It's going to be an expensive winter

If you are already worried about your energy bills, then look at this and weep. Forward prices for gas this coming winter are currently 30-40% higher than they were this time last year. Why? Many reasons, but perhaps in 2011-12 the market is expecting our fifth consecutive colder winter in a row?

I think we'd better make this the Chart of the Month for July 2011, a bit ahead of schedule for a change. The source for those who are interested is here, the latest Ofgem market report.

UK households produce more CO2 than the entire transport sector combined

June 2011 Chart of the Month

This one hardly requires explanation, just look at the chart. Household CO2 is now greater than the entire transport sector. Bear in mind that the transport sector includes:

• All cars, trucks, motorbikes, vans, buses, HGVs, etc
• All trains, rolling stock, etc
• All domestic civil aviation and aircraft support vehicles
• All national shipping and fishing vessels
• All military transport

To me that’s astonishing. Add up the total CO2 emissions from all these things, and you come to a lower number than if you add up the emissions from electricity, gas and heating fuel that we use every day in our homes.

A footnote to the statistics maybe, but a footnote with huge implications: residential carbon is set to become the single biggest environmental pollution problem of our time.

Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

Planning permission for solar panels

We are getting a lot of questions about planning permission for solar. There is added confusion for people living in period properties, historic houses, listed buildings or in a Conservation Area. The correct guidance can be hard to find, so we have written a short summary here.

Click on the display below to view the document, you should be able to view, print and share easily, but any problems please use the comment space below to let us know.

Open publication - Free publishing - More consent

Introducing ... the Ocean Source Heat Pump?

A few months ago I put up a post about how a Ground Source Heat Pump works. But here's an interesting twist on the same idea: the Ocean Source Heat Pump. *

As David Mackay has pointed out, the risk with ground source heat pumps is that you eventually extract enough heat to freeze the ground around you. Essentially, the ground is a good store of heat because of it's low thermal conductivity, but for the same reason it's also hard to replenish the store. Which means that if you're constantly take heat from the same hole in the ground, eventually you get to a point where you've taken it all.

Of course in the ocean you have a different situation, first of all because you're working with a liquid heat store, and secondly because you can more easily float your power station around to different locations. In the video clip I have linked to above, Dr Ted Johnson, Director of Alternative Energy Development at Lockheed Martin who are developing the prototype, says:

"I dream of thousands of floating OTEC ships, roaming the seas of the world and providing an inexhaustible supply of clean energy, fuel and water for all people of the world"

Well, it's a wonderful vision and I agree with that. But presumably the problem is how to store the electric power that the floating heat pumps generate, or more precisely how to do that without destroying the economics of the thing completely. Bear in mind that electric storage is REALLY expensive: even a small 24 KWh battery for a state of the art electric car costs about $10,000 - $15,000, and Ted is talking about ocean pumps with 10 or 100MW capacity. So even without having done the math on this (which at some level is against all my principles), I'd assume that the energy storage costs do this project in.

BUT, hang on a moment. Things would be different, wouldn't they, if you had something useful you could do with all that power right there in the ocean? And if you think for a minute about the applications of clean energy generation in close proximity to the ocean... well, it doesn't take long for desalination to jump to mind, i.e. the highly power-intensive conversion of salt water to drinking water.

Perhaps Dr Johnson has come up with something unbelievable after all, the answer to the world's water wars of the future. And clean water is of course, much easier to store and move around than clean energy.



* Of course, I noticed that this technology is not exactly a heat pump, but it's a close cousin. So let's get on with it and not be too pedantic.

We can organise your insulation now

Loft or cavity wall, whatever you need.

• Typical jobs cost £150-200, and pay back within 1-2 years or less 
• One of the most cost-effective actions you can take
• Some people can get insulation completely for free 
• VAT on home insulation is  only 5%

If you've had a survey in 2011, we'll have talked to you about this already. But if we came to your property last year then we'll need to have another quick chat to explain how you can take advantage. Fill out the form below and we'll be back in touch to explain the next steps.

Who gets free insulation these days?

People keep asking us this, and it's strange that it's so hard to find out the right answer. Hundreds of millions of pounds a year are spent on this, but it's not very transparent at all. If you want to know exactly who gets what, well then you have to pick through a bunch of horrendously complicated government documents. 

Anyway, we've done the work for you and here for the record is the answer. To be considered a "Priority Group" for energy saving, you must be :

1. Age 70 or over, or 
2. In receipt of 
• council tax benefit
• housing benefit
• income support
• an income-based jobseeker’s allowance
• an attendance allowance
• a disability living allowance
• a war disablement pension including mobility supplement or constant attendance allowance
• a disablement pension  which includes a constant attendance allowance
• state pension credit, or
3. Earn under £16,040 and be in receipt of
• child tax credit
• working tax credit

So there you go. There aren't actually any hard and fast rules about what you can get for free, exactly, but in practice if you're in one of the Priority Groups above, then you can usually get your insulation for free, and if you're not you can get about a third or a half of the cost paid for.

There are also some "Super" priority groups now too, but I think we'll come back to that another day.

The electric blanket is back (picture version)

Can't see the image? Try clicking on the space where it should be, or clicking here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

This article was originally posted with a long explanation, but we decided that all you really need to get the point is in the picture above. Enough said?

ISE and the white goods market

Image not displaying? Try clicking on the space below, or  here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

This post is to announce our partnership with ISE Appliances, a nice company that makes very high efficiency, long lasting domestic appliances. Their 1607W washing machine (which I have just installed at home, with great pleasure) is guaranteed for 10 years, and is tested to 8,000 cycles - enough for 20 or 30 years in a domestic setting.

To encourage you to buy from this company, when your current appliances need replacement, we will reimburse you the £50 delivery & installation charge. Carbon Census households only! See further details below.

What we like about ISE Appliances

What we like about ISE is the simple insight they've had: that saving energy through appliances is not just about getting an A rating. That's because for most appliances, the potential saving you can expect in terms of energy cost is only in the order of £10 or £20 a year.

So, the bigger issue which nobody is talking about is how long the machine lasts. When it finally conks out, you'll have to incur the environmental cost of :

• Manufacturing a new machine 
• Shipping it to the UK, usually in a container from a long way away
• Delivering it to your house 
• Taking away your old machine 
• Stripping down, recycling or sending the old machine to landfill 

If your machine lasts 20 years instead of 5 years, you save the environmental cost of replacement 3 times over. Or twice over if your machine lasts 7 years, which we think is about the average in the UK these days.

So that's why we think this is a great little company, and why we're happy to send you in their direction with our rebate scheme.

Requirements to qualify for our scheme

• You must have had a Carbon Census at the address on the invoice 
• You must buy through the UK White Goods website 
• Not available in conjunction with other offers (although there are none at the moment, as far as we know) 

I guess that in principle this (like all our offers) is subject to fair use, but we can't think of any ways an offer like this could be used unfairly. If you can think of any, please don't!

Swiftflow - Our new green contractors

Image not displaying? Try clicking on the space below, or  here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

New benefits for Carbon Census households

We have today announced a new partnership with Swiftflow, a full service plumbing, electrical and home maintenance supplier. Here are the details:

What you get

• A 10% rebate on any hourly work, e.g. repairs, emergency callouts, etc
• A 5% rebate on any fixed-price work, e.g. a new boiler installation

For example

• £200 replacing your heating controls - we send you a £25 rebate
• £5,000 installing a new boiler - we send you a £250 rebate

What you need to do

• Contact Swiftflow directly when you need them - you don't need to tell us
• Mention CARBON CENSUS when you book the job
• Complete and pay for the job - your contract is with Swiftflow, not us
• Send us a copy of your paid invoice, marked Carbon Census
• We send out your rebate cheque in the post 

How long it lasts

• We intend this offer to be available indefinitely - but it's a new idea, and in all honesty we will need to review progress as we go along. If we extend, amend or alter the offer we will post updates here or on our main website, www.co2census.com, and let you know in our monthly newsletter

Any exclusions?

• No. All Swiftflow services are covered, not just energy saving measures. 
• You can also use this rebate scheme for a broken washing machine, a blocked drain, or anything else that Swiftflow can do for you. 

Key points to qualify

• You must have had a Carbon Census at the address on the invoice
• Your invoice must be marked Carbon Census by Swiftflow
• The offer is not open to the general public, only to households in the Carbon Census.

We could have saved sixpence ...

"Mr Rooney, we could have saved sixpence. We have saved fivepence. But at what cost?" - All that Fall, 1957

Chart not displaying? Try clicking on the space below, or  here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

This month the government published our latest national CO2 statistics. They are quite interesting to look at, you can read the full press release here or just have a quick look at the chart above.

The headline is that CO2 is going in the right direction and everyone is rather pleased. In total we seem to have cut our national carbon footprint by 28%. That's the kind of good news we like to hear, if things are indeed what they seem.

But of course, things are not what they seem. The first big sleight of hand is to have excluded from the data the only 2 major sectors where carbon emissions are growing massively: shipping (up 17% since 1990) and aviation (up 109%). When these are included, the total UK saving falls to 25%.

But 25% is still good right? Well, it sounds good, but what's strange is that a big chunk of this saving (about a third of it, actually, or about 8% points) has been delivered in the last two years. And because the reporting is all a year in arrears, that means between 2007 and 2009. Hmmm. Can anyone think of anything that might have happened from 2007 to 2009 that would have reduced our carbon footprint by about 8%?

So what are we left with? When you include the boats and planes that refuel in the UK and allow for the recession we've just been having, well then you're left with about a 17% saving over 19 years, or about 0.9% per annum. Somehow that doesn't seem so exciting to me.



Here is the data table as published under, I believe, Kyoto reporting agreements. You'll notice it doesn't include shipping and aviation, we had to dig those out of a footnote to come up with the chart above.

Zero carbon homes - good policy, bad politics

Budget day today, and big news on Zero Carbon Homes. The best summary so far was from our friends at UK GBC, who said this at 5.30pm, when all the shouting died down:

“In the space of two weeks, this government has gone from a firm commitment on zero carbon homes, to a watered down policy. A zero carbon home will no longer do what it says on the tin. The world leading commitment that new homes would not add to the carbon footprint of our housing stock from 2016 has been scrapped despite a remarkable consensus between industry and NGOs in support of it. ... it is a backward step by a government that wanted to be seen as ‘the greenest ever’.” 

So, a bit of a surprise then? After all, it was only in February Grant Shapps had said "the commitment to Zero Carbon remains in place - there's no ambiguity about that" and then on 8 March, just a couple of weeks ago, The Carbon Plan from DECC was still saying things like "the government is committed to ensuring that new-build homes are zero carbon from 2016 and do not add extra carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere". So we might have been forgiven for thinking this one was in the bag, right?

But actually, I think not. It was inevitable that the Zero Carbon Homes objective would be watered down in some way, and here's why: this was a policy which genuinely seemed to say "let's incur cost now, so we can create benefits later - we may not be around to enjoy those benefits ourselves, but let's create them anyway, just because it is so important."

Well, I actually quite like the sound of that. And so do a lot of people. But not most people, and what most people seem to want at the moment is growth and less red tape. So from that point of view, Zero Carbon Homes was a good policy with bad politics - and relaxing it was, well, a bad policy with good politics.

Tant pis.

Something strange is happening to our weather

Can't see the chart? Try clicking on the space where it should be, or clicking here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

Did you know, the Met Office now posts UK weather station data online? It’s pretty easy to rummage around in the numbers, so we've been having a go. Take a look at this, our Carbon Census Chart of the Month for March 2011.

This chart (which is from the Heathrow weather station, but typical of weather stations around the UK) shows three rather strange things, as follows:

First strange thing: our winters have been getting colder. The coldest temp has got colder for 4 years in a row. That's only happened once before at Heathrow since records began. 

Second strange thing : our summers have been getting hotter. The hottest temp has got hotter for 3 years in a row, and that's also only happened once before in this dataset

But the third really, really strange thing is that the first two strange things are happening at the same time, which appears to be a genuinely unprecedented event for these isles.

In the past, when there has been any kind of run of warming or cooling in the weather, it has either got warmer for a few years, or got colder for a few years. There is no previous example of the hottest month getting hotter and the coldest month getting colder, for three and four years in a row, in either the Heathrow data since 1948 (plotted above) or in the data from older weather stations such as Oxford which go all the way back to the 1850s. (Take a minute to look at the analysis we've done of the Oxford dataset, if you like this kind of thing you'll get the idea straight away.)

So the next question is, could this be a coincidence? Well perhaps it could, but to answer that question we would need to have a Theory of the Weather. We would need to say something like this: here is how we expect the weather to behave, here is what it's been up to recently, and here is the chance of that happening for no particular reason, i.e. just by fluke. In statistical terms, in other words, we need a null hypothesis.

Of course, we're not meteorologists over here, so we haven't got a Theory of the Weather, so we haven't got a proper null hypothesis. But heck, let's just make one up and see what happens. Let's assume that there are no long term changes in the weather going on, and so the annual high and lo temperatures just bounce around a bit from year to year, with a normal distribution and standard deviation around some long term average value. We know that's not true, exactly, but it's not far off... and here's the interesting observation: if this cartoon model of the weather were true, then the chance of drawing the chart above by fluke would be less than 1 in 100,000.

So on that basis, I'd like to make a wager. I'll wager that this pattern is not a fluke at all, that it's an extremely unusual anomaly in historical terms, and that within 12 months of today someone will publish a peer reviewed article showing that this is the case. And just a hunch, of course, but I also think we'll hear a lot of news this year that climate change is accelerating and the impacts are worse than we thought. Increasing volatility (widening extremes, rather than rising averages) will be the climate change story of 2011.



For those who are interested, the Met Office weather station data can be downloaded here, and the Oxford analysis going back to 1852 is here. Many thanks to Lora Brill who helped me with a previous draft of this article.

The electric blanket is back (article)

OK I admit it, I was wrong about electric blankets. I misjudged them. I always thought they were a bit frivolous - you know, the whole thing about not using useful stuff like electricity just to keep your toes warm. But then I realised something.

People use electric blankets because they are cold at night. If you are not cold at night, then pretty obviously  this particular posting is not about you. But what about if you are cold at night, and you don't have an electric blanket? What do you do then?

Perhaps you knit yourself a pair of bedsocks and go to bed with a nightcap. But more likely these days, you pop downstairs and turn up (or turn on) the central heating. Or you pop to B&Q and buy a cheap portable heater for about £30. (Of course, if you leave it on overnight it'll only take a few weeks to have spent more running it than it cost you to buy.)

Anyway, if those sound like things you might do, then read on. You're a person who should have an electric blanket, and here's why:

• You can get a decent one now for £35
• Leave it on overnight, it turns itself off in the morning
• In a 12 hour night shift, it eats only 0.25 KWh of energy ...
• ... costing you about 3p in total

Loyal readers will remember, that's about half what it costs me to mow the lawn for 20 minutes. And doing all the calcs, the total carbon impact over 12 hours is about the same as running a 22KW condensing gas boiler for 3 minutes. So the choice is yours: snug and warm all night for 3p, or a 3 minute blast of heat?

On that basis, and in honour of Chinese New Year, I'm making 2011 the Year of the Electric Blanket. 

Ask What You Can Do

From today, The Carbon Census has a new strapline - Ask what you can do.

Taken from the inaugural speech of President John F Kennedy (on 20 January 1961, exactly 50 years ago today) this phrase just seems to capture what we're trying to do with the Carbon Census. Ask not [what the politicians are ever going to do about climate change], ask what you can do!

And ask us, of course.

For more on JFK take a look at www.jfk50.org - and for more on uplifting public rhetoric, try watching this tribute video. Interesting cameo from a UK politician about half way through - can you guess which one? Well, we'd been wondering where he'd gotten to since May.