Small wind turbines criticised

Encraft have just published their report on small wind turbines, known as the Warwick Wind Trials, which was supported by the British Wind Energy Association and the Micropower Council. The full report can be downloaded here.

The report states that:

The average energy generated per turbine per day across the sample set has been 214 Wh (including times when turbines were switched off for maintenance or due to failures). This is equivalent to an average of 78 kWh of energy produced per site per year and an average capacity factor of 0.85%. (This compares to typical capacity factors of between 10% and 30% for larger turbines on free standing sites in good areas).

If the results are adjusted to exclude data from periods when turbines were switched off or broken the average energy generated per turbine per day rises to 628 Wh (230kWh per year equivalent) and an average capacity factor of 4.15%.

Of particular note is that turbines on our high rise sites, Eden, Ashton and Southorn Court were able generate as much energy in one month as other turbines in the trial did in one year. It is unfortunate that these high performing turbines had to remain switched off for the majority of the trial following complaints about noise from the building residents.

and comes to the conclusion:

Overall the trial has painted a picture of an industry and technology that is still at development stage and is likely to make a tangible contribution to energy and carbon saving only on the most exposed sites and tallest buildings. The combination of this reality, aggressive and over-optimistic marketing by some suppliers, and the enthusiasm and credulity of the market (and regulators) has potentially led to an unfortunate outcome where the wind industry as a whole is in danger of suffering from a setback in credibility.

The evidence form this trial is that such potential setbacks can be avoided in future by greater openness by the industry as a whole, and more effort to educate the market and opinion formers about the fundamental science and challenges of new technologies earlier. Micro-technologies need not fear customer resistance, because there are plenty of early adopters out there willing to give things a go. Sustainable technologies and a sustainable future require customers who are properly informed and able to take individual decisions that are both economically optimal and environmentally sustainable. Without open data this is impossible.

To get the whole picture, make sure you download the full report, which includes detailed data on the trials.

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Onil stove on NPR

NPR have published a story on Don O'Neal and the Onil stove he designed. The stove is used by Helps International in Guatemala in a project which won an Ashden Award in 2004.

You can read the NPR article here.

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New SELCO blog

SELCO, who won Ashden Awards in 2005 and 2007 for their work in solar powered lighting, have just launched a new blog that their employees will contribute to. You can read it here:
http://selcomment.blogspot.com

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State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World

The latest "State of the World" report from the Worldwatch Institute is now available, here's what they say about it:

It is New Year’s Day, 2101. Somehow, humanity survived the worst of global warming—the higher temperatures and sea levels and the more intense droughts and storms—and succeeded in stabilizing Earth’s climate.

What did humanity do in the twenty-first century, and especially in 2009 and the years immediately following, to snatch a threatened world from the jaws of climate change catastrophe? State of the World 2009 examines solutions that may help us avoid climate catastrophe and build a sustainable society.

You can download chapters of the book for free here, and buy a full paper copy here.

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Financing domestic biogas plants

In October 2008 there was an international workshop on this topic, held in Bangkok and sponsored by the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV).

Several past Ashden Award winners were at the workshop, including:

• Grameen Shakti
• SKG Sangha
• BSP Nepal
  

The proceedings, hosted by the HEDON website, are now available, click here to download them.

The conclusion notes that the provision of transparent and direct financial incentives to rural farmers is a key factor in the uptake of biogas plants in SNV projects, where the finance is only available for plants that meet the required quality standards. The provision of subsidies and/or credit specifically for biogas plants is needed because they don't offer a way of earning income, but instead offer the user a chance to reduce costs, so allowing them to afford to repay the money loaned.

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Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

This book is available to download free of charge at www.withouthotair.com

Here's a review by Dave Howey of Imperial College:

"'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air' by David JC MacKay. There are many books available about sustainable energy, but this book is unique and interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, it is available to download in its entirety for free online at the author's website www.withouthotair.com. Secondly, it is written by a physics professor at Cambridge University who has carefully and laboriously assembled the evidence to show just how serious our energy problem is (with a particular focus on the UK), but also precisely what could actually be done about it. By allowing the physical limitations to speak for themselves, MacKay produces some conclusions along the way that may surprise some. For example, he discusses why heat pumps are a much better option than combined heat and power (CHP) for heating our buildings, why electric vehicles make sense (but hydrogen is a bit of a red-herring), and why biofuels for transport do not add up in the UK. It is a coherent, witty, thorough and best of all hopeful review of future energy options."

(Thanks to HEDON for the story)

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Charcoal prices soar in Uganda

AllAfrica.com reports:

Kampala — MOST Kampala residents have shifted from using electricity to charcoal, previously regarded as a cheap source of energy for the poor. But the charcoal prices have doubled within less than a year . Further increases are predicted if nothing is done to put things right. Gerald Tenywa tells how the masses are coping.

AISHA Kamara, a resident of Kinawataka, a Kampala suburb, leads a life full of challenges. "We have food, but no charcoal to cook with," says the 33-year-old Kamara. "So we look for wood chips and gather sawdust, which we use to cook."

She sends out her three young daughters to scavenge for whatever their little hands can get in order to have food ready. Charcoal, which used to be a cheap and easy source of energy for the poor like Kamara has become expensive.

"We can no longer afford to use charcoal everyday," she says. In a survey conducted by The New Vision, a sack of charcoal goes for an average of sh30,000 up from sh25,000 in October-November. The average price of charcoal was sh 15,000 last year, but has remained unstable. In Byeyogerere, Kireka and Banda, the prices range from sh28,000 to sh30,000 per sack.

Read the full story here

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Intelligence Squared Green Festival on Climate Change

The Ashden Awards are partners for the Intelligence Squared Green Festival on Climate Change taking place on Sunday January 25th at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

Click on the link below to register and use the promotion code ‘Friend’ to get 20 percent off tickets http://www.iq2greenfestival.com

Svati Bhogle, director of TIDE in India, who won the 2008 Ashden Energy Champion award for their work on biomass stoves, will speak, and you can visit the Ashden Award display of low-carbon technology from developing countries.

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Global solar report card

Global Green USA and Green Cross International have published a "Global solar report card", which they say:

"... explores 16 countries, and the state of California’s, solar commitments to date, as well as their policy efforts in fostering future growth of their solar markets. Success stories as well as lessons learned in policy implementation are discussed. Final grades reveal that all countries are still in the early phases of solar deployment."

You can download the report here.

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Solarcentury at Poznan

Solarcentury, who won an Ashden Award in 2007, joined with other solar companies and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at Poznan to encourage rapid expansion of the use of solar PV technology to combat climate change, as reported by Your Renewables News.

Their proposal included:

• Stringent, ambitious, international and national carbon regulation policies
• Enforceable renewables mandates with a solar carve out or credit multiplier for solar energy
• Near-term incentives that could include feed-in tariffs, partial rebates, tax credits and/or property-based loans
• Favorable net metering, interconnection, permitting and land-use policies.

Jeremy Leggett, Executive Chairman of Solarcentury, said: "As a European leader in building-integrated solar, Solarcentury expects to see buildings routinely becoming power plants in the years ahead, generating all their own electricity and heating needs in situ, and often more than they need, making them net exporters of energy. With the right partners in the construction industry, we can put up zero-emissions buildings in a matter of weeks: not the years that conventional power plants require. We are seeing some excellent progress with European support, particularly with the incentive of strong feed-in tariffs, but we need very much more."

Read the full story here.

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REDP article in Renewable Energy for Development

Renewable Energy for Development is a magazine published by the Stockholm Environment Institute. Volume 21, issue 2 contains an article on REDP China (Renewable Energy Development Project), explaining their finance model, quality control process and the benefits of the solar PV technology they are working with. You can read it here, the article is on page 5.

REDP won their Ashden Award in 2008 for their work in supporting the Chinese solar PV industry. You can read more info and watch a short film about them here.

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Cookstoves in the Economist

A recent Economist article covers biomass cooking stoves, explaining some of the challenges faced in designing them and making sure they actually get used:

If user demand were the sole driver of innovation, the biomass cooking stove would be one of the most sophisticated devices in the world. Depending on which development agency you ask, between two-and-a-half and three billion people—nearly half the world’s population—use a stove every day, in conjunction with solid fuel such as wood, dung or coal. Yet in many parts of the world the stove has barely progressed beyond the Stone Age.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that toxic emissions from cooking stoves are responsible for causing 1.6m premature deaths a year, half of them among children under five years old. In China 83m people will die from lung cancer and respiratory disease over the next 25 years, according to a recent report from Harvard University. Research from the University of California, Berkeley, on stoves in India, Guatemala and Mexico has found links between indoor air-pollution from stoves and increased incidence of pneumonia, cataracts and tuberculosis.
...
Even if they get the thermodynamics and materials right, designers must also make the devices compatible with local foodstuffs and cooking habits. A lot of the initial stove projects failed this test, says Daniel Kammen of Berkeley’s Energy Resources Group, who has worked on several stove projects in sub-Saharan Africa. A lack of field testing, he says, meant a lot of stoves were simply unsuited to users’ needs. The difference in cooking styles between countries, he says, can determine how—and whether—a new stove design ends up being used.
...
If such cultural factors are not taken into account, people will not use the stoves. Dr Wilson says just 3% of chimneys provided as part of one project in India were being used, according to a later survey: the rest had been either sold or reused as irrigation channels.

Read the full article in the Economist, and check out past Ashden Award winners who developed successful cookstoves.

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Ashden Awards at COP14 in Poznan, Poland

With all of the important but rather abstract climate policy discussions that are going on in Poznan this week for the UNFCCC climate change conference (COP14), you’ll be happy to hear that delegates will have the chance to see some real sustainable energy technologies, thanks to the Ashden Awards!

We were invited by the Polish Ministry of the Environment to display models of Ashden Award winning technologies, alongside information about how the technologies have been applied by our winners. These exhibits have included improved cooking stoves (GERES, Kisangani Smith Group, Gaia Association and Aprovecho Research Centre), a ram pump (AID Foundation), a solar home system (Grameen Shakti) and a treadle pump (International Development Enterprises India).

I went out to set them up and they are sitting happily next to hydrogen cars and other futuristic hi-tech gadgets – hopefully as a reminder that these programmes are already delivering social, economic and environmental benefits for millions of people – and need to be rolled out to many more millions. Photos to follow...

Ben Dixon

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Is it time for transition?

What connects farming, famine, food, fossils fuels and fertilisers? The answer is somewhat surprising: oil. This was one of the conclusions of the Soil Association annual conference: Transition - Food and Farming in 21st century Britain. Fossil fuel depletion, climate change, diminishing soil and water resources and population growth present an unprecedented threat to global food security.

Those threats are based on our dependence on fossil-fuels for both our energy needs and for the mass production (and transportation) of food. This places us in a very precarious position. Precarious because oil has peaked and we are beginning to run out. Precarious because mass, non-organic, agriculture is so dependent on synthetic, oil-based fertilisers. Precarious because the burning of fossil-fuels is leading to irrevocable climate change. Precarious because our dependency on imported food and energy leaves us a vulnerable, net importer and precarious because we are destroying the very thing that nurtures us: the soil beneath our feet.

But rather than produce despondency (a common enough human reaction) these problems have led to some remarkable grass-roots solutions. From the rapidly growing Transitions Towns movement to Catherine Sneed’s remarkable and moving ‘healing through horticulture’ programme in US prisons to Dr Vandana Shiva’s ‘Soil not Oil’ movement. You can listen for yourself here: www.soilassociation.org/conference

Ashden Awards was there too, to share the experience of our pioneering winners, as a major contributor to a workshop on farming and energy. The workshop outlined the lessons we can learn from international biogas systems for UK farmers and demonstrated the benefits of biomass in sustainable farming energy solutions as well as the role farmers (and landowners) can play in powering the national grid through wind. There was overwhelming interest.

Whilst the global issues can seem at times insurmountable, this conference demonstrated that it is the often small, frequently bottom up, mostly local and always sustainable solutions that may provide the shoots of hope for us all.

Simon Brammer
UK Programme Manager for Ashden Awards

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Mayor of London follows example of Ashden Awards winner

Boris Johnson and his advisers are examining the scheme for which Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council won an Ashden Award in 2006. The scheme installed insulation, solar PV and solar thermal technology in social and private housing, and also community buildings.

The Telegraph says:

Isabel Dedring, Mr Johnson's director of environmental policy, who is a New Yorker, said she was on her way to Kirklees next week to see how the scheme worked. She hopes the first homes could be insulated in this way within a year.

The mayor is looking to Kirklees after an audit of the green schemes put in place by his predecessor showed mixed results, with relatively few people taking up the offer of a £199 survey and concierge service to identify where homes could save energy.

Ms Dedring said: "It is difficult to get people to do the audit, then even more difficult to get them to do the actions. People are lazier than you think. If it is harder than extremely easy, people will not do it."

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10,000 jobs to be created by insulating homes

The Guardian reports:

A plan to create more than 10,000 jobs in the construction industry by insulating homes in the private and public sectors will be announced by Alistair Darling in today's pre-budget report.

The government will bring forward future capital spending in an attempt to reduce energy bills this winter and to employ some of those laid off during the worst downturn in the property market for two decades.

While the main thrust of the report will be emergency measures to prompt a pre-Christmas consumer spending spree, Darling will today emphasise that Labour remains committed to its goals for the environment. Some of the increased spending will be used to upgrade social housing to make it more fuel-efficient, and there will be a small boost to spending on flood protection schemes. Read the full story here

Several past Ashden award winners have worked with insulation, click here to see a list of them, including documentary videos and case studies.

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Trewin Restorick writes for the Guardian

Trewin Restorick (pictured below), in a recent article in the Guardian, comments that some retailer-led sustainability initiatives contain an element of 'greenwashing' and end up confusing consumers. However, it's not all bad, Sainsbury, Tesco, Marks & Spencer and B&Q are credited for schemes they have run. He says:

"To really push forward change, retailers are going to have to brave more controversial territory. One such area is "choice editing", where retailers offering competing products at similar cost opt to edit out of their range the brands deemed to be most environmentally damaging. This has begun in furniture retailing where there is now considerable pressure on retailers not to stock brands using wood that can't be traced to sustainable sources. B&Q has also done this by opting not to continue selling patio heaters once their existing stock is sold. This could go a lot further should retailers be brave enough to take a stand against the holy grail of unlimited consumer choice."

Trewin is chief executive of Global Action Plan, who won an Ashden Award in 2008 for their work in helping businesses reduce energy consumption and waste production.

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Sustainable housing awards 2008

Inside Housing has announced the 2008 winners of their Sustainable Housing awards. The categories range from biodiversity and social housing to water conservation and sustainable energy. Good Energy, a past Ashden Award winner, won the "Green energy supplier" award.

Full details on the winner projects are available on the Inside Housing website: Sustainable housing awards 2008

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Grameen Shakti article in the FT

The Financial Times has published an article about Grameen Shakti and other sustainable energy companies. Grameen Shakti won Ashden Awards for their work in 2006 and 2008.
The article says:

Faroukh lives miles from the nearest mains power. His mobile, like the lights in his home and in his wife’s sewing workshop, are charged by solar electricity, courtesy of a small photovoltaic (PV) panel attached to the roof of his house. It was sold to him by Grameen Shakti (‘village energy’), an offshoot of the hugely successful Grameen Bank.

Thanks to a simple micro-credit system, even poor families like Faroukh’s can afford the panels. Savings on the smoky, unreliable kerosene lanterns easily cover the monthly repayments. The solar lamps mean Faroukh’s family can work into the evenings, more than doubling their income, while the phone plugs them into the wider economy in a way that would have been unimaginable ten years ago.

Grameen Shakti – winner of an outstanding achievement prize in the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy – has now installed nearly 200,000 solar home systems across Bangladesh, and confidently expects to hit one million by 2015. With over 30 million families marooned ‘off grid’ in Bangladesh alone, the potential for future growth is enormous.

read the rest of the article here

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Biomass district heating demo at Wood Energy site

On 27th January 2009 Regen SW is running a biomass district heating demonstration at Park 25, a site installed by Wood Energy. Details of the event are here.

Wood Energy won an Ashden Award in 2008 for their work installing biomass boilers and starting wood-fuel supply chains across the the UK. Information on the whole range of district heating schemes they have installed is available on their website.

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