Interesting post on Energysavinggadgets about a device that you screw over existing light switches so that the lights switch off automatically after there’s been no movement for some time.

Will they save you any money though?

I can’t find them in the UK but they are on ebay.com in the US for $25 – say £15. Assuming we’re talking about a nice bright 20W bulb, and your electricity costs 15p per unit. 5 hours of wasted light costs 15p, so for £15 you could get 500 hours of light (about 21 days). How long does it take you to waste 21 days worth of light? I think it takes me a pretty long time! And that figure, of course, doesn’t take into account the cost of the 3AA batteries it costs to run it, and the carbon costs it takes to create it.

They haven’t come out in the UK now, but I’m not exactly champing at the bit to get one…

Excitingly, my mate Tim has decided that our rugby club should make money by putting up a wind turbine to make extra funds. I’m keen to follow this closely, because it’ll be interesting to see the hurdles that you’ve got to jump to do it.

Looking at the numbers involved it seems that you can get a surprisingly impressive return on your investment of around 20- 25% which means it pays off the capital cost in 4 to 5 years then after that it’s all jam money, which would be great for the long term health of the club (and, more remotely, the community). Obviously whether it’ll get the same subsidies long term is less clear, but still.

On the face of it, we’ve got a decent site. A big ground in the middle of nowhere, nice open space on quite high ground (average wind speed 6m/s which by all accounts is pretty decent). But will the downsides win? Will a tree preservation order get in the way? Will it be too expensive to bury the nearby power lines? There are few houses nearby, but what will the single householder say about a windmill 92 metres away (apparently over 200m away the noise is negligible but…)? How will the nearby residents association (currently well organised and fighting off a housing development application) react?

Wow, it feels like a geography project case study. So I’ll try and blog about it occasionally. And in the meantime I’ll swallow my misgivings about wind power!

This is a good video – more videos should compare economic growth to a massive hamster, in my view. Can’t help thinking it might be an oversimplification of the arguments, but still, the principle that we can go on producing ever more, for ever, just doesn’t seem right.

What’s the alternative to growth, though? I’ve wondered for ages why 0.1% growth is so much “better” and feels so much nicer than 0.1% recession – but given that that’s exactly the sort of thing we’re experiencing at the moment – job losses, misery, falling asset prices and the like – it’s difficult to see how we can get weaned off the addiction to economic growth.

Even by oversimplified videos of massive hamsters.

(Hat Tip: Green Thing)

As a “light” green it’s hard not to fix hopefully on current newspaper headlines like this one: “Science chief John Beddington calls for honesty on climate change”. It would be so nice to think that it was all a hoax, or that it was all exaggerated. We could all stop bothering and go back to wasting loads of money and energy – what fun that used to be!

The sad thing is that it’s not like that. Beddington says that we’re exaggerating our level of certainty rather than exaggerating the level of the problem.

“Some people ask why we should act when scientists say they are only 90 per cent certain about the problem. But would you get on a plane that had a 10 per cent chance of landing?”

It’s hard even for the deiners to argue with that.

As Phil has pointed out, This is pretty fustrating reading. As Phil himself says

It’s been rumbling on for years and years. You may have seen the equally massive “NO MEGA PYLONS” billboards from the train as you went over the Drumochter Pass. There are already pylons on the proposed route. And it mostly runs parrallel with the A9 – people only moan about it because it spoils their views from the car instead of marching across pristine wilderness.

I have asked some Scottish friends (and woudl be interested in any comments) whether it is true to say that Scotland has become so addicted to state handouts that it is no longer interested in making its own money and developing its own capabilities? Surely this is a massive opportunity for Scotland to create loads of job, generate loads of power, and sell it to England. But instead people would rather sit on their hands and complain about pylons getting higher.

It’s a shame

It’s exciting reading about the quite-solid-looking plans for putting up loads more windpower batteries, but it does give me mixed feelings.
GOOD that non-carbon energy is going to be brought online
BAD that it’s windpower, which I feel pretty ambivalent about given its unreliability
BAD that you need to keep coal burning power stations on in case the wind doesn’t blow, so you don’t really save any carbon
GOOD that Gordon Brown keeps saying we’re aiming to be a leader in windpower to boost our economy and exports
BAD that he’s wrong, that we’ve done it too late, and that accordingly the jobs making this kit are going to be overseas, so we’re buying it in instead of making it and selling it to others (our only windmill factory shut last year)
BAD that we haven’t really got the money to do this because Brown spent it all on the welfare state in the Noughties, so any sensible successive government will rein in these plans.

This is a great rant by Giles Coren (who I hadn’t realised was much of a green), and I couldn’t agree with it more. It is so frustrating hearing people make jokes along the lines of “It’s snowing = there’s no climate change”.

Nobody who understands the science is claiming that global warming (if it happens) is going to make Britain hotter in the long run. You hear me? Nobody is saying that, not the bleeding-heartedest, most climate-credulous ladyboy Yakult-drinker in Islington. It will do the opposite. Global warming will in the end interfere with the ocean currents, knock out the Gulf Stream, and remove the protection we have from the icy Nordic weather that is our due, as sharers of the same latitude as Siberia. Britain will get colder.

It’s called “global warming”, but that doesn’t mean “nice warm weather”. So please stop making these stupid, stupid jokes in my newspapers and on my television.

Quite right!

According to the Times, Npower have sent out a load of energy saving lightbulbs at the last minute as a sop to hit their energy-reduction targets, even though they reckon they won’t be used. Poor show by them.

I was one of the beneficiaries of these. The Energy Saving Trust says there are 6 unused bulbs per household – I’ve got triple that! And I can’t stop buying them, it’s ridiculous at the moment, I keep seeing them for 10p in Sainsbury’s and remembering the days when they were £1.99 or £2.99. I’m going to keep stockpiling them for the future, as they won’t be this cheap for ever!

On the subject of “it being cold”, I heard some great chat over Christmas from a friend who is a policewoman in Reading. Her most pointless call over Christmas came from a woman who was complaining that someone had built an “obscene snowman” in her garden, and it was pointing in through her window – and she wanted the police to do something about it. My friend told her to close her curtains and wait for it to melt – great no-nonsense police work in my book!

My new year’s resolution is never to build a non-obscene snowman ever again.

A great effort from me before Christmas – my girlfriend went away and I didn’t turn on the heating the whole week – even though it was absolutely Baltic. It’s great being green – you can be really tight and pretend it’s just your principles. Thankfully Laura’s back this week so I can have the heating on and blame it on her.

Check this out – Global Rich List shows you how rich you are compared to the rest of the too-many-people-in-the-world. It turns out I’m rich beyond my wildest dreams – in the top 1%. Get in!

By the way, I have failed to draw any moral lesson from this. And in the spirit of Christmas, I have donated a whole £0.00. It seems to me that the greenest thing to do is not to do anything to encourage all these people to be alive in the first place. I always said that being green and being tight go together (not to mention being unpleasantly smug)…

Hat tip: Green Thing

Anyway, enough of Copenhagen, here’s another gadget – the PEG or personal energy generator. You walk along and it generates electricity – cool huh? Of course, it’s a tiny drop in the ocean but the fact it exists gives me a massive sense of totally unjustifiable wellbeing.

My intention ages ago was to make my millions out of installing little waterwheels in everyone’s arteries, which would generate power that could be stored in a battery inside you. Every now and again you’d go and download into the national grid, like a cow getting milked (except it’d take less time). To save money you could just put them into people who already needed operations so were already in hospital, but over time you’d have phased them into a good proportion of the population. It would be great.

The downside is you’d have to eat that bit more food to get the extra energy to turn the wheel, which itself has environmental implications – but that’s negligible. That objection would also apply to the PEG of course. Still, good on them. I wonder how long it takes to offset the carbon it takes to make them?