Author: Nick

Reclaiming NIMBY – Nuclear in my Back Yard

What do Plymouth, Weymouth, Southampton and Portsmouth have in common?  They’re all South coast towns in England, and for the past fifty years they’ve all been happy to host small nuclear power plants within a few miles of their town centre.  In the not very distant future, they might be joined by a lot more British towns and cities as nuclear enters a new phase of rolling out SMRs – Small Modular Reactors.  That could be the best energy decision any Government has made for the last seventy years.

The small nuclear reactors these towns host aren’t connected to the grid – they’re the ones that power the UK’s fleet of nuclear submarines which visit these and other ports.  The concept behind an SMR is to scale these small reactors up to a level where they can be manufactured cost effectively as standard power plants which can be located wherever a baseload electricity generator is needed.

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Today is the centenary of the loudspeaker

It’s hard to imagine that it’s only 100 years since the loudspeaker was invented.  On April 1st, 1925, Edward Wente, of the Western Electric Company, New York, filed patent no 1,812,389 for a practical moving coil loudspeaker, although the patent only refers to it as an “acoustic device”.  I doubt that he was aware of just how revolutionary that would be.  Within a year, amplifiers with his design of loudspeaker would be on sale, allowing everyone in a room, or even a theatre to hear the same recording, film or radio broadcast.  Up until then, everyone had been forced to huddle around horns to listen to their records or the radio. 

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Marketing Net Zero

I wonder how many UK householders know that part of their electricity bill is a payment to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem?  It won’t be immediately obvious to most electricity users why they are paying them, but it’s a royalty payment for the use of Einstein’s image in the rather crass adverts which the Government uses in an attempt to persuade everyone to have a smart meter fitted.  It’s only one of an increasing number of invisible charges added to electricity bills to persuade users that they should support the Government’s fast-track approach to net zero. 

The campaign’s not working very well, which should be worrying Mr Miliband and his band of merry net zero mandarins at DESNZ (the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero).  So far, the Smart Metering marketing campaign has spent about £500 million trying to persuade us to do something which is free.  If the UK is going to meet the Government’s decarbonisation targets for home energy, their next task is to persuade us all to sign up for something which will cost millions of home owners tens of thousands of pounds each.  The prospects are not looking good.

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How HP valued Humane

Last week HP announced that they were acquiring the patents and key staff from Humane for $116 million.  A few years ago, I wrote an article questioning the value of patents for startups (of which more later), so it seemed a good opportunity to try to dissect the purchase price to see if it’s possible to put a value on Humane’s patent portfolio.

Humane’s not your average startup.  From the start it was viewed as a potential unicorn.  Its first product – the AI Pin, which turned out to be its downfall, had high ambitions.  Although few reviewers appeared to notice it, if it had succeeded, it would have been the first nail in the coffin of the smartphone.  The product failed to meet that promise, and the company appeared to be heading for a fire sale.  Fortunately for the core team, HP saw their value and snapped them up for the bargain price of $116 million.  Let’s look at how they might have worked out that purchase price.

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EPCs and Net Zero Coercion

If you live in the UK and own or rent a property, you’ll know about EPCs.  Their official name is an Energy Performance Certificate, although most people are more likely to consider them as Entirely Pointless Certificates.   They were introduced by the UK Government in 2007 to give anyone buying or renting a property a guide to its energy efficiency, rating houses in much the same way as electrical appliances on a scale of A (good) to G (worst).  The letter signifies how much carbon dioxide your property is likely to produce each year.  EPCs also provide guidance of how you could “improve” your home, with suggested measures to reduce the CO₂ emissions, along with an indicative cost of doing it.

If you sell or rent your home you have to obtain an EPC.  Currently you are not allowed to rent a property unless it has an A to E rating.  There were proposals to tighten this to an A to C rating, but those proposals have been pushed back.  However, many owners feel that EPCs are likely to be used as a stick to force them to make changes to meet net zero targets.  Although that has been consistently denied, a recent survey by the Social Media Foundation titled “Whose energy transition is it anyway?” shows that concern is still real.  That is reinforced by a new Government consultation on Reforms to the Energy Performance of Buildings Regime, which implies that EPCs may be turned into a net zero coercion tool.

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Is Carbon Capture the new Fusion? 

I’ve just finished reading Charles Seife’s “Sun in a Bottle” – an account of the first fifty years of nuclear fusion research.  It is a fascinating story, not least for the optimism that has driven research into fusion reactors.  At the start of that development, we were repeatedly told that fusion power might appear at five years notice, giving us energy that was “too cheap to meter”.  That last claim was made in 1954.  It was a great vision, which may yet come true, although I doubt that the “too cheap to meter” will ever happen, as there’s a lot of infrastructure needed to deliver electricity.  However, the prospect of fusion as our major source of electricity is still largely a dream. 

What struck me about much of the language used to promote the fusion dream over the last seventy years is that it is almost identical to the promises being used to sell the latest miracle technology – Carbon Capture and Storage.  Carbon Capture and Storage is being promoted as the means of saving the world from climate change with a similar evangelical zeal to the way that fusion was in the 1950s.  You could take any article or press release about either, swap the phrase “Nuclear Fusion” for “Carbon Capture”, or vice versa, and it would feel just as convincing.   Sadly, Carbon Capture’s imminent arrival is just as tenuous as that of nuclear fusion.  Its credibility is being held together by a mesh of minor achievements, suggesting that small academic advances will somehow scale into vast plants which will save us from climate change.  The same optimistic requests of “just a few more year’s work” and “just a few more hundred billions of investment” are blinding our technically-illiterate politicians into believing that the promise is real, without noticing that they are being fed the same story.  In the UK, Ed Miliband sees it as the saviour of his net zero plans.  The bad news is that he thinks he can make it happen by adding the billions of pounds of development costs to future domestic energy bills.

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