The Carbon Census Blog

It's going to be an expensive winter

2011-06-22T22:34:00.001+01:00

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

2011-06-01T14:39:00.007+01:00

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.

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Planning permission for solar panels

2011-06-01T11:10:00.002+01:00

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.

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Introducing ... the Ocean Source Heat Pump?

2011-05-03T22:32:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-19T15:06:00.009+01:00

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?

2011-04-19T14:45:00.002+01:00

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 :

Age 70 or over, or
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

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)

2011-03-29T13:02:00.005+01:00

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

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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

2011-03-28T17:59:00.060+01:00

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

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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

2011-03-28T15:25:00.012+01:00

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

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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 ...

2011-03-25T23:44:00.024Z

"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.

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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

2011-03-23T22:23:00.003Z

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

2011-03-11T19:29:00.029Z

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

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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)

2011-02-04T11:03:00.011Z

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

2011-01-20T23:27:00.008Z

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.

How does a heat pump work?

2010-12-28T11:41:00.006Z

We get a lot of questions on this, so here's the answer. A heat pump does more or less what it says on the tin: it pumps energy from one place (usually outside) to another (usually inside). It turns out that you don't need to work very hard to move large amounts of energy around in this way, so heat pumps are quite efficient.

The other thing people ask is how you can heat a home to 18 or 20 degress when the heat source, in the air or ground outside, say, is only 4 or 5 degrees. Perhaps the easiest way to think about that is just that the heat pump is also an energy concentrator of sorts - it is harvesting energy from a lot of air (or ground) and using it to warm up smaller amounts of air (or water) in your house.

What's perhaps most interesting about this is the source - How Things Work - The Universal Encyclopedia of Machines - first published in 1967. A reminder that we have been around the energy-saving block at least once before, so far (it has to be said) with no success. Have another look at this year's Godkin lecture by John Deutch of MIT for a first hand account of how frustrating that is for people who were involved in this sector in the 1970s.

Open publication - Free publishing - More refridgerator

PS I am not sure who has the copyright to these pages. I have looked for the original publisher online (Granada) but they are long gone, it is now 40 years since this book was published. There is a US website called How Stuff Works that has a useful (and somewhat more modern) page on heat pumps.

PPS heat pumps are not the best solution for many houses. The typical savings are often not better than a Band A condensing boiler running on mains gas, and the performance (in terms of comfort levels) can be poor, especially in large uninsulated homes with radiator-based central heating.

Energy Flow Chart 2009

2010-12-20T16:36:00.000Z

I've been meaning to post this for a while. If you've been enjoying the blog so far, then you should enjoy this (which comes from here and uses these as units) without further explanation. Click on the image for a full size view.

It's not a tube map.

An unbelievable Christmas present

2010-12-11T08:16:00.004Z

Happy Holidays! Over the past 2 weeks, every member of the US Congress (and every Governor's office around, and every state and local representative...) has received an unusual seasonal gift.

So what's the gift? A board game called This Way To Jobs. You can play it online, but let me save you a few minutes of your valuable time and tell you how it works.

Game Rules

You choose a counter - CEO, Director, Entrepreneur, etc
You roll the dice to move around the board - a bit like The Game of Life
You start in a Ghost Town - tumbleweed blows across the screen
Your goal is to get to Prosperity Park
Dodge as many regulations as possible on your way around
If you get a regulation card, you move back 3 spaces, etc
Look out for Financial Reform Falls, Labour Lagoon and Energy Edge ... regulation lurks at every bend in the road

Wow. A truly elaborate and creative campaign and targeting the Environmental Protection Agency in particular. Not surprising in itself, but guess who is behind this campaign, so out of tune with contemporary reality? Maverick Republicans? Big Oil? Swiftboat Veterans for Truth? No, the campaign is run by the US Chamber of Commerce itself. I am truly astonished.

Have a look at some of the cards you can draw :

"Insulation is sexy" (Who said that?)

2010-12-03T18:57:00.001Z

Somehow I managed to miss this whole thing, almost a year ago exactly today. So perhaps some of you had missed it too? If so, watch and enjoy!

(Hint: Use the slider to skip ahead to 1 min 50 secs and just watch the last 20 seconds or so. That's all you need!)

November newsletter - True or False

2010-11-25T10:48:00.006Z

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.

You haven't seen the newsletter yet? If you're on the list, a copy is on its way to your inbox. If not, you can read an online version here or sign up to join the mailing list here.

What's it worth to turn off the escalators?

2010-11-08T13:33:00.002Z

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

2010-11-08T12:40:00.003Z

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

2010-11-01T21:46:00.002Z

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.

Lightbulb propaganda from the EU

2010-10-18T21:31:00.000+01:00

Who'd have thought it? Some reasonably entertaining lightbulb propaganda from the EU. Very Batfink (those of a certain generation will know exactly what I mean by that).

The source for this one is Philip Sellwood's blog at The Energy Saving Trust.

A useful thing to do with Carbon

2010-10-12T10:55:00.002+01:00

In case anybody missed it, two smart guys from The University of Manchester just got a Nobel Prize for Physics. The prize was for their work on graphene, a material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms in a chicken-wire formation. (Chicken wire - that's a technical term, by the way.)

Graphene is 200 times stronger than steel, if you scaled it up to the thickness of cling film and stretched it over a cup of coffee, it could hold up the weight of a truck bearing down on the point of a pencil.

"Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again" said the Royal Academy.

(PS Did you notice that one of the recipients also won The Ig Nobel Prize - for levitating frogs in a magnetic field? I kid you not. The image below is for real, you can download the research paper here.)

October 2010: Chart of the Month

2010-10-08T10:09:00.006+01:00

(Looking for the September Chart of the Month? Click here )

At this time of year, everyone is turning the heat on.

I've already written about how we're also turning the heat up. I used some research data from BRE to show that we've been cranking up the thermostat for about 30 years now, and as a result the average temperature inside a British home has gone up from about 13°C in 1970 to about 20°C today. As a result, I said that Britain had gone soft.

But that's only half the story. The truth is, Britain has gone very soft. The part I was missing out is what has happened to the temperature outdoors over the same period.

So guess what? It turns out that, using a more or less accepted method for measuring these things, it is a lot warmer these days than it was 40 years ago - warmer, that is, in the sense of how many days a year you'd need to turn the heating on.

Have a look at the chart below and you'll get the picture. There are about 10-15% fewer heating days per year than when our parents were our age.

Conclusion? We need less heat, but we are using more. If you can figure that one out, please post a comment below.

(Click on the image to enlarge the view.)

The raw data is from the Met Office, although access is only after an authorisation process. And here is a bit more on the methodology for Heating Degree Days. In the chart, I have taken a simple average across all UK weather stations and shown the hi/lo bands in the shaded area.

Watch the latest video from Al Gore

2010-09-28T11:37:00.000+01:00

Interesting video from Repower America, the environmental campaign group backed by Al Gore. More evidence that US organisations of this type are far ahead of their counterparts in the UK, where 1 in 3 of us still believe the whole climate change thing is bunkum. Watch the video, and look out for a cameo appearance by Alec Baldwin (from The Departed) and a few other celebs you know. Kris Kristofferson is in there too.

We are now a Social Enterprise

2010-09-21T14:04:00.007+01:00

A couple of quick updates. First, our registration as a Social Enterprise is now official, under a scheme run for the Cabinet Office. Note the handsome new logo up above.

Second, a new design for the blog, just to ring the changes. You'll see we also now have proper "sharing" buttons on each post - to get this working, just hover over the word SHARE at the bottom of each post, and up will pop your options. Those with gmail can just click on the red "M" logo to send a link. OK, sorry if that was obvious - apparently this little gadget has been used 1 billion times already on the web.

So, onwards and upwards ... we will be relaunching co2census.com very shortly, more news on that soon.

Our electricity could be gone for months

2010-09-20T09:24:00.003+01:00

Earlier this summer I blogged about High Impact, Low Frequency events, unlikely occurrences but which could knock out the power grid. It sounds fanciful, but it's a real issue - dangerous electro-magnetic pulses could be caused by solar flares, electro-magnetic storms or by man-made nuclear explosions at high altitude.

So, very pleased to hear Radio 4's Today Programme covering this topic today, with an interview of Avi Schnurr at the EMP Coalition. It's a risk we face that didn't exist a hundred years ago. The interview has not been posted yet, but should appear soon on the i-player (but for UK internauts only I believe).

The oil is still there (under the sand)

2010-09-13T12:31:00.003+01:00

A colleague in the US writes:

I was recently at a presentation of the damage that BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico. BP has spent $100 million on PR and is saying that the beaches are clean, that the oil has evaporated, been digested or otherwise dispersed.

However, finding the pollution is as simple as digging a couple of inches into the sand on the barrier islands, where you'll find about a foot of coagulated oil. [see photo] We're very concerned that BP is about to declare victory and avoid doing a full cleanup.

Well, I don't know exactly what to make of this - it certainly seems as though there's a lot of oil still out there. But in general I don't think bashing BP over the oil spill has helped a great deal - they drill for oil in the gulf because we buy it off them afterwards, so the problem of getting off fossil fuels (and away from the risks of drilling) is one that we all share responsibility for solving.

Even so, the photos are striking. They are by Shawn Carey, a photographer who works for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and who is campaigning to extend the clean-up.

We should charge electric cars at petrol stations

2010-09-10T20:49:00.002+01:00

Just a short post to link to my article on electric cars in the Guardian today. Seems to have caused a bit of a stir - in any case, it currently has the second highest number of comments on the environment pages, just behind "Live online: Post your questions to No Impact Man".

Hard to compete with that, I guess ... but let's see if we can catch up by tomorrow morning.

September 2010: Chart of the Month

2010-09-08T12:36:00.009+01:00

For reasons that don't bear explaining I have found myself looking into the latest government data on light bulbs. It was quite an illuminating exercise. For instance, I learned that we have cut our energy usage for lighting by 4% in the last 20 years, although on average the light bulbs we use are 43% more efficient. Hmmm, something up with that. The explanation must be that there are more of us, and we have more bulbs each. I chewed through the data and sure enough, the picture is as follows:

(Click on the image for a full size view)

To me, the column of interest in this chart is the third. It shows that we're each using more light bulbs, which is weird. But sure enough, that's exactly what we're doing. Think of a classic kitchen refurb: you take out a 100 watt centrally suspended bulb and replace it with 8 or 10 halogen spotlights, at 35 or 50 watts each. So the total energy requirement triples, at least. Sometimes it quintuples. There are now 170 million halogen lights in UK homes, more than the total number of energy saving light bulbs in the whole country.

Some people hope to solve this problem with LED lights, but I am not convinced. A 4 watt LED from Philips costs £22, compared to 99p for a 50W halogen spotlight . The LED lasts 20 times as long, and at 10p / KWh I estimate the cost of ownership is 6 times less per hour the bulb is used. But since the halogen spot only costs 0.5p per hour, and produces nearly 10 times more lumens than the LED version, I'm not surprised if most people just can't be bothered with the calculation.

As usual, the source data is here for anyone who wants to check the maths. But more interesting than the raw data is the moral of the story: to make the kind of reductions in energy usage that we are currently targeting, we need the third column of this chart to start working for us, not against us. In this example, we need to stop ripping out low energy solutions and replacing them with high energy solutions. It just doesn't make sense. Perhaps we should introduce a tax (or a pox!) on halogen spots.

100 years to get off the planet

2010-08-26T12:09:00.002+01:00

Worth watching this 2 minute video from Stephen Hawking and the Big Think. Hawking says: "If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue ... we have made remarkable progress in the last 100 years, but if we want to continue beyond the next 100 years, our future is in space." Wow.

There is more background on the Big Think website, which has been publishing 'one radical new idea' each day this month. You might also want to have a read of Big Idea #16 (Parents Don't Matter), or #1 (Drug our Drinking Water).

Welcome to ... the Altruistic Vigilante

2010-07-20T21:39:00.014+01:00

This blog has mostly been about economics, so for a change let's have a crack at some philosophy. Political philosophy, at least.

Norman Lewis has drawn my attention to an FT article about wilful damage. Activists break into an arms factory, smash the place up, but are acquitted in court. The logic is that harm was done, but to prevent further harm, and in the eyes of the law that is acceptable.

So far so good. But what's interesting here is that guilt is established subjectively. The test is not whether your action has actually minimised the damage, but whether you believed that it would. It doesn't matter if you were right, just whether you honestly thought that you were.

Let's drag this back to energy and climate change. What are the implications? Could you break into my house and turn out my lights or smash my tumble dryer? Could you slash the tyres of my car? Or sneak in secretly at night and insulate my loft?

I think we have just invented the Altruistic Vigilante. The floodgates are open. Remember, you read it first here.

Oil prices down 10% since the BP spill

2010-07-04T21:55:00.014+01:00

We all know what the oil spill is doing to the environment. But have you seen what it's done to the market? I thought I'd take a look, and the answer is ... wait a minute, nothing at all??

The explosion was on April 20. On April 16, a barrel of light sweet crude cost $83. And 140 million spilled gallons later, it costs $75. Contracts for 2015 have also come down about 10% (see chart).

How is that possible? The answer is: although the spill is massive, the market is massiver. I estimate that the spill so far is worth about 1% of 1% of the 21 billion barrels of proven reserves in the US alone. And of course Deepwater Horizon was an exploratory well, so the market never even knew this oil was there.

I think traders are more interested in global economics. If prices have cooled off since April, it must mean the outlook for global growth has done the same. (Think public sector deficits, Greek debt crisis, Chinese currency appreciation ... ).

All this makes sense, but there is one more observation. Prices for December 2015 are about $10 ahead of today's spot prices, so the market does expect oil to be more expensive in 5 years time. For most of June, this gap looked like it was rising to about $15, presumably because a proper approach to safety would make production costlier in the future.

But in the last few days, the gap from spot price to Dec 2015 price has dropped back to $10 again. So much for talk of a safety premium. Happy 4th of July folks.

Energy prices are from the EIA and futures are from nymex.

Black cabs running on chip fat

2010-07-04T21:06:00.000+01:00

So, I don't know enough about biofuels. But I think from what I do know, we'd be better off with Plain Old Electric Vehicles.

Even so I can't help liking Uptown Oil, a company which collects used chip fat from restaurants, cleans it up and sells it back to cabbies for about 10% less than diesel. At least it stops all that bad stuff going down the plughole: apparently we're pouring 400 tonnes of fat down London drains each month, and 500 tonnes at Christmas. So that's the market size right there, if they can collect it.

Somewhat disgustingly, Thames Water have put a video of this on youtube. Follow the link if you want to see what 400 tonnes of Turkey dripping looks like from the inside of a London sewer.

Eeyughk.

Tax breaks for fossil fuels worth $9.1 billion

2010-06-18T15:09:00.004+01:00

You couldn't make it up! A report from the OECD shows we're spending $9.1 billion on tax subsidies for fossil fuels. That's about $7.50 / year for each of us, just in the few selected industries that the report has looked at.

They're still working on figuring out the total, which is likely to be much larger. See the helpful comment below from Ron Steenblik, one of the authors.

Similarly, The Global Subsidies Initiative (an interesting institution in itself ...) suggests that fossil fuel subsidies outside the OECD are worth around $400 million, or getting on for $15 per person every year. As shown in the table, that's nearly 10 times the total subsidy available for renewables.

Finally, the OECD team has also estimated that removing subsidies to fossil fuels across all developing and emerging economies (I think this is the region where they have the best data) could cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 10%. And as we've seen before on this blog there are not many policies with that kind of potential.

Click here for the report this table comes from.

It's official - we've gone soft

2010-06-15T11:11:00.014+01:00

June 2010 Chart of the Month

For over 30 years now, our partners at BRE have been collecting data on average indoor temperatures in the UK. What they've found is that over time we're heating our homes to higher and higher temperatures, from about 13° C in 1970 to over 20° C in recent years. And all this during a period where the weather, if anything, has been slightly warmer than it used to be.

Of course, one thing that has changed since 1970 is that a lot more people have central heating. So what I like about this chart is that it separates out this effect: all else equal, the chart shows that the spread of central heating would have increased indoor temperatures only to about 15° C by 1970 standards. The rest of the increase (by rough calculation about 70% of it) is just behaviour. We've gone soft!

The Energy Saving Trust says that turning down the thermostat down by 1° C cuts your heating bill by 10% on average. So what we're really seeing here is the long run trend of rising incomes and falling relative costs of energy. Which if you're worried about these things, would get you thinking again about pricing.

The data source is here for those that are interested.

First fall in energy use since 1982

2010-06-14T10:03:00.004+01:00

The source is BP's Statistical Review of World Energy. You can read an interesting if cynical critique of this report by Jeremy Leggett in the Financial Times, arguing that the statistics are a cover up and that an 'energy crunch' is upon us.

Relatedly, BP do publish some data about Jeremy's area, solar PV. Solar PV grew nearly 50% in 2009, which is surely good news. But total capacity is still only enough to meet about one twentieth of 1% of global demand for electricity. So Jeremy's article just offers a reminder of how little protection we really have against the energy-crunch scenario.

High Impact, Low Frequency?

2010-06-07T23:59:00.017+01:00

The BP oil spill has got us all thinking about low frequency, high impact events. But some people have been thinking about these things for quite a while, including the team at NERC - the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Who knew such an institution even existed? Their job apparently is to worry about unlikely events that would be really, really bad if they ever came about.

The latest NERC report includes a detailed section on geomagnetic storms:

The analysis indicates that the [geomagnetically induced current] in over 350 transformers will exceed levels where the transformer is at risk of irreparable damage... Such large scale damage could lead to prolonged restoration and long-term chronic shortages of electricity supply capability to the impacted regions, arguably for multiple years.

In other words, a really big storm could roast enough components (70-80% of transformers in some states) to put the lights out for years. A version of this event happened in March 1989 and knocked out parts of the Canadian grid for most of a day. But since then, the grid has been developed in ways that make it more vulnerable than before: essentially, higher voltage transmission means geomagnetically induced currents can travel further and do more damage.

From a different angle, we could perhaps get a similar effect from a high altitude nuclear explosion. Here's a photo of the last time we had a go at one of those. This one was 400km in the air but the electromagnetic pulse was enough to blow out the streetlights in Hawaii, 1500km away.

(This is the 1962 Starfish Prime explosion.)

Why energy policy has failed

2010-06-07T23:06:00.000+01:00

This year's Godkin lecture by John Deutch is worth watching. Deutch was US Undersecretary for Energy in the 1970s, so he has some interesting long term perspectives. He reminds us for example of Carter's target for 20% of energy to be generated from renewables by the year 2000. We continue to set similar targets as if this was a new idea. As Deutch says: "Aspirational goals are rarely accompanied by serious analysis that indicates how the goals will be credibly achieved."

Vive la France!

2010-05-28T18:51:00.002+01:00

Congratulations to France, which has de loin the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in the G8. Good news for those who think the future is nuclear. Of course some of us think that the future will not be nuclear. If anyone has a G8 league table of hazardous waste per capita please post the link.

PS I am guessing France benefits from a bit of warm weather too, from a quick look at the Canada column. The dataset comes from here if you are after the source.

1 in 3 Brits say climate change is bunkum

2010-05-25T12:12:00.012+01:00

The BBC published a poll in February showing 25% of British people think Climate Change is not happening. Another 10% believe it is happening, but it isn't man made. So it's official: 1 in 3 Brits do not believe in man-made Climate Change.

Well, I for one am one of the other two. I doubt I could express my reasons as well as Peter Gleick in his letter to Science magazine this month, signed by 250 members of the US National Academy of Sciences. Sensible, straightforward stuff.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8500443.stm

We're saving £5 of energy a year - that's all

2010-05-07T12:28:00.006+01:00

In March we posted that UK residential CO2 emissions were 500 years off target. Apologies. It turns out that we are in fact only 369 years off target - as shown below. The trend rate of improvement since the year 2000 is 0.4% per annum. In other words, since there are 27 million households in the UK, we're cutting our actual CO2 emissions by about 25 kg per household per year.

Another way of looking at this: the total impact of all UK energy saving policies is about £5 of energy saved per household, per annum. Now, that's not a figure you'll hear quoted very often in the House of Commons.

What to learn from the Australian EPC?

2010-04-29T19:42:00.005+01:00

Here is an Australian Energy Performance Certificate. You can compare the UK version here. Some obvious differences are:

More, small scale / easy recommendations (good)
Includes water efficiency (good)
Linked to a govt loan programme (good in principle)
Happy-smiley design (bad!)

Oh, and wait a minute - worth mentioning that the Australian government pays ~£120 for each certificate. Sounds good, but in practice it's been a nightmare for everyone involved. The $10,000 loan element has since been withdrawn - too expensive and too complicated, apparently. A lesson for any new UK government thinking of launching a similar scheme.

Carbon Census Song

2010-04-20T17:54:00.010+01:00

So here it is, the Carbon Census Song - our contribution to the Take One Small Step competition. If you'd like to support us click here to watch the 1 minute video and give us your vote. Many thanks to Joy Mills for putting this together.

Introducing the Carbon Census Rule of Thumb

2010-04-17T15:26:00.003+01:00

How much power do you use when you're not using any power? Surprisingly, not zero. Take my house for example: it's a quiet Saturday afternoon, the family has gone out and everything is turned off, but our power monitor is reading 170 watts. How so? After 5 minutes poking around I found the culprits: microwave, radio, TV, DVD and a list of other things.

These devices draw a tiny amount of power, but they draw it all the time. That's the problem. So I spent another 5 minutes figuring out how much this 'background demand' is costing me. According to a really rather elegant coincidence, it turns out that 170 watts of background demand will cost about £170 a year. That's about 1 tonne of CO2 or 30% of the average UK electricity bill, just for stuff I'm not even using.

Let's call this the Carbon Census Rule Of Thumb: 1 watt of background power costs £1 a year.

(Interested in why this works? There are about 10,000 hours in a year, and a kilowatt hour of electricity costs about 10p. Well, just under 10,000 hours actually and just over 10p, but the rounding cancels out making the answer nice and easy.)

Lib Dems adopt Reverse Pricing

2010-04-14T08:39:00.002+01:00

Great news, the Lib Dems have committed to introduce reverse pricing in energy. I believe they are the first major political party to do so, let's hope the other parties follow suit. Here's what the Lib Dems say:

Protecting low income households is a good idea, but not with a social tariff. It would be better to help low income households consume less energy (e.g. by switching away from electric heating) than to subsidise prices. For more info read our article of 26 March which introduces the reverse pricing idea.

Undercover Economist

2010-04-10T08:58:00.000+01:00

Tim Harford has picked up our arguments on energy pricing on the Undercover Economist website.

Energy prices double, but suppliers lose money for 5 years. So how on Earth does that work?

2010-04-08T10:37:00.010+01:00

A picture is worth a thousand words. Have a look at this, an excellent piece of work from Ofgem:

The chart shows the average net margin on a dual fuel energy account, and goes a long way to explaining the mysterious behaviour of the UK energy market. It's a classic case study in sticky prices: the retailer is 'caught out' by steeply rising prices in the wholesale market, and can't push prices up to consumers quickly enough. Net margins turn negative around August 2004 ... and they don't recover for nearly 5 years.

Horrendous industry, you might think. But the flip side is a 20-fold increase in generation profits. So as long as you are in generation and retail, none of the above matters. What the chart really tells you is that energy retail is just a hedging option for generators, against inevitable periods of low wholesale prices.

So what of the sticky prices thing? One way to think about those is as a barrier to entry for future competitors. As the chart shows, a challenger must be prepared to lose money for a pretty long time. And who's got the cash to do that, if you don't happen to have a generation business in your back pocket? If you saw what happened to BizzEnergy then you know the rest of the story.

10% of households use 1/3 of our electricity

2010-04-02T11:07:00.003+01:00

Last week we posted our Financial Times article on reverse pricing. We said this policy could double the marginal cost of energy without making households worse off overall. There would be winners and losers, and people asked us how many: the answer is about 2/3 of households would benefit, and about 1/3 would pay higher bills.

But here's what's really interesting: to get to this answer we had to crunch the data on 26 million domestic electricity meter points, producing the chart below as a by product. Wow. The top 10% of households use nearly 1/3 of all domestic electricity in the UK. The top 20% use 44%. For whatever reason, there are about 5 million households who consume up to 6 times the national average every year. So we really do need policies - like reverse pricing - that make energy saving more attractive for high volume users.

You can see the source data in DECC's Energy Trends, March 2009 (p24 and after).

Can we make CO2 into fuel?

2010-04-02T10:21:00.004+01:00

Here's some interesting science. It may be possible to turn CO2 into methanol, a useful fuel. There is a good article about this in the New Scientist and you can find a summary of the science here.

Nobody believes the strategy will work

2010-04-01T10:40:00.000+01:00

We do like the new government strategy for household energy management, we just don't think it's going to make much difference. But who cares about us, what does everyone else think?

Here's one way to find out. Today's chart shows the Centrica (i.e. British Gas) stock price since Ed Milliband launched the Warm Homes strategy on 2 March. According to the Minister, we are going to cut household energy demand - about 1/3 of Centrica Group profits - by 29% in 10 years. What did the market make of that? Hmmm. Centrica stock is up 4%.

(OK, so I admit, this one is just for fun. We could have looked at SSE, whose stock price has gone the other way in the same period. But the point is that the new strategy doesn't seem to have made a jot of difference to utility stocks. I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be the case, if analysts really believed that household energy demand was going to be down 30% within 10 years. Or if they expected the government to introduce a policy with a more dramatic impact, such as reverse pricing.)

Time to Reverse Pricing

2010-03-26T16:02:00.003Z

So, what to do about the fact that household CO2 continues to increase? We posted a statement of the problem yesterday, so today we post a suggestion on what to do about it. We think the government should require that domestic energy prices increase as you consume more energy, not the opposite as happens at present. Look at the charts: the left hand side shows how electricity tariffs work today, the right hand chart shows how they would work under reverse pricing. The average price is the same for the average user (4-5 MWh / year), but the marginal price would be 2 x higher - halving the payback time of a typical energy saving investment.

You can read more in our article on this in The Financial Times, or click here to download a more detailed explanation of the idea. We would welcome your comments!

Household CO2 is 500 years off target

2010-03-25T11:19:00.022Z

The latest CO2 statistics were published today. Not good news. Residential emissions grew by 3 million tonnes in 2008, despite the economy being in recession for most of the year. This is why we say that current policies are not working in this sector: the average reduction in household CO2 emissions since 2002, when the flagship EEC/CERT program began, is now 0.3% per year, meaning it would take 500 years to achieve an 80% reduction. That's supposed to be our target for 2050, by the way.

You can download the data for yourself on the DECC website. The picture looks better for 2009, but DECC attribute the improvement to warmer weather in 2009 and the full dataset won't be published for another year or so.

£1 billion bank is nothing new

2010-03-25T08:31:00.015Z

So, yesterday we heard the Chancellor put £1 billion of our money into a green investment bank.

But did you know we already spend much more than this? The Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) creates an obligation for energy companies to spend money every year to encourage us to buy less energy from them. The cost of this program (paid for by each of us, with small increases in our energy bills) is about £1.3 bn every year. It's mostly spent on subsidising loft and cavity wall insulation and a few hundred million low energy light bulbs.

Unfortunately this very expensive program isn't working: we'll do a post to explain why that's the case later on. I don't know why nobody writes about this in the press.

What is a tonne of CO2?

2010-03-24T13:05:00.004Z

About as much as

100 trees can absorb in a year
Driving across America in a car
A 10,000km long haul flight, per passenger
£175 of gas and electricity at current UK prices

The Carbon Trust publish some useful conversion ratios for this kind of thing. We use a figure of about 10kg per tree which is widely quoted on the internet; the United Nations Environment Programme puts it at about 12kg a year, but 10 kg / tree (or 100 trees per tonne) is a pretty good rule of thumb.

How much CO2 can I save?

2010-03-24T12:27:00.012Z

Well, here's the answer from all properties in the Carbon Census to date :

On average a UK household can save 2 - 6 tonnes of CO2 each year by implementing all of the measures identified in an official Energy Performance Certificate. About a third of the saving can be achieved with relatively cost effective measures - lighting, insulation, thermostats, heating system and so on - and about two thirds from more expensive improvements such as installing solar thermal hot water, solar panels or solid wall insulation. That said, solar panels are one of the more cost effective investments now that feed-in tariffs have been introduced. A typical installation saves about 1 tonne of CO2 per household per year.

Why the Carbon Census?

2010-03-22T17:01:00.002Z

So, let's use our first post to answer the first question: why do we need a carbon census? The answer is easy: 27 million homes in the UK; 142 million tonnes of CO2; each of our homes is producing 5-6 tonnes of CO2 every year. That's just from using the gas and electricity that's piped into our homes every day. Altogether home energy use creates a quarter of all CO2 emissions in the UK, more than all road transport combined. It's a huge deal. We definitely need a census. The official emissions statistics are published here for those who are interested.