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The Environmental Cost of Keeping Cool

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  The Environmental Cost of Keeping Cool If Britain Embraces Air Conditioning, Can We Do It Without Creating a New Energy Problem? “The question is no longer whether British homes will need cooling. It is how intelligently we choose to provide it.” For most of my life, the British house has been designed around one overriding problem: how do we keep warm? We fitted double glazing. We filled cavity walls. We piled insulation into lofts. We sealed draughts. We installed better heating controls. All perfectly sensible. But our climate is changing the design problem. Increasingly, there are days when the problem is not keeping heat inside the house but desperately trying to get it out again. In England, around 3 million homes were reported as getting uncomfortably hot in 2024 , and the proportion reporting overheating has risen from 7% in 2019 to 12% in 2024. The Climate Change Committee warns that, by the middle of the century, as many as 92% of existing UK homes could experie...
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Solar Panels During a Heatwave: Do They Actually Produce More Electricity?

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  Solar Panels During a Heatwave: Do They Actually Produce More Electricity? Hook: Solar panels love sunshine — but they don’t necessarily love heat. When Britain experiences a run of cloudless, exceptionally hot days, it seems obvious that solar panels should be producing electricity at their absolute maximum. Blue sky. Intense sunshine. Long summer days. Surely this is perfect solar-panel weather? It is certainly good solar weather — but there is an important complication. Photovoltaic panels need light to generate electricity, but as the solar cells themselves become hotter, their efficiency falls. A wonderfully bright but very hot August afternoon can therefore produce less peak power than an equally sunny, cooler spring day . That sounds contradictory until we separate two things that we normally lump together: sunshine and temperature. They are not the same thing. Sunshine Makes Electricity. Heat Does Not. A photovoltaic panel converts incoming solar radiation int...
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Should We Stop Trying to Keep Britain Green All Summer?

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  Should We Stop Trying to Keep Britain Green All Summer? Perhaps a brown lawn in August isn't a gardening failure. Perhaps watering it is. For generations, the picture of the perfect British garden has included one almost compulsory feature: a neat, rich, green lawn. Green in April. Green in June. Green in August. But perhaps that expectation belongs to a different climate. During a hot, dry British summer, grass begins to lose its lush colour. It fades through pale green, then yellow, then eventually turns the rather alarming straw-brown that makes us think something has gone terribly wrong. The instinctive response is obvious. Get the hosepipe out. Yet an established lawn turning brown during drought has not necessarily died. In many cases, the visible leaves have died back while the roots and growing points remain alive. The grass has effectively reduced its activity until better conditions return. The Royal Horticultural Society specifically advises gardeners to resist...
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