Honing my own carbon literacy
My name is Sarah and it is 50 days since I had solar panels installed. We also had a Tesla Powerwall fitted at the same time to store excess energy for later use. Like all things Tesla, it is beautifully designed and supported by cutting edge technology — in this case, an app that lets you see how much energy is being generated, what is being used by the house and what is being stored in the battery.
And it is addictive viewing…
At the slightest hint of some sun, my husband and I are on the app looking at the various graphs, analysing the various peaks and troughs. You can clearly see when we put the kettle on, started cooking dinner or turned off a particular device. It really gives you a much more immediate view of the energy that you are using and forces you to question whether you really need to make that cuppa, or whether you could cook a couple of dishes simultaneously to make it really worth heating the oven up.
All great things to learn about my own consumption patterns before training others to be more carbon literate themselves. It also gives me lots of practical examples to include in the course.
Another great resource is Georgina Wilson-Powell’s new book Is it really green? Everyday eco-dilemmas answered. It covers how to make all aspects of your life greener. And I mean all. It doesn’t just stop at reducing flights and buying water in plastic bottles, but covers areas where I really hadn’t considered the need for a more sustainable alternative such as starting a family or funerals.
The former isn’t relevant and hopefully I won’t need the latter for a while, but there are lots of other easy swaps to make. And so we are gradually swapping to beech wood washing up brushes as the plastic one wears out, swapping the brand of tea we buy and trying to source things closer to home to reduce the length of the supply chain. I’ve just written a long piece for our corporate intranet on ways to make working from home more sustainable and — in talking about the benefits of houseplants — literally greener.
I have been pulling all this together with material on the need for climate literacy into an outline of what the course needs to cover in order to meet the accreditation standard.
And, of course, liaising with the Carbon Literacy Trust on the best way to develop a course for Autovista and to deliver it given that is will need to be virtual. In the course of those conversations, it came up that AutoTrader — the used car portal that is both a supplier and customer of our business — not only is a Carbon Literate Organisation (CLO), but would be willing to work together to develop materials that could be used by other similar businesses.
The trust also highlighted a presentation that AutoTrader were giving at an online conference run by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy about the benefits of carbon literacy training for their business. Having attended that, I talked to AutoTrader about the possibility of doing something jointly. They are more than happy to do it because the more people that are carbon literate and know what changes they can make to reduce their impact on the environment, the better for us all.
The first step is for me to see in action how the training works. From there, AutoTrader is happy to share any materials with us that Autovista can use in its own training.
I will be going on the one-day course in March. That’ll be great because it will allow me to see a training course in action and really get a sense of what is covered. I have heard about the sessions from my husband who did the course when the scheme was first launched and I have the curriculum of what should be covered, but I don’t really have a sense of how it works in practice. It all seems a little theoretical at the moment, which makes it hard to know exactly how the Autovista scheme should run.
I’m looking forward to the March course. Until then, I will keep gathering material together for our carbon literacy scheme.
