Taraloka

The sun has been shining here at Taraloka for two weeks pretty well uninterruptedly. And in that same two weeks our EcoEnergi team have installed twelve solar thermal panels on the roofs of the community house and the retreat centre. There are four sets of panels altogether. The community panels are working and our hot water now comes direct from the sun!! and the retreat centre will soon be following suit. Here is what they look like ….

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It’s an amazing delight to turn on the tap and have very hot water come out – knowing that the source of that heat is direct sunlight from 93 million miles away! We know it’s  about photons, vacuum tubes  and light sensitive chemistry – and also it’s like magic. We’re trying to think what Hogwarts’ spell Harry Potter would use to produce hot water. Any suggestions? Mine is “Calorificus!”

The work will be continuing in the community this coming week to bring the biomass boiler online and working in tandem with the community solar thermal panels. The retreat centre is in use now until 12 th July so the final link up of those solar panels and the biomass boiler will have to wait till then.

And if all goes to plan – the official energy project launch will be on our Open Day on 25th July. Everyone is welcome!!

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It was last Wednesday. Vajradarshini was leading a study retreat on the Yogacara. She changed the day’s program completely so that we weren’t trying to study at 10.30am when a large motorised crane was due to arrive,  followed at 11am by a very large articulated lorry – delivering our Energy Box.

At 7.30 I was in the Tara cabin meditating with the others on the retreat when I heard what was obviously a large vehicle arriving. I thought the recycling collection was happening early. In fact it was the Box! driven over from Austria by a couple of nice Bulgarian guys. Saddhanandi and Suchitta took them out coffee and croissants.

Three hours later the crane arrived and the transfer of the 8 tonne Energy Box – it comes complete with boilers, tanks, pumps etc pre-installed inside – began.

While all this was happening Genevieve Tudor from BBC Radio Shropshire came over and recorded a short set of interviews with Kulaprabha, Andy from Organic Energy, and some of our retreatants. Click here to listen.

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Before the Energy Box arrives we needed to excavate the foundations for it’s concrete base and far a new access driveway. All done by Earl the excavator and Kev the builder… though you’ll see that Earl had a new apprentice getting a lesson in earth-moving! And for all fans of the TV archaeological program  “Time Team”, Earl did the earthworks  for one of their programs!

Kulaprabha writes:

Yes!! it’s happening ….. in fact, preliminary work is starting in three days time!!

It’s over two years since I started gathering data to work out our carbon footprint.  Then about a year ago I started seriously  investigating the possibilities of installing solar thermal panels and biomass boiler systems in our retreat centre and community house. Installing these is not cheap and it wasn’t going to go ahead without getting funding in place. There is funding out there but it’s been a steep learning curve for me in accessing information and finding out what Taraloka is eligible for and what it isn’t. Some grants that are available for England are not available in Wales and vice versa. Then there were various  pretty complicated online forms to fill in. And somewhere in the midst of all that, I discovered I needed Planning Permission for the new biomass boiler house – which led to another another set of forms!

But now all the funding has fallen into place  and since then we’ve had our first commissioning meeting! This is us sitting in the community library – I think they were in the midst of a detailed discussion about electrical supplies and pipe bore diameters when I took this photo!

The whole project will cost around £130,000 and we have been given £80,000 in grants and another £23,500 in a zero-interest loan. We have allocated funds from our own reserves to cover the rest of the installation costs.

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As to who has made this possible?

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Our funders are:

UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC website)  who provide funding via

- Low Carbon Building Program (their website)

- The Carbon Trust (their website)

and

Scottish Power Green Energy Trust (their website)

Needless to say I am delighted that we are able to go ahead with this project and want to thank the three funding bodies who have backed the project. Thanks also to Sharon Holman  of Wrexham County Planning Office for all her help. And to Mike and Mark of the Welsh Forestry Commission Wood Energy Scheme who were prepared to step in with a top-up funding application if DECC didn’t manage to give us as much as we’d asked for.

At the moment I am working with Matthew Goodwin of EcoEnergi Ltd to draw up a time-line for the installation. Fingers crossed that it will be installed by the end of June. Here is some of what is involved:

• a very large crane to unload the Okofen Energy Box which houses the biomass boiler. It’s basically a mini-district heating system with a twin wood pellet boiler delivering heat to the two sets of building that make up our premises.
• a new access driveway for the wood pellet delivery lorries
• excavating heat trenches from the boiler house to the two sets of buildings
• sensing equipment to allow the solar panels and biomass boiler to work in tandem
• roof access to install the panels
• special hot water tanks to work with solar thermal systems – four systems altogether

Matthew and Kulaprabha shake on the deal

Most of all I want to thank Matthew who has provided the technical information for all the grant applications I’ve made. He was very patient in the face of detailed questions from BRE examiners, that’s Building Research Establishment, as they went through his calculations with a very fine tooth comb!

Then guess what?

In the midst of all this, DECC announced that from next year they will be extending their Renewable Energy Incentive Scheme. This is a way in which the government is encouraging sustainable energy installations by paying so much per kilowatt produced even if you use that energy yourself. It already covers electricity and from mid-2011 it will include heat energy. In other words the government will pay Taraloka an amount per kilowatt produced by our biomass and solar thermal equipment! That will enable us to pay off the installation costs much more quickly than I thought. So thank you DECC again.

At some point we’re aiming to have a Grand Opening….. watch this space!!

construction traffic!

This sign has been at the end of the track to Taraloka for about three months – ever since a British Waterways canal maintenance crew doing some work on the canal bank accidentally broke through into a very extensive badger set – thus de-stabilising the canal bank, causing a partial collapse and a flood. This happened just opposite where our retreat centre buildings are. Fortunately for us – but not for our neighbours on the other side of the canal – the badgers had excavated their set on the sunnier south-facing side of the canal away from our land. Have a look on the Bettisfield Village website for more photos.

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drained section of the canal

In a matter of days the piece of land next to our canal bridge was an engineering site! Complete with very large excavators, offices, piles of materials like pipes, steel reinforcements and electricity generators. It was noisy. Well noisy for us. Lindsay and I met up with the British Waterway project manager who was very sympathetic and helpful. Within a couple of days he had arranged for much quieter generators to be installed.

Last week the heavy machinery moved out and the works site was dismantled. Now all that left is a slightly muddy bit in the field. The fences are back in place, the tow-path is open again. And they repaired bits of our track where the heavy loads had done a bit of damage.

And the badgers? On the one hand, badgers are a protected species in UK.  On the other hand canals need to be kept safe! Now that the necessary canal bank strengthening has been done and steel pilings added, we are hoping that they will take up their residence again before too long.

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photo by Neil Phillips

Lis Whitelaw writes:
You’ll probably remember from the news last weekend (11-13th December) that it was the middle weekend of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Vigils were planned to mark the desire of people across the world for the world leaders and negotiators to commit to significant measures which would reverse the trends currently affecting the planet.

That same weekend, I and a dozen or so other women were on retreat at Taraloka with Parami. On the Saturday evening, those of us on the retreat and some members of the Taraloka community held a candle-lit vigil in the shrine room. As we did it we knew that waves of such vigils were moving across the planet, starting at 5.30 pm local time, marking our solidarity with the countries most threatened by the results of rising global temperatures, countries in Africa, Latin America and small island states such as the Maldives and Tuvalu. In our shrineroom, we meditated, lit candles, passing the flame from one to another, and chanted mantras, all dedicated to attaining what the Buddha attained …. and also hoping that our political leaders found the will to forge a worldwide agreement on a effective set of climate change measures..

Thousand-armed Avalokitesvara

The countries most severely affected and climate change activists are calling for a reduction of the concentration of CO2 to 350 parts per million and on Sunday 13th December, churches across the world rang their bells 350 times to show their support for this demand. Again we joined in, but rather than ring bells we chanted the Avalokitesvara mantra – Om Mani Padme Hum – 350 times which took us about an hour. Avalokitesvara is an archetypal figure, symbolising Enlightened Compassion, and sometimes called ‘Regarder of the World’s Cries’ – a fitting figure to bring to mind in the circumstances. As we came out of the shrine room we heard the bells of Bettisfield Church beginning to ring out with the same wish for the world.

On both occasions it was intensely moving to sit in a circle of candlelight in front of the shrine, to reflect on our sense of connectedness with all beings across the planet and to dedicate our practice to those most affected by climate change.

There is a continuing series of actions that you can join in to help take climate change measure forward. Ed Milliband the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is calling for a continuing campaign of action - write a letter to keep the momentum going (this will open a new window in your browser)

Kulaprabha again: So this is the third and last post about our sustainable energy project…  well, last one for the moment.

If you’ve read the first post, you’ll know that we’re in the middle of a project to move to wood pellet boiler and solar thermal heating for our space heating and hot water. I submitted two grants / loans  proposals today. So either cross your fingers or chant mantras on our behalf – or both!

If you’ve read the second post, you’ll know that even with our current very old and inefficient oil-fired boilers, our carbon footprint in the community is half the UK average. Which is great to know and what I was hoping would emerge from the carbon calculations I’ve been doing. Definitely a benefit from nine of us sharing our living space in a community together.

What you don’t know yet is how much better our carbon footprint will be if we can get the funding to help cover a proportion of the wood pellet boiler and solar thermal system installation costs. So now I’ve used the footprint software to calculate what our footprint would have been in 2008 if we’d had had the renewable sources in place. Here are the results:

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The difference is in our energy use. Other sources of CO2 remain the same.

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Here are the details:

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If had we had the biomass boiler and solar panels in place last year, then we would have reduced our CO2 from 98 tonnes to 28 tonnes. A reduction of 72%!! And our energy consumption would have dropped from 88% to 60% of the our CO2 production. Here’s another graph to show you what I mean:

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The tonnes per person is an average taken over the year for all retreatants plus  community members. Perhaps a more useful figure is for the community only, where the amount of CO2 would have decreased from 6.7 tonnes per person to 2.2 tonnes over the year.

You know those Energy Performance Ratings? If you have an old fridge it’s likely to be Rating C or worse? Whereas new fridges will be A or A+? Well we’ve had an energy assessment done for Taraloka. At present we are Rating ‘E’ for the community and ‘D’ for the retreat centre. If  we make the change away from oil, upgrade our attic insulation and install wood burning stoves which means we don’t have open chimneys any longer, then both the community and the retreat centre will be Rating ‘A’! The high efficiency wood-burning stoves should be installed by the end of next week. The attic insulation has been costed but we’re going to wait until after the solar thermal work is done before going ahead with it  – it saves on mess in the attics!

So far I’ve been looking at changing the technologies and machinery we use. We’re fortunate here at Taraloka in that we can explore these possibilities and allocate funds to them. We couldn’t do that if we didn’t own the property. If you’re someone who is renting property, whether for a charity, a business or a home, you don’t have that freedom. Not unless you have a very environmentally concerned landlord and even then they might not have the cash to invest. I’m grateful for the level of funding that there is but I think there is a lot more that could be in place.

I was at a  seminar last month called “Renewable Energy – It Doesn’t Have to Cost the Earth” hosted by Marches Energy re:Think.  One of the speakers – a West Midlands business man – was asked what change he’d most like to see happen in the UK: he said he’d like the UK Treasury come on board and be much more serious about supporting the shift away from fossil fuels. I thought his was one of the best presentations at the seminar. It has a dramatic title :  “Armageddon or Opportunity Paradise.” You can download it and the other presentations and workshops on the seminar by following this link.

There is another aspect to all this. At present our business and personal travel at Taraloka contributes 10% of our carbon footprint. If we manage to get this project sufficiently funded then that changes to contributing 35%. We could make changes there and produce a further reduction in CO2. That’s definitely doable. But it would take us into a different arena altogether : not just changing machinery and technology, it would mean changing our behaviour. And that’s difficult!

This afternoon I was talking to the energy assessor who compiled our energy performance ratings. He told me he was drawing up guidelines for housing association tenants about what they can do to change their behaviour and diminish their energy usage. I might ask him for a copy for us! Another speaker at the seminar, the head of the  Sustainable Energy Division of E-on UK Ltd, was talking about building low carbon communities. One of his remarks has really stuck with me. He said – with regard to changing our behaviour in the UK :

“If  everyone does a little …….

And then he paused. You’ve probably finished the sentence. But maybe not the way he finished it ….

“If everyone does a little, we’ll only achieve a little.

To minimise the impact of climate change, we need to reduce UK carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. And that means 80% from every one of us.”

Think about it. And if you want to read more, try  UK Met Office / Climate Change. (Clicking this will open a new window in your web browser.)

Kulaprabha writes: Last year, I started searching back through old invoices to get our annual consumption for electricity, gas, oil, water.  For several months, I was to be seen weighing our recycling waste  – paper, glass, tin, plastic, cartons – and estimating the volume of our non-recyclable waste. Then there’s travel. Fortunately we keep a log of mileage in our community cars so it only needed some arithmetic to work out our mileage over the year for business and personal use.  I added estimates for other personal car use, and also personal train and air travel. Eventually I had a spreadsheet with a lot of data in it. It’s really not difficult to assemble the data. It just needs a bit of perseverance. And the Carbon Trust website has a set of energy equivalent tables making it very easy to find out how many kilowatt hours  you get from a litre of oil or a kilogram of propane or a tonne of wood! After entering all this data into online carbon footprinting software which did the carbon equivalency calculations, I now have Taraloka’s CO2 footprint for 2007 and 2008. I worked it out separately for the retreat centre and for the community and then combined them to get an overall measurement.

Here are the overall 2008 results :

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I had to make some assumptions and decisions in doing this. For example, I included Maitrimala’s travel over to Akashavana to get ordained but I didn’t include Saddhanandi’s travel over there to be on the team of that retreat. It seemed OK to include Maitrimala’s travel in Taraloka’s footprint. But I think Saddhanandi’s travel is part of Akashavana’s footprint, not Taraloka’s.  There is no allowance in these figures for the distance traveled by our retreatants getting here. I don’t know what mileage that amounts to but, in any case, I think it is part of their personal footprint, not Taraloka’s. These assumptions and decisions seem sensible to me, and I’ve applied them consistently over all the calculations. But no doubt there is a discussion to be had there. The 2007 figures show a total of 87 tonnes of CO2 ie 12 tonnes less than in 2008. But we had fewer retreatants that year and the averaged amount of CO2 per person comes in at 4.6 tonnes, much the same as in 2008.

Fortunately for me, Lindsay keeps very accurate attendance records and they enabled me to work out that there were 13 people in the retreat centre each day, averaged over the year. And, on average, there were 8 people in the community. From these it’s possible to work out tonnes CO2 per person. I’ve also worked out the amount of CO2 produced equivalent to one person here on a week retreat.

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For comparison, the average CO2 produced per person in UK is 12 tonnes and energy consumption makes up 90% of that. That UK average includes everything : schools, government, infra-structure, etc etc……..

I’m fairly confident in the data I used for these calculations. I don’t suppose they’re 100% accurate but I don’t think there is anything significant missed out; or significantly over or under estimated. It seems that those of us living in the Taraloka community produce just over half the average UK personal carbon footprint. So that’s good! Community living ought to reduce the environmental impact. We live on-site so no daily commuting. And I guess we go off on holidays abroad less than most people.

These figures are for our actual 2008 consumption ie still using oil for our central heating and hot water. Next thing is to enter the quotations I have for biomass and solar thermal into the carbon footprint software……..

….. next instalment coming soon!

Kulaprabha writes:

Earlier this year, I was at a Taraloka trustee’s meeting where we were being asked to approve replacing our old

Earth and the Moon from Mariner 10

oil-fired boilers with new ones. One boiler heats the retreat centre and one heats the community. They do need replaced – and we’d certainly use less oil by installing new more efficient boilers.

But I wasn’t too happy going ahead with this proposal because it seemed to me that we were looking at our energy usage in a rather piece-meal way and without a long enough perspective. In particular if we installed new oil fired boilers then we’d be tied into oil for quite a long time. A couple of years ago Saddhanandi, our chairwoman, instigated a fund-raising appeal to help us install solar thermal systems in the retreat centre. But was it really a good idea to go ahead with that – assuming we could get help with the installation costs – and at the same time renew oil-fired boilers? I didn’t think it was. So I suggested to the other trustees that we postpone things and that I try to get a better perspective on our options.

Lots of questions leapt up asking to be answered:

What kind of sustainable energy is best for us … biomass? ground source? Are they really as reliable as a dependable oil fired boiler? Is it worth it financially to include solar thermal when hot water makes up only about 15% of our heating costs? etc etc… Some of my questions have fairly straightforward factual answers. But some of my hesitation was more about feeling uncertainty, insecurity even, in contemplating such a big move away from what’s normal and tried and tested…. ie from burning fossil fuels. What if it all goes wrong and doesn’t work and we don’t have any hot water and hot radiators? But then it is all going wrong isn’t it? The planet, that is, as opposed to our central heating system.

an inconvenient truth

Six months later, I am considerably better informed about biomass boilers and solar thermal panels and cylinders. The cost of moving over to biomass is considerable and I’ve found out quite a lot about available grants. There are various sources of funding for this sort of project but I’m not sure yet which of them we are eligible for : Low Carbon Building Program (LCBP) Phase 2; Welsh Forestry Commission WEBS scheme; Community Sustainable Energy Project (CSEP); the Carbon Trust.

It’s been a bit of a steep learning curve but in the course of enquiring into all this I’ve met some very interesting people, all enthusiastic and happy to pass on their expertise and experience. They include Matthew Goodwin of EcoEnergi; Robert Saunders of re:Think Energy, Shrewsbury; Andy and Jan at Organic Energy, Welshpool; the team at Carbon Hub for making their carbon footprint software available; and a very helpful lady at the LCBP Office who answered all my queries !!

So now …… I’ve got various quotes; haggled a bit over them; decided on which installer to work with …. and am about to fill in the LCBP application form. This is crucial to us. If we get the 50% installation grant then the project goes ahead. If not then I’m afraid we’re looking at oil-fired boilers again.

Will keep you posted…