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With just a day to go, the bidding on the Aga has just gone up to £720. Also arrived today the details about a couple of log-burning boilers. Costs, including installation, start at £10,000, with grants available for around £2,500. We’ll now have to look at further alternatives, as well as how such boilers are […]
With solar and wind looking a bit problematic at this stage, I’ve starting looking at wood power. We’ve got plenty of it lying around and most of the experts claim that it doesn’t add to CO2 (for reasons I haven’t totally fathomed yet). So I’m looking at log boilers and wood chip boilers. And as […]
The 13.6 square metre photovoltaic array at Camden’s Women and Health Centre.
Real time display of how much electricity the solar panels at Camden Women and Health Centre are producing, and the total produced since April 2003.
Went last evening with my daughter Boo to the Women’s Health Centre in Camden. 3 years ago she organised a complete rebuild along environmental lines. Now the results are very impressive. They have put a lot of effort into insulation, bringing daylight into the building, energy efficiency and water harvesting from the roof. But the […]
March – and Hedgerley is under snow. We have to get the central heating boiler repaired and it’s clear we couldn’t easily survive without it at times like this.
the guilty secret at Hedgerley – trying to hide the oil tank that holds some 2,000 litres
Anuradha has just come up with an excellent term – energy literacy. I guess it’s also what I’ve been trying to acquire in the last few weeks.
Signed up with Good Energy. Their system is very clear, although the comparisons with the present are more complicated. Their rate is going to be 8.73p for kWh for daytime usage. The compares with our current Powergen rates of 7.96, but with the first 200 units at 10.18. However this is based on a day/night […]
This month’s Resurgence includes a new column on these issues written by Lorna Howarth. She refers to the Global Commons Institute (http://www.gci.org.uk/) and their notion of ‘Contraction and Convergence’. They have a much tougher calculation: that with a global population of 6 billion, the planet can only sustain 2 tonnes of emissions per person. That […]
Last year Anuradha and I travelled 83,000 air miles, causing a total emission of CO2 of 24 tonnes. Another wake-up call. Only half a ton was for holiday travel, which I guess is reasonable in the light of our new targets. We could justify the 23 and a half tonnes that we travelled for OneWorld […]
Given that the car does 5,000 miles a year on average and the scooter mileage is around 500, we can finally calculate our current total emissions (hold breath)… And the answer is: 21.8 tonnes of CO2 a year. This comes 89% from home energy and 11% from transport. And we have to consider that: this […]
The reason for doing all this was reinforced today when I read an application Anuradha is preparing to fund a mass blog on this subject under the OneWorld banner. She writes: “I had been writing about Climate Change with a generalised anxiety since 1980 – but, like many anti-poverty activists, I considered it ‘an environmental […]
Hedgerley Wood built in the 1930s (photograph by Tom Dyson)
First real numbers look horrifying: yearly use of heating oil (hot water, heating and pool) was 6245 litres yearly use of electricity (lights and gadgets) was 20,700 kWhs This computes to CO2 emisions of: oil = 19,476 kgs of CO2 per year electricity = 9,192 kgs of CO2 per year Giving a total of 28,668 […]