Ryanair and Energy

 

Early Saturday morning we flew into Gatwick from the Gambia at about 2:30 after an enjoyable break.

The interesting thing to note as one approaches England at that hour is how much electricity is wasted lighting empty roads and streets.

Curiously, I looked up how much is wasted on Wikipedia.

If you take an average UK city or town of say 100,000 inhabitants (Cambridge, Ipswich, Colchester etc.), it will have about 18,000 street lights, which will all burn for about 4,000 per year. This uses about 11 billion watt hours of electricity and results in the emitting of 3,700 tonnes of CO2.

This level of usage is easily dropped if you use such things as electronic balances, lights that light the ground rather than the sky and LED bulbs. You can also reduce light levels to something that is more appropriate as in many cases there is just too much light in the wrong places. As about half of the hours when lights are switched on are between midnight and six in the morning, you can also reduce levels in these hours. The latter is very easy if you have the electronic balances, which can be remotely controlled.

If you make changes which give a quick return on energy saved, it would be easily possibly to cut our mythical town's emissions to 1,500 tonnes of CO2 with no reduction in safety.

How does our flight to and from Gambia compare?

According to Climate Care that works out at 1.23 tonnes for the return trip for one person. We probably do another three shorter trips that probably make up out usage through air transport to about 2 tonnes of CO2. These are probably conservative figures when compared to a modern airline like Ryanair.

So sorting the street lights out in a town would actually produce enough carbon offset for the flights of 1,100 of the towns residents. This may not seem much, but bear in mind that most people don't fly as much as my wife and I. We're just the average middle-class middle-aged couple.

But sorting street lights would be a very visible way of showing us all how to save energy.