Three ways to save that 10%

To make good on that 10:10 committment of reducing your CO2 by 10% by 2010, how are you going to do it?

Here are three things you can do to get started:

1. Sign up to 10:10

If you haven’t made a committment to the 10% reduction, go to the 10:10 website and sign up.  That’s important.  It adds to the volume of people and business that have signed up, and makes it harder for the government to ignore, so there’s something useful for them to take to Copenhagen.  You can sign up as a person or as a business or as a school or an organisation.

2. Look at the Guardian G2 guide to get ideas where to make changes

The Guardian published a really clear guide to personal carbon reductions, with simple actions and real numbers.  They start with averages of  CO2 per year then lists lots of actions you can take to make CO2 savings.  It begins:

Every year, each person in the UK is, on average, responsible for about 14 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. (The government’s published figures suggest a lower amount, but they omit things such as international aviation.) So, if we want to make a genuine cut of 10% across the board, we need to reduce our emissions by about 1.4 tonnes each. Let’s call it 1.5 tonnes, just to be sure.

And goes on with useful savings you can make by tonnes per year.   This is the best short reference I have seen so far.

3. Start an EcoTeam, measure and reduce

Gather your neighbours or online friends and start measuring, learning and reducing your Rubbish, Energy, Water and Travel.  Sign up and create an EcoTeams online — invite friends, and start measuring and learning and reducing your usage.

You can sign up online now and get started gathering your team together.

EcoTeams is one of my favourites, perhaps because I’ve been working on several releases of the EcoTeams website over the last couple of years.  This latest version makes fully online EcoTeams easy, and support you a lot in taking measurements and inviting others to get involved.

Here are three ways to get started. I’ll do an update article in a few days with a few more online resources to have a look at, incluing using power saving plug adapter things, energy monitors and turning things off.

I wish I’d done this ages ago

I picked up a Efergy real-time energy meter for £39.95 from Maplin. At this kind of price it finally seems worth it, and after bringing it home and quickly installing it, I’ve now got a sense of how much power the house uses. I’m very happy with it so far, easy to use and nice clear display. It sits in the kitchen.

With all the lights off and the fridge idling, there’s still a little over 100W needed to keep the place running, which is mad. That is going to be a bunch of plugpack transformers (wall warts) that are just making heat while doing nothing. More of those are going to get switched off now.

Turning on the kettle is a shock. I know the kettle is going to use up energy like mad, but watching the display go from 0.100 kW to 3.100 kW was more shocking than I expected.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m hoping this will give us all enough awareness to drop our consumption of electricity about 20%.

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).

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) .

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.