Sustainable Times

Working out your electricity costs This month is all about how to work out your electricity costs, and how to discover the appliances that can cost you the most by borrowing some home energy monitors. What you pay for your electricity will depend on the supplier you are with, and which tariff you are on with that supplier. A tariff is simply the way an energy provider bundles together the costs that you will pay. There can often be many different tariffs from the same supplier that may seem confusing, but they are really designed to suit the different needs of a customer. For example, if you have a big family, you might want a tariff that offers a lower daytime rate. Or, a tariff that has a cheaper night-time rate might suit you better because that is when your heating comes on. Understanding how much electricity you use, and when you use it will help you make decisions that can reduce your bills There are two parts to your electricity bill: – 1 – Standing Charge The standing charge is a fixed daily charge and is the same everyday regardless of how much electricity you use. The standing charge is designed to cover the cost of keeping you connected to the electricity supply, network maintenance, to fund some discount schemes, and to cover the cost of rescuing customers from failed energy companies known as the ‘supplier of last resort’. While the focus has been on rising electricity costs the standing charge rate has also been increased significantly by suppliers due to inflation to cover the increasing cost of wages and materials, and to support the supplier of last resort scheme. As mentioned, the standing charge is a fixed daily rate. As long as you are a customer of an energy supplier you will pay the charge even if you didn’t use any electricity at all. The only way to change the amount you pay is to change your tariff or supplier. Generally, tariffs with a lower standing charge cost will charge more per unit of energy you use, tariffs with a higher standing charge will charge you less per unit. Depending on your circumstances it may make sense to change your tariff if you are currently on one that does not suit your particular needs. 2 – Energy Use The next, and usually main part of your bill is the cost per unit of energy. For electricity this will be shown as pence per kWh. kWh stands for kilowatt hour and is how much electricity you use in one hour. Depending on your tariff you may pay a single rate for all your electricity, or you may pay different rates at different time such as an Economy 10 tariff where you get 10 hours of cheaper electricity per day. These different rates may be called the standard or normal rate and off-peak rate. It is important to know what you pay for your electricity, and you will find the rates you pay from your energy bill. For example, a single rate tariff might have a unit cost of 30.24p per kWh. This is the rate you will pay for every unit of electricity you use, and you can work out how much you use by reading your meter.  How to work out your costs To work out how much you pay for a typical day take a meter reading at the same time a day apart. Take the smaller number away from the larger number to give you how many units you have used during that time. Now multiple that number by the kWh cost to give you the cost of the electricity you have used. Finally add the standing charge to give you an accurate cost for that day’s electricity. Here is an example: – Monday reading at 9am   = 70452 Tuesday reading at 9am  = 70490 70490 – 70452 = 38 kWh of electricity used 38 x 30.24p per kWh = £11.49 of electricity used Finally add the standing charge to give the total £11.49 + 50.14p (example) = £11.99 for the day You can then multiple the daily rate by 30 to give you a monthly estimate, or by 365 to give you a yearly estimate.             £11.99    x    30   = £ 359.70              £11.99    x   365  = £ 4,376.35 It will only be an estimate based on the amount of electricity you used on the particular day you took the meter reading. Take regular readings to give you a better understanding of your use and calculate a better estimate. Additional Help If you would like help understanding your bills, please pop into Heilsa Fjold with a copy of your bill and we will help you work it all out and check to see if you can save money. Contact the CDO or Wellbeing Coordinator for help with any bills, forms, or letters that you do not fully understand. We can also loan a home energy monitor and plug-in appliance monitors to quickly help you understand you costs and in particular the cost of an individual appliance such as a kettle, heater or microwave. You will then understand how much it costs to use those appliances and make better choices on when to use them. Get in touch if you would like to borrow a whole home monitor and 2 individual appliance monitors for 2 weeks (like those shown below). We will help you get setup and show you how to use them.

Orkney Climate Festival Thank you to all those who took part in the first Sanday Climate Festival, which itself was part of the first Orkney wide Climate Festival. The Orkney Festival was created by the newly formed North Highlands & Islands Climate Hub who are funded by the Scottish Government. The Hub is one of the first of a network of community led Climate Action Hubs which are forming across Scotland to support communities make a just transition to net zero, create greater resilience in communities and support a climate ready Scotland. You can. Find out more about the work of the hub at www.nhclimatehub.co.uk The Scottish Government is committed to reaching Net Zero emissions of all greenhouse gases by 2045, a full 5 years ahead of our neighbours. The commitment means that we will all be affected and have a part to play even if you do not agree with the causes of, or impact of climate change. As a Development Trust we are already seeing the impact as future funding applications will require us to demonstrate our commitment and action towards achieving the net zero goal. Our involvement will be to help prepare and support the island through the transition process via initiatives such as the Climate Festival and this very section of our monthly newsletter. Following on from our own week of climate action we are also supporting the governments Scottish Climate Week. You can find more information at https://tinyurl.com/ym7msk8k One of the activities from our Climate Festival was a Beach Survey. The survey was not so much about clearing rubbish from the beach (although we did remove a fair bit) but to think about the rubbish found, where it come from and how it might have got there. The activity took place with help from the Youth Development Team across three of our wonderful beaches and a rather impressive, if sad amount of rubbish was found. Every family taking part also received a free book. We also ran a couple of youth activities that focused on growing plants and climate science with kits funded by the North Highlands and Islands Climate Hub. A big thanks to everyone who attended the Community Picnic and made it such a success. For some time, the Development Trust had been wanting to put on a community event to bring the island together following the previous years of Covid related restrictions and lack of social events and the Climate Festival provided that opportunity. A very special thanks goes to Jacqueline Seatter for catering the event and to the many volunteers that helped. Finally, a thank you to Jonny from the Climate Hub for his help in creating the festival and for travelling to Sanday to hold a Climate Conversation event that closed our week of activities.

Sustainable Times The ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ are often used to mean the same thing but are actually very different and by mixing them together it is easy to overlook the story they tell. Weather is the short-term weather that we experience day to day. Take a look outside your window right now and if it is raining, windy, dry or sunny, that is the weather. Climate on the other hand is what Is happening long term, think decades rather than months or years. So weather is the right now and climate is the trend, take a look at the diagram above (© esa www.esa.int/climate Comparing the weather tells us very little about global warming and ‘climate change’. That is why it is very misleading to try and compare the weather now with what we have had in the past. It is easy to say ‘What is all the fuss about? Sure, we are experiencing a heat wave right now, but I remember the summer of 1976. Relax, stop complaining and enjoy the sun’. It is only when we look at the climate that we begin to see the real story. Imagine trying to understand the plot of a film by watching it for 3 minutes near the beginning of the film and another 3 minutes near the end. While you see what is happening it probably won’t make sense and you will not understand the story it tells. Only by watching the whole film will you understand what it is all about. That is why it is more important to look at what the climate is doing rather than the weather. The weather will always vary and there will be the hot year, the year it didn’t rain for months, and the year the airport road flooded. On their own it is not too much to be worried about unless they are happening more often, getting more extreme or happening in places they didn’t before (they are) That is what the climate tells us. So, when the climate shows that temperatures are rising, even if it is by a degree or two it is a worrying sign. Our planet usually does a great job of looking after itself and not everything that happens can be blamed on humans. However, it is also a fragile eco-system and there is only so much it can handle. So why are humans mostly to blame? Well if we think that ‘modern’ humans have been around for 100,000 years. We only started to really farm around 10,000 years ago and we have been considered a civilisation (think complex society) for around 5000 years. In the year 1000 the world population was around 300 million, 500 years later in 1500 it was around 500 million. We hit the 1 billion mark around 300 years later in the 1800s and then 2 billion about 100 years later around 1900. By 1950 the figure is 2.5 billion, just 9 years later it hit 3, and then 4 billion around 1974. It took another 13 years to hit 5 billion, 12 more to hit 6, and another 12 to hit 7 billion around 2012. So going back to the year 1000 it took us 800 years to go from 300 million people on the planet to 1 billion. It has then taken us just a little over 200 years to go from 1 billion to 7 billion. We are now adding a billion people every 12 years, and it will get even quicker. Millions and Billions are so easily thrown around these days that it can be easy to forget how different the numbers are. So lets put them into a context that is easy to imagine. 1 Million seconds is 12 days, 1 Billion seconds is 31 YEARS. Just think about that. And if you want to get really crazy (considering we have just seen our first companies valued at 1 Trillion dollars), 1 Trillion seconds is over 31,000 years. Hopefully it is now a lot easier to appreciate that our planet does not have a chance to continue repairing the damage us humans are doing to it and why we must change our ways. It is simply not sustainable, we need sustainable times.

Sustainable Times Climate change and the ‘greenhouse effect’ fears may feel like a relatively new thing but scientists began to realise the link between certain gases and rising temperature way back in the early 1800’s. The first person known to have experimented on the warming effect on sunlight and different gases was Eunice Foote, an American scientist, inventor, women’s right campaigner and distant relation to Isaac Newton Similar work was also carried in out in 1859 by Irish scientist John Tyndall and by the early 1900’s some even believed it would lead to the extinction of the human race. The NASA Climate spiral is a great way to see the increase in global temperatures. It starts in 1880 and for the first 60 or so years the temperatures stay roughly within the middle circle of 0 degrees. Then with each following decade the temperatures increase until 2015 when they begin to break through the + 1 degree circle. The video ends by showing the changes as a vertical stack which shows the increase much more clearly.  You can view the animation here – Climate Spiral An increase over + 1 degrees over 140 years does not seem like a big deal at all. We experience big jumps in weather temperatures throughout a year so what is all the fuss about? This is a big difference between weather and the climate. Next issue we will look at why such a small increase is such big news.

Sustainable Times Welcome to the new section we are calling Sustainable Times. These days there are so many buzz words and phrases such as sustainable development, climate emergency, food security, circular economy, biodiversity and net zero to name a few and so it becomes difficult to keep up and know what they mean. The aim of these pages is to highlight the important issues, explore what they mean and offer advice on what we can all do to take action in a balanced, non-preachy way. Those actions often have multiple benefits such as reducing your ‘carbon footprint’ which is good for the planet but can also save you money and reduce bills, something that we can all relate to at the moment with the cost of living on the increase. The fact remains that they are all important issues and will affect us all. As a Development Trust we are deeply involved in planning for the island’s future and aligning ourselves with the guidance and advice from a variety of organisations from the Scottish Government to the United Nations. We also invite you to take part and contribute. It can be sharing simple tips to your transformation into an eco-warrior. For my own part I have recently been accepted as an Island Ambassador for Island Innovation. I have also received my Carbon Literacy certificate and am personally focusing on reducing my energy usage that has led to some big changes and benefits. You may still wonder what this is all actually about? This where the other two words come in to play – People and Planet. Hopefully, if you continue reading over the coming issues you will see that it is such a vast, wide area it is impossible to easily sum it up but let’s start with the name. We use the word Sustainable here in the context of Sustainable Development and the short answer explained by the United Nations Sustainable development has been defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs Sustainable development calls for concerted efforts towards building an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for people and planet To address this the United Nations has created 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Click the image below for more info. As a Development Trust these are also our goals and run through everything that we do. We have more influence in some than others but you can hopefully begin to understand and appreciate our ambitions and purpose. Community Garden Project – Part of the plan If there is one project that ticks a lot of the Sustainable Development boxes it would be the Community Garden. The Community Garden really has grown (no pun intended) and developed over the past few years into a space for the whole community to enjoy and benefit from.This has only been possible thanks to the help of Development Trust volunteers under the leadership and guidance of our amazing community gardener Alan Cole.For those that don’t know the community garden is located opposite Heilsa Fjold and is open to everyone to visit. The Community Garden is a multipurpose space that is not just about growing plants but somewhere to relax and explore the many different sections, from the sensory areas to the Standing Stones. It is not a show garden of the Chelsea Flower Show variety and is never meant to be. It is a celebration of nature, recycling and zero waste. Click on the link below for more info Working towards our future Climate change, global warming and all manner of related topics are common news headlines these days. Often, and unfortunately they are associated with protests that tend to focus us on the disruption caused rather than the message. Worse still are the conspiracy theories that confuse and dilute the reality even further making it just easier to ignore the whole subject altogether. The truth is that even if it was all untrue (it isn’t) the changes we can make will still have a dramatic and positive impact on the future. The world is a big place but as humans it does not seem that we are doing a very good job of looking after it. So many of the things we can do to benefit the environment will also directly benefit you regardless if you do it for the environment or not. We are seeing the price for energy continuing to rise and that along with other events in the world are causing the cost of everyday essentials from food to fuel increase. Lots of the changes we can make can be good for the planet and for your pocket. Regardless of anything else we do know for sure that these issues will effect us all as the Scottish Government has pledged to reach Net Zero by 2045, that is 5 years ahead of the UK Government. There will plenty of incentives and pressure for us all to make changes. Click the image for more info As a Trust we are already being advised that the majority of all future funding applications will need to incorporate Net Zero goals. That is not a bad thing, but it is significant. Of course, Net Zero in itself is not a fix. It is like switching off the tap after the flood has happened, we’ve stopped the flow of water, but it does not undo any of the damage. So, what can we do? As an individual a good start is to understand your contribution to the causes of global warming. There are many online sites that will help visualise your impact but a good one is provided by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and can be found at https://footprint.wwf.org.uk My favourite one however is PawPrint. You do need to create an account, but it provides much more useful information and scores four main sections separately (home, diet, travel and other) https://app.pawprint.eco/ The overall statistics for Scotland (2019) show that