The WREN Blog
My apologies. The blog has been silent for over half a year, mainly because the renewables-related writing I’ve been doing has been as director of communications for WREN, so it’s been appearing in the News section of this website, in the Newsletters WREN sends to members and other subscribers, and in press releases which have made their way into the Cornish Guardian, North Cornwall Advertiser and occasionally, Western Morning News. The blog may have been silent, but it’s not yet dead. There’s a new piece immediately following this one.
One Guy With A Marker [And A Whiteboard] Just Made The Global Warming Debate Completely Obsolete
- that's the line I caught on a tweet yesterday. How can you not want to know more?
The tweet had a link to a nice little video with a different view on the climate change ‘debate’. It’s about ten minutes long, and you should view it now to understand better what I’m writing about. (Just don’t forget to come back!)
Interesting piece in The Guardian today (18th Jan) on the Green Deal. “The energy ‘savings’ that are just hot air” is the headline for the story, but is that really the case?
You can read the article here: http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jan/18/energy-efficiency-savings-less-than-advertised-green-deal
The gist of it is that in practice the financial savings from installing energy efficiency measures such as loft and cavity wall insulation and a new boiler do not measure up to the advertisements. The new figures come from the National Energy Efficiency Data Framework (NEED) published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). NEED tracked the observed savings in thousands of homes compared with homes that did not have measures installed. It found the average decrease in home gas consumption for loft insulation was 1.7%, for cavity wall insulation 7.8% and for a new boiler it was 9.2%, a total of nearly 19%.
There were a lot of items on the agenda for the November Board meeting, but the ones that took the time were all connected thematically. You could simplistically boil it down to: "What do we want to do and how do we tell people about it."
A week beforehand, there was a volunteers' meeting attended by four or five who mainly staff the shop and five or six who are directors. The shop volunteers wanted to know more of what was gong on in WREN and better resource materials and training, so as to be more confident in helping people who came in. Following on from that meeting there was a proposal to do a proper analysis of the communications needed by WREN, to volunteers, members and other interested parties.