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Archive for April, 2008

Think08

Nick and I were kindly asked by Phil Clark to speak at this year’s Think08. We thought long and hard and decided that I’ll be representing Carbon Limited (and Fontenergy) at the event while Nick schmoozes in the background. So I’ll be the Face Man to his B.A. so to speak. Or the Magnum to his Robin Masters. The Buck to his Twiki. Or… whatever, you see where I’m going with this.

Phil’s put us in a great stream at the conference, speaking alongside Robert Kyriakides (fellow blogger and the man behind solar thermal company Genersys), Richard Shennan from Fulcrum (with his effortless cool, top ‘tache, and unbeatable Basque cooking), and Angus Norman from EDF (who I’ve never met but am looking forward to meeting).

I’ll be talking about the effect of the upcoming regs on the way we generate our energy (i.e. the extent to which regs will push us from a centralised generation model to a distributed one and what the implications are). I’ve been doing quite a lot of work in this area with one of the big developers, though I haven’t written much about it on the blog.

Come on down, watch the talk, and say hi.

 

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At work I’m helping a large housing association upgrade their existing heating networks to save carbon and reduce costs to occupants. There are various steps to take: upgrading boilers, re-insulating distribution pipework, considering CHP, and so on. But the single most effective thing you can do on these schemes is to install heat meters.

Doing some background research, I rang up the very friendly and forthcoming Dick Bradford, the driving force behind the hugely successful biomass community heating schemes in Barnsley, to ask him what effect installing heat meters had had on his schemes. He told me that following the installation of heat meters, heat consumption dropped by 50%. I was gobsmacked.

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