One whole year of solar power, and what is "green" power anyway ?

Our photovoltaic solar panels were installed on our roof just over a year ago, in April 2012. As they've been installed for a whole year now, we can see how effective they've been not only in Summer but also in Winter.

Having kept note of production from the solar panels also meter readings for the last year, it's possible to draw a graph. The graph takes into account 12 months, I've added the first six days of April 2013 to the April 2012 figure in order to show that as a complete month:

Note that apparent downward trends in consumption for May/June and July/August/September are due to our reading the meter inconsistently in those months so we don't have exact figures. However, total area of the red "actual use" is correct.

The blue bars show solar energy production each month. Red bars show our consumption. It's quite pleasing to see the blue bars drawing a good approximation of a sine wave, as they were expected to do over a year. It's also interesting to note that our electricity has some similarity to a cosine curve. While we don't use electricity for heating, we use electric lights a lot more in winter than in summer, and perhaps we also bake more in winter.

Successful experiment !
I'm pleased with the result of our first year of solar power. The electricity that we generated from April 2012 to April 2013 totalled 3286 kWh with a value of about €680. The shortfall was 133 kWh, which has a value of about €27. So long as the system remains so effective our electricity bills will remain minute.

The predicted output of our panels in our location was about 3150 kWh, so in the first year we've generated about 5% more than the supplier said we would. No cause for complaint there, especially given that last summer was one of the wettest on record.

The system cost €8000. It will take just under 12 years for the system to pay for itself if electricity does not go up in price within that period. I predict that it will and therefore I expect the system to pay for itself sooner. Time will tell. In any case, we are effectively immunized from the effect of any electricity price rises.

The panels are guaranteed to have over 90% of their rated output in 10 years time and over 80% after 25 years.

Peaks and troughs
Our peak month was May when we produced 447 kWh. June had the best ratio of production vs. consumption, 392 kWh vs. 223 kWh (consumption was 175% of consumption). You'll note that the lacklustre summer of 2012 caused June and July to have lower output than May.

Even when completely covered in frost there is still some
output - 600 W when this photo was taken.

The worst month was December. In this month we produced just 35.2 kWh but consumed 328 kWh. Our production was just 11% of the consumption. January was also low, but note that production held up quite well in other winter months, in November we produced a third of the electricity we consumed and in February over 40%.

From April when the panels were installed through to January, we had a positive balance in the amount of electricity generated vs. consumption. In February the balance went negative.

What happens at night ?
It costs us roughly €240 per year to be connected to the grid. This gives security of supply and of course for us the grid operates as a "battery".

There is no practical way of storing large amounts of electricity. People often imagine it's as simple as having a car battery in some corner of your home, but actually it requires a huge battery to store enough energy to run an average western home at night time. What's more, as you can see from the sine-wave of production vs. cosine wave of consumption, we don't have just a 24 hour cycle over which our consumption has to be matched to production but a 365 day cycle. To store enough electricity in Summertime to power the homes of people with average Western lifestyles through Winter is in fact impossible. The earth does not have enough resources to built a battery capable of doing this.

Oxxio fuel mix figures for small
business clients (we are on this tariff)

And what is that "battery" in reality ?
My electricity provider, Oxxio, state that the electricity I buy from them is entirely "green". They say that the energy comes almost entirely from water power, but of course there are no hydroelectric power stations in the Netherlands, so what does this mean ?

Oxxio, like other suppliers, buy "green" Guarantee of Origin certificates from Norway. Norway and the Netherlands are linked by a 700 MW cable, enough to balance the grids a little but only to carry but a fraction of either country's use. The Netherlands as a whole uses a lot more than 700 MW of electricity. Oxxio have 800000 customers. If each of their customers consumes electricity at the same average rate as we do (and we're a little below average) then total consumption of Oxxio customers is about the same as half of the capacity of the link between here and Norway. Oxxio are but the fourth largest electricity supplier in the Netherlands. One of their competitors, Essent, has over 2.3 million customers and many of their customers are signed up to "green" electricity as well.

The figures don't add up and when you look at it, it's obvious why. While companies in the Netherlands and elsewhere are buying Green Certificates which say that the electricity they sell is "green", nothing requires that the electricity they sell genuinely comes from a "green" source as these certificates are "traded separately from the energy produced".

I'm pretty sure that Norwegian consumers assume all their electricity is "green" because virtually all (98%) of their electricity generation is from hydro electric plants. As a result, the "green" electricity is in effect being sold twice. Electricity sold to Norwegians, whether they realise it or not, is now certified as being over 75% non green even though they are being sold electricity which overwhelmingly comes from that country's hydro electric power stations. The reason is that Norway is selling their Green Certificates. The result is that Norwegians, perhaps unwittingly, buy their hydro-electric power as "not green" at a lower price while those of us in countries like the Netherlands who buy "green" electricity are actually been sold electricity which comes almost entirely not from renewable sources but with an additional charge to cover the Green Certificates.

And so in reality when we switch on our lights at night time or in winter, our electricity comes almost entirely from non-renewable sources. That we produce and export genuinely green electricity much of the rest of the time doesn't help at night because there is no way to store "our" electricity and return it to us. Similarly, it doesn't help much that we're signed up to a green energy supplier because they have no way of guaranteeing that our electricity genuinely comes from a green source.

I still think it's a good thing to have the panels on our roof, and I still think it's got to help a little to buy from a green supplier. However, this isn't quite the green energy revolution that I'd hoped for. If you know of a solution, please let me know.

One solution, the most important of all, is to consume less. That was the immediate response from a friend of mine. We are working on that too !

Why I am no longer on Facebook

Between 2007 and yesterday I had an account on Facebook.

I originally joined the site because I thought it would be useful for keeping in touch with family members and ex-colleagues, and to some extent it was useful for this.

Later, I set up an account for our business with the hope that this would be a useful way of keeping in touch with customers.

However, over time Facebook became something that I really did not like. Perhaps it's my own fault that my "friends" grew beyond those people who I'd actually met, but that's the nature of the thing and it's certainly not all negative. I met plenty of pleasant and perfectly rational people online on Facebook who I would never have met in real life and of course I don't regret that at all. However, as the number of "friends" grew and the number of "friends" of "friends" who could see my posts and comment on them grew, it became clear that what was posted on Facebook was no longer for my actual friends and family at all.

The big problem with the site is the signal to noise ratio. For every person posting items genuinely of interest and including some original thought there are a thousand others re-posting "amusing" pictures of cats, taking photos of their dinner, links to pointless games, automated updates from some self-important piece of software or other or offering an unwelcome glimpse into their sex-life, not to mention the unthinking knee-jerk "judge and jury" reactions to stories in the news. While I'm interested in reading sensibly written pieces by people who have actually thought about what's going on in the world, I have no interest at all in any of this other stuff. Too much time is taken up sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Facebook also has a quality problem. Their software changes too often and their quality control is poor. There are now a bewildering array of configuration options which make it difficult for people to tell who they are sending their messages to (hence receiving things which clearly were not meant for a wide audience), every single irritating app must be blocked individually and while the Android app is better now than it used to be, that also has enough bugs and user interface funnies that it adds another layer of tediousness to the user experience.

A fake conversation generated by Facebook between myself and my alter-ego.
They wanted me to pay to generate more meaningless noise on their website.

The final straw came yesterday when Facebook attempted to sell me a pointless service for replying to emails. They illustrated their offer with a made up conversation between myself and my alter-ego in which no real information was transmitted either one way or the other.

This is almost a perfect example of what is actually wrong with Facebook. There is no information in that "conversation", just noise which wastes time. I don't want to automatically reply to my customers with such banalities as this. If they've asked a sensible question (i.e. not a spammy "thanks for sharing...") then they deserve a sensible answer. They can get that through the email contact on our company website. We give further support on the company blog, where it remains readable rather than disappearing under a future wave of noise.

It's not just Facebook
As for Twitter. I still have an account there, but I post infrequently. Twitter is in many ways even worse than Facebook. 140 characters is enough for a knee-jerk response to anything, but is rarely enough to make a reasoned argument. People use it largely to promote themselves and therefore they post the same things repeatedly in order to be noticed. I find its effect to be similar to that which would be achieved if everyone in the neighbourhood bought a loudhailer and used it to pontificate continuously about themselves from their roof-tops. A majority of tweets do not get read even once, and the problem of fake twitter followers seems to be growing.

And what about LinkedIn ? I have an account there too, but while it masquerades as a jobs site, I don't see that it is in fact much different to Facebook in the way that it works. People clearly accept invitations from others who they don't know (I receive enough such invitations) and endorsements of skills seem to flow freely from people who don't know how well the person they are endorsing can perform a particular task. I've received plenty of endorsements there from people I've not actually worked with. LinkedIn is a website which, just like Facebook, encourages people to accumulate lots of "friends" but doesn't actually lead to anyone knowing any more about anyone else.

And what about all that data collection ?
Many people also have fears about the amount of data collected by social media websites. I don't personally subscribe to conspiracy theories, but there is still something a little creepy about websites sometimes seeming to know too much about you, and more so when they use this simply to try to convince you to buy stuff.

Conclusion
Social media had some sort of promise, but it's not really achieved it. For now I'm bowing out.

I'm no luddite. In the mid 1980s I found myself in trouble at the Polytechnic which I attended because I'd written an email tool and was encouraging people to use it ("waste of computer resources", apparently). Twenty years ago I was trying to think of useful things to do with the world's first tablet computer with wireless link to the internet. I keep abreast of technology, but I'm not controlled by it.

Top 145 Most Ethical Companies ?

Today I came across a mysterious event organised in the UK for "all those working to encourage Dutch levels of cycling in Britain". I came across by chance of course because the sort of people who would organise this type of event probably don't want someone like me coming along and spoiling their three days packed full with seminars, lunches and dinners by pointing out that they don't seem to bother to actually ride any bikes.

Anyway, the conference is to have contributions from pretty much the usual "rent-a-quote" types that usually turn up to such events, quite a few council people, and various contributors from corporate sponsors.

I looked at just one of the sponsors' websites and found a proud claim tha they have "once again been named one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies for 2013 by the Ethisphere Institute". That sounds good, right ? Well, perhaps not. I looked up this Ethisphere institute and found their list of 145 "ethical" companies. Very interesting...

Banks, financial services, military contractors, an oil pipeline company, mining companies, several US health insurers (more information here), drug companies who practice vivisection, cosmetic companies who do the same,

I've no particular reason to pick on Cummins, but the
juxtaposition of truck taking logs from a forest with
"sustainability" written underneath and the boast about
being "one of the world's most ethical companies" was
hard to ignore.

The 21 below are all picked out simply because they're names that I recognized and thought were relatively well known. Some are amongst those that I personally avoid over ethical issues:

1. Alcoa (mining and metals)
2. American Express
3. Cisco
4. Colgate-Palmolive
5. Cummins (big engines, see right)
6. Ford
7. Gap
8. General Electric (oil, gas, jet engines, shale gas, nuclear power)
9. Intel
10. Johnson Controls
11. Kellogg
12. Kimberly-Clark
13. L'OREAL (cosmetics)
14. PepsiCo
15. Rockwell Collins (defence)
16. Safeway
17. Starbucks 
18. Tata Steel (mining and metals)
19. The Co-operative Group (UK supermarkets)
20. Time-Warner
21. Visa

So it makes me wonder what this list actually means. I find it hard to believe that anyone who takes any particular ethical stance would find that all 145 of the listed companies would pass. So whose ethics does the list reflect ? Does it have any real meaning at all ? Do such lists ever really have any meaning ?

If they're getting it right, we're getting it wrong. We don't do any of that nasty stuff !

Insulating the floor

Since we've lived here, we've fitted HR++ double glazing to the previously single glazed upstairs windows and installed cavity wall insulation in the one wall where this possible. We're also generating our own electricity these days with solar panels on the roof. However, our quest to reduce our energy consumption is not finished yet. One of the first things we did when we moved here was to insulate the roof a little better, but that needs more to be done. Before this winter, though, we decided that we would prioritize insulating the floor.

It may seem counter-intuitive to bother with the floor at all. A normal rule of thumb is that only about 10% of heat loss from a home is through the floor, with the walls taking about 50% and the roof 40%. This would make it seem that insulating the floor is barely worthwhile. However, most of the effect of the extra insulation which we've installed over the last few years has been felt upstairs. We don't need our bedrooms to be so warm as the living room, but for the last two winters we have found that when we go downstairs on a cold morning, we go from relatively warm rooms upstairs to a relatively cold room when we get to the living / dining room. The conclusion to draw is obvious: while effective, our insulation efforts thus far have been a bit unbalanced, favouring the upstairs, and we now need more effective insulation of our ground floor.

As luck would have it, as we started to think seriously of installing floor insulation a leaflet came through our door which said that the local council would pay for energy advice and an energy performance report for our home (we had these in the UK as well and I'll write more about this later). A few days later Wietse Hiemstra, a very helpful friendly adviser from Real Advies, came to our home and made calculations about all the potential energy losses from our home. These confirmed that by far the greatest potential energy loss from our downstairs rooms was now through the floor. This is so because not only was it not insulated at all, apart from the effect of the carpet, but also because the floor exposes a greater area to the outside cold than anything else on the ground floor

We have a concrete floor with "kruipruimte" underneath. This is a space about 60 cm high through which you can crawl. It's not a cellar. The three options available to insulate this space were to have an 8 cm layer of polyurethane insulation sprayed upwards onto the bottom of the floor, a vast quantity of polystyrene packing pellets poured in to make a 30 cm deep pool at the bottom of the cavity, or pockets of reflective silvered plastic foil could be suspended underneath the floor ("space blanket" material) to reflect heat back into the house.

Initially, I was least enthusiastic about the polyurethane. This was not due to any concern about its effectiveness as polyurethane foam is clearly a very effective form of insulation, but that I didn't much like the idea of the house being made smelly for a long period of time due to the chemical reaction. However, when we considered all the pros and cons, this eventually came to the top of the list.

The silvered plastic foil seemed attractive in that it has the reported lowest cost to the environment. However, while the manufacturer is very enthusiastic about it, I couldn't find any independent verification of its efficacy. I also wasn't sure that I entirely trusted it to stay attached to the bottom of our floor. If we were to look under the house in a couple of years time and see that it had fallen to the bottom of the kruipruimte, then our expensive insulation would have effectively completely disappeared. Perhaps this never happens. However, I couldn't find independent verification. This was also the most expensive of the three options, and therefore would take the longest to pay back in reduced heating costs.

The plastic pellets were the cheapest option. However, this sounded like it would be a real bundle of laughs if there was ever plumbing work needed underneath the house. Our water supply and drainage both run down there. Therefore I rejected this on these grounds.

That left the polyurethane. This would also stick around pipes and wires, but to do work you'd just have to cut away the part of the insulation which was awkward. That left the problem of smells. The suppliers assured us that the smell goes after a couple of days. We decided to take the risk and the work was done on Saturday.

Installers from Van Den Berg Isolatie. There are four pipes, two supply the two part PU insulation, one provides air for expanding the insulation and the last provides air to breath.

Into the kruipruimte.

At first the smell was overpowering and unpleasant. We expected this from the beginning, and we ate our evening meal in a restaurant on Saturday. When we went out we left the door closed between the living room and the hallway and the windows in the living room open, and there was very little smell in either our living room or bedroom.

Spraying in progress. The washed out look of the photo is due to the acrid fumes which filled the underfloor space while this went on. An air supply for the guy doing the job was clearly essential.

As I write this, it's just over 40 hours after the installation was completed, and there is very nearly no smell in the house at all unless I open the hatch to let the fumes out (with windows open to disperse it), and even then the smell is tolerable.

Before

After

Before

After

Our initial feelings are good. The floor feels warmer. I've been wearing slippers in the living room for a few days now due to autumn being a bit cooler, but found that my feet were too hot last night so I took them off. I think this is a good sign.

Now we wait and see if this makes a noticeable difference to our heating bill over winter.

Rip-Off Britain

The term "Rip-Off Britain" has been used for many years to describe things which cost more in the UK than in other countries. Of course, rogue traders exist everywhere, and odd things often happen with prices of identical products which are sold in different countries. In this, Britain is really no worse on average than anywhere else. However we've found that to really be ripped off by Britain you need to emigrate.

A case on point, we recently had to renew our British passports. This, according to the British Government's own web page in the UK, costs £72.50 per passport, including postage (they recommend paying an additional £8.75 to the post office for more secure postage).

However, we live in the Netherlands and cannot order our passports in the same way. In order to receive our renewed passports we had to navigate a remarkably complex website and send our original documents to France (the British embassy in the Netherlands doesn't do useful things like this). The procedure for doing this is very odd indeed.

According to the website for the "Regional Passport Processing Centre" (this "region" being somewhat larger than the whole of the UK), the cost per passport is €170 per person, plus a €27 courier fee.

The interest/charge was levied for one of the two completely
un-necessary currency conversion, from Pounds to Euros.

Sadly, the processing centre only accepts payment through a choice of two American companies (Mastercard or Visa). For that reason it was not possible for us to pay in Euros from our Euro bank account to their Euro bank account. Instead, we had to pay from our British bank account in Pounds.

The eventual amount taken from our bank account in the UK for two British passports which would have cost £145 delivered in Britain was £309.20 - a rip-off margin of 213% relative to what it would have cost if we still lived in the UK.

That's the result of several things put together:

1. The price for a passport is set arbitrarily higher for us than it would have been if we still lived in the UK.
2. The higher cost of postage (I have no argument with this, but it is a small part, rather less than 10%, of the total).
3. The bizarre requirement that payments made from a British citizen to the British government must always be processed through an American commercial corporation who take their cut.
4. The cost of two currency exchanges - from Pounds to Euros and back again to Pounds as presumably the money is supposed to end up in the UK.

At least we have ten years before this can be forced on us again.

Because our British bank doesn't seem to believe that merely living outside the country means we're no longer residents, our British bank account still has tax deducted from it as if we lived in the UK, meaning that we are double taxed on the small amount of money which remains in that country.

Taxation without representation

I've been disenfranchised for my entire life. While I had been able to vote in the UK since I was 18, not once did my vote ever count for anything at all due to the terrible "first past the post" electoral system of the UK.

One of the good things about the Netherlands is that there is a much fairer political system here which gives smaller parties a voice. As a result, votes are not wasted in the Netherlands and no-one is disenfranchised. Well, I say "no-one", but actually that's not quite true as I remain disenfranchised. I can't vote in national elections in the Netherlands because I am not (yet) a Dutch citizen. I could still vote in the British elections, but there's really not much point in going to the effort of registering to do so merely to see my vote count for nothing at all yet again. As a result, I am disenfranchised. I pay tax to the Dutch government, but I do not get to influence the Dutch government. Taxation without representation as Americans would likely put it.

That sounds bad, but actually it is no worse for me than it would be if I lived in a country with a less fair political system, such as the UK, USA or many others where I could see my vote count for nothing year after year. There are many people in those countries whose votes never count for anything and they are just as disenfranchised as I am.

What is needed is electoral reform to a fairer system as is used here in the Netherlands. There has long been a movement in Britain which would like to achieve a fairer political system, but last year the reformers made such a colossal mess of their campaign that they set back any attempt to fix this problem for many years.

Now that brings me to the upcoming election in the Netherlands (September 12th). There were hustings in the centre of Assen yesterday and the local representatives of political parties were out in force to convince people to vote for them. This all happened in the middle of the main shopping area in Assen, where there are always hundreds of bicycles parked. Only one political party brought along a car as the centre-piece of their display and that was Groenlinks - the "Green Party" of the Netherlands.

I've noticed before, not only here but also in the UK and other countries, that "Green" parties seem to be particularly easily taken in by the implausible claims of car manufacturers that today's latest technology (what technology that is varies from year to year and has been unleaded fuel, catalytic converters, hybrids and electric cars, for instance) will somehow transform what is one of the most energy wasting devices that we have into something altogether different. This never happens of course, because actually such claims are mere relativism. Electric cars use almost exactly the same amount of energy as cars which burn fossil fuels directly and they are just as capable of killing more than a million people each year. It is only good for car manufacturers if everyone buys a new car and throws away the old ones, not for the environment.

It's Greenwash, nothing more, and it's a shame that it is believed. I don't vote for Greenwash, so I don't vote for Green parties either. I find it amazing that Green politicians are often not particularly enthusiastic supporters of cycling, and that this is true not only in other countries where bicycles are not used much for transportation, but also here in the Netherlands where we have a higher proportion of trips made by bike than in any other country in the world.


The Fietsersbond has information on their website about the policies of each party with regard to cycling. Groenlinks does have a lot of good policies for cycling, even though they are also enthusiastic about cars.

I could vote, I'd be voting Partij voor de Dieren (PvdD) - Party for the Animals. I think the name makes many people think they are little more than a single issue pressure group, however this party seems to have more comprehensive green policies than any other, and they are the only one to really recognize the effect of animal based agriculture and diet on our world.

Anyone who has ever tried out an online "ecological footprint" calculators will have noticed that adopting a vegan diet and using motorized transport as little as possible are the most effective things that one can do for the environment.

Two megawatthours from the sun

This morning we reached another milestone with our solar energy installation. 144 days after installation, more than 2000 kWh had been generated by the solar panels on our roof. In the same period, we consumed just under 1300 kWh so we're currently generating at a significantly higher average rate than we consume electricity.

We reached the 1 MWh milestone 71 days ago on the 17th of June, so the second megawatthour took almost exactly the same time to generate as the first. I had hoped that July and August might see better average power output from the panels, but while we've had some very nice bright sunny days this summer, there have also been far more gloomy grey days than anyone had hoped for. If we lived somewhere that was more reliably sunny than Northern Europe then the performance of the system would be better. However even under these conditions the system is doing very well and we're ahead of where we need to be for the year.

Stats
In 144 days we've generated more than half the total amount of electricity that we expect to consume this year. Even with reduced output through the winter, when we'll see a drop from the current average of 15 hours of production each day, we have a very good chance of making up the rest of what we'll consume.

Our panels generated electricity worth about €370 at the price which we are billed. This is nearly 5% of the installed price of the system in less than five months. A simple extrapolation suggests that the system would pay for itself in just over 8 years if this rate of production is constant. We expect it to take a little longer (perhaps over ten years) including the effect of shorter and darker days in winter, though if the price of electricity rises over the next ten years, our pay-back period becomes shorter.

41% of total world electricity is generated by burning coal. If we had produced the same electricity from coal as we have from the sun this would have resulted in the emission of over 1100 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The Verdict
Thus far, it still looks good.

The nice pie chart comes from the World Coal Association website. And just how gloomy was this summer ? We get the same weather as the UK, and there it was officially the wettest summer for 100 and the gloomiest for ten years.