Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: UK’s Carbon reduction commitment legislation – the shape of things to come globally for universities and business

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Friday, December 11, 2009

UK’s Carbon reduction commitment legislation – the shape of things to come globally for universities and business

UK’s Carbon reduction commitment legislation – the shape of things to come globally for universities and business http://bit.ly/73VM2a

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the UK has passed legislation called the Carbon Reduction Committment (CRC).

The CRC is a groundbreaking piece of legislation designed to help the UK meet its carbon reduction targets by 2020. Basically, the CRC scheme will apply to organisations that had a half-hourly metered electricity consumption greater than 6,000 MWh per year in 2008. Organisations qualifying for CRC would have all their energy use covered by the scheme, this includes emissions from direct energy use as well as electricity purchased. Initially, it is estimated, around 5,000 organisations will qualify, including supermarkets, water companies, banks, local authorities and all central Government Departments. Qualifying organisations mostly fall below the threshold for the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, but account for around 10% of the UK carbon emissions.

The organisations involved will need to register or make an information disclosure by 30 September 2010. A financial penalty (£5,000 plus a per diem charge for each subsequent working day an organisation fails to submit a report) will be imposed on organisations who fail to meet the deadline.

The first year of the scheme (April 2010-2011) is called the footprint year. Companies are required to submit an audited report of their emissions during the footprint year by 29 July 2011. Again financial penalties will be imposed for failing to meet the deadline.

In the second year, (2011-2012) participants will have to purchase emissions allowances to cover their forecast emissions for 2011/12. And in 2013 auctioning of carbon allowances begins, with all the income from the auctions recycled back to participants by the means of an annual payment based on participants’ average annual emissions since the start of the scheme.

There will be a bonus or penalty according to the organisation’s position in a CRC league table. The league table will be made public thereby enhancing the transparency of companies carbon reporting and hopefully shaming any egregious emitters into reducing their carbon footprint.

I have gone in to a bit of detail about the CRC here because it is difficult enough to find out information about the scheme and most UK business appear to be wholly unprepared for its implementation. The UK Department of Climate Change (I think it is interesting that the UK has a government department of climate change in the first place – how many other governments do?) has an easy to follow guide to the CRC [PDF] available for download which will help.

The CRC is going to be closely watched by other countries and you can be sure it will be used as a model by many to reduce their carbon emissions.