Power by the people

Clever people will save the planet.

Politicians worry about how to generate all the electricity the population needs without burning fossil fuel. They are asking the wrong questions.

Instead of trying to provide us with electricity, why don't they look for ways in which we can generate what we need ourselves?

Scientists are investigating how to generate power from the light which passes through the glass in our windows.

Now there is news of clever people at the University of Texas who are investigating how microscopic windmills can do the job:

http://www.wired.com/design/2014/01/mini-windmills-power-iphone/?cid=17794184

There must be clever young minds in British universities who can think beyond 240 volts generated by a smoky coal-fired power station somewhere.

There is a fortune to be made by someone who can let people generate small amounts of power when they need it and sell them devices which need only small amounts of power to work.

Awakening

Sad to read of Phil Everly’s death.

The Everly Brothers were part of that exotic American culture which was so exciting to a youngster growing up in 1950s Newcastle. So exotic we couldn’t hear it on the BBC, we had to tune our radios to Radio Luxembourg and put up with Bird dog fading and coming back as the AM signal bounced around the mountains.

Music is so important to those of us lucky enough to be in that post-war generation.

In our schooldays, we had Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Everlys, Eddie Cochran and Duane Eddy. No one was called Buddy, Elvis, Chuck or Duane in Newcastle.

In our teens, the culture suddenly became local and even more exciting as groups in Liverpool, London and, yes, even Newcastle burst into the charts. There were boys called John and Paul, Eric and Alan in my school.

In the 50s the news was all grown-up stuff. In the 60s, we were in the news. What we listened to, what we wore. What Bob Dylan sang was more relevant than what politicians said.

Everyone remembers the time when they moved from child to adult as the golden years. My golden years coincided with the country changing from a regimented do-as-everyone-else-does society to the do-your-own-thing society we live in now.

Little Susie wasn’t the only one who woke up.

A glimmer of light

This has been a good week.
Parliament decided it did not want to join America in bombing Syria.
MPs are horrified by the cruelty in Syria, but don't think the response to military violence should be more military violence.
We are starting to see the light.

Thinking outside the bomb

Labour and the Conservatives say we must continue having submarines armed with nuclear missiles on patrol at all times.
The Liberals are the only ones saying: Let's find a better way of keeping us safe.
Subs with nuclear missiles are the answer to the question: How do we prevent Russia from bombing us? 
As the only countries which go to war these days are America and us, having a re-think seems a sensible idea.
Does anyone seriously think today that Russia or China is likely to start bombing us? Terrorist are likely to bomb us; other countries are not.
The two countries which are keen to get nuclear missiles are North Korea and Iran, both of which are more likely than the rest of us, to be attacked by another country.
If we were realistic about this, we should sell our Tridents and our submarines to North Korea and Iran and spend the money on terrorist-prevention instead.
This is no more stupid than spending £20 billion to prevent something which was likely 50 years ago but isn't now.

Killing people

I am fascinated by the shouting going on over drones and gas.

Drones are OK because we are flying them and we are killing bad guys with them.

Gas is not OK because Assad may be using it to kill the rebels.

Ordinary people are not allowed to kill other people. Governments are allowed to kill people.

To explain this conundrum to us, governments and the media talk of honour, duty and our boys when talking about the people they train to do the actual killing and evil, barbaric and terrorist when talking about the people they send our boys to kill.

When we come up with better killing technology, drones for example, that is giving our boys the equipment they need.

When the bad guys come up with better ways of killing: gas in Iraq and Syria, nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran, backpack bombs and crashing planes from the fundamentalists, we cry foul and run to the United Nations.

If you believe that killing people is an acceptable way of solving problems, don’t be surprised if your opponent takes the same view. How either of you does the killing is irrelevant.

We are good guys and whatever we do is honourable. They are bad guys and whatever they do is evil. We have been told this by our betters since the days of the crusades.

I am astonished we have not found more civilised ways of solving our disputes in all that time.

I am equally astonished that we, the public, still buy this nonsense.

Don't buy, rent

More evidence of the rapid changes in the game.
Adobe, the people who make very expensive software for designing pages or manipulating pictures, will no longer sell their software in shrink-wrapped boxes for you to install on your computer. Instead, they will rent you access to the software in the cloud for 20 or 30 dollars a month.
This follows the lead of Microsoft, another purveyor of expensive, shrink-wrapped software. They are now offering Office 365 which you can use, in the cloud, for a modest price each month.
There are clear advantages for companies and individual professionals. You don't need to manage installations, updates and crashes. You can pay for it as day-to-day expenses, rather than a big licence fee now and then.
Google are to offer a music-streaming service. Why buy, collect and store music when you can play what you want whenever you want it. Play lists instead of LPs or CDs.
Apple, who introduced adults to digital music, are considering the same.
And BT are offering Premiership football, which used to be something the broadcasters had to themselves, following the lead of Netflix who commissioned a series with a star, which, again, used to be something only the broadcasters did.
All this is possible because we live in a connected world, where you can get what you want when you want it. And there are many more people offering it than there were in the old world.

Power to the people

Ecotricity, the company from which I buy my electricity, have just put up two wind turbines at Ballymena in Northern Ireland which will be used to provide power to the Michelin tyre factory there.
This is what people did 100 years ago. The Lots Road and Greenwich power stations in London were built in the early 1900s to provide power for trams and underground trains.
There was no National Grid. If you wanted electricity for your business, you had to build a power station.
Over time, we built bigger power stations to provide power to whoever needed it and now, it is apparently the Government’s responsibility to ensure that we have enough generating capacity to keep all our fridges and iPads running.
Ecotricity are not just making money from supplying electricity, they are looking to find better ways of providing it. The wind turbines at Ballymena follow a couple Ecotricity put up in Dundee for the Michelin factory there. They say that delivering electricity to a specific business is more efficient than adding that capacity to the grid.
Good for them. We need new thinking in this business. Instead of calculating how much electricity we are using, how much we might use in the future and building gas or nuclear stations to deliver that, why don’t we work out how to use less electricity and how to generate some of it ourselves?
The ARM company which makes chips for mobile phones and tablets, got rich by producing chips which needed less power than those produced by Intel. A government would get lots of green points if it told manufacturers their fridges and TV sets had to use 30% less power by 2015 or else.
And it is possible to build houses which use next to no electricity for heating or cooling. Why not make this part of the building regs?
It is also possible to generate electricity from the daylight which falls on glass. Tiny amounts so far, but I’m confident that clever youngsters can work out how to generate enough power in our own homes to run the energy-efficient devices we will all have if the government takes my advice.
We don’t need more power. We need to work out how to use less.