June 10, 2008
How Much Do We Want? 80% Less! When Do We Want It? Now!
It seems to be the week for new web sites. First off, John Grant is one of "ten green bloggers" (it's not clear if they're hanging on a wall...) writing about the launch of new web site CanvassYourMP.com.
It's a web campaign to persuade the UK government to set some real and useful targets for CO2 emissions. The site will help you find out who your MP is, and how to get in touch with them so that you can ask them to support a change in the Climate Change Bill.
Most interestingly, they're also collating the responses, so hopefully we'll see some report in the future of how well the MPs listen to their constituents.
May 30, 2008
Would You Like More Control Over Your Electricity Usage?
For a while now I've been wondering about how to green our homes. Over on the company blog I've just announced the Mazzini Project, the latest idea along these lines that I've been playing around with.
It's a wireless power-monitor combined with a control unit so that as well as letting you know exactly how much electricity whatever is plugged into it is using, you can also turn it on and off remotely. I'm still just building the first prototype (I was wiring together circuits and measuring things with the multimeter just this afternoon) but I wanted to start talking about the idea to see what people thought.
I've put some slides together to try to explain it in more detail, so please have a look at them and let me know what you think. Is it a good idea? Would you buy one? How would you hack one to do things I haven't thought of?
If you want to see the slides full-screen, then you can do that from this page.
May 23, 2008
May 22, 2008
An Electric Tractor
This is the first post from the recent trip to Modena, but don't worry, there are plenty of pictures of supercars still to come. This photo is from a collection of tractors which forms part of the Museo d'Auto e Moto d'epoca Umberto Panini, rather a contrast from the old Maseratis just a few metres away.
It's good to see that people have been experimenting with alternative power sources for things other than cars and bikes, and it brought to mind some of the recent comments on Dale's blog.
According to the details attached to the tractor (and assuming my Italian is up to scratch), the tractor is powered by four electric motors, each providing between 5 and 9.5KW. The motors are run from two 72V batteries, which give 480Ah of charge. The tractor weighs 4500Kg (the batteries themselves account for 1440Kg of that total) and has a top speed of 18Km/h.
Tags: electric tractor sustainability
May 16, 2008
Off to geeKyoto
It's far too early in the morning, but the one daily flight from Turin to Stansted leaves in a few hours so I'll be off to the airport soon.
This is a short post to remind anyone who might be interested that it's the geeKyoto conference tomorrow. I'll be attending (which is the reason for the trip to London) and am looking forward to it. If you're going, say hi - I'm quite friendly really, and look something like this
If for any reason anyone needs to contact me, I'm reachable on 07710 036866.
March 04, 2008
See you at geeKyoto2008?
Mark Simpkins green geek conference idea that I wrote about a while back now has a date, a venue and a name.
geeKyoto2008 is on Saturday, 17th May 2008 in London, and tickets are available for the bargain price of £20.
I'm going; now I need to see if I can find a better way to get there than by plane...
Tags: geeKyoto green sustainability uk conference
February 14, 2008
December 16, 2007
geekGreen - a Great Idea for a Conference
Mark Simpkins has floated the idea of geekGreen, a conference he wants to organise to encourage "radical ideas and stories in the time of climate change".
I'm posting this because I think it's a great idea, that needs more support so that it will become a reality. I think the idea of an "unconference" for the third day is superb.
I'm also going to use this post to register my interest in attending, and maybe even speaking, because I can't be bothered creating yet another login for a site just to leave a comment. If it's on when we're back in the UK then I'll definitely be attending, and I'll have to see how the finances are if we're still here in Turin. I'm still disappointed that I missed Interesting 2007 because we were in the middle of moving country.
And speaking of Interesting 2007, it's organiser, Russell Davies, has is collecting suggestions for conferences to attend. There are plenty of suggestions in the comments if anyone wants to find something to attend next year...
December 13, 2007
It's Not THE Environment, It's OUR Environment
Two important and related links about climate change and global warming.
Via Greenormal is news of the urgent need for people to show the world governments at the climate summit in Bali that we care about tackling climate change.
Sign up at avaaz.org
Here's what it is about (from the AVAAZ website):
"Climate negotiations in Bali are in crisis. Things were looking good till now: near-consensus on a delicate deal, including 2020 targets for rich countries, in return for which China and the developing world would do their part over time. IPCC scientists have said such targets are needed to prevent catastrophe. But Japan, the US and Canada are banding together to wreck the deal, and the rest of the world is starting to waver... We can’t let three stubborn governments throw away the planet's future. We have until the end of Friday to do everything we can. Please sign our emergency global petition below -- we'll deliver it through stunts at the summit, a full-page ad in the Jakarta Post in Asia, and directly to country delegates to stiffen their nerve against any bad compromise. Add your name to the campaign below now!
THE PETITION: We call urgently for the US, Canada and Japan to stop blocking serious 2020 targets for emissions reductions, and for the rest of the world to refuse to accept anything less."
And once you've signed the petition, head over to the RSA website and listen to the lecture given by Lord Puttnam (see the entry for 6/12/2007 entitled The Light That's Lost Within Us) from last week. It's a clear, and well thought-out piece about why we should be doing something about global warming.
His slavery analogy, and an audience member's observation (from which the title of this entry comes) are particularly good. Both were covered by Mike Reed when he wrote about it whilst guest blogging at Noisy Decent Graphics. So if you don't want to listen to the lecture, at least go and read Mike's summary.
December 03, 2007
If Not Hot Water, Then Something Else?
In a recent email (after my follow-up posting about the solar-water-utility), Jeff wondered if I'd heard of heat pumps and whether they'd be a better solution than solar water panels.
They are something I'd heard of, in fact I saw one in the flesh during the tour of the AC Architects practice a couple of years back. They also had photos taken during the installation, when they sunk the boreholes for the pipework. More recently I'm sure I've heard about air-to-air heat pumps, which I imagine aren't as efficient but don't need you to dig deep holes in your garden.
It isn't something I'd considered with respect to the Green Utility (I can't call it the Solar Water Utility now, can I?) and I'm not going to invest any more time looking into it now, but it's a good idea.
However, today the House 2.0 blog has a post about some experiments that Barratt have been carrying out with Manchester University which give some interesting data points for anyone who would be building the Green Utility. Not taking into account inflation (or presumably other possible energy price increases), they've calculated the payback period for a number of green technologies:
- Domestic wind turbines
- Although in theory these are a useful approach, with the current technology (possibly the electrics side, rather than the wind "capture") in practice they aren't any use.
- Photo-voltaic panels
- A £4,500 solar electricity generation system would take 37.5 years to pay for itself
- Ground source heat pump
- Not as efficient as makers claim, but still worthwhile. A £7,800 system will reduce a home’s carbon emissions by 62% and has a payback period of 15 years.
- Solar hot water
- They didn't work out the payback period for solar hot-water but did comment that, although they heated water to much higher temperatures, the evacuated tube collectors didn't really provide any benefit over flat-plate collectors, so weren't worth their extra ~£1,000 cost.
- Micro CHP (Combined Heat and Power - units that generate both heat and electricity)
- No payback figures on these either, although they give figures for the power generated during the year's testing. It might also be worth reading another House 2.0 entry about micro CHP which comments on a report casting doubts over their validity in domestic situations.
Tags: green sustainability power utility solar heat_pump chp
November 26, 2007
The Green Marketing Manifesto Hits Italy
A couple of days ago as I was passing the little bakery in the bottom of our apartment block the lady who owns it called me over. She wasn't checking if I wanted another siciliana loaf, one of the cool things about life in an Italian apartment block seems to be that one of the shops acts as an informal parcel collection point. Pop in for some bread, and pick up that Amazon delivery that arrived this morning...
Or in this case, my signed, bloggers-review copy of The Green Marketing Manifesto (Amazon UK, Amazon US).
And just to prove that it has made it all the way out to Turin, here's a photo of me holding it in Piazza Bodoni, just down the road from our apartment.
I had intended to make up some stupid pun about the Green Marketing Manifesto and the verdigris on the statue of Alfonso Ferrero, but whilst I was sat in the piazza I realised that I could mention the two green Torinese initiatives which were metres away from where I was sat.
Of course, this being Turin - home of FIAT and Lancia - both initiatives are transport-related. The first is the Autobus Elettrico, an electric bus service. The Star 2 route (so there are at least two electric bus routes) started recently and runs past Piazza Bodoni. The buses (see pic below) don't produce any emissions, and are much quieter than normal ones; they are still loud enough that you hear them coming, which is something I'd wondered about when I'd heard of such schemes before.
The other scheme is the Car City Club car-sharing club. They have lots of parking spaces dotted around the city-centre (like the one at Piazza Bodoni pictured below) and cars are available from 2 Euros/hour during the day (or there's some monthly payment system too).
I must admit I haven't used either of these services, but that's because we live in the middle of town and either walk or cycle (Turin is quite bike-friendly) to get anywhere locally.
Tags: green_marketing_manifesto green sustainability torino turin
November 23, 2007
More Thoughts on the Solar Water Utility
After my post about encouraging take-up of solar water-heating, self-confessed professional sceptic Jeff raised some interesting questions. Rather than have them languish in the comments section of that entry, I thought I'd pull them into a new one and offer some form of response.
Here's what Jeff said:
1. The biggest problem is probably financing the operation: you are tying up the capital and cost of installation for the payoff time. It could work if the cost was cheap, and payoff was short, but if the payoff was over 5 years and it was £2500, I think you'd have a problem. Being below the interest rate provided by banks is a sure-fire way to make sure that the company is not going to be financed. You probably need to be hitting about 10% return per year. Not that much different from the rates on credit cards.
2. Energy users can swtich at any time. What if they switch 1 week after installation. You need a good contract. What if the house is re-possessed? You lose your investment.
3. UK government grants are not likely to pay for it. I think I've heard that they usually get all taken up on the first day that each grant season opens.
I'm not all doom and gloom, but I might be a professional skeptic. There are probably ways to make it work, but I think that the cost of the units and of installation have to come down.
I think they're all valid concerns, with the first one being the biggest and the one that I'm going to address here (given that I've thought the most about it).
I'm going to assume that the second point can, as Jeff suggests, be sorted out with the right contract - with the worst-case scenario being that the equipment lies dormant until you persuade a future householder to start paying you again. The third point just makes the first one harder, and wasn't something I was relying on - if "free money" is available, it makes sense to try to claim some.
Some Numbers
I figured all this was a pretty pointless exercise if it was conducted with hand-wavy guesses as to the costs, payback period, etc. so I've done some very rough-and-ready calculations to give it a grounding in the real world.
Installation cost. Going on the price of a DIY-kit from this supplier and a throwaway comment on their FAQ (if I remember correctly), I reckon that each installation would be somewhere between £1500 and £2500.
Energy saved. A while back I came across some government research (warning: pdf) into the effectiveness of solar water-heating. That showed (averaging the results from table 7.7) that solar panels can provide about two-thirds of a household's hot water, or around 1050 kWh-worth of energy. That's the equivalent of around 117 litres of petrol, or 14 days of non-stop kettle boiling. The research is almost a decade old, so current technology should be better - however, the "old" solar panels were already providing more energy than could be used during the summer, so any gains would only help in the winter months.
Payback: replacing gas. npower charge 4p/kWh for the first 1000 kWhs, and only 2p/kWh after that. Solar energy is only likely to affect the second, lower pricing band which means it would save you a woeful £21 each year! Even if you assume that the price will almost quadruple over the next 30 years (pretty much what happened over the past 30 years) you wouldn't pay off even a £1500 installation cost over a twenty-five year lifespan of the panels.
Payback: replacing electricity. As electricity costs around 8p/kWh, it's easier to make a case for replacing it with solar water-heating. Even with no price increase you could payback a £1500 installation cost within 18 years, and given the same 30-year increase as we did in the gas example, the lower end installation would be paid off in eleven years and the £2500 installation cost in sixteen.
Carbon saved. Each year the solar water-heating system will save about 415kg of CO2 from being released, so over an expected system lifetime of 25 years that will add up to just over 10 tonnes of CO2. If you sold that today as a carbon offset it would be worth about £15.
Some Conclusions?
To be honest I'm rather disappointed with the way the figures stack up, regardless of any business opportunity. Whether there's any decent profit to be made will depend on how the energy prices change over the coming years; particularly the price of gas, given the popularity of gas-fired central heating in the UK and its highly competitive current pricing.
I think there's still scope for a business that isn't entirely profit-driven in this area, although as Jeff points out, funding would be a huge issue. Could some form of hybrid charity/business be formed with the mission to remove our reliance on the energy grid?
As a charity (or charity-like entity) it could raise some of the funding from people who just believe in the goal and want to help out. It could add to the pot by selling the carbon-savings as carbon offsets - there's debate over how useful carbon offsets are, but if they can be used to help finance endeavours such as this then that's fine by me.
That won't solve the money problem, so if I was trying to start this myself I'd bootstrap it. Start small, and operate as a regular solar water-heating installer at the same time. That must be profitable because people are doing it, and the profits would be used to pay for the long-term investments.
If nothing changes then it continues slowly making the world a better place, but if the costs come down or gas/electricity prices soar you're perfectly placed to take advantage and scale things up.
October 05, 2007
Getting Yourself Into Hot Water?
One of the advantages of attending a performance of the baroque Mass of Notre Dame, as I did recently, is that it gives you a good two hours with nothing else to do but to sit and think as the sounds of the hurdy gurdy and Gregorian chant wash over you.
It was during this period that I got to wondering about how you could increase the take-up of alternative energy systems like solar water heating.
As you do. It's one of those chicken-and-egg situations isn't it? Even disregarding the benefit in reducing usage of fossil fuels, surely it's something everyone should be doing? Free energy, and it'll pay for itself after ten years or something.
So why haven't we all got it installed? It's that initial cost isn't it? A couple of grand isn't that easy to do without for ten years while you're recouping the cost. We thought about it when we had the bathroom done on the house in Cambridge, but couldn't quite justify the outlay given that the tenants would get all of the cost-savings. In the end we settled on a compromise measure, and had the right kind of hot-water cylinder fitted so when it's done in the future it will just need a couple of pipes run into the bathroom.
What we need then is some way for everyone to finance the installation without needing the cash up-front. Otherwise, solar-water heating will remain a doing-my-bit middle-class indulgence rather than a widely-adopted, distributed step in stemming global warming.
You could argue that the government should pay for the installations, or provide cheap loans to get round this problem; and to an extent it already does. However, that just shows what the problems are: there's a limited amount of funding available; you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get any of it (e.g. you need a certain thickness of loft insulation); there are different grants available from different parts of government (in Cambridge there was a council grant available in addition to the central government one) with different conditions. On top of that, you still need to find someone to actually supply and fit the system.
None of which is very encouraging. We need a way to make it easier, and to remove barriers - not make it harder.
A Distributed Utility?
What if we could make it as easy as a process that lots of people already do, such as switching to a different gas or electricity company? When I switched our electricity to ecotricity last year, it just involved filling in a few fields online and then taking a meter reading. That's the sort of simplicity we need to aim for.
What if there was a different sort of green energy provider; one that, when you switched to them for your gas or electricity, also came and installed solar water heating at your house? Lets call it SOWHAT, the SOlar Water HeATing utility.
The switch-over process would be a bit more complicated, as there'd be an installation to arrange, but SOWHAT would deal with getting the government grants, providing the solar panels, etc. and use their own installers to fit it all. At the end, they'd give you a bill for the cost of the kit and the installation.
You would then decide to pay off as much, or as little, of the bill as you wanted, and the rest would be recovered over the years through your utility bills (plus a certain percentage to cover SOWHAT's ongoing costs and give them some profit). It might mean that it takes 15 years for your solar water heating "investment" to pay off, but in the long-run you'd still get free solar energy and collectively we'd get a lot more green power being used sooner.
Would it work? Does anyone want to build this utility? Let me know if you do, I'd love to be involved, even if it's just as one of the first customers.
Tags: utility solar power sustainability
March 27, 2007
A New Bathroom Suite For Under Fifty Quid
We had a successful trip to Milton Tip yesterday, dropping off a collection of broken video recorders and an assortment of other junk from round the house.
That isn't worth blogging about, but I thought I'd mention what we brought back.
We're soon to redecorate the bathroom and will be replacing the bath, basin, etc. Even the most basic bathroom suites will set you back a couple of hundred pounds, so we were pleased to pick up a sink (including some nice taps), pedestal and toilet cistern for just £20.
If you add a bath and toilet pan to that (we didn't have space in the car for the bath, and they didn't have the exact style of toilet we're looking for there - we'll try again in a few weeks) I reckon you could have the whole set for not much over 30 quid. A bargain, and much better for our green credentials.
If anyone wants a caramel-coloured suite, there'll be one there in a month or so...