Greener Eynsford Blog
Green news and views relevant to our community
Individual Carbon Footprint - June 2023
6th July 2023
Eynsford Green Team: Personal Carbon Footprint Monthly 2022 and 2023
My carbon footprint in June (0.29T/CO2e) was lower than May (0.40 T/CO2e) because May included a return trip in a petrol car to Scotland. June is the lowest month so far, my gas usage for heating was minimal. It is also lower than June 2022 (0.37) mainly because the electric car means grid electricity replaces petrol use for transport .
A question was raised this month about offsetting. Given that flights are such a large contributor to a personal carbon footprint, does offsetting the flight solve the problem?
Carbon offsetting aims to balance the negative CO2e impact of an activity (eg. a flight) with an equal but opposite, positive (eg. CO2 sequestration) activity such as tree planting. I am, though, skeptical about them…
Offset - pros
Conceptually a nice idea – offset bad activity with good activity
Offsetting - cons
Carbon offsetting does not work on the core issue of reducing CO2 emissions - we are already significantly in excess of the total environmental capacity of our planet – we have to actually reduce our impact not just balance it out
Offsetting can mean we don’t change our personal behaviour - we need to reduce our impact, offsetting lulls us into a false belief that our activity is balanced out and we can continue as now
Offsetting projects have different effectiveness rates and evidence is appearing that many of them are not delivering the CO2 reduction that is claimed, for instance tree planting must both be real, incremental and long term (ie the trees maintained for 50 years)
Questions : We would love to receive and discuss any questions info@eynsfordparishcouncil.org.uk
Individual Carbon Footprint - March 2023
6th July 2023
Eynsford Green Team: Personal Carbon Footprint March 2023
Annual overview: Personal Carbon Footprint by month 2022 and 2023
My carbon footprint in March 2023 was actually slightly higher than the previous month although lower than in 2022. The change from 2022 comes firstly from having more people in the house (we are hosting a Ukrainian family) so the energy use per person has become less – this is a personal (1 person) carbon footprint. Secondly from switching from a diesel to an electric car, so car footprint comes down but electricity has gone up.
March Month: Personal Carbon Footprint 2022 and 2023
My March footprint (0.42 T/CO2e) was slightly higher than February (0.39 T/CO2e). Two main factors – house gas use went up 10% (3451 kwh Mar vs 3079 kwh in Feb). In my mind I think March was a bit grey and damp so that may be the explanation. The official statistics come out a month in arrears so I only have Feb to go on, we’ll have to wait next month to see if that’s correct. House electricity use mainly from charging the car went up to 519 kwh March vs 380 kwh Feb given higher mileage in the car.
In the month 161 kwh were produced by the PV panels on my roof, around half of which was utilized in the house and half exported to the grid. 519kwh were taken from the grid. 315kwh were used to charge the car and 284 kwh to light and power the house.
Questions
We would love to receive any questions and could use this forum to discuss the most common ones. info@eynsfordparishcouncil.org.uk
Solar Panels - A Resident's View
23rd March 2023
Thank you to a resident of Eynsford who has provided details of their experience of having solar panels fitted.
Our experience of having a solar system fitted to our house in Pollyhaugh began back in June 2022. We received a communication from Kent County Council about a countywide scheme to promote the fitting of solar panels. The scheme was called Kent Solar Together and the idea was to have people register their interest and then invite companies to tender for the work. It was expected that this would result in reductions in the cost of the solar panels compared to what people would have to pay if they arranged for the installations themselves.
We had been thinking about having solar panels fitted for some time and were attracted by the scheme, not just because of the cost savings but also because of the assurance that participating in a council-backed scheme would give us that we would be contracting with a reputable supplier.
The company that fitted our panels was Home Smart Energy, who are based in Burgess Hill, West Sussex. We received an email from the company a few weeks after registering our interest asking us to confirm that we would like to proceed and to provide them with some information about the house, including photos and direction of the roof areas and a photo of the fuse board and whether there was any spare capacity within it. We subsequently received details of the proposed layout of panels to be fitted, along with an estimate of the cost.
Having accepted the estimate we paid a deposit for a surveyor to call and carry out an on-site survey of the property and finalise the installation. Based on this survey we had to delete one of the panels as it would be too close to one of our dormer windows. So the full system would consist of 7 500W panels, an inverter, battery storage, and a system that would, in the event of a power cut supply power to 2 sockets fitted above the inverter from which we could run extension leads to low power appliances in the event of a grid power outage, eg TV, table lamps, hob.
We didn’t hear from the company for a long time after the surveyor’s visit in mid-July but eventually, they contacted us to let us know that our panels etc would be fitted on Monday 12th December and that scaffolders would visit the week before. The scaffolding was erected as planned but unfortunately, the weather intervened with snow on 11th December and the installation had to be put back until the New Year.
The new installation date of 9th January finally came around and the whole system was installed in around 5 hours. The battery was 50% full when it was installed and it was a fairly sunny day so we could immediately see the cost of our electricity usage reducing from our smart meter.
As with everything these days, there’s an app linked so the system (SolisCloud) through which we can see how much power the panels are producing, whether we are charging or discharging the battery, and whether we are exporting any power back to the grid. The app also shows our overall electricity usage and how much of that has come from our own generation. It also shows how much CO2 the system has saved and how many tree plantings that equates to. As of 12.00 on 25th Feb we have saved 159.52kg of CO2 emissions which sounds like a lot but it only equates to 0.09 trees!!
The data shown by the app is available both for the current day and for each of the days since the system has been installed so we are able to build up a picture of how our generation varies with the weather (in particular the level of cloud cover) and what our cost savings have been.
As of now the solar-produced energy has been just under 35% of our overall usage for the period since the panels were installed, and we estimate that we’ve saved £86.18 (£1.83 per day on average) which considering the time of year we are really pleased with. On the sunniest days we have generated up to 73.6% of our consumption! Unfortunately on some sunny days we have found ourselves exporting over 40% of our generation to the grid without being paid for it since the process of getting ourselves set up to receive payment from our supplier (EDF) under the Smart Export Guarantee scheme takes over 4 weeks. Even when we are set up the rate we’ll receive will be very low (only 5.6p per kWh) so we’ll be doing our best to time the usage of our electrical appliances so that we use the electricity that we generate rather than letting it go to the grid. Since we are on Economy 7 we generally try and run our higher-powered appliances when the much lower night rates apply but on the sunnier days we’ll run our dishwasher during the day using our own power!
Another thing that we try to do is to reduce spikes in our electricity consumption during the day (which tend to lead to us drawing from the grid) by using lower powered appliances. Eg a lower powered kettle will take a bit longer to boil but we can power it entirely from our own generation.
As you can see from the photo below the controls, battery and inverter for the system take up very little room and can easily be fitted, as here, in a small cupboard.
We’ve included a screenshot below of what the app looks like on a smartphone. From the data in the top right corner you can see that we weren’t using anything from the grid at the point that this screenshot was taken.
