How serious are we about reducing greenhouse gases emissions?

Thanks, Alister,

I agree that we will not all be able to chose electricity as an alternative for coal, oil or gas and heat pumps are certainly one of the best alternative available for Scotland, particularly when they are combined with solar panels, for instance. The Sanyo heat pump also  seems to be one the best on the market so far and is likely to be suitable for quite a lot of the housing stock in Edinburgh.

I suppose  what we will need is a good choice of alternatives and these alternatives will have to be adapted in such a way that they provide the best possible options for different types of households. with the cost reflecting the ability of the householder to invest in these initiatives. One of the main obstacles to choosing home generated renewale energy is that it is often the most costly option at present.

Much as the goverment tells us that we will need to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, the threat of climate change and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions feels pretty unreal to most people, certainly not real enough to want to spend two to three times more money that they need to on energy efficiency!

In Edinburgh, we are told, 45% of housing is tenements with 1/4 being pre 1919 tenements.  This type of housing is considered 'hard to treat', with a lot of flats leaking heat through doors, windows, lofts, tenement stairs and so on. Conserving and generating energy is hard and often not a cheap option. 

A lot of effort are being made at present to provide individual householders with 'bespoke' solutions and also to identify practical communal alternatives. Careful research is also being conducted to identify the most efficient and acceptable solutions for people living in 'hard to treat' properties. 

Transition Edinburgh South is currently engaged in a project in two 'hard to treat' tenement streets. With the collaboration from specialists, it is hoped that we be able to contribute to current initiatives to find the best ways to be energy efficient for individual households. 

As members of the community ourselves and trying hard to identify the best solutions for our own flats, we are interested in people's views and ideas about their own preferences and also in finding out what they have managed to do so far. We have already found that there are a lot of resources and useful information in our local community and that a lot of expertise from specialists is available free. Both will benefit from being more widely known.

So, if you live in Woodburn Terrace or Hope Park Terrace, where we are conducting our pilot project 'Switched on to Switching off', get in touch with either Michele Hipwell or Mike Hall in Woodburn Terrace or Jamie Auld Smith in Hope Park Terrace.  Contact us through the 'get involved' contact form on this website or take note of the letters we have put through your letter box.

Upgrading to a new gas boiler is probably the cheapest thing for you to do. It will be more energy efficient so will probably reduce your emissions by 10-20% and will be cheaper to run than your existing boiler.

But, if the lifetime of your new boiler is 10-20 years, then there may well be issues with the availabiliy of natural gas during its lifetime.

The Chief Executive Officer ot Total SA, the French oil company said last week

“There won’t be enough oil and gas by the middle of the next decade.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=aTv00Tc4yhSA

So you may have to transition to other fuels before your new boiler reaches the end of its natural lifespan. And, of course, while your CO2 emissions will go down due to improved efficiency, if we consider you as an individual,  they will not go down far enough to meet the huge cuts of 80% we need.

If you switch to purely electric heating you will not be so exposed to the security of supply of natural gas. And as the electricity supply becomes decarbonised, so does your heating. So, you could install conventional electric fires and electric storage heaters and heat your water with an electric immersion heater. But if we all go this route, we will need three times as many wind turbines and wave energy or tidal machines to generate the electricity to produce the heat as we would if we used heat pumps. And the demand on our electricity supply is only going to go up because we need to do everything using electricity. Not just lights, appliances and computers, but transport too as oil production declines by 2 million barrels per day every year and heating as natural gas declines.

The Sanyo CO2 Eco system does require a tank. It's about the same size as a fridge freezer. It acts as a buffer or heat store. This is advantageous as it allows you to make use of renewable electricity when it is abundant and demand is low (for example at night) and store the heat for later use. If we have lots of these units installed and they are precharged with heat overnight, it reduces the morning peak demand for electricity as heating systems are switched on and everyone jumps into the shower. Reduced peak demand means less installed generating capacity or more efficiency. The tank also allows you to use solar thermal panels for seasonal water heating to reduce your electricity demand by a further 10% approximately.

The noise figure for this unit is 49 dB. The lowest limit of urban ambient sound is 40dB. Conversation is 60dB. So I think it is fairly quiet and I know the Japanese have made every effort to make these units as quiet as possible. Also, when you are sitting outside, presumably in warm weather, your heating will not be on so there will be little need for the heat pump to be running constantly. And you can always turn it off. If you want peace and quiet and security of supply, go for the conventional electric system. But, if we all go this route, our peace and quiet will be at the cost of someone else's diminished view as more turbines (wind, wave or tidal) will have to be built.

The Sanyo unit is undoubtedly more expensive than other solutions. A householder grant should be available for this system by the end of this year at up to 30% of the installed cost or a maximum of £4,000. A renewable heat incentive is being considered by the government. There is a consultation going on at the moment about this. I suspect that the incentive will take the form of a separate electricity tarrif for heat pumps at a lower cost per unit of electricity reducing running costs. There is also talk of interest free loans for householders. More information should be available early next year as the renewable heat incentive is due to be in place by April 2011.

It might be worth waiting a few months to see what form the incentives from government take. I suspect that the package will have to be very attractive as the only way the government are going to meet their emissions targets is if significant numbers switch to low carbon renewable heating systems.

Hi Michele,

Interesting stuff!

I think what we are seeing in these figures are the first small steps on a very long journey. At least as far as the electricity supply is concerned.

Note that non-hydro renewables increased from 0.6% in 2000 to 7.4% in 2007. A large part of that increase is from the installation of new wind turbines. The figure of 18% of electricity from renewable sources sounds about right for 2007. We're at over 20% now and will be at 31% by 2011 and 50% by 2020.

And, as Ian Bryden explained, there's huge potential in wind and wave not to mention off-shore wind.

Scotland's first off-shore wind farm started producing electricity this week

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/south_of_scotland/8245857.stm

with an ultimate capacity of 0.18 GW which will displace the emission of 235,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). This will take us to over 2 GW of installed wind capacity in Scotland.

So, as far as electricity generation goes, the journey to a low carbon future has started and the pace is picking up.

I think we are serious about cutting carbon dioxide emissions in Scotland, but part of the problem is that people are confused and do not know what to do.

Individuals can make huge cuts in emissions. For example, replacing your old gas boiler with a Sanyo CO2 Eco air source heat pump will cut your CO2 emissions from heating by a whopping 50% as I pointed out in my recent blog. In the case of my house, this would be a reduction of 1.2 tonnes of CO2 per annum.

As a Transition movement, we need to be clear about what the transition is. In my view, it is off fossil fuels for heating and transport in particular and onto increasingly renewable electricity. But we need to use that renewable electricity as efficiently as possible. So we need insulation and draught proofing and low energy light bulbs and switching equipment off etc. But we need to gradually replace the power hungry and inefficient bits of equipment we use to generate low grade heat. We can use heat pumps (using CO2 as a refrigerant because those heat pumps are most efficient in our climate) to reduce the amount of power we use for heating and hot water by two thirds. And heating is our biggest use of energy in the home by far. So out go electric fires, electric immersion heaters, electric storage heaters, electric showers and even gas boilers and in come heat pumps to do the same job but much more efficiently.

Alister.