Being eco, part 1. Energy
Sooooooo, before the restaurant reopens tomorrow - and we begin gratifying you blog-wise with foodie eye candy etc. what we have mostly been thinking about and doing of late is setting up a new organic bakery and vegetarian takeaway enterprise next door - and before getting into all talk of the beautifully crafted and scintillating produce we’ll soon be making and serving, we are still working through the fore-thought and set-up, which is an intense and all-important process in itself obviously. Including planning around, ethics, quality, ecology, building, craft, organics… ingredients, labour, workflow, equipment, energy…
Take energy for example; today we have been cutting through the concrete again and digging new trenches across the front garden of the new shop to install 3-phase electricity. It isn’t long ago that we dug a big trench from the path into the building, for the installation of new water pipes - which we ducted then filled in and restored - only to then decide to put in 3 phase electricity - requiring different ducts to the ones we had left in with our previous excavations. Today’s main irritation though is that despite the fact that we are investing big bucks to be as eco as we practically can be in terms of our energy consumption - the carbon saving eco benefit of what we are doing is not clear cut and just as we had dug up our trenches we received back an ‘energy efficiency’ report to show this, as follows; We recently took a decision to run our new bakery using electricity rather than gas, despite this being significantly more disruptive and expensive at the outset. The theory being however that electricity is or will be ultimately a better energy ecologically/for the environment as more of it is produced by the sun, wind and waves - as opposed to gas for example, as a carbon producing fossil fuel that is likely to be phased out over the next 10 years. Ironically however on the day we embarked on digging trenches for the installation of our powerful 3-phase electricity supply (today) - we have received back a report we’d commissioned from an eco energy project in November that currently contradicts the idea that electricity is significantly less carbon producing than gas - in the UK (its not easy being an eco warrior) But this is complicated, …
We had connected with this energy efficiency project with a view to greening the Waiting Room - and hopefully obtaining a few quid in European match funding towards this. This is ahead of our buying a new £20,000 ‘stone-bake’ deck oven for example - so that the decision to buy a gas or electric oven needed to be made (We don’t have the space for a Wood-pellet). So as mentioned whilst waiting for this report we have opted for gas - as everybody knows this is where we’re all headed in terms of green energy… Yet! our (delayed) report then came back to us today which is to assess the best ways for businesses to decarbon and adopt more environmentally sustainable energy consumption measures - and it says that electricity use per kilowatt hour actually produces twice as much carbon twice as much carbon as gas. However, it turns out that this particular project is bound to use relative gas vs electricity figures for 2017 - as this is when this European funded project was established, but in the meantime, our consultant tells us, by 2022 electricity has just about caught up with gas in terms of that amount of carbon it produces - and is expected to be significantly better in the coming years. Nevertheless - the long and short of it is that the ERDF project we applied to is still using comparative carbon figures from 2017 and so can’t identify savings that would qualify our planned works for grant assistance. Nevermind.
