Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
quite a lot of money. I prefer to focus on reducing the number of runners.”
He has two in particular in mind.
Offshore wind
The UK has a total of eight Gigawatts (GW) planned or in operation.
But this will have to increase to 29GW if the UK is to meet its renewable
energy commitments to the EU. “In general wind-turbine development,
the UK missed the boat, though we have had some success in blade-
A few good ideas
Solar cookers
Right at the start of this topic, we underlined what a menace
to the health of people and planet traditional biomass cooking can be, when
precious trees are chopped down for cooking in badly ventilated kitchens.
So it was particularly heartening to see a cheap-to-make ($5) solar cooker,
designed by Kenyan John Bohmer and dubbed the Kyoto Box, win the
$75,000 first prize in the
Financial Times
Climate Change Challenge, organized
by the Forum for the Future sustainable development body.
Various models of solar cookers, functioning as heat traps and using the green-
house effect to good purpose, have been around for some time. But the Kyoto
Box has the great merit of simplicity and cheapness. It is composed of one card-
board box with aluminium foil to focus sunrays placed inside another cardboard
box, painted black to increase
heat absorption, and topped
with a clear acrylic cover to let
in and trap the rays of the sun.
Black paint, foil and insulation
work together to raise the tem-
perature high enough to boil
water. By replacing firewood,
the cooker could save up to two
tonnes of carbon emissions per
family per year. It could also
save lives: it can boil ten litres of
water in two hours, destroying
the germs that kill many chil-
dren each year in developing
countries.
Road lighting
There is a law-and-order case for overhead street lighting
especially in cities; criminals prefer to work in the dark. But street lighting
consumes a lot of electricity - the only man-made features that astronauts
are said to be able to spot on earth are China's Great Wall and Belgium's
motorway network, lit up with off-peak night-time nuclear power.
