Outside, it’s a warm summer’s afternoon. Inside, you’re sweating over a maths exam paper, hunched over one of the small, wobbly desks in their endless ranks, the faint drone of the gardener’s lawnmower matching the throbbing in your brain as the sun, glaring through the gymnasium’s large glass window, plays its own unwelcome part in overheating your head.
An example of a schooldays, or schooldaze, memory, and also of passive solar heating. The reality is that heating and other energy requirements mean more than 10million tonnes of carbon emissions are produced by the UK’s schools each year – a not insignificant 2% of Britain’s total emissions.
Schools have plenty of flat roof space to accommodate solar panels. Although it has been suggested that because solar hot water systems reach their peak potential during the summer months, when schools take a long break, they are not worth installing, there are still the warm months of May, June, most of July and September to consider. In any case, during the summer holidays schools are often used for other purposes such as adult education or sports centre activities. As for photovoltaics, with the introduction of feed-in tariffs next year schools will be able to sell any surplus electricity back to the national grid.
Among recent projects, SolarUK designed and installed a solar hot water system for High Hurstwood Primary near Uckfield, East Sussex.
Renewable energy is a great practical educational resource. It’s a theme that can be integrated into science lessons (how the sun’s energy is converted into heat or electricity), geography (tackling climate change), the apparently fast-growing GCSE in Citizenship (reducing your personal carbon footprint) –and probably plenty more across the curriculum.
Unlike trigonometry and algebra, it’s a subject that will affect each and every pupil, as a homeowner or a voter, remaining relevant well beyond that exam room cauldron.
We live in an age of clutter. We make-and-mend less and buy more. Most of us have too many possessions in too limited a space. Homes with cleverly designed storage spaces are much sought-after, and there are even entrepreneurial professional declutterers (the profession is big in the USA) waiting for your call on their services.
Where solar panels are fitted onto sloping roofs they don’t take up any usable space, as only the cat ventures up there. Flat roofs, on the other hand, present interesting options. We could create a ‘green roof’ on which to grow vegetables, an attempt at self-sufficiency to go with our space-efficiency (so long as the roof is strong enough). A green roof can also serve as a wildlife-attracting garden. More prosaically, it can enable better water run-off, reduce the urban heat-island effect, and extend the life of the roofing materials underneath.
Large commercial buildings with their extensive flat roof space offer the most potential for adding energy efficiency to the mix. A green roof and a solar panel can be perfectly compatible. The cooling effect of the roof can help photovoltaic panels to work more effectively. Aluminium frames are often used to raise the height of the panels so that they are not obscured by any foliage.
Portland State University are carrying out thorough research to find out how these two green projects can work in combination – for example, assessing how plants on the eco-roof can benefit from shade under the solar arrays.
The National Trust launched a drive this year to encourage people to grow their own vegetables and herbs on balconies and windowsills, ‘vertical vegetable gardening’, and also suggested businesses help employees to do a bit of veg cultivation at work. One can readily imagine this gardening being done on the green roof of an office block, health and safety regulations permitting.
Once you start thinking about it, you realise there are all sorts of unused spaces which could be put to use as vegetable plots. Step forward fans of guerrilla gardening.
Although illegal, and surrounded by some alarming language (such as flower ‘bombs’ – balls of compost containing seeds which are hurled at roundabouts from speeding cars), this international movement seeks to improve the quality of our visual environment by turning apparently worthless and neglected urban patches into attractive flower and plant beds. On firmer legal ground, London’s Lewisham Council has published a guide to help communities secure a nod from the landowner and cultivate derelict land. Gardens for space-deprived, garden-less city dwellers.
It’s half-term for many this week, which is good news for the kids and good news too for anyone who, in the struggle for road space each morning, loses out to large cars with a solitary school-uniformed small person in each front passenger seat.
They are all heading for pretty much the same place – there aren’t that many schools in any one town - so surely a creative solution involving redesigning school bus systems shouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility? Meanwhile, the regular car commuter may have noticed less congestion in the last year or so, as reported recently by the AA and Trafficmaster. This is due to the recession, apparently.
However, this situation isn’t likely to last when the economy grows. There may be fewer cars on the move, but it’s a result of unemployment. Not so many people are using them for work purposes. (But also, interestingly, it’s because people are increasingly working from home: how much of this office-in-the-spare bedroom stuff is due to the recession and how much an evolving lifestyle change?). Reports confirm that Bank Holiday traffic this year has actually risen, so the nation’s attachment to the motor is still no less strong than its love for Strictly Come Dancing.
So do we need a recession to make us green?
Doing green things comes naturally if money is tight. Many have discovered that acquiring furniture through Freecycle or growing their own vegetables in the allotment is good for their finances, with sustainability an attached bonus.
However, this doesn’t mean welcoming recessions. They are unarguably negative vehicles for sustainable development (no one wants to see the human cost as companies lay off staff), and in any case do not normally last.
The Arab oil embargo of the early 70s provides a lesson in the limitations of temporary economically-driven shifts in behaviour. Although it prompted the US government to look for ways of reducing its dependence on Middle East oil and invest in the technology behind solar electricity, the drop in the cost of this renewable energy source was eventually matched by a fall in fossil fuel costs as the oil crisis eased. Incidentally, for a short time during Jimmy Carter’s tenure the White House had solar thermal panels.
Many blame our consumer culture both for the recession and our environmental woes. There is a way out in the shape of green growth: incentives, investment and job creation in the renewable energy sector would drive this. In our ideal future, the lines on an economist’s graph plotting carbon emissions and unemployment would be heading steadily downwards in tandem. With school-run congestion going in the same direction, hopefully.
Mind the generation gap, the Government is being warned.
The electricity generation gap, that is. The energy regulator Ofgem’s report last week on the security of the UK’s energy supplies suggests that demand for electricity could outstrip supply within the next few years, leading to blackouts.
Shadow energy secretary Greg Clark blames the Government, saying that it did not act quickly enough in the face of the imminent closing down of outdated coal and nuclear power stations. “Britain faces blackouts because the government has put its head in the sand about Britain’s energy policy for a decade,” he claims.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change calls the blackouts claims “alarmist”. However, Ed Miliband seems to acknowledge that the government has been caught short, saying that more intervention is needed rather than leaving the incentive of extra investment to the markets.
Playing catch-up will mean huge investment costs, whether in installing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to coal-fired stations or overcoming the hurdles (including planning delays) facing renewable energy projects.
Whatever happens, we are going to have pay rather more for our gas and electricity than we’ve been used to. Even in the least pessimistic (from a financial point of view) of the possible scenarios identified in the report, domestic energy bills are set to rise by around 14% over the next ten years. Short-term increases resulting from wholesale price surges could be as much as 60%.
The implications? Well, astute home owners are already turning to solar hot water systems, which are looking an increasingly attractive, cost-effective option in an era of fossil fuel price rises.
If you are heading down this route yourself, our advice is to invest in a highly efficient system – the LaZer2 designed and manufactured by the team here at SolarUK, to be precise. It’ll pay dividends in the long run.
Solar panels: expect to see more of these
Yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur is giving up her maritime adventures to concentrate on campaigning for sustainability. Meanwhile, she is busy building a ‘green’ house, complete with solar hot water, wood burners and impressively thick insulating walls.
It was her sailing that prompted her environmental concerns. Spending so long in a boat with the bare minimum of resources made her realise that on dry land we are rather more profligate.
There are parallels here with another adventurer, Thor Heyerdahl. In 1969, 22 years after his Pacific Ocean journey aboard a balsa wood raft, famously described in The Kon-Tiki Expedition, Heyerdahl took to the sea again for the first of his two ‘Ra’ expeditions, heading from Morocco to Barbados in a reed boat. He found the realities of industrial progress intruding this time: instead of the clean seas of the Kon-Tiki voyage, he saw worrying signs of oil pollution. During the second Ra trip a year later he recorded his observations on behalf of the UN, which helped lead to stricter regulations controlling the oil and rubbish discharges of oceangoing vessels.
Coping with just the basics for survival, experiencing a stark contrast with the pampered, conventional land-based life - and seeing environmental damage first-hand (and you can’t get closer to the high seas than on a low raft) – make environmental problems more tangible. The next best practical way of making the majority of us, who live more sedentary existences, think deeply about these matters is to show us film footage of blighted parts of the world. This works better for pollution (think of oil-coated sea birds) than for climate change, where an unarguable scientific link between droughts, floods and our consumption of fossil fuels is harder to establish.
It is easier to stick to showing people how they can reduce their personal carbon emissions and the financial savings to be made in the long run.
Just as people with water meters fitted find they consciously use less water, perhaps if we all have advanced smart meters, giving us detailed information on how much energy we are using in our homes, we would throw our container ship-loads of electrical appliances overboard and live the stripped-down, self-sufficient life of the sailor.
Two items in the weekend’s newspapers caused your blogger to throw up his arms in near-despair over the chances of our society ever combating the environmental costs of wasting food.
Firstly, a reader’s question in the lifestyle pages asked whether products might still be OK to eat once they have passed their ‘best before’ or ‘use by’ date – for at present he or she chucks them away.
Leaving aside the puzzling matter of why someone intelligent enough to read a newspaper cannot understand the difference between the terms ‘best before’ and ‘use by’, with behaviour like this is it any surprise that around 6.7 million tonnes of household food waste is thrown away each year?
If your blogger threw out all his food once it passed its sell-by date he would have a woefully empty kitchen.
Secondly, in the travel section there was a fawning article about a cruise holiday in which the writer reported admiringly on the huge quantities of food available on board, most of which was included in the holiday price, noting with approval the policy of throwing away everything that remains uneaten at the end of each day. While we aren’t suggesting that bubble and squeak made from leftover vegetables would be our holiday food of choice, binning large quantities of food is not something any company should be boasting about.
And so to Monday: as if to reinforce the weekend’s reading matter, a supermarket shopper was overheard lamenting the necessity of routinely throwing away the remains of her Sunday roast pork. For what, she asked rhetorically, can be done with the meat the next day? Well, freezing it would be one suggestion. And although this isn’t meant to be a cookery blog, why not heat it in curry sauce from a jar, with boiled rice on the side, for an effortless weekday supper?
According to WRAP, if we didn’t dispose of food which could have been eaten, we would save at least 15 million tonnes in greenhouse gas emissions each year – perhaps the equivalent of taking one in five cars off Britain’s roads.
Going on the anecdotal evidence above, the Government’s ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ campaign, launched nearly two years ago, has some way to go.
More public information adverts in the weekend newspaper supplements perhaps?
The sun’s gone down on another summer rock festival season, during which recollections of the original Woodstock Festival – in this its 40th anniversary year – did the rounds. No doubt some misty-eyed old timers are reflecting that today’s gatherings aren’t what they used to be. But even if these events have lost something of their early sparkle, like the music industry itself nothing stands still and perhaps they are setting new standards in terms of entertaining an enormous crowd without leaving a carbon footprint bigger than Elton John’s birthday party bill. Glastonbury, as befits a festival of its size and profile, takes the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ message to heart, separating all glass, cans, paper and organic waste and, for the first time this year, recycling the waste electrical equipment. Also new this year, organisers boasted a Solar Generator – a box trailer containing batteries and solar panels.
Glastonbury’s website proudly mentions their fair trade products, and their list of caterers makes it look like a rural version of London’s Borough Market rather than an extended rock concert, but despite the variety of tempting offerings there is no mention of local produce.
Meanwhile, there’s not a great deal to suggest the Green Man Festival is living up to its name. Its website advocated car sharing before this year’s shindig in the Brecon Beacons, inviting lift arrangements via their forum. But can we suppose that, being a folk-oriented event, perhaps most of the acts were acoustic and required no plugging into the power network?
Back to the great Woodstock. Its ramshackle organisation was part of its charm, so although it coincided with a period of growing ecological awareness we can overlook its accompanying sea of litter. It seems there was a shortage of food (one nostalgic ex-hippie recalls accepting the offer of some orange segments from some Hare Krishnas) due to the numbers turning up. Less food means less plastic cutlery and polystyrene containers left behind in the rain-sodden field.
For your blogger, who is keeping an eye on developments as the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference approaches, an encouraging recent piece of news is that policymakers are likely to put a price on the stored carbon of tropical rainforests, recognising their value as part of the global ‘consensus’ (if that doesn’t prove too optimistic a word come the Conference in December) on tackling climate change post-2012. Meanwhile, closer to home, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers has called for artificial trees to be installed in the UK to absorb CO2 (though this sounds like a mitigation measure, an admission that global warming cannot be halted; and we have to wonder how much fossil fuel will be burnt in their manufacture).
So, plenty of talk about trees. But the topic of agroforestry and its potential isn’t being discussed as widely as it should.
In ‘The Secret Life of Trees’, author Colin Tudge speculated that if grains such as wheat had never existed, humans would still have flourished: we would have based our agriculture on trees instead. But because of the convenience and consequent dominance of grains, we haven’t had the motivation to invest in using trees as a food source. The food could be for domesticated animals, not just us, which would take the pressure off cereal-growing – a food source for which humans and animals compete. The shady surroundings of a forest are natural territory for chickens, pigs and cattle. On suitable plantations in the tropics, as well as finding cover under branches, the livestock would enjoy a varied diet and, in turn, manure the trees.
While most of the potential lies in South America and other rainforested regions of the planet, there is a useful demonstration of this philosophy going on in a corner of England, Sheepdrove Organic Farm in Berkshire to be precise. The chickens there spend part of their lives pecking at a variety of insects, fruits and herbs on an ‘agroforestry’ strip of trees and shrubs. This makes for a tastier bird: agroforestry, complemented by the solar panels powering the feeders in the mobile field houses, means it’s a more sustainable one too.
Bearing in mind poultry’s popularity as a low cost staple in the British diet, is it too whimsical to imagine the day your average chicken swaps its shed for a happy and healthy life in a forest?
What do we have against clouds? By ‘we’, I don’t mean SolarUK of course. Anyone familiar with our products knows that the LaZer2 solar collector will work on cloudy days as well as brilliantly sunny ones. So long as the sun is still somewhere in the sky (which it should be for another 5 billion years at least) it will heat the water in the vacuum tubes which then circulates through the system and heats the boiler. The client under the roof in question will be happy. And if the client’s happy, that’s us happy too, and we won’t hold any grudges against our fluffy friends in the sky.
No, it’s the public at large who, given the choice, would like a permanent clear blue sky over its collective head.
Popular sayings such as ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ reinforce the prejudice. Similarly, company employees – though not, let us point out, at SolarUK – gather in meeting rooms to indulge in some ‘clear skies thinking’, their sharp executive minds unsullied by nebulosity.
But take a break from your daily preoccupations and look up at the sky. Recent weeks in particular has seen some very pleasing cloud formations in the stratosphere of SolarUK’s home county. On one early evening the your skygazing blogger admired the fluffy children’s picture white cumuli, while in the other direction the eye was drawn by puffier, expansive patches of stratocumulus with flat, grey bases. Higher up were hints of wispy cirrus, and to the west light translucid clouds, partially shielded by those of a darker hue, veiled the sun’s descent.
It’s like looking at an animated version of an Old Master landscape painting.
Former Deputy PM John Prescott revealed recently that he’s having solar panels installed at his home.
Hopefully it’ll prove a successful and sound investment, and that before too long he’ll be expounding the joys of solar in his own inimitable way. But surely he could have saved himself some money if he’d made sure he kept hold of the solar panels installed on the roof of his Hull residence by some Greenpeace protestors a few years ago?
The activists, who were highlighting the apparent failure of his department to improve the energy efficiency of the UK’s homes, also gave him some energy-saving lightbulbs and loft insulation material, the value of their gifts adding up to £4000.
He has missed out on four years of solar energy. Still, his decision is timely: last week saw the launch of the New Earth Deal, headed by his good self, an initiative from the Council of Europe pushing for global agreement on climate change ahead of the Copenhagen conference in December.
