Just come to the end of another great Ashden Awards week! If you only watch one of our winners' films from this year, make sure it's this one, from Hollybush Primary school in Derry:
Just a few quick links for interesting blog posts relating to Ashden Awards stuff going on this week:
Pleased that we have this one in the Guardian:
Just a quick note to say that the 2012 Ashden Awards ceremony will be webcast for the first time. To see it, go the Ashden website at 7pm on Wednesday 30 May 2012, and follow the link to view it. The ceremony starts at 7:15pm.
To get an idea of what you'll see, check out the video from 2011:
We've just uploaded the video from last week's awards ceremony. Enjoy...
There's more videos from last week on the Ashden Awards YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/ashdenawards
Well, that was a long week - but a good one! I've been staying in London most of the past week, as we had the Ashden Awards Conference all day Wednesday and the Awards Ceremony Thursday evening. Both went really well, and you can see more pictures and read about the winners on the Ashden Awards website.
Just a quick post to tell everyone that the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy finalists for 2011 have been announced. (If you didn't know, I work for the Ashden Awards)
Click the links below to visit the Ashden Awards website to read a bit about them and see some more photos.
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Many of you know I work for the Ashden Awards. Well, here's a short video of what our work led to in the 2010 Awards Ceremony. Featured are Louis Theroux, Neil MacGregor, Shami Chakrabarti, Anna Ford and Sir David Attenborough.
Mike
OK, so here's the detail on why I was visiting Eigg. At the time, they were an applicant for an Ashden Award, which they went on to win this summer. The award was given for their work in cutting their carbon emissions by almost 50%! This has been done through a combination of renewable energy generation, energy efficiency and behavioural change. The renewable energy generation is the most visually impressive, so that's what most of the pictures are of - I'll talk about the other stuff at the end of this post.
The heart of the system is a small building which has two main rooms, one housing this huge bank of Rolls lead-acid batteries, sufficient to run the entire island for 24 hours without discharging too deeply:
The batteries work to smooth out the changes in supply and demand for electricity over time, thereby reducing the need for backup generation. The connections for these battery banks pass through the wall into the next room, which houses twelve 5kW inverters, four in parallel for each of the three phases used by the grid:
Also in this room is all the control hardware for the system:
including all kinds of live data from the weir and water turbine:
Just outside the control room is a pair of diesel backup generators, which operate alternately to provide redundancy. A generator will come on to top up the battery bank whenever the charge level drops too low. In practice they don't get use much - over 90% of Eigg's electricity comes from the renewable energy sources, and this will increase when they add more solar PV.
Not far from the generators is 10 kWp of solar PV, which is due to be increased to 30 kWp in the near future. It's in a great location, with no shading and a view of the Sgurr in one direction and the sea in the other:
To the south of the Sgurr is the wind farm, which uses four 6kW Proven wind turbines:
Inside the control room for them are inverters and equipment to divert power to dump load heaters in the event of there being excess power. Dump load electric heaters are also used in community buildings, and as the grid frequency rises with excess generation, they automatically come on in stages to make use of the spare power. The dump loads at the wind turbines only come on when all of the heaters in community buildings are already on.
As you can see, some of the roads are pretty rugged, hence the need for a 4x4. At least they don't get driven very far, and there's a lot of lift-sharing as well.
Near the centre of the island is a weir:
From here the penstock takes water out of the stream for the water turbine, with a valve controlled remotely to ensure some water remains in the stream:
There's a drop of over 100m from here to the turbine, and we walked down it, following the buried penstock across fields and streams:
You can still just about see where it was buried on its way to the power house where the turbine is located (strip running up from the bottom of the picture, just left of centre):
Inside the power house is the water turbine - these are never very interesting to look at, they just sit there and do their job. This one was painted in the traditional "hydro blue" that seems to be compulsory for turbine equipment!
It's a pelton turbine, here's the technical details:
Well, that's where Eigg's electricity comes from, but as as I said, that's just one aspect of how they've cut their carbon emissions. Another is switching from from fossil fuels to wood for heating - I saw forestry work in progress, and the production of logs for heating is ramping up rapdily now:
The wood is burned in stoves that either heat a room or have a boiler in them to run central heating:
Every home has an OWL energy monitor - this is crucial, as one of the constraints adopted to make the renewable energy supply practical and affordable was to limit every house to 5 kW, and businesses to 10 kW - if you go over, your electricity cuts out, and a technician must visit to turn it on again. The meters sound an alarm if consumption gets close to the limit, and very few people ever get cut off, as energy-saving habits are second nature to the residents of Eigg.
Every house on Eigg has to have it's own water supply, and it was nice to see a few ram pumps running - supplying water without using fossil fuels. We had an international Ashden Award winner using these a few years ago, in the Philippines.
Over at the school sustainability was high on the agenda too, with a geodesic greenhouse and raised beds in the garden (I was there in February, which is why there's not much growing):
The school is proud of its achievements and has won a Green Flag from Eco-Schools for its work.
There are numerous other initiatives in progress, such as home insulation, poly-tunnels to grow food (reducing food miles), increased cycling and the use of solar water heating:
Eigg's done an amazing job, massively cutting it's carbon emissions, and showing the rest of the UK the way it should be going with renewable generation. To finish, I'll leave you with the video that the Ashden Awards made about Eigg's achievements (you can download a copy from the Ashden Awards website):
Local solutions to climate change: the 2010 Ashden Awards Imperial College Conference
Every year the charity I work for, The Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy, runs a conference in conjunction with Imperial College in London. It's the only opportunity to see films and presentations from all of this year's finalists, who are from the UK and developing countries.
This year it's on Wed 30th June 2010, and the Royal Geographic Society in London, and best of all, it's free! To read more about it and register, visit this page:
ashdenawardsconference2010.eventbrite.com
Here's the blurb:
Ashden Award winners are finding solutions to poverty and climate change through the clever use of local sustainable energy. In June this year’s winners will be in London to share their success at our conference which will be opened by Professor Sir Peter Knight of Imperial College and includes:International presentations will be in the morning, UK in the afternoon. Numbers are limited so tickets are on a first-come, first-served basis.
- 2010 international and UK winners – films, presentations and Q&A sessions.
- Carbon finance – Is it the way forward? Panel debate chaired by Anya Sitaram of BBC World News with panellists including Mike Mason, Founder of Climate Care and Sarah-Jayne Clifton of Friends of the Earth and author of the report ‘A Dangerous Obsession’.
- New politics - Does blue and yellow make green? A conversation with Jonathon Porritt, a senior government Minister and Ashden Award winners about the role that local sustainable energy solutions could play in a tough fiscal future.
I'm busy visiting the shortlisted applicants for the Ashden Awards at the moment, so I've not been getting up to the wood very much. So, in the absence of any woodland photos, here's a couple of videos of Pete and Tom, our cockatiels.
Pete can be very demanding sometimes - in this video Tracy's working, but Pete thinks she should stop to preen his feathers. Eventually he gives up trying to distract her and goes to do the preening himself...
And in this video, he's just showing off and singing!
Mike
We identified the fungus we found last week, and our friend Tim confirmed it - Chicken of the Woods (or Sulphur Polypore):
We've not tried eating any, but it is supposed to be edible. Perhaps we'll give it a go... we hear it's quite expensive to buy!
Another interesting thing growing is the big holly tree in the public footpath. Here's a picture of it during the coppicing work last winter:
As you can see, it now has a lot of light getting to its lower branches as well as the top. As a result, it is now flowering!
I assume it's been flowering at the top every year, but this is the first time we've seen it flowering near ground level. And if you're wondering why the leaves aren't spiky, it's because it has polymorphic leaves - only those lower down (and therefore at risk of being eaten) grow spiky.
The big event this week so far was a visit from some of my work colleagues from the Ashden Awards and their families:
They all had a good time, and there's a write-up on the Ashden Awards blog, with some more pictures.
Last of all, on Monday we did a bit more processing of firewood:
This isn't ready to sell yet as it needs some more seasoning. Here's a birch log that had been striped along one side only:
It's hard to tell in the photo, but you can just about see that near the stripe made on the top by the chainsaw the wood is drier (paler colour). This is why it's important to stripe birch if you're not going to split it (this log in particular has been split now, by some of the Ashden Awards people!).
We're off to the woods again this evening, this time for a friend's birthday, so I think a fire, marshmallows and a few beers are in order...
Mike
