I've realized that I needed to do something about my Blog. I don't have time to spend hours each day updating the blog, so I am relegating the old entries to a "Previous blogs" page. As and when I get round to writing a new Blog, I'll post it on a new page. Meanwhile, here are some of the things that have exercised me in the past!
April 9th 2008: More proof that privatizing the power industry was stupid
There are a couple of interesting things about the Times article today on problems with Scotland's power situation ("Scottish power groups face penalties as watchdog looks into station shutdowns" on Page 43). First, the display shown in the photograph has a number of oddities. How about taking a look and e-mailing me with the ones you spot? But the article itself provides further evidence that the abolition of the CEGB and SSEB was ill-advised, to say the least.
Last autumn, Scottish Power (SP) and Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) took some power stations off line for maintenance. This forced the Grid to send power from England, but the interconnections couldn’t handle the load, forcing the Grid to buy power from SP and SSE at a high price as the two operators brought the plant back on line to meet the demand. Instead of paying £40 per MWhr, the Grid had to pay £750 per MWhr, which cost them £10M extra.
This would never have happened in the good old days of the CEGB, SSEB and NOSHEB. And what has this incident cost? In addition to the existing overhead of having to pay for OFGEM we now have to face the additional costs of this enquiry, which will no doubt provide lucrative employment for huge teams of lawyers and accountants.
OK, the old power authorities had their problems – I recall some extravagances (remember CUTLASS?) – but they were as nothing compared with the present madness. Instead or reining in the CEGB, the Thatcher Government tipped out the entire organization and replaced it with the present motley crowd of hungry wolves and their supporting packs of legal hyenas.
And that’s progress?
April 3rd 2008: "Whitehall's antediluvian policy is absurd"
Typical of the media attitudes that annoy me is the one epitomised by Camilla Cavendish in today's Times under the above heading. I don't know what this lady's engineering or scientific background is, but here are some excerpts:
"Coal produces almost three times as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as gas"
"Renewables offer self-sufficiency"
Both statements are true, but need to be put into context. What would Mz Cavendish have us do? The simple fact is that there is only one way of plugging the energy gap, and that is to build nuclear plants and to start doing it NOW. Meanwhile, the coal-burning plants must continue to operate, whether she likes it or not. Perhaps Mz Cavendish would like to answer the question I posed on December 22nd, and then see how stupid her view is. (Not that the Government approach is any more sensible.)
I repeat: politicians and media people should stay out of important engineering decision-making!
March 31st 2008: Apologies for absence!
I am sorry that my daily rantings have been absent for almost two months. The primary reason was that I spent a lot of time organising Doug Lightfoot to come over to the UK and present his excellent lecture, "Nobody's Fuel", at the IET on March 12th. Nothing's ever simple, and the weather in Canada threw a wobbly and delayed Doug's flight by a day. Still, he finally made it, and over 250 people were in the main Lecture Theatre at Savoy Place to her his clear message: we have to do something - and do it soon - or face the consequences. And the future is nuclear!
This leads me to the sad thought that the UK, which pioneered nuclear power stations, will have no option but to buy reactor designs from overseas. Oh, the politicians will trumpet that so many thousand jobs are being created in the construction of these plants, but these will be transient, second-flight jobs. The French, German or American designers and manufacturers will have stolen a march on us.
The most likely candidate is the Franco-German EPR, no doubt a splendid and safe design, but not ours.
February 3rd 2008: More on that Plane Crash
One of the newspapers has picked up the idea that I mooted a few weeks ago, about the Boeing being brought down by what the paper calls "a high-tech jamming device" used for the Prime Minister's protection. Only time will tell (that is, unless the idea of the safety of a passenger aircraft being compromised by the security services is ever allowed to be admitted), but in any case I think that aircraft designers should think very carefully about "fly by wire" technology being used for critical flight controls without the application of very, very secure defences.
In my own field I would advocate the use of triple-redundant, fault-tolerant technology. It would be interesting to know the details of the safety systems used by Boeing (or Airbus for that matter). Is this another case of the geeks bamboozling the non-specialist mechanical and electrical engineers? It's like "the Emperor's new suit of clothes" - non-specialists are sometimes unwilling to admit they don't understand what the computer gurus are saying, and so keep quiet when they should really be speaking out to prevent absolute foolishness.
January 27th 2008: Bankside Power Station
This morning on Radio 4 somebody was enthusing about Liverpool Cathedral and said that the only other place he knew of that could match its vastness was the Tate Modern. That triggered another explosion from me. Society has really gone stark, staring mad. The arts world has taken over a power station, stripped it of its machines and gawps at the shell - now renamed 'The Tate Modern' - and oohs and aahs its cavernous hulk. This was a Power Station, for God's sake! It served London from 1947 to 1952. The building itself was magnificent, but it was primarily a power station. As an engineer I find it very, very sad to see people, mostly with absolutely no knowledge of what that place represented, wandering around, looking at works of art.
It's as if somebody had unearthed my long-dead grandmother, put her in a glass case and promoted her remains as "a work of art". I weep tears of frustration!
January 22nd 2008: More on the BA crash
Following yesterday's blog, I've been sent information on more incidents where mobile phones have been identified as definitely interfering with aircraft controls. But another intriguing theory has also risen.
Many terrorist bombs are designed to be triggered by mobile phone signals. When the terrorist wants to detonate the bomb he rings the mobile number, and that action triggers the explosion. Countermeasures reportedly consist of powerful transmitters that broadcast on the mobile phone frequencies, effectively jamming them.
Given the strong security presence at Heathrow on that day, due to the Prime Minister's imminent departure for China, it seems not improbable that the security services would set up such a jamming system at the airport. If that was so, is it not possible that the powerful jamming signals interfered with the Boeing's engine command system?
That raises another interesting question. What will happen if the investigation by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch finds that this did actually happen? The mind boggles.
Whether it transpires that the incident was initiated by a passenger using a mobile phone or the security services deploying a jamming system, the implications for the aviation industry are worrying. It's not just 777s that could be affected: any aircraft with 'fly-by-wire' flight command systems are vulnerable. Until the truth is discovered, the authorities should immediately come down hard on mobile phones on aircraft - treating them as they would weapons - and any visit to an airport by a high-profile party should be reason to stop all flight operations for as long as the risk is present.
Whatever! I'm just glad that I'm not flying anywhere at present.
January 21st 2008: "We're coming in to land"
Here's a thought! There seems to be no definite indication of mechanical failure on the BA 777 that crashed at Heathrow last week. This has made me wonder about a possible cause. I am not an aircraft engineer, but I wouldn't be surprised to be told that the engine commands were all issued electronically. Could it be that the control electronics were interfered with by a mobile 'phone?
Flight attendants and passengers will be aware of the syndrome where, as their aircraft begins its approach, a businessman (or woman) switches on their mobile 'phone and says something like: "We're jus coming in to land. If you bring the car round now I should be through Customs by the time you arrive". I know its total conjecture, but it does seem to fit: with what we know (or don't know). Look at the lack of an immediately obvious mechanical cause (which I'm sure we would have heard about by now if it had been found), the occurrence in the final seconds of the approach, when the mobile phone syndrome I've described is known to happen. And finding the evidence will be very hard - the signal was transient, and all that would remain would be that - for some inexplicable reason - the engines failed to respond to the command for more thrust.
When I mentioned this idea to an engineer friend last week he agreed. Then he smiled and said: "Shades of 'Far Point' isn't it?"
Was my book prophetic? Sooner or later the kind of computer-assisted disaster that I described there will happen. It's just possible that it happened last week.
January 18th 2008: A simple way of meeting the UK's 15% renewables target?
Apparently, the EU is to demand that the UK should meet 15% of its energy needs by the use of renewables. No mention of nuclear, so that's it folks - 15% of all the electricity you use should come from wind, tidal and solar power and by burning biomass. Oh, I know that the target includes gas, but the inference is still that we have to step up our electricity-from-renewables use by a large factor.
I've addressed the question of "spinning reserve" above. Has anybody factored this in? I doubt it.
In our climate solar seems a forlorn hope, but here's an idea. I have a large south-facing roof on my house, which would be ideal for supplying some of my own energy needs. It would be simple to put PV panels up there and (my pet idea) couple these to the existing immersion heater - which, by good luck, is in the room directly underneath. I use that heater only in the summer, so I could easily put in a changeover switch to change from mains to PV when I need extra hot water. The Sanyo PV panels I've looked at generate about 40V, so six of them in series would produce 240V, and could provide 200W on a sunny day. No match for 3kW, but on all the time it would do the trick. As an engineer, I don't see why the immersion heater should mind being fed from dc - as it's an inductive load I'd probably get more current into it from the same voltage. The quotes I've got all use inverters to turn the PV panels' output to ac, to feed the rest of the electrical loads in my house and possibly export to the Grid. Why go to all that trouble, when I could heat my water very simply by the scheme I've described? Perhaps someone will tell me.
The cost of PV+inverter systems is many thousand of pounds, but although Council grants are available, they provide negligible help. I've calculated that the payback will be 40 years, and I know I don't have that much time left! OK, it could increase the market value of the house, but by how much?
Whether or not my idea is viable, there are a lot of roofs in the UK, and even with our country's poor sunshine levels it seems to me that, by supporting such schemes, the Government could go a long way to meeting the 15% target.
January 16th 2008: The real threat to the planet
People often question my stance on CO2. It's simply this: this is not in itself the real risk, though it is a by-product of it.
To see the real culprit in one of its disguises you have only to go to a part of the world that - within my children's lifetime - was a lovely, isolated place, and which is now ruined: covered by an ugly sprawl of luxury developments, populated by hordes of tourists. Lovely forests are hacked down, beaches levelled, inconvenient villages removed, local economies transformed into unnatural and unsustainable monsters. Power and telephone lines are constructed to bring electricity and communications to the areas, precious, water resources are tapped and squeezed to supply the inhabitants and to create lovely rolling acres of green golf-courses and gardens, sewage is pumped into antiquated and inadequate disposal systems. These developments are spreading like a cancerous melanoma across the loveliest parts of the planet.
They are cynically made to look so very attractive, to pull in more and more people, to draw in ever increasing piles of money. The tourists and immigrants arrive, speaking their own language, demanding foodstuffs and goods that are familiar to them back home (while paying lip-service to "just loving that local speciality, my dear"). They pour in through ferry terminals and airports and drive their rented cars along kilometers of newly constructed roads to reach these havens.
In another disguise, people in remote villages - whose forefathers have lived in the area for generations, and lived by virtually unchanging standards - are urged to buy cars, TV's, refrigerators and so on. They are lured like mesmerised mice by the piper's beguiling tune. He sings, "Come on, come on! Buy, buy, buy!"
Yes, my friends: the real threat is man!
January 11th 2008: The nuclear debate on Radio 4 tonight
Just heard Jonathan Dimbleby announce that he will be chairing a panel on "Any Questions" tonight, debating the decision to build 5 nuclear power stations. It's a bit like passing a serious accident on the road: some deep instinctive urge draws my eyes towards something my better self just doesn't want to see. If I listen I shall get so angry that I'll probably throw the radio out of the window.
But engineers need to speak up! We need somebody to say the things I said yesterday. I'd also like to hear some analysis of the realities. If the protesters are afraid of people being killed and injured, shouldn't they focus their attention on road accidents, where over 2 million people die each year? Whose ideas have killed more people: Robert Oppenheimer or Henry Ford?
January 10th 2008: Nuclear power for the UK
The news today is the Government is going to give the go-ahead to the construction of a new batch of nuclear power stations. About time! We've been lucky (so far) that the weather has been kind to us, and there is little doubt that if it hadn't, the lights would have started to go out all over the country. And it's not just lights: it's computers, lifts, escalators, heating & ventilation systems, hospital equipment .... the list is a long one. And to those companies who say they have adequate back-up power systems installed I'd ask them when they last tested them under real operational conditions: have you run up generators, checked fuel supplies, are cooling supplies available, checked automatic changeover systems and so on?
We need the new power stations on stream soon, but I hope that the checks and balances are adequate. Our present nuclear stations were all designed and constructed by the CEGB. Whatever people say, this organisation worked efficiently and safely. With engineers strongly present all the way up the CEGB's management tree, one could be sure that safety was never an issue. We don't have that situation now, and to those who say that commercial pressures will never be allowed to jeopardise safety - because of a strict regulatory regime - I'd say, "That will only be true when the Regulator is effective, adequately staffed and trained, and armed with teeth to check and intervene at each stage of the engineering process".
Have we got enough trained, experienced engineers available for the design, construction and safety-monitoring of these plants? Anybody who thinks we have needs to have their head examined! And if people say that we can get them from overseas, what does that mean? The whole of the developed world is short of engineers, and if we are going to be flooded with "engineers" from Eastern Europe, for example, the difficulties of ensuring that they comply with our engineering standards will just add another job to the mountain facing the regulators.
The other thing I fear is political interference. People may not realize that the CEGB came under strong pressure at one time - mainly from Tony (then Wedgwood, I think) Benn to adopt the RBMK reactor design being promoted by his friends and heroes in the USSR. It was only strong pressure from engineers that stopped this, and the UK being landed with a reactor that was inherently unstable.
January 9th 2008: Wallcharts
Now look! As part of my New-Year resolutions and a major re-decoration project, I am about to heave out a big collection of power-station memorabilia. Among these is a collection of large cut-away colour wall-charts of power stations: conventional, CHP, hydro, nuclear and so on. I'd be happy to send these to anybody who will give them a good home. I feel they should be useful to schools, universities, colleges and so on. It seems such a waste to throw them away, but out they must go. So if anybody wants them, please e-mail me quickly!
January 3rd 2008: Kingsnorth
Break over! Another new year, another bunch of resolutions. Having listened to the BBC's Today programme this morning and heard the clever, articulated but totally doolally speaker from Fools of the Earth spouting off about E-ON's plans to build a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, I'm breaking one of my resolutions already - I will get annoyed and I will speak up.
Forget Carbon Emissions for a moment: I wish legislation could be framed to force these well-meaning people to balance their Opinion Emissions. Every time they propose stopping the construction or operation of, say. 1,000MW of power plant, they should be required to propose how they would replace it - in the same time frame and at the same cost - with an equal amount of practical and reliable generating capacity that would be acceptable to them.
Eventually, by their endless badgering, these people force power companies to do things that actually make very little sense. The accountants and economists who run the companies overrule the practical and realistic engineers, and force them to do things they would rather avoid. So, rather than proceed with building nuclear plant, because of FoE's wailing about the disposal of radioactive waste, they propose to build plant that will store huge amounts of carbon. Think about it chaps - the radioactivity of nuclear waste decays with time: carbon's there forever. If you're worried that some geological upheaval may thrust nuclear waste to the surface at some future time, why not worry that a similar event would release the carbon that you've so carefully buried? And instead of investing in the proven technology of nuclear or fossil-fuelled plant, they will be spending millions on a new and unproven technology that offers the prospect of storing up a pollutant for the future. Doh!
December 22nd 2007: Happy Christmas!
Over the Christmas break I shall be adding to this Blog only if something gets up my nose, so let's hope we all have a quiet and enjoyable Christmas. Meanwhile, I'll leave you with a question: With all the talk about Global Warming and mankind's contribution to it through the production of CO2 , how much - as a percentage - of the planet's total CO2 emissions is caused by human activity? Try and send your answers to me via the guestbook, by January 11th.
December 21st 2007: 24/7 workers
BBC Radio 4 this morning, on the "Today" programme (and that's another thing you don't want me to get started on!), there was an item about people who are going to be working over Christmas. Of course, the usual suspects were lined up - those in broadcasting and the hospitality industry and so on, which is probably as far as the attention span of the "Today" team can go. No mention of those in the water and energy utilities, on whom society is totally dependent. How would those presenters on Radio 4 get on with their so-called "jobs" with no lights in the studios, no lifts, no computers and no broadcasting equipment?
Well, some of us out here are thinking of them. Thank you, guys and gals! I, for one, will think of you when I switch on my lights.
December 20th 2007: Speak up, engineers!
I think it's time that professional engineers spoke up more loudly to defend their industries from all the balderdash that's hurled at them. (Don't get me going on Global Warming!) We are increasingly driven by sensation-seeking media and politicians who make ill-informed decisions. For example: the general public ought to realize that for every wind turbine that's built, a conventional power station (coal, oil or nuclear) of equivalent size has to be operating, standing by, and ready to deliver power if the wind drops. It's called "spinning spare", and it is needed because you can't just press a button and get power - it can take several hours to start and run up a power station. (Yes, I know that pumped storage is almost instantaneous, but our reserves of that type are tiny.)
I remember the days before privatization, when the upper management of the CEGB, SSEB and NOSHEB was made up entirely of engineers. Real engineers, people with proper technical training, who had worked in the industry and understood its operations. Now? The Boards of the utility companies are stuffed with academics, economists, financiers and management consultants, with token engineers who have little or no experience at the coal face.
December 19th 2007: Drax the polluter
I have always respected the Times newspaper, but in today's edition there's an article that really annoyed me. It was about Drax power station, and it said that "Drax was the nation's biggest polluter". Ooer! Drax is the biggest power station in the UK, and so it does produce more CO2 than any other, but Megawatt for Megawatt it is by far our cleanest power plant. Also, it uses advanced technology to eliminate sulphur from its stack emissions. If Drax were to be taken off line, the demand for electricity could be met only by running other, smaller power stations, which would then release much more CO2 and sulphur into the atmosphere.
