How energy-efficient are Charlbury homes?

Tue 28 Mar 2023, 20:20 (last edited on Tue 28 Mar 2023, 20:35)

Nothing New is Needed - as Liz points out. I can point to Housing Coops in the 70s who did Zero Energy housing without the benefits of heat pumps, one of which I stayed in regularly when working on stuff with the Open University in the 80s. 

I again paste in a review article from the New Scientist below as being a subscriber some stuff is locked behind paywalls. Fair do's -if you don't want to read it, skip on.

Here's the title. I've just bought it (Hive.co.uk has just run out of copies so alas, Amazon bought...) but it got snaffled first by someone in the family so I haven't perused it . Here is the title, and its an important thesis to read:

No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air by Mark Jacobson. Penguin in paperback via CUP.

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We don't need 'miracle' green technologies to save the planet

A focus on revolutionary solutions like carbon capture and geoengineering is slowing the uptake of existing answers to the problems of climate change, air pollution and energy security, says environmental engineer Mark Jacobson

New Scientist Default Image

BILL GATES has put billions of dollars into new technologies he believes will help halt climate change: small modular nuclear reactors, biofuels, capturing carbon dioxide from fossil fuel facilities (carbon capture) or the air (direct air capture) and geoengineering (reducing solar radiation by adding particles to the atmosphere). ExxonMobil is building a “blue hydrogen” plant that produces the fuel from natural gas and tries to capture the CO2 emissions. The US Inflation Reduction Act provides funding that Gates, ExxonMobil and other companies can use to capture CO2 . It also helps to fund Gates’s dreams of small modular reactors and bioenergy.

The problem is that none of these technologies is useful for helping to solve the climate crisis, let alone the wider air pollution or energy security problems the world faces. We only have until 2030 to eliminate 80 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and until 2035 to 2050 to banish the rest to avoid 1.5°C of warming. Moreover, 7 million people die prematurely each year due to air pollution and hundreds of millions more become ill. About 90 per cent of this pollution is from energy. Lastly, the world faces several energy-security risks, including the instability that will result from fossil fuels and uranium running out.

Given the magnitude and urgency of these problems, the best solution is one that can be implemented quickly, at low cost, while tackling all three issues at once. However, almost all the technologies proposed by Gates and ExxonMobil, among others, don’t attempt to address pollution or energy security – and they hardly help with climate change.

Carbon capture, direct air capture and blue hydrogen – which all require equipment and energy – increase air pollution, relative to using the same money to replace fossil fuels with renewables, while scarcely reducing CO2 . New nuclear plants have a 10 to 21-year time lag between planning and operation (too long to help solve the problems discussed here), costs that are five to eight times those of new wind and solar power per unit energy, and CO2 emissions that are nine to 37 times those of onshore wind. Bioenergy produces air pollution and greenhouse gases while using rapacious amounts of land and water.

Rather than searching for a miracle, we need to look at the wind, water and solar technologies right in front of us. Combining these with energy storage, efforts to encourage people to shift the time of their electricity use to even out demand, a well-interconnected electrical transmission system to limit the problems of intermittent power supply from renewables, and efficient electrical appliances, such as heat pumps, will allow us to solve all three ginormous problems at low cost worldwide.

A wind, water and solar system would use much less energy than a combustion-based one. Globally, the energy that people use typically falls by over 56 per cent with these green technologies. On top of that, wind, water and solar reduce the cost per unit energy by another 12 per cent on average, resulting in a 63 per cent lower annual energy bill worldwide.

The global upfront capital cost of building such a system by 2050 is around $62 trillion. However, due to the $11 trillion annual energy cost savings, the payback time is less than six years.

What is more, we already have 95 per cent of the technologies we need to solve all three problems. So we don’t require “miracle” technologies. To solve our problems, we need to avoid policies that divert funds from true solutions. We must educate the public and policy-makers about what works and what doesn’t, and thus overcome the misinformation that has distracted us to date.

Mark Jacobson is a professor of environmental engineering at Stanford University. His new book is No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air by Mark Jacobson is published by Cambridge University Press.