White Christmas, Green Year?

It's a brand new decade! I hope you all had a great Christmas & New Year and wish you a safe, healthy, happy and green 2021.

   Why green? You mean like the Grinch? Not exactly. With everything that's been going on, the fight against carbon has kind of taken a back seat. But the climate is still changing. We used to call it the Greenhouse Effect back in the 80s, before someone decided that was not a very politically correct phrase, and after all, who could prove for sure that the climate didn't just change of its own accord? Of course it does, just a lot faster with our help.

Click to enlarge this graph from Climate.gov

   As you may know, I like to record our monthly energy usage data, put it in a spreadsheet, calculate the CO2 emissions associated, and draw up a graph. Because I'm a bit of a nerd like that.

   How? It's simple. On the first of each month I go round and record the readings from our electricity, gas, and solar meters, and record the mileage of my car. Next I put them in a spreadsheet. Then I do the same the next month, and subtract the difference. After that I researched on various websites how to convert electricity and gas into kg of CO2 emissions (CO2e/KG)*. Finally, in the last column, you add it all up. Looks a bit like this:

   Nice, eh? Red represents winter, green summer and blue is spring and autumn. 

   Here are our CO2 emissions for the past two years from 1/1/19 to 1/1/21.

   The orange line is our electricity, green our car usage, blue is gas, yellow is solar and brown is total.

   The CO2 emissions for car take into account the mile per gallon reading (56.3) and CO2 emitted during the car's manufacture, spread out over its projected lifespan per mile. Because cars don't just grow on trees.

   The electricity usage 'should' be lower than if we didn't have solar panels. But since we've always had solar panels since a couple months after we moved in, this is hard to gauge. 

   The solar reading is negative because it represents the energy we put into the grid (50% after what we use in the daytime) rather than take out. 50% is pretty accurate I guess. (I have no idea really. The guy who put the panels on told me, so that's the best I got.)

   As you can see for the graph, our total carbon emissions are dropping year on year. Electricity and gas remain relatively unchanged, but car emissions are on the decrease. This is because in 2018 I often drove into Edinburgh for business meetings, which ceased in around spring 2019, bringing it down to normal levels in winter 2019. Then 2020 brought Covid-19 and with it lockdown and working from home. 

   This is all moot anyway now as we take our electricity and gas from Bulb, which is a renewable energy company providing either gas from anaerobic digestion, or offset by supporting carbon reduction projects around the world. This just leaves our car. But happily Bulb provide a carbon footprint calculator and payback scheme which allows you to offset your additional carbon emissions using a monthly payment. We pay about £3 per month on top of our energy bills. 

   Why just £3 per month? I guess because the electricity and gas is all carbon neutral to begin with being from Bulb, and the car is a hybrid which we hardly use that much due to lockdown. We hardly fly any more and don't eat much red meat. Don't get me wrong, I like a long-haul flight to Japan to eat steak as much as the next person. Just haven't done it since 2018. (Technically I should have added that on here, but I've also planted a tree or two since then so I'm hoping they cancel each other out).

   Try the Bulb Carbon Footprint Calculator here. Go on. I dare ya!

   I know this is beginning to sound like an advert for Bulb, but it's not product placement. It's in our species' own interest to record, reduce and offset the CO2 emissions we produce. The more people who do it, the better the effect on our planet, the better future our kids and their kids will have.

  My Personal Plan for 2021: Continue to reduce emissions by:

•    Improving home insulation
•    Switching from hybrid to electric vehicle
•    No flights
•    Working from home
•    Increasing plot size and growing more vegetables 
•    Charging batteries in daytime to use at night
•    Going to bed earlier? Would this help?
•    Accelerating and braking gently while driving
•    Wind turbine?

   Any other suggestions welcome.

   Here are some other ideas on how you can have a green year:

• Switch to Ecosia search engine who use their profits to plant trees.
• Switch to a renewable energy provider such as Bulb, Good Energy or Ecotricity.
• Set up a direct debit with WordForest.Org, a charity which plants trees and helps communities in Kenya.
• Fly less
• Use your own private car less
• Move away from red meat to a vegan diet
• Sign & share petitions
• Write letters & emails to politicians 
• lobby private companies that engage in dirty energy practices or investments.

   You could argue, "I'm just one person in billions - a drop in the ocean. What difference will it make? Why should I bother?"

   But we are all drops in the ocean...

*These are the formulae I use, but don't ask me where I got them as it was two years ago now...

Formula to convert electricity (Kwh) to CO2 emissions (CO2e/kg) : CO2e/kg = Kwh x 0.2773

Formula to convert gas (ft3) to gas (kwh): gas (kwh) = gas (ft3) x 31.513

To convert gas (kwh) to CO2 emissions : CO2e/kg = gas (kwh) x 0.18

Gallons of fuel spent = mileage/mpg

Car emissions calculated by Car CO2e/kg = (0.051+10.6/mpg) x mileage + (1.968 x mileage/mpg)

Please let me know if you spot an error. 

Thanks, and happy greening!

Carbon

Been thinking a lot about carbon today, as it's the last day of February when I check our car mileage, gas, electricity and solar meters. I do this on the first day of each month and have been for the past 14 months to monitor how much energy we use.

Above is a graphical representation of this data. The wine-coloured line is total emissions, which is the sum of gas, electricity and car usage, minus the emissions avoided due to our solar panels.

To calculate the emissions from using our hybrid Toyota Auris, I've taken into account manufacture of fuel and production of the car as well as the combustion of the fuel, per mile as described here (http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/calculate-your-driving-emissions). According to the dashboard display the fuel efficiency rates between 56-58 mpg.

For gas usage I first had to convert ft3 to kwh using the following calculation from here (https://www.businessenergy.com/business-gas/gas-bill-calculator/):

Here's how to convert cubic feet (ft3) to kWh from your gas meter reading. 482 unit used X 2.83 to convert to cubic metres X 1.02264 X 39.2 calorific value divided by 3.6 provides 15,189 kWh. At 2.84p/kWh provides an estimated bill of £431.38. 482 x 2.83 x 1.02264 x 39.2 ÷ 3.6 = 15,189 x 2.84 = £431.38.

Then I multiplied it by 0.18 as described here (carbonfootprint.com)

For electricity usage I multiplied by 0.2733 as used by the same carbon calculator website. For solar, the same, except negative.

If my calculations are correct (doubtful) then the above graph should be representative of our family's CO2 emissions in kg for the past 14 months.

Some things to note: I cycle more in the summer months when the weather is better, and the mpg rating of our car is also better in the summer months.

We went on holiday to Legoland in August 2019, which may explain why that reading is so low across the board.

Interestingly the 1/8/19 readings reveal that we generated so much solar power that it offset the use of car, electricity and gas combined.

Here's a pie chart:

As can be seen from this, car usage is by far our worst means of CO2 emissions at about 57%. And it's a hybrid.

Looking again at the above line-graph, the difference between summer and winter emissions is quite shocking. From 75 kg in August 2019 all the way up to 525 kg at the start of data collection in Jan 2019.

So what can be done? It's cold in winter and there's more sunlight in summer. There's not much I can do about that. But the car is screwing everything.

Big time.