This is my second Transition Ashtead report, this time on the Home Energy group.  We have just applied for funding from Surrey County Council’s new climate change fund to carry out a programme of activities designed to reduce carbon emissions from Ashtead’s houses.  The following description of our plan is copied straight from our fund application. 

 

1.  We aim to carry out a programme of planned activities over one year to promote the importance of reducing domestic energy consumption and carbon emissions to Ashtead residents. The plan is to have three events – the first in early April to initiate interest (speaker + some home energy efficiency equipment demonstrations), the second in June as a main event to have speakers and workshop/exhibitions on relevant locally available technology.  The third is to have a speaker and equipment display on home renewable energy options.

 

2.  We aim to set up a library of locally available energy efficiency equipment – some to show and some to loan e.g. draught meters, LED and low energy light bulbs, power meters so people can see and try them out.

 

3.  Get a small number of people trained in (a) draught proofing methodologies so they can train others to create a pool of people who can do this and (b) advising people on the grants available for domestic carbon reduction work and if necessary helping people complete the grant application forms.   We plan to carry this out as part of the Ashtead churches Act10n initiative in 8-12 July, and so the main beneficiaries should be needy and vulnerable people.

 

4.  Research local suppliers of energy efficiency and renewable energy suppliers and identify those with real expertise and good reputations and create a preferred supplier list or get them added to the approved trade lists such as Checkatrade

 

If anyone is interested in learning more about any of these activities you can ring me on 01372-378914 or email info@ transitionashtead.org.uk

 

Derek Smith

When Cuba lost access to Soviet oil in the early 1990s, the country faced an immediate crisis — feeding the population, and an ongoing challenge: how to create a new, low-energy society. Cuba transitioned from large, fossil-fuel intensive farming to small, less energy intensive organic farms and urban gardens, and from a highly industrial society to a more sustainable one.

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil tells the story of the Cuban people’s hardship, ingenuity and triumph over sudden adversity — through cooperation, conservation and community, told in their own words. As the world approaches Peak Oil, Cuba provides a valuable example of how to successfully address the challenge of reducing our energy use.

“Everyone who is concerned about Peak Oil needs to see this film. Cuba survived an energy famine during the 1990s, and how it did so constitutes one of the most important and hopeful stories of the past few decades. It is a story not just of individual achievement, but of the collective mobilization of an entire society to meet an enormous challenge.” – Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over and Powerdown

Transition Bookham is intending to screen this film as part of it's launch event. Date, time and venue to be announced soon.

Zap your leaks

We have been lending out energy monitors for some time, and now the Green Mole Forum can lend you a thermal leak detector.

This nifty gadget makes it easy to check your home's energy efficiency by finding places that let heat out or cold air in.

As you scan it around it shines a light on the surface your are measuring - green, blue, or red.

Simply set the detector's temperature tolerances to one, five, or 10 degrees farenheit (or 0.5, 3, or 5.5 celsius) and scan the light across the area you want to inspect. As well as displaying the temperature of the surface you aim it at, the light will change to red for warmer spots and blue for cooler spots to detect air leaks in both warm and cool weather.

 

Cut Energy Bills and Improve Your Home's Efficiency

Sealing the leaks and improving insulation in your home can help you save as much as 20 percent on your heating and cooling bills. An efficient, greener home will stay cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Use the Thermal Leak Detector to check your refrigerator and freezer temperatures and efficiency.

If you would like to borrow it for a week or two contact us or send an email to ask to be added to the waiting list. Happy hunting!

 

It's much more fun trying to reduce your carbon footprint in company with others and having some sort of target to aim for.  So to help encourage Mole Valley residents to cut their carbon we are inviting Mole Valley residents and their Councillors to take part in a 2010 footprint challenge, to see who can achieve the lowest carbon footprint - a resident or a councillor!

The contest is based on your individual household energy use, car use and airmiles during 2010 and your footprint is very easily calculated using www.thecarbonaccount.com.  The Green Mole Forum will present a small award to the winner.  If you saw the article  in the local press about the green granny with a zero footprint - don't think its not worth you entering as the green granny won't be so green in 2010 - she's flying to California to visit her son!

If you want to take part in this challenge contact us here or telephone 01372 456421.

One easy way to make your lifestyle more planet-friendly is to reduce your electricity consumption. The Green Mole Forum can help make this simple – just borrow a monitor pack and you can find out how to cut your electricity bill, with very little effort on your part. The monitors are also available through local libraries but, as they have long waiting lists, we're offering this alternative, along with some technical help, if you need it.

Each pack contains a pair of ingenious monitors – one that allows you to see how much electricity your whole house is using (and what this is costing) and another to see how much energy an individual appliance consumes at any given moment (useful to check out standby current) or over a period of time.

The monitors encourage getting into the habit of switching things off, especially last thing at night or when going out, the challenge being to get consumption to as near zero as possible. They also show which appliances are greedy guzzlers of electricity (freezers, tumble driers, irons, kettles, electric heaters) and which are relatively innocent (like a portable radio). And interesting things like, how much you save by boiling just enough water for a cup of tea, instead of a kettle full!

For a £20 refundable deposit you can borrow them for a fortnight. Call Anne Brewer (Bookham) on 01372 456421 or Derek Smith (Leatherhead) on 01372 378914 for more details or contact us to ask to be added to the waiting list.

If you're doing some refurbishment on a property there are a variety of government grants available, from loft insulation to renewable energy, to households who qualify. There are also a variety of FREE products on offer, such as low energy lightbulbs.

On the 15th July 2009 the Government published its energy white paper... the previous day TV presenter Kevin McCloud, spokesperson for the Grand Designs Great British Refurb Campaign, had built his own model home, outside the Houses of Parliament, to show MPs what can be done to insulate existing properties. It's estimated that by retrofitting our current housing stock, over 26 million homes (accounting for around 27% of the country's man-made CO2), nine million tonnes of CO2 could be cut, equivalent to the average output of over 1.5 million homes a year.

On the 16th the campaign handed in an 8,000 signature petition to 10 Downing Street, calling on the Government to help householders to play their part. Energy efficiency is the best way to minimise the costs of a low carbon future and it needs to act now if it wants us to reduce our carbon output by 34% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Given that the majority of these homes will still be standing, it's a hopelessly unrealistic target, unless we can improve their eco-credentials.

For more information on the campaign and how you can help check out their website.

The Green Mole Forum has now started a loan scheme of Energy Meters across Mole Valley in conjunction with Mole Valley Disctrict Council.

Meters are available for a two week loan from Anne Brewer in Dorking, Derek Smith in Leatherhead and Esther Phillips-Constans in Bookham.

We have so far a waiting list of 22 people and the first meters have now gone out on loan. Richard M. from the Green Mole Forum probably holds the record for having signed up most people at our stall on Bookham village day. Well done!

The first device measures power demand of individual appliances (Dear I hope I get this right as my physics were never brilliant). The second one (much more fun) is a whole house meter.  Once plugged in it measures and displays the consumption of the whole house and also displays the running costs. We tried it for two weeks and it is great fun and gives you quite an incentive to chase around in the evening to switch off everything but the fridge.

Should you wish to be added to the waiting list or know somebody who lives in Mole Valley and could do with a carbon diet, please contact us via the Forum.

I have started this blog as a place for us to discuss the pros and cons of the proposed drilling for oil and gas at Coldharbour.  Below are the contents of the emails on the subject to date between GMF members.  I have copied them all to this blog to enable any visitor to the GMF site to join in.  I have edited the emails slightly for readability.
I suggest that this blog is not the place to discuss the impact of drilling on the local area.  The following website is the place to do that: http://www.thevirtualvillage.com.  The virtual village web site contains this statement: “All you need to know is 30 HGVs per day via Knoll Road”.  To my mind that illustrates the parochial mindset of many objectors.  Let’s use this blog to develop better arguments and think of more than just the immediate impact on local people.  This is definitely NOT all you need to know!
Derek Smith
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As some of you may already know, plans are afoot for an oil well on Leith Hill. Bizarre as it may sound, a company has lodged a Planning Application to carry out some exploratory drillings. As you can imagine, a number of local residents and users of the area have got a bit upset by this, and have set up a campaign website here
 http://www.thevirtualvillage.com/oilwell.cfm,
 with details of the plans and how to object to the application. Not that we're trying to form your political opinions for you, in fact you may think it sounds like a super idea, in which case we'd recommend setting up a pro-oil well website before the protestors put a stop to it. If on the other hand, the idea of having this as a back drop to your Sunday morning ride doesn't sound great, then you may want to visit the website above and raise your objections.
Cheers, The Head For The Hills Team
Head For The Hills
43 West Street, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 1BU
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Isn't this a tricky one? Should Transition Dorking support this since it might reduce dependence on non-local resources?
Matt
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Please ask your contacts to visit TheVirtualVillage.com to support the objectors to the oil and gas exploration application.
Paul
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Matt is right this is difficult – I would argue that:
Transition Dorking exists to provide a framework for people to undertake projects to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, minimise our impact on the environment and create local resilience. I do not think Transition Dorking can have a position on an issue like this. We are a self selected, not a representative, group; we have no idea what the views of our mailing list supporters might be much less the wider local population. Individual members of Transition Dorking can no doubt express their views as individuals.
My view as an individual is I have to say deeply ambivalent. I find it hard to see the moral justification for objecting to something like this while continuing to use oil based products, which may well have originated in other parts of the world where many local environments, and communities, have been devastated. This is in order to provide us with a comfortable lifestyle in our own unspoilt environment.
Andy
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I sent my email to GMF members, not to Transition Dorking and all I said was:
 “I'm sure you'll be interested in this bit of news and may well want to throw your oar in.  I will do a blog on it.”
The ‘you’ here are the various GMF members initially and then any GMF website visitor if they read the blog.  It seemed to me that our blog pages could provide a good forum to help people sort out the best response on this.  In fact, now I’ve had a look at TheVirtualVillage.com, I’m more convinced of this.  This web site already has lots of content, 100% from angry locals from what I can make out.  I noticed one ‘we don’t want to burn oil or gas because of climate change’ comment, but all the rest is NIMBY stuff.
My gut reaction is that I want UK to reduce its ghg emissions as fast as it realistically can – to zero in 20 years – and start now.  The rest of the world then follows suit and global oil and gas demand falls dramatically.  On this rosy scenario, we don’t need to discover any more new oil and gas fields.  We live on the existing ones until we don’t need them any more.  So we certainly don’t need to run the spoil some nice countryside for the possibility of a small new oil or gas find.
That’s what I’d like to happen but we have to live in the world as it is, not as we want it to be.  In reality the UK is likely to be importing oil and gas for a long time, and probably throughout the life of the Coldharbour field.  If it turns out to be a gas field, this will likely power a local electricity generator and feed into the grid.  Dorking could maybe set up a company to sell this to the grid and thus benefit the whole community.  Sounds quite good?  If it’s an oil field, it will be too small for a pipeline and so the oil will probably have to be sent by road tankers to the nearest refinery – Esso Fawley I imagine.  That does not look so attractive.   I imagine it’s more efficient overall for the oil to be imported in a small corner of a supertanker.
If this had arisen a year down the line with Transition Dorking well established, people would be expecting Transition Dorking to have view I think.  At first sight it looks illogical if TD on the one hand has a (local) energy descent plan, and on the other supports an increase in local energy supply. But there is no conflict really between Dorking reducing its energy demand and increasing its supply.
We could air these sorts of arguments on the GMF website, as they will get completely drowned out on TheVirtualVillage.com I suspect.
Derek
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Very interesting issue this.  I thought Andy's response was very helpful and Derek spells out the dilemma in more detail.  I was afraid most of the reaction locally would be of the NIMBY variety and it sounds like this is the case.  Like Derek I would like to see us cutting our dependence on oil and gas - or at least all the dependence which generates greenhouse gases which I suspect is nearly all the uses we currently make of it and like Andy I think we should accept that if we use oil or gas products we should not complain if their production impinges on our local amenities.  It would seem best to me to advocate checking the existence of the oil or gas and then registering it and saving it up for future use for essential needs locally, when technology has been found to use it without having to transport it miles for refining or whatever.  It could be a life saving local resource for the future inhabitants of the area.  We are currently profligate in our use of these resources and to ruin a beautiful landscape in order to get a bit more to waste seems wrong.
Anne
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I have also been asked if we would take position on this issue and help with the campaign so I think we definitely need to blog about it.
I share the ambivalence, first I was outraged at the destruction of yet another part of beautiful Surrey but the people of Surrey use a lot of the planet's resources... so it would be good to gently point that fact out and it might be an opportunity to invite people from the virtual village.com to join the CRAG.
Esther
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To Anne
You say “It would seem best to me to advocate checking the existence of the oil or gas and then registering it and saving it up for future use”.  Just to clarify, the present proposal is for a exploratory drilling only – ie checking for the existence of oil or gas and nothing more.  If they find it’s commercially exploitable, they will then have to apply separately for a licence to operate as a production field.  TheVirtualVillage.com blog says that the likelihood of it being exploitable is about 1 in 10.
Derek

We're starting a CRAG today. (What's a CRAG?)

Fancy joining us? Then read you household meters, make a note of your car mileage and contact us.

We will welcome you in at any time of the year.