November newsletter - True or False

This month we had a True or False policy quiz.

We asked which of the following has NOT happened since our last newsletter.

• The pope endorsed condom use
• The Prime Minister announced an extra Bank Holiday on my birthday
• The government introduced rising block tariffs, a Lib Dem election promise

The answer of course is the last statement is the false one: Rising block tariffs were promised by Nick Clegg in the election debates, but this eminently sensible policy has yet to see the light of day.

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What's it worth to turn off the escalators?

Today I passed through City Thameslink tube station at around 11am. There was nobody else there, but the escalators were all running. It made me think, shouldn't these all be on a stop-start system so they only run when people are there to go up and down them?

Here's the math. If you could stop all escalators on the tube from running 25% of the time, you would offset the CO2 produced by about 750 houses.

For comparison, if you wanted to provide renewable electricity for 750 houses, you'd need something like the micro hydro station at Garbhaig (see below) which cost about £1 million quid to build. So my thought would just be this, next time we have a million quid burning a hole in our pockets, let's put stop-start on the escalators instead of building another power station in the beautiful Scottish highlands.

Photo is from Roddy Smith and geograph. Here's the math if anyone wants to follow it through:

• A typical large underground escalator will have a 7500 W motor.
• There are 422 escalators in London tube stations.
• So to run all the escalators on the tube for 1 hour you need 3165 KWh of energy. 
• 1 KWh of energy creates about 500g of CO2 at average rates for the grid
• That's ~1.5 tonnes for all 422 escalators running for 1 hour
• You could perhaps save 6 hours running time per escalor per day
• That's ~10 tonnes CO2 saved per day or 3650 tonnes per annum
• The average UK house emits about 5 tonnes per annum
• So 6 hours saving per day for 422 escalators = 730 houses

It costs 6p to mow the lawn

This weekend I cut the grass with an electric Flymo.

It took 20 minutes and the flymo has a 1500W engine, so I reckon that I

• used 0.5 KWh of energy
• created 250g of CO2
• spent about 6p.

All in all, a good deal for me. I could have used an old fashioned manual mower and saved 6p, but I thought about it and I didn't want to. So what's my point? Well, I suppose the first is just that consuming energy * is not wrong, in fact it's very helpful. We're lucky that it's so easy to get your hands on some when you need it, even for everyday things. The enemy is waste, not usage, so although we do like the novelty of things like the No Impact Project, we're not really in the same camp.

I suppose the second point is just it should be easier to understand what you use. The math on this really isn't so hard. I'll post the methodology one day soon so everyone can have a go.

* OK physicists, don't all start yelping - I do know that I didn't really consume the energy, I just converted into other things, like noise and heat and grass clippings, which I suppose embody the kinetic energy required to get the blades of grass off the lawn and into the collector. But you can't say that kind of thing on a blog or it slows you down.

Snake Oil Awards will not help very much

Well, I used to enjoy David Mackay's Hot Air Oscars. So it made me chuckle to see that the US has come up with a bigger and better equivalent: Official 2010 Snake Oil Awards for Public Deception. Perhaps not surprising that BP is a nominee.

In general I am a fan of Repower America, the organisation behind the awards. But I wonder if what the clean energy movement needs right now is Corporate Villains? Clearly some movements for social change have benefited  from creating villains (e.g. anti-smoking), but others haven't needed to (e.g. road safety). Some  in fact have seemed to hold back on the blame game, even when there was more of a case for advancing it (e.g. Civil Rights, Quit India).

So what do we think? Is clean energy hard to deliver because Bad People in Big Companies have conspired to hide the truth from us (as perhaps was the case with smoking)? Or is it because we have behavioural habits that are deeply engrained (like speeding and drink driving)? I believe the latter, therefore Snake Oil awards, though potentially amusing, will not help much.