Energy
Energy
Production and consumption
Electricity
The majority of the households in Åkra use wood for heating. People mostly cut the wood themselves in Åkra, but some people buy it. Wood is the cheapest you can use for heating, especially if you cut it yourself. One 60 litre bag with wood costs about 50-60 kr, depending of what type of wood it is. Wood as an energy source is a rather environmentally friendly option. Some households do also have invertor. The invertor works like a fridge, just the other way around. Invertors are also a very cheap alternative to heating, but when it is very cold it doesn’t work good.
Most people in Åkra use electricity for heating, but wood or invertor are their main energy source. To heat a house with electricity is very expensive, so I think that people try to avoid it as much as possible. The electricity prices are very high sometimes, especially in dry and cold periods. That is because when there is not much precipititation, the water power plants don’t get their magazines filled up with water.
The most common fuel for vehicles in Norway is diesel and petrol. Diesel and petrol are not good for the environment. Diesel and Petrol .There are also some other fuel alternatives like biodiesel.
Hydropower
One billion of the world’s households use hydropower as their main source of energy. This is also the most important energy source in Norway, as we have a lot of water.
In our local area we have three small hydro power plants from 10 to 15 GWh. There is also one large hydro power plant approximately half an hour from Åkra. This is one of 5 stations with a total production of circa 1400 GWh per year. This is enough energy to cover about 70 000 households on an annual basis.
Power consumption in our school
Of all service industries in Norway, school and kindergarten is the industry with least consumption of energy.
In our school we have an aircleaningsystem which are automatically turned off at 3 o’clock. The system turns itself on a couple of hours before the school starts. We save a lot of power by turning off the aircleaningsystem. We have the aircleaningssystem to make sure there is fresh air in the class rooms at all times. To keep the rooms comfortable we have ovens in every room. To keep the temperature stable the ovens are regulated by a thermostat. Most of the power consumption comes from heating. In the new part of our school the lights are turned off automatically, after 20 minutes when the room is not used. This helps us to save power, if we forget to turn the lights off.
What can we do to reduce our consumption of energy?
In cities a normal suggestion to solve this problem would be to drive less car. You can walk or travel by bus. Colleagues can share cars when driving to work instead of driving separately. But in a remote village like Åkra, you cannot expect buses to be there at all times of the day. The people who commute to work by car, start work at different times. That makes it difficult to drive together. But we can walk to school and leisure activities. We can also go to the grocery and leave the car at home. All in all this can make a positive impact on the environment.
There are also a lot of things we can do to reduce the power consumption at home. An important investment would be to install energy efficient products like energy-saving bulbs and water-saving shower heads. We can also set the thermostat to a more fitting temperature at different times.
We can unplug chargers when not needing them. It is for example a waste of energy to let your laptop be plugged to the charger when it is fully charged. Another initiative is to use power strips to switch off the electric equipments and gadgets when not using them. Some examples to this are televisions, computers, stereos and microwaves.
