Microgeneration in the news
After realizing yesterday that microgeneration is starting to move up in the online world, I thought I’d take a look at traditional media sources. With the Tories’ recent interest in microgen, the fuss about the microgeneration strategy and It’s Not Easy Being Green on the telly, maybe the wider world is starting to become aware of microgeneration too.
I decided to investigate using a completely scientific method. No not Google, LexisNexis. I searched for the word “microgeneration” in UK publications over the past twenty years and found a couple interesting things among the 199 results.
First, here’s the overall trend:
There are four things going on here.
- There’s very little coverage of microgeneration prior to May 2005 and most of that early writing is not in newspapers
- Microgeneration started to appear on the public radar last May. At this time, EST was promoting its last year of PV grant money, the REA had a conference on microgeneration issues, and there was generally more talk about what the UK’s microgen strategy might entail.
- Next you’ve got the debut of Green Dave during the Tory leadership contest in autumn 2005 and lots of fuss about the microgeneration consultation and LCBP in the winter.
- The microgen strategy and budget caused the recent spike in March.
In this last wave of microgeneration interest, only 53% of the publications were newspapers. The next figure shows that this trend holds overall as well, with magazines and trade publications outweighing newspaper coverage. In other words, most of the chat about microgen so far has been within expert circles.
A breakdown of the newspaper figures shows a good mix of broadsheet and other papers (see below) . Looking at the detailed headlines, it seems that newspapers approach microgeneration from a number of different angles including the novelty of the technology, the cost issues, the climate change and policy aspects or – in the case of some local papers – human interest profiles of specific installations.
Although the method’s not perfect (for example, the search missed this well-titled opinion piece from 2000), I think these graphs do show that microgeneration is gaining prominence in the UK media. Most promisingly, the variety of mass media stories suggests that microgeneration has a diverse appeal and hence promoting the uptake of microgen might be encouraged from more than one angle.
I’ll keep tracking the figures for a bit and provide an update later on. For now, though here are some of the punnier headlines from the data set.
- Rooftop generation to give power – and cash – to the people
- Saving on electricity bills can be a breeze
- Renewables; ‘Saving the planet’ vs. reality
- How green is Brown?; Scotland should be encouraged to lead in efficiency
- Microgeneration in the UK should take off…in 2009
Like that last one. I’ll mark it in my diary.
Blue = Green?
As much as I’d like to steer clear of partisan politics on this site, I think it’s now unavoidable. Ever since being elected leader of the Conservative Party last December, David Cameron has put the environment on his public list of priorities, cycling to work (until he bought the Lexus) and proposing to install solar panels and a micro-wind turbine on his house (assuming he can get planning permission). As Labour have suggested, perhaps the change from true-blue Tory to deep-green is only skin-deep but at least all the fuss has put energy, climate change, and microgeneration in the headlines.
One of the frustrating things about all this rhetoric is that, being in opposition, Cameron and the Tories actually have very little power to do anything. No doubt they would therefore like you to trust them, vote for them, and watch the green policies sprout after the next general election. I’ve got a better idea though.
Local elections are just around the corner. Merton, Kirklees, and nearly 75 other councils are passing requirements that oblige the developers of new properties to install renewable generation (or CHP) on site to provide as much as 30% of that building’s energy demand. If the Tories want to prove their green credentials, they should be running on a campaign of implementing the Merton rule in all their councils. That would give them three years of proven environmental performance when it comes to the next general election. And according to the BBC, the Conservatives have control of approximately a third of UK councils (mainly rural) so this would be a huge boost to microgeneration on a national scale too.
Describing the recent microgeneration climate, an industry spokesperson noted at an REA conference that his money was “on the councils, not Whitehall”. The local elections are therefore a perfect opportunity for the Tories to show that they are serious about the environment and microgeneration.
The state of microgen on the web
When I first started this site, I spent some time trying to find similar sites on Google. After all if someone was already writing about microgeneration, it would be better if I complemented their work by offering something new, rather than just duplicating content.
I wasn’t terribly successful at first. There was a brief article on the German feed-in tariff at Earthscan’s website (the publishers) and some microgeneration related news items at Sustainablog and a renewable energy blog, both talking about Greenpeace’s decentralised generation vision. The blog tracking service Technorati turns up a number of microgeneration hits, but again almost all of the results seemed to be one-off posts and, more importantly, US-centric.
Today though I got a trackback on the ‘What is microgeneration?’ post from micro-generator.com. It’s also based in the UK so it’s nice to know that the site is useful and that there are others scanning the news and keeping an eye open for interesting microgeneration news. For example, it reminded me that I completely forgot to mention It’s Not Easy Being Green programme on BBC2. Which, as an aside, is both entertaining and thought provoking. The main message seems to be that, even if you’ve got a ten acre spread in Cornwall and a river running through your backyard for microhydro, it’s actually quite hard being green!
The problem with the internet these days is that it takes no time at all for a topic to spawn a few small sites and then morph into a completely overwhelming deluge of information. Blogs on microgeneration seem to be no exception and I think it will only be a matter of time before junk ad-sites and ‘I found this cool link. The end.’-type articles become prolific. Perhaps then, it’s a good time to reassess the progress I’ve made on this site since its launch. Having looked back through the posts so far, I’ve concluded that Small is Beautiful is at its best when it provides that extra bit of insight and analysis, teasing out both the simplifications of mass media and the complications of policy debates. So amid the growing numbers of microgen sites, I’m going to continue writing, but try to provide that extra little bit to make this site a valuable and trustworthy resource for those with a keen interest in microgeneration issues.
Wedding pictures
My sister got married on Saint Patrick’s Day, which means I’m about five weeks slow in getting these pictures up. Sorry Chris!
Slacker
I haven’t posted anything for a few weeks but I’ll get around to it soon. Honest. It’s just that I’m in the middle of writing up my thesis at the moment. See?
