The Greening of Hedgerley Wood

This blog has moved

2005-10-05T16:42:00.000+01:00

You can find out what happened next at our new blog site at:
http://www.hedgerley.net/greening. See you there.

Days 7 and 8 - Groundworks Finished

2005-08-15T09:26:00.000+01:00

The garden may look like a first world war zone, but after two weeks all the ground work is finished.

Yesterday the four trenches running out from the house were all finished, with both pipes laid and covered with sand.

Richard did an excellent job in measuring the trenches to ensure that the two pipe runs were balanced. In fact they ended up only about 8 meters different, which is well within tolerance. I'm still not sure whether we would have been better to use a single, meter-wide trench for each pair of pipes. But Diddy the digger was sure that the extra amount of earth to be shifted and replaced would not have been worth it.

Then the JCB could get on with backfilling, checking all the time with a pressure gauge that the pipes are not damaged by flints. This was finally finished by lunch-time on Saturday and I could then go round doing the last bits of tidying by hand.

We now have a much more definite idea of the costs of the whole system.

With the total for groundworks at 4K, this is 2K up on my original estimate, and higher than the impression given by the salespeople in the first instance. This is down to the cost of the work John and Pete had to do my hand in mending broken pipes, digging sections near the house by hand, smoothing the bottom of the trench to make best use of the sand, spreading the sand and maneouvering in the pipes. Add to this the hire of the dumper truck and the amount of sand needed and we get to our 2K overspend. This will bring the total cost of the system to 13K. So without the carbon saving angle, this would only be an economic proposition for a family if they had a good long time to recoup - or fuel costs go off the scale.

Anyway, it's done. Now we have to leave the garden and the woods at least six months for the earth to settle. Then we can replace some top soil, seed the lawn and re-make the surface of the drive.

Then towards the end of September the new model of boiler should be available from Sweden and we can see if this all works.

Day 5

2005-08-08T10:39:00.000+01:00

The first trench loop is completed in the morning and the third and fourth trenches started from the point where the pipes will fan out. Better success in avoiding the mains water pipe (circled).

By the end of the day the bottom of the trench has been smoothed (by hand) to receive the sand and the first 6 tons of sand put in. Laying the first pipe was tricky because it had to be threaded under all the points at which it crossed the mains water and other pipes.

The pipe was filled with water and pressure tested. This testing will have to continue while the trench is backfilled to ensure that the pipe is not damaged by one of the thousands of flints being put back in the trench.

2005-08-08T06:46:00.000+01:00

The Pledge. Kristi has been following the whole greeening process from Boston and has been over with the family for the past three weeks. Today she challenged us on recycling - shouldn't that be part of our strategy? Tara had also been urging this, so I was made to pledge that I would commit to re-cycling our rubbish from now on. In return Kristi agreed to work on the emissions level from the family cars - especially the SUV.

2005-08-06T08:38:00.000+01:00

And we decided that we needed a dump truck to move the sand around. Another couple of hundred pounds, and I'm not sure in this case it will do that much better than the wheelbarrow, since it has to be filled and emptied pretty much by hand.

2005-08-06T08:36:00.000+01:00

Day 3. Digging only brought the first tench half way back to the house. 5 tons of sand delivered, estimated by ICE as what we will need for the first trench. Another few hundred pounds, but apparently vital to protect the pipe from flints and improve heat transfer.

2005-08-05T09:33:00.000+01:00

Finally at the end of day 2 we reach the turning point for the first pipe and start heading back. So the digging alone is going to take around 8 days, even without the sand, pipe laying and testing and backfilling. All in all it's just as well that we agreed a fixed contract of �2,000. Otherwise at �180 a day plus a lot of extras it could have got our of hand.

2005-08-05T09:30:00.000+01:00

Day 2. Trying to avoid cutting the mains water again, Richard asks for some wire because he uses dowsing to find underground pipes. It seems to work and he marks the grass. See if you believe it - video clip. But half a day later we end up by hitting the pipe again anyway. More delays.

Snagging

2005-08-03T19:29:00.000+01:00

We knew about one pipe and managed to avoid it. But then we fractured the tiny oil feed pipe (perhaps a good symbol) and later cut through the mains water supply that was snaking strangely through the woods. That meant no water in the house for half the day and time wasted mending the pipe. Still by the end of the day we had dug 60 metres, including the more difficult part. Tomorrow's challenge will be tree roots.

Heat Pump - the Commitments

2005-08-03T19:25:00.000+01:00

At last we are underway with our heat pump system. The instruction manual says: dig trench, lay pipe, pressure test and backfill. But it ain't that easy. We've got excellent JCB drivers, Diddy and Richard, working with our long-time builder, John. We plan a route across the lawn and through the wood that gives us the necessary 400 metres of trench. We've decided to cut a 9" trench for each pipe, rather than a 1 metre trench for a pair, because of the amount of extra digging. It starts well, but we immediately hit problems.

A Chance to be Hybrid

2005-06-22T03:07:00.000+01:00

We were surprised and delighted when we got to Hertz in San Francisco to find they had allocated us a Prius for our three days driving to meetings around Silicon Valley. This was a great way to see what it was like to drive a hybrid in case we could ever afford one (£20K in the UK versus $20K in the US - and in the US there is a one-year waiting list).

In was very pleasant to drive, being responsive while so quiet. What I didn't like was the limited all round visibility. Also it's a comparatively small car in terms of what you can haul around in it. So overall probably not for us. But people noticed it and commented, so we felt we were stand-in evangelists for greener driving.

Then strangely on the flight to New York SkyRadioNet had a feature on all-electric cars based on lithium batteries. The reference is www.hybridtechnologies.com. They have a number of concept cars and bikes - mostly claiming to do around 100 miles on the basic set of batteries, and with high performance. They don't give prices for the cars, and the only bike for sale is $6K. But maybe in a year or so they'll be a practical and affordable green car or scooter that we can change to.

Mini Wind Turbine

2005-05-08T08:59:00.000+01:00

Interesting piece in the Guardian about a new mini wind turbine made in Scotland by Windsave. It's said to produce 1kW in a 12 m/s wind. In our case it would only contribute a little, but at only £750 it's worth it if only to experiment with and offset a little of the increased electricity use with the heat pump. What makes it possible for Hedgerley is that it is barely above the roof height, doesn't require planning permission and plugs straight into the existing electricity meter. So we'll see. I've sent off for more details.

Seabed solution?

2005-04-25T07:19:00.000+01:00

The Observer reported yesterday that BP claims to have a practical solution to disposing of CO2 by pumping it under the bed of the North Sea. They claim that the Miller field could absorb 5 million tons a year of liquefied CO2 which would be pumped from the Peterhead power station into the porous rock where the oil had been. This would be capped by the existing layer of mudstone and would be stored for 10,000 years. And the North Sea as a whole could absorb all the CO2 produced over 60 years by all the power stations of Europe, according to CEO Lord Browne - though he didn't say what would happen after that.

Apparently the principle has been working for 8 years in Norway's Statoil operation. What is clever about the BP proposal is that it is also in their interest, since the Miller field is coming to the end of its life and the CO2 would flush out the remaining oil for them. However, they do say that it depends on the government reducing its oil taxes.

This could be a very significant develop at the national level, but it is not an alternative to the need to control emmissions from domestic energy use and travel. So the campaign must continue.

Bizarre but I saw it working

2005-04-25T06:47:00.001+01:00

Went up to Eynsham to visit Ice Energy. I thought their name was an acronymn until I asked how they had drilled a bore hole in an industrial park to get their heat energy. They hadn't. Instead they heated the offices from a block of ice in a tank wrapped in the heat transfer pipes of circulating glycol.

This works because there is still some heat energy even at zero degrees C. This is extracted and heated up by the compressor and even colder glycol is returned to keep the block of ice frozen.

Having got over the shock of heat from ice (actually I still can't get my head around it), I went on to look at the works.

I really is like a fridge working in reverse, and not that much bigger. Power is needed for the mainly for the compressor and then for one pump to circulate the hot water and another for the glycol circulating through the underground pipes.

The whole assembly puts the water tank on top of the heat pump and adds pretty sophisticated controls based on a number of sensors. One important detail is that the system heats the water up to 60 degrees once a week to pasteurise the system in order to prevent legionnaires disease.

The tank is going to be an issue. It's actually double, with a hot water supply in the centre surrounded by water for the radiators. That may mean in our case using a separate tank to get enough hot water - and this will cause a space problem in the boiler room.

The next step is to arrange a site survey to check everything, size the system and let us know what it is going to cost.

Should have known

2005-04-25T06:41:00.000+01:00

Franny tells me that low-energy light bulbs just start dim but then brighten up. She's right, but I'm still not convinced that they are quite as bright even then.

Those flights

2005-04-20T11:19:00.000+01:00

Delighted to receive an email today from Key Travel, who specialise in working with charities, announcing their carbon calculator.

This is just what we need to offset the irreduceable flying that we have to do. So for my upcoming flight to Nairobi and Lusaka, they report that I will be producing 4 tons of CO2. To offset this I'm offered options for planting trees in Mexico or Uganda. I've chosen the Bushenyi District in Uganda where they say they are planting of mixed native woodlot for timber, including mahogany, cedar, African cherry, laurel, and silk trees, with
boundary planting for fuel wood and fruit. My offset costs £16.43.

Sending this off results in an immediate email from the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, who seem to be a central authority in this area that so many people refer to. They promise to send a leaflet with more details of the scheme along with the invoice.

All this strikes me as both a very efficient operation (done in 5 minutes) and surprisingly cheap. The Future Forest gift scheme offered one tree for £10 (a fifth of a tonne of carbon). Wheras this is 20 trees for £16.43 or one tree for a little under £1. So cutting out the middle organisation seems a good idea, although they are clearly doing good things with the margin.

The very low cost also allows us to fully compensate for all our flights (both as a company and a family) without this remaining as a barrier to reaching our target for this year of 15 tonnes. All good news.

Possible Breakthrough

2005-04-14T08:08:00.000+01:00

I went to a Solarsavers seminar yesterday in High Wycombe to discuss energy options with a number of suppliers. I had expected to be most interested in the solar water heating options.

There were some good nuggets in the presentations:

"the 19th was the century of coal, the 20th of oil and the 21st will be the century of solar"
PV costs around £3,000 per kW. For Hedgerley a 4kW system would cover 40 sq metres, cost around £10,000 net of grant and produce around 4,000 kWh a year, or a third of our current electricity needs.
Oxford Solar Initiative is another local advice centre, which has some additional grants on offer.
The Solar Trade Associated is said to be a good kitemark against cowboys.
UK has 60% of the solar radiation of the equator.
Normal required temperature for domestic hot water is around 50 degrees.
pipe insulation should equal the thickness of the pipe.
most solar water heating uses a dual coil boiler.
20% of the savings from solar water heating can be lost in electricity to power the pump.

But the real disappointment was that shade is a killer even for vacuum tube systems - contrary to what I had read. I am arranging a survey anyway with Gary Fowles from Rayotec, but it doesn't look hopeful. One speaker said that more than 2 hours of shading a day made systems uneconomic.

But then the final presentation was on a technology which I had somehow managed to ignore up to now - ground source energy pumps. The speaker was a very enthusiastic engineer from ICE Energy in Eynsham, David Greenwood. It's not a new technology, having been used for decades in Scandinavia. It takes heat from the ground through long pipes of circulating water linked to a heat pump, working as a refrigerator in reverse. It does require an input of electricity to drive the pumps, but offers 4 kW of heat for every 1 kW of electricity used. It also needs a 3-phase supply, but I think we have that available. And the result is round-the-year hot water and central heating, though there are issues I need to understand about the lower temperatures achieved without boosting.

As applied to Hedgerley, this would mean a 200 metre trench, one metre deep, down into the edge of the woods, which should be no problem, although if we hit the chalk we apparently have to add sand. Then the combined pump and cylinder would replace the current cylinder and boiler in the same space. David couldn't give a total cost, because they only supply the heat pump side, but it sounds like around £8,000 all in. The next step is to arrange a survey and go and look at the pumps themselves.

Finally, he said that a good approach is to undersize the heat pump slightly and use a wood-burning stove on particularly cold days. So that could the the combination we end up with.

Overall this seems like a very exciting option, providing steady heat and hot water with no carbon implications and lower running costs. It might even allow us to use the swimming pool again in the summer when the ground heat isn't needed for the house.

Local survey and advice

2005-04-14T07:58:00.000+01:00

We've just got back the 'home energy check' results from Thames Valley Efficiency Advice Centre. This was a good idea and free of cost, but in our case the advice they've sent is pretty general - insulation and more low energy lights. More surprising is that they rated our present oil-fired boiler as 'good'. It seems they are more focused on energy efficiency than carbon. Their closing words are; 'the faster you act, the faster you will start saving'.

Fire Research

2005-04-09T08:20:00.000+01:00

We spent a fascinating morning at Walkers in Burford. After researching dealers in wood-burning stoves around the country, they turned out to be the best in our area. In particular they offer a complete service from supplying the stove to arranging the installation and plumbing. Sandy Walker has been passionate about wood-burning stoves for more than 20 years and he took us through all the issues.

It seems as though the Clearview 750 would be best if we want to use the stove with an back boiler. The medium size boiler produces 27,000 btu and could provide our hot water and two radiators. However, it does mean that the radiators would always be on when the fire was lit. As Sandy said, it's like a steam engine - once the fire is lit, the hot water has to go somewhere. But on balance we don't see this as a disadvantage since we'd use it only in the cold six months of the year and then we'd welcome the heat in the living room and bedroom, as well as in the kitchen from the stove itself. All being well hot water in the summer would be produced by solar topped up by green electricity.

Very impressive was how controllable the stove is. Closing the air vents has an immediate effect, reducing the output from 14 kW down to 2 kW in a matter of minutes. At this level the fire will stay in for up to 12 hours. The firebox takes around 5 logs and needs to be re-filled three times a day. Very little ash is produced and can be put on the garden once a week as a useful source of potash.

The story behind the Clearview range goes back 18 years when it was invented by Jonathan Greenall in Shropshire. The basic idea is that the air that is drawn into the stove to provide the oxygen is pre-heated, which produces less smoke. By producing a form of after-burn, the emissions from the stoves are said to be five times less than a conventional stove. They claim that this also obviates the need for a catalytic converter, which would anyway quickly stop working. Sandy was given an early demonstration and says he was so impressed that he dropped the other 99 types of stove he was stocking to sell only Clearviews.

The Clearview literature also gives another environmental arguement in favour of wood as a fuel: that it releases the same amount of CO2 whether it is burnt or left in the woods to rot.

This was a fascinating morning. We'll be able to follow up with a survey to see in particular how best to line our chimney. And we need to wait for the solar water heating survey to be done to see how these different energy sources can best be integrated at the level of plumbing. Finally, we also have another option to check out. Our neighbour at Hedgerley was recommending ceramic stoves as particularly fuel efficient, so we need to look into these as well.

A present and a shock

2005-04-08T18:21:00.000+01:00

Two very interesting outcomes from our Birthday shramadana.

My present from Devi and Matthew was a carbon sequestering tree that they had paid to have planted. More details to follow.

Looking into the issue of carbon sequestration led to an interesting page from the Union of Concerned Scientists - Ten Personal Solutions. One striking example they give is that if every family in the US changed one light bulb for a low energy version, this would be the equivalent of taking 7.5 million cars off the road. This is staggering - but I guess they are scientists. If this is right, it's well worth emphasising. We're now using 23 watt bulbs which are better than 20s but still rather dim.

The other thing I turned up was a cutting from the Times. It reported a study from Greenpeace claiming that "stopping global warming would be such a big task that it is impossible in practical terms." It would take a 70% cut in fossil fuel consumption over the next 30 years in order to bring it under control.

And what was so chilling was that this report was dated February 1990. So we've already used up half that 30 years with little or no effective progress made.

2005-04-04T08:02:00.000+01:00

Shramadana. Wonderful birthday weekend with the family joining us in a concerted effort to sort through, recycle and share out 20 years of accumulated stuff that was clogging up our living space and wasting energy.

Kyoto Meter

2005-03-29T07:57:00.000+01:00

A great idea over dinner from Rajendre Khargi, Chair of OneWorld Netherlands. Why not add a third option to the in-car navigation systems? As well as choosing the fastest route or the most fuel efficient, why not have the option of the route that saves the most CO2? This would presumably be based on estimations of cruising speeds, traffic etc. Then at the end of the journey it would show how much carbon you had saved. It sounds to me like something people would be glad to have and to use.

2005-03-29T07:12:00.000+01:00

John and Tim arrived today with a lorry and a crane to take away the Aga. It took three hours and the removal of a door, but has left us with an excellent space for a wood-burning stove - and the money to pay for it.

2005-03-24T12:01:00.000+01:00

When we got back to London, feeling just a little smug about our CO2 saving, we then felt even better when we saw this very striking poster from ABB. We felt like saying - 'well a least we stopped a tiny quarter of a ton from happening this week, so if every one in the UK did their bit we could easily achieve what looks like a massive saving.'

We'll be in touch with ABB, with whom we had some great meetings at Davos, to see if we could link campaigns.

2005-03-18T18:08:00.000+01:00

For the first time we deliberately choose the train over the flight, going to Amsterdam via Brussels for OneWorld Board meetings. Door to door it meant:

7 hours instead of 5 hours,
about £400 instead of about £150
but it saved around a quarter of a tonne of CO2

2005-03-13T20:10:00.000+01:00

Today's step was putting in low energy light bulbs. These quad bulbs are 20w, which should be a good saving in joules. They are also guaranteed to last 10,000 hours, which would be a big improvement on our current ones. But the light output is disappointing. They claim to be equivalent to 100w regular bulbs, but they are much dimmer - closer to a 60w. Not sure I'm going to respond well to the dimmer rooms, being an SAD person.

Aga saga

2005-03-11T10:05:00.000+01:00

With just a day to go, the bidding on the Aga has just gone up to £720.

Also arrived today the details about a couple of log-burning boilers. Costs, including installation, start at £10,000, with grants available for around £2,500. We'll now have to look at further alternatives, as well as how such boilers are best integrated with solar water heating.

A View from Boston

2005-03-07T10:42:00.000+01:00

The Boston branch of the family have come up with a great quote this morning from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

"If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously."

Kristi also questioned the idea that wood is as carbon neutral as claimed. I must say I am also still a bit sceptical. Here's what they say at Logpile.co.uk:

"Wood as a Source of Renewable Energy. Provided that the following basic rules are followed wood can truly be described as 'solar energy in a package' and thus a source of renewable energy. The basic rules are that:
- The wood should come from a sustainable source
- The wood should be burned in a clean and efficient appliance and
- The wood should be used close to source i.e. not transported over long distance.

"When wood is burned in the presence of oxygen it produces carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for climate change. However, the amount of carbon dioxide released is no greater than the amount absorbed by the tree when it is growing, providing that the above rules are followed. Even allowing for emissions of CO2 in planting, harvesting, processing and transporting the fuel, replacing fossil fuel energy with wood will typically reduce net CO2 emissions by over 90%."

The DTI makes the same point on their renewable energy site:

"Biomass, also known as biofuels or bioenergy, is obtained from organic matter, either directly from plants or indirectly from industrial, commercial, domestic or agricultural products. The use of biomass is generally classed as a ‘carbon-neutral’ process because the carbon dioxide released during the generation of energy is balanced by that absorbed by plants during their growth. However, it is important to account for any other energy inputs that may affect this carbon-neutral balance on a case-by-case basis, for example any use of fertiliser, or energy consumed in vehicles when harvesting or transporting the biomass to its point of use."

So I guess I have to believe it. But it does mean we should start with dead wood (of which there is a lot) and make sure we replant if we do cut down any trees. We certainly score high on being close to the source of fuel.

getting eBay into the game

2005-03-06T19:35:00.000+01:00

With solar and wind looking a bit problematic at this stage, I've starting looking at wood power. We've got plenty of it lying around and most of the experts claim that it doesn't add to CO2 (for reasons I haven't totally fathomed yet). So I'm looking at log boilers and wood chip boilers. And as a first step we've decided to sell the old aga. It was the centre of the house heating system in the 1930s, but there's no way it'll help us now.

We've tried selling it locally for a few hundred, but there was no response. So I put it on eBay yesterday with no reserve, so long as the buyer agreed to dismantle and take it away. I would have been pleased with £200 or so, but the bids were up to £400 yesterday evening and this morning we've had 10 bids up to £670. And still six days to go. This is very promising and a good chunk of money for a new wood boiler. There are also some grants on offer that will help as well.

2005-03-04T10:59:00.000+01:00

The 13.6 square metre photovoltaic array at Camden's Women and Health Centre.

2005-03-04T10:57:00.000+01:00

Real time display of how much electricity the solar panels at Camden Women and Health Centre are producing, and the total produced since April 2003.

Learning more in Camden

2005-03-04T10:22:00.000+01:00

Went last evening with my daughter Boo to the Women's Health Centre in Camden. 3 years ago she organised a complete rebuild along environmental lines. Now the results are very impressive. They have put a lot of effort into insulation, bringing daylight into the building, energy efficiency and water harvesting from the roof.

But the main thing I wanted to see what how their large solar PV array was working in practice. There are plenty of theoretical specs for such systems but this is a chance to see how it actually works out. They have a 13.6 square metre array on a third story roof. It's facing south and carefully angled to the sun. The project was managed by Sustainable Energy Action Ltd and installed by Sundog Energy. It cost £12,000 and was completely funded by grants from the Energy Saving Trust, SW Electricity, EDF and the DTI Major PV Demonstration Programme. Quite a lot of other boxes were involved (notably inverters to turn the DC current into AC).

But the really interesting question was - of the theoretical 1.5 kW the system could produce what has it actually produced in the past two years? And the answer is 22,798 kWh between April 2003 and March 2005. That is 991 kWh a month or 11,898 kWh a year. This saving is worth around £700 a year, making the payback on investment 17 years -well withing the 25 years the PV system is due to last. Moreover, the payback in CO2 saved is around 5 tonnes a year.

The preliminary conclusions for Hedgerley are:

it suggests the early figures I had for the size of panel to generate 1.5 kW were much too low
Hedgerely doesn't have the necessary roof area and is very shaded by trees
We have the advantage of generating (and selling) renewable power back to the grid on the days that we are not there
We should look next at the hot water version of solar.

Pictures above show the set-up.

2005-03-01T09:47:00.000+01:00

March - and Hedgerley is under snow. We have to get the central heating boiler repaired and it's clear we couldn't easily survive without it at times like this.

2005-03-01T09:45:00.000+01:00

the guilty secret - trying to hide the oil tank that holds some 2,000 litres

in a word

2005-02-28T14:30:00.000+01:00

Anuradha has just come up with an excellent term - energy literacy. I guess it's also what I've been trying to acquire in the last few weeks.

At last THE SUM

2005-02-27T11:36:00.000+01:00

Given that the car does 5,000 miles a year on average and the scooter mileage is around 500, we can finally calculate our current total emissions (hold breath)…

And the answer is: 21.8 tonnes of CO2 a year. This comes 89% from home energy and 11% from transport.

And we have to consider that:

this doesn’t allow for the x 2.5 for our impact through society generally
this isn’t taking the x 3 for upper atmosphere CO2
we’re not including work travel (for good reasons)
we don’t live in Hedgerley all the time
it would be far higher but for Good Energy
This doesn’t include the saving of at least 15 tonnes from our wonderful trees, which would bring our current emissions to 6.8 tonnes or 3.4 tonnes each.

Anyway it gives us our starting point. What should our year one target be?

not straight to the 4 tonnes that would be globally fair, since (luckily for us) most people aren’t using their 2 tonnes yet.
not just the ‘save a tonne’ option.
we are already below the UK average (so little car use + Good Energy)

Anuradha and I discussed it and decided to aim to be at 15 tonnes by the end of year one. This would be moving towards half the UK average and make up for some of the counter-considerations above. It would also mean that, if we take the trees into account, we would be carbon neutral.

So to achieve this, we need to save 6.8 tonnes in the coming year. This will come from a whole range of changes, but the most important will be to reduce our oil consumption by around a third, i.e. using 2,000 litres less. This should be possible by not heating the pool and introducing solar hot water systems.

And by the way, what about ‘We bequeath you a planet’ as a OneWorld strapline for this campaign?

Small Steps in Resurgence

2005-02-27T11:32:00.000+01:00

This month’s Resurgence includes a new column on these issues written by Lorna Howarth. She refers to the Global Commons Institute (http://www.gci.org.uk/) and their notion of ‘Contraction and Convergence’. They have a much tougher calculation: that with a global population of 6 billion, the planet can only sustain 2 tonnes of emissions per person. That would make our target 4 tonnes a year. She quotes the UK average as 12 tonnes per person. But she also quotes the take-up by trees from Future Forests (http://www.futureforests.com/) as one tonne of CO2 per mature tree, which is far higher than 5 tonnes per acre of woodland. Checking with her sources, it turns out that Future Forests actually use a rough measure of 5 mature trees per tonne of CO2. This is certainly closer to our earlier figures. It suggests 75 trees at Hedgerley to make up our 15 tonnes saving, which must be about right. I'll go and count them at some point.

She gives some other useful figures:

average car use in UK 12,000 miles, LPG emits 25% less CO2 and costs around £2,000 to convert a car to.
Air travel - their own carbon calculator (www.resurgence.org/carboncalculator) multiplies the usual CO2 figure by three because it is emitted in the upper atmosphere, with is 3 times more damaging.
single glazing can lose 50% of the heat in a house.

Lorna also has a argument relevant to our logs – that burning wood is carbon neutral since the CO2 emitted during combustion will be sunk by the growing replacement by the woodland. I hope this is true. Need to check further.

This issue of Resurgence also has an article on the Hockerton Housing project in Nottinghamshire (www. hockerton.demon.co.uk). These are purpose build eco-houses in a community setting which come close to total energy self-sufficiency and zero emissions. It took them 4 years to get permission for their 26-metre wind turbine (half the cost and twice the output of their solar panels). And their glazing is triple- glazed and argon-filled.

Thinking about Air Travel

2005-02-27T11:31:00.000+01:00

Last year Anuradha and I travelled 83,000 air miles, causing a total emission of CO2 of 24 tonnes. Another wake-up call. Only half a ton was for holiday travel, which I guess is reasonable in the light of our new targets. We could justify the 23 and a half tonnes that we travelled for OneWorld as being offset by the good this travel achieved (including for the climate change debate itself), but we should still look hard at ways to reduce this. Video conferencing may be expensive in cash but extremely cheap in carbon.

First Real Changes

2005-02-27T11:26:00.000+01:00

Signed up with Good Energy. Their system is very clear, although the comparisons with the present are more complicated. Their rate is going to be 8.73p for kWh for daytime usage. The compares with our current Powergen rates of 7.96, but with the first 200 units at 10.18. However this is based on a day/night rate which probably is going to be worth changing to day only, since we won’t be using much electricity at night now. That will take the Good Energy rate to 7.85. I don’t have the comparable rate for Powergen. Anyway it looks as though we are paying something like a 10% premium to be green.

But the carbon payoff if huge. Using the same carbon calculator, our emissions go from 9,192 kg to 766 a month. In fact reading the small print, I don’t even see why it hasn’t moved to zero. More importantly and more philosophically I can’t see that this means we can simply go on using the same amount of electricity, just because it is coming from their 100% renewable sources. We should try and reduce this anyway and are making a start in a number of small ways on this and on oil.

Turning off radiators and lights in rooms we are not using is one immediate change. It had just seemed natural to have the house as a whole lit up as we moved from room to room. Then John, the builder who has helped us re-build Hedgerley over the years, came round to decide which windows can take double glazing. Luckily most of them can, although a few will need to be replaced.

Then we came across an ad for low energy bulbs, which seems an easy way to start. They claim to use 20% of the electricity and last 10 times as long. The quad version is 20w but claims to give the light of a 100w normal bulb. It looks a bit like a folded fluorescent tube, but I don’t think it can be. We’ll see how good they are.

Then today there was a letter from South Oxfordshire District Council about home energy use. It’s only a survey that will be followed up with ‘a personalised report detailing energy saving measures’. The key questions seemed to be about insulation and were tricky to complete in an accurate way for such an old house. Still good that they are doing this.

The Passion behind the project

2005-02-25T09:39:00.000+01:00

The reason for doing all this was reinforced today when I read an application Anuradha is preparing to fund a mass blog on this subject under the OneWorld banner. She writes:

"I had been writing about Climate Change with a generalised anxiety since 1980 – but, like many anti-poverty activists, I considered it ‘an environmental issue’ of secondary importance to ‘people-issues’. Only this year did I realise that it will soon be the cause of terrible human suffering, greater than all the usual poverty-inducing systems (trade, debt, aid) put together. And now there is a new twist: a process of ‘solar dimming’ may have masked the true ferocity of global warming. By 2030, we could have warmed the earth enough to release sheets of undersea methane – the beginning of the end. The nearness of the new deadline takes my breath away.

We have a grandchild, Zoe, aged three. Her name means ‘life’. But in 2030, aged 28, how could she bring new life into the world we are bequeathing her? What is the responsibility of us 20th century citizens to those born in the 21st century? Will there be children in 2050?

I pursued the new research with NGO and media colleagues specialising in poverty-related climate change, who reinforced my worst fears. Earlier this month, New Scientist confirmed the urgency of ‘awakening the sleeping giants’ (like undersea methane). A visit to Sri Lanka, helping tsunami relief, brought home the painful recognition that the heart-wrenching human suffering I was witnessing could be as nothing compared to the havoc soon to come.

We need to begin with a ‘Desiderata’-like statement, laying out in empathetic terms the case for personal commitments to responsible carbon reduction. The mega-blog is designed to attract a wide range of contributors discussing in accessible language the changes they, as ordinary householders, are trying out. Billions of dollars of advertisements have created a cultural climate giving us false permissions that tell us it is absolutely fine to fly and drive constantly – indeed, that raising our status depends on it. The blogs will, through their mosaic of voices, reveal new lifestyles that lack these carbon-spitting status symbols but are yet desirable and satisfying - and which invite easy copying or adaptation. Positive results will be fed back to provide self-efficacy. The blogs can be hosted on OneWorld – the world’s leading global justice portal – to access the size of audience it needs. "

2005-02-24T09:53:00.000+01:00

Hedgerley Wood built in the 1930s
(photograph by Tom Dyson)

Oil and Electricity

2005-02-23T06:40:00.000+01:00

First real numbers look horrifying:

yearly use of heating oil (hot water, heating and pool) was 6245 litres
yearly use of electricity (lights and gadgets) was 20,700 kWhs

This computes to CO2 emisions of:

oil = 19,476 kgs of CO2 per year
electricity = 9,192 kgs of CO2 per year

Giving a total of 28,668 kgs per year, or more than 28 tonnes.

What makes this worse is that we haven't started on car use and flying. It's clear that we are already way over average and that we have everything to do to turn the situation around.

A few more key metrics

2005-02-20T06:21:00.000+01:00

I found a good carbon calculator at the Safe Climate site. I won't be able to get our own totals until I'm back home with the utility bills, but it does give some of the key conversion ratios:

heating oil - multiply gallons of oil by 11.81 to get kgs of CO2
petrol - multiply gallons by 8.87
air travel - multiply air miles by .29

By the way some sites quote in carbon rather than carbon dioxide, so it's worth knowing that 1 unit of CO2 is equivalent to .2729 units of carbon.

To calculate a family's total footprint, multiply domestic use (including all travel) by 2.5, to cover all the other societal uses, since typically domestic use is around 40%.

Solar panels: a 4 x 8 foot glazed panel can generate (at the low end which is what it would be for us) 1,500 kWh a year. So we'd need a few to make the impact we need, even if we could achieve this level with so many trees around (but good news of those trees coming up). If instead the panels are producing hot water, then the right array typically produces around 75% of hot water needs in summer and 10% in winter (low ends again). And the panels (which are thicker than PV) can come in varieties that contain anti-freeze or gas, so that they also work to some extent in winter.

Now the good news on trees. An acre of forest will soak up 200 tons of CO2 over 40 years. So at 5 tons a year our woodland cover (which we could conservively estimate at 3 acres) would absorb 15 tons a year. And we should easily be able to stay under this limit, even with a reasonable amount of air travel. On the other hand, should the fact that we could afford to buy this piece of woodland let us off the hook in this way?

Another Canadian site I've just found along the same lines is the OneTonne Challenge site.

First answers on wind energy

2005-02-19T07:31:00.000+01:00

I started at the British Wind Energy Association - www.bwea.com and supplemented this with some US-based information from Wind Energy Weekly - www.awea.org.

The basic wind story looks pretty promising. If an average house uses around 10,000 kWh a year, then a 5 - 15 kW turbine can made a sigficant contribution to this. A 10 kW turbine, for example, would cost around 20,000 pounds and payback in 15 years. A turbine operates in winds over 10 mph and typically produces in an average year 30% of its potential output. This suggests that if it runs successfully for 30% of the year (say 100 days) it should produce 100 x 24 x 10 kWhs = 24,000 kWhs. This seems much higher than the sites are indicating.

But theory aside, we need to check out practical case studies from people who have done it. Good starting points seem to be:

CAT has a 15 kW turbine
West Beacon Farm near Loughborough has two 25kW turbines. They apparently welcome visits (Prof. Marmont on 01509 610 033).

However, the big snag for Hedgerely Wood seems to be the height the tower needs to be. 100 ft seems to be typical for these small systems. Worse still, they say that the bottom of the blades need to be at least 10 feet above anything within 300 feet. This means that the turbine is going to be visible whether we put it near the house or at the top of the wood. And in an area designated for outstanding natural beauty, I can see that being a near impossible problem.

So first indications suggest that it may be that wind is not going to be part of our equation.

First link

2005-02-18T11:49:00.000+01:00

Just found this interesting blog from Alan Durning. He seems to have very similar preoccupations but is already very advanced in the solutions.

Starting on the Numbers

2005-02-18T06:58:00.000+01:00

Before we can do any of the maths on how much energy we are using at the moment, I need to understand the best units to work in. Luckily my daughter, Devi, and son in law, Matthew, are on hand to make up for the physics lessons I failed to follow at school.

It seems the basic unit of energy is the joule. It’s not a large unit, so we will be thinking in kilojoules and megajoules. Then when thinking of appliances and systems that use energy we need the watt. This is the rate at which the appliance is using the joules. 1 watt equals 1 joule per second. So now to turn this into actual cases:

A hundred watt bulb will use 60 x 60 x 100 joules in an hour. That’s 360 kJoules. Since the electricity meter measures kilowatt hours that’s the equivalent of a tenth of a kilowatt hour. And at around 6p per kilowatt hour, that light is costing us 0.6p for every hour that it’s on.
The television is rated at 67 watts, so it takes about .07 kjoules an hour, which costs us about 0.4p for every hour of viewing.
And the 1 kilowatt electric fire takes 1 kWatt an hour, costing us 6p.

And by the way, the appliances that are left on standby are using around a third of the power. So the television may only be costing 1 or 2p for an evening’s viewing, but it costs an additional 3p for the rest of each day. And that applies to the set-top box, the two screens and the several other boxes. In terms of computers left on, those are figures to find out…

When it comes to oil, there should be a conversion into watts that we can find. But before that there is the simple measure of how many litres of oil we are using, since avoiding burning fossil fuels and producing greenhouse gases is our main concern. But the efficiency of the boiler and the insulation of the house do come into play, since if these were improved we could achieve the same level of comfort for less carbon produced. In this regard, the EU energy efficiency grades are apparently the thing to look at. Anyway, insulation may be boring but it remains the best first way to improve matters.

Calor gas for the cooking is similar, as it the petrol used in the vehicles.

Matthew also introduced me to Good Energy (www.good-energy.co.uk) which sounds like just what we need. It will supply electricity at a higher rate, but guarantee that it’s all produced from renewable sources. For Hedgerley Wood they will charge 7.85 per KWh plus a standing charge of 12.83 per day. That immediately suggests (and to him as well as to me) that it might be better to heat the water with an immersion heater ultimately powered by GE’s renewables, but to use a smaller amount of oil. Need to check on the logic of this.

Clearly GE can’t at the moment be the answer for everyone, since they don’t produce enough for the needs of the whole country, but the sense is that every household that joins helps them expand their capacity.

They also have on the site a very good first indication of carbon dioxide emissions. The average household, they say, produces 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. And a small car traveling 6 miles produces 1.5 kg.

In the case of Hedgerley, switching to GE for our electricity would, by itself, save around 2,070 kg a year. This is based on the fact that 1 KWh produces 0.43 kg of CO2. When I get back to the electricity bills I should be able to check out our current carbon emissions from electricity.

The other great advantage of GE is that they will buy back electricity that we produce locally. According to the first descriptions of home generation on the site it looks like a much better option that storing locally any energy we produce.

That leads to the question of how we could produce it. The sites to start with (tomorrow) seem to be:
British Photovoltaics Association – www.pv-uk.org.uk
The Energy Saving Trust – www.est.org.uk

If we start with solar it seems that heating the water is the best, since energy is lost every time you convert between different types. Of course with our amount of sunlight it will only heat the water to a certain level, but that will make the final burst of heating required smaller. Beyond that, how to produce electicity is the next thing to research. We need to know whether the same panels can do both, what it will all cost and what we do about all those water pipes during the freezing months.

For wind energy I’ll have to wait to tomorrow to continue the research. I am after all on holiday and the internet connection here is pretty ropey.

Starting in Sri Lanka

2005-02-17T08:29:00.001+01:00

Colombo seems to be a good place for making resolutions. Twenty years ago I was here and decided to become a vegetarian after reading Gandhi. Now I’m inspired by Anuradha's idea for a new way to campaign on climate change at OneWorld: seeing it as a commitment to the coming generations. That led us to discuss how we can personally take the issue more seriously and how we can try and align our own life at Hedgerley Wood to these values.

So we're starting with three aims: to reduce our use of fossil fuels, to save money and make our life more sustainable in retirement, and to record the process in case it’s helpful for other people. So I'm starting with this blog and pictures and will maybe extend to a video diary in due course.

Of course we could be much more radical: move to Sri Lanka, stop commuting to work, live off our own produce, build earth toilets… But in the first place I don’t want to do this and, secondly, it seems unlikely that the majority of people in the UK or the US would want to either. The relevant challenge – at least until things get a lot worse – is to see how far we can go in reducing the negative impact of our current house, jobs and lifestyle.

It seems like the place to start is with a baseline survey of our current energy use and where that energy comes from. That’s both directly in the house and indirectly through our other activities. For that I’ll have to learn a bit about units of measurement of energy.

On the direct side the rough energy inventory I suppose we start with is:
• Oil – for heating, hot water and the pool
• Electricity – for light, some heating and a lot of gadgets
• Gas – for cooking, but very little
• Petrol – for the car, scooter and lawnmower
• Logs for the living room fire.

Indirectly we have to look at the travel we do for work and for leisure.

On the other side of the equation is the positive impact of the woodland round the house. I don’t know how fair it is to count this since we have done little more than buy the five acres and not cut down the trees. However, it will be interesting to know what the contribute in terms of taking up carbon dioxide each year.

Then to begin to research the subject I guess a good starting point would be the Centre for Alternative Technology. I first look at www.cat.org.uk is a bit disappointing, although there is a good list of books on alternative energy. Probably best to go down there, look at working systems and talk to the experts about what really works. A lot of the solar and wind machines they list are at the level of toys and we need to find where the heavy duty stuff is.

It feels as though when it comes to solutions we should start with the issue of storage. However we generate the renewable energy it will have to be either stored or sent to the grid when it’s not being used. So this is a first thing to sort out. I’ve read something about an option of storing in the form of hydrogen, which sounds interesting if a bit daunting. Certainly what I have seen of solar in India suggests that conventional batteries are not really the answer. Even with their amount of sun and pretty large collectors on the roofs, they still need what seems like small rooms full of car batteries even to power a computer and a few lights for 3 or 4 hours. Anyway we need to do the calculations.

Then, still without knowing much at this stage, it seems that after the first phase of survey and research, we could begin on just a few parallel tracks by deciding:
• What form of storage to go for
• What first form of renewal energy to try (maybe solar for hot water)
• What changes in lifestyle could make an immediate difference (not using the pool).

I don’t think we are going to expect to balance the books in the early years. It seems many of the alternative technologies take many years to pay off. But this could suit us well, since we are in a position to invest now in order to have a more economic way of life when living on a pension in ten years’ time.

Now it feels very good to have created the first blog entry, because I hope this will be a great way to link with other people working on similar projects.