The bulb hoarders

The government wants your old-fashioned energy-hungry incandescent tungsten light bulb gone, and gone soon. But some people are willing to go to great lengths to hang onto the lights they love.

Incandescent bulbs - that's the traditional kind to you or me - waste 95% of the energy they use, according to Greenpeace. They calculate that phasing them out in the UK will save more than five million tonnes in CO2 emissions a year.

And yet some households are so attached to them that they not only keep buying them - they're stockpiling them ahead of the day when they're no longer available.
In September last year, the UK government made a deal with major shops for the supply of traditional bulbs to be turned off. Some higher energy bulbs will be gone by January 2009, and all incandescent lights will be off by 2011.

The agreement is voluntary, but other countries have announced legal bans, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

The brighter bulbs are already fading from view, according to Glen Gotten of the light merchant Ryness. "100w and 150w are difficult to get hold of," he says. "The larger manufacturers have stopped making them. We still manage to get enough to supply our customers for now, but they will start drying up."

The 150w, in particular, is seriously rare. They're gone from Tesco. Morrisons have already chosen to ditch them, with 100w to follow in the autumn and 60w next year.
By Steve Tomkins

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Green target 'to hike fuel bills'

UK households could see their annual energy bill rise 20% to pay for the cost of meeting the EU's 2020 emissions target, Ernst & Young has predicted.

The accountancy firm's report estimates that the UK would have to stump up £100bn for the capital investment needed to satisfy Europe's green goals.

The EU wants European countries to cut carbon dioxide levels by 20% by 2020.

It also wants member states to raise the proportion of renewable energy they use to 20%.

The report, called Costing the Earth, says UK households could not
easily afford higher energy bills at a time of record food and fuel bills.

The potential rise in utility bills would push more consumers into fuel poverty, according to one of the report's authors.

"Customers face a triple whammy - rising fuel and oil prices, the cost of climate change mitigation, and on top, the additional investment required to become more energy efficient, for example by insulating the home," said Simon Harvey, of Ernst & Young.

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How far will Renault's hydrogen fuel cell Scenic go?

The hydrogen fuel cell car is also electric, but it has more oomph and more range than the usual milk float. You pump some hydrogen into the car much as you’d refill your car with petrol or diesel, and the gas chemically reacts with oxygen from the air. That takes place in the “fuel cell” or stack, and the electricity generated amounts to 90kw - enough to tug a medium sized car around.

The power is stored in lithium batteries, of the kind you have in your laptop, which is both good and bad for PR, given the incidents of spontaneous combustion that were reported a while back. There is also a conventional 25kw back-up battery on board. That lot powers an electric motor and that moves you and your Scenic along at up to about 100mph. It has a range of perhaps 150 miles. Both are far in advance of anything the conventional electric car scene can provide. Your hydrogen fuel cell Scenic sometimes leaves a little trail of water from the exhaust, like an incontinent spaniel. Very clean.

So as Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, and now Renault have shown, the technology is out there, and it works well. The car felt fine to me; very quiet, obviously, with the traditional engine removed. It is noticeably heavier in the handling, as the Scenic ZEV has gained some 300kg of weight in the conversion, an issue for the engineers. Yet it stopped OK, accelerated briskly and went round corners at moderate speeds in a predictable fashion. As far as the safety of the tank is concerned, this pressurised unit has apparently had grenades thrown at it and survived, so it is probably more secure than most petrol tanks of today. But such concerns as this, and vague memories of the Hindenburg disaster will, I fear, prevent the public from taking to hydrogen fuel cells without a great deal of persuasion.

Trickier though is the whole question of whether this great leap forward is actually worthwhile, on environmental or economic grounds. The technology is there; but that doesn’t mean we have to use it. For a start there’s the cost. Economies of scale would soon kick in, but it may well be that there is still a cost penalty compared with the old-fashioned petrol or diesel car. Will we want to pay that?

By Sean O'Grady

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Homes that produce their own energy

Welcome to the new eco-industrial revolution. Until now, many people who have installed solar panels, wind turbines or other such green paraphernalia have done so largely out of ideological conviction. Increasingly, though, it can make economic sense, too, thanks both to the rising cost of energy and to a series of financial incentives, unveiled by the government last week, that will allow householders to sell surplus energy to the grid at premium prices. The proposals, which include the building of 3,500 onshore wind turbines, are designed to ensure that Britain hits its EU target of generating 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Companies producing solar panels and turbines, or converting redundant water wheels, are reporting a sharp rise in sales as more and more of us try to move partially or completely “off grid”. Even Prince Charles is said to be looking at plans to dig 600ft down to install a ground-source heat pump beneath the gardens of Highgrove.

Such is the rise in demand for energy-sufficiency that County Homesearch, a property-finding company, has launched a specialist service, in conjunction with Gage Williams, a former army officer turned micro-generation consultant, that helps buyers to locate homes capable of producing enough surplus power to generate a considerable income. The company’s Cornwall office has identified 800 promising mills in the southwest, in various states of ownership and repair. If converted, they could produce enough electricity to pay back the cost of a turbine in as little as four years.
Using renewables to heat your home will not produce an income in the same way, but can reduce your energy bills. The main methods are solar thermal collectors, which heat water in pipes on your roof; heat pumps, which extract warmth from the ground; and wood-burning boilers. A basic solar thermal system should cost about £1,800 and provide about 80% of a typical family’s hot water during summer months - and make a useful contribution at other times. A typical ground-source heat pump - which requires either a deep hole in the ground or a large horizontal area - could cost between £6,400 and £12,000, while you could buy a 20kW boiler for £5,000.


John-Paul Flintoff

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