Scotland's Eigg island to become completely self-sufficient in renewable energy
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
They're not self-sufficient in energy. They're self sufficient in electricity generation, perhaps, but energy? All the really energy intensive processes that support their way of life - agriculture, manufacturing of goods - those are happening elsewhere. You can't simply equate household electricity usage with the average human's energy footprint, because the two are massively different.
There's a tendency in the west to ignore the painful truth which is that our actions and consumption has far reaching consequences. Everything you buy has an energy footprint, and for many things it's one that we outsource to China. It's great to say "UK carbon output down x%", but if it's because we moved manufacturing offshore, did we really make a difference? It's easy to blame China for emissions while pointing at our renewables as evidence of how good we are, but the reality is that those emissions are often made to service our needs.
What opened my eyes to this was David MacKay's wonderful (free) book:
Look at this page [1] which shows the rough average consumption of a household in the uk, including non electrical consumption.
http://grist.org/list/scotland-100-percent-clean-energy-2020...
That actually looks really cool. I wanted to visit Skye first but Eigg is looking pretty attractive.
Interesting, thanks a lot :)
That is key.
The Eigg island is part of the Inner Hebrides. According to Wikipedia, in this group of islands, in August the average hight is 15.7 °C (60.3 °F) and in February the average low is 2.2 °C (36 °F). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Hebrides#Climate . From the article:
> On days that are really sunny - or, more likely, really wet or windy - Eigg Electric has a useful way for dealing with excess energy. "We have heaters in all the public spaces on the island, the two churches, the community centre, [the shop and café] down at the pier. So we put free heating into these buildings to keep the island's costs down and to keep the infrastructure of the buildings dry," says Scott.
So, probably they don’t have air conditioning (or they don’t use it very much), and they are using a traditional no renewable energy source for heating.
A lot of people here think that 10C is the temperature you start wearing shorts and t-shirts (this is actually to be observed most Aprils when temperatures soar from the ~5C average we get over winter to the ~15C average we get the other 6 months).
Erm no. Air conditioning is not common in UK homes. What's much more likely is heating. I can't imagine a home not having heating in this part of Europe.
http://www.ecbcs.org/docs/Annex_38_UK_Aberdeen.pdf
[I own a property that is at the other end of the spectrum from a "zero-heating" house - we have parts that are effectively impossible to heat, so we don't even try.]
Most likely the islanders use oil for heating - that's what most rural places in Scotland have to use anyway.
Housing stock in scotland is often old and very poorly insulated. Although it is very rarely chicago-style cold - once per decade it might hit -20C - it is cold enough consistently enough that heating is used for a good 9 months of the year.
The idea of aircon on Eigg is hilarious. They've only just built an electric grid. Heating is a mix of oil-fired boilers, wood, solar water heating, and probably the occasional portable few kW electric heater. I suspect quite a bit of food is locally produced. Crofting is an ancient way of life.
Note that Eigg's population is only about 100, about the Dunbar Number.
Which is a horrible, and a real black mark on Quebec's environmental claims. They should heat with gas and ship the extra electricity to others instead of wasting it like this.
Disclaimer: He's a friend and former bandmate from uni. His music is awesome.