Home Energy Use - Useful Statistics

Home Energy Use

There are many things that we can do around our homes to save energy and reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. Take a look at how much energy and carbon dioxide we could save if we all made energy saving choices.

Insulation

With around 50% of the heat lost in the average home through the walls and loft, there is a massive opportunity for us to save a huge amount of money and reduce our carbon dioxide emissions significantly:

• If everyone in the UK installed loft insulation up to 270mm thickness, the equivalent financial saving would pay the heating bills of over 950,000 families for a year.

• If everyone in the UK that could, installed cavity wall insulation, we could cut carbon dioxide emissions by a huge 7 million tonnes. That's enough carbon dioxide to fill nearly 40 million double-decker buses or fill the new Wembley stadium 900 times!

Electrical appliances

In the UK we spend a massive £2 billion a year powering washing machines, tumble dryers and dishwashers and a further £2.2 billion a year on fridges and freezers. This produces a mammoth amount of carbon dioxide but there are solutions to reducing these emissions in the shape of Energy Saving Recommended products.

• If everyone in the UK upgraded their old cold appliances to an Energy Saving Recommended product, energy wastage would be cut by over two thirds and enough carbon dioxide would be saved to fill 24 million double-decker buses. There would also be enough electricity saved to run the UK's streetlights for 6 years

Reduce carbon dioxide emissions by using Energy Saving Recommended products.

Don't leave appliances on standby

Did you know that over £900 million worth of energy is wasted by leaving appliances on standby, so do your bit and don't leave your TV or other appliances on standby, and switch off chargers at the wall if they are not being used.

Lighting

In the UK, we spend £2.4 billion lighting our homes, and with lighting accounting for 10 - 15 per cent of our electricity bills there are substantial savings to be made by using energy saving light bulbs:

• If every household installed just one energy saving light bulb, the electricity saved in a year could power the Blackpool Illuminations for nearly 900 years and there would be enough carbon dioxide saved to fill the Royal Albert Hall 1,980 times!

Save on electricity bills by using energy efficient bulbs.

Urban Energy

Urban Energy has earned a reputation as the south’s leading renewable energy specialist. This has been achieved by ensuring that from the initial point of client contact we offer 1st class customer service and care.

We only install products that lead the way within the renewable energy industry and that are renowned for their high quality and ecologically sound production. This reflects our own high standards and quality assurance.

We understand that introducing a renewable energy system to either your home or business is an investment that lasts for many years. With our in-house electrical and plumbing division it is our promise to you the customer that your satisfaction and peace of mind throughout this period is our number one priority.

For further information about Urban Energy products and services:

Call: 0800 232 1624

Email: info@urbanenergy.org.uk

Website: http://www.urbanenergy.org.uk/

'Climate dice' now dangerously loaded: leading scientist

Evidence for global warming has mounted but public awareness of the threat has shrunk, due to a cold northern winter and finger-pointing at the UN's climate experts, a top scientist warned Wednesday.

James Hansen, a leading NASA scientist whose testimony to the US Congress in 1988 was a landmark in the history of climate change, said he was worried by "the large gap" in knowledge between specialists and the public, including politicians.

"That gap has increased substantially in the last year," Hansen told a press conference during a visit to Paris.

"While the science was becoming clearer, the public's perception became less clear, in part because of the unusually cold winter in both North America and Europe, and in part because of the inappropriate over-emphasis on small minor errors in IPCC documents and because of the so-called Climategate."

The IPCC -- the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- is under fire for several errors that appeared in a key 2007 report.

Its authors have acknowledged the mistakes, but say the overall conclusions of the report, that man-made greenhouse gases are changing the climate, remain solid.

The "Climategate" affair relates to stolen emails exchanged among British scientists that, sceptics said, showed they had ignored evidence that natural, rather than man-made, causes were to blame for climate change. The scientists have been cleared by a British parliamentary panel.

"The winter was not cold if you look over the whole world: December, January, February was the second warmest in 130 years," Hansen noted.

"It was cool at mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere but unusually warm in the Arctic and that has a simple explanation: there is a chaotic variation in the pressure in the Arctic region. But it's just chaotic variation, there is no reason that it will be repeated."

He added: "We have to look at the frequency of events. Seven out of the last 10 winters in Europe have been warmer than the long-term average, and eight out of 10 in the United States.

"So the climate dice are being loaded at a rate which is in very close agreement with what was predicted ago a few decades ago based on the expected global warming."

Hansen is director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, but stressed he was speaking in a private capacity.

He blasted governments for "ignoring... basic scientific facts" by continuing to depend on fossil fuels, build more coal-fired plants and drill for oil in the deep ocean and the Arctic.

And he said that the poor outcome of December's climate summit in Copenhagen was predictable.

"Frankly, there was a realisation that you can't have 180 countries making the initial agreement, it has to be the major players. So, Europe, the US and China, and probably India, need to agree that there needs to be a carbon price and then it's very easy to make that global."

Reference: James Hansen, NASA
 
URBAN ENERGY
 
Our mission: “To provide and install, sustainable, world class, clean energy products with the highest level of service and care."

Urban Energy is an innovative organisation specialising in the financing, design and installation of economic and environmentally sound solar powered energy systems for commercial property (private and public) and domestic dwellings. Our expertise in the field of Government sponsored funding programmes and solar power products will provide individuals and organisations with an excellent opportunity to overcome capital cost barriers, save money on energy bills, increase profit margins, increase the value of their property and reduce their carbon footprint.

Urban Energy employ the very best engineers in this field, all of which are fully qualified, MCS certified and Government approved to carry out this task, complying with strict guidelines and are members of the Solar Trade Association.

For further information about Urban Energy products and services:
Call: 0800 232 1624
Email: info@urbanenergy.org.uk
Website: http://www.urbanenergy.org.uk/

The Case for Global Warming Stronger Than Ever

One of the many crimes that climate scientists have been accused of lately is that they claim absolute certainty in a field of research fraught with uncertainty. Sure, the planet is warming, say skeptics, but that's happened throughout Earth's history, long before humans were burning fossil fuels. So, how can we be sure this isn't just a natural phenomenon?

Yet a search through the much vilified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports shows that absolute certainty is notably absent. In the most recent document, for example, published in 2007, the authors write: "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [that is, human-generated greenhouse gas] concentrations."

If that doesn't sound definitive, it's because, as the authors freely admit, it isn't: climate science continues to evolve as new evidence comes in. Indeed, back in 2006, even before the latest IPCC report was complete, researchers in Britain were already planning to launch an update. Helmed by the U.K.'s Met Office (formerly known as the Meteorological Office), the update, published March 5 in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is based on more than 100 peer-reviewed post-IPCC studies. The new data may shift the evidence for climate change, but none of it weakens what the IPCC said three years ago.

By looking at a wide range of observations from all over the world, the Met Office study concludes that the fingerprint of human influence on climate is stronger than ever. "We can say with a very high significance level that the effects we see in the climate cannot be attributed to any other forcings [factors that push the climate in one direction or another]," says study co-author Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh.

Plenty of these climate effects had already been observed at the time of the 2007 IPCC report, including warming temperatures, shifts in rainfall (wet regions getting wetter, dry regions getting drier) and the increase in summer meltback of Arctic sea ice. Those patterns have continued, and in some cases gotten worse.

Some entirely new observations have been recorded as well. In its 2007 report, the IPCC did not include the impact of Greenland's or Antarctica's melting glaciers in its estimate of future sea-level rise, saying it lacked sufficient data. But now the speed-up of flow from these glaciers has been documented. And while the IPCC noted in 2007 that every continent had warmed throughout the 20th century except Antarctica, that continent has now been shown to be warming as well — very likely due to man-made influences, says Hegerl. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)

There's plenty more evidence in the Met Office report to support global warming. But the question from critics remains: how can we be sure this isn't just a natural phenomenon? Scientists haven't done a good enough job of communicating how they distinguish human versus natural influences, says Hegerl. The answer lies in climate models — massive computer simulations that allow the scientists to project climate effects in various scenarios, including those in which humans do not emit any greenhouses at all. "We go out of our way to check out other explanations — by assuming it's all explained by solar activity, or by solar activity plus volcanoes, or by combinations of any of the other natural forcings known to affect climate," says Hegerl.

According to the models, none of those combinations can produce the climate patterns currently being observed in the real world. Add the greenhouse gases that we know humans are generating (and which we've known since the 1800s tend to warm the Earth, all other things being equal), and the simulations finally come close to matching the real world. Its possible, albeit far-fetched, that the simulations are defective. It is even less possible that all of them (and there are many) are defective in the direction of overstating humanity's contribution to warming.

Again, none of the evidence adds up to absolute certainty, a rare commodity in any field of science. On Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that an independent panel of scientists, representing national science academies from around the world, would review the IPCC's research procedures — an effort to account for the 2007 report's mistakes, for which the IPCC has come under hard criticism. But while the U.N. group may benefit publicly from more transparency, it won't change the fact that more than 99% of the scientific details in the 2007 report have already withstood the most intense scrutiny. The fact that climate change evidence that was "very likely" a few years ago has now been declared likelier still by the comprehensive Met Office report suggests that the evidence for human-caused climate change is getting better all the time.

Reference: Time. Michael D. Lemonick is the senior science writer for Climate Central.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1971702,00.html#ixzz0i3FdVE7B 

URBAN ENERGY

Our mission: “To provide and install, sustainable, world class, clean energy products with the highest level of service and care."

Urban Energy is an innovative organisation specialising in the financing, design and installation of economic and environmentally sound solar powered energy systems for commercial property (private and public) and domestic dwellings. Our expertise in the field of Government sponsored funding programmes and solar power products will provide individuals and organisations with an excellent opportunity to overcome capital cost barriers, save money on energy bills, increase profit margins, increase the value of their property and reduce their carbon footprint.

Urban Energy employ the very best engineers in this field, all of which are fully qualified, MCS certified and Government approved to carry out this task, complying with strict guidelines and are members of the Solar Trade Association.

For further information about Urban Energy products and services:
Call: 0800 232 1624
Email: info@urbanenergy.org.uk
Website: http://www.urbanenergy.org.uk/