I reckon that you could boil 25,000 teapotsful* (litres) of water in an electric kettle on the amount of electricity we’ve produced from the sun at the Watermill. I hope I’ve got the figures right, and you may think I ought to have better things to do with my time, but I was just trying to visualise in an easy-to-understand way the total amount of free electricity we’ve generated here since we installed our photovoltaic panels a few years ago. All this talk of kilowatts and megawatts (and abbreviations like Kwh and Mwh) is all very well, but boiling teapotsful* gives a much better picture. (*It’s a British Standard measure I’ve just made up, but one teapotful is roughly a litre. Ten teapotsful equals one urn; four urns, one tub and so on.)
If you would like to see the figures, here’s the snapshot early yesterday morning from our clever little online monitor:
Here’s a close-up:
It shows that we’ve made a total of 64.549 megawatt hours (Mwh) of electricity from the sun. As you well know, a megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts. So, if your generous teapot takes a litre of water and your average electric kettle uses 2.6 Kw per hour) it will take two-and-a-half minutes to boil the water.
My figuring is that you could boil 24,826 kettles for one hour or one kettle for 24,826 hours (if you are so inclined) on the electricity we have produced.
Furthermore, as the other ringed close-up shows, we have avoided 45 tonnes (metric tons) of carbon dioxide production from conventional power stations. For those of you who, like me, haven’t the faintest idea what 45 tonnes of carbon dioxide looks like, it’s about 25,000 cubic metres, which doesn’t help much! The best comparison I can think of is with those old-fashioned gasometers (gas holders) we had in our towns and cities in the old days, which averaged about 50,000 m³.
But enough of these figures. Time for a cup of tea!
The simple fact is that our hidden array of photovoltaic panels produced far more electricity than we consumed.
In the summer months, when the Watermill is full with our creative course guests, our solar electricity also goes to power our extensive air-conditioning system, in all the bedrooms and public rooms, including the dining room and studio. During the creative course season, particularly when the weather is hot and the air conditioning is on much of the time, we still make a little more electricity than we need each day. Out of season we make much more than we need and we sell the excess to the electricity company.
Sun-powered electricity, along with making the Watermill and guests ‘plastic neutral’ by stopping plastic waster reaching our oceans (click here for the story) means the Watermill is becoming cooler and greener. So why don’t you join us one of our world-renowned creative courses or inspiring tuition, warm hospitality, spectacular settings, delicious food and wine, the convivial company of like-minded people — and be Cool and Green?
Everything is included in the cost of your course: you get to Pisa, Italy, and we do the rest! Please go to the Watermill website for more about everything.