and so on) – so do nations. This blog post has some enlightening things to say about one nation in particular. Now, I’m not going to get into the politics of it, but what seems obvious to me is that some forms of environmentalism, such as anti-nuclear policies, may have unexpected environmental impacts. You use no nuclear, so you rely on coal. It’s a balancing act for governments of all emerging industrial, currently industrial and post industrial countries.

So, while there’s big work for the policy makers, and a lot at stake, there’s still stuff the ordinary folk like us can do. And there’s just as much at stake. The first thing to do is to get an idea of how much of a carbon footprint we are creating as individuals. [NB I don’t like the term ‘carbon footprint’, even if, as stated above, my entire body is made of carbon. Any suggestions for an alternative phrase??]. A good place to start is one of the Web sites that calculate your carbon footprint. the results aren’t meant to be scientifically conclusive, just to give more of a ball-park figure, and help us to think a bit more about how certain of our behaviours can sometimes be energy-wasteful. Only by identifying things like these can we, as ordinary people, make a real difference.

Carbon: it all adds up...

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OFGEM Green Certification = Good, Right?

The first round of ‘green certified‘ domestic energy tariffs has been announced by OFGEM.

The certificate has not met with universal approval from the green community however. Ecotricity founder Dave Smith said:

“Ofgem’s new ‘rules’ set an artificial standard of what green electricity really is. If suppliers want to plant trees or look after birds, I’m all for that but not under the guise of green electricity. Consumers just want to be sure of two things: where is my green energy coming from, and what good will my bill bring? And both of these are quick and simple to verify.”

There are also some claims that changing to an energy efficient lightbulb would have as much real environmental benefit.

Only 2% of the UK population are currently signed up to green energy tariffs.

What are your thoughts on the green energy certificate?

Would seeing the label sway your decision in any way? Fill in our poll!

Here are the tariffs that have  ‘Green Energy Cerification’:

• SSE better plan – Scottish Hydro’s green electricity scheme, also available with  SWALEC & Southern Electric
• Zero Carbon (to be renamed) and Future Energy from British Gas
• Go Green from E.On
• Green Tariff from EDF Energy
• 100% Green & Gold from Good Energy
• Juice and National Trust Green Energy from npower
• Simply Green from Scottish Power

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Do You Qualify for the Boiler Scrappage Scheme

A Gas Boiler Scrappage Sheme Not To Be Missed

Boiler Efficiency Rating

We have had the car scrappage scheme, window’s scrappage scheme and now we have the boiler scrappage scheme. It all sounds a bit like a joke but I have to take my hat of to the government for this one.

Homes in England can get a £400 discount when buying a brand new boiler if their old one meets the set criteria. Two sets of winners in this one. People with households who have old boilers – that are not environmentally friendly, and most of all, our planet. Once again this single movement will not save us from the threat of global warming but it is another step in the right direction.

There should be more than 125,000 households that will benefit from the scheme should they decide to take up the offer. Homeowners and landlords will benefit the most from the scrappage schemeas. For social landlords and housing associations it is bad luck as they do not qualify for the scheme, they are already obligated to provide sufficient services that keep in line with reducing carbon emission targets.

To qualify for the £400 discount the household owner will need to have a G-rated boiler that is in a working condition. If the homeowner is over the age of 60 then they will still qualify if the boiler does not work.

This is an opportunity not to be missed. Very unlucky if your boiler is broken though.

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