JULY 2001 BROADSHEET - Renewable Energy and the Greening of Europe
Our June meeting drew a good crowd. In fact we had to rearrange the usual TWI horseshoe with serried ranks of seats. Guy Mulley, who organised it, kicked off with a witty introduction on environmental issues and it was good to see more interest than usual in the European element. Our first speaker, Sophie Tolley of Caminus, the Cambridge-based energy consultancy, emphasised the contrast between the US and European attitudes to Kyoto, to the extent that Japan and Russia were being encouraged to join the European Green lobby and form a counter bloc to American extravagance. (sophie.tolley@caminus.com http://www.caminus.com)
Sophie outlined very thoroughly the system of emissions trading set up by the Kyoto Accord and the way it would operate in Europe and the UK through the Climate Change Levy. This would be charged on utility bills and could only be alleviated by effective reductions in emissions, particularly, to begin with, CO2. Martin Mayfield of Mott MacDonald followed with plenty of ideas for green sustainable buildings. He covered the emission costs of producing different building materials, aluminium the most, concrete the least and then the costs over the life of buildings, reduced by the use of bore hole cooling, chilled beams and micropore fabrics to allow buildings to breathe. (mjm@mm-shef.mottmac.com http://www.conmottmac.com)
Finally, the flamboyant Adrian Gaye of another Cambridge firm, HelioDynamics, reviewed a huge range of renewable energy sources. He showed how wind power was really taking off in Europe with 80% of the applications to date. His own speciality was a new form of solar collector which was much more efficient than the standard photovoltaic cells and for which was obtaining $8M first round funding. (gaye@heliodynamics.com www.hdsolar.com)
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