Free information and ecology

For several years now I've taken two things as self-evident. I'm also acutely aware that these are not at all evident to other people. 

The first is that the human race is treading on very thin ice when it comes to our relationship with the natural ecosystems of the planet. And the ice is about to melt, because that's the nature of thin ice.

The other is that intellectual property, and the notion of owning ideas and creations of a non-physical nature is just wrong. 

Since I believe both of these things, I don't usually think of them as separable, much less contradictory. However, I've been wondering recently whether intellectual property could actually be good for the environment. It's possible that freely allowing information to spread is going to lead to more consumerism and greater damage to the environment.

Then I think, no way, I must just be getting old and veering to the right. 

Cropping Energy

Or to visually compare our energy production and consumption with the financial income and expenses, see the graphs below. 

The wavy orange line is the simulated generation in the graph above, and in the graph below is the income we'd get if we sold all of that at 48 yen. The higher bars are the generation or income since January 2012, and the lower bars are the consumption or electricity bill.

I wish they all could be rechargeable

I saw some non-rechargeable batteries in the house. They were for a label printer that isn't used much and gets through one set of batteries in about five years. So it's not worth getting rechargeables. Or at least it seems intuitively like it's not worth it. At least it may not be worth it financially. 

In terms of environmental impact, it's probably always worth getting rechargeable batteries. Even if they are just going to sit in a device for ten years. At the end of the time, they can be taken out, recharged and reused somewhere else. 

I'm not really sure why they have to be so much more expensive than one-use dry cells. I'm sure a lot of the costs are the same. In fact I found with CR2s that I could get rechargeables online cheaper than the non-rechargeables in the local electric shop.

A battery has a metal case, which makes the anode. It has a rod down the middle, making the cathode. Between them is some chemical compound which can store and release current. The chemical compound is different, but it's only a few grammes. It's not like it's gold.

The costs are all wrapped up in economies of scale, and dry cell batteries are cheaper because more of them have been made for longer. Edison-style incandescent light bulbs aren't cheaper than LEDs because there are fewer resources, or because it's intrinsically easier to make vacuum-filled glass bulbs but because factories have been set up to make them, and the plant is all paid for. In fact once the plant is in place, LEDs are likely to be cheaper.

Also, the rechargeable batteries are more expensive because of supply and demand, since people are prepared to pay for more, and because the extra cost and the sale of battery chargers can mean more shop shelf space.

What would really make sense is solar-powered batteries. When they go flat, you could leave them somewhere in sunlight, like a windowsill. The tricky part would be to get the charging circuit to work with the battery characteristics to ensure effective charging without any memory effects, and without shortening the battery life. They may take a few days to charge, but batteries come in a few standard sizes, and you can get extras.

The solar panels would also need to be tough, since they represent the outer casing, so a next generation of solar cells is needed.

There, I've written about it, now I'm sure if I search the web for a few minutes I'll find somebody has made some. 

It takes four litres of water to make a one-litre bottle of water

Apparently. According to some people on a radio programme talking about a Stephen Emmot's book 10 billion.

I was just as shocked and horrified as you are. Then I started thinking about the alternatives.

Reusing a bottle is a great idea. Much better than buying a new one.  PET bottles are perfect for reuse. They're good for recycling too, but recycled PET goes to other uses rather than making bottles, since health and safety regulations prevent post-consumer recycled waste from being used on food and drink packaging. This is strange when you think that they've been using recycled glass for years, and they are quite happy to let us use recycled trees and recycled oil. Anyway, recycling is not going to reduce the amount of oil used to make new PET bottles. It could even use more energy by providing cheap resources to make other products we didn't know we didn't need, thrust onto the market with an eco label, because they are supporting recycling.

So reuse is definitely better than buying a new bottle. But back to the four litres of water, how many litres of water does it take to reuse a bottle? Remember you have to wash the bottle before refilling it. Who knows how many litres of water a trip to the doctor would take if you didn't, and somebody got sick as a result! Tap water flows at around 0.1 litres per second, so the litres quickly start clocking up. Don't forget to wash your hands too. And wring out the cloth you used to wipe the bottle.

Or you could just use a cup. Bottled water, at least in English-speaking countries, wasn't invented until the 1980s. Before then it was a quaint and derisable habit of continentals, whose primitive urban planners allegedly hadn't mastered plumbing. Then it was the preserve of yuppies and source of scorn to pour upon them. And now we are all buying water, left right and centre, and carrying it around wherever we go. So do we really need all this water? Has the world got more thirsty? Or is this just a result of beverage producers such as Coca Cola measuring their success by the percentage of human fluid consumption that they supply? Or is it part of a space programme, ensuring that there is a massive supply of water, ready and packed to send off in the escape pods?

Even using a cup is going to consume more than a litre per litre because you still have to wash it. Another thing we tend to do when getting water from the tap is to let it run for a while, and this is going to use more water too. I know you could be letting the water run while rinsing out the bottle, but the chances are you start filling the bottle after rinsing it, then realise that you didn't let the water run before that, so you need to rinse it out again.  A minute later the tap is still running, and that's six litres, mostly down the drain.

And the chances are that if you get a cup you could end up with a jug, which needs washing too, and if there's a jug people may start putting ice in it. And maybe a slice of lemon. 

So, it takes four litres of water to make a one-litre bottle of water, does it?

Well, that's not too bad. I wonder when they can reduce that to three litres?

A roof over our heads

We've now paid off the two-year loan for the solar panels. That means that we own the roof over our heads. This is a great thing. We still don't own the walls or the land beneath us, as those are long-term low-interest loans, but at least we own the roof.

Perhaps we should have put the panels in with the builder's contract, but it seemed to make the financing easier to pay some of this up front and get a separate loan for the rest of it. The rate was higher, but since we paid it back in two years rather than thirty-five, the total cost of the loan was a lot less. The first thing the bank advised us when we put the loan application in was to cut the costs by taking some of the panels off the roof. This is strange because it was about the same time they published this report in Japanese which seems positive towards domestic solar.

Over the year and a half of generation, we've earned 47,000 yen per month on average, and paid 7,500 yen for our electricity bill. We sold 89% of what we generated, so without our panels we would have paid another couple of thousand yen on the electricity bills. 

At this rate we'll pay back the investment on the panels in around eight and a half years. I'm not sure who else the bank is lending to, but a return on investments in under nine years seems fairly healthy, and I really don't know why they aren't insisting that all houses they finance put panels on the roof, even offering to fund them in return for the electricity companies paying directly to the bank to repay them. 

In terms of kWh we've generated an average 36 kWh per day, which is a little over twice the 16 kWH we use. In terms of the amount of electricity we are getting for each kilowatt of solar panel we have installed, that's 1450 kWh/kW per year or 4 kWh/kW per day. 

I'm not exactly sure how much of the cost we can attribute to the roof and how much to the panels. I have a back-of-the-envelope estimate from the architect, printed out on an undated piece of A4 with some of the figures to the nearest yen, and some to the nearest 10,000, which compares the option we took with a conventional roof and solar panels installed on top. It compares an older quote from Rooftech for an integrated roof system of 4.44 kW (actually written as kWh) which was around 3 million yen plus an estimate of 1.35 million for the roof work needed underneath their roof, which ends up as 4.35 million; 4.04 million after getting the grant. The other quote was 2.4 million for 4.81 kW of panels, with a roof estimated at 1.81 million coming to 4.21 million; 3.87 million after the grant.

In other words, the integrated roof and panel system was more expensive than installing panels on a conventional roof, but only about 3 or 4 percent. It should be added that this was for around half the roof area covered with solar panels, and it's not clear what kind of roof the alternative was. Anyway, we chose to go for the integrated roof because it seemed well worth the potentially slightly extra cost for the simpler design elegance. 

Getting a good rate

Currencies trade around a fictional middle rate. This is always moving and you're never going to get it, unless you're on the trading floor, which these days would mean you are a computer. Banks have buying rates and selling rates, which typically add or take off 4 yen for each pound traded. Actually, as far as they are concerned, they are always taking the 4 yen, and as far as you are concerned, you are adding it. The bank always wins. They will also charge you for transferring from bank accounts in different countries.

Some banks allow you to hold accounts in different currencies, and let you change money between them. Businesses sometimes have accounts that will allow live trades, on the current market rate with a small commission rather than a published daily rate with a large commission. If you have one of these accounts, that may be the best way to trade. If you know someone who has one, you could ask them to help, but there is no guarantee that they will get the rate you want, when you want it.

If not, there are two other ways that will get a better rate than you would walking into a bank. One is a credit card with a bank in the currency you are trading from. Unless it's a debit card, withdrawing cash will likely be very expensive, but using the card for shopping will incur a charge of 2.75%, with a minimum of 2 pounds, so if you're buying something over 73 quid you're paying 2.75%, and anything over 50 quid is probably getting a better rate than you'd get from the banks.

Since my main worry is not so much getting a good rate myself as making sure the banks get as little of it as possible, the other way is my favourite.  I found someone who needs to transfer currency the other way. We came to an agreement to make transfers each month, based on the average rate over the last month. Unless the currency pair were violently swinging around the time of our exchange, both of us were better off as the rate was between the TTB and the TTS.