This piece about UX research on smart meters could be retitled “How I Quit Smoking The Data”, to say nothing of this one. I really dislike a lot of the funky energy/M2M/Internet of Things concepts because they basically shame you for boiling the kettle, and either work because you do daft middle class lifestyle bollocks…
Read More how I quit smoking energy dataI saw someone like “Guy Wankey” from Policy Exchange on the telly today about solar power. He was very keen to say that it doesn’t make up very much of the grid today. This is apparently a reason not to use it tomorrow, in much the same way as the tiny numbers of computers in…
Read More Minor supplementary pointHere’s Tory MP Greg Barker just giving up, giving up and passing out the talking points from his financial backers directly, without any further intervention on his part. npower response to Labour energy policy announcement http://t.co/hf1lbbZZj3 — Greg Barker (@GregBarkerMP) September 24, 2013 He may yet delete it, so: Ha ha, Tories doing PR for…
Read More A slight return to Gambetta vs. NpowerRealClimate reviews a 1981 attempt to forecast the climate impact of CO2 emissions, and finds that it’s basically pretty good (see also The Register eating their words slowly). Which is what you’d expect – the physical processes involved aren’t that complicated at that sort of low-earth orbit viewpoint, and the only things that could really…
Read More Shouty letter-writing egghead winsSherwood Rowland, one of the scientists responsible for discovering that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer and fixing the problem, has died. Realclimate has a good write-up, as does Eli Rabett, who makes the excellent point that we needed to invent quite a bit of the chemistry involved before we could discover there was a…
Read More Failure of a lobbyThinking about my last post brought one of the ideas in this one to mind, especially given today’s front page. That is, was the miners’ strike a strategic bombing campaign? You what? But consider the strategy the NUM adopted. The basic idea was to concentrate on the supply of coal to the steel industry –…
Read More the 1980s considered as a battle in the air war over GermanySwinging off a discussion at Jamie Kenny’s of climate deniers, I wonder what Jamie thinks about Steve Levine’s thesis here that China’s emerging culture of mass protest, the famous Mass-Group Incidents or MGIs, may have major and positive consequences for Chinese energy policy and therefore for the world. It’s surely time we started calling the…
Read More MGIs for cleaner skies, and Power Tool of the WeekWe keep having power cuts. In eight days, we had three, all of them between 5.30am and 6am, which all lasted most of the morning. I know exactly when they happen, because the smoke alarms start beeping and wake me up. My partner claims she was warmer on a demo than she was in the…
Read More local news: power cutsPessimism: if we keep burning the coal, eventually keeping warm will be the least of our worries. Where’s your discount rate now, Timmeh? Stupidity: can we get out of this Bruce Sterling novel now please? Blame: it’s Coalistan vs. Everyone Else. Logistics: China can’t lay railway track fast enough to move as much coal as…
Read More pessimism+optimism = futureThis story from Rajiv Chandrasekharan about two rival approaches to sorting out Kandahar’s electricity supply is informative, but not just about its apparent topic. Basically, the US Army wants to go for a quick fix, installing a lot of mobile generators and trucking in the diesel fuel, in order to get the lights on as…
Read More it’s called “power” for a reason