In many countries, such as the USA, heat dumps are a familiar feature of solar water heating systems. Solar panels get very hot and because the energy is drawn on demand and there is a sizing ratio between the surface area of solar panels and the amount of hot water you can store, when panels overheat many brands of panels need to have somewhere to dump the neat, otherwise the system will fail. When you understand that Genersys panels are designed not to get hotter than 170 degrees Celsius, you will have some insight into the heat that these panels can generate.

Many panels have to have a heat dump fitted to them. I have seen systems in the United States where the heat dump comprised a radiator fitted at the back of the installation, often on a back roof, in order to dissipate dangerously hot heat. That constitutes a heat dump. Other places dump surplus heat into a nearby watercourse of pond – not a practice that I would recommend.

Genersys panels do not need a heat dump, even if they are situated in the middle of the Sahara Desert (as some of them are). I now set out Chris’ paper on heat dumps in thermal solar systems.

He covers the different types of solar thermal panels (also known as collectors) and explains the technical advantages of not needing a heat dump.

Genersys panels do not require a Heat Dump

1.  Collectors that cook out

 These are collector types like some panel makes or all tube systems with only two connections. This means a few fewer connections but the disadvantage is that once the panels start to stagnate (reach very high temperatures) all of the glycol needs to steam up to get transported out of the collector. This is a process akin to cooking the glycol. It means very high stress on the glycol and the membrane of the expansion vessel because of the large amount of steam which reaches all the way down to the vessel. On larger system you would always need to install a pre-expansion vessel to protect the membrane of the main expansion vessel.

2.  Collectors that steam out

These are collector types like Genersys 1000-10 with 4 connections. This type of collector will push the glycol out of the absorber as soon as just a little steam develops and pushes it to the expansion vessel. The glycol will then be protected inside the expansion vessel. As soon as the panel cools down and the steam starts to condensate the glycol gets pushed back into the panels, this design increases the longevity of the glycol and the entire solar system, without the need for expensive heat dumps.

 The expansion vessel should have at least the pressure related to the height of the system + 0.5 bar. Though the system should have a minimum pressure of 1.5 bar on the entrance of the pump. This pressure is important for the pump to work properly.

 That is the technical position. In effect if you do not overheat the panels and have a Genersys solar system your system will:-

• Not need a heat dump, which is a cost saving.
• The glycol (which is the heat exchange fluid inside the panel) will last longer and keep its qualities better
• There will be no need to take overheating precautions, like covering the panels
• The pressure vessel and pumps will last longer

Some two connector systems like vacuum tubes are not fitted with heat dumps as a matter of course and this often causes overheating problems and an excessive wear on the solar panels (which can cause loss of vacuum) and excessive wear and tear on the system.

You should only have to fit a solar system once, and once fitted you will not want to have to pay to have someone go to the roof to carry out repairs on the panels or replace them.  That is why fitting a high quality system, like Genersys, is important.

Dr Boardman rightly expects that for some time (she puts the date at 2025 and I am not sure if I agree with that date specifically) gas will remain the main heating fuel for buildings. After that she expects gas to be produced by anaerobic digestion, which is simply burns most of the gas that would otherwise leak into the atmosphere or be locked into the soil. It is possible to alter and adapt buildings that presently exist to that they are brought up to very low energy homes by insulation and similar measures so that we will eventually find that we do not need any space heating, just water heating.

This seems to be the foundation of what she rightly wants to achieve – “Zero”. There has been a great deal of useful work in compiling the matters that she thinks need to be addressed to achieve zero, and I commend it very highly.

I am not sure about whether she is right in her founding premise that we can adapt all the buildings to, say, passivhaus standard, because I fear that although we can make every building wind tight and highly insulated there may well be health consequences to the occupants of such buildings. I am unhappy with the build up of carbon dioxide in homes without adequate ventilation and not sure that highly insulating a home and then mechanically ventilating it is a solution that we have been able to find as yet, in a way that is sustainable and in a way that we can avoid the health and greenhouse gas consequences of doing this.

This is more of a consummation devoutly to be wished, rather than technology that you can put into 26 million buildings which you have to be absolutely sure that there are no ill effects, no undesired consequences and no adverse life cycle and life style effects. A great deal more work has to be done on this, from a technical and engineering point of view, as well as from a medical viewpoint.

I nevertheless think that there is a great deal of sense in the concept and the need to massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions created within buildings.

The other interesting points about the report are the ideas that Dr Boardman proposes as a means of achieving two things which inevitably have a tension between them. The first is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the second is to reduce fuel poverty. You can reduce greenhouse gas emissions to an extent by pricing policies and also reduce fuel poverty by the same. Dr Boardman’s proposals do not, in my view, deal with the importance of fuel pricing. Instead she concentrates on nine suggested polices. I now take the liberty of quoting from her executive summary:-

1. complete coverage of the building stock with energy performance certificates and address specific databases at a basic level by 2013, for fuel poverty eradication. This is the pre-requisite for all other policies;

2. extension of display energy certificates to every business property and the publication of league tables to encourage action and improvements;

3. high minimum standards in the Building Regulations for new buildings, covering all energy use as soon as possible;

4. Building Regulations for existing properties to require consequential improvements, so that major changes to the building do not increase its overall energy consumption;

5. Building Control Officers to have a role as mentor for individual properties, to ensure they are on a low-energy trajectory that is understood by the owner;

6. financial and fiscal incentives to encourage both take-up of the most energy efficient products and buildings and improvement of the least efficient;

7. education to alert consumers to the importance of energy efficiency and the extent to which it varies between products, properties and lifestyles;

8. computer-based networks and directories to facilitate information exchange on innovative products and services between producers, purchasers and communities;

9. the immediate development of a Low Carbon Zone in each local authority to take action on the worst housing, occupied by the poorest people

These are, of course broad ideas and rightly so, but I am concerned that if we put them all into practice the purpose and intent of the ideas would lost in the inevitable bureaucracy that government creates which makes simple ideas very expensive, cumbersome and self defeating when it come to putting them into law or regulations. I find the ideas, which centre on assumptions about gas and electricity supplies, useful but if you take away the assumptions I am not sure whether they will work in what may the real world.

My preference, in place of Dr Boardman’s ideas, are measures founded upon the four principles of energy use, which I set out in “the Energy Age”, namely, benign energy first, conserve energy, the polluter must pay and there should be no unnecessary use of energy. In other words, the problem is the use of energy, and that is the problem to be addressed.

My own policies would be different from those of Dr Boardman:-

1. Invert the price pyramid of energy cost; as a building uses more units so its unit cost should increase.

2. Make compulsory home insulation. Forget persuasion, make proper insulations standards the law that has to be obeyed.

3. Make compulsory some form of genuine in home usable low or zero carbon energy production within the cartilage. It is more important to address the problem locally rather than with big schemes which suffer from intermittency.

4. Recognise that there is a tension between fuel poverty, which is solved by having cheap fuel and renewable energy, which, the way the dice are loaded, is more expensive to produce than burning fossil fuel. Address it by a levy on fossil fuel that takes account of the full life cycle effects of getting it and burning it – such as the air quality effect and cost on the health service.

I think the adoption of these ideas, especially pricing, will create a need to reduce energy and instead of renewables competing against the lowest unit price of fossil fuel energy, they would compete against the highest unit price.

That is my solution towards achieving zero.

Trees are useful and have helped create the climate which we now enjoy. They attract rainfall, and the forest floor holds water, preventing too much run off. The trees sequestrate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it, until it is slowly released by rotting (in which case about half of the carbon dioxide leaches into the forest floor and forms part of the soil), or by burning, in which case the sequestrated carbon dioxide is rapidly pumped back into the atmosphere. Trees are important and if we cropped all them (perhaps keeping a few to put in a tree museum) our client would change. We would release into the air the carbon dioxide sequestrated in the soil by disturbing it, and we would inevitably burn much of the timber releasing even more. Our climate would become hotter less plentiful in oxygen and rains would wash away the topsoil from land that formerly grew trees, making it hard to grow anything there.

Today in the tropics and in the great northern forests of Canada and Russia timber is very big business run by multinational companies that owe no allegiance to humanity or the environment in which humanity lives, but only to the pursuit of wealth. They crop the trees taking into account existing laws, but no doubt they buy timber from those who know that when a tree falls in the forest in the Amazon jungle, no one hears the sound in Brasilia and many involved in the timber market across the world have also developed selective deafness.

For those business that obey the restrictions on farming trees, in tropical regions, where trees can grow very quickly, they use a cutting cycle, which in some places has been enshrined in legislation and in other places become considered as good practice, of between 30 and 40 years, which those who study forests say is too short to allow trees to grow back sufficiently to cope with demand, and this inevitably means that more and more forest is cropped and brought into this short tree growing cycle.

This is just fourth part of the problem. The second part is by their very nature not every species of tree in the tropical forest is suitable as a source of timber that can be sold. It does not take much imagination to guess what happens with trees that are unsuitable for timber. Other trees are very suitable for cropping and selling the timber from them but they grow so slowly no one replants them for crops.

The third part of the problem is that in order to crop trees in the jungle you have to get men and equipment to them. That means cropping other trees to build the access and egress roads and infrastructure to crop trees and in doing so you create roads across the jungle. Where there are roads come humans who colonise the areas that they can now access, clear jungles for villages and towns for pastureland for cattle and for cash crops, for illegal mines all of which create the need for other roads.

The fourth part of the problem is that there is so much illegal logging. It is hard to guess how much of the world’s timber is in effect black market produced, in breach of laws that are supposed to apply where the trees grow. Current estimates are between 20% and 50%.

It all adds up to a difficult problem and one that becomes less manageable every year. It is also a problem that is in nature of a slow but sure and inevitable disease. Many environmentalists are called “tree huggers”. You do not have to hug a tree in order to understand the importance of maintaining large tropical forests for the sake of the future of humanity being able to live and breathe on this increasingly shrinking planet.

The legal basis for the court’s decision was that the government should not have reduced the subsidy until after the end of the consultation period. Thus, the Court argued, the decision to reduce the subsidy before consultation had ended was legally flawed.

I have been involved in many energy consultations over the past ten years. I have never seen a consultation about renewables change or even modify government policy. Consultations about other matters sometimes achieve changes but with energy, especially renewable energy, when you start to read the consultation document and see what questions are being asked your heart sinks. It is clear that policy is set and that whatever you answer nothing will change. In this sense most consultations are a sham, and on the basis that most consultations are designed to be theoretical rather than practical a brave court would have ruled that waiting until the end of the consultation period would not have made any difference to the process about which consultation was being made. The Government’s argument that paying subsidies at 43p per kWh was unsustainable trumps, in my view, the argument about the consultation.

The irony of the situation is that the very high subsidy for photovoltaic solar has created a group of very wealthy companies who have, in my view been enriched somewhat unjustly. These companies can afford now to take on the government through the courts, something that the PV industry would never have done a few years ago. In effect subsidies taken from fossil fuel energy users have been used to enrich a specific group, which once enriched has plenty of spare money to fight the government in the courts so as to ensure that the group’s unjust enrichment can continue for a while longer.

None of this should, however, detract from the point that the government set the feed in tariff at a ridiculously high level in the first place.

I need to reflect on one item of news that has caught my attention. In 2005 about 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed in Haditha by eight US Marines. After six years the trial of the last marine has ended. One of the eight was acquitted; six had the charges against them dropped and the remaining marine, a sergeant Wuterich, achieved a plea bargain and has pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty, which carries a light punishment when you consider what the dereliction resulted in.

The killings were wrong, and killing unarmed civilians should be punished. In war many bad things happen. We send our young men and women to fight in wars that are unjustified and where there is very little moral high ground for them to recognise. We fill them with propaganda. We train them so that their minds are largely devoid of independent will, free will, in battle conditions where they must subsume their free thought into the conditioned reflex of obeying orders.

We send them to do terrible things; were the killings in Haditha by US marines are worse than the killing of other civilians who have lost their lives from bombs dropped at them from great heights, by “accident” or as a result of collateral damage, that euphemism for unlawful killing?

The second hardest thing is to know the rules of law; the hardest thing is to obey them. We put our soldiers into a frenzy, falsely convincing them that the enemy is evil and that one of our soldier’s lives is worth any number of the lives of the enemy. When something happens that results in the murder of innocents we struggle to find the right solution. We cannot bring the dead back to life. These issues are complex, perhaps the responsibility for the killings does not lie with those who killed but with those who put the soldiers into a condition where they killed civilians.

As I said, sometimes it is hard. I need to reflect.

In the old days when the authorities disagreed with the contents of a pamphlet they subjected the pamphleteers to the full rigours of the criminal law. It was the way that governments prevent anyone from expressing an idea that conflicted with the prevailing government view or prevailing mores. Hundreds of years later, after many battles for democracy and for freedom of speech which is the freedom to express an idea, we now find that disseminating an opinion about homosexuality that is contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist is a criminal offence. Apparently calling for homosexuality to be made a crime and for those who practise it to be punished is not a legitimate opinion that people can hold these days. To express such an opinion is against the law, a crime, and three men found guilty of so expressing it by a jury are likely to be sent to prison, yes prison, for expressing their views.

It seems that to express such a view is a hate crime against gays – inciting hate on the grounds of homosexuality. It rather hard to find the exact statutory provision because the law on this important topic has been created by amending existing statutory provisions. You have to look at the Public Order Act 1986 as amended by the wording of othe statutes; as best I can tell the law that applies to both religious hatred and hatred on grounds of sexuality, is

A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up… hatred…against a group of persons defined by their sexual orientation.

The jury (and I have great confidence in the good sense of juries) found that there was such an intention, which they presumably inferred from the wording of a pamphlet. We are not allowed to see the pamphlet and I have been unable to find any link to it on the internet. However I cannot see how anyone who expresses a religious belief about homosexuality is stirring up hatred of homosexuality any more than the statements about homosexuality in the Bible, the Qur’an, or in the Talmud.

For example the King James Bible has “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them”.(Leviticus 20:13 KJV). This is surely an incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation, is not it? Am I guilty of an offence by publishing these words on this web site and are all the book shops that sell Bibles also guilty?

The New Testament has a passages included in the gospel according to St Mark in which it is arguable that homosexuality is forbiiden and evil, according to Christianity: “And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, sexual impurities, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.

There are also passages in t he Qur’an and the Talmud and the various teachings of learned and righteous Muslim and Jewish clerics which are unequivocal; according to their religious belief homosexuality is an abomination and punishable by death.

The beliefs of these major and important religions may not be the beliefs of everyone practising those religions or the majority of those practising those religions but they are bona fide beliefs. I do not agree with those beliefs but I can well understand the basis for them.

I am sure that to express your beliefs and your religion, if those beliefs are held in a bona fide matter, should not constitute a crime. Certainly gay people may be upset by the expression of those beliefs, but perhaps those expressing those beliefs are equally upset by gay people expressing their beliefs. Too bad. We cannot and must not pick and choose the beliefs that people are or are not allowed to express. The distributors of the pamphlet were expressing a very strong opinion that they held. It seems that they believe that the law on homosexuality should not have been de-criminalised (it was mostly by the Sexual Offences Act 1967).

Having not read the pamphlet I cannot be sure as to whether it actually incited hatred. The jury thought it did, but that is not an objective test. The strength and weaknesses of juries is that they bring their prejudices into the jury room. They cannot leave them at homne. No British newspaper of broadcaster has told us what this leaflet contains but according to Indian internet sites it called for gay people to be executed for practising homosexuality and that Allah permitted this without specifying how execution was to be carried out.

Should this be an offence? I do not think it should be an offence any more than publishing a pamphlet claiming that Jews and Muslims will spend eternity after death in hell, tortured in hell (which is the belief of many Christians) or in publishing a Bible or any other religious text.

Those convicted in Derby will in all probability be sent to prison. That is a disgrace and makes me ashamed of the laws of England. I hope that they will appeal and continue to appeal to uphold the right to express their opinions even though it hurts and frightens others.

In the nineteen sixties homosexuals were frightened to express their opinions or even to admit to being gay. How ironic that forty five years on people are now curtailed from expressing their opinions about homosexuals, unless they have something society deems nice to say,

The Human Rights Act provides

Article 10: Freedom of Expression

(1) Everyone has the right of freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without inference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

(2) The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Can it genuinely said that there was disorder as a result of the pamphlet distributed in Derby? I have heard of none. Was any crime urged? Not to my knowledge. Were morals protected? Of course not – that part of the Article is meaningless.

There is a conflict between the laws of sexuality hate crime and Article 10 unless you hold morals to be whatever the government of the day believes them to be. I hope it is resolved in favour of those found guilty at Derby. I do not agree with the views they hold but I have to defend their right to express them, and so must everyone, including homosexuals.

If people think it right to prevent the distribution of opinions about homosexuals which do not accord with the prevailing zeitgeist then they should remember that that particular sword, like most of them is double edged as well as having a sharp point. The right to freedom of speech, just like the right to practise homosexuality,  was hard to win and easy to lose.

Every renewable energy subsidy (which is usually in a direct cash grant) requires state approval. Rules that save the nuclear energy industry the cost of insurance or having to maintain (rather than distribute) cash reserves for future clean up operations are in essence as much as a subsidy as a direct cash grant. A pound saved has the same value as a pound earned. The real difference between the subsidies is that those affected the nuclear energy industry are far more valuable in monetary terms than any money the government dishes out for renewable.

While the environmentalists have got their ducks in a row on the nuclear industry why not look at the indirect subsidies for the fossil fuel industries? Those that burn create dust and particulates and damage air quality that costs the nation in health and other costs as a result of illness caused. At the moment the costs of fixing poor health falls on the nation, not the energy user. It might we worth considering another complaint to the Commission.

“We are creating venues, facilities and infrastructure for the London 2012 Games that leave a lasting social, economic and environmental legacy for London and the UK, while minimising any other adverse impacts during the design and construction of the Olympic Park, venues, infrastructure and housing” boasts the ODA. It also points out that it has become the “first Games Organising Committee to be certified to the British Standard 8901: Specification for a Sustainability Management Systems for Events”

I wonder if they have taken into account the carbon footprints of the opening and closing ceremonies. The opening ceremony has a budget of £80 million and spending a good part of it on fireworks would not be a sustainable achievement or a low emission activity.

There is a huge cost associated with building a new airport. The financial cost is estimated at eight billions but will almost certainly come in greater than that by a considerable margin. The expenditure is justified by claims that air travel will increase fourfold in the next twenty years; I am not sure how accurate those claims are. There are claims that without the new airport London will lose hub business to Paris, Frankfort and other European airports. If so, so be it.

There are serious environmental consequences of building a large new airport. The carbon dioxide emissions created in the building will be immense, quite apart from the carbon dioxide emissions given off by the additional aircraft.

Most importantly, the strongest objection to the estuary airport is that the proposed airport site is heavily populated with birds that live in the wetlands. Bird lovers will see that as an objection in itself but those using the airport might be unhappy to know that birds can bring down aircraft, when their bodies become entangled in the jets. This rarely happens but building an airport in the flight zone of millions of birds will increase that probability significantly. Aircraft are most vulnerable to bird strike when taking off, and a large bird ingested in the jet engine can not only cause serious damage to the engine but imperil the lives of those flying. There have been 200 lives lost, as far as we know, due to bird strike.

I cannot see that a cull of birds would be acceptable or would even prevent new birds taking up the place of the culled birds in time, so the problem is probably insoluble.

If we have eight billions to spend on aviation related matters then it would be more logical to spend it on aircraft design that would reduce the environmental impact of aircraft and which can use existing facilities. The money would be better used to design a craft that is larger than those used or in design, with more doors to load and offload people more quickly, that is much more fuel efficient and which can take off and land in shorter runways that those presently in use.

Air travel is no longer about being faster; it is about having a lower environmental impact. It is much more important to reduce the environmental impact of flying than it is to build more airports.

In North East Bulgaria there seems to be large potential deposits of natural gas in an area of nearly 1700 square miles. In principle the Bulgaria government were minded to permit Chevron to exploit these and obtain the gas by drilling and then injecting into the shale a mixture to sand, water and chemical to release the gas, which would then be captured and piped. Many Bulgarians are worried about the environmental impact of this process. It is clear that existing laws and fracking practices are insufficient to protect the water supplies.

So after much agitation by environmentalists the government has decided to call a halt on the project. It has withdrawn Chevron’s five year permit to explore for gas by fracking and will not reinstate it until it is sure that commonly used shale gas drilling methods of hydraulic fracking are environmentally safe.

All of this shows that however desperate you are for energy, no one wants to have plenty of energy which costs the price of contaminated water.