Posts under ‘renewables’

Article from BD, 19 December 2008
So change has come — how many end-of-year reviews will be using that phrase? Those of us starting 2008 with grand hopes and visions for the embedding of sustainable design and construction principles in the UK ran into the stark reality of a full blown downturn by the autumn. The [...]

We managed to pull off another pretty successful virtual event last week. Education Now offered plenty of new content and discussion around the still burgeoning schools market. One serious point from this, and then the promised-in-the-headline bit of bad taste:

The International Energy Association (IEA) has said it will be almost impossible to prevent dangerous climate change above 2 degrees without extracting greenhouse gases from the air.
Two further numbers from their annual report featured on Reuters:
$3.6 trillion - the cost of decarbonising all the world’s energy production between 2010 and 2030.
$4.0 trillion - the price paid to shore up [...]

So farewell then Allan Jones, chief executive of the London Climate Change Agency (LCCA), one of the numerous redundancies that are about to befall ours and other industries. His departure was not much of a bacon sandwich-dropper - he was a Ken appointment, and today’s Building article points to the lack of discernible results from [...]

To Pall Mall last night for a lecture from James Woudhuysen, the professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester. Or alternatively a sustainability iconoclast. By that I mean he has it in for greenies that believe we need to rethink man’s role in the world. So out goes conservation, reduction or going [...]

I took part in my third energy brunch seminars yesterday morning. The event, organised by Atkins at its Leeds office, was a comprehensive run through of the latest energy performance legislation that is coming out. Part of it included a session on design, which focused on some of the sexy global projects that the engineering [...]

One of the interesting themes to emerge from my evening at Green Mondays last week was payback periods. In our ever more cost conscious times it’s not much of a surprise that even more consideration is given to the bottom line and the amount of time it takes to recoup up-front investment. When the question [...]