solarsaddle

Like everyone else I have been mesmerized by the mess left by the hacking of the Climate Research Unit's email servers. There can be little doubt that some of the statements these people have made are completely idiotic, but are they so different from the sorts of things one says in the pub. Do parents on the sidelines of a football pitch who shout "Kill him!" really mean what they say? Sure, you can quote them, but in the heat of the moment one says all manner of idiotic things. By its very nature email gives an illusion of privacy and, let's call it, intimacy that leads one to say the same kinds of things that one says in an informal conversation. But does this mean that the CRU people really believe they could stop certain data "getting out" or being published? This is complete nonsense, and if they believed it they were pretty foolish.
The big problem is science is not the fact that there are gags on scientists and that there are hundreds of voices out there dying to get their stuff into print and who are symied by the peer review process. Quite the opposite. Academic publications flourish - there are more of them than ever before and if you don't get published in Nature you can always move down the pecking order until you find someone who is happy to take your work. Equally, being published in Nature or Science is not a guarantee that the work is any more reliable than anyone else's. It just means that you and a few others feel that it is particularly significant. But the proof of the pudding is not the publication itself, but what happens to it over time. Do others use it? Do they quote it? And do they build on it? There are plenty of papers that are cited because they prove to be unreliable and people want to flag the fact.
So the idea that a couple of atmospheric scientists at CRU might somehow prevent someone from being published is at best laughable.

More importantly, though, what it has really done is to get the scientific community to realize that one needs to put the data "out there" where anyone can analyze it. And a great set of links have just appeared in the last few days: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
It;s not exactly user-friendly. But then again, what is? If someone gave you the raw accounts of Marks and Spencer would you find it trivial to analyze? Of course not. You need to be a forensic accountant to do that. What will happen is that some people will complain that "the scientists" are deliberately providing the data in arcane form to prevent others from doing an analysis......

One just can't win.

For someone who cycles all the time, and is therefore surrounded by cars, I'm remarkably insensitive to makes, colours and appearances. I guess I've never really "got" cars. So instead I tend to focus on the smokey ones, the loud ones, the big ones, and, of course, the aggressive ones that try to tell you who's boss.
One of the reasons why I don't wear headphones while cycling has a lot to do with the fact that I like to hear vehicles coming. And you develop a half decent sense of where cars are behind you without having to look round, though I do that a fair bit too.
So I was a bit surprised when I was overtaken the other day by a low-slung car, hammering northwards on Great College Street with little more than the sweeeeesh sound of the tyres on the road. This was no Ferrari or Lotus. This was something quite different, and, I have to say, rather unpleasant. To have something come hurtling past at that sort of speed without giving any warning really gave me pause since clearly one of my main senses failed to alert me. Yet at the same time, it was nice to imagine a world in which silence rather than engine noise ruled.
It wasn't the first electric car that has snuck up on me. The Prius, at low speeds, can creep up behind you without you noticing a thing, but generally, if they're doing any sort of speed, their engine kicks in and you can hear them.
It's pretty common for pedestrians to step out in front of cyclists - I was knocked unconscious three years ago hitting my head on the tarmac after hitting a man who stepped out in front of me. Bicycles are often pretty quiet, travel close to the kerb, and being narrow, subtend quite a small angle in your field of vision. Easy to miss, especially if you don't stop and look properly either because you are relying on your hearing, or are in an mp3-induced La-La-Land.
How long will it be before we start to see a bit of a blip in people getting knocked over by silent cars? After my crash, I invested in a "ding dong" bell - one that makes a happy noise that tends to make people laugh, but which also jingles gently as I bounce on London's uneven roads, signaling my presence. Perhaps it's time we took a leaf out of the Victorians' book, and hang small bells - something small and discreet - onto the front of every car, especially the hybrid ones, to keep us alert to their presence.

I haven't posted in almost a year and I need to get back into it. I am prompted by this astonishing story out of the United States. A judge has halted construction of a coal-fired power station on the grounds that since the Supreme Court made an earlier ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency must consider CO₂ a pollutant, that the emissions from this plant must be considered when deciding whether a permit can or should be issued.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7485936.stm
This is a remarkable ruling and really shows how far things have moved in the United States. Suddenly not only are States taking the initiative on climate change, but they are also being backed up by the judiciary. And once the US Government finally comes on board properly some serious things will start to happen internationally. Hurray for Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore.

It's been some time since I've posted anything here. Things have just been too busy to allow much leisure to post thing. However, I came across this website http://www.ecovation.org.uk which has some interesting stories about people trying to do things to their houses to make them more energy efficient.  And tucked away are some interesting products to look at and maybe play around with. If the wind blows in the right direction I'll try some of them out and then post here.

In our house the big developments are at we can now report that our 3.28 kWp system generated 2530 kWh in its first year. Not as much as had been predicted, but then late June and July were just awful, 20-25% below the output in the fabulous April.

We have also put in a condensing combi boiler. Because our gas use at this time of year is so low it's hard to see that it's made any difference. We'll see in late October what happens when we need to turn the central heating on.

Plans to do something about chimneys, doors, and windows are afoot.......

if anyone is ever reading this they'll know that I have a virulent hatred for biofuels. I think it's a complete con. Here's the latest in a series of disturbing articles from the FT.

This is from Monday 26 February.

"The rapid expansion of biofuel production is welcome news for environmentalists, but for beer drinkers it is a different story.  Strong demand for biofuel feedstocks such as corn, soyabeans, and rapeseed is encouraging farmers to plant such crops instead of grains such as barley. Jean-Francois van Boxmeer chief executive of Heineken the Dutch brewer warned last week that the expansion of biofuel sector was causing a "structural shift" in agricultural markets. One consequence could be a long term rise in the price of beer..... The price of barley which is used for beer whisky and animal feed has soared in the past year. Futures prices for European malting barley have risen 85% to more than Euro230 (£154) per tonne since last May."

What worries me about this huge rush to "green" energy, is the fact that it is bringing the purveyors of perpetual motion machine out of the woodwork. Everyone thinks that they can find a quick fix, primarily because they don't understand the sums. or if they do, because they understand the sums all too well - investors pile in and you make a killing while feeling virtuous all the while. More on this coming. Does the name Ted Patzek mean anything yet? It will soon.

An interesting article was passed on to me today. Published in the journal Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications last year  (2006, 14, 275-280) it is an analysis of the payback times for photovoltaic panels in Europe. By payback time, they don't mean the cost payback. it is simply a question of how long does it take before the array starts to generate more electricity than was required to build it. The authors, who have published in this area several times before, did a full survey of the lifetime energy costs of various types of PV panels including the mining of the materials, construction etc.and included disposal, recycling etc. They arrive at what look like quite favourable estimates of energy payback times in Europe which are of the order of 2-3 years for small domestic installations.  What is striking is that the times are much shorter than previously reported, which they attribute to the improvements in the PV technology - not just the efficiency of the panels, which has risen, but the reduced amounts of silicon required, as well as improvements in the processing of the silicon chips etc. So in spite of the fact that silicon is one of the most expensive elements to extract and purify, it looks as if it is increasingly worth using, provided, as they point out, you go to considerable lengths to minimize the inverter and other losses between the array and the grid. and they point out that big arrays are very seriously competitive with a range of other technologies.

And in other news, we just reached an important milestone: 1 MWh produced. Let's hope it's many more.

Australia is to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6378161.stm
this is a remarkable development coming from a government that has until now been among the staunchest objectors to the Kyoto agreement. John Howard has consistently tried to ridicule and undermine any significant binding agreement to reduce emissions over the past few years, and tried to set up a parallel Asia-Pacific/American deal involving technology. How fast things change. It looks as though the drought that has hit Australia and which is being attributed to climate change is starting to change minds as well.
Sure, one can argue that reducing lighting emissions is peanuts compared to heavy industry, but it does signal a real shift in thinking. Will David Milliband, our wildly enthusiastic minister propose the same thing in the UK? And will that extend to halogen lights which are only a fraction more efficient than the ordinary filament bulbs?

We've all heard about green tariffs - nPower for example has Juice and so does every electricity producer. The idea is that you can be guaranteed to be buying electricity from some kind of renewable source. Many of us have signed up and feel great and greener as a result. King's College London proudly display an A4 certificate in their foyer on the Strand which says that all of their electricity consumption is from hydroelectric power. Indeed some people (who will remain nameless but they have high profile "green" blogs) go one stage further and remove their "green" electricity consumption from their footprint calculations altogether. How smug. In the long term, sure.... demand for renewable energy causes industry to retool and build wind farms etc. Approval has been given to let a thousand wind turbines bloom in the Thames Estuary, all of which sounds great.
But simply switching to some green tariff makes no difference to the world as a whole in the short or even the medium term. All it means is that your neighbour takes a "richer" mix of electricity, more fossil fuel based since the existing production is simply accounted for differently. Is that a result? And does switching to a green tariff mean that we get sloppier about our energy use and therefore waste more? Is it like the availability of "diet" foods - which make little difference to people's waistlines because all they do is make them feel virtuous and that somehow they have a "right" to indulge in a "sinful" Mars bar?
The real issue is to reduce one's own and everyone else's total energy consumption and not rely on accounting fiddles to makes oneself feel better.

So it's official. The Bush administration plans to reduce petrol consumption in the US by 20% in 10 years. This is nothing to do with reducing emissions. Not at all. It's to reduce dependence on "foreign" oil. The idea is to extract oil and gas more efficiently, raise fuel economy standards and to use more biofuel.  I'll believe it when I see it.
Well, you can raise fuel economy standards all you like, but given that most cars will be on the road for more than 10 years, it will be a long time before you've replaced your car fleets. Meanwhile the fuel economy of older cars will be getting worse and worse. Unless you order that each vehicle be tested for fuel economy each year and you crush vehicles that fail your test, your legacy issues are colossal. And anyway whose got an incentive to get a more fuel efficient car if petrol costs next to nothing.
And then there's my favourite bugbear - biofuels. Harvest that corn and convert it into ethanol or ethanol/butanol. No matter that the IEA estimates that the primary energy cost of doing the conversion from corn to ethanol is about 80% of the energy that the ethanol can produce (Source:  www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2004/biofuels2004.pdf see Chapter 3 esp Table 3.2). And the report goes on by saying that the production of biofuels would increase global competition for arable land  driving up food and fodder prices. Well as I've said before this is already happening.  Prices of tortillas have risen sharply in Mexico as the price of corn has risen. If those farmers find it more lucrative to help americans drive, the God help the populations in poorer parts of the world who rely on American grain shipments to feed themselves. China is now a net importer of grain and their demand isn't going to drop any time soon. And if droughts start to hit harder then demand for grains will rise further. Whose going to buy that harvest: starving people in the desert or SUV drivers?
That rant aside, "fewer than 1000 of the 165,000" US filling stations can supply ethanol. It'll take some doing to set up a distribution network. And is anyone going to do anything about America's pathetic public transport?
So I fear that George's optimism is nothing more than pissing in the wind.

And to put it into perspective, it's not as if in the UK our transport footprint is negligible. Far from it. Time Tony and Gordon started to make a concerted effort of their own and not just leave it up to Ken Livingstone.

OK. Time to do a roundup of our carbon numbers for 2006. They are mixed.
First of all electricity (based on NEF's 0.43 kg CO2/ kWh).

2005 1276 kg
2006 876 kg (imported but on nPower's green tariff)

At the same time we produced 876 kWh between June and December (coincidence, ha! that'll keep the numerologists busy). And the import is on a green tariff which might allow one to say "zero". That would smack of hubris to me so I won't. Considering the fact that we have an additional small child and use cloth nappies that need regular 40 degree washes, I don't think we're doing too badly.

Gas central heating.

2005 3300 kg
2006 2820 kg

This looks like a substantial reduction though I'm not sure how much is due to the this autumn having been so incredibly mild. I, of course, would love to attribute it to simple measures - reflective mylar under under the floor on the ground floor, over the insulation in the loft, mylar under our solar panels, and behind radiators. And of course, keeping the temperature in the house fairly low. We'll see how this spring compares to last year.

Travel

2005 3000 kg
2006 3000 kg

These numbers are something of a guesstimate. They are mainly based on flights (based on the NEF's 0.1 kg CO2/mile) plus significant car or rail journeys. Car journeys are of course rentals as we don't own one so we have no supermarket runs - that all gets done by bike. I've started adding a few kilos a week for public transport around London. If of course you accept Grida's view (http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/aviation/) that one should treat each kg of aircraft CO2 as the equivalent of 3 kgs (because of the part of the atmosphere where the CO2 is dumped and the other components of the exhaust that are greenhouse contributors) then the numbers look stark: 9000 kgs per year.

The real question is where we stand in terms of other lifestyle contributions, which are much harder to quantify. There is the COIN website http://coinet.org.uk/projects/challenge/measure which gives guesstimates of what your contribution is based on your lifestyle. I'm going to take values of 2000 kgs for "things", 600 kgs for food (as we eat a mix of locally sourced and supermarket stuff), and as we're meat eaters, 1200 kgs for meat.

So now we can look at the breakdowns. Here are two pie charts for the breakdown in our footprint:


However you cut it, reducing flights would make a substantial difference to our carbon emissions...... should we go veggie? Yikes!

The news in the UK has been doom and gloom because of the massive storm that hit. And the wind continues to blow very strongly. Our roof and and panels have been fine. And what is more, things are looking up. Yesterday we had our first 3 kWh day since November 18th and today is going to be similar so spring really is on the way.
Looking at some of the panels on our lower roof, though, one can start to see an accumulation of filth on them - bloody diesel dust, basically. and any crap on the glass will cut our performance markedly. Time to head to a window cleaning store and get some kit 'cos there's no point not looking after one's investment.
Roll on Ken's Low Emission Zone, I say. More on that in a separate post.

I wandered past a brand new shop in Central London the other day and noticed that they had a double-glazed shop front - a spectacular enormous double glazed shop front. I walked a bit further and of course the huge double doors were wide open to attract customers. Isn't that brilliant? You spend a fortune making sure that you don't leak heat into the world through your windows and the leave the doors open from 9 in the morning to 8 in the evening.

Open door policies abound. Pretty well all big chains have them - Oddbins, Carphone Warehouse, Fopp, Boots you name it. You step over the threshold and there's an electric heater blasting heat downwards at you. The result is that the people inside can walk about in a T-shirt and millions of kWh of electricity are wasted. Perhaps there's another piece of energy conservation legislation they could enact - if your building is heated or air-conditioned the door must be shut.

Then again, why stop at shop fronts? If you look at houses with double glazing almost a quarter (I counted walking home the other day so if my street is representative.....) had a window open on the front. Double glazing is fiendishly expensive as it is and then having spent the money what do you do? Open the window to let the heat out? A lot of people, apparently. Of course who's going to install heat recovery ventilation at the same time as double glazing? That would make it even more stupidly expensive.....

There must be a better way.

Well as expected we're not producing much at all now - fairly steady at just below 8 kWh per week, which isn't much but better than a poke in the eye. Our current import is between 40-50 kWh per week. I wish I could break that down between appliances but that would require me to rewire our boiler, for example....... maybe not.
We are coming up to the six month mark shortly - about two weeks away. The most interesting part of the first year is still to come as we were well on the downslope when we started.

Biofuels promise such wonderful benefits don't they? You grow your crops using free solar energy. Then you press the seeds to make oil and after a little jiggery pokery you can drive your car around blissful in the knowledge that you are carbon neutral. Shame that the whole idea is a pile of codswallop.
Let's just take a look at photosynthesis. It is pretty well known in the biology community that wonderful though photosynthesis is, it's not very efficient. Plants only harvest the blue and the red parts of the visible spectrum (That's why they look green, duh!). The photons they harvest are then converted through to sugar. The total efficiency is well below 1% (it depends on the type of plant - the metabolism of maize is about twice as efficient as that of most other plants). Yes. You read correctly. Less than 1%. In other words, it's going to take a hell of a lot of plants to keep your average motor ticking over. An article in New Scientist at the end of last year (http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19125701.200-fuels-gold-big-risks-of-the-biofuel-revolution.html;jsessionid=MODDNJDILFDL)
suggests that to fuel 10% of Europe's vehicles would require 72% of the arable land on the continent. I guess that would be one way to solve Europe's obesity problems.
So it's obvious that the current rush to biofuels is going to start affecting our ability to feed ourselves sooner or later. And sure enough, it's already started. Mexicans are finding the price of tortillas, their staple food soaring at the moment. Why? Because the price of corn on US markets has risen sharply as investors pile into the biofuels business. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6255781.stm)
Two further comments are worth making. Solar panels may be marginal from an economic point of view, but they do convert 16% (or so) of the available light into electricity. So if you want to power your car, buy an electric buggy and get some panels going. Electric motors are far more efficient than internal combustion. All we need are lighter and less lossy batteries.
But it's also a salutary reminder of just how much chemical energy is packed into a liter of petrol. That litre of petrol represents years upon years of sunlight captured in an incredibly intricate and delicate process. And to burn it going to the supermarket is an astonishingly profligate way to go about life.

An email to the Microgeneration people at nPower to find out how they do their calculations resulted in the following reply:

When there is no Export Meter at the property we calculate export from the
generation meter reading. You joined the scheme Aug 06 your generation
meter reading was '0', Dec 06 your generation reading was '626.6' Industry
studies say that 50% of what you generate you consume and 50% you export.
We divide 626.6 by 2 = 313.3, your current buy back rate is 9.88p per kWh
exported = £30.95p.

Let's ignore the error (the reading 626.6 is for October 6th, not December). In other words, if you have no meter then it makes little difference whether you're with nPower
or Good Energy in terms of the money you are paid for your production.

How realistic is their estimate? Good question and I don't have enough to data to check. Our electricity imports dipped sharply in early August, but they crept back up to where they were before quite quickly. If one were really obsessed with this one would start running the washing machine only when the sun was out to minimize imports, but then again, one needs a life.....

Meanwhile we're not producing much at the moment as the sun is just too low and sky too often overcast. One gets excited if one comes close to 2 kWh. Roll on spring, I say.

Well nPower finally sent us a cheque for the "estimated" exported power between when we installed in July and October. £30.95. In that period we generated about 750 kWh. Because we haven't got an export meter it's hard to know precisely how sensible their estimate is, but it looks as if we got back an average of 5p/kWh generated.
Had we set up a deal with Good Energy who pay about 5 p/kWh then we would would be in a similar position.
Let's watch this space and hope that nPower get a move on and put in the meter. it's annoying that you can't put one in as part of the installation.......

So the Met Office confirm that this has been the warmest year on record (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2006/pr20061214.html). There's a surprise. I bet that this is the reason why our gas usage is a bit down on previous years. It's nothing to do with insulation, draft-proofing, Mylar radiant barriers and so on. It's simply that as it's warmer we don't need to heat as much. So we've been generating about 100 kgs of CO₂ per week which is about half our consumption back in January. My data were a bit patchy at the start of the year and I didn't get properly organized until the end of January but for what it's worth here are our Gas and Electricity consumption in kWh for this year. Notice that in fact, the solar panels made a big difference in July and August but by the time September came round we were back to business as usual.

It looks like I screwed up with my spreadsheet - I wasn't thinking when I posted the weekly data and the discrepancy between the weekly and the daily data are quite glaring.

Here are the weekly data up until December 5th and the output is indeed falling steadily as the sun tips lower and lower in the sky.




So in fact we are now producing rather less than our weekly consumption.

nPower, meanwhile, still haven't got around to putting in an export meter but at least they've dropped us a line telling us that they've had unspecified admin problems. So eventually I guess we'll see a bit of return from these panels. But it's worth noting that our monthly bill has been reduced by over 1/3. So someone has noticed that we are drawing less than we used to.

Roll on summer.

Haven't posted for a while - just too much stuff going on at home at the moment but still monitoring energy use. I'll post on that shortly.

As the autumn has gone on, production has dropped fairly steadily. But, interestingly we're still getting more power out than in August which was just awful. Here are the weekly figures.

[Graph has been removed because I made a silly error in my spreadsheet and carried through the error making our production look a hell of a lot better than it really is.... sorry]

We'll be down around 20 kWh per week by Xmas I guess.....