On Monday 25th January, SHARE members attended a Zoom talk on Community Energy Schemes by Dr Tim Jones of CEP. Despite a few IT difficulties, the event was very well organised and interesting.
The talk, hosted by St Cleer Outdoor and Environmental group, ranged far and wide over the relative benefits and costs of non-fossil-fuel heating; Cornish “Dickensian” housing stock; transport and other topics.
A mention of Carbon Footprints inspired us to look back to 2019 when SHARE commissioned a Carbon Footprint Report for South Hill Parish. Along with an analysis of energy supply and demand in South Hill,
the report looked briefly at where savings in greenhouse gas emissions could be made in years to come, and you can read the full report, taken from a presentation, here…
Following this, in early 2020, our Company Secretary Astrid Fischer gave a talk to South Hill W.I., during which the group collaborated on a “Mr & Mrs Average” carbon footprint survey, using the website https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx.
This takes a look at household energy use, travel, food and drink, clothing purchases, phone, mortgage and insurance bills. The result was rather scary!
One of SHARE’s main aims is to address the carbon footprint in South Hill parish. So far we have installed two solar PV systems, saving more than 90 tonnes of CO2e since 2015.
This is considered to be the equivalent of planting over 4000 trees. In fact we have also planted many actual trees around the parish, taking advantage of free offers from several sources.
We have also published a booklet “A Guide To Saving Energy In The Home” which you can download here…
Our current project is a feasibility study in the hope of being able to use water power to generate electricity in the parish. Read our latest instalment on this at SHARE Hydro – Three Steps Forward and One Step Back.