CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme – 2012 Budget update
The Chancellor announced a review of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC). George Osborne said it is "cumbersome, bureaucratic and imposes unnecessary cost on business", and that if ways of improving it "cannot be found, I will bring forward proposals this autumn (2012) to replace the revenues with an alternative environmental tax".
The subsequent review concluded that the CRC scheme should be continued in a simplified form in "Phase 2".
CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme
CRC started in April 2010 and covers the largest 30,000 organisations in the UK who had to sign up with the Environment Agency by 30 September 2010 (or face fines). The CRC aims to improve energy efficiency and cut emissions in large public and private sector organisations. These organisations are responsible for 10% of the UK’s emissions.
Organisations that meet the qualification criteria, which are based on how much electricity they were supplied in 2008, will be obliged to participate in CRC. For Phase 2, organisations will qualify if, during the qualification year, they consumed over 6,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of qualifying electricity through settled half-hourly meters. Participating organisations will have to monitor their emissions and purchase allowances from Government, initially at £12 a tonne of CO2 emitted from 2014. The more CO2 an organisation emits above its target level, the more allowances it will have to purchase. There is a direct incentive for these organisations to reduce their emissions. As well as reducing carbon emissions, by increasing energy efficiency the scheme will help organisations save money by reducing their energy bills.
The better an organisation performs in terms of reducing its emissions, the higher it will appear in the annual league table, showing the comparative performance of all participants. One of the simplifications has been to drop the annual league tables from Phase 2.
Further details on CRC are available from DECC and from the Environment Agency.
Interseasonal Heat Transfer can save over 50% of carbon emissions compared to using a gas boiler for heating.
Interseasonal Heat Transfer can save over 80% of carbon emissions compared to using standard air conditioning and chillers for cooling.
CRC – Reducing Carbon Emissions from existing buildings
Many large corporations would like to reduce the carbon footprint of their existing building stock, but are unsure how this can be done beyond attention to detail like increasing the insulation levels to reduce heat escaping in winter.
Interseasonal Heat Transfer can be applied to some existing buildings. This is often possible if the building uses air conditioning in the standard way, which is to use a large amount of electricity to "waste surplus heat" to the outside air in summertime. Depending on location and the buildings involved, ICAX may be able to reduce the energy consumption of air conditioning by "banking" the surplus summer heat in vertical boreholes in the ground.
In the winter heat is recovered from those boreholes via an ICAX Skid (which includes a heat pump) in order to heat the building more cheaply in winter – without burning fossil fuels.
Interseasonal Heat Transfer can now be used to provide on site renewable energy to heat buildings without burning carbon fuels. Interseasonal Heat Transfer captures surplus heat energy in the summer and stores it in a ThermalBank for release when it is needed to heat buildings in winter.
Interseasonal Heat Transfer also captures cold on winter nights, stores this in ThermalBanks™ in the ground and releases it to cool buildings in summer. Renewable Cooling is a more natural form of cooling with a much lower carbon footprint than the standard solution of providing air conditioning powered by electric chillers.
Interseasonal Heat Transfer™ is suited to some existing buildings and may be able to link in to existing heating and cooling distribution systems in current buildings.
CRC – Reducing Carbon Emissions from new buildings
Interseasonal Heat Transfer™ is ideally suited to well insulated new buildings.
Please see: What IHT is.
See also: Retrofitting IHT to save carbon emissions.
