Under plans announced by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, FiTs open the door to householders who choose to generate their own energy (by installing solar panels or wind turbines for example) to ’sell’ surplus energy via their energy supplier back to the National Grid.

The scheme does have its critics, but it is the first of many steps the Government will be taking to help meet its targets for lowering carbon emissions.  For householders, it offers the chance to radically change their relationship with energy suppliers.  Rather than being solely importers of energy into their homes, they will become exporters – which can offset energy costs and any investment made on green energy devices in the home.

So, Home Zero Home was interested to see how much people on the street know about FiTs – if anything.  GreenUnlimted spent the day talking to punters in London, at Oxford Circus and in the City.  The results, admittedly straw poll-like in their methodology, make for interesting reading…

The following questions were put to 233 homeowners:

1.     Are you a home owner? (the assumption being that people who own their own properties would be more likely to undergo the improvements needed to qualify for the scheme)

2.     Have you heard of the government’s new Feed in Tariffs?

3.     Would you be interested in partaking in the Feed in Tariffs?

4.     Do you think your property is suitable for installing renewable energy?

5.     Do you know when the Feed in Tariff initiative launches?

Less than 1% (2 people) had heard of the FiT’s. After a brief explanation of what they were just over 24% (57 people) were interested in partaking in the scheme but only 5% (12 people) thought that their property would be suitable. No one knew when the scheme launched.

GreenUnlimited believes that there is a need to overcome the inertia of public ignorance about the existence, benefits and suitability of FiT’s for domestic energy generation. Extending early adoption beyond the enclave of those already converted and expectant of the scheme gives FiT’s a stronger foundation from which to grow.

We’ve sent the findings to DECC with some ideas about communicating FiTs.  If you have any views about FiTs, they’ll be gratefully received.

Here at Home Zero Home we like to practice what we believe so this year I will be turning the small 1930’s two bedroom flat I bought with my wife in Stockwell south London into a zero carbon (or as close as possible) home. It’s a process I’m really looking forward to. My wife and I have already lined every available wall space with books (excellent insulation) and shunned the use of the kitchen for the restaurants and bars of our fair city.

Our plans are quite ambitious and I’m interested to see how difficult they will be to implement. I was going to begin by explaining what these were and how we shall calculate our home’s footprint, but the Government’s new boiler scrappage scheme presents quite a good example of the opportunities and difficulties that lay ahead.

With snow covering all of the UK, everyone – including the kids – at home, the heating on max 24 hour a day and gas supplies reportedly running out the government’s announcement of £400 cashback to replace old boilers with more efficient ‘A’ rated ones seems well timed. 60% of housing emmissions come from gas fired boilers.

The scheme, set to launch on January 18th, will be too late to lower the worst of this winters bills but the need for energy efficiency savings could hardly be clearer. Furthermore British Gas and N Power are offering an additional £400 to those replacing their boilers taking the total savings up to £800.

The problem is the scheme probably doesn’t apply to you. There are two reasons for this. Firstly your boiler probably isn’t the least efficient type; the scheme only covers G rated ones that are likely to be at least ten years old. Secondly there are 125,000 vouchers available. The government estimates that there are 3.5 million G rated boilers in England.

So, how can you work out if you qualify and what to do if you don’t?

To start with you can check the energy efficiency rating of your boiler here: www.sedbuk.com.

A new boiler for a ‘typical’ home with installation will cost between £1,200 and £2,500 depending on its size and manufacturer. If your boiler is G rated the general estimate is that you will be able to save around £235 a year on your bills. Using the full £800 available to you this would put the payback period – the time it took for the monthly bill savings to match the initial investment – at between one and seven and a quarter years. Over this period you would also save between 1.3 and 9.4 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

All well and good. But what if your boiler is not a G rated one? Well I looked up my Potterton Suprima 30 (very fancy name for a small and rather tatty looking little thing – has yet to kill us all with carbon monoxide on the plus side) and found it to be an E rated boiler. This is not great. A G rated boiler has an efficiency range below 70%. An E rated boiler has an efficiency range of between 74% and 78%. My particular boiler rates at 76.6%. A rated boilers are 90% efficient and above.

To replace it would cost about £1,500. The annual saving would be around £110, meaning that the payback period would be over 13 years and six months. The annual carbon saving would be half a tonne.

Is this the best use of my limited funds? I highly doubt it.

Thus while the scrappage scheme is a good way to take a small proportion of the worst boilers out of England’s homes it is obvious that other more wide ranging solutions are necessary before mass change can occur.

This is where Home Zero Home comes in. Over the coming weeks and months we will be looking at ways to answer the questions that this short of story throws up.

What are the best ways to improve the energy efficiency of our homes?

What are the best ways for government to get involved and promote change?

How can the private sector help?

We don’t have all the answers and we hope you will get involved in helping us find some interesting solutions. We’re interested in the results – we have to adapt the way we are living and fast – but we are also interested in the story; what it takes to change.

It’s going to be an interesting journey.

We do need to do something.  And it needs to be big. So I predict that there will be a considerable amount of conflicting messages floating around in the foreseeable future, just as in the past.  I also predict that the various targets that have been set for ‘zeroing’ the planet’s carbon output are at risk of being missed, and probably will be.  Politicians will say, on Radio 4’s Today Programme and elsewhere, ‘I told you so’. I also predict that the media will moan about the ‘cost’ of being/going ‘green’ and the zero carbon housing that has already been built will be ‘outed’ in a shock Sun newspaper expose that reveals exclusively that some of these dwellings are, in fact, not ‘zero’ at all.  This will be supported by quotes from a mad scientist who looks vaguely like Einstein, who will eventually appear on ‘Britian’s Got Talent’.

‘He’ will get the Christmas number one single in the UK charts at some point in the next decade.  And then he will be revealed as actually being a woman, who will then join the ‘Loose Women’ team as a regular and possibly go on to host ITV’s ‘This Morning’ with that bloke with the silver hair. Basically, the next decade will be a bit like the last decade.  As usual, for those not interested in making the effort to look a little further beyond their comfort zone, it will be full of all the usual ’stuff’.  Great! However, maybe it’s worth making a New Year’s resolution to dig a little deeper, go a couple of yards beyond the usual nine, peek into things with a tad more effort than normal and form some opinions – or even better – get online and join a debate that you feel passionate about and let people know how YOU feel about things that MATTER and that you CARE about.  If that happens to be climate change, you’re welcome here.  If it’s not, you still will be – but there are plenty of other places out there in the digital world where you can participate and have your say. Join in.  Engage.  It’s a great, liberating thing to do.  It’s powerful.  And you CAN make a difference. Happy New Year everyone, and thanks for the support with HZH in 2009. We’ll be back in 2010 and beyond with a new site, some campaigns and more to say!

The Prime Minister of Denmark, the Secretary-General of the United Nations and a limited number of Heads of State and Government, including President Obama, representing all groups and regions, are speaking at an Informal High Level event. Watch on the UNFCCC live stream.

President Obama of the United States has now arrived to lend his political weight to the negotiations and, hopefully, help achieve an ambitious deal.  Yesterday the President’s Secretary of State Hilary Clinton announced America’s intention to work with other countries towards a goal of “jointly mobilizing $100bn a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries.”

The UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has already given his statement at the High Level Segment of the COP15 urging leaders to overcome obstacles and form “the first global alliance of 192…for the preservation of the planet”.  Gordon Brown has also spoken of the challenges of his role at the UN Climate Change summit, but says that he is determined to reach a “legally binding treaty”. The PM said, “It is really important, for Britain that we get this deal and it is important that I do everything I can in the next few days to make that possible.”

Energency efficiency

The Government will set aside £200 million from April to help with energy efficiency, which includes £150 million to help 75,000 of the most vulnerable households through the Warm Front scheme and £50 million to fund the greener boiler incentive for 125,000 homes.  The Warm Front scheme is delivered by Newcastle-based eaga plc through a contract with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)

Energy discounts and payouts

Energy companies are asked to provide discounts to a further one million homes in financial difficulty. From April people with a home with a wind turbine or solar panels who send power back to the national grid will receive an average tax-free payment of £900 a year. Electric vehicles are to be exempted from company car tax, and electric vans from a van benefit charge, for five years.

Carbon

£160 million investment in low-carbon and renewable projects, through the Innovation Investment Fund and the Carbon Trust’s venture capital scheme.

US President Obama will pitch up in Copenhagen towards the end of the UN Climate Change summit

Apparently, we have just 11 days to save the planet from global warming.  At least, that’s what the telegraph online has informed me this morning.  Steady on chaps, I nearly choked on my Special K Red Berries!

Trust me, it’s difficult enough to get a major UK TV broadcaster to commission a television programme that loosely features climate change as a subject (try not to use the word “green” if at all possible and consider how it affects people with disabilities, seems to be the advice).  But this end of the world element surely makes the whole subject interesting, right?!

I could maybe quickly obtain the world-wide TV rights to the big end of the world event.  Although, thinking about it, maybe it will be just too derivative of existing formats, specifically the big disaster flick, “2012.” And I guess there wouldn’t be much call for a second season.

It’s funny the way the climate change story plays out in the media.  It really is all or nothing.  It’s either nought miles per hour or 200mph, no gentle acceleration through the gears to enable us to get our collective heads around the actual issues.

The Daily Telegraph either reports nothing or says the end of the world is nigh!  And it’s not just the Telegraph, even those smiling sofa bunnies at GMTV have jumped on the bandwagon today – but at least they have put some top tips for saving the planet on their website so viewers need not be too alarmed.

And then we have the faked global warming data allegations levelled at those boffins at the University of East Anglia.  I assume this will eventually win the tag “climategate” if it rumbles on and on (even as I write I know I’m too late with this prediction!).  This is just the kind of dark, sinister and mysterious activity that is guaranteed to have everyone focussed on anything but the real point of it all.

So, what of the key event that’s driving much of the current media flotsam and jetsam about global warming?  The world’s leaders are gathering at The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Honestly, I don’t hold out much hope for genuinely focused outputs from this high-level banter. The biggest problem seems to be to me all about encouraging mass engagement of everyone around a set of consistent messages that show a simple set of steps anyone can take to make a difference in a realistic way.

We can’t tell consumers to change to energy efficient light bulbs in one breath, and then tell them world’s going to end in the next. And, on the “climategate” point, it’s terrible that some official boffins may have tampered with some evidence, but surely we are past the point of relying on scientists to still be dishing out and qualifying the cause and effect information?

The longer we wait for and rely upon governments and world leaders to sort things out, it really will be too late.  The power, on this and many other issues in the world today, is literally with the people.

Not so with the work of David McCandless a London based author of Information Is Beautiful and designer. His ‘love pie, hate pie charts’ approach to presenting information gives a clear, simple and attractive representation to ideas and facts that may otherwise pass you by.

This excellent graphic shows how the Kyoto signatories are shaping up to their commitments as we approach the talks in Copenhagen designed to replace them.

The information comes from a European Environmental Agency report and neatly summarises 188 pages of rather dense data.

As you can see the UK scores extremely well along with Germany, Greece and Sweden whereas Canada, Denmark, Italy Scotland, Spain and Switzerland are well off target.

Another example of effective climate communication can be seen below. In Good Magazine Spanish designer Lamosca has given an excellent graphic that shows nations carbon increase or decrease from 2006 to 2007.

It is interesting to see that the UK has the largest decrease of 3.8%.

The government is also in on the act. Below is a map released last month by DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change). Created in collaboration with the MET Office Hadley Centre it shows the global consequence of failing to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees Celsius.

The full interactive version is excellent and well worth playing with. It can be found at the DECC website here.

Much of the current interest in climate change was created by the persistent use of a simple Power Point presentation (Al Gore’s famous Inconvenient Truth). If we are to continue to spread the message and understand its complexity graphics such as the ones above must become common currency in our media, schools and offices. The time has come to see the change.

The Tory scheme, announced today in a speech given by George Osborne, was pioneered in the US and has been piloted in some Tory run councils. The idea is to provide incentives for people to recycle through a points system that can then be renewed through popular high street retailers.

Ecotricity are one of the greenest suppliers of electricity in the country. They are looking to invest £50 million into two biodigestion units (green gas mills in the company’s words) and match British Gas on dual fuel pricing. The scheme will be introduced in January but initially it will run of ‘brown’ gas with the introduction of biogas coming in stages over 2010.

Waste is turned into biogas by microbes contained in tanks without oxygen that convert the matter to methane and carbon dioxide. This can be burnt to generate electricity or supplied over the national grid as gas. Recycling at its best.

Both plans provide novel ways of dealing with household waste, and considering that UK homes send roughly 22.6 million tonnes of rubbish to landfills a year, ones that are to be welcomed.

By Lawrence Buckley

Good news for all households interested in having wind turbines or air source heat pumps for their homes. The Green Energy private members bill promoted by Peter Ainsworth, Conservative MP for East Surreyand supported universally by the Government and the main opposition front benches have received royal assent.

Bad news for those of you who’d like to do it this weekend, the legislation won’t come into force for six months.

However he basics of the bill will be welcomed by everyone interested in greening their home. The changes include:

• Wind turbines and air source heat pumps will not be require planning permission as long as they are below a certain size and do not produce a noise of over 45 decibels for the neighbours.

• Business, schools, hospitals and other non-domestic buildings can have microgeneration without planning permission including wind turbines up to 15 meters high.

It will also allow charging points for electric vehicles subject to size and siting considerations legal without planning permission.

This is a great step forward for making our homes more sustainable places to live. The government’s own figures suggest that up to 7 million homes could have some form of microgeneration installed by 2020, making those families and homes an important contributor to badly needed reductions in CO2 emissions.

by Lawrence Buckley

Displaying an impressive imagination and masterful grasp of Paint, the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology plan to build a solar powered cloud above the Olympic Park as part of London’s lasting legacy from the games.

The 120 meter tall tower topped with large plastic bubbles that visitors will be able to walk around will be solar powered and take no energy from the grid. Instead it will use regenerative energy from the lifts breaks to display Olympic race results and weather information for the gathered spectators. Google, Umberto Eco and Arup are amongst its supporters with Google wanting to supply the information feeds.

One of the most interesting aspects of the cloud is its funding. The designers are asking for millions of micro donations via their website and will build the cloud according to the amount of money raised

“It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.

“We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”

“Many tall towers have preceded this, but our achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material and the vast volume created by the spheres,” said Professor Joerg Schleich, the structural engineer behind the towers and designer of the Munich Olympic Stadium.

Other finalists shortlisted in the competition set up by London Mayor Boris Johnson are thought to include the former Turner prize winner Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, the designer of the Angel of the North.

The results are yet to be announced but the team are determined to build the structure whether it wins or not. If you would like to be part of its sucsess you can donate via their website here.

http://www.raisethecloud.org