carbon limited

When it comes to carbon from energy and the built environment, misdirected government measures (however good the intention) are now likely to do more harm than good. Eye-catching initiatives, if and when they fail, provide justification to cynics and people whose interests lie in maintaining the status quo. And more importantly the measures waste time and damage the chances of introducing more effective alternatives in future.

We’re seeing this now with the zero carbon targets. As the UKGBC recently found, the targets as they stand will be impossible to meet for up to 80% of new homes. The current zero carbon definition is a great idea very badly expressed.

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Nick and I were kindly asked by Phil Clark to speak at this year’s Think08. We thought long and hard and decided that I’ll be representing Carbon Limited (and Fontenergy) at the event while Nick schmoozes in the background. So I’ll be the Face Man to his B.A. so to speak. Or the Magnum to his Robin Masters. The Buck to his Twiki. Or… whatever, you see where I’m going with this.

Phil’s put us in a great stream at the conference, speaking alongside Robert Kyriakides (fellow blogger and the man behind solar thermal company Genersys), Richard Shennan from Fulcrum (with his effortless cool, top ‘tache, and unbeatable Basque cooking), and Angus Norman from EDF (who I’ve never met but am looking forward to meeting).

I’ll be talking about the effect of the upcoming regs on the way we generate our energy (i.e. the extent to which regs will push us from a centralised generation model to a distributed one and what the implications are). I’ve been doing quite a lot of work in this area with one of the big developers, though I haven’t written much about it on the blog.

Come on down, watch the talk, and say hi.

At work I’m helping a large housing association upgrade their existing heating networks to save carbon and reduce costs to occupants. There are various steps to take: upgrading boilers, re-insulating distribution pipework, considering CHP, and so on. But the single most effective thing you can do on these schemes is to install heat meters.

Doing some background research, I rang up the very friendly and forthcoming Dick Bradford, the driving force behind the hugely successful biomass community heating schemes in Barnsley, to ask him what effect installing heat meters had had on his schemes. He told me that following the installation of heat meters, heat consumption dropped by 50%. I was gobsmacked.

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There seems to be much confusion regarding the forthcoming status of the Code for Sustainable Homes. There are many references to Government making a Code assessment mandatory from April this year.

But is this truly the case?

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I’ll keep this short to ensure that it does get posted, but I suspect that I could rant on this till closing time on Friday night. For a recent renewable energy assessment for a client I finally took the time to review the potential for air source heat pumps to deliver carbon reductions and I don’t like what I found. Read the rest of this entry »

Down with tonnes, bring on the megagrams! It’ll freak the squares.

The post title refers to the fact that a 22 turbine wind farm will receive the go ahead today and it is one that will directly affect me inasmuch as my parents house is about 2 miles from the nearest turbine. I spent a long time educating my parents on the true performance details of large wind, not to convince them that they should support the wind farm proposal, but so they could make up their own minds based on good quality information rather than the guff offered particularly by the anti wind lobby. In the end they came out in favour and have, to a degree, suffered partial ostricisation within their local community for it.

 It is very easy as a consultant to make recommendations that incur costs for my clients. It is easy to play with other peoples money.  

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For those that are interested about the points raised in my last post, we have started an online petition to the Prime Minister to have the stamp duty legislation reviewed before it undermines any impetus to achieve zero carbon homes.

If you sign, many thanks, and if not, feel free to leave a constructive comment as to your reasoning. I am interested to know other viewpoints.