Wind farms

[Andy Hamilton]

"It cost roughly £12 a year now if you leave your phone charger plugged in but not attached to a phone,"

Rubbish.

"These are all things that add up to current demand for power that didn't used to exist."

Like incubators for premature babies and MRI scanners than can spot cancer early?
Attacking progress is the reason so many people are so against environmentalism, we dont want to live in a mud hut and subsist on soy curd.
You may be happy to live in a yurt with enough electricty for an hour of radio each week, but the rest of the world quite likes central heating and life expectancies above 50, and attacking those as the price of "green" makes the rest of us look like nutters.

Oh dominic take some deep breaths. Also you might want a quick read of our rules, there is no need to attack anyone with an apposing point of view every time. In fact I am not sure that I do totally have an apposing point of view. In fact everyone take a few deep breaths.

I am not really sure where you are coming from Dom - at no point have I said that I want to attack progress (unless that was no directed at me). I was talking about needless waste of electricity, a very different matter. I take it you are happy to chuck your money away leaving everything on standby?

I also don't think that people with green views are considered nutters anymore if Exon Moblie are spending millions on telling us they are green then this is certainly a sign that it is no longer a fringe movement.

Ok just looked up the phone charger and yep you are right that was rubbish it actually cost about £1.21 at todays prices. So yes I admit you were right to jump on that one.

I did however meet one bloke once called Richard Hallows author of "Diary of a reluctant green" who said that by just turning things that were not needed off he shaved 67% off his electricity bill. He is not walking about in the dark or living in a yurt, he still leads a happy and contented life he just does not waste as much electricity as he used to. That is simply my point if everyone did the same our need for power stations would decrease.

And just as I was about to post I saw your post Russ, glad you agree

[Annpan]

One thing that everyone has failed to mention so far is USING LESS ELECTRICITY

It is my sincere hope that the rising costs of fuel will make us all more slightly aware of how much power we are using. I don't really understand why people don't think of energy conservation not as a green thing but as a sensible thing. It cost roughly £12 a year now if you leave your phone charger plugged in but not attached to a phone, think about that with an estimated 40%-60% rise in fuel costs - making it closer to £18 a year. Now add up the costs of various other appliances left on standby and think of how many days work or even overtime you have to do just to keep a phone on or a kettle full when it's boiling. As most of us are overdrawn a lot of the time then interest payments should be added to the over all costs.

Why oh why do people give up so much time in order to pay for little red lights to be on? We would perhaps not be having this argument if we all stopped wasting so much electricity!

Andy, have you got one of those electricity monitor thingys, they look great - but the are expensive... we are trying to get a freebie one from JohnM's work.

The thing is we are all so used to having as much electricty as we could wish for - of course there are fantasic life saving machines that need electricity but what about the huge users of energy that are not essential.
eg. Shops - air conditioning (yet no windows), vast amounts of artificial light (particularly spot lights), hot air blowing on you when you walk in the door, in winter, with the door open.

[hamster]

Annpan, what about asking friends or on Freecycle if anyone would lend you one? Most people I know who have one said they are really useful for about 2 weeks but after you know how much your appliances use and what you personally leave on they are less use, so there is probably someone who would be prepared to let you borrow one for a couple of weeks.

[Andy Hamilton]

Nope I have not got one of those monitors instead I am very anal about what it left on. I am sure it would make me worse if I had one.

I managed to get one of my electricity bills down to £50 for a quarter once! They are still normally pretty low, you just get to know what uses what if you have written a book about it

[Rod in Japan]

One thing that everyone has failed to mention so far is USING LESS ELECTRICITY

I think we did. pumpy mentioned waste which I assumed to mean the odd bit here and there for stuff left on. And I then mentioned the greater waste involved in making throwaway consumer electronics as one example. Then DomJ ran off on a totally uncalled for reductio ad absurdum trip about living in a yurt. (Actually I'm going for an MRI tomorrow DomJ for my buggered knee. I don't consider useful technology a waste.)

I'm close to being a fundamentalist about turning stuff off. Since I'm in the power generation business myself with solar panels on our house, I'm keen to sell as much power as we can. This sometimes puts me at odds with the rest of my family who want things like Christmas lights (No way! NO WAY! Yurts don't have Christmas lights!)

[marshlander]

Here's an article I hope you will find of interest. The author Dr David Fleming will be at our next Transition Town Louth meeting.

Nuclear Energy in brief

1.The world's endowment of uranium ore is now so depleted that the nuclear industry will never, from its own resources, be able to generate the energy it needs to clear up its own backlog of waste.


2. It is essential that the waste should be made safe and placed in permanent storage. High-level wastes, in their temporary storage facilities, have to be managed and kept cool to prevent fire and leaks which would otherwise contaminate large areas.

3. Shortages of uranium - and the lack of realistic alternatives - leading to interruptions in supply, can be expected to start in the middle years of the decade 2010-2019, and to deepen thereafter.

4. The task of disposing finally of the waste could not, therefore, now be completed using only energy generated by the nuclear industry, even if the whole of the industry's output were to be devoted to it. In order to deal with its waste, the industry will need to be a major net user of energy, almost all of it from fossil fuels.

5. Every stage in the nuclear process, except fission, produces carbon dioxide. As the richest ores are used up, emissions will rise.

6. Uranium enrichment uses large volumes of uranium hexafluoride, a halogenated compound (HC). Other HCs are also used in the nuclear life-cycle. HCs are greenhouse gases with global warming potentials ranging up to 10,000 times that of carbon dioxide.

7. An independent audit should now review these findings. The quality of available data is poor, and totally inadequate in relation to the importance of the nuclear question. The audit should set out an energy-budget which establishes how much energy will be needed to make all nuclear waste safe, and where it will come from. It should also supply a briefing on the consequences of the worldwide waste backlog being abandoned untreated.

8. There is no single solution to the coming energy gap. What is needed is a speedy programme of Lean Energy, comprising: (1) energy conservation and efficiency; (2) structural change in patterns of energy-use and land-use; and (3) renewable energy; all within (4) a framework for managing the energy descent, such as Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs).

To find out more take a look at the full report, The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy, available free of charge.

Alternatively, you may prefer to buy a printed copy.

The material on this website is available as a Creative Commons Licence: it may be freely reproduced and distributed for a non-commercial purpose, without modification, with acknowledgment. For commercial reproduction, contact the author: David Fleming. ©
http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net ... mmary.html

[Rod in Japan]

marshlander, Greenpeace Japan sent an open letter to James Lovelock (pdf) urging him to drop his support for nuclear power. It contains even more detailed arguments. You might find it useful.

[DominicJ]

Was not my intention to jump, I had intended to expand on "Rubbish".

Its just, every time someone "green" repeats something like that, a "normal" person assumes everyone who mentions solar power or hydro electric dams wants to break modern society and go back to living in communes of a few hundred, with sheep poo and mud houses and getting killed off by typhoid before your 30. That causes immeasurable damage to my cause, having heating and light in 5 years time.

[Annpan]

Was not my intention to jump, I had intended to expand on "Rubbish".

Its just, every time someone "green" repeats something like that, a "normal" person assumes everyone who mentions solar power or hydro electric dams wants to break modern society and go back to living in communes of a few hundred, with sheep poo and mud houses and getting killed off by typhoid before your 30. That causes immeasurable damage to my cause, having heating and light in 5 years time.

I don't agree Dominic, and this site is a testament to that. Many of us have 'real jobs', 99% of us have running water, grid electricity, standard homes... and every one of us is part of 'normal' society. We all have friends and family who we try to 'educate' and certainly my friends and family are starting to come round to it.
Green is quite a widely used phrase these days, and I am pretty sure that most people think it means - organic, fair trade, solar panels, planting trees, recycling - I don't think anyone thinks that 'green' means 'getting killed off by typhoid before you are 30'

They way you talk is as if you don't want to change anything - We have to stop producing so much crap, which mean we (the consumer) has to stop buying so much crap, and using so much crap.... and yes a wii is in the category that I call crap (especially when it is for a single child who already has various other games consoles - which is probably how most are purchased)

[red]

hmm yeh - I can't see a Wii (stupid name) ever being brought into this house.

my son does play computer games on his pc though - (and er.. we all here hang around on forums!), so not quite ready for the sheep poo yurt yet...

[Rod in Japan]

Was not my intention to jump, I had intended to expand on "Rubbish".

Well kudos to you anyway for pointing out factual inaccuracies, as they do tend to get repeated as gospel. It's good to know the true costs of things.

(Since you mentioned horrible diseases, it's ironic that many of our 'modern' practices are encouraging a resurgence of historical diseases. Perhaps my grandchildren will be too busy trying to fend off the malarial mosquitoes to play Wii, though I hope not.)