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:
Archive for the ‘renewable energy’ Category
planning reports may be ticking time bombs
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 »
Sunday Times quote
Posted in climate change, Code for Sustainable Homes, other stuff, renewable energy, zero carbon on August 3, 2009| 2 Comments »
Made it into the Sunday Times this weekend in an article titled Ed Miliband’s carbon neutral homes pledge in peril.
Two things: first, I sometimes feel a little uneasy speaking to journalists because I might be selectively quoted – but I needn’t have worried. And second, it’s very interesting to see this sort of article making its way into the mainstream press. Discussion about low carbon is spreading outside the building industry.
document mania – reading roundup
Posted in climate change, energy, feed in tariff, renewable energy, sustainability, zero carbon, tagged Ed Miliband, Lord Hunt, Low Carbon Industrial Strategy, Peter Mandelson, Renewable Energy Strategy, UK Low Carbon Transition Plan on July 16, 2009| 2 Comments »
Government launched a barrage of documents at us yesterday. I was mostly watching out for the Renewable Strategy but that was only a small part of it. Here’s the reading roundup:
- UK Low Carbon Transition Plan – this is the overarching doc. It’s basically the roadmap to meeting the legally binding carbon budgets from now to 2050 with some good stuff on how it will be done. But puts a hell of a lot of faith in nuclear, building new coal (with mythical magical CCS), and the efficacy of the EU ETS. 7m homes to get refurbed under Pay as You Save (more on this later). Cars to emit less carbon.
- Consultation on Renewable and Small Scale Low Carbon Electricity Financial Incentives – the consultation on the RO and the Feed in Tariff. They appear to have watered down the FiT saying 5% return is enough to attract investment. We’ve got to stop the government from nickel and diming its way into grand sounding but useless gestures.
- Renewable Energy Strategy – Following the draft version in 2008, this doc lays out the map for the UK to meet 15% of its total energy requirements from renewables by 2020 (this in an EU requirement as opposed to the other targets with are internal). A good thing: renewables claiming FiT’s are also likely to count towards Zero Carbon standard.
- Low Carbon Industrial Strategy – much of the above recycled but in the context of UK business. How jobs will be created and the costs of transitioning to a low carbon economy will be minimised. It might have been the picture of Peter Mandelson in the intro, but I struggled to maintain any enthusiasm reading this one. Tidal power to get £60m. Nuclear to get a £15m research centre (let the subsidies begin!), the SW of England to become a pilot low carbon economic area.
LCBP back up and running
Posted in biomass, feed in tariff, renewable energy, sustainability, zero carbon on July 9, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Good news. As spotted by Tom N, the LCBP Stream 2 is back up and running with £35m of new funds (and a hefty backlog of PV, GSHP, and solar thermal projects that weren’t processed before the money ran out the last time). One lovely feature: the cap for heat technology has gone from 45kW to 300kW. Much more sensible.
It’s clear this is the Government’s stopgap until the FiT comes in for electricity in March April2010 and the RHI comes in for heat generation in April 2011. They’ve put those dates on the LCBP website as if they were set in stone, but I wonder…
biomass supplier database
Posted in biomass, renewable energy, sustainability, zero carbon, tagged biomass energy centre on July 9, 2009| Leave a Comment »
The Biomass Energy Centre has launched a national woodfuel supplier database. A couple of websites have tried to do this over the years but this one is already fairly well populated and it looks like BEC mean business.
what is an ESCO?
Posted in chp, energy, engineering, ESCO, private wire, renewable energy, sustainability, zero carbon on June 11, 2009| 1 Comment »
Most people who work in the built environment agree that ESCO stands for Energy Services Company. But that seems to be the only thing about ESCOs that everyone agrees on – the term can mean vastly different things to different people.
So what is an ESCO?
The short answer is: there’s no one answer. Here’s a rough list of the services that an ESCO might offer. Keep in mind that a company might provide all, some, or only one of these services and still call themselves an ESCO:
2013 comes two years early
Posted in climate change, energy, engineering, renewable energy, sustainability, zero carbon on May 20, 2009| 5 Comments »
We’ve all seen the private development sector hit the skids over the past nine months. At the moment, the only residential projects that seem to be going ahead are those with a large RSL component (and so grant-funded by the HCA). This has a serious implication from a regs point of view because from spring 2011 all publicly funded housing will have to meet Code 4 (pdf). That effectively means that the residential development sector, such as it is, has to meet its regulatory targets two years early.
Here’s a map (ok, I know Code 6 won’t look quite like that once the consultation finished, but it will still be a hell of a drop):
Bob Cervi, the editor at the CIBSE Journal, writes this month that on the road to zero carbon “it’s going to be a quick six years.”
It’s going to be an even quicker 5.
a simplified financial model for CHP (or any LZC generation)
Posted in chp, energy, engineering, micro chp, renewable energy on May 14, 2009| 14 Comments »
We engineers are great at estimating energy and carbon emissions and dealing with concrete systems: pipes, wires, flues – that’s our bag. One of the things we do poorly (but for some reason are too willing to do) is financial modeling relating to low and zero carbon generation.
For the last couple of years I’ve been working alongside financial and commercial bods who actually do know what they’re on about and it’s been a real eye opener. They might not know how to size a duct but they can tell you where your business is making money – and where it isn’t.
On a recent project I was looking at small CHP engines (5 – 30kWe) on a sheltered housing scheme. As part of that work, I put together a simplified financial model (with guidance from the bods) to quickly test whether a given option was worth looking at in detail. It was hugely useful and threw up some surprising results – for example, none of the small engines I looked at could pay back its capital cost in its lifetime. Ouch.
So based on that work, here’s the model. I’m using micro-CHP as an example but it’s just as easy to use for renewables.
cookie speaks out
Posted in architecture, climate change, Code for Sustainable Homes, passivhaus, renewable energy, SAP, sustainability, utilities, zero carbon on March 27, 2009| 3 Comments »
I just received a very interesting comment from a “simple builder” about the regulatory maze. There are some interesting points in there. I don’t agree with all of them but I wanted to draw attention to them just the same:
Sorry guys I just have to speak out.
I speak as a simple Builder, we are a practical breed, not scientists, but we are being treated with rafts of legislation written by lunatics…
standard biomass supply contracts
Posted in biomass, renewable energy, tagged biomass supply contract, ESA, FEY, Future Energy Yorkshire on March 12, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Future Energy Yorkshire has put together some standardised biomass supply contracts, available from their website. This provides a great starting point and actually takes some real costs out of setting up a supply contract. Excellent work, FEY.
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