The Greening of Hedgerley Wood

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.

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 doesn’t allow for […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 issue’ […]

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 kgs per year, or more than […]

I found a good carbon calculator at the Safe Climate site. I won’t be able to get our own totals until I’m back home with the utility bills, but it does give some of the key conversion ratios:

heating oil - multiply gallons of oil by 11.81 to get kgs of CO2
petrol - multiply gallons by […]

I started at the British Wind Energy Association - www.bwea.com and supplemented this with some US-based information from Wind Energy Weekly - www.awea.org.
The basic wind story looks pretty promising. If an average house uses around 10,000 kWh a year, then a 5 - 15 kW turbine can made a sigficant contribution to this. A 10 […]