We started our sustainability journey late one night in 2006, when my boss humbled me: "We are just talking about this Jon ..." I vowed to stop talking and start doing and Neutral Group was born to reduce energy and improve efficiency in supply chains. Thirteen years on and, despite the achievements, I have been humbled again: my home is nowhere near carbon neutral. In fact I didn’t know until recently how much energy it actually consumed, yes really!
My belief that only business could get us out of this climate crisis had blinded me to something much closer to home: residential emissions account for 15% of UK emissions. How can we ignore this if we wish to to meet the UK government’s net zero target in 2050 ?
So in June this year our family set out on a new challenge: can we take our home “net zero off the grid” ?...is it possible and how economical is it ? So the project began to future proof our house ! We were not starting from scratch as we already have an early generation Ground Source Heat Pump and PV Solar Array, but we decided to use the opportunity to build a house extension as the catalyst to see if we could get all the way to ”Net Zero”.
We decided that we did not want to live like monks either and in fact “Green should not mean Mean” so we included a lot of creature comforts in the design, we just challenged ourselves to do it better.
We are now three months into the project and we have already learnt many salutary lessons about the pitfalls and the nature of the cottage industry that serves the domestic market place. I plan to share a series of weekly blogs of on the many different aspects we are experiencing. Please do comment with your ideas and suggestions, all our welcome and you are welcome to ask “Are we Mad ?”
留言