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Proposed EU Regulation on Organic Production

I’ve mention this before.  If passed, this measure will regulate organic agriculture in Europe starting in the year 2020.  This measure is the result of a 2+ year trialog process between the EU Commission, Council and Parliament, and several people and organizations I know have been involved in it.  It’s been heavily influenced by the food industry, and lots of compromises have been made on all sides.  Probably everyone is a little unhappy with it, and it’s not perfect.  It is however set to significantly change the way organic food is produced for the European market.

The first vote on this measure is expected in the council on 20 November 2017.

The most contentious element concerns the use of organic seeds, or more broadly Plant Reproductive Material (PRM), in organic production.   That is, the food industry wants the use of organic seeds to be mandatory, because they are the ones who control most of the production and distribution of organic seeds.  This has really no added benefit to consumers, because they are still industrially bred and produced seeds, and it’s unlikely any incidental agricultural chemicals present in seeds could impact the quality of the final product.  In a broad sense, the food industry seems to have won on this point, and organic seeds will be required more frequently in organic production.

On the other hand, the rules concerning biodiversity have been relaxed.  There is now a new class of PRM called ‘heterogeneous material’, which is more suited to use in organic production and more likely to result in higher quality products and more diversity being available to the consumer.  Technically speaking, pretty much any organic seed will be legal to use, which is a big change from the present situation.

The main losers in the new regulation will be small farmers in the developing world, who now have to comply with EU organic rules, and will find it difficult to source reasonably priced organic PRM suited for their local climates.  This also means European consumers will also lose out, because fewer high quality products will be legal to import under the label of ‘organic’.

Some important points of the new regulation:

  • Organic farmers will be allowed to exchange, use and sell their own ‘organic heterogeneous material’ without prior registration.  The current rigorous system of prior registration will be replaced with a highly simplified system of notification.
  • Farmers will now have access to ‘organic varieties suitable for organic production’, initially on the basis of a 7 year marketing test, later to be incorporated permanently into EU legislation.  This will allow organic farmers access to better quality seeds than are currently available.
  • An EU-wide database will be created, containing all available organic seeds.  This will be available to all EU users free of charge.
  • Many products not covered by the current organic framework, or presently sold as organic, will be in the future.  For example rabbits, deer, traditional herbal preparations, beeswax, cork, wool, salt, etc.
  • Reinforcement of the soil-bound principle for plants.  In the future, plants not grown on soil would not be considered organic.  There will be a minor 10-year exemption for some pre-existing Nordic producers.
  • Limited ‘group certification’ of organic producers would be allowed.  For very low income farmers, it will now be possible to apply and maintain organic certification with a group of other farmers.
  • Measurement of contamination is to be addressed, and smarter enforcement of violations.
  • European standards are to be imposed on all imported goods.  Currently about 50% of organic goods are imported, covered by about 60 different organic standards.

Responsibility of Consumers

While this regulation may be a little more credible, and under some circumstances ‘make legal’ some biodiversity that’s not currently available, no benefits are guaranteed for the consumer.

Now more than ever, it’s important to uphold the principle of buying locally, from farmers and sellers you trust.  This is far more important than buying certified organic.  It’s important to share your experiences and conclusions on social media, and to promote sensible products over low quality mass marketed ones.

More than ever, it’s important for consumers to be aware of what seeds are used in the production of our food.  This new regulation provides a small crack, through which the sale of non-industrial seeds are to be legalized.  It’s important consumers find ways of buying food grown from these seeds, and clawing back control of the food system from multinationals.

This new regulation will introduce many changes, and no doubt some surprises are in store for all of us.

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The Glyphosate Debate — EU Politics at it’s Peak

EU Commission

The Commission has been debating the extension of the licensing for herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Round Up.  There is a lot of pressure both for renewing it, as well as not.  As a sort of compromise, the Commission has proposed renewing it for 10 years instead of the usual 15.

In a surprise last minute move, the Commission decided to put the matter to a vote of the EU member states, with the default action being no renewal at all, unless a qualified majority votes in favor of extension.  This seemed to reflect some irritation at member states like France and Germany which campaigned hard for a system of qualified voting based on their large populations, only to opt out of issues like this entirely, effectively using their qualified status to silently sink a large number of measures.  The EU Commission would like the qualified status to not be taken into account when no vote is cast, and this is all apparently to make a point on this issue.

Until now, they have received a response from 8 out of 28 member states, but decline to say which ones.

The Fake ECI

I’ve posted before about the European Citizens’ Initiative that was staged on this issue.  It’s just not possible to gather 1,000,000 signatures in Europe without any reports of public events mentioned on the Internet, besides two in Brussels put on by Greenpeace.  Also articles I posted about it got little attention from the Internet, suggesting that even if people were signing the initiative, no one was really interested enough in it to research it on the Internet.  It’s just 1.3M signatures that appeared out of nowhere.  Activists organizations are touting heavily the merits of this fake ECI.

Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta

Monsanto and Bayer, who are in the process of merging, have remained largely silent on the issue.  While they both have seed varieties that are Round Up Ready, and apparently dependent on Round Up, they both would seem to benefit far more by having a patented product removed from the market, allowing more room for patented alternatives.  Syngenta has even gone so far as to announce it has an patentable alternative in the pipeline.

The Activists

While it’s no secret activist organizations often act according to business interests, it seems a little incredible they are openly towing the line of the pesticide companies.  In fact they seem to be doing everything possible to boost corporate profits.

While the pesticide companies remain silent, the activists speak on their behalf.  The activists seem to care less about the impact this would have on small farmers and their communities.

The Farmers

The farmers are lobbying very hard to keep glyphosate on the market, because it’s a tool many of them depend on, and they are simply screwed if they are forced onto another more expensive patented product.

Restrictions

Again and again the subject of restrictions come up.  Glyphosate would be a much less contaminating substance if it was only used on farms, and in a way that minimized unnecessary contamination.  For example forbid it’s use by private parties and in public spaces, and establish clear rules when it can be used on a farm.

Even though this comes up again and again, there’s been no action from the Commission on this idea.

France

France is the only member state to publicly announce they have responded to the Commission on the issue.  The response however is far from clear.

The Macron government says they reject the 10 year renewal proposal as put forth by the Commission.  At the same time they say they will ask the Commission to put forth another plan for phasing out the herbicide.  They maintain that for now farmers need to keep using the product.

Macron suggested that he thought it might be good if glyphosate remained on the market for the rest of his term in office, about 5 years.  Another government spokesperson suggested 7 years might be better.  Macron himself firmly denies any time limit has been given.

This seems to be intended to keep all parties a little bit happy, and undermine the EU commissions effort to base the decision on a qualified majority.  The farmers support this position, because they say before they had nothing.

Germany and The Netherlands

Both these countries recently had elections, and are in the process of forming coalition governments.  Here in the Netherlands there doesn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel, and it looks to be very difficult in Germany as well.

As far as I know nothing has been said about this in the Netherlands, and I don’t expect any issue to be taken on this.  As far as I know, we don’t even have an acting agriculture minister, because the last one quit in the middle of the eggs being contaminated by Fipronil scandal.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has said if it were up to her party, she would like to renew glyphosate and help the farmers.  She is however in the process of forming a coalition, and it depends on the other parties too.  By custom, when there is no agreement, there is no position taken, and it seems likely Germany won’t take a position.

The UK

The UK seems likely to support a renewal of the glyphosate license, but does this matter?  Are they even still a voting member of the EU, or will they choose to vote under the circumstances?  How does this fit in with the EU Commission requirement of a qualified majority?

The Vote

The vote on this issue was due at the beginning of October, but the Commission now says it will be considerably after that.  The deadline is the end of the year when the current glyphosate license ends.  Are we looking at another short term renewal?  This would certainly be the European way.

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Guerrilla Solar Panels

Flexible Solar Panel

I live in the old city of Amsterdam, in a 350 year old house.  Like a lot of people, my circumstances limit my ability to install solar panels on my house.  While not many people may live in such an old house, many are renters and may not be able to get permission from their landlord or live in an apartment building and not have access to their roof.  In some cases the local authorities may not allow connecting solar panels to the grid.

In my case, even if the city let me, my roof is 30 or so years old, and too old to consider putting holes in it.  I’m also not likely to get the necessary building permits from the city to install solar panels.  I am however allowed to lay something on my roof, and am allowed to make temporary installations.  As long as whatever I do does not change the structure of my house, is not visible from the street and can be removed if necessary, the city is not likely to bother me.

In addition, solar panel technology is rapidly evolving, and in the last few months a number of new possibilities have come on the market.

As a test, I bought the solar panel you see above, a 500w grid tie inverter:

Grid Tie Inverter

And a meter, which is visible above connected to the inverter:

The meter cycles through a number of different readings, showing watts, watt hours, amps and so on.  Pretty much everything you need to know.  One side connects to the solar panel(s), and the other side to the grid tie inverter.

The purpose of this post, and the ones that come later, are to take you through some of the thought processes involved in designing your own solar system like this.

Solar Panels

The solar panel pictured above is a new kind, laminated in plastic, and weighs about 1kg.  They are flexible, and can be bent to about 30 degrees.  It’s easy to carry a stack of 5 of them, under your arm, and up the stairs.  You can install them in an area that gets light foot traffic, and walk on them with soft soled shoes.  They have grommets in the corners, and you can tie them down with rope, or mount them on a wall with 4 screws.  You can also glue them to a vehicle or home roof.  They are intended for temporary installation, and so often don’t require a building permit to place on your house.  Even though they are intended for temporary installation, they are just as durable as the older glass panel type.

It’s not really the purpose of this post to do product reviews, so I won’t mention the brand.  In fact this same type of panel is made by different manufactures, and they all seem very similar.  I suspect they are all more or less the same.  They all seem to be made in China, but I think the technologies were developed in the Bay Area in the US and are being made under license.

The price of these panels is coming down very quickly right now.  If you are considering buying some, you might want to wait.  The panel I bought for testing cost €180, I recently ordered 5 more to expand my setup for €160 each, and I now see they are going for €130.  In a year or two they will probably be much cheaper.

These panels are so-called 12v panels, even though they really operate at 18v.  I guess they’re called 12v because, they are suitable for charging a 12v battery, if your system uses batteries.  The voltage they produce is dependent on the load and amount of sunlight, as well as the temperature of the panel.  They also have a Voc, or maximum possible voltage of 20v.  This is an important number, because equipment is easily damaged by over-voltage, so you want to make sure anything you connect it to is within it’s Voc rating.

System Voltage

If you use equipment that’s designed for a higher voltage, it’s easy to achieve this by combining solar panels in series.  When you connect the positive lead of one panel, to the negative lead of another, then use the remaining unconnected leads, you have the equivalent of a 24v panel (that really operates at 36v, and has a Voc of 40v).  If you connect more than 2 in series, the voltage continues to increase in a similar way.

If you connect the panels in parallel, the voltage stays the same but the current increases.  The current will double with 2 panels in parallel, triple with 3 panels in parallel, and so on.  Most equipment like inverters is not damaged by the presence of too much current, but you have to be careful not to use cabling and connectors with equipment that may draw more power than they can handle.  You can think about this in comparison with household appliances, for example a table lamp or a mobile phone will need one thickness of wire, whereas a washing machine or oven will need a larger cable.

In terms of the cost of a solar system, lower voltages tend to need simpler and cheaper equipment, but heavier and more expensive cabling.  If you try to work at the extremes, for example trying to do everything at 12v or everything at 100v+, you are likely to find yourself developing a very expensive system of solar panels.  Also, except for combining solar panels like I describe above, using equipment to change to another voltage, is also likely to be expensive and limited in it’s capacity.

Also, if you’re tempted to try to connect your system of solar panels to multiple devices, for example a combination of battery charge controllers or inverters, you are also likely to find yourself limited.  Some brands of inverters or charge controllers are ‘stackable’ with the same brand, but you are likely to have a lot of issues with load balancing and race conditions, where one device draws all the power.  You have to be very careful with cable length, and mixing technologies like MPPT and PWM (more on these later).  Here’s a video that explains this a little.  In general, you need to match a single solar panel or combination of panels, at a single voltage, to a single device.

Meter

The meter I use pictured above cost about €15, and works well enough.  It’s really only useful for testing and not gathering long term information, because it only goes up to about 8kWh, then resets to zero.

You can see on the left side of the picture, some small wires.  There are small pins which you can connect to a supplemental power source.  This is necessary, because the meter itself requires some power to operate and retain it’s memory.  It can draw this from the solar panels, but of course only during the day.  At night, there is no power available, and so it loses it’s stored information.  You can connect to the pins with jumper wires used with circuit breadboards, that have a female end.  For example, these.  The minimum required voltage is 4.6, so I cut off the micro USB connector from a standard USB charging cable, and exposed the red and black wires in the cable.  I then used a standard USB charger for the power source.

Grid Tie Inverter

With a solar system you can either use a system of one or more batteries, a grid tie inverter, or both.  A grid tie inverter simply connects to your household wiring, and feeds power back to the grid.  In my case, the one I bought is designed to simply plug into a standard outlet.  It works very well and is trouble free.

There are different suggestions on the Internet, but mostly the suggestion is that if you feed back more than 450W, you should use a dedicated circuit.  In other words, you should hire an electrician or install a dedicated fuse in your fusebox for feeding back onto the grid.  I would take particular care when using a circuit that has sensitive appliances, like computers or those that use high power like ovens or washing machines.

What happens when you feed back onto the grid?  For most people, in most cases, your electric meter will turn backwards.  The main exception to this is if you have a so-called smart meter, that can detect the direction of the current and records this together with the time of day.  Even modern digital meters will usually just turn backwards when you feed power back.

In most cases you can do this without prior arrangements with the utility company, although this may be illegal or against the policies of your utility company.  Consider that it may not be appreciated if your utility company comes to read your meter, and you have a negative usage.

In this way, using a grid tie inverter is like using the power grid as a giant battery, feeding it when you have surplus power, and drawing from it when you need power.  Your electric bill is calculated as the net.

The argument is sometimes used that safety can be an issue in unauthorized feeding back to the grid, especially during a power outage.  You have to consider this yourself, but modern grid tie inverters have what’s known as anti-islanding protection, where they will automatically shut off during a grid failure.

MPPT and PWM

PWM is the standard type of charge controller.  If you have a relatively small solar panel setup, this may be enough, and they are much cheaper than MPPT.  MPPT (Mamimum Power Point Technology) is included with many inverters and the more expensive battery controllers.  Solar panels perform better at their working voltage (18V for 12V panels), and if you attempt to draw too much power from them, the voltage will drop and they will become less efficient.  MPPT attempts to maintain the ideal voltage, but some products implement this differently than others, and are more or less effective.

Most serious solar panel systems will use MPPT.

With MPPT charge controllers it is technically possible to use different voltage on the solar panels than on the batteries, but the charge controllers that do this at higher currents are very expensive, and there are limits in any case.  You will find it difficult to maintain large differences.

My Setup, Issues and Specifications

The solar panel I bought to test, pictured above, is 100cm x 50cm.  I have two places on my roof, one for a row of 6 of these, and another place for a row of 8.  I have another spot on my roof terrace wall for 2 more, and beyond that there are a few places where I might put more if necessary, but they wouldn’t be convenient.  In short, I have a convenient place for 16x 100w solar panels.  Some will get more light than others.

My electric bill is about €500 per year, about €100 of which is paid by a subsidy that I would receive in cash if I didn’t use the electricity.  My goal is to bring my electric bill somewhere between the total amount, and the total amount less the subsidy.  If I generate more electricity than I use, the amount paid back to me by the utility company is trivial.  It’s not my intention to generate 100% of my own electric needs.

I have done some calculations, making some assumptions that may or may not be true, that suggest a 2kW solar panel system would meet all my electricity needs and cost €4000.  This should mean it pays for itself in 8 years.  Since I have convenient space for a 1.6kW system (16x 100w solar panels), I will make due with this and perhaps look for ways to make my house more energy efficient to make up the difference.  I’m expecting to spend €3000 in total, and will do it step by step rather than installing a large system in one go.  As I expand, I will look for ways to eliminate bottlenecks and use the cheapest and most efficient technologies and products.

Results of My Test

At the beginning of this post I explained I bought a solar panel, meter and inverter to test.  The idea was to learn about the equipment, the sun conditions on my roof and so on.  In broad terms the test was a success and proof of concept, but I also learned some things.

First of all, while the meter one time recorded 104w from my 100w panel, proving it is working to specifications, that was really an exception.  In general, the efficiency was much less than that.  I never personally witnessed the panel generating more than 75w, and doubt it frequently goes beyond that.

This is probably due to the angle of the sun with respect to my roof.  On one hand this means some of my expectations weren’t met, however my original calculation that I need a 2kW system does seem to be correct.  This is because while the peak output of the panels are not as high as I expected, the panels are unexpectedly good at lower light conditions.  In particular, on a cloudy day, the panels can usually generate 50W, and in the evening with no direct light, but a lot of indirect light, they can usually do 25W.  Normal panels are about 15-18% efficient, but these are rated at 22-24%, and that may be the difference.

Because the panels rarely reach their peak performance, I can think about using a cheaper grid tie inverter, one that’s rated for fewer watts.  This is because when if the panels do generate more power than expected, the excess power will be wasted, but if this doesn’t happen often, not a lot will be lost.

One issue that came up was the size of the cables needed.  As a rule of thumb, you need a 4mm cable for up to 30amps, and a 6mm cable for 50amps.  These are very heavy cables, and since they are designed to be in the direct sun and outdoors, they are covered with a thick and heavy layer of insulation.

For a 1600W system, the number of amps is calculated by dividing by the number of volts.  So,

A 12V system (operating at 18V) would be 1600/18 = 88 amps

A 24V system (operating at 36V) would be 1600/36 = 44 amps

After pricing various options, and taking into account that I already had one 500w 12v grid tie inverter, I came to the conclusion that I would need 2x6mm cable pairs.  One of the pairs would be 12v and the other would be 24v.  It might also be possible to start at 12V, using what I have, but then later switching to 24V.

I went over and over these calculations, and was really looking for another solution.  These cables are not only expensive, but very heavy and would be difficult for one person to manage.  The main problem was this:

View to my roof

This is the view up from where the cables would run.  It would be a 6-7 meter straight drop from the edge of my roof, and the cables themselves weigh some 10’s of kilos.  I may eventually need to run 2 pair of them, about 50kg combined, and drill holes in my 350 year old wall for them.  If something happened, and one or both of them dropped, the weight would potentially bring the solar panels off the roof with them, or at least rip the wiring out of the panels.  This would have been a lot of trouble to install securely.

They needed to come this far down, because this is where I both had a dedicated circuit to connect them to the house electric wiring, as well as space for inverter(s) and batteries.

The Solution, and the Next Step

I have a spot on my roof good for 6 panels, and already have the one panel I bought to test with.  I will later expand to 16 panels in total, but buying 5 more now is a good step.  What you see a little to the left in the picture above is this:

Back Side of my Roof Terrace

And more specifically, this in the bottom center:

Electric Junction Box

This is a disused junction box, for an outdoor light.  There’s already a hole in the wall for this, and as it turns out, it’s on it’s own electric circuit.

Together with the 5 new panels, I will buy an outdoor grid tie inverter, what’s sometimes called a micro-inverter.  This will convert the power from the solar panels into electricity suitable for feeding back to the grid, at the level of the roof, eliminating the need to run heavy cables down the back of my house.  A normal electric cable can be used for connecting it to the junction box in the picture.

More on this in a future post!