Grants for CHP and other renewable heat in 2011

With the recent Govt kick in the teeth for renewable energy generators, they seem to be hell bent on dismantling the heat part of the industry. In saying there will be grants or tariffs from 2011, what they are in fact saying is “don’t buy anything till then” so, the industry has to last with no ordered for over a year!

Why wait for a year? If it is the same as electrical energy FITs, then only equipment fitted after April 2011 will comply and thus get the Govt money. Who on earth will pay for a system now when next year it will be subject to Govt support.

GOVERNMENT DELIVERS RAW DEAL FOR SOLAR THERMAL INDUSTRY

Today the Solar Trade Association welcomed the announcements by Ed Milliband regarding solar energy, but expressed disappointment that the proposed rate of investment will be lower than that for other green energy technologies.

See: http://www.solaruk.com/news/solarenergy.asp?item=2048

Roof colour and solar water heating

I have just read a very interesting comment on the Solaruk website detailing research on the effect of roof colour on solar water heating, in particular vacuum tubes.

Its pretty obvious when you think about it, wish I had! But basically, a white or reflective roofing which has solar vacuum tubes mounted on it will of course reflect a portion of the energy back on to the solar collector.

The amount of energy reported  being 9% was certainly higher than I would have expected but makes the consideration of roof colour very relevant, in particular where considering a new build.  I would wonder about the cost benefit of re-roofing, but perhaps a small area with a secondary covering of a reflective roofing surface would make sense.

This does of course apply to flat roofs and only vacuum tube systems, tough perhaps a rack mounted flat panel with the rear suitably coated might have some of these benefits.

The article is here: Improved solar gain with reflective flat roof colouring

Feed in Tariffs, a kick in the teeth!

Feed in tariffs will NOT apply to ANY system that has already been installed.

If you have a renewable energy system, your system, as with mine will continue to receive the same, pittance, a minimal financial return on generated and exported electricity. This will apply to all systems, all the schools, community halls, the public everybody who has put their money where their mouth is!

Only systems that have been installed under the new MCS (Microgeneration Certification Scheme) will be able to claim the much publicized 35p per unit generated. The MCS has yet to be finalized and though it replicates the IEC regulations that your system (and mine) will certainly comply with, the MCS is an additional layer of bureaucracy that seems to function only to sideline us. (Us being all the people who have created this industry, lobbied for feed in tariffs and changes in the planning law and who have (for whatever reasons) coped with the high cost of installation).

This MCS will severely curtail the number of companies able to install solar PV, retaining a very tight club of installers and almost certainly allowing for a ‘cartel’ pricing structure. Solar systems are already twice teh price in the UK as Germany! It does not add to the quality of equipment or installation as Part P and IEC (IEC is the recognised international certification scheme) already have that function.  The cost of management of MCS and the quango that will be created will almost certainly be higher than the money saved in alienating us through avoiding payment for solar generated electricity.

I would expect that the negative publicity associated with the sidelining and effective alienation of all early adopters who would otherwise be actively promoting this technology will also represent a cost in that the scheme must now be publicized at a cost to the taxpayer.

I am an early generator of solar energy with a professionally installed Solar Century system. It is grid connected and the Highest power station in Kent. I was part of the EAMA study and have and expect to continue exporting renewable electricity. My electricity and system seems to be perfectly adequate, the system will be exactly the same as new systems!

This twist to the Feed in Tariffs whereby only new systems can apply is a slap in the face to all of us who have facilitated the creation of the renewable microgeneration industry in the UK. Without us investing in this new technology, there would be no industry, no installers, nothing!

I do not understand the Governments atitude in alienating so many people. people who should have been supported as they would have been fantatsic free publicity. EVERYBODY with a system is going to be ‘hurt’ by this. There will be NOBODY with an installed system who will be out there actively promoting – we won’t be saying, get a system, we will be saying, “I’ve been utterly let down, don’t trust these people”.

Worse than this, it will be financially beneficial for me to scrap my existing system and install what will almost certainly be an identical system, just 5 years newer (with the same 25 year and more lifespan). Whoever came up with this incompetent system, well, words fail me!

This Government should hang its head in shame!

Also see: http://www.yougen.co.uk/equal/: Join our Campaign for Equal Cashback with petition.

Shock Horror, Govt Scientist has revelation!

I am not the only blogger who has commented that when estimating our carbon emmissions we must take into account emmissions that have been generated overseas in manufacturing products that we use.

Go back a few years and the consumer durable that you bought, a TV, computer, clothes etc was almost certainly made in the UK. That TV caused a certain volume of emmissions, both carbon and other pollutants. Now the TV is made in another country, we seem to think the emmissions don’t count!!

CO2, methane or any greenhouse gas along with most pollutants don’t obey national boundaries, it is a global problem!

Briton has a long way to go to get to an 80% (by 2050) or even a 20% reduction by 2020.  Unless Govt start to take it seriously – like when the Nazis were going to invade -  we will fail.

I note that the recent speech by Gordon Brown didn’t mention Climate Change, realistically the only thing of any importance for the next 50 years, and that just days after another relevant science report says we should expect 4 degrees of warming perhaps by 2060 – I’ll be 103!

Why is the UK public more ‘climate sceptical’ than the rest of Europe

On one of the bbc blogs there was a quote “In general, the UK public is more ‘climate sceptical’ than the rest of Europe.”

Surely that’s because our “weather” is more evident than our climate.

On the continent they have “climate” of which their weather is a subset. In the UK we have weather, in summer it could be hot, cold, windy, wet, foggy, in extreme cases it might hail or even snow! In Italy in summer it is hot and sunny, it is hotter now than 10 years ago. In the Alps it used to be invariably very cold and snowy. Increasingly it is not so cold and not so snowy.

This trend is just not experienced in the UK unless you are interested, look hard and perhaps live in the country. Less snow isn’t a clue, but Swallows arriving early means Africa is hotter earlier. Bluebell walks increasingly seeing the flowers on their way out rather than in full bloom and Daffodils now blooming in late February !!!

Look deeper and we see fish stocks moving north, non native species appearing in our southern seas round Cornwall and Dorset, even up to Hampshire, Kent  and the Thames Estuary. Other effects are the real sea level rise, hidden to the casual observer due to wind, waves and tides but for the local, that 2 or 3 centimetres of sea level rise is a clear indication of change.

With the majority of people living in cities, in a largely artificial environment all of this just isn’t seen. How many Londoners know the frequency of the Thames Barrier being raised?

Going back to the title and the implications. If there is a strong public feeling that Climate Change is not real, the pressure on our Government to do something is slackened. Climate Change, unlike war doesn’t have  a fixed date of declaration, a point in time from which we can all work together.

Climate Change will keep happening and speeding up, perhaps it will take the destruction of a city to wake us all up to that fact? Perhaps not,. New Orleans was devastated, bad luck and an off course Hurricane was blamed. Perhaps when the Thames Barrier is overtopped the general feeling will be it was just a combination of weather events, no more than a perfect storm!

Continued Decline – In consumption!

My electricity consumption continues to go down!

My Energy Tracker

The earlier decline in energy consumption is largely due to general conservation measures, switching off lights and not using standby. The red realistically shows no change and fits in with the trend from last year, our extra effort in energy saving having started in April 2008.

With what appeared to be a limited impact on our net energy consumption by our wind turbines I approached FutureEnergy who very kindly called in and made some changes to settings. The mains electricity here is 250 and more volts, far from the European target of 230! Their visit was in late June and we appear to be showing an immediate 20% electricity saving from our Turbines and its during the summer when there is far less wind!

Ongoing changes are replacing failed light bulbs with LED lights (not CFLs). My bathroom will have 9 LEDs with a total consumption of about 11 Watts!

Overall a target of more than 10% by 2010, having had a 20% reduction in 2009 and similar in 2008.

See: Guardian article on Politicians plans to reduce consumption. You would think they would be leading, it all seems to be political hot air!

UK Climate – Sea Level Rise

The UKCP09 shows the most recent calculated projection based on existing data. As usual the big problems are 2 generations and more away!

So, something to not worry about now, lets get back to the banking crisis, unemployment, whose up for eviction on Big Brother!

But, it seems that each year these projections are released, they are invariably sooner and worse! Arctic ice was going to last the rest of the century, then it cam to 2030s then at least 20 years, then 2013 – that was last year (2008) But I wonder if we will see any real summer ice in 2010?

Sea level rise, again its going to be no more than a metre by 2100. But doesn’t that mean 1/2 metre by 2050? And that’s average sea level rises and most of that’s coming from the Greenland ice sheet melting!

Greenland, that’s not far away and for it to lead to a 1/2 metre global average increase, aren’t we assuming that the Greenland melt water is going to pretty quickly travel round the world and even out?

Add a bit of science here and avoid being simplistic – or even perhaps imagining the earth is flat. Its a sphere, in space and subject to its own gravity.

Why would a mass travel from its position at one side of the sphere to go to the other side when its already in equilibrium. The current mass (weight) of ice in Greenland, when melted will surely remain as close as possible to point of equilibrium. If a significant proportion were to somehow flow all the way round to the Pacific, the Earth’s centre of gravity would surely have to shift to compensate? After all this is a sphere subject to its own gravity!

That being the case, rather than this 1/2 meter increase by 2050 or 1 metre by 2100 being spread over the worlds oceans, won’t it be retained or spread out over the north Atlantic and Arctic oceans? Even were it to spread evenly round the globe, it would still have to flow through the Bering Straights – a fairly small gap, or take the long route via the Southern Capes, again a bit of a constriction before reaching the mass of the Pacific!

But I don’t see what science there is that makes a mass, even one that is liquid, flow out of equilibrium?

The North Atlantic and Arctic make up lets say 1/4 of the worlds Ocean surface. To my mind that means to keep our sphere in equilibrium, most of the sea level rise due to the melting of the Greenland ice caps will be remain in that region. A global average 1 metre will therefore mean we will see a local 4 metre sea level rise, perhaps significantly higher nearer to Greenland, after all, that is where the mass should remain in order to retain our world’s spherical shape without implying a marginal shift in the earth’s centre!

What with sea level just starting to make an impact and the prospect of relatively larger rises over the next decade. What would be a 10 cm average increase could of course be a 40 cm increase on the North European coastline. The North Eastern shore of the United States and Canada is a bit closer to Greenland.

The US fails in its Carbon Responsibilities

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu says the US will not be able to cut greenhouse emissions as much as it should due to domestic political opposition.

Basically, the worry is that if they do the minimum that is required, the public will object and turn away completely from any changes that are required to mitigate climate change. A bit like Neville Chamberlain and peace in our time, Climate Change is Czechoslovakia, that small uninteresting place far away.

Its just that by appeasing Hitler then we reaped the whirlwind.

By constantly putting off real action on Climate Change, there will be no whirlwind, more a perfect storm.  

Even where the USA is waking up to the need to make change, its only the big and manly projects they want to take on. When US policy advisers suggest that we would only need to put solar PV on just 5% of the worlds deserts, it shows how totally out of touch from reality they are. Meanwhile they miss the utterly outrageous waste of energy that goes on in the US. While we are adding a third or fourth layer of loft insulation, in the USA, most houses do not have insulation which is relevant both in the air conditioned South and the heated North!

If the USA were to take Climate Change seriously, surely they, as the remaining superpower has an real chance of  working towards a way of having a technical populous civilisation while preserving the climate that we know.

What about a Manhattan Project with Fusion power as the goal? Okay we have had JET and now ITER, but these are long drawn out projects that are more akin to basic research, Physicists playing! There is little desperation to take ideas through to the point where they are products.

JET at Culham was a project of the 1980s. That was 30 years ago! The Manhattan Project went from Nuclear energy as a theory to the bomb in 5 years, then little more than another 10 years to Britain’s 1st Nuclear power station!  

Perhaps we are too focused on Solar Energy?

Buying Solar Water Heating

An increasingly popular investment is in fitting solar panels for water heating. Not a new technology and one that is widely used on the continent. After insulation, the most likley to show an actual return on investment, certainly if you are on oil like me!

You will most likely have had a few letters from solar water heating companies through your door, perhaps from smartenergy, simple solar and a whole host of others. Beware! Unfortunately the industry has attracted the same people who 20 years ago were selling double glazing, 10 years ago it was timeshares and they have just moved out of selling dodgy finacial deals into solar panels! Call one of these guys and you are in for a few hours of sales patter, sign now and we will knock off 30% etc etc.. Its just that at £8,000 or £10,000 or £12,000 even with the extra special discount, its still a con!

A decent solar water heating system should cost no more than £4,000 and possibly less. It will only heat a proportion of your hot water, it will not heat the house. Mine, which I have had for about 4 years, allows me to switch off my boiler between May through till September. In late Autumn, Winter and eraly Spring there is minimal overall heat generated.