> It is, in fact, how I want to heat a house I am in the process of building myself. After a lot of careful consideration, I decided to install a log-gasification boiler as the main heating system. Such boilers are more than 90 per cent efficient, they feed a very large accumulator tank of hot water, and only need to be fired up every two to four days.
>
> The wood will come from thinning from a forest that I manage locally, cut with a solar-powered chainsaw. There is no market for this kind of low-quality timber from small woods. If I cannot use it for heat, it will lie and rot – and produce carbon emissions – on the forest floor. The fuel wood will emit two per cent of the carbon being absorbed annually by the forest from which it is sourced.
>
> The house design is rated B for energy efficiency (falling short of A by only two points) and is rated A for carbon emissions. I have planning consent and I even have a grant and loan offer from the Scottish Government to install the boiler.
>
> Due to technical issues, however, I have yet to submit the final application for a building warrant. This will now as a matter of law be refused and I will incur the expense of revising the planning permission, commissioning new engineering assessments, and preparing a revised building-warrant application. I will also need to reject the grant and loan offer.
>
> If you live in Edinburgh or Glasgow, however, you can still install a wood-burning stove even where you don’t need one and even when it contributes to significant levels of particulate matter pollution. In rural Scotland, you can live in or near a forest, perhaps off grid, but you are not allowed to use what is still a renewable low-carbon fuel when appropriately sourced and combusted.
So a rural ultra efficient boiler using waste wood gets banned yet an urban nice to have log fire is allowed?
This is the very definition of not catering to the needs of rural Scotland
Fucking usual story.
This is madness, I used to stay in the middle of nowhere, frequently get snowed in and electricy power cuts. The only thing we had to make our house liveable in those times was a multi fuel stove, just sleep in the living room with heat. Just utter madness. Shafted by the SNP again.
Usual disconnect and out of touch attitudes from central belt policymakers. I’ve lived down here for just as long as I did growing up in the Hebrides by now, but it still never fails to irk me how detached the two are in understanding each other’s realities.
Same goes for banning peat burning and pushing for no sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 – it just isn’t feasible for the highlands and islands. Both from growing up there and still having a majority of my family there, you just cannot rely on electricity alone for any of these things. Consistent power cuts and extreme premiums on energy prices means these policies not just put people under extreme financial strain but is also telling them to live their lives a way which is simply not consistently achievable.
I’m an advocate for pursuing sustainable alternatives just as much as the next, but any policies need to be fair and actually achievable, fuck sake!
Got slaughtered on a thread last week for making this same point.
The evidence for this measure is extremely circumspect, the implementation is extremely clunky and the perceived benefits are not based on measurements in the past, so can’t be corroborated in the future.
It’s the sign of a government introducing legislation for the sake of being seen to act. At the same time they announce scrapping targets that ARE based in science and that will have a significant impact.
6 comments
> It is, in fact, how I want to heat a house I am in the process of building myself. After a lot of careful consideration, I decided to install a log-gasification boiler as the main heating system. Such boilers are more than 90 per cent efficient, they feed a very large accumulator tank of hot water, and only need to be fired up every two to four days.
>
> The wood will come from thinning from a forest that I manage locally, cut with a solar-powered chainsaw. There is no market for this kind of low-quality timber from small woods. If I cannot use it for heat, it will lie and rot – and produce carbon emissions – on the forest floor. The fuel wood will emit two per cent of the carbon being absorbed annually by the forest from which it is sourced.
>
> The house design is rated B for energy efficiency (falling short of A by only two points) and is rated A for carbon emissions. I have planning consent and I even have a grant and loan offer from the Scottish Government to install the boiler.
>
> Due to technical issues, however, I have yet to submit the final application for a building warrant. This will now as a matter of law be refused and I will incur the expense of revising the planning permission, commissioning new engineering assessments, and preparing a revised building-warrant application. I will also need to reject the grant and loan offer.
>
> If you live in Edinburgh or Glasgow, however, you can still install a wood-burning stove even where you don’t need one and even when it contributes to significant levels of particulate matter pollution. In rural Scotland, you can live in or near a forest, perhaps off grid, but you are not allowed to use what is still a renewable low-carbon fuel when appropriately sourced and combusted.
So a rural ultra efficient boiler using waste wood gets banned yet an urban nice to have log fire is allowed?
This is the very definition of not catering to the needs of rural Scotland
Fucking usual story.
This is madness, I used to stay in the middle of nowhere, frequently get snowed in and electricy power cuts. The only thing we had to make our house liveable in those times was a multi fuel stove, just sleep in the living room with heat. Just utter madness. Shafted by the SNP again.
Usual disconnect and out of touch attitudes from central belt policymakers. I’ve lived down here for just as long as I did growing up in the Hebrides by now, but it still never fails to irk me how detached the two are in understanding each other’s realities.
Same goes for banning peat burning and pushing for no sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 – it just isn’t feasible for the highlands and islands. Both from growing up there and still having a majority of my family there, you just cannot rely on electricity alone for any of these things. Consistent power cuts and extreme premiums on energy prices means these policies not just put people under extreme financial strain but is also telling them to live their lives a way which is simply not consistently achievable.
I’m an advocate for pursuing sustainable alternatives just as much as the next, but any policies need to be fair and actually achievable, fuck sake!
Got slaughtered on a thread last week for making this same point.
The evidence for this measure is extremely circumspect, the implementation is extremely clunky and the perceived benefits are not based on measurements in the past, so can’t be corroborated in the future.
It’s the sign of a government introducing legislation for the sake of being seen to act. At the same time they announce scrapping targets that ARE based in science and that will have a significant impact.