You're assuming that there is a single "Green Movement" with one set of ideals and one set of goals.  For example, there are many people that consider oil to be a valuable raw material for making things, so it makes no sense to burn the stuff.

Roger,

“Surely the just stop oil folks will want to go fully renewable in a more realistic timeframe rather than wait for trees to rot down into more oil.”

What is fully renewable? The current offerings, wind turbines, solar PV and battery electric vehicles also use a large amount of finite resources. In theory you can build up hydrocarbon fuels from C02 and water but this is highly energy intensive and would only be feasible using nuclear power.

Simon,

“For example, there are many people that consider oil to be a valuable raw material for making things, so it makes no sense to burn the stuff.”

I am one of them. I am concerned about the consumption of all our finite resources and see the current renewables route as incredibly wasteful of many finite raw materials. If you follow the comment from Siemens we will have to use 10 times our historical consumption of steel, concrete, copper, oil based products and rare earths just to stand still on energy generation. Now apply that concept to supplying renewable energy to the developing nations, disaster.

The only reasonable energy source long term is nuclear, initially fission and maybe in 30 years time fusion.

To me the Green Movement is the group of people who behave like spoilt teenagers demanding everything now with no wish to understand the cost in money and resources. They seem to think that government funding is inexhaustible.

At least Insulate Britain had the right basic idea but absolutely no clue about how to implement it for the UKs housing stock without creating much bigger problems due to lack of ventilation.

Hardly insurmountable problems - various 'robust detail' documents and compliance guides are full of proven solutions, Even if you get to completely air-tight, sticking  in a heat recovery ventilation system is hardly rocket science - both my previous and current houses have one.

   - Andy.

As I sit with plenty of personal lagging on in my freezing (55 deg F) office at home, improving the insulation of the house makes a lot of sense, but there are limits. The walls cannot be clad externally 'cos the conservation people would have a hissy fit, and the interior decor (cornicing, picture rails, dado rails, and skirting boards) prevents internal insulation. Insulating the floor (suspended wooden joists) might have something to offer. Best option is likely to be secondary double glazing.

Up to this year, I could overcome cold spells by spending on gas, but not any more so the equation now looks very different.

Roger B said:

The green fanatics will need all the coking coal they can get to build their wind turbines. According to the Siemens Energy CEO wind needs around 10 times the material used for conventional generation.

An interesting article! I have previously questioned the pay-back period for wind mills. Economically, it may be surprisingly short; but in terms of materials, it is self-evident that more are required.

Connect a generator to a gas turbine in a shed or stick it at the top of a long pole out at sea. Machines don't really like the marine environment, so which will last longer?

We need to conserve all types of energy/fuels by what every means possible.  Insulation of houses and reduce housing build/materials costs is most necessary.

But everything must be the most economical possible engineering solution.  Anyone can produce a green plan but the bottom line will win by public insistence.

Public transport using minimum size vehicles no empty trains or buses.  Use less rail coaches or mini buses.  Same with cars micro is best option to save fuel.

.Power stations should be mini nuclear for base load 30 GW and rest wind, solar, hydro or tidal whatever green alternative is available or coal/gas/oil as last option.

Andy,

I agree absolutely that there are technical solutions to all sorts of insulation problems however as Chris Pearson notes there are other difficulties which affect the cost benefit balance. The last house we owned in the UK had minimal loft insulation in the original building and none in the extension when we bought it. The central heating boiler also had no time clock, it was always on, just controlled by the thermostat. To have the loft properly insulated, cavity wall insulation and a timer for the boiler were sensible and easy investments.

Clive S

Britain has a very big problem with it’s housing stock going back many decades, not helped by the desire of every Englishman to have his castle, which has resulted in a lot of cheaply/badly built little houses with a large surface area to volume ratio. My two bedroom 80m2 apartment in Switzerland has just two outside walls. All the other surfaces are insulated by other peoples apartments. Could we persuade the UK citizens to live in this way? Is the thought of an apartment block still poisoned by the tower blocks of the 60s and 70s?

At what point do we consider that certain housing stock is no longer viable and should be replaced? There are a lot of embedded resources to be considered.

Public transport sizing is a complicated one. The vehicles have to have sufficient capacity for the peaks so what do you do off peak? You can have a second fleet of smaller buses which contain resources and also require additional trips to the depot to exchange them. The most efficient passenger trains are multiple unit confections but these cannot easily have the number of carriages reduced. The typical solution is to couple two or three units together for the peak times, reducing to one off peak. Once again you need places to store the units when they are not being used and to ensure they are the right end of the line when required.

Once you start to consider using fossil fuels as a back up for intermittent renewables you are entering a difficult resource consumption problem. How much over capacity of wind, solar etc do you need to install before you end up with zero or negative payback. This paper suggests a factor of 10 overcapacity is required to deal with still air periods in winter, so an installed capacity of 600 GW of wind power. Their proposal is that using hydrogen as a storage medium (yet more embedded resources) the required capacity can be reduced to 190 GW.

https://www.energynetworks.org/newsroom/renewable-hydrogen-offers-best-route-out-of-future-energy-supply-crunches

This links through to the paper ‘A System For All Seasons’.

Is this sensible? Is it just a blinkered green dream? At what point do you just burn some fossil fuels?

Roger B said:

Could we persuade the UK citizens to live in this way? Is the thought of an apartment block still poisoned by the tower blocks of the 60s and 70s?

No problem if you look at the number of blocks going up on the south bank of the Thames in Battersea. It's all to do with the neighbours! The tower blocks of the 60s and 70s were publicly owned. If you put a price tag well over £0.5M for the smallest apartments, the situation is rather different.

I agree absolutely that there are technical solutions to all sorts of insulation problems however as Chris Pearson notes there are other difficulties which affect the cost benefit balance.

You don't have to tell me. In 2010 we bought a stone built Edwardian semi in a conservation area. In the first winter, even though I was only living in it part time, it cost me over £1000 in gas (2011 prices) - really to just keep the chill off it - not heat it properly. If I'd heated it properly full time I reckon I'd have been looking at maybe £3000/year (2011 prices - maybe something in the order of £6000 now).  We've since been through insulating it all properly (i.e. to something close to PassivHouse elemental U values)  - along with triple glazing, ventilation system and so on - and now my monthly DD for gas is £31.70 - so around £380/year (at 2022 prices) - and probably more than a quarter of that is standing charge, and a lot of the remaining usage will be on heating hot tap water rather than space heating. My 1st floor home office has no heating (actually it does have wet underfloor heating, but it's not be set to come on since the day I commissioned it) - and usually it sits at between 19 and 21 degree C - last night (when it got down to -6 outdoors) it did dip down to 18 for a few hours. If I could persuade my other half that keeping all the main rooms at at least 21 degrees wasn't a fundamental requirement, I could probably chop a fair bit more off the bill. There is a small solar thermal panel that helps with the hot water in the summer (with hindsight I would have gone for a larger one), and a log burner that's occasionally used in the winter (which I probably should make more use of), which will help a little too. But all in all I'm pretty happy with the results.

Yes it took a lot of time and work (we did almost all of it DIY, and much of the time I was working near full-time). In my case the house hadn't really been touched since the 1970s so was overdue a major refurbishment anyway. The old lime plaster had well and truly perished, so ceilings and walls had to be stripped back anyway - which made a lot decisions easier. Skirtings, picture rails etc. really aren't a problem, even ornate decorative plasterwork can be replaced (either putting the old back, as I did with the 4' ceiling rose in the front room, or with new (fibrous plaster cornice that's a direct copy of traditional designs is readily available). Sockets and radiators I reckon just need a bit of effort. The difficult one in my mind was interior doors that abut an external wall - the ideal of moving the entire door opening 6" inwards can be problematic - we only had one of those and my other half wanted that wall taking down anyway, so I was excused that particular problem.

In my case the cost of the insulation probably paid for itself years ago - of course it would cost more initially if it had been done by trades rather than DIY and I would have had to count in the extra costs of things like new plasterboard & skim, relocating services and decorating, if we weren't in the position of having to replace them anyway. But still I reckon it can still be very beneficial. One advantage on internal insulation is that it's much easier to do things gradually room-by-room, so spreading the cost and enabling people to do the most used rooms first. Given time trades should get techniques and approaches sorted out to a fine art, so keeping labour costs reasonable.  I reckon the biggest barrier is one of attitude - often the deciding to do it is more challenging than the actual doing - most rooms get redecorated fairly often - while you still need an overall plan to work to - if the norm became 'insulate and redecorate' rather than just 'redecorate' I think we could make a lot of progress in a reasonable timescale.

   - Andy.

An interesting account. Having been bred and reared in the North, I am content with cool rooms, but Mrs P is a tropical animal.

When we entertain for Christmas, the downstairs central heating will have to be full on from breakfast time onwards. The boiler input is 51.7 kW. If it is firing constantly, that will be about £5.67 per hour!

The alternative to Andy's approach is self-build. It has been very interesting seeing the construction of step-daughter's house. It is so well insulated that shall be surprised if they need more than 5 kW to heat their 200 m².