Avatar, Anti American, Anti Military or just a call for common sense?

We watched Avatar on DVD last night, fresh in at our local video rental shop.   The graphics were, of course, wonderful, full of faultless CGI but the film was so immersive that I took that for granted after a while.  What I didn't expect was a great story... 

Its set off world where the terrans are mining the wonderfully named "Unobtanium" and the hapless indiginous population of the planet is getting in the way of the corporate greed for more.  The aliens are living in harmony with their planet where every living thing is connected and depends upon keeping a delicate balance for survival.  The human invaders make a half-assed attempt at deplomacy before deciding just to take what they want by force of arms.

The parallels with human history are there in abundance. But more striking is the current battle of words about global warming, or the lack of it depending which side you are on. While one side is happy to destroy without thought for the consequences, quite happy with "business as usual", the other side see's its world being destroyed by ignorance, their pleas unheard.  At the centre of this conflict is a lone GI, "of the Jar Head clan", who bothers to take the time to understand the other sides point of view and decides he's on the wrong side.

Some people have written  that the film is anti-American and anti-military, but nowhere is it claimed that the corporation is American, and the wrong doers are not "the military" but a bunch of hired mercentaries. Any similaritieas must therefore be in the mind of the accuser, who surely believes that corporate America is like that and that it is their military might that made the USA great.   Personallly I think its films like Avatar, and freedom of speech that makes democracys like the US great.  Avatar is a warning of how our world could become if we take sides and stop listening to each other;  its not science fiction, its reality TV!

Sustainable Energy — without the hot air

Is actually the title of a book written by Prof. David JC MacKay of Cambridge University and available for free download from www.withouthotair.com . I've just downloaded it and it makes fantastic reading.  Highly recommended!

The Survey is now closed ...

Many thanks to the 150 people who filled in my survey.  I promised to publish the results, which I will do in another blog in the near future.  For now, here are some of the comments:

On Q10 : House Construction:

• I have just had insulation board added to the inside of the walls which are at the gable end.
• Cavity wall and loft insulation installed to current regulations in last 8 months.
• Recently insulated
• Recently renovated up to modern insolation standards (but still an old house)
• Three storey converted terraced building
• Rental property
• Not completely sure don t have construction knowledge!
• We rent our house so we are not likely to make any major changes to it eg. solar panels different heating.
• The house is less than 1 year old and was designed very efficient as far as heating hot water and water consumption concerned. Examples: water heating tubes on the roof day/night eletricity meters and use rain water for toilet flushing.
• Much lath and plaster. Some inaccessible roof spaces.
• cavity wall just done
• We rent. If we owned our home there is a lot we would do differently (adding insulation solar panals etc.)
• Breeze block construction with brick facing very small cavity between brick and internal.
• Three storey terraced house
• During renovation close attention was paid to improving this aspect of the house
• Added cavity wall insulation.
• in is vintage 18 century
• Some extra insulation has been added.
• I am not the owner of the place I am currently living in.
• You forgot to ask whether the respondent lives in an apartment in a larger house... and then let them skip the irrelevant questions :)
• Energy Level as defined by Belgian goverment: E44 To be more correct on heating system; it s an air-to-water heat pump.
• insulation as per 1979 standards = not great but OK
• Originally solid wall construction but a considerable part of the walls is now insulated double glass and a new roof.
• Mixed: cavity and solid
• Cavity wall insulation installed about 2 years ago. Loft re-insulated this year.

On Q11:Other Greentech:

• would love to but not feasible as an individual flat
• conduits built into walls from roof ready for solar panel installation
• specialised glass to reflect heat as part of double glazing
• Specific building construction. Hot water comes from 1. solar panel 2. air heat pump (which is alo used for heating) 3. electricity

rain water for toilets & washing machine
On Q13: Why people would not be interested to lower their C02 by 50%

• Unless US & China come to forefront then whatever the rest of the world does is pointless - if these guys join in then hopefully we ll see cost effective solutions.
• [yes] Although the future saving on energy bills would be the most attractive lure for me.
• not yet convinced these carbon footprinting philosophies are truely helping and not just a marketing gimmick.
• depends on initial outlay. Q13 makes no sense to me.
• Because we rent our house and we don t expect to be in it for many years. If we had our own home we would be interested in this.
• I said yes because I believe anything vs today is a gain. Without financial details (what will it cost to me) and understanding what would be the consequences if I do not go lower than 50% I cannot give a better answer.
• We won t stay long enough in the house for it to be worth it
• This does not represent my entire carbon footprint it would be easier to make savings elsewhere e.g. less air travel
• As a senior citizen I do not have the capital to undertake the work required
• I would say yes but we rent our house so would not invest!
• Other (budgetary) priorities right now!
• don t believe it makes a difference
• it is the energy (read $) that needs to be reduced. whether or not carbon footprint is reduced is less important (or seems)
• Depends on the payback period should be < 10yrs I am not convinced carbon footprint is related to global warming. not interested in % rather in payback period. Population is the main cause of global warming. Anything other than reducing the number of people is palliative at best and diverting form the real problem Not enough detail to form an opinion Cost vs. proven savings.

On Q17: Comments about Financial Section

• free money helps! Not prepared to take out a loan.
• Prefer to finance alone and make independent decisions about company I would choose to carry out installation. Government/approved installers often charge well above the reasonable rate and do not necessarily do a better job. Would also prefer to see such help restricted to those who most need it
• Would not need loan - but would want to reduce the cost / payback period - so loans not of interest.
• Payback is the real issue. If the goverment would match half of the cost the technology would be widely deployed
• Not clear why the energy supplier would want to subsidize a technology that reduces dependency on them... this is absolute B.S.
• goverment tax breaks are only relevant for people paing a lot of goverment taxes
• Payback period
• Government subsidies and tax breaks are usually tied to it being done by qualified suppliers which seems to drive up the cost. I don t like borrowing money. I suspect that my *heating* costs (i.e. cost of gas minus hot water costs) are not that high so I would imagine that anything with a sub-three year pay-back would be quite cheap anyway. If it was going to take (say) twenty years to pay back then I d have to be totally convinced that (a) it would actually still work in twenty years time and (b) I couldn t do better just putting the money into an ISA.

Last but not least, Final Comments:

• Perhaps people aren t filling in the survey cos they don t know if you are genuine? I don t think I am really your average person when it comes to this sort of thing. I would spend up to about £4000 and not want payback and spending more than that I wouldn t really be calculating payback but how much the price of my house would go up as I don t know if I ll live in this one all my life. Good luck with your venture.
• Sorry Didn t understand question 14
• Our house is rented so we may not have much say in the final decision to install a new heating system in our property but have answered the questions as based on if we owned our property and therefore had full control over the upkeep and contents.

As you can see one of the recurring comments is what to do about rental properties.  Any bright ideas would be gratefully received!

New Survey by Nextgen - Please fill in!

I've created a survey to find out what my BLog visitors think of Green issues you can find it here:

http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=KKEDOL_28ace136

Please take a look and fill it in.

All that Glitters is not Green!

I hope that over the last few articles I have established my credentials as an engineer and eco-warrior. Unfortunately not all my decisions have been good ones and purchasing a cheap chinese electric scooter turned out to be one of the most costly mistakes of my life .....

In 2008 I started a 2 year part time MBA course in Leuven. Lectures are on Thursday evenings and Friday afternoons/evenings meaning that two days a week I had to go directly from work in Brussels to Leuven, a journey of 25km and which would be a stretch for my electric bicycle.  More importantly the journey time by bicycle would be about an hour, which would mean I would have had to leave work very early.

For the first term I cycled home and then took the car the rest of the way but this meant my wife could not collect my eldest daughter from Friday nights out with her friends.  Around this time my daughter’s boyfriend got himself a 50cc scooter.  These are tax exempt in Belgium and no number plates are required, as are electric scooters. Encouraged by this thought, I test drove an electric scooter at our local shop in Tervuren but I was not impressed with its performance. Its 750Watt motor seemed much slower even than my electric bike so was not going to solve my problem. After a few weeks of web surfing I came across Elecscoot, a UK company that seemed to have exactly what I was looking for, the Elecscoot 3. The 2008 model (now replaced) claimed to have twin 1500W motors; 4 times more power than the one I had tried. The website claimed that the scooter was capable of 40 miles on a charge, had a top speed of 50mph and came with regenerative braking and Lithium batteries guaranteed for 2 years/2000 charge cycles. The price was just under £2000. It sounded too good to be true, but I found another website (since updated) that seemed to corroborate the bike’s specifications, claiming that the bike came with a 3kWh, 60V Lithium battery pack. Based on my experience, 3kWh seemed to tie in with the claimed specifications. The only downside was that the vendor was in Consett, County Durham so it would have been expensive to arrange a test drive.

After much deliberation and several emails to check the specification with the vendor we took the plunge and ordered the scooter sight unseen. We paid the extra for DHL shipment to Belgium. Even as we unpacked the scooter (see picture above) from its shipping crate alarm bells started to ring. There were scratches all over it. The documentation consisted of a very dubious looking certificate of conformance to EU standards and a single sheet of paper saying that “according to EU regulations this scooter is limited to  45km/h (30mph). This latter fact instantly blew a hole in my use case – how was I going to make the journey time any shorter if the maximum speed was only 45km/hr? I took it for a test drive. There was no evidence of regenerative braking and after just going up and down the road a few times the battery went from apparently full to empty. The motors that were supposedly 1.5kW were clearly marked as 500W motors (see picture) so we had clearly been lied to. We felt like we had been kicked in the teeth.


I immediately wrote a letter of complaint to Elecscoot and emailed it to them. My claim that it did not meet its original specification was not helped by the fact that Elecscoot had cleverly removed all trace of my scooter from their website and had replaced it with a new model with a different specification. For those that are interested I’ve placed a copy of my letter including pictures of the damage here.

We received nothing back from Elecscoot (and still have heard nothing a full year later) so we contacted Tesco VISA (who we bought it through) to dispute the purchase and try to get our money back. They were very reluctant to do anything. One word of warning here – I do NOT recommend using Tesco VISA for internet purchases. It is not, in my opinion, a full service credit card company like Barclaycard.  They do not, as we found out to our cost, do customer service. Tesco’s slogan says “Everly Little Helps”, and in this case it helped very little indeed!! When we lived in the UK our nearest supermarket was a Tesco store and we were loyal customers for over 20 years. This experience has left me so bitter that if and when we move back to the UK I will make a point of ensuring our nearest supermarket is NOT Tesco.

Eventually Tesco told us we would have to get an expert’s opinion on what was wrong the scooter. Hmm, How was I supposed to find an expert on electric scooters? After some digging I found that there was an electrical vehicle group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), a Dutch language university close to where I worked. I approached them and they said they would be pleased to test it for me, but they would have to fit it into their schedule. I explained that my primary complaint was the range of the scooter. They performed two test runs complete with telemetry. The first run was up and down hills and the scooter managed only 18.5km (11.6 miles) on a charge. The second was on the flat which achieved 25.6km (16 miles). In short, this scooter would not even get me to work and back never mind from home to work to Leuven and back, which is what I had bought it for! The VUB produced a short report and we duly sent it to Tesco only to find out that there was a time limit on getting back to them with a complaint and that time had passed so they were unable to help(!).

In the meantime I had found a whole community of disillusioned Elecscoot owners. A few people also contacted me after I wrote a review slating the product and had similar stories to my own. Some had tried going to Trading Standards. Others had at least managed to get a reply from Elecscoot fobbing them off but no-one did any better than we did. So, having paid for insurance I passed the scooter on to my daughter who could at least use it to get to and from local babysitting jobs.

This situation carried on until mid February when I got a distress call from my daughter because she had crashed the scooter and been thrown off. Luckily she was not badly hurt and I went to look into the damage. I found that the front wheel had completely seized to its spindle and the spindle had turned round and round, coiling the power lead and undoing the wheel nuts as it went.  The power lead quickly became taught and had no doubt pulled the handlebars out of my daughters hands such that she was thrown off.  As far as I can see the scooter is a write-off after only 950km.

If you are considering buying an electric scooter make sure:

• Its not a cheap chinese import with no-name batteries
• Inspect it and throroughly test drive itto check its range meets your needs.
• There is local service and support
• If you can, get a recommendation from a previous owner, and make sure if there are reviews that they are all positive!
• Buy it with a Credit Card that you can trust to support you if things go wrong

I now see why the EU restrict these Chinese imports to 30mph. My daughter would have been severely injured had she been going at speed when the accident happened.  Perhaps better though would be for the EU to have tighter type approval procedures and import inspections to stop dangerous scooters from being imported in the first place?

Down with Uplighters

Up-ligthers have, probably quite rightly, a reputation for being a very inneficient form of lighting.  I thought I would share with you a 1 hour project I undertook last year to radically reduce the carbon footprint of our humble up-lighter.  As we live in rented accommodation we were not keen to spend huge amounts of money on light fittings for our forty square meter lounge.  Instead we bought ourselves a dimmable halogen up-lighter which provided a nice light that could change with our mood and which we could take with us when we moved.  Being a large room we had to have quite a powerful light and the up-lighter we chose used a 300watt halogen bulb.  We use it virtually every evening for 3-4 hours so it probably accounts for 10% of our lighting bill single headedly.

In September last year I was walking through our local DIY superstore when I spotted some GoVenA 20W dimmable compact fluorescents on special offer and immediately got the idea of replacing the halogen bulb with two of these.  [I should say at this point that I am a qualified electrical engineer, but I don’t think that this kind of project is particularly difficult for an average Do-It-Yourselfer with reasonable knowledge of electrics].  In the same store I was able to purchase two bulb holders that came with a screw mount. 

Once home I disconnected the lamp and started to remove the halogen fitting. The up-lighter sits on top of two twisted copper tubes (see above picture). One tube carries the live and the earth wires while the other carried the neutral.   The halogen lamp was strung between them.  Luckily on the fittings there was a screw fixing for part of the halogen lamp assembly which I could use to mount the two new eddison screw fittings.  The only thing that remained was to take a live feed wire to the other side fitting and vice versa for the neutral.  The earth wire remained connected to the metal part of the lamp (see picture, right for finished assembly).  The whole exercise took around an hour and worked perfectly and safely. Actually, as it produces so little heat, its probably safer than the original [HOT!] lamp.

The twin 20W bulbs are easily as bright (if not brighter) at maximum brightness as the 300W halogen was, but uses just 13% of the electricity.  If, as I assume, this one fitting consumed 10% of our lighting power, which In turn is 10% of the electricity we use and that is 20% of our total household energy consumption then I saved 0.17%¹ of my total household energy consumption for a cost of around £40.  Better still the light spectrum coming from the bulb is cleaner and whiter than the original halogen bulb and the spectrum remains the same as the light is dimmed.  According to the GoVenA website the lamp can be dimmed to 2% of full power – or just 0.4W per bulb!  These bulbs are extremely efficient even compared to other compact fluorescents.  FYI I found two YouTube videos of a similar bulb here and here.

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What You Can’t Measure, You Can’t Control

The commitment made by 10:10 members is to reduce their carbon footprint by 10% in 2010. This is a very small fraction of the 80% reduction we are told we need to stop global warming so surely it should be possible? But is it so easy? To answer this question we need to apply science, not emotion.
 
There has been a huge rise in obesity over the last 40 years. Scientists have been looking into this to try to understand why. Most people intuitively link it to the rise in processed “fast” food consumed at home and in restaurants but scientists have found that our daily calorie intake has not significantly changed in the last 40 years. They did, however find a strong correlation between obesity and car ownership. Moreover, the increasing use of cars has led to the demise of the corner shop and replacement with out of town supermarkets such that it is now almost essential to own a car. If it is lifestyle change that is causing the rise in obesity and not our calorie intake, it’s no wonder that most diets don’t work.

We should conclude that a “carbon diet”, like any other diet, will only work if we make significant and permanent lifestyle changes.  Unfortunately as any dieter knows, those diets that include [perceived] depravation or take significant physical or mental effort are very difficult to stick to.  Currently the UK Government is urging its populous to drive “5 miles less per week”.  While the aim is laudable we first should ask “5 miles less than what?”; i.e. how do we know if we are doing it? Counting miles is like counting calories; it’s too hard to do so it won’t work for the majority of us.  Secondly there is an implicit assumption that many journeys are simply not necessary. For most of us going to work, going shopping etc are necessities.  In reality the car is a means to an end, not an end in itself and to affect a cure you have to tackle the disease, not just the symptoms. For instance, according to my brother in law, Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones, half of all so called “food miles” are down to car journeys to and from superstores.  Perhaps the Government should be promoting on-line grocery shopping as a concrete way of saving a trip to the superstore rather than some vague, inaccessible (because it is not measurable) 5 miles per week?

But surely there is a quick fix? Wind energy, solar energy and other renewable energy sources are all laudable goals to pursue but it’s not clear to me whether the whole life-cycle [carbon] costs of some of the proposals are actually higher than the ones they replace. Take the Government car scrappage schemes for instance. While it is clear that new cars produce much less carbon per mile than older ones, how much carbon is produced in making that new car? and how many years could you run the old car on the equivalent carbon saving? Let’s assume that the carbon cost of producing the new car is the equivalent of 1 years fuel consumption.  I have no idea whether this is correct but it sounds reasonable.  Let’s further assume that the new car produces 25% less carbon per kilometer than the old one.  The break even point of the new car would then be after 3 years, by which time the old car would be 13 years old and would probably be scrapped anyway.  I suggest that the car scrappage scheme was more about helping the economy than reducing our collective carbon footprint.

Low energy light bulbs are a clear win-win but even here the actual carbon saving is hard to measure.  According to a BBC article lighting accounts for 19% of global electricity generation, though it does not cite a source. Other sources more targeted towards domestic electricity consumption put this figure closer to 10%.  A quick web search would show that electricity makes up only 16% of the total energy consumed in an average European home.  The consumption of energy in the home is roughly 2x that consumed by the family car(s).  Low energy bulbs save around 75% of electricity.  Replacing all lights with low energy lights would therefore result in a total carbon saving of 10% * 16% * 2/3 * 3/4 = 0.8%, a worthwhile saving, but hardly a magic bullet.  Perhaps less well known is that you could save as much energy by changing your 10+ year old refrigerator to a modern A+ rated one, or even changing your 20 year old central heating pump for a new one.  It is these things, thac consume power 24/7, that are the real electricity hogs.

While many of us know fad diets are doomed to failure, the lack of published (or should I say publicized) science about carbon reduction leaves many of us clutching at straws.  There is a clear need to lower our carbon footprints, what is less clear is how we can achieve it.  We need tools to measure, not Government platitudes if we are to make lasting, positive lifestyle changes. This to me should be the central lobbying effort within 10:10.