[Stoves] News 24 Jan 2017: Dirty woodstoves cause a health crisis in London

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

So much for Beijing (which has quite good air these days compared with all sorts of other cities in the world) being the poster child for ‘dirty air’.  Yellow Springs Ohio has air that can hardly be inhaled it is so polluted by wood smoke. The cause? Incomplete combustion of wood in fireplaces (not stoves).

Meanwhile there were near-riots in Ulaanbaatar protesting the air quality which is 10 (!) times worse than Beijing’s. It used to be 20 times before the stove replacement programme started.

Will London do what they did during the coal smoke crisis in the 1950’s? Instead of learning how to burn coal smokelessly, they banned the fuel. They could do the same again: bad wood combustion instead of applying known physics and designs to produce a dramatic drop in smoke emitted to less than 1% of what it going up the chimneys now – equivalent to pulling 1,000,000 diesel powered vehicles off the road, right?

Wanna bet which avenue is taken?

If the UK government is going to subsidise American LPG to those in energy poverty, they will have to stop subsidising wind turbines.

Regards
Crispin


Air pollution in London passes levels in Beijing... and wood burners are making problem worse<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/01/24/air-pollution-london-passes-levels-beijingand-wood-burners-making/> Telegraph (UK)

"Temperatures have fallen below zero overnight over the last few days, meaning householders are burning more fuel to keep warm. ..“This was the largest contribution from wood burning measured during the winter so far,” said a spokesman for King’s College."

What will happen when temperatures fall below -20 C? Will wood smoke create a local GHG effect?

Maybe DfID will now give another grant to GACC to establish evidence of the climate benefits of "renewable biomass".

Or import USEPA New Source Performance Standards for residential wood heaters. (Does anybody know if EPA uses WBT 2.0 or 5.3 for testing? I will have to look, but am afraid USEPA website is hacked or frozen by the Trumpists.)

"More than a million homes in Britain now have a wood burning stove with 175,000 new ones installed every year. . . Demand for the stoves, which cost between £400 and £7,000, has tripled in the last five years – partly down to the savings they can make to energy bills."

Sounds like Colorado, Vermont, Upper Michigan and Maine. Except that US hasn't yet hiked up electricity costs by imposing a hard carbon target.

Brexit may make things worse for UK GHG emissions.

I wonder what the IAQ levels are - these fancy woodstoves merely putting the pollution out?


Nikhil
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