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.
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 [...]
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 commented on Chris Newman’s blog over at Parity Projects the other day, where Chris had suggested that embodied energy is not worth considering as (in energy saving kit) it would always pay back over the life of the installation. While this is true, and the way he shows it is quite nice, that doesn’t [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In writing this post I felt like I was channeling a door-to-door double glazing salesman. If you hear this set of arguments from a bloke on your doorstep with a clipboard, an earnest expression and an insistent, nay desperate tone of voice then I apologise in advance! As a sustainability consultant it is quite easy [...]
Modern international society is obsessed with increasing GDP, despite the suggestion that beyond a point it is no longer well correlated with wellbeing – the Easterlin Paradox. This is quite apart from the fact that growth in GDP generally ignores the depletion of natural and environmental resources and is incompatible with cutting carbon emissions. However, [...]
This post is here to explain three of the terms I use quite a lot when looking at project viability. Some will be familiar, others less so. Put together these three measures and the interactions between them go a long way towards assessing whether an energy generating or energy saving project is “worth it”. Ratios ROI: [...]
