A bright outlook: solar photovoltaic panels on a roof in Sussex
It could be because the Government has come to realise that it needs to support renewable energy technologies if it’s to meet its carbon emissions target (and its obligation for renewable sources to provide 20% of the UK’s energy by 2020).
It could be because homeowners are looking for ways to reduce their contribution to climate change, and can also see that energy from fossil fuels is becoming ever pricier and that energy efficiency measures will add value to their homes.
Whatever the prime driver, it’s all beginning to come together for solar photovoltaics and solar hot water in 2010.
Exhibit one: at the end of 2009 the Government introduced its Boiler Scrappage Scheme. The boiler and central heating system in an average home account for about 60% of the building’s carbon emissions, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that householders with inefficient G-rated boilers are being encouraged to upgrade to a new appliance. They can register with the Energy Saving Trust (EST), use an approved installer to fit a modern A-rated boiler, and receive a voucher for £400 towards the costs. The money can also be spent on a renewable heating system – such as solar thermal.
Exhibit two: on 1st February the Government revealed the finalised details of its new Feed-in Tariff. This provides a great incentive for homeowners to invest in microgeneration.
The rates for photovoltaics had been criticised as being too low, but the revised rates bring across-the-board increases for all sizes of PV installations. The rate for ‘retrofit’ installations of less than 4 kW will be 41.3p/kWh compared with the 36.5p/kWh originally proposed.
At the same time the Government announced the start of its consultation period on the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), which could do for solar thermal what the Feed-in Tariff will do for solar photovoltaics. Due to start in April 2011, it will guarantee long-term payments for installers of solar thermal and certain other renewable technologies.
One blot remains on this particular landscape in that the rate of return for solar thermal is not going to be as much as that planned for the other renewable heat energy sources. Yet solar thermal is considered the most cost-effective renewable technology currently available, and a proven one too (as over 100,000 system owners in the UK can confirm).
Exhibit three: on a smaller scale, around 500 homes across England taking part in a DECC-funded pilot project to try out ways of funding whole house makeovers. Householders taking part in this ‘Pay As You Save’ initiative will be given the chance to invest in energy efficiency and microgeneration without having to pay upfront. The repayments will be made over a long period of time and will be lower than their predicted energy bill savings.
All this indicates Government commitment, which of course doesn’t automatically translate itself into actual growth (it was apparently a supporter of wind power, but look what happened to the Vestas turbine factory on the Isle of Wight last year). But the vibes on the ground are looking good.
Fast track to Europe: the train
You’re off to a northern European destination for business or a short break. Do you let the plane or the train take (or add to) the strain?
As air travel becomes ever more of a stamina test, whether the delays are due to snow or security concerns, and we’re made to feel environmentally irresponsible for even thinking of flying, trains are back in our good books. And as this year sees the end of Eurostar’s monopoly on passenger train services through the Channel Tunnel, there could be cost-competitive rival services to choose from, and faster services to some major cities.
But we mustn’t hold our collective breath. There are logistical matters to be cleared up, so it’ll be a few years before the other operators are steaming ahead. Also, Air France-KLM’s plan for a high speed London to Paris service this year, with a Paris to Amsterdam connection in the offing too, has apparently hit the buffers – for the time being anyway.
Similarly, Deutsche Bahn has denied reports that it has put in a bid to run direct trains from London to Cologne. It says it has ‘no plans in the next year or so’, wording which suggests that it’s still very interested. Perhaps sooner rather than later we can expect to enjoy a smooth passage to Germany’s fourth largest city and home to the celebrated perfume.
Even as things currently stand, a comparison between plane and train journey times suggests that flying isn’t always the much faster option.
Hop on the train in London and you could get to Amsterdam in 5 ½ hours (this calculation includes a 30 minute check-in time and connection times). Go by plane, and you would arrive in just under 4 ½ hours (including transfer from central London to Gatwick and a 2 hour check-in time). So the air traveller only beats his train-journeying counterpart by an hour.
Take the train from London to Cologne and you could be there in five hours, only half an hour more than the plane would have taken you. Once the new rail link using the Channel Tunnel that Deutsche Bahn is toying with is a reality, the journey time will actually be faster than air at only four hours.
Meanwhile, significant improvements are being made to high speed rail lines across continental Europe, all of which cut down journey times.
Naturally, the unknown quantity here is price. But with the air industry being hit by green taxes, air fares are likely to rise faster than those for trains. And comfort is a factor for both leisure and business travellers. The airport queues, the hanging around, the uncertainty caused by budget airline cancellations, could increasingly tilt the balance in favour of the train.
By the end of this week a twelfth of the new year will have passed, more speedily than we’d like. It’s time to air a calendar matter that has been exercising your blogger’s mind since he started scribbling in his fresh and new 2010 diary.
At issue is the claim by this slim volume to be an ‘Eco Diary’. Closer inspection reveals that the only ecological feature is the paper used, which is 100% recycled. But we all recycle paper where we can, and notebooks and more made from this sort of paper are commonplace. So what makes it stand out from the green crowd?
Well, each day has a trivia question (today’s is “Which constituency did Tony Blair represent?”) No green theme here. There are unnecessary bookkeeping pages: if your blogger had the pizazz to run his own company he would use a computer to record his cash flow.
Thumbing to the back, we find a web directory. A valuable resource crammed with links to green shopping websites, environmental blogs and more? Sadly not. If you didn’t know that Google’s web address is www.google.com, or that Channel 4’s pages can be found at www.channel4.com, or if your regular search engine is incapable of tracking down the website of the Home Office or the Ministry of Defence, then this list is for you. Otherwise it isn’t.
If this product is ‘eco’, what is a properly eco product to be called? Super eco? What we really want to know about are the other active steps the diary manufacturer (an established mainstream brand) is doing to back up this so-called eco-initiative. Maybe it sponsors a wetland conservation project or runs its fleet of delivery vehicles on chip fat oil – but if so it’s certainly not telling us.
In short, it’s just another example of putting a green gloss on an otherwise humdrum product to highlight its appeal.
The WWF predicts that by 2025 two-thirds of the world’s population could be facing severe water shortages. For conservationists, a significant knock-on effect is the continued decline in the fortunes of freshwater species (which are more at risk than species of any other habitat). While the fate of the Yangtze River dolphin (see ‘Last Chance to See’) cannot be pinned exclusively on China’s demand for water for agriculture and drinking, it was nonetheless a victim of vigorous and competing interests along the great waterway – from the disorientating noises produced by increased motorboat traffic to unsustainable fishing practices.
While we don’t really talk about carbon ‘wars’, this term is by contrast often used when the struggle for water is discussed: our thirst for it makes it more of a matter for national security than competition for fossil fuels.
Hosny Khordagui, director of the water governance programme in Arab states with the U.N. Development Programme, recently warned that shortages in Yemen could lead to increased migration to urban areas and a subsequent increase in crime and violence, which would provide a fruitful recruiting ground for the extremist organisations active in that country (since then, the attempted bomb attack by a Yemen-trained man on flight to Detroit over Christmas has provided a sharp reminder of Al-Quaeda’s activities there).
In another continent, meanwhile, Scientific American reported on tensions in Peru. What was once a harsh desert is now the hub of Peru’s export agriculture businesses. Demand for irrigation is draining the aquifer, leading to the diversion of water from the highlands – which means less for that area’s subsistence farming llama herders.
But is there a tendency to be too alarmist? As Jack Schafer points out on the Washington Post’s online magazine Slate, there has been no formal declaration of war over water in the last fifty years. India and Pakistan, which one would imagine don’t need much of an excuse to go to war with each other, have come to an arrangement over water via a World Bank-brokered agreement. The escape valve easing the pressures that could lead to conflict seems to be that a country without enough water for all its agricultural needs will import food from a country that does. So essentially the solution lies in trade and international agreements. This suggests that it’s the natural distribution of water that’s the problem, rather than any shortage. Indeed, in the Peruvian case, officials point to the fact that two-thirds of the country’s population lives on the dry western side of the Andes, where less than 2% of the country’s water flows.
As Jeffrey Sachs pointed out in The Guardian last spring, there is no one fix or even cause of water shortage. The solutions will have to be found on different levels, from easily-replicable piped water projects in African villages to global efforts to mitigate the worst consequences of our changing climate.
In the meantime water footprints could be the new carbon footprints in the coming decade.
Installation on Killick House, London: similar projects to come in 2010?
2010 could be the warmest year on record, according to the Met Office (who add, unsurprisingly, that this is ‘not a certainty’; especially not after last week’s ‘big freeze’ which caused havoc across the UK).
Whatever this means for the planet, there would at least be a silver lining for owners of solar hot water systems: a warm year could lengthen the period (currently May to September) when the sun provides virtually all a household’s hot water requirements – and perhaps boost the sun’s energy input during the winter months too!
As things stand, over the course of a year an advanced system such as the LaZer2 solar water heating system should be able to provide between 50% and 70% of a household’s annual domestic hot water demand.
SolarUK director Geoff predicts a sluggish start to 2010 followed by a 52% (an intriguingly specific figure) spike in demand for its services. Growth should be propelled again in 2011 when the Renewable Heat Incentive, which will apply to the generation of heat from a number of technologies (including solar hot water), is in place.
Turning to the state of the nation, we have a general election to entertain us in 2010. What will the parties’ manifestos say about renewable energy – from which we might also deduce their take on solar power?
Looking at current policies of the three main parties gives us hints. The Conservative Party says that developing renewable energy sources will be a ‘priority’, with any expansion of nuclear power not coming at the expense of investment in renewables. It enthuses about feed-in tariffs and smart meters, which our current Government is already rolling out (the differences, and the devil, may be in the detail). Its plans for a ‘smart grid’ would see demand and supply managed in a way that minimises CO2 emissions.
The Liberal Democrats make a specific pledge: at least 20% of our energy will come from renewable sources by 2020 (if this figure seems familiar, it’s because it matches current EU targets) helped along by new incentives for microgenerators in the form of guaranteed minimum feed-in tariffs (the Government’s own new ‘cash back’ feed-in tariff comes into force in April). They will also roll-out smart meters within five years (twice as quickly as currently planned).
The Labour Party’s summary of its policy highlights its ‘target’ of making all new homes zero-carbon from 2016 and its ‘new £100 billion blueprint for renewable energy’.
Meanwhile, there are notable developments on the European stage. The nine countries involved in the ambitious scheme to link clean energy projects in a ‘supergrid’ should, by the autumn, have worked out a practical plan setting out how and by when the network will be built.
Finally, away from domestic politics, it’s the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity. Its objective – a predictably woolly one, it has to be said – is to ‘raise awareness of the importance of conserving biodiversity for human well-being’.
A belated Happy New Year from all at SolarUK.
Christmas is a time to recline in front of the telly and enjoy a film.
How about a film engrossing enough to take your mind off family squabbles and hangovers, but which also has an environmental message to think about afterwards?
Our film guide might even make further appearances on this blog in the New Year, but here are three to start off with. We are not including film versions of famous novels, except where the film has become better known than the book. Unfortunately this counts out the rather touching Watership Down. (Still, at least we’ve had an excuse to mention this rabbit-populated animation).
The China Syndrome (1979)
A thriller about safety coverups at a nuclear power station. Thirty years after its release, it’s not showing its age, the themes of corporate greed and corruption being just as relevant as the nuclear energy debate.
The Emerald Forest (1985)
An American Engineer is working on a construction project in the rainforest when his young son is kidnapped by a little-known tribe.
For an aspiring actor it must be quite handy having an established movie business figure for a dad, and Charlie Boorman, now better known for his TV motorcycling adventures, took on the role of the boy (found in the forest after a ten year search) in this John Boorman-directed drama highlighting the conflict between nature and the ‘civilised’ world.
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Taking global warming to its far-fetched conclusion, it’s a more a case of global freezing as the world plunges into a new Ice Age. A disaster movie rather than a realistic picture of what will happen if carbon emissions aren’t curbed: but in a two hour film climate change has to happen very quickly. A slightly colder than normal winter in New York wouldn’t be very exciting, would it?
And now to three more films. Glancing at the choices, you might wonder what they have to do with environmental matters. But just think about them through the prism of current ecological concerns, and a hidden green message reveals itself, unintentional though it was on the part of the scriptwriter.
Brief Encounter (1945)
Public transport, and railway waiting rooms in particular, make romance possible. If the Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson characters had taken to their respective cars, they would never have had those platform encounters that led to romance.
Mary Poppins (1964).
In this classic family film, which is getting a BBC airing this week, the magical nanny shows her young charges that a more fun-filled life is possible, eventually working her charms on the banker father: by the end he is quite happy to have left his corporate life behind and is enjoying the down-to-earth pleasures of spending time with his children flying kites.
The Wicker Man (1973)
Under the stewardship of Lord Summerisle, the Scottish island in this scary film is clearly aiming for self-sufficiency, with its ‘back to nature’ (and to paganism) approach to crop growing. The visiting police constable is given tinned food for his pub supper – a result of crop failure – which hints at a very commendable sensibility to the impact of seasons, the weather and the environment on our food production (which we easily forget, used as we are to year-round availability in supermarkets).
Electricity meters as we know them are to be replaced by Smart Meters, whose digital display will show us how much the energy we are using in our home (gas as well as electricity) is costing – both in money and CO2 emissions – with other useful data too. On top of that, they’ll be a means of communication between us and our suppliers.
This will happen by 2020, if the Government’s roll-out goes to plan.
These meters have already helped reduce energy use in Italy. But the UK is far from slack, at least according to some American energy forum users who have contacted your blogger and reckon the UK Government can teach the US some lessons.
For opponents of Smart Meters, a major gripe is the potential for inaccuracies and even fraud. In a case mentioned in a 13th December New York Times article brought to your blogger’s attention, a Californian resident was alarmed to find that his meter reading this July was over three times that of the corresponding month last year, despite having put in new windows and insulation in the interim.
Here in the UK, chiming with the disquiet over CCTV intrusion and the prospect of ID cards, there are concerns that the monitoring functions of the meters would represent one more step towards a ‘surveillance’ society.
Both here and in the US, critics argue that consumers will inevitably be faced with higher bills. This is because the meters are expensive to install – and the utility companies will need to claw back this money from somewhere, as well as make up for any loss of revenue resulting from the newly clued-up homeowner using less energy. The customer, they say, will pay. All told, the consumer might only be around £20 a year better off.
But looking at the positive aspects, the Smart Meter would – assuming the basic errors are eradicated – mean no more estimated bills. Meter readings by an inspector will be a thing of the past. Energy companies can reduce their staff overheads (and these savings might just be passed to the customer).
They’ll bring more flexible tariffs, so we can hoover or put our washing machine on at, say, 11pm (peak time is between 5 and 7pm) and save the spare-power generating coal power stations some booting-up effort (and save us some money).
Some will find reassurance in the connectivity of the new meters, as utility companies can see immediately if someone’s power has failed.
One of your blogger’s stateside communicants suggested that US residents’ shying away from Smart Meters is down to a resistance to change. Well, we in the UK tend to like the status quo, too. Whether Smart Meters in their proposed form are a good, bad or indifferent idea, at the fundamental level if you can see how much you are using, you will look for alternatives – such as ditching the electric kettle and heating water on your wood-burning stove instead.
Wood, as an energy-generating alternative to the dirty and finite resource that is coal, looks to have plenty of potential to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. It’s a carbon-neutral fuel because the carbon dioxide given off is balanced by what the tree used during its life.
So plans for a series of biomass-fired plants, as reported in The Times recently, should be welcomed…except that, sadly, nothing is ever that simple in the world of sustainability.
Just one of the new plants being built (that at Port Talbot) will consume each year the equivalent of 30% of the UK’s domestic annual wood harvest. Therefore, most of the wood supplies will have to be imported from overseas. Shipping this wood in such large quantities will leave a trail of carbon emissions in its wake, thus cancelling out a chunk of the environmental gains these power stations are intended to provide.
There is a further knock-on effect. The price of wood will rise due to demand, meaning that manufacturers of wood-based products (such as garden furniture) will suffer, with more woe too for the recession-hit construction industry.
There are echoes here of the rather better-known debate surrounding biofuels. If crops are to be grown for fuel, where do we plant the crops for food? Plus there’s all that energy needed to power the tractors harvesting these crops, not to mention the chemical plants turning beans into biodiesel and the transportation of the finished fuel.
There’s a social impact, too, before the seeds are even under the soil: farmers in developing countries face being on the receiving end of aggressive land-grabbing by those eager to exploit a lucrative alternative to growing food. It is hard enough weighing up any initiative’s carbon savings potential without factoring in these human costs as well.
If it’s any consolation, matters are simpler for homeowners and businesses going down the solar thermal route. SolarUK’s solar panels are manufactured in the UK (East Sussex to be precise) so assuming they are being installed here they won’t need to cross any oceans. This, and the materials used in their construction, enables a LaZer2 solar collector to become carbon neutral after only around nine months, which is substantially less than the tested versions of other companies.
A SolarUK panel won’t harm the visual environment either, their frames being a sleek all-black design. Indeed, if the National Trust considered them suitable for its Elizabethan, Grade I listed Nunnington Hall – and got them through the planning process – it’s clearly possible, even on the most sensitive of buildings, to find a spot for them where they don’t offend the eye yet are still exposed to the sun’s clean energy.
Solar panels on a roof, Nunnington Hall, Yorkshire
That'll do me nicely, thanks
It’s about this time of day that a blogger’s thoughts turn away from work and towards lunch. The trouble is, for a blogger on a reduced-wheat diet (which fortunately is scarcely an intolerance and certainly not an allergy) finding satisfying sustenance can be a frustrating experience. Salads lose some of their appeal at this time of year, while a cold day makes a hot pasty, in all its wheaty glory, an almost irresistible temptation. Scan the ready-made sandwich shelf of your usual retailer, and you would think that bread can only be made from wheat, and that historians of South America mislead us when they say that the pre-Columbian natives of the Americas got by on their cereal staple, corn.
In fact, corn (or maize, if you will) still comes out on top, ahead of rice and wheat, in terms of metric tons of it produced worldwide. The USA is responsible for nearly half of this harvest. Such a huge amount of it is grown that uses for it must be found, with the result that it’s fodder for beef cattle. It makes them grow quickly, but it’s not their natural diet. Antibiotics have to be continually added as feed supplements to help their stomachs digest the stuff.
As well as cow health, there’s a high cost in terms of carbon emissions too. Monocultural corn farming is heavily dependent on fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, so industrially-reared cattle are, in a sense, eating oil, in stark contrast to the traditionally-reared cattle eating grass grown with free solar power.
Grass-fed beef has lower fat overall, and more of the healthy omega 3 fats also found in nuts and fish. The omega 3 in a cow’s tissues begins to be lost if it is moved off the grass and into a feedlot.
Fortunately most cattle here in the UK spend their springs and summers chewing on grass, with conserved grass in the form of silage to keep them going in the winter, perhaps topped up with sugar beet, turnips, plus those potatoes not up to supermarket standards.
As for corn for direct human consumption rather than cattle fodder, could an enterprising supermarket not try selling sandwich fillings in a pure corn wrap, in a form that might be recognised by an ancient Aztec? At least one hungry stomach would be grateful.
No longer with us: a Golden Toad
Reviews of the decade allow greater scope for reflection than end of year sum-ups, a year being just too short a frame of reference to allow considered observation of changes and emerging trends. When we raise our glasses to 2010 later this month, ‘the Noughties’ will be history. So now is the time to look back over the last ten years. In this vein, a few weeks ago a weekend magazine presented readers with a broad survey of world events during this first decade of the 21st century, including a list of ten animal extinctions.
It’s easy to imagine that the only species which become extinct these days are obsure and undistinguished beetles, virtually identical to thousands of other related beetles, or other lifeforms uninteresting to the layman and not contributing much to the colour and diversity of global fauna.
However, top of the magazine’s list was the Baiji dolphin, which lived in China’s Yangtze river. The last documented sighting was in 2002. Were there no glaring warning signals? After all, dolphins are among the more photogenic animals. A Save the Yangtze River Dolphin campaign would have had garnered plenty of attention. And then there’s the Golden, or Monteverde, Toad. A gold-coloured amphibian can’t be that easy to mislay. Yet it was confirmed extinct in 2007. It seems pollution and global warming led to its downfall, as it existed only on a high altitude ridge in Costa Rica.
All this has happened in a decade when conservation has been relatively high on the agenda. Higher certainly than in the first half of the 20th century. The most-missed species to have disappeared in that period is surely the Tasmanian Tiger, a wolf-like carnivorous marsupial, the last specimen filmed for posterity at Hobart Zoo in the 1930s.
Back to the current decade, and Hawaii has lost two bird species, the Po’o-uli and the Kama’o. The latter was a large thrush: research for this blog has found that a smaller variety still exists, but is listed as ‘Critically Endangered’. Will it still be around when we write our decennial reviews in 2019?
