This data shows that 2012 was just slightly worse than long-term average for total hours of sunshine, so our domestic PV over-performance (see previous post) was not due to high numbers of hours of sunshine.
This is a 3.68 kWp domestic array, in two strings, one facing East and the other West. Total yield in the year was about 2,700 KW hours. The installer's annual generation estimate was just under 2,500 at the time of purchase. I'm not sure whether the actual over-performance is because of prudence in the installer's estimate or a better-than-average amount of sunshine last year. Anyway, I'm delighted with the performance so far.
I’ve had the pleasure of attending the Oxford Real Farming Conference this month in Oxford, and have compared and contrasted it with the published materials from the Oxford Farming Conference (a separate conference
which took place at the same time in another part of Oxford). I have to say that the text of Mark Lynas’s presentation at the Oxford Farming Conference – downloadable at: http://www.ofc.org.uk/papers - comes across as confrontational. In it, he attacks anti-GM lobbyists (of which he says he was one several years ago) on the grounds that without GM-driven improvements in agricultural productivity in the past circa half a century, mankind would have needed X more agricultural land to produce the same amount of food as is produced today. The statistics he quotes to back this up are indeed impressive. However, in the context of sustainability, productivity (for example as expressed in yield per hectare) is not the most important aspect of the current debates around food and farming. For sure, efficiency can be a good thing – reducing the amount of inputs used for a given amount of output is desirable, all other things being equal. However, all other things are not equal in the context of our use of the planet’s resources to feed ourselves. In a finite- resource system (such as the capacity of the planet) each increase in efficiency has consequences elsewhere. Unless all the knock-on effects (of significance) are factored in, the external costs and consequences of the increased efficiency can be greater than the direct productive effect of the efficiency. Taking this to its extreme, the ultimate efficiency would be disastrous. Consider this - the ultimate efficient, productive system might be represented by, for example, two-thirds of the Earth’s landmass growing one crop species to feed the whole of the human population living on the remaining third. This might be an extremely efficient system, based on a tremendously high-yielding GM crop innovation that had out-competed all other crop species (both GM and non-GM). The major downside, which hardly even needs to be voiced, as it is so obvious, would be that the system would be suicidaly vulnerable to failure of that one crop through, perhaps, disease or climatic conditions one season. In my view, what this superbly ridiculous reductio-ad-absurdum scenario demonstrates is that there are at least two aspects other than efficiency that must come into play, over the long-term: The first aspect of importance is a total system perspective. This can be phrased as the debate between systematic approaches based on one planet living and alternative (currently prevailing) systematic approaches based on assumptions of unconstrained economic and physical growth. The second aspect of importance is risk and resilience (paraphrased as the debate between permaculture/polyculture and monocultures in agriculture). Agroecology is an increasingly significant area of academic and practical investigation on these matters. I won’t say more about risk and resilience in this post, because I want to say more about efficiency. From a total (finite) system perspective, efficiency is fine up to a point. That point is when efficiency and total system health come into conflict with each other. (System health could be described in terms of quality of life of system residents and long-term viability of the system itself). At that point, Jevons Paradox comes into play. This paradox says that, under reasonably normal market economics of supply-and-demand, increasing productive efficiency will usually result in increasing throughput (ie sales) because the improved economies of scale mean that reduced selling prices can be offered. At the point where system resource limits are being approached or have been reached, a more important consideration than efficiency is the matter of how to respond to the impending system failures in order to protect (or fundamentally redesign) the human system. The most important system failure at that point would be the catastrophic collapse of the ability to source some, or all, of the necessary resource inputs to the (man-made) system. There are many historical examples of this already, such as over-fishing of cod in the North Sea. In such a scenario, increased efficiency (on its own) just hastens the collapse of the system rather than preventing it. What prevents (or delays) such system collapses are measures such as those described in modern times as “demand-side response” (influencing consumption behaviours, for example through public awareness campaigns) or more drastic ones such as direct government intervention in markets and supply chains (eg through regulation, taxation, subsidisation, price-controls or even rationing). Monocultures which typify the increasingly efficient GM-based approach result from the drive for yield per hectare and increased economies of scale. This is also typified by reduced numbers of people living and working on agricultural land. This obvious disconnect between people and the food they eat is one of the symptoms of the lack of health of the current system. To round up this somewhat rambling post, I’ll summarise my own position on GM and its place in a healthy planet-scale agricultural vision. While I wouldn’t rule out the use of GM in tightly controlled circumstances as part of a mixed and diverse farming system, I would not support its unconstrained growth to the point where it dominates the farming system and provides economic control of that system via the large corporate participants in it, to the exclusion of small, organic or low-impact farming methods based around agroecology, polycultures and environmental balance. This is because we need a healthy system capable of operating in a balanced way that provides both the means for significant numbers of people to live and work on the agricultural land and also produces sufficient food to feed all current and future generations of people in the rest of the global population (which might peak at, say, 10 billion people). Mark Lynas is wrong to support GM so wholeheartedly as he does in his recent speech. He is also scare-mongering when he says: “If we don’t get yield growth back on track we are indeed going to have trouble keeping up with population growth and resulting demand, and prices will rise as well as more land being converted from nature to agriculture.” We need a more measured, inclusive and balanced approach than he espouses. My own vision is for a future Earth where living on the land AND using the land to produce food sustainably is much more prevalent in all communities, whether in urban settings, peri-urban ones, in open countryside or even in the few remaining ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ settings. This is very different from the current paradigm, where these things are so often separated out and the vast majority of urbanites have nothing to do with growing food and the vast majority of farmers have nothing to do with the people who consume their produce. This separation encourages short-term sub-optimisation rather than total system health for the longer-term. The picture below shows a slide that was presented at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, showing the UK cities that are Sustainable Food Cities that the Soil Association are working with, to encourage consumers to support sustainable agriculture. One of my favourite green living initiatives currently is the Lammas eco-hamlet in Wales. Here is a schematic map of one of the plots. I'm confident the plotholder has a much healthier ecological footprint than I have. I don't know the exact size of the plot, but I'd venture that it's probably well within the amount of average global hectares per global citizen (one planet living is about 2 global hectares per person).
When I rerun the Global Footprint Network's ecological footprint calculator with all the most sustainable choices as answers, the result becomes 1.4 times the sustainable level supportable by the planet and 3 global hectares required to support me. The website explains that in many countries it's not possible currently to live within 1 planet of resource because of the choices outside our control as individuals (presumably, choices made by our governments and industry sectors / companies on our behalf). That means that, in order to live within my average share of one planet's resource, I should not only make all the sustainable choices I can, but also I should try to
influence government and industry to make changes in the UK's 'structural unsustainability'. I did a very quick run through the Global Footprint Network online ecological footprint calculator. The tool doesn't have a country-specific calculator for the UK yet, so I've used Switzerland as the nearest equivalent Western European country for which there is one. The result is shown below. It tells me something that I already suspected - I'm living at a resource consumption of 1.9 times the rate at which the planet can support me (as an average global citizen) and I use up about 4 global hectares of land to support me. I can see that the main reason for this is my choice of foods (high in meat content) and where I source it from (much of it not local food). In that respect, I think I'm fairly typical of many Western Europeans. One of the things I'm looking to achieve is to use more effectively (and sustainably) the 1 acre of land I possess (less than one hectare) to produce more food for myself, my family and community, to reduce this imbalance. Other aspects are already better balanced on my smallholding - eg energy from PV already in place. By trying out alternative scenarios in the calculator (or using a straightforward ratio on the results above), it seems that the average global footprint for 1-planet-living is equivalent to about 2 global hectares of land per person.
At the weekend, while disposing of something at the local household recycling centre, I found a substantial metal garden fork. the only problem with it was a slightly bent tine - an easy thing to fix. Unfortunately, when I asked a member of staff if I could take it away with me, he said something to the effect of "sorry, but no, mate - too much paperwork - and don't even think about taking it when nobody's looking, 'cos it's all covered by CCTV". So, a garden fork that would have seen many years' use on the smallholding has had to go (prematurely) for melting down. What a waste! How many more useful items are being recycled instead of reused, I wonder. I know that it's far better to recycle things into new products than to use 'virgin' materials in manufacturing, but it's also far better to reuse items than to recycle them - and the earlier in their life cycle this reuse happens the better. I've calmed myself down by finding the picture above, which is a view across nearby fields one recent misty morning. |
About the BloggerI'm David Calver - an Accountant with a passion for sustainability. Categories
All
Archives
February 2016
|