Posted in district heating, energy, engineering on December 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
This is number 3 in a series on DH. Here’s where to find the first and second posts.
A key way district heating networks go wrong is through poor design. This can come from:
In this post, I’ll take a closer look at these problems.
Posted in district heating, energy, engineering, ESCO, utilities on November 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »
This is the second post in a series on DH. The first can be found here.
As I mentioned in my previous post, cost of heat on DH schemes is directly tied to system efficiency. The more efficient the system, the less fuel is needed to meet the heat requirements of the customers. And of course the reverse is also true: lower efficiency means higher cost of heat. This relationship between efficiency and cost is hugely important: it’s real cash, coming from residents to pay their heating bills and from the landlord or ESCO to pay the fuel bill.
In fact, I’d go as far as saying that efficiency is the single most important issue for DH schemes. This post explains why efficiency matters so much.
Posted in district heating, engineering, utilities, tagged community energy, logstor on November 13, 2013| Leave a Comment »
District heating (DH) has become a common strategy for new developments to reduce carbon in order to satisfy planners and meet building regs. But despite its prevalence, in the UK we frequently get district heating wrong.
Most of what we do at work relates to DH in one way or another. At Insite we provide meter reading and customer care to several thousand people on district heating schemes. We take residents’ calls, help clients set tariffs and assess efficiency data, among other things. At Fontenergy (one of Insite’s two parent companies) we’ve project managed the design and install of DH networks and we operate centralised plant for ourselves and others. In our efforts to get DH right, we once even imported one of the best DH contractors from Denmark and worked with them to install a network in North London.
When it’s done right, DH is a cost-effective strategy for delivering low carbon heat. What’s more, it’s an essential technology for decarbonising heat in the UK (mainly because relying entirely on the theoretical decarbonisation of the grid in order to electrify heat is nuts, but that’s another post). The reality is we need DH, but often we don’t do it right.
Posted in engineering, utilities, tagged Anglian Water, water leaks on November 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »
I was at a conference last week on smart metering in Cambridge. A guy from Anglian water reminded us all that the water network in England and Wales loses 3.36Bn litres of water each day due to leaks. That sounds like a lot – is it?
If the average person in the UK uses 150 litres per day, that means we’re losing enough clean, pure water for 22.4 million people every day. There’s only 56m people in England and Wales, so that’s enough water for around 40% of the population!
I’m stunned.
Posted in biofuel, chp, climate change, energy, engineering, renewable energy, sustainability, zero carbon, tagged biodiesel on February 25, 2010| 6 Comments »
Sure, biodiesel is considered “renewable” in the upcoming building regs. But that won’t stop the backlash against developers who use it.
Yesterday a biodiesel generation plant proposed for Avonmouth near Bristol was rejected 6-2 in planning committee on the grounds of its impact on rainforests on the other side of the globe. Of the 1,121 letters received by councilors in advance of the meeting, only 2 were in favour of the plant.
Strictly speaking, the application should not have been rejected. The plant passed air quality tests and all other material considerations. The chairwoman of the committe went as far as saying she could find no reason to refuse the application and the city’s legal chief agreed. After all, it’s not the job of the planners to consider the source of fuel – that’s OFGEM’s role.
But that didn’t stop the committee throwing it out anyway, at the end of a fiery meeting, on moral and ethical grounds.
Posted in climate change, energy, engineering, ESCO, PAYS, renewable energy, sustainability, utilities, zero carbon, tagged CLG, DECC, Supplier Obligation, UKGBC on February 22, 2010| 6 Comments »
In Whitehall, advocates of PAYS and an expanded suppliers obligation are clashing over which mechanism should be used to refurb existing housing. This is the second post of two. If you missed it, read the first part here.
Here’s a quick summary of the two mechanisms:
Posted in climate change, Code for Sustainable Homes, energy, engineering, ESCO, passivhaus, PAYS, renewable energy, sustainability, utilities, zero carbon, tagged CLG, DECC, HEMS, HESS, Supplier Obligation on February 14, 2010| 5 Comments »
Hitting the 80% carbon reduction by 2050 has huge implications (and costs) for the residential sector. Two strategies are emerging for dealing with these costs, each with its own potentially severe side effects.
Posted in biofuel, biomass, chp, climate change, energy, engineering, feed in tariff, renewable energy, renewable heat incentive on February 1, 2010| 6 Comments »
DECC have announced the final FiT levels in advance of the incentive coming in in April. Having had a number of disheartening conversations with policy makers over the last few months, the FiT levels are no surprise. No one in government seemed to mind that the FiT would be a subsidy for middle class greenies and folks like McAlpines. The important thing was that the FiT wouldn’t cost too much.
Posted in energy, engineering, feed in tariff, london, PV, renewable energy, zero carbon, tagged Volker Quaschning on August 14, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Following on from discussion about planning reports last week, here’s a chart I put together showing roughly how much PV you can fit on a flat roof. It’s based on the formulas described by Volker Quaschning, the German Godfather of Sol (Thank you! I’ll be here all week. Try the crab).
The shading angle is the angle from the bottom of the panel behind to the top of the panel in front. As a rule of thumb, you can use the height of the sun at noon on the winter solstice – for London, this is about 15°. Utilisation factor is the ratio of panel area to roof area.
Posted in biomass, chp, climate change, Code for Sustainable Homes, energy, engineering, london, private wire, renewable energy, SAP, sustainability, zero carbon, tagged Merton Rule on August 6, 2009| 1 Comment »
For consultants, energy reports for planning are fantastic: a bit of SAP, a few benchmarks, some spreadsheet magic, and hey presto you’re sending an invoice. But the contents of the energy report can have huge implications, in some cases committing the scheme to commercially or legally impossible strategies, causing delays and increasing costs later in the programme. Here are a couple of examples:
| Why Ofgem must stick… on how many old homes will get he… | |
 | Marko Cosic on Testing, testing |
| Martin Winlow on the myth of stone walls as… | |
| Martin Winlow on the myth of stone walls as… | |
 | Martin Winlow on the myth of stone walls as… |
 | AlanDHill@hotmail.co… on the myth of stone walls as… |
| Comment: What would… on why we’ll share Open… |
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