I was at an event the other week where a keynote speaker put up a picture of an ancient Landrover and said "This is my car. I'm eco-friendly as the emissions from vehicle production are much higher than those in use, so keeping it on the road is the right thing to do!"

"Rubbish" thought I (or words to that effect). But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and looked up some published stats, and as you can see the use phase comes to 80% and the manufacture 18%.

Toyota Gasoline Vehicle CO2 Emissions:

Driving 72%
Fuel production 8%
Vehicle production 6%
Material production 12%
Others 2%

But everybody knows this - who on earth told him the opposite?

Another one...

In May's ENDS Report, a Rosi Fieldson is quoted as saying "The more technologies that are put into a home, the higher the embodied carbon [ie that required to produce materials, components and build the house] becomes. Currently embodied energy is 15% of energy used over the building's life time .... In a zero carbon home this would rise to 80-90%."

Well either Dr Fieldson has been misquoted or she needs to go back to primary school to sort out her maths. It's a percentage! If you cut one part of the pie, the percentage taken by the other must go up because the two parts must add up to 100!

Strictly speaking the embodied energy of a zero carbon home should be 100% of lifetime energy, because the usage (non-renewable) energy is 0%. But it doesn't tell you whether the amount of embodied energy goes up or down...

I think I'm going to go and lie down in a darkened room...

Labels: energy, fun, life cycle assessment, rant

Two things happened to me yesterday that made me think about this:

1. someone asked me if they thought the environmental sector would be hit by the so-called 'credit crunch' and associated economic downturn.

2. I filled up my diesel car's tank with fuel for the first time in two months and nearly passed on on the forecourt when I saw the cost.

It is fairly obvious that a good response to an economic downturn is to cut costs. If you have a 25% profit margin, then every £1 you save in your operations is worth £4 of sales.

The biggest cost in most businesses is staff. But if you cut staff you have to pay redundancies, you lose the investment you have made in training and development, and you hit the morale of those you retain. Plus, when things improve, you will have to rush around recruiting and training new staff which is both an additional cost and a delay which could cost you market share.

On the other hand, there are only ever benefits from reducing waste, energy costs, water costs, transport costs, raw material costs etc, etc. So if things are getting tight, why not divert some of that 'redundant' staff time into identifying and eradicating environmental costs? If you do it right, they should more than pay for themselves - and you will continue to see the benefits when sales pick up with the increased margin.

Labels: energy, raw materials, staff engagement, transport, waste

One of the things that makes me mad is people who should know better mixing up 'energy' and 'electricity'. Of course electricity is a form of energy, but one that is very carbon intensive, but still doesn't contribute as many carbon emissions as gas and oil used for space heating and transport.

For example, in the Observer on Sunday, environment editor Juliette Jowit wrote:

"...'feed-in tariffs' which allow homeowners to sell spare electricity to the national grid to help repay their costs would ensure that people opted for the best technology, which also includes solar panels and ground source heat pumps."

OK, Juliette (adopts exasperated-teacher tone), a feed in tariff is a mechanism to allow householders to sell electricity to the grid. A ground source heat pump consumes electricity to produce heat. So it can't benefit from a feed in tariff. Have you ever tried heating an electrical wire? Would it light even the most efficient lightbulb? (flings chalk at cringing editor)

I'm jesting (of course), but this is really important when discussing the future of our energy supply. There's a large contingent who shout "We need nuclear!", but to effectively cut emissions this way, we would need to convert all our domestic/commercial heating and transport to run on electricity. Which would of course be extraordinarily expensive in terms of capital costs (new power stations, heaters, vehicles) and running costs.

Currently nuclear produces 20% of our electricity supply and those plants are due for replacement - to deliver say 33% of our total energy supply (as one prominent energy expert suggests), this would require a very large number of new nuclear power stations and we would have to find a very large amount of nuclear fuel which of course is finite like gas, oil and coal.

I didn't mean this to turn into an anti-nuclear rant, but we are risking basing this and other similarly important decisions on opinions that are flung about, deliberately or otherwise, without a true understanding of what we are talking about.

Labels: electricity, energy, heat

Another positive from the Local Government Association Climate Change conference. I asked the Audit Commission's carbon gurus about the use of heat from electricity generation and was told that it is almost certainly to be counted as zero carbon against Local Authority targets. In other words the carbon will be counted 100% against the electricity user rather than divvied up between the two.

This will provide a huge incentive for councils to use waste heat energy in social housing and municipal buildings when the new Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) reporting and the Carbon Reduction Commitment hit in 2009 and 2010 respectively. The CAA will also measure emissions from non-social housing and commercial properties.

Maybe we will see district heating rise again, rather than squandering this easy source of energy.

Labels: district heating, energy, local authorities

With all the furore over that logo, attention has been distracted from the business opportunities relating to the delivery of the 2012 Olympic Games. Well, if the Olympic Delivery Authority’s sustainable development commitments are anything to go by then it certainly will be a green games:

• Aiming to minimise the carbon emissions associated with the venues through a 50% reduction in carbon dioxide by 2013.
• 90% of demolition material to be reused or recycled and at least 20% of materials used to be recycled.
• 40% reduction in the demand for potable water in permanent venues and a 20% reduction target for residential development.
• Aspiring to transport 50% of construction materials, to the Park by water and rail.
• Protecting and enhancing the biodiversity and ecology of the venue locations.
• Maximising timber from sustainable sources with all timber used from known, legal sources, with clear supply chain evidence.

This sets a challenge for everyone looking for a slice of the action. And with £4bn of contracts going, these games will be the biggest single public procurement exercise in the world, ever.

In the bidding documentation, "the Environment" is listed as one of the five key criteria against which bids will be assessed, with particular reference to waste minimisation and energy use - and the criteria above will be expected to be read across into contracts as appropriate. Anybody wanting to bid will certainly need to get their environmental credentials in order.

Labels: climate change, design, energy, green procurement, olympics, waste