The Greening of Hedgerley Wood

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Free TV Show from Ustream

Jamie from OneWorld put me onto AudioBoo, which seems to me much better than Twitter. You can embed the results, so here is a first trial:

If you check the site you can also see the map reference and picture that goes with the recording. But you can’t seem to search that site yet.

To the new Prius we’ve added excellent bike racks at only £65 each. They hold the bikes really well, so now we’ve been able to get beyond the impossible local hills to find some really nice cycle tracks. Feeling much better and a little fitter after this week’s eco holiday.

We’ve been keen for a long time to install a wood-burning stove to replace the old aga. The problem was always going to be the solid concrete chimney breast built in the 1930s. In the event it took two very persistent workmen from the Czech Republic most of a day the hammer through a big enough opening to the pull through the chimney lining.

It wasn’t until the second day that they managed to get it all installed.

Since then we’ve been only moderately pleased with this Clearview model. It’s heats this side of the house pretty well, but it uses more logs than we expected and it doesn’t seem to stay alight as it should when the vents are closed down. Maybe our chestnut, beech and oak logs are not ideal. Or maybe we have to learn more about the optimum settings. We’d been looking forward to coming down to a warm kitchen in the morning.

However, the ground source heat pump has performed heroically throughout this very cold winter and has kept the whole house really warm.

It’s a long story but at last we have gone for a Prius.

Ideally we would have liked an electric car and my researches at the motor show turned up a few possibilities:

But then I went to a really interesting lunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the leading manufacturers were discussing their plans for launching electric cars in the next few years. What I picked up was the very strong advice that this was not the right time to buy electric - at least for a family car. The reason is that battery technology is evolving rapidly, so the plan for the future is to sell the car and battery separately - like a torch. That way batteries can be upgraded and even exchanged at future electric filling stations. But buying a car with a fixed battery now would render it unsalable in a few years. And it will be, by all accounts, at least three years before the new electric cars will be available in Europe.

So the best option for the next few years seemed to be the Prius, not only for the low emissions but also because I’d really enjoyed driving them in the States. Plus Andrew has one and is very fond of it. Second-hand prices turned out to be reasonable. And so far we are really delighted with it.

It seems that this issue has come out because companies have only recently been required to publish the fuel mix. And it’s going to shock a lot of people.

I had an authoritative response from someone in the business (who had better not be named):

“I am not surprised at this. Ecotricity is run by Dale Vince… He has persuaded everyone that ecotricity is the greenest of the green, not because it is, but simply because he says that he will plough the profits of his business back into only developing new renewable energy projects. At one level I understand this logic but when I look at it from a business perspective this is just what any “renewable energy company” would do. The fact is that RE is very profitable. It is only recently that companies have had to disclose their energy mix, and so you can actually see that…for many years honest, ethically minded people thought that buying from Ecotricity was the very best they could do when in fact a large proportion of their energy was coming from Nukes!!

This really is a triumph of marketing over substance and… I strongly suggest that you move back to Good Energy who do actually sell 100% renewable.”

So, taking this advice, we’ve switched back to Good Energy. According to electricityinfo.org they are the only UK supplier using a 100% renewable fuel mix.

Back to to the Carbon Account to update our footprint.

I’ve just got round to signing up to Torchbox’s carbon calculator - The Carbon Account. It’s quite the best I’ve used for a number of reasons. It logs detailed information about your particular vehicles and your energy supplier, looks up the latest information on them and presents your progress to reducing your carbon footprint in a really clear, evolving display. The result was higher than I expected (3.57 tonnes) but the reason for this turned out to be rather shocking.

The Carbon account uses information on the fuel mix used by the different energy suppliers from here. We were with Good Energy and they show up as using 100% renewable sources. But we switched to Ecotricity precisely because we were told that they were more truly green. But based on this information, they in fact only source 24% from renewables - with the same percentage coming from coal.

So what’s this about? Going Ecotricity’s web site, I can’t find any reference to their fuel mix. Instead they make great play with the fact that they are the largest investors in new renewables. But is this really the point? And should we switch back to Good Energy?