Archive for energy policy
The film “Minority Report” – Pre-Crime, and Pre-Bribe
Posted by: | CommentsPeople may have seen the rather good (IMHOP) film “Minority Report” starring Tom Cruise.
The basic plot idea is that in the future the authorities have a means of detecting serious crimes just before they are about to happen, using a sort of hi tech clairvoyant.
Tom Cruise and his hi tech cops then zoom off and arrest the about-to-commit-murder criminal, and he is charged with Pre-Crime – a crime he didn’t commit but would have committed but for the police intervention. It’s a good yarn. Read More→
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Professor David Elliot, Open University criticises New Labour Policy On Nuclear Energy
Posted by: | CommentsNuclear expansion? Not in my name
The public debate and the government consultations in 2006 and 2007 on nuclear
power were framed in the context of a replacement programme for existing
reactors scheduled to close. On this basis it has been suggested that there was
if not a clear consensus then at least a majority in favour.
However, subsequently the government began to talk about goin Read More→
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Plotting the performance of a technology against the money or effort invested in it most often yields an S-shaped curve: slow initial improvement, then accelerated improvement, then diminishing improvement.
These S-curves can be used to gain insight into the relative payoff of investment in competing technologies, as well as providing some insight into when and why some technologies overtake others in the race for dominance. Analyzing renewable energies from such a technology S-curve perspective reveals some surprising and important implications for both government and industry. Using data on government R&D investment and technological improvement (in the form of cost reductions), we show that both wind energy and geothermal energy are poised to become more economical than fossil fuels Read More→
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A Government still addicted to petrol – article by David Strahan in the Independant
Posted by: | CommentsSunday, 26 April 2009
“All targets and no trousers” seemed to be the gist of the reaction from environmentalists to last week’s Budget. Greens welcomed the introduction of new, legally binding, carbon-reduction goals but attacked the lack of a clear road map showing how they could be achieved.
Some applauded policies such as the extra subsidy for offshore wind and investment in building efficiency, but attacked overall funding of £1.4bn as miserly in comparison to the enormity of the climate crisis and recent financial bailouts.
But for those who are more worried about oil depletion, the Budget was utterly hollow. The car scrappage scheme came without efficiency conditions attached, the return to inflation-plus fuel duty increases was welcome but timid compared to the escalator that was killed off by the petrol protests of 2000, and tax breaks for North Sea operators will do little to stem the decline in output. Production has halved since its peak in 1999, and is now dropping at 7 per cent a year, dragging Britain ever deeper into import dependency.
Still less will the Budget improve the global oil outlook. The International Energy Agency forecasts a “supply crunch” early in the next decade, Shell predicts a production plateau from 2015, and the head of the Libyan National Oil Company sees peak oil looming.
In contrast, the big energy announcement of the week looked far bolder. The Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, said new coal-fired power stations would only be approved if they included a demonstration plant for carbon capture and storage (CCS) from day one, and a commitment by the energy company to retrofit the entire power station once the Environment Agency judged CCS to be technically and commercially proven. This came beside plans to fund four of the new pilot plants through a 2 per cent levy on customers’ bills.
The move was welcomed by environmental groups and is an advance on the Government’s previous dither in this area. But it is also a spectacular gamble and has three obvious risks.
One, pilot plants will capture only a quarter of new power station emissions .
Two, the technology may not be viable, at least not in time, posing a dilemma in the mid-2020s: whether to close the power stations or sacrifice the climate.
Three, coal may be less abundant than the Government assumes. In 2000, the global coal supply was expected to last 277 years, but by 2006 that had plunged to 140 years as consumption rose and estimates of reserves were revised downwards. One forecasting group predicts peak coal as early as 2025, Mr Miliband’s deadline for retrofitting CCS.
The Government seems too timid to confront peak oil publicly, but reckless enough to gamble on potentially unabated coal emissions and the coal supply.
Why not bet on true sustainability: get serious about energy efficiency, renewables, electrification of transport and a European supergrid, and commit the sort of money they have recently been throwing at the banking industry? The stakes are even higher.
The writer is author of The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum man
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Relevance Paradox
Posted by: | CommentsDonald Rumsfeld, Tacit Knowledge and the Relevance Paradox
Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge
“Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge – as expounded in March 2003, when the then US defence secretary engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What Rumsfeld forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns” – things we don’t know that we know, all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it” – Slavoj Zizek Guardian, Saturday June 28 2008.
Of course “how we perceive reality and intervene in it” is in fact tacit knowledge.
Rumsfeld actually put it very well, we all suffer from “unknown unknowns” and these can allow us to have technically incorrect opinions, which we sincerely believe are soundly based, but are not. Our certainty comes from the knowledge we have which appears to be complete, so we see no reason to investigate other spheres which we already know (or think we know) are wrong or irrelevant.
Another way of putting this is the Relevance Paradox, where there is important information which if we had, we would use. but because we don’t have it, we don’t at that time see the relevance of gaining it. (Its a bit like losing your glasses – if you had your glasses, you could find your glasses, but without them you can’t)An example of this would be that many people sincerely believe that because self evidently it is not windy all the time, then wind power cannot be a serious contender to generate large amounts of power. They only hold this view because their view seems to them reasonable so they have never felt the relevance of finding out about grid inter-connectors, switchable loads, standby plant and so on, because their present state of knowledge tells them this is irrelevant.
Civil engineers built numerous irrigation schemes in the post war years, which inflicted serious water born diseases on people they were supposed to help – they didn’t know about the UN guidelines on how to simply design these schemes to minimise the occurrences of these diseases – the engineers were the victims of the relevance paradox.
The solution to the The Relevance Paradox and the means to acquire tacit knowledge are to become involved in the dialogues of the Claverton Network, and the use of the concept of Interlock Research, both of which were designed with these issues in mind.
Fred Starr’s Fifth Unknown
Dr Fred Starr has also pointed out the fifth unknown for politicians, managers and sales people are the “Known Knowns which they would prefer to remain Unknown”.
Or rather, as is often the case, they are Known, but no one dares talk about them for fear of losing their job or some other retribution. This is of course the well known taboo.
6th Known – Known Knowns by some people
That is things known or suspected by some people, that people in power don’t want even discussed in case they prove to be true, meantime they can pretend they are unknown. This would be things like the graduate engineers who interconnected the National Grid sub regions in the 30s one night as an experiment, without telling there bosses and against all instructions. They turned it all off again after a while with no ill effects. Whilst the sky didn’t in fact fall in on them, when what they had done leaked out, they all got a jolly good telling off. It was normal to run interconnected all the time by 1938″
Or we could cite the astonishing fact that Britain’s power stations waste heat energy equally to the entire import of natural gas, and it could have been harvested, as to the Danes to heat building, at a stroke halving our gas imports, and CO2 emissions from power stations. The Civil Service does not want this discussed or known, preferring to allow, for reasons we can only gas at, and presumably not unconnected with non executive directorships when they retire, to allow the large energy companies to carry on selling us as much energy as they can, rather than a lot less of what we actually need.
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