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Date Published: 22/10/01
Author: Matilda Lee Tackling climate change is a global battle, but as individuals we all have a part to play. The only difficulty is working out which direction to take. Matilda Lee helps us on our first steps. |
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Following the lows (‘Kyoto is dead’) and the highs (‘Long live Kyoto’), and vast forests-worth of rewritten negotiating text, the international agreement reached in Bonn is expected finally to initiate the transition to an energy- and carbon-constrained future. From now on, everyone will be increasingly expected to play a part in reducing their consumption of fossil fuels to help mitigate climate change. Exit coal, oil and gas, and enter ‘green’ and efficient energy.
Sounds fine in theory, but how realistic is it? If individuals are now expected to take responsibility for their contribution to climate change and act to reduce it, what actually can they do today that’s meaningful and affordable? The benefits of solar, wind and other clean and efficient energy sources are many and hardly disputed, but are they accessible to a mass audience, and if not, how soon will they be? Can individuals really stop watching from the sidelines and take a proactive role in efforts to prevent climatic devastation? Can we shrink our carbon footprint?
ENERGY EFFICIENCY AT HOME
Energy used in the home was responsible for around a quarter of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) in 2000.(1) Each time you adjust your heating system, replace a light-bulb or cook a meal, you add to the amount of carbon your household emits. An average household in Britain emits 7.5 tons of CO2, much of it unnecessarily and at a cost: the typical home wastes around £278 a year in energy inefficiency.(2)
The home, therefore, is one of the places where you can make the most immediate difference to climate change. According to the UK’s Energy Savings Trust (EST), nearly 50 per cent of household energy can be saved. Moreover, the first 10 per cent can be saved through no financial obligation, but merely through small lifestyle changes. All it takes is setting your mind on achieving big things in small ways, treating the most mundane acts as heroic deeds. These range from washing your clothes at 40°C or less instead of 60°C (which uses a third less energy than normally needed to heat the water for a hot wash), to turning your lights and appliances off fully when you don’t need them. If everyone in Britain turned their television off at the set, for example, rather than leaving it on standby, it would save enough electricity to power a town the size of Basingstoke.
INTELLIGENT INSULATION
Achieving greater savings, however, requires a little investment. The greatest amount of energy in any house is used by heating and hot water systems – which account for over half the cost of the average fuel bill. So investing in existing and widely available heat-loss-reducing technologies can save a considerable amount of energy.
According to the Energy Savings Trust, more heat is lost through walls than by any other route, but 60 per cent of that loss can be avoided by installing cavity wall insulation, a process of filling in the air gap in your walls that can be done in a day. The cost starts at about £500 but the savings generated mean that it can be recovered within four years.
Poorly insulated window frames and single glazing, meanwhile, are responsible for almost a quarter of heat lost from a home. Much of that can be reduced by having your windows double-glazed or fitted with low-emissivity glass, which reflects heat back into the room. It will cost about £170 and £275, respectively, above and beyond the cost of replacing singled-glazed windows, but will save you £25–40 on fuel bills per year.
EFFICIENT APPLIANCES
Replacing an old boiler with a ‘condensing boiler’ will save yet more energy, as condensing boilers convert 85 per cent of the fuel they use into heat compared with 65 per cent for standard boilers. It will cost you between £1,500 and £2,000 – up to £300 more than standard boilers – but could save you up to 32 per cent on your fuel bills.
It is also now possible to buy other energy efficient home appliances, such as domestic refrigerators, freezers, washing and drying machines, and dishwashers, which generally use between a third and half of the electricity of their inefficient counterparts.
All new appliances are now required to carry a label (as part of the EU’s Energy Labelling scheme) denoting how energy efficient they are. The label is based on a rating system by which ‘A’-labelled products are the most efficient and ‘G’ are the least efficient. Since late 1999, manufacturers of fridges, freezers and fridge freezers were required to stop producing the least efficient models, or those rated ‘D’ or below.
A typical ‘A’ rated washing machine (which is usually equipped with more operating options) would cost about £330 to buy, compared to £230 for a ‘C’ rated model, and £279 for a ‘D’ rated model. However, if the lifetime energy costs of the three models are taken into account (assuming one load of wash a week), the ‘A’ rated washing machine would cost £478 over its lifetime, only a little more than the ‘C’ rated model whose total lifetime costs amount to £430, and far less than the ‘D’ rated model, whose energy costs over its lifetime come to £1,279.
Clearly, spending a bit more up front for an ‘A’ model pays off in overall energy savings.
GREEN ELECTRICITY
Another easy option now open to most UK households is to buy so-called ‘green electricity’ straight from electric utility companies. Most of the 10 primary electricity suppliers (and independent ones) run green electricity schemes, but each is different.
There are typically three different schemes to choose from. The first is a ‘renewable tariff’ where your supplier matches every unit of electricity you use by purchases of renewable energy. The other is an ‘eco fund’ where your money is put into a fund dedicated to developing new renewable energy. The third system is a hybrid of both.
According to Graham Carr, of the Energy Savings Trust, there are currently between 17,700 and 35,000 individual households in Britain that buy green electricity.
A typical green electricity scheme costs customers, on average, 8 to 12 per cent more than ‘brown’ electricity. Some groups have realised that this may be off-putting to potential customers and have created schemes with green rates no higher than conventional electricity. Greenpeace is running such a scheme, teaming up with the energy supplier npower, an Innogy group company, to offer 50,000 customers ‘Juice’ – which will initially supply customers with electricity from onshore wind and hydro power, but is also helping develop a large offshore wind farm in Wales. Another such scheme is run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), in cooperation with Scottish & Southern Energy, which provides electricity from hydro power, landfill gas and waste.
Far more green electricity should, in theory, be available to customers by the end of the decade. The government has launched the Renewables Obligation initiative to boost renewable energy electricity from 3 per cent of total electricity supply today (50 per cent of which is generated by large-scale hydro power installations) to 10 per cent by 2010 (from non-hydro power sources), which would offset millions of tons of CO2 emissions.(3)
Buying green electricity is a meaningful way to help cut emissions, but if you want to take the matter into your own hands, there are micro-level solar, wind and soon-to-be hydrogen based fuel cell systems that can be installed in your own home.
SOLAR ENERGY AT HOME
Energy from the sun is silent, clean and free and can be harnessed domestically in three different ways. The first is by designing and orientating a new building in ways which maximise the amount of warmth from the sun inside the building.
The second is by installing a solar thermal system which uses the sun’s energy to heat water – deployed already in 40,000 to 50,000 UK homes. Paul Allen, from the Centre for Alternative Technology, has described solar water heaters as simply water pipes painted black to improve heat absorption. The small diameter of the pipes ensures that a large surface area of water is exposed to the sun.(4)
Typical installation costs vary from about £1,500 for a do-it-yourself system, to £5,000 for a commercial system, which can provide approximately 50 per cent of typical domestic hot water needs for a 3-4 bedroom house.
A third type of power – and probably the most significant – is the generation of electricity from light – the ‘photovoltaic effect.’ Solar electricity is produced by layers of sophisticated photovoltaic (PV) cells, made up of silicon semiconductor materials that, when hit by daylight, cause electricity to flow. PV generators operate with no moving parts or noise and can be installed directly on your roof (as slates), making PV, at present, the most likely renewable energy technology for use in homes in urban areas. And, thankfully for residents of the UK, PV panels do not require sunny skies, just daylight.
The climatic benefits are large. If every roof in the UK was covered with solar PV, research has shown we could close all our power stations.(5) PV panels save between 30 and 34 tons of CO2 in their lifetime and will indirectly save you energy as solar roof owners generally turn into ‘energy-efficient addicts,’ according to Jeremy Leggett, Chief Executive of Solar Century, one of the UK’s leading solar PV retail companies.
They are expensive, however. Installing PV panels on the roof of an ordinary home to supply energy for an average household costs in the range of £15,000 to £20,000. Although electricity bills will be slashed and houses with PV panelled roofs have been known to sell for £10,000 above their market value, the net costs are still prohibitive for most people.
So when will PV become affordable?
Jeremy Leggett estimates that PV panel costs will match those of traditional roofing materials by 2005–7. In order for this to happen, the UK would have to increase production to around 100mW a year to allow for the economies of scale that would make prices competitive. Currently, the biggest plant in the UK, a thin film solar plant that is being built by United Solar, will produce 25mW a year.
Attracting industry giants to build manufacturing plants and bring the costs of PV down will require the government to commit to more extensive schemes to propel the market. It could, for example, adopt the so-called ‘premium price tariff’ offered in countries such as Germany where electricity suppliers pay back consumers with excess solar PV from their homes at up to five times the normal retail rate for electricity. This, along with a 40 per cent low-interest loan for installation, and various Federal State programmes, led to a 150 per cent market increase in Germany’s solar market in 2000.(6)
In contrast, in the UK to date, electricity suppliers buy back excess electricity from PV suppliers at only about half the rate they charge for their own electricity. One supplier, TXU Europe is currently the only electricity supplier to pay back solar electricity producers at the same rate at which it charges consumers.
Another means of increasing the affordability of PV is by providing grants. The UK government is now rumoured to be considering matching the policy pursued in Japan by giving 50 per cent capital grants for solar roofs installations for 70,000 houses – a far more substantial offering than its current Domestic Field Trial involving around 200 homes. And building societies are in the early stages of offering ‘solar mortgages’ which will allow homeowners to spread the cost of installation.
But the ‘holy grail’ for the UK’s solar market, according to Jeremy Leggett, may come from building integrated PV. That means installing solar panel roofs as part of the original structure of new houses, which number around 200,000 a year in the UK.
‘The economics is different, you have to have a roof anyway, all you are doing is adding a few percentage points to the price of a house,’ says Leggett. ‘There are bags of evidence that if people are going to pay a certain amount for a house anyway, they would pay for a PV roof, very often, happily.’
The government estimates that the costs of PV electricity, when it is installed in this way, will rival conventional electricity by 2015-2020.(7)
WIND ENERGY FROM YOUR GARDEN
The UK is one of the windiest countries in Europe and harnessing that wind through the use of turbines is now the most cost-effective means of generating clean electricity. But wind power tends mostly to be associated with large commercial wind farms, and is not viewed as an option that the average consumer can deploy.
However, homeowners with plenty of space can generate their own electricity from wind, and according to Alison Hill of the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA), it is not as complicated as some may think. Find a company that manufactures wind turbines, outline what your needs are and they will advise you on the appropriate turbine.
There is a wide choice. Turbines for home use range from one-volt battery chargers up to around 20kW, which could power a small industrial unit. Whatever size you chose, your wind turbine can power a battery bank, which then can be dipped into as needed.
The initial capital investment required, however, is substantial, and the government does not currently offer any grants to cover purchase or installation costs for domestic energy needs (nor can domestic users yet make money selling spare energy back to the electricity grid). If you are going to invest in a wind turbine, expect to pay around £14,000 to power an average household – but you will recuperate your costs in about 10 years.
Moreover, as Alison Hill points out, ‘The costs of wind turbines have almost halved in a decade and we see the prices continuing to fall. Government support for commercial off-shore wind power will have the effect of bringing the cost of all wind turbines down.’
FUEL CELLS - A NEW SOURCE OF CLEAN DOMESTIC ENERGY
In the near-future, possibly the simplest and most convenient way to produce clean electricity from your own home will be by using a device known as a fuel cell.
This technology produces clean energy through a combustion-less process using hydrogen and oxygen, with water vapour the only emission.
Fuel cell units the size of a dishwasher can be installed in the garage and power an entire household. US-based H Power is testing a fuel cell in the US, Japan and Europe that generates 4.5kW of electricity (enough to power a 3–4 bedroom house) and is expected to begin sales next year with a full-scale production price of $5,000 to $6,000 (£3,500–£4,200).
Plug Power, another US company, hopes to market a slightly larger 7kW unit by next year, but says it will take several years before becoming financially viable. General Motors recently unveiled a natural gas run fuel cell that could be used in homes and businesses, but it will not be commercially available until around 2005.
In the UK, Johnson Matthey, in conjunction with TXU Europe and Energy Partners, are testing a 3kW micro-combined heat-and-power fuel cell system and aim to bring it to market within three years.
Fuel cells can be used to power appliances too. A fuel cell-powered vacuum cleaner being developed by Electrolux in the US is currently undergoing field trials and, when marketed, will cost as much as today’s mid-range cleaners. The UK’s ZeTek Power will make fuel cell products on a made-to-order basis, but warns that they will not be available on the mass market for another five to 10 years.
TRANSFORMING TRANSPORT
After domestic energy use, individuals contribute most to climate change from their choice of transport: a sector which is responsible for about 22 per cent of the UK’s CO2 emissions.(8)
Alternatives to car-driving have long existed – from walking to cycling and taking public transport. But it has only been fairly recently that those wedded to the car have been offered choices allowing them to continue to enjoy the ‘comfort’ of their machines while beginning to do less harm to the planet.
The internal combustion engine is being challenged at last by the onset of alternative fuelled vehicles (AFVs), which include hybrid electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) cars.
HYBRID CARS
Hybrid electric vehicles combine the internal combustion engine of a conventional vehicle with the battery and electric motor of an electric vehicle. Benefits include regenerative braking, or the car’s ability to generate and store electricity when braking, and greater fuel efficiency.
Hybrid vehicles have a much greater range than those relying on electric power alone; fuelling does not pose a problem as these cars rely on conventional petrol; and they are available today. As a result, hybrids are
the most likely short-term leader among alternative fuelled cars.
Two hybrid vehicles are already on sale in the UK, Honda’s ‘Insight’ and Toyota’s ‘Prius’. The Insight went on sale in Britain in September 2000 and is expected to get 61 miles per gallon (mpg) in the city and 70 mpg on the highway, and costs £17,000.
Toyota’s Prius went on sale in the UK in October 2000 and is expected to get 52 mpg in the city and 45 mpg on the highway. The Prius had a successful debut in Japan where now more than 35,000 are on the streets since sales began in 1997. The Prius costs £16,430 (and all vehicles sold this year will come with a government grant of £1,000).
The difference in cost from a similar-sized conventional car is not huge. While a similar non-hybrid vehicle costs around £2,000 to £3,000 less than an Insight or a Prius, a hybrid uses around 55 per cent less petrol, so costs are recouped in a few years.
And the benefits to the climate are significant: hybrids cut CO2 emissions by between 33 and 50 per cent compared to conventional vehicles. However, while they may ease our dependence on fossil fuels, they will not abolish it. Hybrids by no means represent the end goal in the revolution in transport.
HYDROGEN CELL VEHICLES
Hydrogen, considered by many experts to be the ‘fuel of the future,’ could offer a long-term solution to the challenge of eliminating transport emissions. Hydrogen can be used as a conventional transport fuel and in emissions-free fuel cells, such as those made by Ballard Power Systems, based in Canada, which have been proved in tests to have greater power and efficiency than the internal combustion engine at the same weight and height.
For now, there are only a handful of HFC-powered vehicles in the world; most being used in pilot programmes. But the world’s major auto manufacturers are pouring large sums of money into fuel cell development in the hope that their model will become the industry standard. Bill Ford, chairman of the Ford motor company, predicts that HFCs ‘will finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine,’ and become the main power source for transport ‘within 25 years’.(9)
You won’t find one for sale yet, though. Most of the car manufacturers have set loose deadlines for retail sales by around 2004, and large-scale mass production probably won’t start much before 2010. The estimated cost of these vehicles is not being disclosed, although if they were to be sold tomorrow, we know that the price would likely be high: the cost of HFCs would need to come down 60-fold to about $50 per kW to be competitive.
The biggest stumbling block to commercialisation is the ‘tower of Babel’ effect where all the major parties (especially the car makers) are speaking in different tongues – mostly about the type of fuel and method to use to make the necessary hydrogen.
Ford, Honda and DaimlerChrysler have developed HFC prototypes using ‘on-board’ reformers to extract hydrogen from methanol, while General Motors, along with Hyundai, Toyota, Nissan and Renault are betting on a fuel cell powered by hydrogen reformed from gasoline. Ford and Honda are also now working on a model powered directly by hydrogen generated by electrolysis, using electricity to separate water into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen. BMW, meanwhile, is alone in its quest to stick with the internal combustion engine but power it with liquid hydrogen.
And not all fuels are created equal from a climatic point of view. If the wrong choice of fuel production for HFCs is made, it could lead to minimal emissions reductions from ‘well to wheels’. Extracting hydrogen from gasoline reformed on board an HFC-powered vehicle would reduce emissions just 22 per cent compared with an internal combustion engine, versus 35 per cent from methanol reformed on board, and 72 per cent from natural gas reformed in a large plant.(10) Achieving zero-emissions would require using hydrogen produced solely by electrolysis using a renewable energy source.
Storing and distributing hydrogen are also problematic, and makers say that for a real hydrogen revolution to take place, governments need to develop safety and regulation standards for hydrogen use, help create the necessary infrastructure, and gear up consumer demand through subsidies and education – which so far they are failing to do.
The British public will be given its first taste of riding in a hydrogen-powered vehicle from 2003, when three HFC-powered buses will be trialled in London as part of an EU-funded project. From then on, as Julie Foley from the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research says, we are likely to see government and taxi vehicle fleets convert to hydrogen, before finally reaching the commercial car market.(11)
LIGHTER LIVING
The prospect of an emissions-free future is clearly tangible, and many low or no-cost measures are available now for each of us to start shrinking our carbon footprint. With a little forward-thinking, buying into the more expensive products such as intelligent insulation, energy efficient appliances, and hybrid cars today will save money in the long run. Solar PV and individual wind turbines are probably still beyond the reach of most people. But that will almost certainly change over the next few years.
Meanwhile, the world awaits the arrival of fuel cells for use in cars and homes – a technology with huge potential in the fight against climate change. All in all, each of us has the opportunity to make a real difference in this battle. Given the damage climate change is predicted to cause if emissions aren’t reduced, do we really have a choice?
Matilda Lee is a researcher at the Climate Initiatives Fund.
1 The Energy Savings Trust, www.est.org.uk
2 Ibid.
3 "New and Renewable Energy: Prospects for the 21st Century," Department of Trade and Industry, 2000.
4 "A Shining Example," by Paul Allen, the Centre for Alternative Technology, 1997.
5 "Here comes the Sun", by Alex Benady, The Guardian Weekend, June 30 2001.
6 "Photovoltaic (PV) Government-Industry Group: Final Report" March 26, 2001.
7 Ibid.
8 The Energy Savings Trust’s Powershift programme, www.est-powershift.org.uk.
9 Statement by Chairman Bill Ford quoted in a MSNBC.com news report on November 1, 2000.
10 "Climate-Friendly Hydrogen Fuel," by the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation, 2000.
11 "H2: Driving the Future," by Julie Foley, Institute for Public Policy Research, July 2001.
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