September 15th Schleswig-Holstein Biogas

Travel today by bike 12km
Today by car 50km

I’m chucked out of the communal area last night at ten when they lock up and it’s late enough – I sleep deeply again and eat a hefty breakfast with Kirsten from the bed next door who has cycled from Hamburg and tells me she got up to go to the toilet at 2am and a couple were in there ‘having a lot of fun’.
I spend some time transcribing yesterday’s interview and then decide I had better get going - after a few hundred yards I remember they drive on the right. I follow a different cycle sign to yesterday hoping it will take me along the coast. It appears to dead end at the marina but then I see a cycle track right along edge of the sea. I stop to take photos again and it leads me back to the same point I entered the forest yesterday. As I get to Artefact the sun is shining so I quickly take more snaps before it starts again. Werner has been let down by someone and so is teaching kids how they live in Africa and another group about making solar panels. He’s clearly in youth education mode with a bright shirt and a cap with a solar powered fan in the peak and reminds me briefly of Jo Gwilym, the only man who can make electrics interesting and a natural teacher. I join in with a school group watching a film on energy in the region. I talk to a couple of the girls afterwards – this is their second visit. I ask what they think about it and they say ‘it’s ok’.
When they’ve gone I watch the film again in English. It’s commissioned by the ministry for agricultural affairs and paid for by a number of renewable energy developers and suppliers (including Vestas and RWPower) about sun, wind and biomass energy in the Schleswig-Holstein region and is very upbeat with lots of stirring music and big zooming camera shots swooping over wind farms and through fields of maize.
At last Werner is free and rounds up Paloma, their intern who is studying biomass and comes along as an extra interpreter and for her own interest. She’s German American and so a big help. I fold up the newbike, put it in the car boot and we set off at breakneck speed to our first visit – a biogas plant in Linau.

Nico is one of the many regional farmers who turned to wind when milk and wheat farming couldn’t provide a living two decades ago. He still sees himself as principally a wind farmer but since six years ago has had a share in the plant he shows us round. A vast yard with walls maybe 4 metres high holds up to 20,000 tonnes of maize, dried and shredded. Twice a day Nico shovels ten tipper loads into the feed hopper for the first fermentation vessel. This takes around an hour a day but with additional maintenance and administration he reckons four hours a day to run the plant. The maize is fed by automatic screw feed into the first vessel, then into a secondary vessel and then into a holding tank. The resultant sludge is pumped out and taken away by tanker, back to the maize farmers. The methane so produced is burnt in three 370kW engines to produce annually 1.1MWh of electricity and 1.2MWh of heat.
The electricity is fed into the grid and receives the feed in tariff. They could claim this even if they threw away the heat, which many people do – Nico rolls his eyes at this and complains of ‘Verructer Politiker’ which I translate as crazy politicians. The propagation of biogas plants in the region has been so rapid that legislation has not been able to keep up, there is no central strategy for them and now there are too many he says, with some driving in maize from Denmark (where they don’t have a biogas feed in tariff).
But he admits that finding a use for the heat is always the problem. Their heat is fed into a district heating main which feeds the village. Initially it was just six households but 30 or 40 joined in the second year and now it is up to 90. The first six get the heat at a flat rate for the year, which works out about 50% of the cost of oil heating and the others are metered but still make a saving over the cost of oil. Government subsidies are available towards the cost of connection. Some, like Nico have a back up oil heater still but many do not. After touring the plant we go and sit in one of his buildings and it’s toasty warm – Paloma says afterwards she nearly fell asleep. I ask about the efficiency of a heat network when the buildings are so far apart. Nico says it’s very efficient, then he points at the lawn and says that you can see where the heat main is in winter because the snow melts above it. But apart form that, he insists, it’s very efficient. We have so much hot water, he tells me – we wash our horses in hot water!
Two villagers recently have built new houses to a very high spec and they hardly need heating but they have still attached to the heat main. Beside the portacabins that house the engines are dry coolers to dissipate the heat when the heat main can’t take it.
We thank him for his time and Werner presents him with a small model car with a PV cell on the roof that powers it. ‘I can only guarantee it for a couple of million years’ he tells him, ‘and then the sun might go out’.

We drive a little slower to the second appointment with Dirk and Bernd Nissen, brothers who run a farm biogas plant, a slightly smaller operation of 715kW split between three engines with around 1000kW of heat as a by-product. The farm also has four 600kW turbines and two 1.5MW turbines and a 125kW PV array which covers all of the cow shed. We sit in the control room and Dirk explains in English that he built the plant himself and maintains it, because he’s a mechanical engineer – I am riven with envy at this and feel like I did when Hugh Piggott showed us how to make a wind turbine out of wood. That’s proper engineering I think – being able to make electricity out of wood, or in this case shit. The plant runs on a combination of cow manure, maize and grass. This gives them some resilience in the case of a year with a poor harvest. They also have a problem with heat dissipation – only three farms are close enough to benefit from the thermal output and so they have come up with a plan to run a gas line down to the nearest town and move one of the engines to run there so the heat can be used. They could link into the gas main that runs nearby and they say that E-on who owns it is prepared to let them do this. But they don’t want E-on selling their gas anonymously – they would rather prove that their way of doing things is a viable alternative to the monopolies. Anti E-on feeling is high in the region, especially since the CCS plan – signs on the roadside and in shops, black on yellow with a gas masked face, pronounce against the plans. There is a big demonstration on Saturday in Berlin. Paloma is meeting her mother there. Werner wants to go but as he appears to be almost singlehandedly running Artefact he may be too busy.

Our third stop is in Shaffland, a town of 2,200 inhabitants where we meet Carstensen at the Agraberatung Nord offices. They are not a co-operative although they’re supported by farmers, and not quite a company. They provide consultancy on matters agricultural and in the past five years this has included a rapidly growing number of biogas installations. He tells us that the primary hurdle is getting financial backing – the banks are much more cautious now and want to see clear evidence that a secure and long term feedstock supply is in place Below 1MW (total electric and thermal combined) plants do not need planning permission as it’s classed as a ‘privilaged’ construction and bound only by a few guidelines such as minimum distance from habitation (they don’t stink but they have a definite farm-yardy smell). Even above 1MW planning is not really a big issue unless there is a limiting factor such as road size. This is one area where legislation has recently caught up as more and heavier traffic to feed the plants and remove the sludge led to high road repair bills. But there is no limitation due to a regional strategy as there is in the case of wind (the 1.5% of allowed land cover has been reached). Carstensen doesn’t see that this is a problem as the availability of feedstock is already starting to act as a brake (15,000 hectares of maize he reckons is imported from Denmark). He does think that the legislation isn’t clever enough in the differentiation between size of plant. There are three bands (up to 150kW, 150-500kW and 500kW-5MW) with the smallest attracting a much higher tariff. One developer is in court right now for installing ten small plants to claim the lower tariff. The other potential problem is one of centralization of farms. Over the last decade the number of farmers has shrunk to only 10% with farms merging and being bought out. It seems they may be against monopolies in general, and E-on in particular but this doesn’t stop them buying their neighbours.

Werner and Carstensen are getting deeper into conversation but my head is hurting from trying to take it all in and understand the German even though it’s being translated (although at increasingly lengthy intervals) and poor Paloma looks like she might start eating her own arm so we thank Carstensen, Werner presents him with a solar mini-car and Paloma and I leg it over the road in the rain to the bakery just before it closes to get a sandwich and some cake. I’m dropped back at the youth hostel and say goodbye to Werner (Paloma I will meet again tomorrow). He’s been a great help and the meetings he’s organized really constructive. There’s a worry when you’ve only met someone by email or picked somewhere because the website looked good but on this occasion it’s certainly worked.

Back in the hostel yesterday’s roommates have all gone and been replaced by Helen from Oxford. I warn her about the late night toilet activities and go in the rain to the supermarket for food. I really want something hot but I can’t see anywhere close by and the prospect of staying dry is slightly more appealing. I do that thing I do where I buy something because it looks interesting – a jar of potted meat lumps in jelly and some rum and raisin rittersport chocolate (fond memories of a school skiing trip). The potted meat lumps are surprisingly nice, thereby re-inforcing my belief that this is a good way to approach food experimentation and means I’m about 2% more likely to try eating the snails in the back garden (I have it on good authority that ALL snails are edible). After eating and writing up the day I can feel my face getting red with tiredness and so despite it being not even ten yet I’m off to bed. I have ‘Compass Bearings for a Course Change’ to read, based on Germany but could just as easily be any country in the developed world. Page eleven tells me the large scale production of biofuels leads to the destruction of ecosystems and has negative impacts on food supply. Cheerful stuff.

14th September - Talking with Werner about energy and Artefact

(Energy)’…it’s a civil sector question not a technical issue for a handful of engineers.’

Artefact is Germany’s first Infotainment park on renewable energy. It has a guest house the foundation of which is insulated with bottles from Flensburg Brewery and a number of other buildings and demonstration modules based on solar and wind power. They run seminars for schools groups and an adult education programme with some thousands of participants from 50 countries a year from development organisations, architects, community politicians, and companies. They’ve had about 250,000 visitors in the last two decades. It seems to be almost singlehandley run by Werner with a small team including a couple of volunteers and, at the moment, an intern called Paloma who has an interest in different crops for biomass.

Werner tells me he started out his career in education in developing countries, including 5-6 years in West Africa. His experiences there made him realize that although they had local issues to address the greatest problems, for example the effects of climate change, were mainly the product of rich countries consuming energy and creating poverty by controlling markets for their own benefits. And so he was driven to return home, to deal with the issues there, ‘to be a development worker in my country’.

He started then to look for local solutions – for building materials that didn’t need transporting from far away, that created jobs locally and that could be easily recycled, for ways to minimize energy use and also to see how energy could be produced locally. People laughed back then, and said, ‘You have no choice but to go with coal and nuclear because you have no sun in winter, no wind in summer, and you still need to produce heat’. But they tried and have proved that combination of these two technologies combined with biomass co-generation works well not just for a centre such as Artefact but also for the region.

Nowadays he says the farmers don’t come to Artefact to look at the demonstration models. They’re still laughing but now because they have much larger versions of their own. 15-20 years ago many of them were on the verge of selling up – they couldn’t make a living on milk and wheat alone but now most of them have a turbine and a PV array, and in the last five years more and more have biogas plants. The region of Schleswig-Holstein produces enough electricity over the year to cover it’s own needs, feeding into the grid in winter and drawing some out in winter. They have over 2600 turbines covering 1.5% of their land, around 200 biogas plants, also PV arrays and solar thermal.

The feed in tariff has been the main instrument of implementation – every new installation is guaranteed a price for its output - for the next twenty years. Even though the tariff drops every year to reflect reductions in price and increases in efficiency the price you are offered when you install remains the same. This gives people the confidence to install. Werner describes it as ‘A tremendous success story’. They have had delegations from 50-60 different countries to look at it – wanting to know if its just a incentive for the producers and if the consumers are paying more and are maybe are not happy about it or whether it involves local investors and if the funds made locally are reinvested? It seems it’s a win-win situation. Over 10,000 people are employed in the industry locally, including many in the field of ‘re-powering’ where turbines are replaced with a larger, more efficient models and the old ones refurbished and down-cycled to the developing world. Although the global economic crisis affected the ship building and other traditional industries the region has come out better than most as the renewables market has continued to boom.

They do struggle with infrastructure, as we do in the UK. With centralized large scale power plants the electricity transmission cables get thinner as they stretch out to rural regions but when you want to feed in from wind in the other direction sometimes the cables aren’t big enough. This means downtime for wind turbines and missed opportunities for both energy and money generation. Werner believes that the big energy producing monopolies are deliberately obstructing the development of the grid to benefit their own profits. Even now they’re in negotiation with the government to prolong the life of several nuclear and coal plants. Germany exports the power of 5-7 nuclear power plants – they don’t need it for domestic consumption but the government is still considering continuing production. This despite bad publicity around a test storage site where more, and more toxic, waste was deposited than originally planned because the energy company didn’t have anywhere else to put it. Evidence has emerged that the choice of location came down not to geological advice (apparently it’s prone to seawater and so not recommended for nuclear) but to score points over the East German Government who had set up a similar facility just across the border. He describes it as ‘taking their own children hostage’. I ask about new nuclear but it seems that, like us, they stopped building 15-20 years ago. Unlike the UK however there is no support for new nuclear. Even the conservative Government sees that route as madness. I say that in the UK some people are saying that nuclear is safe now and although it’s not a popular choice that it’s inevitable. Werner says it’s a safe bet if we want war. If we replace coal with nuclear global uranium reserves would be gone in 20 years. Today Russia is buying nuclear mining areas in Australia. In Niger and Mali we have the beginnings of civil wars because of French and Russian nuclear companies try to get control of mining areas. ‘What we have in Iraq over oil we will have over nuclear in 15 years if we continue this. So if you say oh sorry we can’t send more soldiers to Iraq, OK - you can send next time to Australia or Congo’.

Werner sees it as a struggle between the centralists and the decentralists. ‘Renewable energy’ he says, ‘is democratic. If someone has a roof or a car which can use electricity instead of fuel they can produce and use renewable energy, but who can run a coal or nuclear power plant? It’s nothing more than the defense of privileges’

With 60-70% of the tax income in some parts of the area being linked to renewable energy there is a high level of awareness regionally. For example – many local people are against carbon capture and storage. One large energy producer has a plan to burn brown coal in Koln and then pump the captured carbon up to Schleswig Holstein, and they want European grants to do this. Even the government of Schlweslig Holstein changed their approach because of pressure form local people and have caused a new law to be written which says you cannot force regional governments to take the CCS waste against their will but it’s not in the statute books yet. So now the company are trying a different area which suffers from high unemployment in the hopes that the population there will be more easily bribed.

Werner admits that the awareness of energy does not necessarily translate into an awareness of other aspects of sustainability, especially transport, given the rural nature of the region and the difficulty of powering it with anything other than a liquid fuel. If they wanted to run all the vehicles of Schleswig Holstein on rapeseed oil they could produce 16% regionally – they would still have to import over 80%. I ask about the debate of land use for fuel as opposed to food and he says there are discussions locally about the ethics of feeding people or cars. He rolls his eyes at this and says, ‘Of course they don’t talk about how we feed animals instead of people – if we were vegetarians we could feed seven people from the same piece of land’ but it all sounds as theoretical as the same discussions in the UK – I think as long as the price of transport is so cheap that we can ship or fly in our food from elsewhere it will remain so.

September 14th Hamburg – Flensburg

Found out after updating the blog last night that I’d got a couchsurfing response after all but only that morning (although I only sent it the night before but I didn’t put the country code with my mobile) – from Kristoff who is an electrical engineer with an interest in renewables. Really gutted I send a massive apology back. The internet place is small and cramped, with row after row of little booths barely wider than the screen and afterwards when I go looking for food I realize I’m slap bang in the middle of the red light district. Bored looking girls in short skirts wait outside every other building on the side streets and the main drag is pretty much all sex cinemas offering every combination or variation imaginable in neon lights (with the odd dead or flickering light and some peeling paint just to give it all that really glamorous feel). It’s all quite tawdry and depressing and I lose interest in exploring a new city and instead get some food from a grim supermarket (I feel like washing the outside of the packets when I get back to my room). I find ‘Flight of the Conchords’ which I’d forgotten I had on my netbook and watch that before going to bed without a shower (I looked in it but had no confidence I’d come out any cleaner). I sleep like the dead and wake up to rain. Fortunately I’m even closer to the station than I thought so I don’t get wet. The currywurst vendor is doing a roaring trade (that’s sausage with curry sauce) but I get some fresh orange juice from the shop next door. They sell cakes too - they are nearly, but not quite, as big as my head so I don’t buy one.

The newbike is not happy to be going back in it’s bag so soon after coming out and the two of us wrestle for a good ten minutes before the train arrives and I get on still without having managed to get the zip fully zippered. The 2nd class carriages are the same style as the 1st class ones I was on yesterday so I get the comfort without the obnoxiousness.

I cycle up to Flensburg Youth Hostel (and it is up) and check in, drop most of my luggage and set off to Glucksburg. I decide to take the main road rather than risk getting lost on the back roads and so am disappointed when the cycle lane beside it veers off away from it – until I realize that what I thought were back roads on the map are in reality a network of clearly signposted scenic forest paths – the Ostsee fitnesstrail. I start to feel a bit precious about the newbike who hasn’t even been on the canal towpaths back in Manchester but it’s fine. I go past a lake covered in waterlilies and another with a fairytale white-towered castle on the other side. I stop to take too many photos of mushrooms and little frogs. I’m grinning like a loon on loon tablets at everyone I meet and have to remind myself that to them this is all perfectly normal. Like Lenny Henry in Bernard and the Genie (if you haven’t seen it, do – or better still come round mine when I’m back and I’ll watch it with you) upon discovering that New Yorkers are completely blasé about having 36 different flavours of ice-cream I want to throw back my head and shout ‘YOU’RE CRAAAAAZZZYYYY!’ but I don’t because they’re already looking at me like I’ve just escaped from the asylum.

I get to Artefact and am greeted by Werner. I try to explain my joy at the cycle paths but when I say ‘In England we don’t really have this’ he says, ‘The forest? No – I’ve heard this’. He gives me tea and talks to me about the situation with renewables locally and in Germany generally against the backdrop of climate change and global inequality (see the next blogpost) for a couple of hours and then I walk round the power park in the rain. It’s on a much more modest scale than CAT although clearly built with as much thought and passion. It’s drizzling and apart from a couple of staff I’m alone as I walk round the displays. They’re well done and they’ve just added some English to the signs. They do some education as well and seem to struggle with the same issues as CAT but they have to close right over the winter due to lack of customers. We sit in the communal area of the guest house – an adobe-walled structure created from a number of circular rooms interlinked by a central corridor. After my tour we chat some more and then I cycle back down the forest trails in the rain getting well and truly mudded. I am unsurprised to see that the inside of the fashion panniers are soaked through. After a shower I stroll to the supermarket and get some fish in a jar which is really salty and a yoghurt, and some weisbier. Internet at the youth hostel is a rip off at €8 for an hour or €29 for a month which would be reasonable but I’m only here for three days.

First Stop - Germany

Of the countries I’m visiting (UK, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Holland) they all have a comparable climate (i.e. temperate) and a high level of urbanization, between 83 and 90%, well over the global average of 50% and much more in line with the sort of levels predicted globally by 2080. Germany falls at the top end of this scale with 88% of its citizens leading urban lives. The UK is even higher at 90% which surprises me at first but makes sense when you think of how spaced out we are in the countryside and reinforces the need to develop energy solutions for our urban areas.

Germany has legislated for energy performance in it’s building regulations since the oil shocks of the early 70’s and is home to Passivhaus – the most exacting standard in the world requiring an extremely airtight structure - 3m3/m2/h@50Pa as opposed to 10 under UK building regs and an averaged floor wall and roof u-value of 0.1 compared to the UK Building regulations figures which result in a value of 2.4. Passivhaus is a voluntary standard, not a legal requirement (in Germany that is – it’s a legal requirement in Sweden) but even the German regulations require a averaged u value of 0.3 and a 15% requirement for renewable provision of services load (heating, lighting, hot water) OR the equivalent CO2 reductions from energy efficiency, also limiting efficiencies on boiler plant.
Germany has another voluntary code, the DGNB (Deutsches Gutesiegel Nachhaltiges Bauen) which rates buildings with gold silver and bronze certificates. I expect this is like the AECB (Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders) in the UK. Germany also has a much better record of post occupancy evaluation than us, although that wouldn’t be hard.

(Note to non engineering friends – u value is how much heat gets through the fabric of your building so lower is better and the air tightness figure indicates the number/size of holes you have in your building under pressure. Basically they stick a big fan on the front door and suck the air out to see how much leaks in. The UK value of 10m3/m2/h@50Pa means that at a pressure of 50 Pascals 10m3 of air will be sucked out for every m2 of floor area of the building over the course of an hour)

So the second part of the energy equation – energy efficiency (be lean) is pretty well addressed. What’s the situation with renewables?

Germany has a much higher financial incentive for renewables – they’ve had a feed in tariff since 1991 and since 1999 it’s been worth 2.5 to 4 times the base tariff (in the UK until now the price that energy companies would buy your renewably generated electricity from you was less than you paid to buy it back). During 2006 and 2007 €32.8 billion were poured into energy efficiency measures in existing and new low energy buildings. This makes the UK’s £10.5 million over 4 years (2006-2010) invested in the Low Carbon Building’s Program seem pretty insignificant, even talking into account the difference in size (population Germany 82.4 million, UK 61 million). As a result of all this the levels of renewable energy in Germany were 12% (UK 4.6%) in 2006 and are now around 17%.

So does this results in a lower carbon footprint. Surprisingly - no it doesn’t. Germany has a per capita carbon emission equivalent to 9.49 tonnes of carbon dioxide (UK 8.72) (again 2006 figures form the Zero Carbon Compendium so possible slightly changed since). This is made up of all our activities so perhaps looking at buildings is more appropriate. Their households are responsible for 5.71 tCO2/annum, lower than the UK’s 5.99 although I would have expected the gap to be wider.

September 13th - London to Hamburg

September the 13th – London St Pancras to Brussels Midi

Getting the newbike from the youth hostel to the St Pancras is not nice, even though it’s so close and I have put my heaviest things (locks and netbook) in my rucksack and as I’m shuffling along with it I vow to unfold it whenever possible. I do at Brussels and it takes six minutes and then I am free for an hour to ride around. Cars go across pedestrian crossings even when the green walking man is showing which confuses me (until I remember the they’re allowed to run you over on a right turn rule – it’s a continental thing) but the cycle lanes are nice and wide and the potholes few. The area is more down at heel than Brussels North and features a great many wholesale fashion shops. I take some photos and then make my way to platform 5 and wrestle newbike back into its bag.

Brussels to Koln

I’m in first class for the next leg because I booked it so far in advance that it was still really cheap. This means I have lots of space but have to put up with some obnoxious git on the table next to me loudly telling the guy next to me that he lives in Toronto AND Tel Aviv AND Nanjing AND Dusseldorf and a list of other places which just proves he lives nowhere and likes to show off. He is rude to the train staff (except for the young pretty woman whom he flirts with shamelessly). He orders a massive meal with wine although it is hardly lunchtime yet and snorts and clears his throat noisily whilst he eats it, pausing to talk loudly on his phone between bites. I bet he leaves half of it and he does – probably because the guy beside me is willing to listen to him self-aggrandise. He buys and sells ‘things for the military’, finds his sons argue with him all the time (I don’t blame them), dislikes daughters but unfortunately has one (poor woman), loves money above everything, doesn’t see why he should pay tax and most distressing of all classifies himself as an engineer. I don’t see that he can be as he is clearly more of a problem than a solution.
I am gladly distracted from him by the sight of Liege station – the most beautiful modern station I’ve seen – and a justified use of glass - huge arching white curves far overhead, glazed in between with something that looks like reactalite lenses. The lady opposite me who has been rolling her eyes at the man as well is equally impressed and so I meet the wonderful Margot Macartney from Tucson, Arizona who completely redeems the journey for me. We talk about cycling and trains and marvel at the little gardens we see from the train. They are called ‘Shraeder – Gardens’ apparently – I was enchanted by them in Augsberg last year. Sort of like allotments but not – they have high hedges and lawns and little chalets – people own them or rent them and stay at them for weekends. Margot is an ex-laywer, a writer, campaigns her local representative to get the government to invest in energy infrastructure (Belgium apparently did this first – something to ask about when I get there) and has plans to engage with the owner of her local copper mines to get bicycle lanes built across the city.

Koln to Hannover
The morning I left the housemate checked ‘The Book of Wisdomosity’ (which lives in the bathroom) for me and it advised ‘Don’t eat anything larger than your own head’. I have fond memories of finding a load of shops at Koln train station last year which sold cakes as big as my head and I worry that this could count. As it turns out I only have five minutes to make my connection at Koln and have to hurry (as much as is possible with the newbikebag) past the bigheadcake sellers to make my train, cakeless. Not only is the objectionable man on the next train too – he has even taken my seat. I look around but then he checks the reservation and moves. I go to sit down and he tells me it’s reserved. ‘I know,’ I say, ‘It’s mine’. Thankfully he gets off at the next stop after clearing his throat loudly all the way – I hope it’s something serious.
Before Hannover we get given some complimentary peanuts. Mine tell me my hair is nice.
Check out www.callabike.de www.bahnundbike.com

Hannover to Hamburg
At Hannover I have even less time to make the connection and someone has taken my seat, again, although in an empty carriage it’s the only one with a reservation.
As we roll towards Hamburg the landscape gets flatter and my single speed legs breathe a sign of relief. Wind turbines start to appear – in ones and twos and occasional farms.
I eat the peanuts and some squashed Chorley cakes – I don’t want to waste my appetite on train food. It’s nicer than it’s UK counterpart but not by much and it’s just as overpriced.

Hamburg
Once again I didn’t quite get round to organizing accommodation in Hamburg – I’d sent a few couchsurf requests but none have come back to me and I figured I’d get here early enough to easily find the youth hostel. I spend a while wheeling my bike around the streets near the station looking for a café with WiFi but it seems that there are only sex shops and adult cinemas. ‘The Oasis’ - a grungy looking hotel has rooms for 49 euros but the owner is happy to give me directions to the youth hostel so I tell him that if it’s full I’ll come back there. It turns out to be the ‘Youth Hotel’ a swanky affair with rooms at 150 euros. I figure if I’m going to stay in a sleazy dive I can find one closer to the hotel, after all it’s only for a night. I’m right. To explain how awful it is here’s a few details
– there is an ashtray and a shadeless lamp on the bedside table
– there are football stickers on the back of the door
– the plug socket comes off the wall in my hand
But it’s only for a night and from tomorrow I’m booked into Flensburg Youth Hostel for three days.

Low Carbon Communities

First off – when I’m talking about community I’m referring to a geographically distinct region, something with definable borders. This will contain a community of people and these will also be part of many more communities, physical and virtual, within and without their region based on demographics and interests but here and now when I say community I mean a place.

By low-carbon I mean responsible for less carbon emissions than ermm… the same place would’ve been otherwise, without the measures taken, whatever they are. We talk about carbon savings in terms of CO₂ (carbon dioxide) but it could be any greenhouse gas that we’re not pumping into the atmosphere. I’d like to put a figure, even a percentage band, on ‘low’ but I’m shy of even saying ‘significantly less’. The Tri-gen at Media City for example is predicted to save around 20,000 tons of CO₂ per year, and this is without doubt a Good Thing. But I’m not convinced that it justifies the amount of glass on the buildings (lots of glass=high heat gains in summer/high heat losses in winter=lots more energy required for cooling and heating respectively). Some would argue that it is justified, that without beautiful structures our cities would be ugly and unpleasant places and that glass technology has come so far that covering a building in glass is alright (and I would argue with them). But on this trip I’m going to be looking at the things which have saved carbon emissions whether they are the use of renewable energy or measures to avoid using the energy in the first place and try not to get too hung up about the architecture.

Carbon is a better metric of sustainability than just energy use because it forces us to consider where the energy comes from. So Australia has an average CO₂ emission per head of more than double the UK (18.95 to our 8.72 tonnes per year) principally because of coal use. Also because energy efficiency measures are almost always cheaper to implement than renewable energy generation these will still be addressed first and foremost, however you’re calculating the cost.

It’s not infallible however - Las Vegas is very low carbon as its electricity supply comes from the Hoover Dam. But presumably the farmers downstream of the dam suffering with drought aren’t impressed by that. A less clear-cut example is Iceland which is mostly powered by geothermal energy (from the earth’s core as opposed to ground source which is solar energy stored in the ground) and where building standards are quite low and energy use high. But because the energy is low carbon, and could not reasonably be exported (unless we develop a hydrogen economy perhaps) then perhaps the usage is justified.

Energy usage can be reduced by three methods, summarized by the phrase ‘Be Mean, Be Lean, Be Green’ which means we need to first stop using energy we don’t need to use, then to use the energy we do use as efficiently as possible and finally, when we’ve done the first two, generate the energy we do still need in a sustainable manner, i.e. one that doesn’t screw the planet up for the next generations.

Tomorrow I go to Artefact – an eco-centre near the northern coast of Germany to have a look at what they’ve done. Also they’ll be showing me round some local solutions over the next couple of days including a biogas CHP. Also through Artefact I am meeting Emoeke and Helge at Flensburg University who have arranged some visits in Flensburg for me.

St Pancras YH

Made it - and they did have beds left. Cycled from paddinton and was a bit wide-eyed and wired when I got here but didn't have anyone try very hard to kill me and was not in tears which is a first for me cycling in London. Saw a load of Boris's bikes on the back of a trailer - being moved to more popular pick-up points presumably. The pot holes and ridges in the tarmac were truely bad - worse than Manchester and much much worse than Bristol.
Note to self - just because the newbikes bag has room for the locks, and pannier rack and quite a lot of other random bits and pieces that's no reason to put them, in there - it makes it really heavy.
Right - bed.
night