Thursday, 30 May 2013

Cheap Coal ‘Threatens UK Pollution Targets’

Coal on the global market is so cheap that it threatens government attempts to tackle climate change, the chairman of the Environment Agency has warned.

Lord Smith says the UK’s share of electricity generated by coal is up to 40% – the highest since 1996.

Unless this trend is curbed, he says, the UK will miss its targets on curbing climate change and sulphur pollution.

The price of coal has been driven down by the dash for shale gas in the US.

Gas is much less polluting than coal, so carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have fallen in the US. But European power generators have gobbled up the resulting cheap coal, driving carbon emissions up in several nations.

The EU’s statistical agency Eurostat estimates that from 2011 to 2012, CO2 emissions increased by 3.9% in the UK. The rise is most likely to be due to increased coal burning.

UK emissions of sulphur, which is damaging to health, have risen when they are supposed to be falling.

Read full story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22711416

Tuesday, 28 May 2013

Efficiency in Energy Management is key to pressures in Food Industry

Increased competitive pressures, tighter margins and rising energy costs are forcing manufacturers to alter their methods of operation. At the same time, new ways of managing energy consumption and quality through sophisticated power monitoring tools have emerged – providing the information that companies need to be able to take action to reduce energy usage. In short, effective energy management is no longer an option; it is a strategic business necessity.

By 2020 it is predicted that the earth’s population will have swollen to around 8 billion people1, meaning that food and beverage manufacturers are facing a significant challenge of producing enough food to meet the world’s growing need. To add to the pressure, the UK’s manufacturers have also been tasked with reducing their energy consumption by 20 per cent.

Mounting pressure to become more sustainable means that many manufacturers are now seeking solutions that will enable them to lower energy usage but maintain flexible production standards – all while meeting health and safety guidelines.

Within the industry, the term ‘Overall Equipment Effectiveness’ or OEE, is a recognised key measurement of efficiency and is based on three main factors: performance, availability and quality. With the increasing focus on reducing energy consumption, we believe that there is an argument to now include energy within the equation – resulting in what could be termed Overall Equipment Effectiveness plus Energy Management (OEE+E).

In today’s tough economic climate, end-users now expect control systems to go beyond functional and regulatory performance. They have now become a tool to manage the plant while reducing energy and overhead costs, cutting carbon emissions and providing quick and precise information that moulds both production and business strategies.

Over the past decade, the adoption of Ethernet-based control networks and commercial off-the-shelfhardware, components and operating systems have improved the way the systems in place communicate. This provides end-users with the flexibility, choice and predictability necessary to achieve a truly energy efficient manufacturing plant. By upgrading to a fully integrated solution – incorporating both the energy management and automation system with the operation management applications – it is possible to make vast improvements to a site’s OEE+E.

Finally, for a food manufacturer to lower running costs while reducing energy consumption, they must employ a flexible automation system that is capable of reacting to changing energy costs. The price of energy can vary significantly at different times of the day, as well as geographically. While manufacturers may be using a process automation system to manage energy consumption, if they are using too much energy at the wrong times of the day, both costs and emissions will remain high.

About ENMAT

ENMAT (Energy Monitoring & Targeting) is a web based Energy Monitoring and Targeting system. It presents energy management data in a way that is relevant, meaningful and useful to users.

The purpose of Monitoring and Targeting is to relate your energy consumption data to the appropriate energy drivers, such as weather and production, so that you get a better understanding of how energy is being used. In particular, it will identify if there are signs of avoidable waste or other opportunities to reduce consumption.

Envantage offer a Monitoring and Targeting (M&T) service to enable organisations to save energy and cut costs. The use of this platform means that we can deliver a bespoke solutions to meet your needs.

Aimed at industrial/commercial SMEs and multi-site retailers, the Envantage ENMAT service utilises the latest software technologies to obtain a full picture of customer energy usage across single or multiple sites.

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Looking for an affordable Energy Management Solution?

http://www.en-mat.com/ ENMAT (Energy Monitoring & Targeting) is a web based Energy Monitoring and Targeting system. It presents energy management data in a way that is relevant, meaningful and useful to users.

We offer a free service for business users with Half Hourly Metering. We also support a wide range of smart devices such as Google Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsbar.ENMATEnergy415754&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5hcHBzYmFyLkVOTUFURW5lcmd5NDE1NzU0Il0 .

One In Three Councils Not Complying With Legal Duties On Monitoring Their Buildings’ Energy Use

Nearly a third of councils are not complying with their legal duties on monitoring their buildings’ energy use under laws designed to encourage councils to improve their estates.

The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive from the EU requires public authorities to have up-to-date Display Energy Certificates (DEC) in all their buildings over 1,000m2.

The government has allocated local authorities £1.9m each year to fulfil these duties. But Freedom of Information requests by the Property and Energy Professionals Association (PEPA) have revealed that 30% of councils in England and Wales admitted they were not compliant with the directive. While 58% said they were compliant, a further 12% did not answer the question.

Mike Ockenden, head of secretariat at PEPA, said the lack of compliance with the directive would mean less work for firms in the energy efficiency sector.

Ockenden said the Department for Communities and Local Government, which oversees DECs, had not put the right framework in place to ensure compliance with the directive, adding it was “absurd” that compliance with the directive was monitored by trading standards officers, who are themselves employed by councils.

He said: “It seems that the communities secretary Eric Pickles does not understand why improving energy efficiency is so vital, not just to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions, but for the economy.”

Sustainability expert Neil Cutland said the findings were “depressing”. He said: “The directive is there for a good reason, European directives get a bad press generally, but this one is set to be driving so many [positive] things in the market that would not be happening without it.” He said the directive needed greater “political will” behind it to be effective.

Building’s Green for Growth campaign has called for the roll-out of DECs to the private sector to stimulate work in the construction industry and meet the UK’s carbon emission reduction targets.

About ENMAT

ENMAT (Energy Monitoring & Targeting) is a web based Energy Monitoring and Targeting system. It presents energy management data in a way that is relevant, meaningful and useful to users.

Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Carbon Trackers In Cities Aim To Monitor Urban Carbon Footprints

Every time Los Angeles exhales, odd-looking gadgets anchored in the mountains above the city trace the invisible puffs of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that waft skyward.

Similar contraptions atop the Eiffel Tower and elsewhere around Paris keep a pulse on emissions from smokestacks and automobile tailpipes. And there is talk of outfitting Sao Paulo, Brazil, with sensors that sniff the byproducts of burning fossil fuels.

It’s part of a budding effort to track the carbon footprints of megacities, urban hubs with over 10 million people that are increasingly responsible for human-caused global warming.

For years, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse pollutants have been closely monitored around the planet by stations on the ground and in space. Last week, worldwide levels of carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million at a Hawaii station that sets the global benchmark – a concentration not seen in millions of years.

Now, some scientists are eyeing large cities – with LA and Paris as guinea pigs – and aiming to observe emissions in the atmosphere as a first step toward independently verifying whether local – and often lofty – climate goals are being met.

For the past year, a high-tech sensor poking out from a converted shipping container has stared at the Los Angeles basin from its mile-high perch on Mount Wilson, a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains that’s home to a famous observatory and communication towers.

Like a satellite gazing down on Earth, it scans more than two dozen points from the inland desert to the coast. Every few minutes, it rumbles to life as it automatically sweeps the horizon, measuring sunlight bouncing off the surface for the unique fingerprint of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

In a storage room next door, commercially available instruments that typically monitor air quality double as climate sniffers. And in nearby Pasadena, a refurbished vintage solar telescope on the roof of a laboratory on the California Institute of Technology campus captures sunlight and sends it down a shaft 60 feet below where a prism-like instrument separates out carbon dioxide molecules.

On a recent April afternoon atop Mount Wilson, a brown haze hung over the city, the accumulation of dust and smoke particles in the atmosphere.

This summer, technicians will install commercial gas analyzers at a dozen more rooftops around the greater LA region.

Using Technology to cut carbon emissions and improve agriculture

Greenhouse gases from agriculture account for more than 10% of total emissions globally, roughly equivalent to the entire global transport sector. Meanwhile, it is estimated that agricultural production will need to increase by about 70% by 2050 to keep pace with global population growth.

What’s more, the real impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector are likely going to be hardest felt in many of those countries whose people rely on agriculture most for their livelihoods. In sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, for example, some estimates show a reduction in the productivity of most major food crops as a result of changes to the climate over the next 40 years.

While this may sound like a doom and gloom scenario, affordable technologies that have the potential to reduce greenhouse gases and increase productivity in agriculture are becoming more widely available. I am referring not to agricultural technologies — although those certainly play a role — but to information and communications technologies, like the mobile phone, video and radio.’Climate-smart’ methods of agriculture, such as conservation agriculture, agroforestry and others already exist. The challenge is that not all farmers know about them, there is no single prescription, and traditional practices can often die hard, particularly when you are working with small margins and taking risks could spell utter ruin for your family. So how do information and communication technologies change this? They make it easier to share locally relevant information on improved techniques and to provide time-specific information and recommendations (such as weather forecasts, and when to do what).

Full Story : The Guardian