I worry about the environment, which explains my goal this year of reducing my carbon footprint. The problem is I feel a sense of paralysis that comes from not knowing what I should do beyond the well known staples of energy saving light bulbs and switching off equipment at night.
This is why I sent off for the BBC and OU’s climate change guide. It actually contains quite a few interesting pointers such as theyworkforyou.com. I may include a few more of these links once I’ve taken a look at them.
The most enlightening thing I happened across was the Energy House. This shows you, very simply, the carbon footprint impact and related cost of certain improvements you can make to your household. What surprised me was that by far the most effective course of action is to switch to a “green power” provider (or green power tariff with many existing suppliers). I’ll certainly be looking into this now.
What prompted this? A post by Wil that should quash any remaining doubts you might over whether climate change is real.
Tags: environment, politics
You could always look into getting your own wind turbine or solar panels. I had a look into the solar panels and it seems like a good idea. Any energy generated by your house during the day is used up by you and any spare is put back into the grid (which you get paid for) and then at night you use the power normally from the grid. Green and profitable, it’s a plan…
http://www.ecotricity.co.uk Generates power from turbines, like the big one in Reading. Sign up is all on-line.
That’s cool, I didn’t realise the Green Park wind turbine was actually owned by a green power company directly. Not sure what I thought, actually…
What annoyed me slightly yesterday was that I couldn’t find their tariff stated anywhere on their web site. This sent me to uswitch.com and it’s clear that compared to, say, EDF they are going to be more expensive. However, that’s not the point because we shouldn’t be switching based solely on financial advantage.
Anyway, the tariff is available on their site; you can find it and a calculator on the right-hand side of this page:
http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/makingadifference.html
I’m going to do the sums, see how it works out and then do a post on my findings.