The sun, which drives both Dale’s generators via wind and mine diectly won’t be running out of energy in the near future.

Only joking

You can call yourself Paul if you like – I don’t have a monopoly on the name (and I didn’t make a trademark application )

Anyway – Jean – I think I was there too – 1995 wasn’t it? I was in the Technotribe area faffing with a laptop and mobile phone/data card…

We may have even met (my recollections of that period are a little hazy!).

also, while we’re on the subject, I agree with TR – I also knew you were talking about wind powered phones, and the EdF campaign

Maybe you thought this was posted on a windcar related blog (though that wouldn’t explain the apparent hostility towards Jean and her seemingly innocuous comment)

I may of course be wrong, but I gather she was just making a simple comment about EdF’s greenwash campaign and that fact that ASA haven’t done anything but send a generic letter to anybody who’s made a comment about it to them.

There’s no real allegation there that’s aimed at anyone other than ASA and EdF. Unless ‘windphones’ secretly refers to something unsavoury
Running the risk of sounding niave, I have to admit I just though it referred to something along the lines of wind-powered-phones.

If I made an incorrect assumption, it was due to Jeans initial comment not be accurate enough. eg. I did read the comment thoroughly.

1. The car isn’t for sale as a commercial product to the public.
2. It isn’t being advertised.

I’m surprised that someone running a commercial business doesn’t understand what an advert is.
How green is you online radio station? It Seems to promote increasing computer use.
If you are going to target people for not being green, i suggest you target the real culprits. You typify the thoughtless activism that targets Vestas for prolonged and pointless protesting rather than EDF, BP, Shell etc.

I have uploaded some photos of our event:
http://www.portsmouthcan.co.uk/news/events-meetings-conferences…/portsmouth-green-fair-2009-photos.html

Notice the large numbers of people!
We did have a Peugeot car converted to electric at the fair, not as good as Dales car though.

Just as a reminder this was what the EDF event looked like in Portsmouth in July:

http://www.portsmouthcan.co.uk/news/news/watch-the-tumbleweed-role-by.html

I think it’s more like “finding the way” than “greenwashing”; certainly in my case (and separately Ecotricity’s) there is nothing to ‘wash’ and no PR subterfuge!

I also agree that it’ll need to be automated. There is stuff built into even the current system to load shift automatically for suitably aware devices with an Internet connection. Eg my dishwasher at home and my UK-based (and other) Web servers which avoid all non-essential activities outside non-’green’ time. It actually works now for some of the devices that I have control over. if you want I can show you how to do the same for your stuff! I’m hoping to push this a little further when I catch up with stuff already on my to-do list… Watch this space!

Rgds

Damon

As with other sorts of battery, getting energy in and out of PS loses some, over 20% typically, so avoiding using storage would be more efficient and thus more ‘green’ in a couple of ways.

So, where possible, I only run my dishwasher at ‘super-green’ times, ie green on the traffic-light AND no PS being used…

Rgds

Damon

While I have been away the subject seems to have changed!

Can anyone tell me if pumped storage (PS) electricity is counted as zero carbon, given that it was in all probability brown electricity that put the water halfway up a mountain in the first place?

If I – as an Ecotricity customer – use electricity at a time of day when PS is on line, does that part of my usage count towards the proportion of the fuel mix that is green or brown? Overall I know this is likely to be a small fraction of my total usage but if storage technologies take off as is envisaged with the advent of a smart grid it could become a significant factor in the supposed greening of our electricity supply.

Is there such a thing as khaki electricity?

Best regards,

Jonny.

Read the article by the good professor, I can see what he’s saying but i think he generalises the situation a little too much (obv some simplification is needed), as Damon says below certain generators just aren’t used at night which has to make a difference to how much CO2 is emitted and when. There’s also the bigger picture, of ultimately removing all peaks and troughs from the UK Grid, through things like changes in habit, changes in technology and smart metering. Our page, and ones like it, are just the start of a huge shift away from the excesses of our energy needs,
Also his last two points are debateable:
a) people being inconvenienced and using more energy at night = the couple of lightbulbs he refers to is not comparible to something like a dishwasher/tumbledryer (it is white appliances that really make the difference)
b) people taking the “carbon saved” and “spending” it elswhere – this is going to be an issue with everything under the sun until attitudes change, not symptomatic of one approach.

He’s right to question it and there needs to be a careful approach to how we tell people they can use the information, but i don’t think it’s useless/pointless. At the least, an important first step (hopefully much more).

I’m not going to try to browbeat you, and I have no formal ‘renewable expert’ certificate to tell you that you should trust me(!), but consider one aspect that I find interesting…

During peak times a significant chunk of our electricity (~1GW) is supplied from pumped storage. The losses of getting energy into storage and out again are ~20%–25%.

If you moved *your* usage from peak times to ‘green’ times and when storage is not being used then you would save your usage doing a round-trip though storage and thus in effect 20%+ of the energy you use. If any of that energy going into storage was coming from fossil sources then you have reduced carbon emissions. Note that on my version of the page I make the relationship between ‘green’ and ‘no storage draw-down’ a little stronger, so my dishwasher only gets run during what I call these ‘super-green’ times.

There are other points too, but that and the fact that ultimately this kind of demand control will allow more wind into the grid are quite compelling it seems to me.

Does that work for you? B^>

Rgds

Damon

Errr… not necessarily. Let’s say I look at one of these websites and it says the grid is presently ‘green’ (low carbon). “Great!”, I think, “I can turn some stuff on and I will have no carbon guilt!!”

However, the way I see it, there is only a carbon benefit if at the exact time I turn all my stuff on, my extra demand is met by either a controllable low carbon source being turned up (to meet my extra demand), or a controllable load (eg pumped storage that is in ‘pumping’ mode) being turned down/off.

I don’t want to believe this, but unless someone gives me a seriously robust counter-argument I have to side slightly with MacKay on this.

The code behind the page holds the most recent 24h-worth of data that it was able to obtain.

I hope Dale and Paul will excuse me showing you my more geeky version of this system for educational purposes only:

http://www.earth.org.uk/_gridCarbonIntensityGB.html

(Paul, feel free to zap this entire post.)

See the bar chart midway down the page? That’s 24h of data which is a reasonably good predictor of green/yellow/red for the following 24h, though the pattern of usage is different enough between weekdays and weekends as to make that harder. I have on my to-do list to base predictions on 7 days’ data, as well as using a slightly more reliable data source. Those changes may then be reflected on the Ecotricity page once they’ve done a better job of making it human-readable than I ever could!

See here for a whole week’s worth of consumption on one graph:

http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/Demand8.htm

Rgds

Damon

Rgds

Damon

Sorry if my comments make me sound like a dumbass but I’m really getting into this green stuff but organising it into nice neat piles in my brain is pretty tough ;o)