carbon limited

When it comes to carbon from energy and the built environment, misdirected government measures (however good the intention) are now likely to do more harm than good. Eye-catching initiatives, if and when they fail, provide justification to cynics and people whose interests lie in maintaining the status quo. And more importantly the measures waste time and damage the chances of introducing more effective alternatives in future.

We’re seeing this now with the zero carbon targets. As the UKGBC recently found, the targets as they stand will be impossible to meet for up to 80% of new homes. The current zero carbon definition is a great idea very badly expressed.

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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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Down with tonnes, bring on the megagrams! It’ll freak the squares.

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The post title refers to the fact that a 22 turbine wind farm will receive the go ahead today and it is one that will directly affect me inasmuch as my parents house is about 2 miles from the nearest turbine. I spent a long time educating my parents on the true performance details of large wind, not to convince them that they should support the wind farm proposal, but so they could make up their own minds based on good quality information rather than the guff offered particularly by the anti wind lobby. In the end they came out in favour and have, to a degree, suffered partial ostricisation within their local community for it.

 It is very easy as a consultant to make recommendations that incur costs for my clients. It is easy to play with other peoples money.  

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For those that are interested about the points raised in my last post, we have started an online petition to the Prime Minister to have the stamp duty legislation reviewed before it undermines any impetus to achieve zero carbon homes.

If you sign, many thanks, and if not, feel free to leave a constructive comment as to your reasoning. I am interested to know other viewpoints.

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