Can you afford to Turbo-Charge your home?

With one event aim being to stimulate you, our audience,  our event experts have been beavering away to develop a question they believed would inspire you to rise to the challenge.  I think they’ve done just that with our revamped question and the plethora of issues explored in the process:

Can you afford to Turbo-Charge your home?

What’s the cheapest route to saving money on/in your home?

1. concepts of sustainability and affordability are so inextricably dependent that one must exist with the other.
2. Excessive use of “sustainability”/derivatives” are an all-round overkill/turn-off.
3. Issues and concerns raised in our lively debates focused around:
   1. Making mass housing affordable and sustainable
   2. Golden Rule
   3. Energy saving
   4. Economics of retrofitting
   5. Carbon footpritnt
   6. UK energy heat and water consumption
   7. Eco for hard to treat homes
   8. Need for more efficient homes
   9. Grid – time of use
   10. HMG lm housing
   11. Energy Saving Trust work and outputs
   12. Level of investment required – £200 billion grid investment
   13. Making more effective use of grid and related resources
   14. Close relationship between manufacturing
   15. Smart technology
   16. Ebay energy with apps – consumer buying and selling
   17. Robotics to insulate hard to reach parts of housing
   18. Teaching people how to do it themselves with uploaded videos on Youtube

Info links for our Housing Event

Housing Event, March 2012 presentations:

• “Playing the Grid”:   Virtual Power Plants, Tom Lipinski, Green Structures Ltd;
• Smart grids, Stuart Williams, Logica plc;
• Manufacturing & Mass Customisation to Retrofit UK Housing, Kevin Hardy, Paragon MMC;
• Option E: Government Policy, Green Deal & its Implementation, Eddie Murphy, Mott MacDonald

“It is a serious distortion to imply, as the top ten lists usually do, that there is any equivalence between these lifestyle preferences and the serious decisions that really reduce emissions –stopping flying, living close to work and living in a well insulated house …  use recycling as a means of discharging responsibility … adopt the simplest solutions as a part of a deliberate denial strategy that enables them to feel virtuous without changing their real behaviour.”

“What are the options to low efficiency light bulbs,  food that has been flown in,  cars that do less than 40mpg,  any kind of flying (or highly restricted) … necessity is the mother of invention”. Ban flights would allow investment in eco-friendly alternatives, massive investment in high-tech sailing boats, telecommunications alternatives, local food, eco-friendly flying to name a few.

Living as we did in the 1950s may save the Earth and us“.

DEATH_OF_A_THOUSAND_TIPS_September_18, 2007

Energy Saving Trust (now defunct) Top_ten_Eco_tips_EST

Ethical Living  and Climate Change 

The Golden Rule

RAE Ingenious Crowd Wise event feedback

Our remaining two RAE Ingenious events on housing and manufacturing are both at DLA Piper on 14th and 29th March respectively.  Registration is from 1.30pm for a 1.4opm start and end at  4.30pm for participants.

After each event we’ll have a short feedback session with our expert panellists on the entire process.  Each expert presentation represents one element of the Crowd Wise process and so the feedback we are looking for also needs to consider quality and/or value of interactions between each expert with their colleagues, and, as importantly with our audience.

We’d particularly like to know what our experts liked about the Crowd Wise process, how we could have done things differently, learning, benefits and overall perceptions.

Green Structures – shortlisted for Autodesk Inventor of the Year

Autodesk is choosing the Inventor of the Year and winning would help Tom Lipinski push the UK innovation forward on the world stage.

To vote for Green Structures all you have to do is press this link: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/783982/Inventor-of-the-Year and then vote for Green Structures.

The University of Sheffield worked closely on the R&D to develop Green Structure’s technology which is the only UK shortlisted company for this award.

Voting closes on Wednesday 29th February.

RAE Ingenious Sustainable Housing Event – Wednesday 14th March 2012

Event fully booked – waiting list in operation!

RAE Ingenious Transport Event follow-up meeting

I’ve circulated the meeting notes of our recent Sustainable Transport event follow-up meeting  RAE Ingenious Transport Event followup meeting 26th January 2012 Meeting Notesand gratefully appreciate the help of Gordon Ferguson and Joachim Dreimann in preparing such  comprehensive notes.

There are some interesting ideas here.  I am therefore delighted to say that Tim Hale, Chairman of the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce Transport Group has very kindly offered to bring our organisation and its work in this respect to the attention of members of the Chamber’s Transport Forum.  Tim will raise some of the points mentioned in our minutes with the relevant Transport Forum organisations and will also let me know if there is any relevant feedback received which I will obviously circulate to everyone for information.

Action for Involvement operates in an informal way. At the present time our core activities focus on bringing people in our communities together and working with key policy-makers, decision-makers or stakeholders to tackle  issues affecting all of us.

Event follow-up meetings are an informal gathering of people inspired by our events to make a difference by taking on issues raised at our events and intended to be fun.

Although I am happy to offer further meetings on transport-related issues, it also needs to be viable for me to operate.  Owing to increasing demands on Action for Involvement and my time I would appreciate help with taking notes which will reduce my workload and inspire me to continue providing this voluntary activity.

Sustainable Housing Event – 14th March

Book now to avoid disappointment.  Nearly 60 bookings since registration opened on Monday – only 13 places left.