Dopplr adds carbon calculations

I’m delighted to see that Dopplr has added a carbon calculator for the trips you take. This is just what we need. Once actual carbon data is visible, people can go ahead and make changes in their travel and lives.

Without the real data, we just all live in fear, doubt and uncertainty (and even denial).

More great resources for non profits

Check out the Non-profit Blog Exchange.

See previous resources detailed here.

You Think, I Think, We Think (Better) Together

Been reading reviews about Charles Leadbetter’s book We Think all over the place. Got to get my hands on a copy sooon (come on Rosie, hand it over).

If anyone is trying to get their heads around Web 2.0, social media, new paradigm thinking and all that claptrap – get a look at this. Lovely simple animation. I’m going to use it at the beginning of all my courses. Free event coming up soon to give people a taste of it all. Watch this space.

Guardian review here (including Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky) which also looks reeal good.

Shame The Big Issue review isn’t available online. A different and very valid take on things.

No wonder most journalist’s I meet are annoyed with blogging and What’s Going On with we-think.

No wonder I am compelled to work in and support this space.

So glad Rosie Sherry is in it with me (thanks for the video).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo&hl=en]

Resilience or “Trapped in First Life”

I’ve just finished my BarCamp2 presentation, all about resilience when the power goes off. How do we build an ad-hoc communications system from the common component we have lying around? And can we make a local internet without needing more than a few laptops, WiFi/WiMax routers and a few antennas.Here’s the presentation as a PDF:  Resilience or “Trapped in First Life”There was an interesting discussion.. Some key points:

• The difficulty of getting stuff configured. Are we really all that capable at solving networking problems and making stuff work under some pressure?
• How do we practice to test if it works?
• Can we use the One Laptop Per Child as nodes
• We needed this for Hack Day last year :-)
• Running a bunch of servers at home use a lot of power. Replace them with laptops.
• Can we demo/test some of this stuff out at another BarCamp? Could we build a solar powered, operating private Internet at BarCamp.

So, going forward, there is some interest. Next steps? Some research on the idea, I guess. I’ll publish more here under the Resilience category.

Brighton Posse Serving Healthy Greens – But Will It Be In Time?

What a great group of people there were at the Striding Out Ethical Pitch event last night, out at the end of the bitterly cold Brighton Pier.

After a brief catch up with Thea Allison from B&H Business Community Partnerships, I was co-opted onto the panel at the last minute to help four passionate organisations sharpen their focus. Without wanting to sound too much like a beauty queen, I honestly felt I had as much to learn from everyone there as they did from me. Humbling to say the least.

Some highlights….

Ethical Weddings – impressed with the potential of their niche politically and culturally. The environmental impact of the average wedding can be huge. The opportunity to have a couple and their friends ritualise their commitment to core human/eco values and each other is a catalyst for great things to happen. I’m a great believer in weddings, and was thoroughly chuffed by how well they are weaving their magic and owning their niche. Ranking extremely well with Google (the blog and dot com would be helping). Great to hear they will be doing more to bring their community together and help them help each other. Let’s see if Ning works for them.

Farm Fresh Express – again, great knowledge about the ethical complexity of their sector. No green wash here. Looking forward to seeing if they can develop a franchise model and start embracing the power of blogging to attract funders, customers and stimulate vibrant conversations about food miles, purity, sovereignty, community resilience, slow food and all the issues that matter. Whichever climate scenario you subscribe to, how we eat and what we eat is a core issue to be dealing with.

Magpie / Shabitat - for their anarchic, shambolic, no-compromise, co-operative cool. Let’s see if they can hang on to it, and take their octopus to the next level.

EcoEvents – Dear Sam. What a woman. Like weddings and eating together, events are another time we come together and share conversations, hopefully positive ones. Plus the consumption of energy to get people their, feed, water and entertain them is massive. Want to see EcoEvents do really well. They have everything it takes. Come the rebranding and refocus onto great events first (which they no doubt can do – can’t wait to refer people to them), green BS8901 standard stuff second – they will be flying. Another dot com ranking well for key search. Well done on that front too.

Main thing is, we can’t shop our way out of global warming. Wish I had kept my big mouth shut and let brainy young futurist Hugh Knowles from Forum for the Future talk more from the panel. Wish he had spelt out in no uncertain terms that their ain’t no time for weighing up the benefits of frilly organic knickers – bleached or unbleached right now.

During a sideways conversation his call to arms hit home and I’m off to start reading Climate Code Red. Hugh reckons the IPCC (Nobel Laureatte Al Gore and Co) are being conservative.

Sadly, I think I agree with him.

Climate Emergency

- Raise the Alarm

Maybe the most important thing for ethical enterprises to be doing right now – other than being fully future aware in how they operate and contribute – is to raise the alarm among their sensitized stakeholders by blogging up the Code Red conversation. We wouldn’t want them to be shunned by those wanting to hide in the bunker. They need to read the signs and focus on the positives, helping us see ourselves as capable of taking on the enormous challenges we are all facing right now in coming back from the brink of destruction.

It needs to be handled sensitively. But without a livable climate, there might not be weddings or enough food to go around. We might not even be here.

Don’t shoot the messenger, bury your head in the sand or blame someone else. Got informed, and start raising the alarm.

“There is an urgent need to reconceive the issue we face as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. The feasibility of rapid transitions is well established historically.

“We now need to “think the unthinkable”, because the sustainability emergency is now not so much a radical idea as simply an indispensable course of action if we are to return to a safe-climate planet.”

More at… Climate Code Red.

More at Al Gore’s site here.

And here.

Where’s Winston when we need him.

Degree Day Adjustments for Heating Energy Calculations

As a part of my work for Global Action Plan’s EcoTeams project, I’ve been building reporting tools to predict household heating energy consumption into the future from some measured readings. This post is all about how to predict energy consumption based on a process of degree day adjustment.

(NB — what follows is a bit technical..)

The Carbon Trust succinctly say:

Degree-day figures quantify how hot or cold the weather has been as a single index number for the region and month (or week). They allow you to account properly for the effect of weather on energy consumption.

Projecting energy consumption for heating forwards involves some calculations — you need to consider changes in the outside temperature, and what impact that is going to have on the energy required for heating inside your building or home. When it is getting colder each month, the amount of heating and energy used for heating goes up. And when summer approaches (we hope) that the outside temperature goes up, and the requirement for heating drops away.

Each year, the weather is different, so the degree day values for each month or week change.

The meaning of degree day values

So, what do these degree-day numbers measure and how are they calculated? I’ll explain a bit.

There’s an assumption used here, that if the outside temperature is 15.5C, the building will be able to warm itself without needing to use energy for heating. Buildings are warmed by people, by heat from the sun, by the heat from equipment in the building among other things to bring the outside temperature up to a reasonable internal temperature.

A degree day is then calculated using the 15.5 degree value as follows:

degree day = 15.5 – outside_temperature * days

A weekly degree day value sets days above to 7, while for a month, it is set to the length of the month in days.

So, the degree day value is bigger when it is colder, and the degree day value is proportional to the energy required to heat the building to a normal comfortable temperature. This gives us the information we need to predict future energy consumption, or compare enery consumptions in different months even though the outside temperature was different.

An example

Say we wanted to work out our energy consumption for Nov 2007 compared with Oct 2007.

Let’s say in Oct 2007 we used 500 kWh heating the house. And in Nov 2008 we used 680 kWh heating the house. We were trying to reduce our energy consumption by turning down the boiler. Did we succeed?

So, we get the degree days values for South-East England:

Oct 2007: 166

Nov 2007: 248

Okay, we can immediately see that November was a lot colder than October, as you’d expect. So we’d expect our energy consumption to go up a lot. But let’s do the calculation:

energy_used_oct / dd_oct * dd_nov = predicted_use_nov

or

500 kWh / 168 * 248 = 738 kWh

So 738 kWh is our predicted energy use for heating adjusted for the relative warmth of the two months.

But we actually used only 680 kWh, so that means we’ve saved a fair bit by turning down the boiler.

Conclusion

So, using the degree days values we can make these calculations, and end up making much more reasonable comparisons between months than if we just take the raw kWh values. Very useful.

References

You can find some historical degree day data from the Carbon Trust (PDF doc) .

Empower Controls

I’m really pleased to say I’m embarking on some interesting work with Empower Controls to help them with some stuff that I can’t talk about yet.

From their home page:

There is a significant waste of energy in home offices, home theatres and office workstations. Devices are often left on or in a standby state. We often fail to realise that devices such as a TV, DVD player, PC, scanner, printer or mobile phone charger consume power all of the time, even when not being used or when they are in a standby state. Hundreds of millions of devices all left in a standby state adds up to a lot of wasted energy.

Empower Controls solutions allow everyday people to intelligently switch off these types of products when not in use and to significantly reduce their energy consumption, with a minimum of fuss.

It is so nice to see this awareness coming to automation. I’m delighted to be a part of this.

Reflect a moment

Tim O’Reilly comments on Google’s Renewables initiative announced this week:

The stakes are high. If our worst fears about global warming are right, we’re going to bring our technological progress to a halt unless we get new sources of clean energy. Google’s goal of beating the cost of energy from coal is critical, because coal is the default lowest-cost choice for electricity generation, and the worst from a global warming perspective.

And let’s be clear, the internet industry we know and love is a huge consumer of power. I love Nick Carr’s estimate from last year that a Second Life avatar consumes almost as much energy as a real human. While Nick’s calculations are provocative rather than authoritative, he makes a good point. Our electronic lifestyle has hidden, off-the-books costs. Google is very smart to acknowledge this fact.

Thanks Tim (and Nick). Beautifully put. Point made.

And remember, if we just ignore this, we end up back at Web 0.0, with either no electricity, or no livable planet.

Get the DVD of An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it again. — and make sure to watch the updates a year later. See? Climate change is accelerating. Bickering about who’s fault it is so 2005. We move on now. We fix this.

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