This time of year is full of music, with carol singers out in force and the ubiquitous Christmas “hits” playing on loop in every store, but a recent discovery has brought music to mind in a different way… The music of the spheres – Pythagorean theory of the universe The ancient Greeks described music…
Read More
A lot is written about the changing shape of the GB power market, with increasing decentralisation, and a shift away from large units of synchronous generation to more dispersed often intermittent renewable generation. Rather less is written about the changing commercial environment on the retail side of the business. The proposed merger of the retail…
Read More
Yesterday scientists from the Universities of Exeter and Oxford together with University College London, announced that climate change is not as bad as previously thought due to modelling errors. In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the scientists concluded that global climate models used in the 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on…
Read More
The UK broke new ground on Friday 21 April 2017 seeing the first continuous 24-hour period since the industrial revolution when coal made no contribution to the power sector. The country which led the way in the introduction of coal for electricity generation with the opening of Thomas Edison’s Holborn Viaduct power station in London in…
Read More
Following on from my previous post on energy efficiency, I was very interested to read about a recent study by the University of Bath which shows a significant gap between the forecast energy efficiency of new buildings and their actual performance once in use. “A correlation analysis indicated little correlation between which variables were thought…
Read More
Peak oil has been in the news again over the last week, but this time in relation to the theory of peak oil demand. This recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, explores a number of potential long-term themes that it believes will be driven by technological change, including the notion that by 2035, we…
Read More
Today my blog on energy innovation, Watt-Logic is one year old! It’s been an interesting and unexpected year. A year of surprises… A year ago Brexit was still seen as a somewhat unlikely prospect, as was President Trump, yet a year on, not only are we on the way out of the EU, but…
Read More
I have highlighted in recent posts some areas of regulatory reform that are needed in order to deliver the energy transition at the lowest possible cost. This is a complex challenge, so it is interesting to consider the work going on in the State of New York, where there a serious attempt to fully re-design…
Read More
13 April 1892 saw the birth of Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar, and descendant of Scottish inventor James Watt after whom the unit of power was named. Also on this day in 1960 the first satellite navigation system was launched and a decade later in 1970, the oxygen tanks on Apollo 13 exploded leading…
Read More
I’ve recently written about the work of the Energy Policy group at Exeter University, however another team at Exeter is exploring a novel way of transport which has significant benefits in terms of speed and efficiency, while also having very low carbon emissions. Geophysicist, Dr Katy Sheen of the University’s geography department has been studying…
Read More