Juice Sustainable Innovation Workshop

The Juice Sustainable Innovation Workshop is currently excepting idea submissions from TSBE Research Engineers here

UPDATE: idea submission now closed, we have four ideas, really looking forward to the day

Didcot A Power Station Visit

Yesterday, we went on a tour of Didcot Power Station that was kindly organised by Marek. Having never been inside a power station before and only studied how they work since October this tour was extremely pleasing to see all that theory put into work!

Since going commercial and providing electricity to the public in 1970 this 2000MW power station was initially coal fired and at peak times burning 18,000kg of coal a day. Didcot A, as it is called, has four 500MW generating units. Didcot B, constructed and opened in 1997 made use of the combined cycle gas technology (CCGT), one of the first of its kind in England, and boasting an impressive 55-56% burning efficiency generating 1,460MW of electricity. Due to the Kyoto Protocol and Renewables Obligation Didcot A had received some very impressive upgrades being co-fired with gas and biomass.

Overall, we had a very nice tour. The introduction demo and that electric demo board in the visitors lounge was very interesting. Viewing the genius work of the engineers, all that pipework, generating units and cooling towers up close was absolutely amazing. And finally the control room with the mascots conveniently placed next to the warning lights maybe to soften the impact of a serious warning? :) It was a beautiful day and our tour guide was very passionate about this power station. She did emphasise that the six cooling towers were not responsible for producing carbon emissions as their only emissions iwere vapour (which sort of forms clouds). It's the tall, thin, exhaust chimney that everyone should worry about.

Gehry not so green?

The Architect of Bilboa's Guggenheim museum criticises the LEED credit scheme.

'Lets Save Michigan'

Interesting site that has crowdsourced a design competition to develop a poster. It shows an interesting possibly unprompted attention to sustainable issues in the built environment, and the challenge of visualising these issues.

TSBE in the NEWS!!

Just thought I'd post this news item from the Uni of Reading about our very own TSBE RE's Stacey and Robert!! well done both, this is great publicity.

http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/newsandevents/releases/PR270348.aspx

Open Source Sustainability

I understand the motivation for proprietary software companies to operate sustainably and the top down management that can enforce this, but does anyone have any idea how the open source community is thinking of tackling sustainablity? I can see how it could be implemented naturally via a code weight and speed angle. I've not googled this, so feel free to state the obvious.

I was excited to read on Zotero's home page a headline 'building a sustainable Zotero project' but it was talking about economic sustainability :)

Government targets... anyone find them hard to make sense of?

Anyone get the feeling that all the different targets reductions that get bandied about are very confusing?

I thought I'd got comfortable with the 15% reduction on 1990 levels of CO2 by 2020 for the UK, of which the electricity sector will contribute 20% renewables to. That and the long term target of 60% by 2050, later increased to 80%.

Now I'm confused, because in the article in the link I've provided (and in others that appear from googling), the targets for electricity in the UK are announced as 30% renewables and a further 10% from nuclear. Granted, these are quite recent (the announcement from Ed Miliband as far as I gather was made around July '09), but I haven't heard these new targets quoted in any more recent paper or indeed in our MSc lectures. Was this perhaps only an aspiration and not a legally binding target, or something else?

Clarity and politics don't mix, one can only conclude.