Nick Beart feels the Government has got it wrong with EPCs. " The EPCs are a wasted opportunity ," he says.
His two main objections are the lack of financial incentives to make energy efficiency changes, and the too-simplistic graphs. "According to our graph, our energy efficiency rating is on band E. It says that if all the changes recommended were made, the rating would be, err, still level E. That's cracking, isn't it. I've spent £400 on this report which tells me that I've got single-glazed sash windows, which I already knew and is why we have triple-lined curtains. It's also asking the purchasers to spend thousands on double glazing that would make no difference to the rating." Mr Beart argues that if the new owners of his house were given a financial incentive to make some of the changes, then it would have been a more worthwhile exercise.
His argument is echoed by environmental groups who say that without financial incentives, all the EPCs provide is information. The Parliamentary Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs recommended in a report in July, "That the Government provide a stamp duty rebate to purchasers who improve the energy performance of their property within one year of purchase." The Government has not yet responded to this.
Dave Timms, Green Homes campaigner for Friends of the Earth, says: " The first six months is the best time to make changes when buyers are renovating. With an incentive they would be more likely to make the m. The Government has got to aim high if we are to achieve our target and cut CO2 emissions from housing by 80 per cent."
He says part of the problem is that EPCs were introduced with the unpopular HIPs, which vendors have to provide at an average cost of £350 to £500. Despite this, over half of homeowners in the country did not know what EPCs were, recent research by the Energy Savings Trust shows.
Christopher Lacy, of estate agents Savills, says buyers are showing little interest in HIPs or EPCs and just seeing them as yet another cost of moving.
But some agents, such as My Place, south London, have embraced EPCs. "Inexpensive changes such as putting in loft insulation can help push a house up a band," says director Chris Kelly.
Michael Jack, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, says: "If the Government wants people to make their homes more energy efficient, then giving a tax rebate incentive would be a positive step."
One seller's view
Janette Bacchetta, who lives in Upper Norwood, south London, is not convinced that EPCs are worthwhile. She put her fourbedroom 1930s semi on the market this autumn and had around a dozen viewings in the first six weeks.
"Nobody asked to see my Home Information Pack in all that time and I'm afraid I have no idea what my Energy Performance Certificate says."
She says that the assessor who came to inspect her home spent 45 minutes in the house and didn't look in the loft.
"I'm not sure how helpful that level of information is going to be to a possible purchaser. I mean, they can see for themselves when they come round what kind of windows and boiler we've got."
Get a free report on your house from the Energy Saving Trust: www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/check
full article
Thursday, 15 November 2007
The top 8 fuels of the future
Renewable energy is still just a small part of the of our overall energy use.
While it’s growing steadily, we’re going to need alternatives if we hope to reduce our dependency on oil, and the carbon-dioxide it chugs into the atmosphere when we burn it. Luckily, brainiacs in labs around the world are finding even more efficient ways to produce energy from what’s readily available and not buried beneath megatons of earthly crust. Look at eight different ways you may be tanking up at home and on the road in the near and distant future.
1. Hydrogen
Like the new BMW TV ads say, their still-unavailable Hydrogen 7 is “ready for the world… when the world is ready.” But progress on California’s “hydrogen highway” hasn’t quite hit the numbers supporters hoped it would. Fuel-cell technology has alternately been a darling of Wall Street and Detroit for almost a decade now, but we’ve yet to see many hydrogen-powered vehicles in the wild.
The technology seems like an environmentalist’s wet dream (literally), with hydrogen bonding with oxygen to produce power and water — and no greenhouse-gas emissions to speak of. But building a new series of hydrogen power stations hasn’t been as easy as once thought, and people still think “Hindenburg” when they think “hydrogen,” although it seems to be a safe enough technology that transit authorities uses hundreds of hydrogen-powered buses to move us around urban centers. Still, hydrogen’s ultimate downfall may be battery technologies and other clean fuels that could overtake it before it has the chance to get wide adoption.
2. Biofuels
This is a fractious bunch of youngsters, with fraternal twins biodiesel and corn-based ethanol trying to keep its younger sibling — cellulosic ethanol — from hogging the family photos. Enormous amounts of capital have flowed into developing both biodiesel (Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is funding the biggest biodiesel refinery in the country in Washington State) and corn-based ethanol (Sun Microsystems founder and venture capital Vinod Khosla has made big bets in this space). Converting vehicles and power plants to these renewable fuels that act and burn like fossil fuels has certainly made much headway. Heck, you could be burning an ethanol blend in your car right now and not even know it, and installing conversion kits for biodiesel makes putting on new spinning rims look tough.
3. Solar
Solar is probably the sexiest of the renewables, what with its black shiny arrays, tilting half-interested at Old Sol. Between tax breaks to install solar panels and new sleeker technology that makes your neighbors want to say “cool roof, man,” solar is beginning to take off. Thin-film technology — allowing you to bend the silicon components into more flexible shapes — and increases in solar-cell efficiency mean you can install solar in the Northeast more viably. And momentum is there among legislators as well. In Colorado, the state has passed a “renewable portfolio standard,” meaning that not only do utilities need to produce a great deal of renewable energy in the coming decades or face penalties, but they also have to buy a portion of that renewable energy from its customers with solar roofs.
4. Wind
Windmills have come a long way from Kansas farm country and being Don Quixote’s nemesis. Wind power first took off — as did many renewable energy sources — in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s with the last spike in the price of oil. But after that it stalled until fairly recently. With many states forcing utilities into renewable energy production, this has spurred great technological advances in wind power, and now wind projects are installed or planned in almost every state. The era of having your own windmill, and going “off the grid,” is also back, with personal household models costing under $20,000, assuming you have forgiving neighbors. And efficiencies in technology mean you don’t need a hurricane to generate a lot of power. But wind’s popularity has also created a bottleneck — estimates are that you’ll be waiting longer for a wind turbine (about 18 months) than you will for a black Prius.
5. Batteries
They’re not really a fuel, but they’re the “universal solvent” to our current rate of use of fossil fuels. Technically, we still burn more dinosaur soup making electricity for buildings than on the road, but all those cars and trucks we sit in use energy in other ways, too. They require gas stations everywhere, and that means yet more trucks to haul three grades of gas and Cinnabons to highway rest stops across the country. But new battery technology will last longer and charge more quickly, making it possible to burn the right fuel in the right place, rather than transporting the wrong fuel all over the place. So maybe as you drive from Seattle to Boston, you’ll top up your electric or hybrid car with tidal power in Seattle, wind power in Colorado, cellulosic ethanol in Nebraska, biogasoline in Illinois and biomass to carry you into Boston.
6. Tides
Think about how it feels to have someone chucking a bucket of water in your face, then multiply that by several hundred million, and you get an idea of the energy going untapped around our coastlines every day. Test facilities for harnessing tidal power in Canada’s Bay of Fundy have been around since the ‘70s, and San Francisco will be putting in a high-tech tidal plant at the Golden Gate soon.
There are certainly environmental concerns around tidal power, since these projects usually involve some kind of plant at the narrow mouth of a bay or inlet, where the water is moving fastest and most violently, meaning it’s not so great for the fish or birds nearby. But the future of ocean power is wave technology, where floating platforms and buoys, dozens of miles offshore, harvest the energy of wave motion. Think of an upside-down yo-yo, except your finger is an anchor at the bottom of the ocean, and the spinning spool floats on the surface. As each wave passes, the yo-yo gets pulled up, and pulls your finger… or a turbine.
7. Garbage
Meet the newest member of the energy family: last year’s trash. While incinerators haven’t really been widespread since the ‘60s because of pollution concerns, companies like American Combustion are working on the next generation of burning, like their PyreJet. It combines a long-range supersonic oxygen jet and focused carbon injection — essentially a jet engine — to reduce last night’s Dominos, a year’s worth of Sports Illustrateds you didn’t get a chance to read and that old blow-up doll into valuable energy for everyone. Now there’s always an answer to, “Who would want that?” when you’re at someone else’s house.
8. Nuclear Fusion
Like that kid in eighth grade who tried to be really cool but annoyed everyone, the nuclear industry has been talking a lot lately, telling everyone at recess about how their emissions “carbon-free.” True, but wind power doesn’t need to go around the lunchroom calling itself “plutonium-239-free,” so quit being a punk or I’ll be seeing you after school by the monkey bars at Three Mile Island, and don’t tell your homeroom teacher. But if the opposite of hate is love, then the opposite of fission is fusion, and while it’s not exactly around the corner, it holds out a lot of promise.
Yes, it’s the energy choice of the Sun itself, but simply put, in fusion, two lighter atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus. In doing so, it releases a few megatons of energy, ideally producing a waste product more benign, though not harmless, compared to its fissile brother. A European test plant managed to produce an output of 16 megawatts of electricity using fusion (about as much as a coal plant), but only for a few seconds. New test facilities are planned, so who knows? The atom may be our pal after all. (petrolplaza)
full article
While it’s growing steadily, we’re going to need alternatives if we hope to reduce our dependency on oil, and the carbon-dioxide it chugs into the atmosphere when we burn it. Luckily, brainiacs in labs around the world are finding even more efficient ways to produce energy from what’s readily available and not buried beneath megatons of earthly crust. Look at eight different ways you may be tanking up at home and on the road in the near and distant future.
1. Hydrogen
Like the new BMW TV ads say, their still-unavailable Hydrogen 7 is “ready for the world… when the world is ready.” But progress on California’s “hydrogen highway” hasn’t quite hit the numbers supporters hoped it would. Fuel-cell technology has alternately been a darling of Wall Street and Detroit for almost a decade now, but we’ve yet to see many hydrogen-powered vehicles in the wild.
The technology seems like an environmentalist’s wet dream (literally), with hydrogen bonding with oxygen to produce power and water — and no greenhouse-gas emissions to speak of. But building a new series of hydrogen power stations hasn’t been as easy as once thought, and people still think “Hindenburg” when they think “hydrogen,” although it seems to be a safe enough technology that transit authorities uses hundreds of hydrogen-powered buses to move us around urban centers. Still, hydrogen’s ultimate downfall may be battery technologies and other clean fuels that could overtake it before it has the chance to get wide adoption.
2. Biofuels
This is a fractious bunch of youngsters, with fraternal twins biodiesel and corn-based ethanol trying to keep its younger sibling — cellulosic ethanol — from hogging the family photos. Enormous amounts of capital have flowed into developing both biodiesel (Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is funding the biggest biodiesel refinery in the country in Washington State) and corn-based ethanol (Sun Microsystems founder and venture capital Vinod Khosla has made big bets in this space). Converting vehicles and power plants to these renewable fuels that act and burn like fossil fuels has certainly made much headway. Heck, you could be burning an ethanol blend in your car right now and not even know it, and installing conversion kits for biodiesel makes putting on new spinning rims look tough.
3. Solar
Solar is probably the sexiest of the renewables, what with its black shiny arrays, tilting half-interested at Old Sol. Between tax breaks to install solar panels and new sleeker technology that makes your neighbors want to say “cool roof, man,” solar is beginning to take off. Thin-film technology — allowing you to bend the silicon components into more flexible shapes — and increases in solar-cell efficiency mean you can install solar in the Northeast more viably. And momentum is there among legislators as well. In Colorado, the state has passed a “renewable portfolio standard,” meaning that not only do utilities need to produce a great deal of renewable energy in the coming decades or face penalties, but they also have to buy a portion of that renewable energy from its customers with solar roofs.
4. Wind
Windmills have come a long way from Kansas farm country and being Don Quixote’s nemesis. Wind power first took off — as did many renewable energy sources — in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s with the last spike in the price of oil. But after that it stalled until fairly recently. With many states forcing utilities into renewable energy production, this has spurred great technological advances in wind power, and now wind projects are installed or planned in almost every state. The era of having your own windmill, and going “off the grid,” is also back, with personal household models costing under $20,000, assuming you have forgiving neighbors. And efficiencies in technology mean you don’t need a hurricane to generate a lot of power. But wind’s popularity has also created a bottleneck — estimates are that you’ll be waiting longer for a wind turbine (about 18 months) than you will for a black Prius.
5. Batteries
They’re not really a fuel, but they’re the “universal solvent” to our current rate of use of fossil fuels. Technically, we still burn more dinosaur soup making electricity for buildings than on the road, but all those cars and trucks we sit in use energy in other ways, too. They require gas stations everywhere, and that means yet more trucks to haul three grades of gas and Cinnabons to highway rest stops across the country. But new battery technology will last longer and charge more quickly, making it possible to burn the right fuel in the right place, rather than transporting the wrong fuel all over the place. So maybe as you drive from Seattle to Boston, you’ll top up your electric or hybrid car with tidal power in Seattle, wind power in Colorado, cellulosic ethanol in Nebraska, biogasoline in Illinois and biomass to carry you into Boston.
6. Tides
Think about how it feels to have someone chucking a bucket of water in your face, then multiply that by several hundred million, and you get an idea of the energy going untapped around our coastlines every day. Test facilities for harnessing tidal power in Canada’s Bay of Fundy have been around since the ‘70s, and San Francisco will be putting in a high-tech tidal plant at the Golden Gate soon.
There are certainly environmental concerns around tidal power, since these projects usually involve some kind of plant at the narrow mouth of a bay or inlet, where the water is moving fastest and most violently, meaning it’s not so great for the fish or birds nearby. But the future of ocean power is wave technology, where floating platforms and buoys, dozens of miles offshore, harvest the energy of wave motion. Think of an upside-down yo-yo, except your finger is an anchor at the bottom of the ocean, and the spinning spool floats on the surface. As each wave passes, the yo-yo gets pulled up, and pulls your finger… or a turbine.
7. Garbage
Meet the newest member of the energy family: last year’s trash. While incinerators haven’t really been widespread since the ‘60s because of pollution concerns, companies like American Combustion are working on the next generation of burning, like their PyreJet. It combines a long-range supersonic oxygen jet and focused carbon injection — essentially a jet engine — to reduce last night’s Dominos, a year’s worth of Sports Illustrateds you didn’t get a chance to read and that old blow-up doll into valuable energy for everyone. Now there’s always an answer to, “Who would want that?” when you’re at someone else’s house.
8. Nuclear Fusion
Like that kid in eighth grade who tried to be really cool but annoyed everyone, the nuclear industry has been talking a lot lately, telling everyone at recess about how their emissions “carbon-free.” True, but wind power doesn’t need to go around the lunchroom calling itself “plutonium-239-free,” so quit being a punk or I’ll be seeing you after school by the monkey bars at Three Mile Island, and don’t tell your homeroom teacher. But if the opposite of hate is love, then the opposite of fission is fusion, and while it’s not exactly around the corner, it holds out a lot of promise.
Yes, it’s the energy choice of the Sun itself, but simply put, in fusion, two lighter atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus. In doing so, it releases a few megatons of energy, ideally producing a waste product more benign, though not harmless, compared to its fissile brother. A European test plant managed to produce an output of 16 megawatts of electricity using fusion (about as much as a coal plant), but only for a few seconds. New test facilities are planned, so who knows? The atom may be our pal after all. (petrolplaza)
full article
Ditch the old boiler and save cash
Switching from a conventional boiler to one of the new condensing models will result in substantial savings for householders, according to Switch with Which?.
It says that replacing an old boiler with a new, energy efficient condensing model will more than pay for itself over the years.
For example, the Which? Best Buy Potterton Gold C24 HE combination condensing boiler costs £800. But compared to older models, a modern condensing boiler could cut your gas bills by between £160 and £360 per year depending on the size of your house.
Older boilers tend to lose heat through the flue, wasting nearly 40% of energy in gas.
Greenhouse gases
Not only does this lead to higher bills, it also means an increase in greenhouse gases.
Mike Stevenson, Head of Marketing at Switch with Which? added: ‘If splashing out on a new boiler before Christmas just isn't realistic, though, it doesn't cost a penny to check you're on the best deal for your heating bills, and switch to a better deal if you're not.
‘People who have switched through Switch with Which? are enjoying great average annual savings of over £200 per year on their energy bills, and switching now will let you reap the full benefits by the time you have to turn the radiators up.’
Energy tariffs
Customers using Switch with Which? can check the value of their current deal in just a couple of minutes, immediately start the switching process and within 10 minutes can have switched to another supplier
It’s the most comprehensive switching service available and provides the broadest criteria for selection of a supplier, offering customers a choice of all publicly available tariffs
full article
It says that replacing an old boiler with a new, energy efficient condensing model will more than pay for itself over the years.
For example, the Which? Best Buy Potterton Gold C24 HE combination condensing boiler costs £800. But compared to older models, a modern condensing boiler could cut your gas bills by between £160 and £360 per year depending on the size of your house.
Older boilers tend to lose heat through the flue, wasting nearly 40% of energy in gas.
Greenhouse gases
Not only does this lead to higher bills, it also means an increase in greenhouse gases.
Mike Stevenson, Head of Marketing at Switch with Which? added: ‘If splashing out on a new boiler before Christmas just isn't realistic, though, it doesn't cost a penny to check you're on the best deal for your heating bills, and switch to a better deal if you're not.
‘People who have switched through Switch with Which? are enjoying great average annual savings of over £200 per year on their energy bills, and switching now will let you reap the full benefits by the time you have to turn the radiators up.’
Energy tariffs
Customers using Switch with Which? can check the value of their current deal in just a couple of minutes, immediately start the switching process and within 10 minutes can have switched to another supplier
It’s the most comprehensive switching service available and provides the broadest criteria for selection of a supplier, offering customers a choice of all publicly available tariffs
full article
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
Hydrogen brewing gets an electrical boost
A new microbe-powered device can extract up to 99% of the available hydrogen from biological compounds that have stumped previous attempts to ferment fuel from plant waste. The secret is to give the bugs a helping hand with a kick of electric charge.
Hydrogen is an attractive environmentally friendly fuel because burning it creates only water as a waste product. But finding an efficient, clean way to produce hydrogen in the first place is difficult.
Fermenting organic material using microbes is one possibility, but generally produces poor yields. Microbes reach a chemical dead end once sugar from material has been broken down into acetic acid, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. That releases at best only a third of the hydrogen in a molecule of the sugar glucose, for example.
"There is no known biological route to ferment glucose to [get] any more hydrogen than that," says Bruce Logan of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, US, who with colleague Shaoan Cheng has demonstrated a way around that the problem.
Reversed process
Their microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) enable microbes to break down organic materials completely, to just water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. The latest design can release as much as 99% of the hydrogen in acetic acid, a common dead end to fermentation.
MECs are modified versions of microbial fuel cells, which are used to harvest electrons produced by metabolising microbes as they feed to generate electricity. The electrochemical reactions are balanced when the used electrons are combined oxygen and hydrogen ions also released by the microbes to form water.
Logan's MECs are like microbial fuel cells in reverse. Instead of charge being drawn out, it is pumped in, and the hydrogen ions combine with electrons alone to form hydrogen gas. Applying roughly 0.5 volts provides enough energy to drive thermodynamically unlikely chemical reactions that break down the dead-end products that limited previous attempts to ferment hydrogen.
MECs can also break down other by-products of fermentation that put an end to the process, such as lactic, valeric, and butyric acids, says Logan. In tests it was fed cellulose and glucose and broke them down completely without problems.
'Great news'
The researchers were able to generate up to 1.23 cubic meters of hydrogen per day for every cubic meter of hydrogen fuel cell. This rate of hydrogen production is about 275 times faster than their earlier MEC.
In tests, the system produced hydrogen that, if fed into a hydrogen fuel cell that was 50% efficient, could generate between 1.2 and 3.4 times as much electricity as was fed into the system. By comparison, hydrogen extracted from water can only pay back about 25 to 30% of the energy used to extract it.
"It is surprising that such high hydrogen yields can so readily be obtained," says Patrick Hallenbeck of the University of Montreal in Canada. "The net energy yield appears much higher than what people are getting in other biofuel production processes – bioethanol, for example," he adds.
But the process is still much too slow to be practical, Hallenbeck adds. Logan and colleagues are currently working on improving the speed. The performance of the MECs exceeded the expectations of Lars Angenent, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, US, who is also interested in using microbes to make fuel. "This is great news," he says.
Mason Inman
full article
Hydrogen is an attractive environmentally friendly fuel because burning it creates only water as a waste product. But finding an efficient, clean way to produce hydrogen in the first place is difficult.
Fermenting organic material using microbes is one possibility, but generally produces poor yields. Microbes reach a chemical dead end once sugar from material has been broken down into acetic acid, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. That releases at best only a third of the hydrogen in a molecule of the sugar glucose, for example.
"There is no known biological route to ferment glucose to [get] any more hydrogen than that," says Bruce Logan of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, US, who with colleague Shaoan Cheng has demonstrated a way around that the problem.
Reversed process
Their microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) enable microbes to break down organic materials completely, to just water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. The latest design can release as much as 99% of the hydrogen in acetic acid, a common dead end to fermentation.
MECs are modified versions of microbial fuel cells, which are used to harvest electrons produced by metabolising microbes as they feed to generate electricity. The electrochemical reactions are balanced when the used electrons are combined oxygen and hydrogen ions also released by the microbes to form water.
Logan's MECs are like microbial fuel cells in reverse. Instead of charge being drawn out, it is pumped in, and the hydrogen ions combine with electrons alone to form hydrogen gas. Applying roughly 0.5 volts provides enough energy to drive thermodynamically unlikely chemical reactions that break down the dead-end products that limited previous attempts to ferment hydrogen.
MECs can also break down other by-products of fermentation that put an end to the process, such as lactic, valeric, and butyric acids, says Logan. In tests it was fed cellulose and glucose and broke them down completely without problems.
'Great news'
The researchers were able to generate up to 1.23 cubic meters of hydrogen per day for every cubic meter of hydrogen fuel cell. This rate of hydrogen production is about 275 times faster than their earlier MEC.
In tests, the system produced hydrogen that, if fed into a hydrogen fuel cell that was 50% efficient, could generate between 1.2 and 3.4 times as much electricity as was fed into the system. By comparison, hydrogen extracted from water can only pay back about 25 to 30% of the energy used to extract it.
"It is surprising that such high hydrogen yields can so readily be obtained," says Patrick Hallenbeck of the University of Montreal in Canada. "The net energy yield appears much higher than what people are getting in other biofuel production processes – bioethanol, for example," he adds.
But the process is still much too slow to be practical, Hallenbeck adds. Logan and colleagues are currently working on improving the speed. The performance of the MECs exceeded the expectations of Lars Angenent, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, US, who is also interested in using microbes to make fuel. "This is great news," he says.
Mason Inman
full article
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