Smoke Pollution in Urban Areas

BattleCorp wrote: »

How do you protect the fuel poverty people though?

Having no alternative (due to lack of capital to make changes) but to use solid fuel as your source of heat because of obsolete infrastructure in your home - lack of central heating systems, bad insulation etc and where that's driven by inability to get out of that trap, rather than some whacko notion (as some of my elderly relative make).

We'd an experience in my own family where we offered to install gas central heating in an 80+ year old relatives house and she flatly refused saying she likes open fires and she "wouldn't have the gas as it dries the air." It was nothing to do with pride or anything like that. She would rather go around wearing a coat and plugging in 3kW heaters (which cost a bloody fortune to run) than install "the gas".

There is a certain generation here who saw central heating as a ridiculous luxury or have almost victorian attitudes about heat from open fires.

Then you've a modern generation who just like the look of open fires and keep using them for nostalgic reasons.

Neither of those cases are fuel poverty.

What I see in Cork City is smoke rising from places like Mahon and other areas with a lot of relatively poor social housing. You can see smoke coming out of chimney pots and it's not just one or two houses, it's a high %. That to me would look like fuel poverty, not people taking notions.

The other issue that's also coming up is burning domestic waste in fire places due to high waste charges. That also is a backfiring element of waste policy as you've got both unregulated burning, including in urban areas, and illegal dumping which is being driven by high waste charges being levied in an unusual way. Most of Europe does not have a privatised waste market like we do, not even in Tory Britain have they gone that route.

I personally know people who boast about putting a large % of their household waste into a stove.
So you're potentially getting poorly combusted, half burnt plastics, inks, coatings and all sorts of stuff going into the atmosphere.

We have a big issue with urban air quality.

One other point to remember in Ireland is natural gas arrived on the market here much later than most of Europe and most of Britain (Northern Ireland was even later) It really wasn’t widespread until the late 1980s and even into the 1990s, having arrived in Cork from Kinsale Head in the 1970s. The network took decades to build out. “Town gas” systems like the old Dublin or Cork gas supplies used manufactured gas and it was uneconomic as a fuel for central heating, so was hardly ever used. So our buildings tended to use a lot more solid fuel and pressure jet oil etc much later than most and in much more urban areas than most.

So instead of seeing a rush of natural gas heating in the 1950s we built out housing stock for open fires and oil.

https://www.purpleair.com is a good source of info and you'll see in winter most Irish towns and cities (and those north of the border too) perform very poorly compared to much of Western Europe. We're more in line with poorer parts of Eastern Europe and that applies to areas of the U.K. too.

Pick a still night and you'll get abysmal readings, including in the bigger cities.

Tonight's not particularly bad due to the wet weather.

If you want to see some of the comparisons on fuel mix used to heat homes here, take a look at :

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/8/1894/htm

Fuel mix:

https://www.mdpi.com/energies/energies-13-01894/article_deploy/html/images/energies-13-01894-g002.png

Ireland's way out there with Eastern Europe on use of coal, a huge amount of oil and almost no renewable worth talking about compared to most of Europe. The UK is a similar pattern for renewables, but massive amounts of natural gas use.

We're actually a total disgrace on home heating. We've basically made no progress at all on it. There's endless talk and policy papers here and no real action.

The reality is we're probably 40 to 50 years behind Scandinavia on this, particularly on the renewables side.

and in 2015 we'd the second most CO2 intensive space heating, only being pipped a bit by Poland.

https://www.mdpi.com/energies/energies-13-01894/article_deploy/html/images/energies-13-01894-g003.png

Basically, we've crappy air quality because we're burning way more solid fuel than most and also in a more uncontrolled manner than the heavy users of solid fuel (a lot of that would go into district heating in Eastern Europe and be burnt relatively more cleanly in boilers, not open fires.)

Oil isn't particularly wonderful either, particularly with older or badly maintained / tuned boilers and burners, they're ones that produce haze. It's not unusual to be able to smell kerosine / gasoil fumes in Irish housing estates and suburbs.