A climate conscious Christmas?

"There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map.

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations."

--George Monbiot

This quote from George Monbiot from his Guardian article particularly struck me when I was considering my Christmassy blog post over the last few days. Although his attitude towards the Christmas mass consumerism does seem to me to be leaning towards the unnecessarily dour side (i.e. have all the gifts in landfill by the 12^th day of Christmas), I can empathise with his wider point. Having had the misfortune of experiencing Oxford Street anywhere near Christmas time, the issue of frantic mass consumerism was apparent to me. According to climate psychologist Rosemary Randall, the average Brit now has a carbon footprint three times larger than the average in the 1950s, and I’m surprised it isn’t more (Randall, 2011).

In several countries, consumerism is being used as a tool to recover from economic stagnation, most significantly being in the Netherlands (Kopnina, 2014). However, what is considered consumerism needs to be analysed, and environmental concerns considered if a movement away from the current paradigm is to occur. There have been many theories proposed in order to change the dominant economic practise, such as ‘ecological modernisation’ (EC), ‘postmaterialist value theory’ (PMVT) and the ‘Environmental Kuznets curve’ (EKC). In turn, these involve:

• EM: natural resources can be used for growth and development – an anthropocentric view.
• PMVT: greater wealth leads to greater environmental values.
• EKC: in early industrialisation materials are used intensely, up to a threshold of development were structural economic changes lead to a lessening in material use.

However, in reality these ideals have barely been considered, as the “material saturation level of ‘developed’ societies is far from sustainable” (Kopnina, 2014). What ideally needs to change is the level AND type of consumerism practised, meaning the pure volume of materials consumed and the increased consideration of the whole production chain.

All of these theories show how the issue of sustainable consumerism is still anthropocentric, which links to the proposition put forth by Crutzen in 2002, that we are living in a new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. He proposes that since 1784 (Watt’s steam engine) that humans have altered the environment so much that we are now the dominant force affecting most of the earth, therefore it warrants a new geological epoch as the earth system is vastly different from previous states. Fundamental in this shift is the use of fossil fuels and non-renewable energies which has vastly contributed to the dominance of humans in the earth system. This is why renewable technology is vital to the economic and cultural change required to prevent further ecological and environmental damage, of which Christmas consumerism is only a part!

Along that theme, a rather large Christmas present given to the Humber region recently, has been the announcement of the government approval of the ABLE Marine Energy Park which will be a huge enterprise area dedicated to the manufacture, assembly and repair of offshore wind turbines to supply the huge plans for wind farms in the North Sea. This will provide around 4000 jobs for the area and ideally act as a catalyst for the whole region to become a renewable energy hub (www.ableuk.com).

This move in the Humber region has been welcomed across the board and hopefully will act as an example both nationally and globally, to encourage the economic shift to a more environmentally conscious system, accompanied by the appropriate cultural change, which over time, could lead to a rather different Christmas!

'Renewables Obligation' - the most ironic policy

Recently, the government announcement of the retraction of certain ‘green taxes’ to ‘save consumers money’ has shed light on the confusing nature of the UK’s energy policy with various renewables incentives. Therefore I will do a quick breakdown of the main incentives to increase renewable energy production in the UK (although, it’s set to change, again, in spring 2014).

• Renewables Obligation (RO)
• Energy Companies Obligation (ECO)
• Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI)
• Feed In Tariffs (FITs)
• Green Deal

ECO: Comprises three aims; 1) Carbon Emissions Reduction Obligation – helping homes which are harder to retrofit and less able to be funded through the Green Deal, 2) Community Obligation – providing insulation measures for lower income areas, and 3) Home Heating Cost Reduction Obligation – companies must provide measures for low income and vulnerable households which lead to savings.

RHI: This is an incentive for the non-domestic sector and essentially provides a subsidy for renewable heat generators for up to 20 years. In spring 2014, this programme will be extended to encourage domestic renewable heat generation (Ofgem, 2013).

RO: This is meant to encourage large scale RE development. It targets electricity suppliers and requires them to acquire a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources, and the value is set annually and increases per year. Renewable Obligation Certificates are allocated and can be traded and generated, and are shown to the regulator Ofgem to show their renewable capacity. However, in a similar fashion to carbon pricing, these ROCs are criticized for being sold too cheaply, at about £46 per ROC. Market controls are imposed in a way to make sure that a surplus and therefore devaluation of ROCs occur. This is done by creating ‘headroom’ - a margin between supply of ROCs and the level of obligation (demand), which creates the much needed certainty regarding market demand.

FITs: these financial incentives are aimed at small scale generation (PV, wind, hydro, micro-CHP or anaerobic digestion), and the energy generated from these systems is sold back to the grid with a ‘generation tariff’ as a bonus for using these sources (DECC, 2013).

Green Deal: Aimed at households whose houses are suitable for retrofitting technology or certain micro RE such as solar panels. A loan is granted to the household by the Green Deal for a part (or all) of the cost, which is paid back at an interest rate of 7.5%/year. The calculations must work out that the repayments must not exceed the projected savings, therefore it is seen in theory as ‘no-regrets’ policy (a theory championed by the previous Australian government (Bulkeley, 2001)). The Green Deal can be combined with the FIT initiative and the energy generated can be sold back to the grid at times when it is not required.

These policies have come under much criticism due to the variation in claims of uptake, general mistrust of both the government, and more recently the energy companies themselves. The UK’s electricity and energy system is unusual, as having some of the most expensive energy in the world, and yet this electricity is still well below the entry price, which doesn't encourage investment. The Electricity Market Reform is looking to, well, reform the system to accommodate renewables, as the market depends on the balance between supply and demand, whereas renewables are seen to provide a less reliable supply, therefore unsettling the market (Helm, 2002).

Much to reiterate my previous post, this further exemplifies the need for policy consistency and a removal for political short-termism, as this will encourage greater uptake and investment in renewables in the UK. I think this is why supra-national agreements are required, because then the legislation is less easily changed with the changing of national parliament if there is an overarching policy which the country, not the government, has agreed to.

Houses: smarter than the policy?

Following on from last week’s post focusing on community renewables, I have down-scaled again and considered renewables and sustainability at the building/home level. This also follows on from the controversy surrounding the effectiveness of the UK’s Green Deal policy which aims to effectively provide loans for energy efficiency measures such as insulation or solar panels. The number of households partaking in this scheme is vastly disputed between orders of magnitude, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands. Therefore I came to wonder about and consider the feasibility of the government aim to achieve carbon zero homes to all new builds by 2016. There is vast agreement within the building community that this aim will not be achieved as the institutional framework and supply chain innovations just aren’t in place to make the extra investments worthwhile (Osmani and O’Reilly, 2009). However, if this was somehow achieved by 2016, this would go a long way to contribute to the UK’s climate change mitigation strategy and specifically help towards achieving the ambitious 80% emissions cut targeted for 2050. Currently, housing and building heating and running accounts for approx. 27% of the UK’s emissions, therefore if these buildings became self-sufficient, this would clearly be a substantial overall reduction, and therefore have significant positive ramifications for the environment and the UK’s position in global climate politics.

There are three concepts associated with sustainable housing (Seyfang, 2010):

1) High tech method – including innovations such as ‘smart houses’, using modern construction methods which monitor and adjust energy needs in the home.

2) Low tech method – off grid dwellings – utilising materials such as recycled resources and waste.

3)Shared neighbourhood facilities – such as laundry rooms and gardens, this cuts resource use and improves social capital.

The first method, the high tech route is most widely applied so far as this also includes retrofitting which has been the most common method to improve house sustainability. However, even these techniques which are so often referred to in political dialogue (especially through the Green Deal) as having successful uptake rates, are only being applied by ‘green’ building companies and not being accepted by everyday building contractors as they are seen as too risky and uncertain to justify the initial upfront costs (Seyfang,2010).

The aim of zero carbon homes by 2016 was set in 2006 along with the Code for Sustainable Homes which aims to increase regulations and requirements incrementally up to 2050. This works by awarding a level rating to houses which achieve certain thresholds in 9 categories (Communities and Local Gov., 2006):

1) Energy and CO2

2) Water

3) Materials

4) Surface water run-off

5) Waste

6) Pollution

7) Health and well-being

8) Management

9) Ecology

The house/building is rated through a points system per category and if it meets or exceeds the requirements then it is awarded a ‘level’, between 1 – 6 depending on the standard of sustainability measures. For example, for a level 4 code rating, emissions must be at least 44% lower than building regulations standard (McManus et al., 2010).

I believe that in theory this code could be effective if the drivers behind the initiative were stronger, therefore ensuing confidence in the technology which would encourage construction companies to invest in building more sustainable homes. This broadens out to the larger concept of the need for a secure and confidence-building nationwide energy policy which doesn’t change on a whim and has long term aims to encourage longer term thinking and investment.

The drivers currently, are:

1) BUSINESS: the notion of corporate social responsibility is significant as construction companies are some of the largest businesses in the UK and when the 20 largest companies were surveyed, 65% of them had a corporate sustainability policy in place.

2) CULTURAL: increasing desire among the general population to lead more sustainable lives, customer demand could help shift the type of supply.

3) LEGISLATION: the main driver currently, through the Code for Sustainable Homes.

However, the barriers to the implementation of the code are currently too high to prevent widespread action. These barriers are threefold. Firstly, technical and design barriers, mainly regarding small scale renewable energy which is perceived as unreliable. Secondly, the cultural barrier of unwillingness to implement more experimental designs to include and integrate renewable energy. And thirdly, the perceived increased costs of this implementation and the costs of ultimately breaking the economic viability barrier of this technology (Osmani and O’Reilly, 2009).

Despite these barriers I believe that the legislation is sound, and is suitably long term (up to 2050) to provide sufficient impetus to the construction industry to implement self-sustaining homes. However, my criticism would be that there is insufficient economic incentives from government and a good way to initiate this would be to incorporate RE into social housing to show how the industry can have confidence in the technology. But fundamentally, the UK needs a comprehensive and unchanging energy policy to provide confidence in the requirements of climate change mitigation and energy security in the long term, irrespective of political ideals. This will give the holistic basis to ensure the innovations required to remove the economic and cultural barriers currently associated with sustainable and zero-carbon homes.

Love thy neighbour?

In light of the green tax reductions announced this week, indicating a pressure to move to a more regulated energy market, I was considering the influence that the ‘Big 6’ hold over the country, and what would happen if the market was decentralised. The notion of ‘community energy’ (CE) has been present in energy policy since around 2003 (with the Energy White Paper) although whether this has translated into an incentive for community energy projects or investment.

Community energy comes in various forms between the following three degrees of community involvement (Devine-Wright, 2005):

•  Information led – passive recipients
• Varying balances of partnership – between different stakeholders
• Ownership led – high local control

And is essentially a community coming together, either independently or working with private investors and/or public sectors to construct and operationalise RE on a small scale, to either use for community energy (usually schools or village halls etc) or to be sold back to the grid to reduce energy bills.

Other European countries, especially Denmark and Germany have a much higher community energy involvement than the UK. The ideas behind CE stem from issues in the 70s regarding local energy generation (Walker and Devine-Wright, 2008) advocating the ‘soft energy path’. In the 90s, there was a (marginal) ‘dash for wind’ which led to intense opposition to renewables by local communities, the CE occurred in response to this information deficit and perceived ideas (Walker et al., 2007).

Communities can have involvement in RE projects in many ways:

• Supporting the project and being well informed
• Allowing the project to go ahead (not oppose it at planning stage)
• Initiating the project through a group in the community finding investors
• Investing financially as a community
• Providing the manual construction for the infrastructure
• Administering and running the operations

However, the term ‘community’ is ambiguous as there can be communities of proximity and communities of interest (Walker, 2008). Also the parameters of community are hard to define, both socially and spatially therefore flexibility in policy is required, else the meaning of community is too constrained. Caution is required when approaching a project under the term ‘community’, as labelling it as such yet not fulfilling the perceived benefits may only increase resentment towards RE energy projects on a local scale.

In the UK, in 2001, the Community Renewables Initiative set up Local Support Teams in certain areas, and these teams had significant effects; such as more than double the applications to the Clear Skies initiative (a scheme to encourage communal/community renewable) compared to areas without the Local Support Teams (Walker and Devine-Wright, 2008). However, the Community Renewables Initiative – in its 5 year lifetime – only created 150 community projects, therefore its success is very questionable and if community energy is to be encouraged, better incentives and initiatives need to be conceived.

The benefits of community energy are shown by the example of Zschadraβ in south-east Germany where the community co-owned a local wind farm and fully owned a PV cell system, through a community club. The community energy concept was created there to deal with public spending – as energy was the second biggest expense. The school’s old oil burner was replaced with a 300MW woodchip burner which heats the school, gym, club house, bowling alley and administrative buildings, and the fuel is supplied by the residents. This community is estimated to become energy independent by 2050, and all the savings from reduced energy demand, increased efficiencies and on site renewables are passed on to the community (Musall and Kuik, 2011).

Criticisms of community energy include the assumption that all in the community will want to or be able to invest time or money into the project, whereas the reality may be that only the wealthier households could participate, therefore negating the community benefits. The project may attract only those who are already heavily involved in the community or those wishing to be involved in democratic debating (Hoffman and High-Pippert, 2005).

The increased levels of acceptance of RE associated with community energy does not necessarily translate to an increased support of large scale projects, however the potential for CE is large therefore this could propose a paradigm shift in the attitudes of renewable energy. The benefits associated with this system when run and organised correctly, and to suit each different community, would be desirable to all; increased cohesion, increased sustainability, lower energy bills, reliable supply and stronger engagement with local issues.

Here is a short video from last year, from the Community Energy Roundtable, it gives a few ideas of the benefits and challenges to the future of community energy.