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.