Are you positive wool is carbon negative?

I'm trying to understand the carbon footprint of buildings, and I always hit a mental roadblock when I see negative numbers. This just struck me on a list of insulation materials where wool was sticking out of the wrong side of the graph. There are also negative carbon footprints for cellulose fibre and cork. This negative accounting applies not only to insulation products but also structural materials such as wood.

Wood is certainly a great material to build with, and is definitely going to emit less carbon into the atmosphere than concrete, steel or glass. It also contains more carbon, and any atom of carbon in the building is one less molecule of carbon dioxide or methane in the atmosphere. But does that make its impact negative?

I have a couple of thought experiments that make me skeptical. First, what if you used twice as much wood on a building project?

If wood is carbon negative, then more wood would reduce the carbon footprint of the building. So just sticking a load of extra planks around the building would make it more "green", even if you use the same amount of concrete, steel and glass. Or you could just deliver the wood to the site and leave it in a pile on the ground. But you've cut down twice as many trees, so how can that be better?

Next thought experiment: what if every man-made structure used wood?

This would be impossible because human structures outweigh biomass. You would run out of trees, and all other living things. The planet is not a factory and you can't just increase production because there is more demand. Tree growth is limited by the amount of sunlight that falls on the trees, the area their roots have to grow into, and their access to water. Trees can take decades to grow and absorb the carbon stored in them. We have to be careful with our applications of economic calculations on natural systems.

So I'm starting off sceptical of a negative carbon impact for wood, which is made from plants that spend their life absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. What about wool? That comes from animals which spend their life emitting carbon dioxide and methane. But wool is also listed on the negative side of the carbon impacts.

Of course wool contains carbon and that carbon comes from grass, and the grass has captured the carbon from the atmosphere. So I guess you could argue that the carbon is being sequestered and stored in the building rather than being left in the atmosphere. That's lovely, but at what cost?

Sheep are warm-blooded animals, which means that most of the calories they consume go into maintaining their body heat. Even though they are wearing highly insulating fleeces over 80% of their calorie intake goes into keeping warm. Given that they are walking around and growing fat and muscle, it's hard to imagine more than a couple of percent of those green carbs they are eating going into wool.

I could do some calculations on the back of an envelope, but instead I looked at published research papers. Brock et al. (2013) looked at a farm in New South Wales and estimated 25 kg of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per kg of wool at the farm gate. A study on farms in Patagonia by Peri et al. (2020) estimated around 8-19 kg CO2e per kg of wool. 

CO2 is made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms, so burning a kilogram of carbon will give us about 3.7 kg of carbon dioxide, or living things will turn 3.7kg of atmospheric carbon dioxide into one kilogram of biological carbon. So even on a good day, assuming that sheep's wool is 100% carbon, taking the lowest figure in those studies, and ignoring manufacture and transport, for each kg of wool in the building there would be well over two kg going into the atmosphere. Am I missing something? 

I was only thinking about sheep working to produce wool, but of course they produce meat as well. Both papers note that meat production changes the estimate, which accounts for some of the range in the second study.

Sheep not only produce wool and meat, they also have other effects for land management. They are excellent at deforestation. Even if they cannot cut down trees, they will eat any saplings before they can grow and make sure that the trees never grow back.

Sheep farming:
Causing deforestation for at least six millennia 

You can see in the background of this picture from the Campaign for Wool "Why to use wool insulation." It should be titled, "Sheep farming: Causing deforestation for at least six millennia!" People talk about wolves in sheep's clothing, but in terms of ecological impact: compared to sheep the wolf is a lamb. Historically speaking this has been very helpful as sheep have cleared the way for other kinds of agriculture and for urban development. We are now in different times. As an Englishman these rolling hills with drystone walls and woolly sheep seem like a perfect rural scene, but it is as man-made as a concrete jungle.

Of course using wool insulation in a building is going to lead to less energy use in your house, like any other insulation. Using insulation is almost certainly a better choice than not using insulation, which would force the inhabitants of the building to use more energy to stay warm or cool. But that is a choice between two different energy uses. You can use all the insulation in the world, and your heating bills are never going to be negative.

And wool may be a lower-carbon option than other insulation materials such as polyurethane or extruded polystyrene. But you may not want to use wool underneath your foundation, and you may find that higher performing insulators can be thinner, which may reduce the need for other building materials.

I don't want to suggest that wool is a bad insulator. Just let's be honest about its carbon impact, think a bit more about the ecological impact of sheep farming and give up with the brownie points.

Sequestering carbon is a good idea, and if we can find places to store carbon, that will help keep it out of the atmosphere. But negative numbers don't exist in the real world. I don't think we can ever make a truly carbon-negative building, any more than we can generate energy by taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

We can just try to reduce the impact as much as possible.

References

Photo from: 

Campaign for Wool (2020). Why use wool insulation in your home? http://www.campaignforwool.org/why-use-wool-insulation-in-your-home/

Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Colin N Waters, Anthony D Barnosky, John Palmesino, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Matt Edgeworth, Cath Neal, Alejandro Cearreta, Erle C Ellis, Jacques Grinevald, Peter Haff, Juliana A Ivar do Sul, Catherine Jeandel, Reinhold Leinfelder, John R McNeill, Eric Odada, Naomi Oreskes, Simon James Price, Andrew Revkin, Will Steffen, Colin Summerhayes, Davor Vidas, Scott Wing, & Alexander P Wolfe (2016) Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective. The Anthropocene Review, vol. 4(1), 9-22. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053019616677743

Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, & Ron Milo (2018) The biomass distribution on Earth. PNAS, 115 (25) 6506-6511; first published May 21, 2018; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 

Brock, Philippa M., Graham, Phillip, Madden, Patrick, & Alcock, Douglas J. (2014). Greenhouse gas emissions profile for 1 kg of wool produced in the Yass Region, New South Wales: A Life Cycle Assessment approach. Animal production science, 53(6). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268631844_Greenhouse_gas_emissions_profile_for_1_kg_of_wool_produced_in_the_Yass_Region_New_South_Wales_A_Life_Cycle_Assessment_approach 

Pablo L. Peri, Yamina M. Rosas, Brenton Ladd, Ricardo Díaz-Delgado, & Guillermo Martínez Pastur (2020). Carbon Footprint of Lamb and Wool Production at Farm Gate and the Regional Scale in Southern Patagonia. Sustainability,12(8), 3077. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/8/3077 

Thinking of Getting a Wood Burning Stove?

There is something magical about wood fires, and people are often tempted to put them into their houses. In writing on low energy building, I haven't really talked about wood burning stoves. People sometimes ask how you can fit a wood burning stove in a low energy building, but the question you first need to answer is: why do you want a wood burning stove?

Before you get one for your house, and especially before you plan to build a new house around a wood burner, you should check that you meet at least four or five of these seven criteria. You don't have to meet all the criteria, and in fact some of them may contradict each other. But you should meet most of them.

1. You have a sustainable source of wood.

Perhaps you live in a forest, or a relative has an orchard, or you live next to a timber yard, or you just inherited a derelict warehouse with a large collection of broken pallets. If you don't know where your wood is going to come from, then you will need to buy it. You may have thought that wood grows on trees. In fact wood does grow on trees, but those trees grow on land, and that land usually belongs to someone. The trees also play a major role in creating habitat for wildlife, and are acting as a sink of atmospheric carbon and a source of oxygen. 

Well-managed forest can provide better habitat for wildlife and can provide more effective carbon sinks, but burning wood will send some of the carbon that has been stored over the last decades or centuries straight back into the atmosphere. Even if the forests are well managed, burning the wood that grows there may not be the best use of it. If left on the forest floor, wood can provide excellent nutrition for the forest and habitat for some of the diverse life there. 

Not really firewood!

So wood may not be the best fuel for your house in terms of economics or ecology.

 

Or it may be the best thing in terms of economics and ecology. 

I don't know the answer, but if you're thinking of using wood, please find out!

2. You like chopping and storing wood, making fires and cleaning stoves and chimneys.

Having a wood burning stove is a lifestyle choice. That's another way of saying that it will take more time, cost more money and may be worse than the alternatives in various other ways. Wood needs to be chopped and stored where it will stay long enough to dry out, but not too long in the same place where it will attract insects and other undesirables. If you only occasionally want to burn stuff, it may be better to go camping. There are some great campsites that allow you to have a fire!

3. You have no neighbours.

You may be planning to go off-grid, which is a great idea if you live away from civilisation, and this may go hand-in-hand with the first criteria. If you are in a residential area, your neighbours may not appreciate smoke getting into their washing. This article in the Huffington Post suggested that the most efficient wood-burning stove will put out the same levels of pollution as 18 diesel cars. Would you like a fleet of cars driving around your neighbourhood?

4. You are going to get the most efficient model available, with a properly installed chimney.

Benjamin Franklin did make significant improvements to stove design back in the 1700s, but even in the 1800s wood burning stoves were only 30% efficient. They sent out particles at levels that would be illegal today, and allowed creosote to build up in chimneys, creating a fire hazard.

Things have got better since the 1800s but even the most efficient wood burning stove will only burn wood at around 80% efficiency. 

5. Your wood burning stove can run on pellets.

Part of the problem is the wood itself. It seems that wood was not designed with burning efficiency as the first priority. Wood pellets provide a more even fuel and allow higher efficiency. Many wood pellets are currently made from sawdust or waste wood products. There are also pellets made from grass cuttings. If demand increases, wood will be cut directly to make pellets, which may remove some of the supply-end energy efficiency, but they will still burn cleaner. 

More efficiency means more of the wood is turned into water and carbon dioxide, rather than other more polluting substances or unburnt particles or residues. So more efficiency means less pollution and less cleaning. Air quality is an issue in many places, and burning wood certainly does not improve it.

You may consider a dedicated pellet burner, which will be easier to clean, and easier to use since it feeds the pellets via a hopper and may be controlled by a thermostat and a timer. It will probably be cheaper to install since the unit usually has a heat exchanger so a simpler chimney can be used. If you're still wondering about the answer to question 1, wood pellets could be your answer. 

6. You are only going to light your stove a few times a year, and are mostly getting the stove because it will look nice in your living room.

If you're thinking of adding a wood-burning stove to a ready-built house, you may not need to worry about this question. But if you're building new, I recommend your first priority to be insulation rather than burning wood.

Depending on your climate, if you have a well-insulated house, most wood burning stoves will make your house overheat, except on the coldest few days of the year. Your well-insulated house should also be airtight, and this may not be sensible if you are burning wood.

7. You know that if burning wood was the best way to stay warm, everyone would still be using it.

Most of us no longer send telegrams, spin yarn on spinning wheels, or nip down to the local smithy to get a horse shoe fixed. We stopped doing these things because of new technology that is cheaper and more time-effective. Burning wood will likely be more expensive and more time consuming than the options. Wood was our first fuel source; if wood produced more energy than fossil fuel reserves, we would never have deforested vast areas of the planet to mine coal or pipe oil and gas. 

There is an old saying: if God had not intended us to burn wood, he would never have invented matches. Actually that's not an old saying at all, I just made it up. But there is something natural and wholesome about a wood fire. 

Burning wood is better for the carbon cycle than burning fossil fuels. However, it may be better to burn nothing. If you want to avoid or reduce fossil fuel use, the first thing you need to do is improve your insulation. Then it may be better to electrify your heating, which allows you to use renewable energy. 

If you see yourself as an eco-warrior and see fire as one of your weapons against the machine, then be aware of the possibility that with fire you are fighting against ecology rather than fighting for it! I know in the situation we are in, the choice between wood burning or electrified heating may be something like choosing between a bicycle and a skateboard as you prepare to go over a waterfall. 

I don't have all the answers, but I do have the questions! 

So how did you score? If you answered yes to most of them, you're good to go. If not, I recommend looking into heat pumps, either in self-contained air conditioning units, or producing hot water for radiators or underfloor piping.

Remember, taken in moderation, wood burning stoves can form part of a calorie-controlled energy diet for your planet!

References:

If you want to get a stove, go to Michael's Stove Shop.

For recent developments, analysis of factors that effect efficiency and a call to get below 1g of particulate per kg of wood, see "Performance history and further improvement potential for wood stove" by Øyvind Skreiberg & Morten Seljeskog (2019) in Chemical Engineering Transactions, 65. pp. 199-204.)

More details from the US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: Choosing and Installing Wood- and Pellet-Burning Appliances

Chapter on Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of Different Wood Products by Zdravko Pandur, Marijan Šušnjar, Marko Zorić, Hrvoje Nevečerel and Dubravko Horvat (2015)

Guardian 16th February, 2021: Wood burning at home now biggest cause of UK particle pollution

Are renewables helping gas burn, or is gasoline stopping electricity going to cars?

First they ignore you
Then they say you're stupid
Then they say you're wrong
Then they say you have an interesting idea
Then they say they thought so all along

"You have enough electricity to power all the cars in the country if you stop refining gasoline." According to Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk via green transportation. "You take an average of 5 kilowatt hours to refine one gallon of gasoline, something like the Model S can go 20 miles on 5 kilowatt hours."

We often hear complaints about renewable energy not really being renewable, because it uses some fossil fuels to produce the materials. It's interesting to note that the petrol that goes into cars is actually using electricity.

As usually things are much more complicated than it seems. Advocates of renewable energy see a future with 100% renewable energy. Skeptics see the energy costs of producing renewable infrastructure, and the source of that energy, and claim that the march to renewables will produce more carbon emissions so we are better off burning fossil fuels directly.

Some of the nuclear lobby, meanwhile, attack renewables and claim they are just being used as greenwash for the fossil fuel industry, which wants to be there when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining. In fact there are many common interests of the nuclear industry and renewable industry. One is electrification. Also, they can also both benefit from increased capacitance in the system: renewable energy because the production is unreliable and may not meet or match peaks in consumption; nuclear for exactly the opposite reason that production is constant and energy storage will mean demand can be met with less plant.

It's very unlikely that burning fossil fuels will lead to a fossil-fuel free future, unless you are cynically hoping that the only realistic fossil-free future is one where they have all been burnt. As a technological development, electrification makes renewables possible since the energy is easy to convert and transfer over large distances. The internal combustion engine has a much more limited diet.

Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes  is a 2015 paper by Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Mary A. Cameron, and Bethany A. Frew from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, and the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

They claim that existing technologies can be used to get the US onto 100% renewable power. The paper has some critics, of course.

This podcast from Science Vs asks whether 100% renewable energy is possible, and features Jacobson and Delucchi as well as some of their critics and more neutral observers. The answer is not exactly yes, and they point out a few areas will be very tricky to get onto renewables, such as iron smelting. But they suggest it's a pretty good direction to think about moving in.

In the conclusion, the podcast suggested people may need to change the way they live, using energy depending on how much is being generated. Use the air conditioning when the sun is shining. Do the washing when the wind is blowing. It's easy to see some logic there. It may be more tricky if people are expected to switch off the heating when there has not been much sunshine, since that's known as winter in several places.

It's interesting to note that at no point did the podcast mention efficiency. Increases in efficiency do not rely on people's behaviour. Also they are cumulative and compounding, so a seven-percent annual improvement in efficiency means half the energy use in ten years. This is certainly a high level of improvement, but the predictions of most of the renewable skeptics assume efficiency improvement of zero. This is also true of fossil fuel advocates and the nuclear industry, whose forecasts are consistently based on increased consumption of energy, and whose forecasts are consistently wrong,. Since they are in the business of selling energy, increased consumptions is in their best interests, and it's not at all surprising that it gets into their forecasts. If I was running a bakery I'd be hoping to increase my sales, and if I was planning for fewer customers in the future, I should probably be taking an early retirement, or at least changing my profession. Even in the paper by Jacobson et al., future energy production is based on the predictions of the IEA, International Energy Agency, who have been predicting the end of solar power growth for fifteen years.

Jargon - A glossary for the low energy builder

​Here is a brief glossary of jargon related to low-energy building, including English, Japanese and an English ​definition. It will soon move to a permanent page, where I hope to update it.

A​r​gon​ アルゴン​​: An inert gas used in multi-pane windows. It insulates around 50% ​better than air.

Astroturf movements​ 人工芝運動: Groups paid for by large corporations to appear to be grass-roots organisations, often supporting their projects or fighting against regulation. A victory of capitalism over morality!

​Cellulose insulation セルロースファイバー: Fibre-based insulation made from wood fibres, sometimes loose and blowable, and sometimes pressed together and bonded with its own resins. (Not universally acclaimed.)

Eco​ エコ​​:​ see green

EPS​ 発泡スチロール​​: Expanded polystyrene. Low-cost foam-based insulation material.​ Being foam-based it does not allow much air or water vapour to pass through. When installed it is important to avoid gaps, which can halve the performance. If used within a wooden structure in earthquake prone areas, it's possible that gaps will appear after quakes. Don't confuse with XPS​, which is much stronger, although can retain more moisture.​

​Fibre​glass​ グラスウール​​: Low ​cost fibre-based insulation material. Being fibre-based the insulation perfomance comes from air trapped between the fibres, which can move allowing water vapour through. A vapour barrier is therefore necessary to keep the building airtight. Not particularly pleasant to handle, but once installed there are no health risks until the building is butchered or demolished.


Green​ グリーン​​:​ see eco

Green bling (derogatory and somewhat archaic)​: Devices, fittings and coverings that can be added to building to make them "green". According to an arbitrary calculation, 90% of the ​building's environmental performance depends on invisible elements integrated into the structure and integral to the conceptual design. The effect of green bling is often like ordering a salad with your steak in the interest of becoming vegetarian.

Green wash​ing グリーンウォッシング​​: Portraying ​products, processes and activities as environmentally friendly without making any fundamental exchanges except in the advertising copy. (See sinsofgreenwashing.com.)
​
Kazoo blow​er​​ カズーブローアー(告発を不正にする者): ​Person who creat​es​ a lot of noise that will support the status quo and drown out ​voices of concern or dissent. (cf whistle blowing; see also astroturf)

Krypton​ クリプトン​​: Another inert gas used in multi-pane windows. ​This is another 50% better at insulating than argon, and allows windows to be much thinner while reaching high performance. Since the frames will also be thinner, and frames and their thermal bridges lose the most heat in window installations, making window panes thinner may not be such a high priority.

Low-e​ ​低E: A coating applied to internal window faces which has low emissivity. This reflects low-frequency back into the building, and improves the performance of windows.

​Mineral wool​ ロックウール: Another fibre-based insulator like fibreglass, but made from ceramics. A little more expensive than fibreglass with the same performance, but not as nasty to handle

Natural materials​ 自然材料:​ ​A somewhat vague term usually ​referring to products with no synthetic chemicals, made from trees. Often these trees were planted in neat rows, cut with chainsaws, transported by diesel-powered vehicles to processing mills running on thermal power stations.

Polyurethane​ 発泡ウレタン: ​​Another foam-based insulator that performs better than polystyrene.

​Thermal bridge サーマルブリッジ・熱橋: ​An extra loss of heat caused by joins between insulating materials, geometry of external structures and additional non-insulating materials. Which heat losses are usually calculated over areas, thermal bridges are calculated over lengths. As insulation improves, thermal bridges become more significant since a larger proportion of heat is lost through them, and also more critical as they can result in cold spots that will attract condensation.

​Vacuum 真空: ​In theory the best insulation material available, since vacuums contain nothing which will conduct. This is sometimes used in multipane windows and insulation panels. I can't help being skeptical about the long-term performance since there is a big pressure difference between the atmosphere and the vacuum, leakage will not be zero, and eventually this will be filled with air. This may take one month, one year or ten years, but you should be planning a building to last for fifty or a hundred years.

Vapour barrier​ 蒸気障壁:​ A membrane usually applied on the inside of the external walls, or within 25% of the insulation from the inside. This stops moisture from the internal air from getting through the walls where it would cause condensation. Some wall finishes act as vapour barriers. Highly insulated buildings should also be air tight, to prevent heat being lost or gained through leaking air. Depending on the performance, vapour barriers may also act as air barriers.

Warm edge​ ウォームエッジスペーサー: ​A technology used around the edges of multipane windows which prevents heat leaking through that weak link in the window assembly.

XPS ​押出ポリスチレン​​: Extruded Polystyrene. The same chemical composition as EPS, but extruded rather than expanded, and stronger. Suitable for use under and around foundations.

Lovelock and Reynolds

I was listening to James Lovelock talking the other day and something he said struck a chord. Although he's something like Moses to the ecological pantheon, his own views towards the environment and especially global warming are somewhat ambivalent. He lamented that an ecologist used to be someone who enjoyed walking in the country, but has become an angry protester.

Although the reaction of many to the amount of energy we are using is one of horror, he viewed the whole system in terms of the Reynolds number, and the increase in turbulence with more energy. Reynolds studied non-laminar flow, and you can see the effect of his eponymous number as you turn on a tap, first in a steady trickle, then with ripples and curves as the flow increases, and finally with splashes and crashes as it turns to chaos. In the same way, as we use more energy human output becomes much more interesting, and Lovelock suggested a threshold of one kilowatt per square metre for this to happen.

You probably don't need me to tell you this, but that's the amount of energy that comes from the sun. There are two implications, one dreadful, and the other divine.

The divine implications is that all of the stuff that's happening can be attributed to a concept from physics, and what appears to be chaotic and out of control is just business as usual for the universe. It's tempting to think of the world like a top that has been spinning merrily and steadily for a long time, and is now wobbling erratically before falling over at the end of its turn. Looking at the Reynolds number, rather than about to fall over, we are just starting to taking off.

The dreadful implication is that if we are going to continue to be "interesting" we need to continue using a kilowatt of energy per square metre, and this is not sustainable if we're using primary solar energy in the form of photovoltaics, secondary solar in the form of wind and waves, or historical solar in its various fossil forms.

Carbon free conference

We're having a language teachers conference in May and a few of us think it would be nice to make it carbon neutral. I think the main carbon emissions are going to come from people flying there. It's at the bottom of Kyushu, in a beautiful city called Miyazaki, and even people from Fukuoka at the top of Kyushu are likely to fly. I'd like to get the train, but it would be a ten-hour journey and cost more than the flight. Probably shouldn't even be going, but, ironically, it's about sustainability in language teaching.

Anyway, there are various sites that will estimate carbon costs of various things from car journeys to weddings in various places around the world. This makes a difference because, for example, using electricity in nuclear-powered France will produce about 20 times more CO2 than in hydro-electric Norway. Electricity from dirty coal in Estonia will produce ten times more than in France. This is just looking at Europe, where comparable data can be easily found.

We used a site called myclimate.org, which has localisations in various countries including Japan. A first rough estimate gave an output of 37 tonnes of CO2, and suggested we offset this with a donation of around 110,000 yen to one of their projects. None of their projects is in Japan, and many, but not all, are in developing countries. Their cost per tonne of carbon works out around 3,000 yen, roughly 30 USD. I'm really not sure whether this is expensive or cheap, but it gave me a first estimate. There are carbon offset projects in Japan, and it seems to me better practice to make a local offset, which may have more tangible benefits to the region that is hosting the conference. Also I have a sense that projects in developing countries could encourage people in richer countries to continue polluting while buying up land in poorer countries to clear their consciences and carbon accounts. 

That site didn't mention any projects in Japan, but luckily another of the conference organisers sent a link to j-ver.go.jp which listed 5 local projects. It even gives some information in an English-language powerpoint file here, mentionig a couple of projects in Japan, one asking for 10,000 yen per tonne of CO2, the other 2,500, so it seems that projects in Japan are not completely different to the international projects. According to the other conference organiser, this is expensive, and this site mentions prices of £7.50, quotes someone saying that the price should be £1 per tonne, and someone else that $11 per tonne is the top price for carbon credits. This site encourages people to spend around $10 per tonne of carbon.

So, it seems there's a mixture of currencies and prices here.The market is likely to drive these costs down, but something makes me feel incredibly wary of that. 

And it make me wonder how much it should cost to get a tonne of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and exactly what that means. For example, in putting solar panels on my roof, I could argue that I've taken carbon out of the atmosphere by reducing demand on thermal power stations. This is the kind of project that may get funding from selling carbon credits. But looking at it objectively, the panels themselves aren't taking any carbon out of anywhere, and in fact produced a fair bit of carbon in their manufacture.

Planting trees seems a more unequivocal way of fixing carbon, but it depends on what was there before. If grey, former industrial land is being re-forested, that should make a genuine difference.

Anyway, these are all things to think about as I'm sitting on the plane...

Two dangerous assumptions

First is the belief that a few well-meaning individuals can make a difference.

Turning a few lights off is not going to stop global warming. Turning a power station off could. Reducing your own consumption of oil by a few litres is not going to make a big difference. Reducing a country's imports or reducing a company's output by a few million barrels is. Throwing a few tins into the recycling is not going to save the world. It's just a tiny drop, and the drop is probably of molten melted in an oil-fired crucible.

The second, much more dangerous assumption is that a few well-meaning individuals won't make a difference. Most of the critical decisions that could affect our survival are going to be taken by individuals. The important actions are going to be made by individuals. Leaders of businesses, heads of governments and representatives of organisations are all individuals. Every policy and paper starts from the pen of one person. The only people who can make a difference are well-meaning individuals. You may be one of them. Somebody you know may be one of them. Somebody who happens to see one of your trivial deeds may be one of them.

Human actions are influenced in many ways, and it's not always clear why things happen. This is why people can get advanced degrees and influential jobs in economics and still sound like complete idiots.

But just when I was worrying about my own actions making no difference at all. Just as I was settling into the realisation that the main results of my noble attempts to change the world through building a house had all long since gone in and out of the bank accounts of various agents in the industry, who are now back to their inevitable unecological tricks. Just when I thought it was all a waste of time, the water bill came. Nothing unusual about that, but on it was a piece of advice. It said something like this: to avoid your pipes freezing, be sure to put some insulation, for example expanded polystyrene, around the main tap.

Now I know this is a small thing, and it would be a lot more useful if the invoice for heating bills suggested you insulate your whole house, but that may be like expecting the people in the hamburger shop recommending you drink water rather than a large container of brown fizzy sugar, or saying "are you sure you want fries with that?"

But it's a positive thing. It's much better than the usual solution, which is wrapping pipes with an electrical heating element that comes on whenever the temperature gets anywhere near zero. I'm sure it does not directly result from my building project, but somebody out there is making some sensible suggestions, and I'm not a lone crazy voice shouting into a wilderness.

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 Smart New Fridge

We got a new fridge in June. The old one had stopped making ice and a guy had come to try and repair it several times before deciding that it needed replacing. It was still under a ten-year guarantee, but only just. I think the ice maker may have been damaged in the move. Not complaining about a new fridge. We have nothing to lose but energy, resource depletion and pollution from the extra parts on their way in and out of the world.

Looking for a silver lining, fridges seem to have become more efficient over the years since we got the last one. 

The sizes are comparable - 500 litres for the old one, 510 for the new - and the rated power consumption of the heat pump has improved around 10% from 110 Watts to 100 Watts. 

The defrosting power consumption has improved much more significantly, from 160 Watts to 93 Watts. That's around 40%.

In other words, the old fridge used more electricity to heat up the pipes inside to melt ice forming on them than it used to cool itself. The new fridge uses slightly less. Of course this is the power used when it's switched on, which is not all the time.

At least I think this corresponds to less power use. It may be that the defrosting is switched on 40% more of the time, and it's using exactly the same amount of power to do the job.

The new fridge has a rated consumption of 200 kWh per annum. That's less than 1 kWh per day. It works out around 23 Watts. So most of the time it's not using any electricity. Either the heat pump or the defroster is on around a quarter of the time.

Defrosting used to be a regular event for fridge-owners, requiring the fridge or freezer to be unloaded and switched off. Now the fridge switches on heating elements in the pipes to stop frost occurring. Presumably the improvement in efficiency that defrosting brings is much greater than the extra energy used defrosting. If the fridge is trying to cool through pipes coated in ice, it is going to do a very poor job since the ice will stop the heat flowing into the coolant in the pipes. The coolant will then get much colder, using much more energy. 

As we know, frost will occur where there is humidity in the air and low-temperature surfaces, which you are likely to get in a fridge. Another approach to defrosting would be to remove all the humidity from the air within the fridge, but this may be less reliable.

I was hoping that there would be more energy saving functions, or at least energy bill saving devices, for example running as much of the freezing and defrosting as possible at night. There is a "shift peak" function, but it just puts off heavier load activity for four or five hours. It doesn't actually have a clock in it, so it wouldn't know whether there is any cheap night-time electricity to use. If it doesn't even know the time, it's not really that smart. 

It has green lights coming on to say "eco", but it would be really nice to have a display of how much electricity it is actually using. 

Another thing that makes it less efficient is the drawer inside. The manual clearly states that to keep the fridge efficient, you should open the doors as little as possible. The most important power saver is probably knowing where everything in the fridge is, although this can be tricky if you have the kind of dietary habits that require 500 litres of fridge. The old fridge had double doors for the main section, with two drawers at the bottom. The one of the left had an egg tray. We used to keep cheese in the one on the right, so we'd open the left door for eggs, and the right door for cheese. 

In the new, but not necessarily improved, model there is only one drawer at the bottom. To open it you have to open both doors. Not the smartest of designs in terms of forcing you to open both doors. The egg tray is now in one of the shelves in the door on the right. Since they have enough headroom to hold a tin of beer, this is not the smartest use of space either. But it's new, so beggars can't be choosers.

Create a better environment... with this bag?

I won't name the shop. The message seems great. Not sure how much it will help. In terms of resources, the use-your-own-shopping-bag mantra is probably myth. Polyethene bags use minimal resources, meaning that you'd need to use your bag claiming you're eco a few hundred times to be in the green in carbon accountancy. And don't forget the one you lost, the one in the car, and the other five you have in the drawer in the kitchen. 

Manufactured multiple-use shopping bags go through multiple processes and end up weighing much more, meaning more carbon getting them to the shop.

This one has a metal zip. Good old eco steel wrought at hundreds of degrees centigrade from iron ore dug from the earth, upstream from rivers of rust. OK, so it's only a few grammes of steel, but grammes of steel use kilogrammes of water and each kilogramme of steel is responsible for 4 kilogrammes of CO2.

They are a symbol for the consumer, and a lucrative product for the shop, making them money while making them seem green. At the risk of being cynical, the bottom line incentive for the shops to use them will be increased profit, not reduced costs. That means more CO2. Not that shops and business aren't trying to do the right thing, just that the economic system in which they work makes the right thing unlikely.

However, this bag is partly insulated, so will keep groceries cooler between shop and fridge at home, saving a little electricity. In this sense these bags are eco.

Talking of fridges, though, ours has had a problem and a guy has been coming over the past few weeks to fix it. The ice maker isn't making ice properly, and the last thing he said was that cold air is leaking through a hole up into the main fridge, which is causing ice to form there. 

Anyway, the good news is that they've decided to replace the Fridge. Newer fridges are more efficient, and it will no doubt have some extra functions.

At least this is good news for us. As far as resource consumption and the pressure on the environment from this, and the stress from another piece of white stuff that needs scrapping, it is another minor disaster. Number 14,000 for the day.

^Hickman, Martin (2011-02-20). "Plastic fantastic! Carrier bags 'not eco-villains after all'". The Independent (London).

P.S. Sorry the image at the top ended up on it's side. I'm not sure if it's worth my effort and the computer's processing power to rotate it.

Three miconceptions about solar power

1. You'll lose out in the winter.

There is certainly less sunshine in the winter, since the sun spends more time below the horizon and more above the horizon in the summer. Also the sun is higher in the summer, which means a less acute angle to the atmosphere, less air to get through, and stronger rays reaching the earth. Also, depending on where you are it can be more cloudy in the winter and more sunny in the summer. So there's less solar radiation available for electricity in the winter. On top of this, in the winter you tend to use more energy, so there will be less left over. 

However, a major factor in generation is the angle of the panels. The steeper the panels are, the more of that winter sun they are going to get. Typical roofs in Japan are too shallow for good winter generation. 35 degrees is optimum for year-round generation. Slightly higher will generate more in the winter, and a little less in the summer. 

As we go into the second year, you can see our generation below. The orange line is the manufacturer's simulation, which so far we have out-generated by 5 or 10%: 

March was our third best month so far. December was the worst month, but the panels were still generating. 

2. You can't store the electricity.

This isn't a misconception. This is usually the truth. But many people have the idea that you can get solar panels, get a battery that will store the electricity they generate, then you can use your own electricity when the sun is down. You could do this, but batteries are expensive, they are not very efficient, and financially you're better off selling electricity you generate to the grid and using electricity from the grid when you need it at night. Looking at our yearly averages, we generate roughly twice as much energy as we use (36 kWh/day compared to 17kWh/day) but we earn about six times more cash than we pay (45,000 yen coming in each month and 7,500 going out, on average). So I'm not rushing off to buy a battery right now. 

3. The government is paying artificially high prices for it.

The government is certainly subsidising people who put solar panels on their roofs by offering grants, and is forcing electric companies to subsidise them by paying a high price for solar electricity with a feed in tariff. However, I'm not sure you can call this artificial. This is a government investment in infrastructure that will be contributing to energy generation and making up part of the electrical jigsaw of the future. 

Especially when you consider how much is spent on other energy technologies. You don't think private companies set out to develop nuclear power stations on their own, do you? And what about tax money going to building gas, coal and oil power stations? I've been looking around for the answer to my question: how much tax money is spent on energy? It's not immediately obvious, so here are some random factoids instead, from world-nuclear.org. 

Based on 2005 data, 40% of the world's R&D spending on energy is made by Japan. Most spending is going on Nuclear fission. Spending on energy conservation, fossil fuel R&D and renewables R&D is similar. A little less is spent on nuclear fusion R&D. 

At the moment, solar is an expensive way to generate electricity, but all technologies begin expensive since you're paying for research and development, and manufacturing infrastructure. We've had 150 years digging fossil fuels out of the ground, and have become very efficient at doing that. In fact, a lot of spending on energy efficiency ends up making us better at using energy. The first uses of steam engines were pumping water out of mines, which made it easier to get coal out. So the cost of those fossil fuels is artificially low and nobody is doing anything to replace them. Economically it's the same as clearcutting forest and selling the wood without doing any replanting, only much worst because you'd need a time machine to go back millions of years to replant. Nuclear power has its own issues that I won't go into here.

So subsidies of solar power, rather than artificial, seem sensible and far sighted, especially for a country that produces solar panels and will benefit from demand. It's not such a big deal paying out a few hundred thousand yen here and there to help people put some panels on their roofs, that will generate electricity for the next half century without any need to import leftovers from other country's nuclear bomb factories. Although I don't want to get too political or emotive and I would like to have some more solid statistics to base this on, and know how much the returns on solar power are compared to the investment, and what the real costs of everything are. 

4. There are lots of solar cowboys out there. 

This is not a misconception at all. The people putting on your panels may be much more interested in getting cash from you, and you getting a grant from the government that will go straight to them. They will be less interested in how much electricity your panels generate over the next half century. 

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and in the kingdom of the sun blind, the guy with very dark sunglasses is king. 

Whistles and bleeps

The whistle could be one of the greater inventions for domestic energy saving. Apparently it was invented after the first world war by Sholom Borgelman, owner of a sheet metal works in London. It's one of those inventions that is so small and obvious that we forget it was ever invented, and details are difficult to come by. You get into one of those circular searches on the internet, where the same little bit of information has been cut and pasted from site to site so many times that it's difficult to see where it came from. Also, most of the hits refer directly or indirectly to items for sale, reminding you that the internet is not so much a font of information as a large shopping arcade. 

Sholom Borgelman is a great name, but apparently he changed it to Borman. It's difficult to find any other information about him. There are no other references to him or his sheet metal works on the internet except single sentences talking about his whistling kettle invention. He doesn't even feature on Wikipedia. Ancestry.com has no Borgelmans living in the US or UK. It looks like his son Barney Borman was a communist councillor in East London, so perhaps the whole family's history was swept away, leaving only a kettle whistle rattling on the floor. 

The steam whistle had been around since the 1850s, although applying the same principle to a kettle only seems obvious to us after the event. The whistle itself is ancient, going back to China like most other inventions that we don't associate with a dead white male, and a few that we do. Wikipedia tells us that Joseph Hudson of Birmingham, England, made the first whistle to be used by a football referee in 1868 and William Atack, a New Zealander, was the world's first referee to use a whistle to stop a game of sport in 1884.

So anyway, for the past year, I've been thinking about getting a kettle with a whistle. This would save  electricity. It's been estimated that 4% of UK domestic carbon emissions come from the kettle, and as another tea-loving nation, Japan no doubt is similar

The beauty of a whistle is that it tells you when to switch off the heat. Running in the kilowatts, ten seconds of extra kettle boiling equates to an hour leaving one of our low-energy LEDs on. The electric kettle goes one step further by switching the heat off for you when the desired temperature is reached. Seth Stevenson pays homage to the electric kettle here. 

Hot water dispensing Thermos flasks are common in Japan, many that can be plugged in to keep the water at the desired temperature. I'm ambivalent towards these as the savings made by stopping the heat as soon as the water boils are probably squandered in the energy used to keep the water hot for hours afterwards. So for the past year we've been using our stove-top kettle, still quite impressed that the handle doesn't get hot.

Then, when I put the kettle on this morning, I found a function on our IH hob. I knew there was a tempura setting, which keeps the chip-pan at 180 degrees. This morning I found a kettle in the menu, with choices of 0.5 litres up to 2 litres. It beeps a few times when the water has boiled, and switches itself off, so we have the best of an electric kettle and a whistle. 

The key point to energy saving is to just boil the amount of water you need, and of course the steel kettle doesn't tell us how much water is in it, and the fact that we have to choose a setting for the amount of water means that it's probably working on a timer rather than a thermostat to decide when the water is ready. Further investigation is necessary. We should probably put in different amounts of water depending on whether we want a rolling boil for proper tea, or water at slightly lower temperature for green tea. It will take time to change the ritualistic behaviour of kettle boiling, but it's time to make new rituals for a new world; to raise awareness of exactly how much water should go into the kettle and then bury it in our subconscious.

Difficult decisions... Counting the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead

February 19th. One of those really cold mornings after a bitter snowy day that was followed by a starry night, and weather that seems to have come straight from the Arctic. Minus eleven when I got up and looked at the data logger in my room that's connected to the outside thermometer. It was under 14 on the thermometer on the window sill, strategically placed in the coldest spot in the house.
The panels were already making 0.7 kW just after 7 am, highly efficient supercooled by the ambient temperature and then some by radiating beyond the stratosphere with nothing coming back.
And I wanted to make a cup of tea.
Usually I turn the IH stove onto a high middle setting to boil the kettle. There are ten bars, and I'll put it to number seven. I think gas stoves are most efficient at a middle setting. They may boil the water quicker if you turn it right up, but they will use more energy to do so. I assume the same for IH heaters, although they may be equally efficient at any level.
Anyway, I was thinking about all those lovely kilowatt hours, and wanting to sell as many of them as possible. Putting the kettle on at any level was going to exceed the 0.7 kW we were generating, and mean buying electricity. Given this, the logical thing to do was to turn the IH stove up as high as possible, and while it was on, put the shutters up, which use a couple of hundred Watts, to keep the time that we were buying electricity short, and we were back to selling electricity as quickly as possible.
This must have saved at least some fraction of a yen.
These are the kinds of calculations that we are forced into by the economics of solar power. Surely I have better things to do. The best thing, of course, would have been to drink water rather than tea.
I did notice, after switching the kettle off and setting off proudly with my tea, that we were still using 400 Watts, which seems strange when everyone's still asleep and nothing's on. I realised it was the pump for the underfloor heating, which I'd set to come on from 7 to 7:30 as well as an hour before 6. This was because I'd left it on too long the previous morning and it had used up all the hot water, so it didn't come on in the evening, as I'm mean and didn't let it start working till cheap electricity rates kicked in at 11pm.
With the sun already beating down, we aren't going to need heating until tonight, so it's a good thing I noticed it. That will actually have saved a few yen.

Alps talking back

As well as the ideas in the planned talk on Boxing Day, there were several digressions and questions. Beyond my rambling notes, it seems a very good idea to address what actually happened, and especially the feedback from the audience, who I hope will have been changed in some little way by the effort that went into the house, and into my talk about it. 

At some point I told them the joke about the luckiest man in the world and the unluckiest man in the world. First, one man says, "I'm the luckiest man in the world: I've got an English house, an American salary, a Chinese cook and a Japanese wife." Next, the other guy says: "I'm the unluckiest man in the world: I've got a Japanese house, a Chinese salary, an English cook, and an American wife."

I'm not at all sure whether English houses are the best in the world, although there's no smoke without fire. Increasingly, of course, there are no fires without smokeless fuel, and a lot of fireplaces that used to sit at the heart of the English house have been boarded up and electrified, or turned to gas, as in the Dursley's house in Privet Drive. The English house was constructed around the burning of fossil fuels, and as such is part of an old paradigm. There is something very solid and reassuring about an English house though, which you don't get with a typical Japanese house. 

However, trying to get back to the talk, a lot of Japanese people seem to think that Japanese houses are the best in the world. The billions of yen put into advertising in the building trade is obviously paying off!

One member of the audience asked me about the cost of imported windows, which I replied was a lot more than domestic windows, if you just look at the initial price. If you consider the cost of all the heat that is going to leak out them over their lifetime, compared to the net inflow of heat from high performance windows, then the imported windows probably end up a lot cheaper.

The question that got me most, that I have heard several times before and has always got me, and probably always will, was "but Japan has four seasons". This seems to have been implanted deep into the Japanese psyche, so that the first reaction is not one of rationality, science or even morality, but whether it is foreign or not. 

I tried to explain that while Japan does have high humidity in summer and low humidity in winter, humidity itself always stays between 0% and 100%. When it tries to go over 100% it's called rain. And while there may be a lot of rain in Japan, Tokyo having twice the precipitation of London, the rain is still made up of molecules of di-hydrogen oxide, which obey the same laws of physics whatever language is being spoken around them, or whatever flag is being waved above them, as atoms have no nationality. And while the temperature may change a lot between summer and winter, and even between night and day, in the grand scheme of things these temperatures are not wildly different, compared for example to those a space craft may experience, or even those in Antarctica. 

Billy Connolly once said there's no such thing as bad weather--just the wrong clothes. With apologies to Billy, I think that there is no such thing as a tough climate--just the wrong buildings.

Eco Babble - Talking to the Alps

The Alps Language Service Association invited me to talk to them, which I used as an opportunity to spout Eco Babble.

Here are brief contents of the talk, which veered seemlessly between Physics lesson, ecological call to arms, and rant about the woeful state of Japanese building. It seemed to engage and captivate the audience of a dozen or so Japanese men and women in varying stages of middle age.

The talk was on Boxing day, the day after Christmas day, in case you didn't know, and they asked me about that first. I told them that for me Christmas was not at all Christian, and asked them what fir trees and reindeer had to do with Israel. Also I told them how it wasn't even Jesus's birthday; that had just been a ploy by the Christian church to suppress and subsume pagan worship of the winter solstice, and celebration of the sun coming back. This actually began to get onto the topic. 

Eco logical or nomic

The bigger TV you get, the more eco points you get. It should be the other way round!

Stick "ECO" on something, and people will pay more for it, and you'll make more money.

Exponential growth of fossil fuel consumption

The vicious circle of increased efficiency, leading to increased consumption, leading to more money coming in, leading to improvements in efficiency. This is counter intuitive, but the record with coal is that improvements in efficiency, rather than reducing consumption, exponentially increase it. Has our economics moved on?

Engineering

Among my studies were electronics, thermodynamics and finite element analysis. Not particularly useful in language teaching, but they have been very helpful in building my house. 

Traditional Japanese building

Much better than modern Japanese building at stopping overheating in the summer. But what about winter?

I talked about a new paradigm in building

We need to stop using fossil fuels

Insulation materials are available

Ventilation systems are available

Better window technology is available

At this point I had to persuade them that the standards in Japan are very low, and though there may be some houses with some insulation now, it is not a lot. 

Common confusions

I talked about heat and temperature. Outside it was five below freezing, but there was a lot of heat, as it was still over 200 degrees above absolute zero. 

Energy efficiency or energy use. I told them about my car, which is one of the most environmentally friendly cars in town as I hardly ever use it. It has terrible mileage though

"It's good for the environment"

Almost nothing humans do is good for the environment. Some things are just less bad. 

Insulation.

People often think that things either insulate or don't. In fact some things just insulate better. 

Passive house

This is an answer and a goal in building a house. It constitutes: 

Very high insulation, including windows;

Very airtight, so it needs a  ventilation system;

A heat exchange ventilation system, so you don't loose all the heat in the exhaust air;

Maximised solar gain, so the windows are on the south

In Japanese this is often called「無暖房住宅」(mudan-jutaku: non-heating house)

The idea in Europe was that with these criteria met, central heating is not necessary, as the appliances and bodies int the house are enough, or the incoming air can be given extra heat within the ventilation system. Central heating has been standard in Europe, although they are now trying to get away from it. In Japan, on the other hand, it is a recent development that progressive builders and up-market buyers are installing.

Good insulator

Thicker is better

No gaps!

I showed them the pictures of the heat sink and the part of the window frame. Most of them guessed which was which, but it was quite difficult, which was my point. 

I asked what the best insulator in the room was. One of them correctly identified that it was air. I found out later he had a PhD in biophysics. 

Eco points!

The house did get lots of Eco points, it was 200% of their low energy standard, at 0.92 W/m²K (watts per square metre of floor space per degree difference with the outside temperature). A figure which I need to check.

To translate this into terms that they could easily relate to, I told them yesterday morning it had been -8°C outside, and it was 14°C inside, and the underfloor heating is not working yet. My old house would have been the same temperature with the heating on.

LEDs

The advantages are: low energy, they don't radiate heat, they're small, long lasting and don't attract insects. They asked why, so I explained that LEDs produce light in the spectrum visible to us, whereas insects are really only interested in animal blood, so they want to see warm bodies with lower frequency infrared vision.

The problems with LEDs are: they can't dim, they have limited colours and they're expensive. Actually the first two are not correct, and the last one will be less and less so, as costs are going down exponentially. 

Solar Power

The advantages are: no fuel, no pollution, no noise, long lasting. The problems are: cost, area and unreliability due to clouds.

Power democracy

I put it in terms of a model of individual ownership of the means of power production, rather then governments and big businesses, who will build a nuclear power station North of Tokyo, and go on holiday in the resorts South of Tokyo. 

I left them with these questions:

Would you live under an oil power station?

Would you live under a hydroelectric power station?

Would you live under a windmill?

Would you live under a solar power station?

NOTE: Units for Q value edited on 20th January. It did say "kWh/m2a" - kilowatt hours per square metre of floor space per year, which is a building performance measurement used by Passive House Institute that depends on the climate, It now says, I hope correctly, W/m2K - watts per square metre of floor space per degree Kelvin, which is a measure of the thermal performance of a building.

So, will it have been worth it?

So you're sitting there, in your old house, knowing the paint is going to be dry in the new one pretty soon, so it doesn't matter that it's getting colder and that the guy who filled up the kerosene cans didn't put the lid on properly, and it spilt on the floor of the car, because soon you're never going to need any more kerosene.

You've already let the kids switch on the electric toilet seat warmer, and if it gets much colder you may actually plug it in. It's not going to be on for long though.

Then you read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/pooran-desai-interview-green-buildings

And you start to wonder, again, whether the extra mile was worth the few inches more of energy efficiency. The point of the article is that the difference between a high energy performance and very high energy performance building is not so great, but lifestyles will make a huge difference. So if you're eating strawberries flown in from India, your eco house isn't really going to be so eco. Riding a bicycle to work may not help your carbon credentials if your burning fat from an avocado from Mexico.

So what does the design of buildings actually do to change the way people live?  

Or maybe this is just the nature of the media to find different opinions, and highly energy efficient buildings really are worth it; there are just other things to worry about too.

I still wonder how much the new house is just going to be a very stable environment, immune to the massive temperature swings outside, and what we're getting is comfort, rather than ecology. I worry that the lifetime carbon costs have been spent and then some in the construction.

There certainly are several fronts to fight on when we're trying to come to terms with a population doubling in a couple of decades.

So, going to back to the idea of a house that doesn't consume energy, at least symbolically this is a challenge to the consumerist aesthetic.

You can't make an omelette without using a few hundred kilojoules of thermal energy.  

But what about all the energy used to make the house?

"Toilet seats from the UK, 250 kg of window from Germany, special visits from foreign manufacturers... are you going for some kind of embodied carbon record?" PJ just wrote.

I remember talking to someone from the Green Party a few years ago about environmental costs, and saying how great it would be if there was some measure of how bad things were for the environment, so we could make the right decisions.

"There is," he said. "It's called money."

And to a large extent he was right.

Recently, Japan has introduced Eco points, whereby you get points for buying energy efficient products. You can then spend these points on... anything you like really. Beer even. Not sure how energy efficient beer is, but that is not the point.

A student said he'd just bought a new TV, and got lots of Eco points for it. Apparently, the bigger the TV, the more Eco points you get. A bigger TV means more energy consumption, so really you should be getting less Eco points for a bigger TV and more for a smaller one, and in this case the money you spend may be a better indication of ecological strain. If you're comparing TVs of the same size, of course the Eco points will help.

Even with a Passive House, the units are all measured per unit area of floor space, so a palatial one-person passive house could use a lot more energy than a one-room home for a family of seven. 

But money doesn't always count.

I remember being told that cars consume ten times more energy in their manufacture than in their normal lifetime, so buying a new car, however energy efficient it is, is likely to be worse than carrying on using an old car. What Car claimed that 80% of the life-cycle energy of a car comes out in its use, with 15% in manufacture and 5% in its scrapping. But perhaps What Car have a vested interest in people buying new cars. According to an article by Mike Berners-Lee in the Guardian, the amount of energy used in manufacture and use is around equal, half and half, but perhaps he has a vested interest in people buying his book on carbon footprints.

Anyway, embodied carbon is an important issue, and the University of Bath has produced an inventory of carbon and energy per kilogramme of various materials, which they will email you if you ask nicely. As well as looking at Carbon Dioxide emissions, they look at other greenhouse gases and convert them to CO2 equivalents. A lot of research and thought has gone into their work, and they even have a special excel file that will calculate the carbon footprint of concrete depending on the mix used. 

For example, it gives the following figures in kg of carbon dioxide per kg of various different kinds of insulation:

polyurethane (flexible) 4.06

polystyrene (high impact) 2.76

glass wool 1.35

rock wool 1.05

wood wool (board) 0.98

cork: 0.19 

But you'd have to drink a lot of wine for the last one, and it's not as good an insulator as the others. After all the wine it may not matter. 

It also gives figures for timber framed and aluminium framed windows at 12-25 kg CO2/kg and 279 respectively. So aluminium frames are not only going to consume a lot more energy in their lifetime, they also consume a lot more in their manufacture. In a lot of cases, though, you have to look at the weight of materials used. For example, aluminum is lighter than wood, although not ten times lighter.

With a little more energy of the human kind on my part and a little more support, it would have been great to balance the embodied carbon in the building with the energy use of the building's lifetime, but the main focus has been on consuming as little energy as possible over the house's lifetime. This is perhaps a foolish thing to do in Japan, where the life expectancy of a building is less than a quarter of a century. On the other hand, if what we are doing can make a difference to the way people build in Japan, then it may be a good thing. 

It may of course backfire, as people copy the mistakes and collateral details rather than the main points. I've heard that the Nara local government are sending their wood to Germany to be built into windows there, as Japan does not have the window manufacturing technology, then sent back to Japan so that they can have windows made of Japanese wood. Not sure how that comes out on the carbon calculator. Also not sure whether trees have a sense of national identity, but that is another issue.

In many cases back in our house, we looked at choices where there is a clear increase in cost which results in a clear decrease in energy use, and the payback period can be calculated.The pay back on the solar panels is around 8 years. There was one issue with the windows that meant a pay back of around 50 years, which is around the lifetime of the windows and, on financial terms, not worth it. In terms of carbon, the choice was between paying for cuttting edge technology and expertise against paying people to pump fossil fuels into fires for the next 50 years, so the carbon calculator gives a clearer answer.

Even if you are just looking in financial terms, the budget of the project will affect how much you can actually spend now, because saving money in the future is no use if you don't have enough to spend now. Reality bites.

I think we looked at reducing the amount of heat we would lose by raising the window frame specs to "Passive House Certified", which sandwich insulation in the frame, but the pay back would have been more than their life time. Increasing the amount of heat coming in by changing the glass in the south-facing windows to high-g led to an extra cost with a much quick payback.

What we have tried to do, anyway, is to optimise the building for lifetime energy efficiency, but work needs to be done in both areas, and our understanding of the carbon footprint is deepening the whole time. This should show what is possible, and where we want to go. The bigger question is how we get there.

Why?

It's always a good idea, from time to time, to stop and check why you are doing what you are doing.

So what, exactly, is the point of all this energy efficiency?

I think the answer comes down to economics, both on a micro and macro scale. I don't really understand economics, which probably puts me in good company with economists. I tend to see things through green-tinted spectacles, but much as it pains me, I think that economics and ecology are fundamentally entwined, and ecology should probably be seen as long-range economics. 

Most ecologists are not interested in protecting the earth for the sake of the earth. Ecologists want to protect the earth so that it will continue to support humans. Those that really do want to protect the earth are likely to be a threat to the human race, for a while the eco-terrorists who filled the gap left by the Communists before Islamists were discovered as the enemy of Western civilisation.

How we do protect the earth comes down a lot to time scales. For example, maintaining bio-diversity is not going to have any immediate benefits, except perhaps for tourism in areas with endangered photogenic species. In the long term, bio-diversity leads to a healthy environment, and survival of symbiotic relationships among groups of plants and animals. Also, endangered species may contain remedies for diseases in the future or other keys to human survival. 

It has become fashionable and convenient to talk in terms of global warming and carbon footprints, and to listen to the overwhelming majority of scientific belief that our activities since the industrial revolution threaten catastrophic changes to the atmosphere. There are geologists calling for the naming of a new geological age, the anthropocene, such is the influence of our race on the planet; unprecedented since the first organism started converting carbon dioxide to oxygen.

Global warming is certainly serious, but rather than seeing this as the problem, I look at it more as a symptom. The problem is more about living within our means, and not cashing in the family silver and consigning our children to poverty. This centres around carbon and oil. It's all in the name, "fossil fuels". Fossils are incredibly old and take a very long time to make. 

Oil first requires organic sediment--lots of dead squiggly things--to have settled at the bottom of seas or lakes. These layers of sediment must end up between 4 and 6 km underground, where the pressure and temperature are suitable for oil to form. These conditions are very rare and the abundance of oil is only due to the size of the earth and human ingenuity at extracting it. Oil is usually called a non-renewable fuel source, although of course the earth may still be producing oil somewhere; just incredibly slowly. It should perhaps be termed an incredibly slowly renewable fuel source. It should probably be used incredibly slowly. 

I was trying to work out exactly how long it takes, and how many millenia worth we are using up each year. Here's a ball park estimate. There are 600 cubic km of known oil reserves, including oil sands. We use 5 cubic km per year, doubling every 20 years or so. The animal life that forms oil has been around for maybe 500 million years.  Let's assume there's been a constant population of squiggly sea life over that time, that the formation of oil takes less than a million years, and that nobody else started taking it away before we did. So on average, the oil we have took around 250 million years for mother earth to make. Let's be generous and assume that there is more oil that we don't know about, but also let's be generous about human ingenuity and assume that we know about 60% of it. So there are maybe 1000 cubic km of oil. If these took 250 million years to produce, that's 4 cubic km every million years, so we're using oil at more than a million times the rate at which it was made.

Another way of estimating it would be in terms of energy. The zooplankton that oil comes from take their energy from marine flora, which get their energy from the sun. The sun's energy reaches the earth at 1kilowatt per square metre, but some of this is going to be reflected, hit land, hit bits of ocean with no marine flora in it, and we'd be lucky if 1% of it was absorbed. Chlorophyl is a pretty efficient solar energy converter, after three billion years or so of development, converting between 3 and 6% of the suns energy into chemical energy. So with a better idea of what percentage of sunlight reached marine plants, what percentage of marine plant life was eaten by zooplankton, what percentatge of the zooplankton ended up in sediment, and what percentage of that sediment ended up at the right strata for appropriate pressure and temperature to form oil, we could get another ball park estimate. Certainly sounds like a long time though.

But wait a minute. If we're using oil at 5 cubic km per year, and have over 100 times that in the ground, what's the problem? I'm sure our grandchildren will come up with something! Allow me to digress from my digression to the island of Sado, north of Japan's main island Honshu, home to the greatest drumming festival in the world, and nothing to do with masochism. 

The sixth largest of Japan's islands, gold was discovered there in 1601. Above is a graph of gold production. Of course, the gold is not really being produced--just dug out of the ground. As techniques for finding and extracting the gold improved, production increased. More gold meant more money and more money brought more machinery and more people in a virtuous cycle, which must have been fairly vicious at times to the people stuck in it. The island was at one time a prison, where convicts were sent to work the seams. Later, homeless city dwellers were relocated there, to the same ends. The village of Aikawa apparently reached a population of 100,000. From 1860, modern methods of extraction were used, and gold production peaked at 400kg in the 1930s, then rapidly fell to zero. Production was negligible since 1951, and the mine was closed in 1989, with 400 km of empty tunnels going half a kilometre under the sea. 

The point being that when you have a finite resource, it will run out, and it's likely to run out when extraction is large and increasing. This is likely to happen to oil, unless we do something to stabilise supply and demand. I think a lot of people have now realised this, and are doing something about it, so all this talk of energy efficiency and solar power is not particularly radical. Just common sense.

They still have a very good drum festival on the island, and a doubly dwindling population as natives are leaving and no non-natives are coming in. Perhaps a piece of silver lining is that rather than trying to fix this problem, some of the island communities are facing up to it, and working out how to live within their means, holding a beacon for some kind of sustainability. 

But, what does this have to do with my house? And what was the point, again?

First, on the micro scale, this house should be a lot cheaper to run. It should save us money as we won't have to worry about heating or cooling bills. I haven't done the sums, but I think it will take several years for the heating bills to add up to the extra building costs. Eventually it will start paying for itself, hopefully within my lifetime, and hopefully the building won't be knocked down as soon as I go.

The financial cost is probably a lot more than the environmental cost though. A lot of the materials and technology suffer the early-adopter tax, and would be a lot cheaper in countries with more developed energy efficiency, like Germany. Hopefully these materials and technologies will be cheaper and easier in the future.