Two years of PV generation

A year ago, I reported on our PV panels.  You may have noticed a little more sunshine this year that last (I even spoke to an Aberdeenshire farmer yesterday who didn't complain about the weather). 

That gave us 3030 kWh of generation and we imported 2426 kWh - both changes in the right direction.  We consumed a little less 3851 kWh.   It's nice to be carbon negative on our electricity (we import from a 100% renewables company). 

Just the oil central heating and travel to focus on ....

A Challenge - EUR 44 per head for cycling?

With some amount of fanfare, the Scottish Government has published their Cycle Action Plan for Scotland 2013 which reviews and updates their 2010 plan.

They describe their target of 10% journeys by cycle as ambitious.  It is ambitious given the paucity of the plan.  But it's not ambitious by international standards. 

So what are the Scottish Government actually proposing?
One measure you can't escape from is cash.

Netherlands EUR 487m/ year - so EUR 30 per head of population each year


London is spending £104m/year - some EUR 21 per head of population each year.

The Peterhead Cycle Demostration project has a total budget of £185,000 - a one off-spend of EUR 13 per head over the three year life of the project.

So what is the Scottish Government proposing in their nice new shiny CyclingAction Plan?  Well it looks like there will be less than £47m over three years (part of the monies are for walking and safer streets) so that EUR 55m.  Sound greats - until you remember that between a population of 5.3m and over 3 years so that comes down to a miserly EUR 3.4 per head of population each year.

If the Government are serious about cycling, perhaps a good place to start would be allocating the 10% modal share aim in terms of the transport budget to cycling.    Transport Scotland has £2,000m a year.  So £200m a year for cycling from that budget.  Ok that's then  EUR 44 per head - but have a lot of catching up to do to get the type of infrastucture that people enjoy in the Netherlands and Denmark.

Winter cycling in Copenhagen






Bees

I have just come to the end of my first 48 hours as a beekeeper.  I kindly acquired a hive full - 11 frames with bees and stores across the frames.

I have thought about keeping bees for many years but was prompted to get myself organised due to the reports of declining populations.  I think this is probably a combination of factors: varroa mites, loss of habitat, pesticides, ... and public policy doesn't work well in multi-faceted situations.

We need robust research through 2014 and 2014 when the neonicotinoid temporary ban is in place and in my view, serious preventative action to ensure that no more bee diseases are imported.

Bees are simply too important to risk.

For those interested, here is a short video of my bees bringing in pollen today.  I'm hoping they have found sources other than the oil seed rape (which will have been treated with neonicotinoids) to the north - and as the pollen seems to be cream/pale yellow, I reckon they may have.


(and yes, the entrance block is ill-fitting and the pollen is in 'pollen baskets', specially adapted hairs on the back legs of the bees)




Generation, consumption and import

We have just had the first full year where we've had PV panels and monitoring of our energy consumption.  We have also been sad enough to take daily readings of generation and import.

So for other energy anoraks out there (showing 7 day moving averages to get rid of the 'noise'):

The captions are a little difficult to read, but you see that Consumption (green) generally sticks in the 10-15kWh/day with dips when we are on away, import (red) seems to have a baseline of 5kWh/day in summer, rising to 10kWh (or more) in winter and that the PV panels (blue) are more or less performing as we expected (dark blue). 

The electricity bills have more-or-less halved as a result of the PV panels.

Annual figures come out at: 
PV Generation 2856 kWh
Import 2505 kWh
Consumption 3913 kWh 

... and therefore we estimate Export at 1447 kWh.  


We are pretty focused on running the washing machine and the dishwasher when the sun shines (or at least during the day) but it's diffcult to time-shift much of our other consumption.


You can see an overnight cycle which is fridge/freezer.  The peaks are the cooking and kettle and then we have computers and TVs.

The apparent base load is getting our attention but the honest calculation is that moving to more energy efficient appliances but it's not worth us making a special effort so we will think about this as we need to replace   The induction hob however does seem to be efficient (all our cooking is electric).  We do have a few gizmos to help ensure that we don't leave things on standby. 

So, what we really need is cost effective ways to store our electricty to use it later (see previous post below) - and focus on using less oil for water and space heating.  The woodburning stove is great for cold days and we have ready supplies of wood - but I think tackling the insulation of our solid walls is the next serious investment.   


Thanks to the Macauley (now James Hutton) Institute for the Consumption Monitoring kit.
 

Energy use and Generation

A recent report from UKERC The UK energy system in 2050:Comparing Low-Carbon, Resilient Scenarios highlights a few important challenges we all have to face.  These are a selection of the main 'pull out' quotes from the report (my bold)
  • ... the sets of technologies to meet the challenge exist, and deploying them is a much lower cost option than the damages from climate change, estimates elsewhere that will ensue if the UK and other countries fail to rise to it.
  • .. of the ways in which the Elastic Demand version of MARKEL (the model used) can meet policy objectives (e.g. carbon reduction constraints) is to reduce energy service demands through price elasticities of demand. 
  • Hydrogen and electric vehicles dominate the transport mix by 2050, this has resultant impacts on the power sector with vehicles being recharged during time of low demand
  • For the targets to be met an economy wide carbon price would need to be gradually imposed, on top of all existing carbpon.enery taxes, reaching about the current level of fuel duty by 2050.
  • All buildings, new and existing, will have to be much more energy efficient.
With the ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere tripping over the 400 mark for the first time and China now announcing serious carbon emission reduction targets, we have a two choices:
bury our heads in the sand or take action.


Hello again

I haven't posted on this blog for a while: I felt I wanted some distance between my new role as a planning consultant and private person and my previous role as councillor.  But I shall now start blogging again on things that interest, intrigue or engage me.