I have just one simple response to High Speed 2 (HS2). Why do we need to invest a lot of money, many billions, in further facilitating long distance national travel? This seems like a bad idea. We would be better served by re-engineering the country and economy to reduce our need and indeed our desire for long distance travel.

We’d do well to focus on the Proximity Principle as described by Dr David Fleming in Lean Logic. The principle states that the need for transport is reduced by using space more intelligently, producing goods and services – especially food – where they are needed, rather than having to transport them over long distances. The objective is to build competence across the whole range of economics and culture, and to enable personal lives to be organised so that routine travel and transport are no longer a necessary condition for material needs, nor for leisure, friendships and work.

The HS2 proposal misses this entirely, it seems to be based on the single, dumb, assumption that there’ll be more travelling in the future. To what end? I and I expect most others don’t want to travel more. In fact what we’d all really like to do is to meet all our needs as, Fleming describes above, without having to spend good time, and good money travelling.

Sadly, HS2 is another case of treating the symptoms, not the disease. Something to which transport policy is particularly susceptible.

The unanswerable question at the heart of transport is the one asked by the farm labourer standing bemused one day in the mid-eighteenth century at the side of the Liverpool-Manchester turnpike, crowded with urgently-speeding coaches: “Who would ever have thought that there were so many people in the wrong place?”
From Lean Logic ~ David Fleming 1940-2010

The media is full of stories about gas prices today. First British Gas (+8%) then nPower (+8.8%). I’ve two observations:

Firstly, there are lots of price data floating around, but it is all either relative percentage rises or total average household bills. This is the wrong way to think about energy. Gas is priced in pence per kWh. So why doesn’t any of the media coverage actually report the price? It’s almost as if we aren’t responsible for the kWh by kWh consumption, instead we’re just lumbered with an annual bill.

Secondly, there’s very little talk of the reason for the rises, the real reason. Quite simply it’s that UK production of has peaked in 2000 and started to decline. By 2004 we were no longer self sufficient and became a net importer. Over the last decade production has halved and prices have more than doubled.

These data aren’t shown on the BBC News website, so here they are, compressed into one simple chart:

So what should we be doing about this?

The first priority is the reduce the number of kWh we use, this means reducing the amount of energy used in our homes. The Bristol based Centre for Sustainable Energy has a website full of energy advice here: www.cse.org.uk/pages/energy-advice They also have a freephone energy advice line to call to discuss domestic energy saving. It is very easy to reduce energy consumption by 8%, our bills need not rise.

A couple of years ago I came across a single page from the Daily Mirror from 19th July 1913. It had been in the back of an old picture frame my mother was working on. This would have been interesting in itself but this 97 year old sheet of paper had a very interesting story about the construction of Great Britain’s first oil-driven battleship heralding the beginning of the “Oil Age”.

Winston Churchill underlines the military importance of imported oil, leading the discussion to the country’s potential self sufficiency in oil. Clearly this is decades before off-shore oil discoveries in the North Sea so shale beds are considered along with a recent breakthrough demonstrating how some 20 gallons of oil can be economically produced from a ton of coal.

Of course some things never change, growing world demand was even reported to be forcing up the price of oil in 1913. As it turned out the UK never embarked on economically significant coal to liquids programmes or exploitation of the shale resources.

Further information on HMS Queen Elizabeth is available here: Wikipedia

It’s an interesting coincidence that just as coal was being discussed as a future source of liquid fuel UK production was peaking. The all time peak production rate of UK coal was 1913:

UK Coal Production

The image below shows the construction of an oil storage depot at Killingholme. Interestingly this is now the site of a large ConocoPhillips oil refinery, opened in 1969 and sited here as a good place to land North African crude. The simultaneous discovery of North Sea oil made it a highly successful venture now responsible for 10% of UK petrol and 14% of all other oil products.

Peak oil may be upon us, but I fear the primary challenge for the UK isn’t oil but rather electricity. With rapid decommission of the aging nuclear fleet and falling extraction rates of indigenous natural gas and coal, our three main sources of electricity (accounting for some 95% of our electricity supply) are all in decline.

For this reason, the country is planning an incredible increase in natural gas and coal imports – with apparently little concern for the effect on the balance of payments or the security of supply. Political debate is also approaching the need for a new nuclear build programme. However I am left thinking that although this shortage is arising from declining supply, the solution lies on the demand side.

This earlier article on Dynamic Demand shows a simple method which adjusts the profile of demand with respect to supply, allowing a far greater degree of intermittency to be tolerated without sacrificing utility. This in turn eases the deployment of renewables, usually criticised for their intermittency compared to traditional energy generation.

Light Bulbs
I have recently moved house and was amazed by the lighting arrangements in the new property. Incandescent bulbs throughout, with multiple spot lights in the kitchen and one other room, and not only that but each bulb had a lampshade hanging below it shadowing the room so that even with 100W bulbs the rooms were dim.

We’ve been using compact fluorescents for about 5 years now, but now I’m thinking enough is enough. Tesco et al need to stop selling 100W incandescent light bulbs for 18 pence each. In fact, the Tesco price isn’t the issue; I believe government should legislate against the manufacture, import and sale of incandescent bulbs. There is just no justification for incandescent bulbs and every reason for us to reduce our electricity consumption. The incandescent light bulb is as old as domestic electricity itself, its invention credited to Thomas Alva Edison in 1879, and remains little changed to this day. I think it’s time to bid farewell to this invention, celebrating the profound impact it has had on civilisation whilst at the same time recognising its inefficiency and therefore unsuitability for an energy scarce future.

At a personal level each 100W bulb used for an average of four hours a day will use 146kWh a year, costing £10.22 (at a typical 7 pence per kWh). Compare this to the 20W equivalent compact florescent which only uses 29.2kWh costing just £2.04 over the year, a saving of £8.18 per bulb. Say the average household has five bulbs with that kind of duty cycle and we’re looking at an annual saving of £40.88 on the electricity bill.

Some common misconceptions about modem compact fluorescents are covered here:

Do they flicker when you turn them on?
Yes, they do, but unlike early energy saver lamps a few years ago, the latest designs generally include electronic rapid start circuitry to make the lamp light in less than 1 second with virtually no flickering.
Don’t they give a rather harsh light?
Some older designs had quite a high “colour temperature” (see glossary) which may be perceived as “colder” but many energy saving lamps now use a “warm white” coating to make the light very similar to a normal incandescent bulb.
Do they take time to “warm up”?
The latest compact fluorescent lamps “warm up” very much faster than older designs, typically reaching 95% of their full light output in under a minute.
They are always too long and stick out above my lampshade!
Again, with the latest designs, this need not happen. Many compact fluorescents are now so small that they are virtually the same size, or even smaller, than ordinary bulbs. If the bulb is visible, you can choose from one of the designs that uses a decorative outer bulb to cover the fluorescent tubes.
Lightbulbs Direct

Compact fluorescents do cost more, typically a minimum of £3-5 compared with incandescents at 40 pence (I can only assume the 18 pence Tesco bulbs are a loss leader, similar to the £1.49 Ikea compact fluorescents, so won’t use those figures), however since compact fluorescents last 5 to 10 times longer than incandescent this unit cost differential is negligible.

At the national level, each of the 22 million homes saving 585kWh a year would save 12.9 Terawatt hours. For reference, a large nuclear power station generates approximately 8.8 Terawatt hours a year. So just the single, simple, modest action of replacing the incandescent light bulbs in domestic homes (which could be phased in over several years as incandescent bulbs need to be replaced) would reduce our electricity demand by one and a half nuclear power stations worth.

If government were to ban incandescents in a similar way as lead pipes and asbestos are already banned, then the average household would save around £40 a year and the nation would save the construction, operation and decommission of one and a half nuclear power stations (or equivalent gas/coal imports). Other benefits might include reduced number of household fires started by hot lamps or faulty wiring (less current being drawn through the lighting circuit), fewer people falling off chairs or electrocuting themselves changing bulbs (since the number of changes would be reduced by 80-90%), and less raw materials and landfill needed for construction and disposal of incandescents.

Any absolute ban like this would also remove incandescents from business and industry providing further energy and financial saving on top of those discussed for domestic users.