Brought to popular attention by Enkvist at McKinsey & Company, marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs or MAC curves) are a way of showing both the cost of saving carbon, and also the size of the potential saving from that source. I’ve mentioned them before in a post about low hanging fruit offered by refurbishment. They [...]
Banana Theory. I meant to post a link to this a while ago but somehow didn’t quite get around to it. This is a blog post I wrote for my EngD centre at UCL and if I can drive a bit of traffic that way I’m sure they’ll thank me for it.
Since I know a lot of people who come here do so for Excel-related posts, I thought it would be useful to rewrite last week’s Pareto frontiers function in VBA for Excel. Remember that 2D Pareto frontiers are the set of options which can’t be bettered on one metric without making things worse on the [...]
We all want to find the best results for the lowest cost, but sometimes it’s not as simple as that. Imagine you have a large number of choices from which you are trying to find the best option. For example, let’s say you have a range of energy efficiency refurbishment packages available and you want [...]
Mel Starrs tweeted a week or so ago about using GIS software to do mapping and energy analysis. I wanted to do the something similar but for sub-metered zones in a multi-tenanted office building. Rather than go down the route of learning a new package, I remembered a chapter on creating choropleth maps in Nathan [...]
A lot of people find this blog through the post about the embodied carbon of tap water so I thought I’d do a quick follow-up post. I found the water industry body, Water UK’s sustainability reports covering the period from 2001/2002 up to 2010/2011. This gave me all the data I need to update the [...]
I have just returned from a cradle-to-cradle conference at the University of Cambridge. In common with a lot of the people attending, I had heard the phrase and filed it in a mental box with other “cradle-to-something” phrases from the vocabulary of environmental impact assessments. Cradle-to-factory gate, cradle-to-site, cradle-to-grave are all a part of the [...]
Low-energy bulbs Low-energy light bulbs split the nation down the middle. Half of us believe that these bulbs will save energy, bring down our energy bills, and reduce carbon emissions. The other half believe that there are all sorts of things that haven’t been considered, and that if we look at the whole picture then [...]
I read recently on the Green Building Forum the counterintuitive claim that in the UK richer people use the least energy. I’m always interested in the relationship between income and environmental impact – and this is not the way I’d expect the relationship to work. As people have more disposable income, they spend more. They [...]
Edit: There’s an update to this post here giving Water UK’s official figures for the past ten years. Their latest figure for 2010/2011 is 0.79 gCO2/litre. In the UK we use about 150 litres of water per person per day in our homes. But what is the carbon impact of that water?[1] A new calculator [...]
