|
Executives from The Shaw Group, the Louisiana-based engineering and construction giant, were in London yesterday on a PR offensive. Shaw, which has 2,000 employees in the UK and runs a pipe fabrication factory for the energy sector in Derby, is a partner with Westinghouse, the firm bidding to build its AP1000 nuclear reactor in Britain.
Shaw, which owns a fifth of Westinghouse, is hoping to capitalise on the UK’s nuclear resurgence, and is making the right noises about involving British engineering firms in construction of new nuclear reactors. Similarly, Westinghouse itself, which is building the AP1000 in China and has secured a number of other contracts to construct it in the United States, the country’s first new reactors for decades, has long maintained it favours a “buy where we build” strategy that could create billions of value in the UK economy.
Jeffrey Merrifield, senior vice president of Shaw’s power group, says the company will be “hoping” to partner with British engineering companies once deals to build the AP1000 have been signed – a state of affairs that is some distance in the future given that the reactor design has yet to be licensed by the government. But managers at both Shaw and Westinghouse qualify their desire to work with UK firms with the caveat that those companies have to be ready to meet the rigorous demands that nuclear new build will entail.
Merrifield highlights the quality assurance, costing structure and financial muscle that companies will need. “You have to have a team that can withstand high regulatory scrutiny,” he says. This is not easy to achieve at a time when resources are strained. Unions warned in December that cuts to the budget for decommissioning the UK’s nuclear legacy could lead to a drain of skills from the industry just as new build comes onto the horizon. If their fears are realised, then companies such as Shaw and Westinghouse may find themselves forced to look further afield for their suppliers.
Merrifield says nuclear new build has become an “international phenomenon”. As a former advisor to the US Senate on energy and environmental issues, he has been around long enough to spot a revolution – albeit one that is moving forward “slowly”, as he acknowledges. “Carbon-free generation from renewables will simply not be sufficient to address climate change, so there is big role for nuclear.”
Now British engineers must prepare themselves for this international renaissance in the hope that firms closer to home than Shaw get a piece of the action. |
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
One of the regular contributors to our letters pages, Francis Otway, died last month, and our condolences go to his family and his friends and former colleagues. There are responses to his letters still being published this week on our letters pages on this website and in the printed magazine.
In his working life, Francis Otway had been in the research parts of the Central Electricity Generating Board, and most of his letters showed his deep knowledge of energy and environment matters – always polite and usually leavened with a good dose of informed prejudice, which is a prerequisite for the pugnacious letter-writer.
A particular favourite of his was the potential for compressed air storage of energy.
The technology has relevance for carbon capture and storage, of course, but he saw it as a basic storage device, enabling output from intermittent supplies or low-cost times to be stored for peak-time usage.
So I’m particularly sad that Francis Otway isn’t around this month to see that General Electric of the US, the German utility RWE, the German National Aerospace Institute and others are now starting a project called Adele to look into compressed air energy storage.
Adele will investigate places such as salt caverns – another idea put forward by Francis Otway on our letters pages – as potential venues for compressed air storage and for using the heat generated in compression locally. It’ll report back after three years whether it’s a good idea or not.
I suspect I already know that it’s a good idea, and not because of the august companies involved in this scheme, companies that would be unlikely to pursue a technology that didn’t have good prospects of success. No, I know it’ll work because Francis Otway said so. And I shall miss the fact that, in three years’ time, there won’t be a letter from him saying, in ever so polite terms, “I told you so.”
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
A risky business, business. Insurance against risk is, perhaps, not a subject likely to get your heart racing, but it might do if you felt there was a perfect storm brewing in the insurance market that could herald a new phase in the financial crisis. Your palms might begin to sweat a little too.
This is the view of new research from London analyst Mactavish, which suggests that in the wake of the recession manufacturing companies and the insurers that service them are ill-prepared for the consequences of a changed financial landscape. The research says that one of the impacts of the recession on engineering firms is to alter the risks they face and add new ones. “Firms are dealing with the toughest trading conditions ever,” says Bruce Hepburn, Mactavish chief executive. “What are they doing about the sheer volume of changes our research highlights?”
For example, manufacturers may have outsourced more work and processes, increasing the complexity of their supply chains, or meaning that, say, product design work is now dependent on the performance of other firms. Businesses are having to innovate and introduce new products rapidly while also cutting costs. Lead times have been slashed by many firms while they also search out new markets. At the same time, engineering firms have not been disclosing the new risks they face to their insurers – who are failing to address such changes.
The response could be “brutal,” Mactavish says, with insurers, which themselves are struggling to access capital, refusing to pay claims because the risks involved are new, unprecedented and not covered by existing arrangements. “Insurers are not being briefed on changes by customers or brokers,” says Hepburn. So the cover they provide may be inadequate and investors could be exposed to big losses.
The researchers consulted more than 250 major companies with turnovers of between £50 million and £5 billion in the manufacturing, retail, construction and financial services sectors. Analysts also spoke to senior insurance executives.
Insurers, for now, Mactavish says, are paying claims when they can, with repudiation of a policy a last resort. But they are going through a tough time themselves and at the moment manufacturers are dependent on their “goodwill,” says Hepburn. If the situation deteriorates, though, and insurers become unprofitable, this could change, creating a “perfect storm” where companies are exposed and make losses as insurers begin to repudiate claims. “This will prompt a new phase of the financial crisis,” argue Mactavish analysts.
The answer is for companies to fully disclose the new risks they face to their insurers, taking remedial action to assess them. “I would assert aggressively that companies need to identify the risks they are running in the wake of the recession,” says Hepburn. “There is no excuse for not disclosing risks.”
Already hard-pressed firms thus have something new to think about as we begin 2010. But, if the analysts are right, failure to do so could prompt a fresh financial mess even as a fragile recovery takes hold.
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
The UK government’s boiler scrappage scheme isn’t exactly popular in the PE office. All right, it’ll make some work for beleaguered central heating equipment makers. And OK, it may marginally help to save the planet.
But when the government leaves off announcing grants of £400 until a week or so after one of our colleagues has invested in a new, full-price boiler, we’re entitled to feel a bit undergruntled. That sum would have bought a round or two over Christmas. Of golf, if that’s your inclination, or something more refreshing if not.
And those of us who invested in new boilers a year or two back have reason to be less than chirpy too. Last week, you may have noticed, was the coldest night in UK history. It may not have been quite that cold in suburban south London, but it felt that way. Particularly, I suspect, to those of us standing outside in our back gardens holding hot water bottles up against small plastic pipes.
The problem comes from not reading the manual for our new boiler closely enough – or rather that the installer didn’t read the manual. Buy a boiler these days, and you’re as likely as not to get a condensing one, and the gist of a condensing boiler is that a bit of condensate gets piped out to the nearest drain every cycle.
Except, of course, that it doesn’t when the weather goes below freezing. It gets halfway down the pipe, sets into ice, and then blocks other condensate from coming down. Which then stops the boiler. The way to repair this is to unfreeze the blockage, but you have to do this gently because otherwise you’ll burst the pipe. Hence the hot water bottle.
I thought I was alone in having an unlagged condensate pipe and was telling a mate all about how daft I felt the day after. Ho ho, he said, and then went home and found exactly the same thing had happened to him. I finally got mine to unfreeze, but called the installer anyway; he didn’t manage it, and called his installer too. Net result: installers get extra work, and we get cold. My installer said that he’d had umpteen call-outs like mine...
I don’t have any problem with the car scrappage scheme, which seems to meet a market need and an environmental one too. But the central heating boiler scrappage scheme? Mmm. Ask me again when I’ve thawed out.
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
The financial crisis provoked an unusual level of political rhetoric about the importance of manufacturing and the role of engineers that was refreshing. In the summer, it seemed Lord Mandelson – with his “less financial engineering, more engineers” soundbite – was on a national tour designed to take in every significant car plant in the UK, posing for photo opportunities on production lines.
But talk of a “new industrial activism” has not been given much concrete impetus in this week’s pre-budget report, which, with an election six months away, has been widely viewed as dodging decisions of substance in favour of crowd-pleasing measures such as the 50% tax on bankers’ bonuses.
Many measures in the report, may, of course, be ripped up by the Tories should they come to power. For instance, they have already suggested they will repeal the further, though deferred, rise in National Insurance contributions for mid-income earners, which manufacturers’ organisation the EEF said was “a further tax on employment” that would “do little” to help engineering firms create jobs.
In the interests of rebalancing the economy after the most severe recession since the Second World War, the decision not to extend the first year 40% capital allowance for investment in new machinery for another year could hamper long-term prospects for the competitiveness of manufacturers, the EEF believes. Companies had not been in a position to take advantage of the incentive in the last year owing to reduced cashflow and credit. Now, with a fragile recovery in the offing, the benefit will be whipped away just at the point when investment was more likely.
Against that, the EEF has welcomed the PBR’s new Capital Growth Fund announcement, but said it would have to succeed in supporting manufacturing companies – “the current banking system has become unfit for purpose,” said Lee Hopley, EEF chief economist – where other government schemes had failed. For instance, the enterprise loan scheme announced in the depth of recession is seen as over-complex and undersubscribed.
There were small rays of hope for the much discussed “green collar” jobs in the report: for example, fresh tax breaks for companies investing in electric cars and vans, which have been welcomed by engineering firms such as Tyneside’s Smith Electric Vehicles, which makes the Newton and Edison electric vans. Support, too, for a further expansion of the Technology Strategy Board’s ultra-low carbon vehicles competition.
But the real perk that could stimulate the electric vehicle market – grants of up to £5,000 for consumers buying electric or plug-in hybrid cars – is still a year away. In the meantime, manufacturers say the market is stagnant in the UK leaving them reliant on exports.
In general, the level of funding for green technology in the PBR is dwarfed by that thrown at the banking system during the height of the crisis – £30 million of Technology Strategy Board money devoted to automotive causes here, £50 million for offshore wind there, said to be for the development of “new manufacturing and testing facilities”. Many might ask why the government is deciding to support that industry now, when a perceived failure to do so earlier was cited by Vestas in its decision to stop wind turbine manufacturing on the Isle of Wight.
■ Manufacturers' organisation, the EEF on "industrial activism": http://www.eef.org.uk/blog/post/Did-the-PBR-put-industrial-activism-on-the-back-burner.aspx |
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
Skill shortages crop up as a concern on PE’s quarterly surveys of engineering opinion without ever topping the list of worries. But you shouldn’t rely on that always being the case. In engineering and manufacturing in particular, unhelpful demographics are at work, because so many people in the sector are reaching ends of careers.
In 10 years’ time, even on present levels of activity, we’ll be short of people in skilled and technical roles. And if, as some suggest, we want a focus on manufacturing and engineering to lift us out of the financial mire, we’ll be even shorter. Of skills, that is.
So skill provision is pretty high up the long-term concerns and EAL, the awarding body for engineering NVQs, SVQs and other vocational qualifications, had a meeting today to hear what might be proposed by the folk we now seem to regard as the government-in-waiting.
Conservative higher education and vocational training spokesman John Hayes has the merit of knowing what he’s talking about in these areas, since he’s been spokesman for quite a while. He comes out strongly in favour of the kind of individual learning accounts that were in fashion a few years back; in favour too of restoring the sectoral influence in skills provision and taking it away from regional authorities.
He has a personal line in some of this. He’s MP for the flat vegetable-growing lands over by the Wash, so his constituents come under “East Midlands”, where “engineering” seems often to mean Rolls-Royce, miles and miles away to the west in Derby. Mostly irrelevant, he thinks, in much the same way that people in Chesterfield seem to lose out from not being in Sheffield when arbitrary lines are drawn on maps.
The gist is what he was saying in any case was that, once again, we’re going to have the training landscape redrawn, and if much of what’s being said is sensible, then you might also feel that much of what has already been done was also sensible – at the time, even if it doesn’t always look that way later on.
In fact, an awful lot of well-meant common sense has been applied to training policy over the years, much of it conflicting and some of it repetitive. Training is perhaps the one place where you can say that the commonsense approach is not common sense; no one has yet got it right, so it can’t be common. The problem is that we really need to be training people for skills that aren’t needed now but will be in 10 years’ time – obviously a nonsense, because no one would fund that. Or would they?
What was interesting was to hear a Conservative spokesman talking about the beneficial effects skills provision can have on social cohesion and on society as a whole. It wasn’t so many years ago, of course, that any self-respecting Conservative would have trouble even admitting there was such a thing as “society”. Now it’s a central plank of policy.
And a corollary to this could be, of course, that a “societal” benefit might be adduced to fund training in an entirely new way. In the same way big employers of the past used to over-train, perhaps government-funded training could now over-provide to populate the industries of the future.
Nice thought. But I don’t think this was what the minister-in-waiting was really saying. Or was he?
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
Good news for the approaching festive season! It’s time to go to war.
No, not with some Middle Eastern country – but with the climate. The IMechE launched its latest report on climate change last week to some fanfare: but it was militaristic bugles that sounded in the cosy environs of the Science Media Centre in Westminster.
It’s been common to think of the struggle with the Earth’s changing climate in adversarial terms: battle, yes… fight, certainly – but war?
Dr Tim Fox, head of environment and climate change at the IMechE, was unequivocal: “The institution believes it’s time to go to war on climate change – the climate is about to attack us and it’s time for us to fight back.”
Stephen Tetlow, chief executive, added that it was time for Britain to get “on a war footing” against climate change.
If some found this alarming – the report’s title is Climate Change: Have We Lost the Battle? - they will also have found little Christmas cheer in the bald facts Fox and his colleagues at the institution are pointing to. The government has just announced plans to build ten new nuclear power stations, with the first operational by 2018; Fox suggested we would need to build 30 reactors in the next five years to meet the target of a 20% reduction in emissions by 2020.
There are currently 2,600 wind turbines in operation in the UK: we would need to build almost 40,000 more by 2050 to meet an 80% reduction in CO2 by 2050 – as outlined in last year’s Climate Change Act.
It is clear there is, as things stand, a colossal mismatch between industrial capacity, investment intentions and our carbon reduction targets. According to the IMechE, the 2050 goal will not be achieved until the end of the century at the earliest based on energy policies today.
So, if we are to go to war, what are our weapons? Fox and co advocate a “MAG” approach to climate change, with a three-pronged, long-term attack combining mitigation of emissions, adaptation to climate change, and geo-engineering.
Geo-engineering, which has many uncertainties hanging over it, should be researched as a matter of priority from next year: artificial trees that absorb CO2 could be tested as early as 2014 if money goes into geo-engineering now. By 2016, the IMechE says, the first carbon and capture storage demonstrator could be operational. By 2020, average emissions of CO2 from new cars could be 95g/km. But all these changes will require a substantial redirection of resources, running into the trillions. Can we hope to change?
Phil Willis MP, chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, told PE last week that the government is already looking at a regulatory framework for geo-engineering in tandem with its counterpart in the United States. This unproven science will work across national boundaries, and so a collaborative effort with the Congressional Science and Technology Committee has begun. Willis said the concept of geo-engineering was starting to be taken much more seriously in government circles.
But geo-engineering on its own will not be enough, and it is improbable that the political will exists to introduce a sufficiently stringent and binding successor to the Kyoto protocol at the Copenhagen negotiations in a few weeks’ time. It’s also unclear how adaptation to climate change will be funded in the most vulnerable developing countries.
The IMechE has set its own vision of the future out, and it’s a tough one: “To decarbonise the UK economy to meet emissions targets would require an unprecedented engineering effort. The commitment of human and material resources needed would not be dissimilar to the investment ploughed into the Cold War.”
Engineers, then – at the centre of the battle to save the planet. Let’s hope they are not frozen out as the war heats up.
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
Should anyone be surprised that General Motors has decided to pull the plug on the sale of its European division to a consortium of parts supplier Magna International and a Russian bank? No.
Should anyone be sorry that GM has decided to stick around with Opel and Vauxhall?
That’s a more difficult question. Patently Magna and its friends will be miffed at the time and money they’ve apparently wasted. And on the basis that everyone’s different scenarios for the future of GM Europe saw a lot of jobs going, and possibly whole plants, then there will be many individuals with cause for concern, and some of those will be people who weren’t so worried last week, but are worried now. Many of those individuals will be German.
The thing that has made the German government react with such fury to the GM decision is that it seems to expose the slightly underhand way the Magna/Sberbank deal was set up to maximise German interests. People in the UK, Spain and other places with Opel/Vauxhall plants had long had suspicions: doesn’t the reaction of the German government just confirm them?
But there are, of course, political machinations all around this issue. GM’s resurrection from the dead in the US has been achieved with huge political help, most of it in financial form. Is that acceptable? Much of the wealth that underpinned the Magna bid came from business liberated from former state control in Russia into the hands of the oligarchs. Acceptable?
You aren’t, no matter where you turn in this, going to get away from politics and political influence, so for one side (or the other) to call “Foul!” is probably not really on. It’s the way of the world.
Rather, to see whether what GM has decided to do is good news, you need to go back to the economics. Does the world (and Europe in particular) need another car maker? Probably no. Does it need different car makers from what we’ve had before? Probably yes. Which deal might do most to reduce overcapacity in world car markets, which is the real issue? Not sure, but probably GM’s continued ownership. Given that GM is continuing in the US, and needs European-style and European-sized cars over there, does it make sense to have an integrated supply chain? Perhaps, if it can be made to work.
There aren’t too many clear-cut answers here. No one wants to see the daftnesses that led GM into American bankruptcy perpetuated, nor to see what appeared at times to be disdain for Europe’s brands and capabilities return. But if new GM really is new, then maybe it’s a better option than a leap into the unknown.
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
Copenhagen looms. In current economic straits, big business probably figures it needs binding targets on reducing CO2 emissions like a hole in the head.
But if an international consensus is reached in the Danish capital that is exactly what UK plc will be facing. How prepared is it?
The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) may have some of the answers. The organisation, backed by an alliance of 475 investors, has just launched its latest report. It has been coaxing FTSE 350 companies into measuring and reporting their carbon emissions and, if possible, their carbon reduction targets.
This year, 95% of companies in the FTSE 100 responded to the CDP survey, an increase on 2008. For the FTSE 350, the rate is lower, at 67%. Those who did respond reported 390 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent – the highest rate since the report began in 2001, and more than 60% of the UK total. At the moment, there is no mandatory requirement to disclose emissions – although experts say this could, and should, change.
The CDP argues that investors are increasingly concerned with the strategies adopted by big corporations toward climate change and all the risks – and opportunities – that it entails.
Investment intentions could well be dictated by the ability of companies to respond to the challenge of climate change, and this, the organisation says, could prove a powerful driver in efforts to improve environmental performance – one that goes far beyond the efforts of policymakers.
Business will require governance to seal the deal, of course. But Hilary Benn, secretary of state for DEFRA, said at the 2009 report launch that the CDP was successfully “persuading companies to count not money but greenhouse gases – although we’ve still got some way to go”.
So who are the saints and sinners? Those lauded for their performance in disclosure or making attempts to mitigate emissions include Tesco, insurance giant Aviva, and several mining companies and utilities, including Centrica, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton. Only one engineering firm is listed in the top ten companies based on its attempts to mitigate emissions: Atkins. In general, the report notes that companies in the industrial sector – as opposed to energy or materials – are “underrepresented” in terms of being environmental leaders.
Lord Sharman, the chairman of Aviva, argues that it is directly in the company’s interests to have a strategy on climate change: severe flooding experienced by its customers could have a dramatic impact on the business. He says Aviva is already looking at technologies and materials for making properties more flood-resistant. This ability of the business to respond to the risks and opportunities presented by climate change is what the CDP would like to see more large corporations adopt.
Next year, it will hope for a 100% response rate and greater transparency in companies’ data. Just 35% of the FTSE 350 disclosed emissions reductions targets, which suggests there is much to do – especially if Copenhagen yields the hoped-for global agreement on curbing greenhouse gases.
The CDP, and the investors who backed the report, would argue that a climate change strategy could have an impact where businesses value it most: on the bottom line. Noting that President George Bush failed to ratify the Kyoto protocol in part to protect the interests of the US motor industry, CDP chief executive Paul Dickinson said this paved the way for Japan to make progress in curbing emissions with models such as Toyota’s Prius. “Look at the motor industry in the US now,” he said. “Bush failed.”
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
I like my car. It’s comfy, reliable and gets from from A to B, and sometimes from B to A, about as well as anything could on the congested roads we have around London. But just this past weekend it’s developed an annoying habit.
I was driving along, as one does, when there was suddenly a warning “bong” and a yellow warning symbol in the middle of the dash display. The symbol was evidently a message of some sort, but I couldn’t immediately work out what it might be. And it disappeared before I could focus on it.
Ah well, no problem, if it’s something urgent it’ll tell me again. And indeed it does, a couple of minutes later: again so quickly I can’t see what it is. After about five of these episodes, I work out that the symbol faintly resembles a lightbulb: it’s telling me a bulb has blown.
Fine. Useful even. But do I have a spare bulb? No I don’t, and in any case in a modern car it isn’t that easy to get to the inner workings where bulbs lurk. In fact, I’ve a sneaking suspicion that I will have to take the car to a dealer to get a new module fitted, which is all a bit shaming for those of us who’ve been doing routine tasks like this for a lifetime of car ownership.
In the mean time, though, there’s a different problem. Can I get the car to stop telling me about the blown lightbulb? No, I can’t. Every couple of minutes, bong, yellow warning symbol. Like a hypochondriac goldfish, my car has turned into a repetitive whinger: “I’m ill, you know. Did I tell you I was ill? Blown bulb. I’m ill, you know. Did I tell you…?”
My car is still comfy and reliable. I’d thought it was nice and reassuring, with all its safety features and warnings. But it’s turned into a bit of a nag, determined to intrude its priorities on top of mine. And I like it rather less.
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
There’s nothing like the holiday season for having a good whinge. The longer evenings, the slightly less fraught days: you can really take the time to hone your complaints to a superior pitch. And just because you’re on holiday doesn’t mean there aren’t things to grump about. Oh no.
Like, for instance, road travel in the UK.
I’ve got steamed up before – not in this forum admittedly – about our collective national fondness for red traffic lights. It’s a kind of “let’s-be-fair-to-everyone-and-give-them-all-a-go” mentality that overrides commonsense.
Here’s an example: you drive 600 miles back from the south of France, including a nifty circumnavigation of Paris, without encountering a single traffic light. And then, at the London end of the Sidcup bypass, at three in the morning, the lights change to red as you reach them. No traffic from the right, none from the left, on the Eltham to Mottingham road that crosses here. Ah, good, it’s your go again… oh no it’s not – the pedestrians have to have a go next. There are none of them either: you wouldn’t want much to be out walking in these parts at that time of night. Finally, after three minutes, you’re on your way again.
It’s the same thing, or at least similar, if you drive down a road with lots of sets of lights – the Hagley road out of Birmingham for instance. You may get lucky and sail through one or two, but the probability is that you’ll stop at a majority. Some main intersections in London allow only half a dozen seconds for a few cars to go past before the lights change. The virtues of flowing traffic, in terms of journey planning and efficient use of fuel, seem to pass us by entirely.
Now take roadworks. It’s a truth universally acknowledged, of course, that a road that has been resurfaced will be dug up again within a matter of months. But a short trip down the M4 on a summer Saturday morning uncovers a variation on the theme. Just after the M25 junction, where five lanes come down to three at Junction 5, there are three chaps patching a section of the main carriageway. The effect of these miniature roadworks is to bring the three lanes down to one: so five streams of heavy traffic are now reduced to a single lane on one of the busiest Saturdays of the year. It took me an hour to get past; a week later, it took a friend two hours, because, with warped logic, these works are happening every weekend.
Who organises these things? Who thinks that stopped traffic is a good thing? Who decides that spinning roadworks out over several weekends in daytime is better than doing it all in one hit late at night? Why are we Brits so good at this kind of petty irritation? And why do others seem to do it so much better?
Answer, please, on a holiday postcard.
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
In downtown Austin, the state capital of Texas, there aren't many shops. Everyone gets their daily provisions and their consumer goods from the malls that surround the city, with most of the bigger and better malls several miles from the centre. And that isn't a problem because Austin has a series of loop roads, and one of the big interstate freeways bisects the city north to south. It may be 30 miles to the mall, but it'll probably only take you 30 minutes to drive there.
And therein lies one of the big challenges facing the US government and, by extension, the rest of the world. In a state where the price of conventional unleaded gasoline is only around $2.40 a gallon – albeit a smaller US gallon than the UK equivalent – there aren't many incentives to throw away the car keys and take more environmentally friendly forms of transport.
Car travel is cheap, convenient and, in strung-out semi-urban cities such as Austin, pretty much the only alternative. At this time of the year, you have to be mad, British or bent on ultra-fitness to venture more than a few blocks outside air-conditioned comfort of cars or buildings. Nor do you have much alternative: there are buses, but not many; the new light rail scheme seems a bit stalled and is in any case limited in its scope; if there are railways, they're well hidden.
Unlike the cities of the Eastern US, which developed at least to a degree in a pre-automotive age, Austin and other boom towns of the further west were designed for automotive living. So everyone drives. Everywhere. It's the norm.
So it takes a bit of bravery, as National Instruments' finance chief Alec Davern did at the group's world conference this week, to say that cheap gasoline was a big factor distorting the US economy and by implication the world economy, and that things would be a lot better if the US government raised fuel taxes massively to encourage new thinking. That, he said, "would change all the equations", and as there seems strong evidence that the present "equations" haven't worked and reapplying them won't prevent a similar disjuncture in the future, then he thinks it's worth a go.
Mind you, exactly how places like Austin would then operate is a difficult question. And the scale of development in this area suggests there's no great enthusiasm to stop doing the things that have made this a boom town: there's a lot more of the same being built. But some people at least in the US are trying to think differently.
And that, from this part of the world, is new. |
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
There’s currently an advertisement above the escalators leading to the Jubilee line at Westminster station, just down the road from PE’s offices. The ad, featuring an elongated Union Jack, is from BAE Systems. To commuters and tourists, it proclaims: “We’re investing more and more in UK manufacturing. Made in Britain. BAE Systems: Real pride, real advantage.”
Now this, given BAE’s track record of investment in UK plc over the past few months, seems a little disingenuous. Like many of the remaining big British engineering firms, from aero engine maker Rolls-Royce to Renishaw, which manufactures the clever probes on coordinate measuring machines, BAE has cut jobs and slashed production as the downturn has gathered pace, and many of those decisions have affected its operations in the UK.
Worst hit has been its land business, which cut 200 engineering positions in November last year, followed by the closure of factories at Guildford, Telford and Leeds - and the loss of a further 500 jobs - in May. The company has been hit by delays to the MoD’s Future Rapid Effects System vehicle programme, but as the cuts were announced, unions warned that they sounded the death knell for armoured vehicle manufacturing in Britain. (BAE retains some capacity for such manufacturing abroad, especially in Sweden, and it is believed it will offshore future programmes.)
The decision to close the land business factories came to mind late last month as I spoke with Brigadier Richard Felton, the former Apache pilot who will take charge of all British forces in Afghanistan next April. Commenting on the storm in the media over a perceived lack of equipment such as helicopters for troops in the field, he said such problems were exacerbated by a “lack of industrial capacity” in the UK.
Further, he said, manufacturers often supplied kit without due consideration of the environment in which it would have to operate. Britain, he noted, with a smaller army nowadays, did not enjoy the purchasing power, economies of scale or spares supply chain of the US military.
Felton said problems with equipment could not just be blamed on the government. “Yes there are things we could do with more of, but we normally get what we ask for - though it may take some time. There hasn‘t been an urgent operational requirement where the Treasury has said: ‘No, you can’t have it’.”
He said he hoped new Merlin helicopters would be deployed by the end of the year and the new Chinooks - being modified for Afghanistan - soon after.
But he acknowledged, too, that it was not easy for manufacturers to develop vehicles that could cope with any eventuality. “It’s not possible to be highly mobile for reconnaissance and to protect against mines.” The Jackal, he said, had been criticised for not being able to do things that it wasn’t designed to do. “You can’t have a vehicle that’s good at everything.”
You can’t have a country that’s good at everything, either, I suppose. But defence manufacturing has been one of the things we did well. And there haven’t been so many of those in recent years.
|
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
We’re not, you may have noticed, in the vanguard of technological switchedonness in this office, but there are times when we realise that we’re better than we think we are. The Tata Nano crash test that we feature in this issue is one such time.
We got invited to witness the world’s cheapest car get put through its paces. We were part of a three-strong press contingent, Tata having recognised quite rightly that, if you give the press an upfront story, they can be powerful allies, but that if you give only a few of the press the upfront story, they’ll be friends for life.
Anyway, off I went to middle England to watch the car that all of middle India is waiting for, and I took my small happy-snappy camera along too, the modern-day equivalent of the Box Brownie. And I wasn’t at all nonplussed when the chap from Autocar magazine turned up with a fully-fledged photographer in tow, complete with tripod, cine, video, and assorted heavyweight paraphernalia, probably worth several times the cost of the car on test.
Cue the crash test. I’m in position, my little camera set in video mode. Press button. Smash. Crash. Press button again. All over in 13 seconds. It is, as they say, a wrap.
A few days later, I upload the video on to the Automotive Engineer website,
www.ae-plus.com, which is a pretty simple thing to do. And that, I think, is that.
Except it isn’t. Barely had we uploaded my small video than it appeared on a couple of automotive blogger sites in India and the US. Then, by some form of piratical magic, it went on to Youtube, where you can see it in several places (tap in "nano crash test" and you’ll find it). To date, somewhere in the region of 200,000 people have hit on the video in its various guises.
Of course, there are some lessons in all of this. The "credit" for the video now seems to be claimed by various people who weren’t there and had nothing to do with it. We might, I suppose, have thought earlier that there’s marketing mileage to be made of such things. We could perhaps have copyrighted something. Or other.
But actually, I’m not displeased at all; rather the opposite. It’s good that lots of people have been able to see something that was a great thing to be at. It’s even better that my little video seems to be getting more Youtube hits than the posher, longer (but less complete) one put up by Autocar. And it’s the best thing of all that I’m treated with new respect by the younger element around here as the auteur of a top-rating vid. |
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
 Comments |
|
|
"Whilst recognising the benefits, I find this experience to be a warning to those of us not up with the latest developments in mushroom communications that one has to be very careful where one puts things in this context."
John Gayfer, Alcester | |
|
You can sit through an hour’s press conference on the state of the North Sea oil and gas sector and write 20 pages of notes. But you can sum it up in less than 20 words: falling investment, rising costs and not enough financial incentives makes for job losses and shutdowns.
The negative market indicators and economic signals have been apparent for some time. The message from the sector’s association, Oil and Gas UK, has also remained constant. It breaks down to “give us some tax breaks” - which they duly got in this year’s budget. The predictable response is: “Can we have some more, please sir?”
But, for the first time today I saw a different kind of indicator – a real world indicator. The walk to Oil and Gas UK’s offices from PE towers takes me around the back of Westminster Council’s main offices. Installed there is a rare sight, two of London’s 47 electric vehicle charging points. Now, these bollard-like chargers were installed at least 18 months ago, and I have never, ever, seen them in use. Before today.
Today, there was a Vectrix electric scooter and a Citroën C1 charging at the points. There were even cars waiting to be charged parked behind them - two plug-in hybrid Priuses.
A little clicking on the internet, (http://tr.im/rpl4) reveals the details of a new electric car share scheme by Westminster council. And good for them, electric vehicles like the little C1 and Vectrix scooter make a lot of sense in cities like London. But ask yourself, what should we be supporting more – an oil and gas sector whose remaining reserves are incredibly difficult to extract, or the development and use of electric cars in cities like London?
Yes, the main culprit of the oil and gas sector’s woes has been the credit crunch. Yes, there are security of supply issues – perhaps oil and gas is falling out of fashion like nuclear did at the end of the last century – and we shouldn’t abandon it. The electricity in electric scooters has to come from somewhere.
But how long is it until this shining new low carbon society we are evolving into becomes at odds with extracting carbon rich mineral reserves from the deep. Surely I’m not the only one who can see the conflation between everybody switching off TVs and unplugging mobile phone chargers to reduce carbon emissions, and at the same time subsiding an oil and gas industry which is still turning a profit, but says that soon it might not.
As a side note, the economist at Oil and Gas UK let slip today that they had already been in talks with the Treasury about how best to tax companies that could use depleted oil and gas fields to store carbon emissions captured from power stations.
It’s staggering that this is discussed when Carbon Capture and Storage technology is more than a decade away from any meaningful commercial deployment. An indication, perhaps, of the parlous state of government finances, and also of how the government is accustomed to treat the North Sea as a cash cow.
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
|
There’s a recession on – or so I’ve been told. But you’d never guess that from first impressions of the Paris air show, the defence and aerospace industry’s once-every-two-years jamboree, which started this week.
Despite the economic woes, the show seems blissfully unaffected: the event is fully booked in terms of exhibitors and virtually every big name, including perennial rivals Boeing and Airbus, is in attendance. And judging by the amount of the champagne being consumed in the corporate entertaining chalets, just about everyone appears determined to have a good time.
But while the exterior signs might look good, more in-depth discussions with the sharp-suited executives who run the defence and aerospace industry confirm that it has been a challenging year. At the first big press conference of the show, Boeing’s commercial airplanes president and chief executive Scott Carson gave a sober assessment of current market conditions.
He said that economic uncertainty and the threat of rising oil prices meant that both passenger numbers and freight levels were proving extremely difficult to predict. And although production levels at its US factories had been sustained, Carson said that Boeing was constantly assessing the market and would act if the downturn continued.
Looking forward, Carson was more upbeat, saying that he believed the aerospace sector “may have reached, or was bouncing off the bottom” of the downward cycle and that it could actually return to growth by the middle of next year.
He said that Boeing had an extensive and geographically well-spread order backlog and that customers were still taking up their order options. And he confirmed that the much-awaited new 787 Dreamliner aircraft would take to the skies for the first time within the next two weeks.
So it’s on with the show in Paris. Next up it is Boeing’s arch-rival Airbus, which will give its market outlook at a much-anticipated and traditionally well-attended press conference tomorrow morning.
These might be challenging times for the aerospace industry, but there remains a real sense of competitive spirit with all the major players vying to grab the headlines.
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
Virtually all MPs had scurried off to their first, or second, homes by the time the
Engineering Council (UK) got on to the House of Commons terrace yesterday to launch its six-point policy on sustainability.
Maybe that was just as well, because it was pretty apparent that engineers, rather
than politicians, hold the moral high ground and are also the primary decision-makers when it comes to sustainability – probably on other matters too.
The ECUK’s policy on this is succinct and sensible, and it’s produced a neat little credit-card-sized digest of the six points for engineers to carry around with them,
just in case they get stuck for motivation when called upon to save a planet or two.
I’ll not reproduce the words of wisdom here when you can find them for yourself at www.engc.org.uk/sustainability
Anyway, the reason for mentioning all this is that, apropos of this august occasion, the EngC invited a response from Professor Michael Kelly, the chemist who’s about to
step down as chief scientist at the Department of Communities and Local Government – Hazel Blears’ lot, in case you’re as unclear as I am about who’s who in government.
Kelly, who is going back to the day job as a professor at Cambridge, let slip that he was not the only department chief scientist to be stepping down in Whitehall in
coming months. He knew of seven vacancies. And wouldn’t it be good, he suggested,
if some of these were filled by engineers rather than scientists?
Wouldn’t it indeed? One of the sensible things that MPs have done in recent months
was to point to a shortage of engineering advice at the heart of government, and
there seems a real opportunity at present to reinforce the message that science and
engineering are complementary, not identical.
In some departments, you’d have thought, there would be much more sense in having
engineering advice than scientific – so long as the engineering was based on true
science, of course. So watch those recruitment pages: there’s a chance to get to
the heart of government and it could be yours.
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
|
Thinking among mainstream scientists and the environmental lobby is aligned nowadays in ways that would have been thought inconceivable, say, 15 years ago.
Green activists may be concerned that it’s too little too late. A report on the potential dangers of greenhouse gas emissions was on President Lyndon Johnson’s desk as early as 1965, but the US Environmental Protection Agency only declared them a threat last month. Scientific thinking, however, has coalesced, by and large, into a consensus that climate change is happening, and that CO2 in the atmosphere is the cause.
These are curious times, where a dedicated environmentalist and climate change specialist like Mark Lynas can break with tradition – albeit, as reported late last year, to some rancour from his peers – and argue for new nuclear power stations. Who would have foreseen such a move in the early 1990s, when climate change first started to be taken seriously by governments?
Now, however, it’s possible to detect where the next set of fault-lines between green lobbyists and the scientific community might be exposed: geo-engineering.
Geo-engineering is the unproven science of manmade interventions that might help slow down global warming, and it has its adherents among scientists. Last week, I attended an event at the Royal Geographical Society where Canadian climate change expert Professor David Keith presented a convincing argument in favour of urgent and serious research into geo-engineering schemes, such as seeding the ocean with iron filings to boost plankton growth, changing the Earth’s albedo, or using mirrors in space to deflect sunlight around the planet.
His argument was that even if emissions of CO2 were cut, in fantastical fashion, to zero tomorrow, there would still be enough in the atmosphere to cause problems. Geo-engineering had the potential to reduce climate risks, Keith said; in a point perhaps designed to wind up environmentalists, he suggested that CO2 was longer lasting, and more dangerous, than even the most toxic nuclear waste.
Engineers have views on the putative geo-engineering debate too: Brian Launder, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Manchester and a fellow of the Royal Society, argued in PE last year that it was time for a concentrated research effort into geo-engineering.
But Professor Keith’s arguments did not sit well with a leading member of Greenpeace. Dr Paul Johnson of the charity’s research lab said at the RGS event that geo-engineering was unproven, unpredictable and could divert attention from the efforts now going on to cut down CO2 emissions. Friends of the Earth has also voiced concern about geo-engineering. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which might be thought to be more sympathetic, dismissed it as “speculative” in 2007. “Our concern at Greenpeace is that rather than helping to solve climate change, geo-engineering could make it worse,” Dr Johnson said.
If geo-engineering, against a backdrop of increasing desperation over climate change, gathers more support among scientists and governments, will we see environmental groups arrayed in opposition to the entire concept? Or should they come around to embrace the idea?
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
Hollywood stretches the bounds of physics in new film Angels & Demons
The European Particle Physics Laboratory – better known as CERN – suffered a blow to its image last year. Critics of the lab worried its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment could create black holes that would suck in the Earth and destroy it.
Their fears proved fruitless: the LHC atom-smasher was switched on for the first time in September 2008 – and the Earth survived. More prosaically, however, the high energy particle accelerator suffered a failure of two superconducting bending magnets, which meant the experimental unit had to be shut down. It is hoped that it will be restarted in September.
The LHC looms large in a new movie, Angels and Demons, based on the book of the same name by Dan Brown, author of the bestselling The Da Vinci Code. Here too, its influence is malign: the film sees the instigators of a plot to destroy the Catholic Church steal a flask of antimatter from CERN to use as a bomb beneath Vatican City. Once again, it’s the “perils” of the pursuit of science that are highlighted; but be sure to take those perils with a liberal pinch of salt.
Hollywood has no problem with playing fast and loose with experimental physics in Angels and Demons. Scientists who have seen the film take pains to point out that while the scriptwriters have got the odd thing right – one eighth of a gram of antimatter would indeed detonate with a force equivalent to one third the yield of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima – the science behind Angels and Demons is implausible.
First, it would take billions of years of operation of the 27 km underground LHC structure to collect such a volume of antimatter. “The quantities of antimatter at CERN are not enough to blow up a communion wafer,” says Dave Wark, professor of physics at Imperial College London. Second, even if such an amount were created, it would be impossible to contain it in a manmade vacuum. Third, anyone coming into contact with such a flask would receive a lethal dose of radiation within seconds. And so on.
But the scientists I spoke to at a preview screening of the movie, including Professor Wark and Dr Tara Shears of the University of Liverpool, didn’t seem to mind. They are thrilled that their baby, the LHC, is used prominently in Angels and Demons. The movie itself is OK: it borrows liberally (some might say to the point where litigation could ensue) from David Fincher’s classic 1995 serial killer flick Seven. The plot trundles along amiably enough, with Ewan McGregor as a Catholic priest grappling with a papal succession and Tom Hanks as a Harvard heathen brought in to help track down the killer.
Much of the story is concerned with the conflict between faith and science, and the possible harmonisation of the two. Wark says: “It’s true that most of the scientists I know are atheists, or, more properly, agnostics, but there are some fine scientists who have faith too. Science and religion tend to become problematic when science is used to answer moral questions, or, conversely, when religion is used to describe the natural world.”
Does Hollywood have a duty to play fair with science? Or is it good enough just to get science into the movies, however misrepresented? Does it irritate the physicists among you when science stretches the bounds of plausibility on the silver screen? And, dare I say it, if engineers had their time on celluloid, how would you like them to be portrayed?
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
Comments:
|
"I see no problem with Hollywood producing films that stretch science and reality, after all that is what the likes of Jules Verne, H G Wells, Arthur C Clark and indeed even the great Leonardo himself and at least a few have seen the light of day.
Todays imaginings can be tomorrows science and to raise imaginary futures might just awaken a few future scientists and engineers.
There is nothing wrong here, indeed a definition of staying young is the ability to suspend disbelief, which could also be a necessary precursor to an inventive mind."
Louis Blache CEng. |
|
"As an Engineer and a practicing Christian I have no problem with “Angels and Demons”. It is just what it claims to be, a bit of escapist fun.
After all, nobody complained that the James Bond films libelled British Intelligence although I am sure that most of our intelligence agents do not really go around sleeping with every female in sight and shooting all comers!! (Maybe they regarded the films as a recruiting aid??)"
|
For good or ill, trade unions have played a big part in the fortunes of the UK motor industry over the past 30 years or so, and their role still excites controversy.
You can view the unions as either the heroes or the villains: dinosaurs whose reluctance to concede on outdated working practices consigned UK-owned companies to uncompetitiveness, or bravehearts whose defiance of the machinations of international big business secured an industry, albeit no longer under local ownership.
But what are we to make of the latest from union leaders about the possible takeover of General Motors’ European operations by Fiat?
The unions, it seems, don’t like it. Plants, including UK ones, could close, they say. This would be bad for the industry: so a Fiat takeover would not be welcome.
Now the economic and industrial logic is probably right. In current circumstances no plant can consider itself immune from the threat of closure or reduction. But the prime cause of this is not who owns what. It’s overcapacity.
For years now, the global automotive industry has had too much capacity for global markets; worse, a lot of the excess is in high cost-base Western Europe and North America where there’s not much prospect of long-term growth. The present recession has sharpened awareness of this mismatch of supply and demand, but it was there anyway. At some point, something has to give.
But there are other factors at work too. GM’s North American woes have spilled over into its European operations, which have asked European governments for help and invited potential investors. Fiat has stepped forward.
It may be, of course, that Fiat has ulterior motives for this: taking out a rival, or getting its hands on more productive capacity than it at present owns. But the unions’ response seems almost to assume bad faith. That seems a bit harsh.
The reality is that GM is, at best, a lame duck, possibly a dead duck. Like it or not, change is coming and there’s no going back to how it was. So to set your face against this or to tell one of the potential big players in any resolution that they’re not welcome seems, well, more dinosaur than braveheart.
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
I tend not to watch much television, preferring leisure pursuits such as drinking and table tennis. Occasionally something quality slips on to the radar such as The Thick of It or The Apprentice and inspires me to fire up the box, but in the main I find television disturbing and offensive.
This proved to be the case one day last week. Things started innocently enough. My workmate Ben Sampson and I were pootling away on treadmill and exercise bike in the gym the IMechE kindly provides its staff in the bowels of Birdcage Walk. We had Channel 5 on in the background, when, in a break in the news, a government “infomercial” sponsored by DECC on climate change as part of an “Act on CO2” campaign slinked across the airwaves.
Bear in mind the context: last week was also the week when Ed Miliband, the recently appointed minister of state of the fledgling department, announced in Parliament plans to build four new coal-fired power stations in the UK. Not, then, perhaps, an opportune time for DECC to be rapping the knuckles of consumers and telling them to remember to switch off the telly, take the iPod off charge and stop the hot tap dripping.
The end of the ad, which had the good grace to mournfully inform us that – and I quote – “energy dependent appliances are part of modern life but much of the energy they use depends on burning oil, gas and coal” (coal, eh?) even had an image of a red-hot Earth segueing, with what the producers probably thought was an apocalyptic gravitas, into a red standby LED.
Does anyone really believe, at this point in the game, that citizens dutifully playing less Playstation and turning their taps off is going to avert catastrophic climate change? And does it not show an all-too-familiar lack of “joined-up thinking” (in this case, within one department) that ordinary people are being told to mend their ways while the government cheerfully announces plans for more coal-fired power stations? Further, consumers not consuming is hardly going to get us out of this economic mess.
As with the details of the bodged plans to incentivise us to buy green cars, there is a real sense that some of the government’s recent schemes – CCS is unproven technology in the case of the new coal-fired plants – have not been thought through. The ad certainly hasn’t been. Ben and I turned the air blue in astonishment. Then we turned the telly off.
Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense).
Comments:
|
"Lobby the Government to build a nuclear power plant next door to the Birdcage Walk headquarters, and tell us if you would still think the same."
R. H. Phillips |
Breaking news from the US: the Environmental Protection Agency has finally, today, declared that greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide “endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations”.
This is the first time the EPA, the world’s most powerful environmental regulatory body, has made any such pronouncement and it’s a measure of the change that has come about in the 100 days since President Obama took over the White House.
Whether it means that any regulation, such as carbon taxes, will follow is not clear. There’s apparently a 60-day period for people to comment on the pronouncement before anything happens.
Pretty obviously, from the postbag we get on climate change and carbon emissions, comments are likely to be of two kinds. On one side, people are likely to ask what took the Americans so long to reach a conclusion that virtually every other world government had come to a decade back. On the other, there will be some distress that what some have seen as the last bastion of commonsense has finally fallen.
Actually, I reckon whichever viewpoint you take, this could be good news. The US government, in which the EPA is perhaps the single strongest agency, controls vast sums of money that hasn’t, over the past few years, been usefully directed into research in these areas.
Maybe now we’ll be in a better position to find out, once and for all, what the truth is about climate change and what the best way forward might then be.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
Renewable energy can split the engineering fraternity right down the middle, so it was appropriate last week that I spent a renewable energy day split down the middle also – attending a “roundtable discussion” on wind turbines in the morning and a conference on geothermal energy in the afternoon.
The contrasts between the two events couldn’t have been more marked. I’ll let you guess which was which. One was exceptionally well attended by journalists in a high tech building in the heart of London’s financial district. At the other I was the only journalist in a centuries old room full of engineers, many of whom seemed intent on discussing projects that happened over thirty years ago.
It’s a leading question, I know, but the differences between the two events summed up for me how “unjoined up” UK energy policy remains, despite many government attempts to produce a coherent strategy. Getting energy from the wind, and getting energy from the heat in the ground, are not new technologies. Both are fledgling industries in the UK, at early stages in their deployment. But the level of awareness and support for the technologies is very different.
There are pros and cons to each. Ground source heat pumps, district heating schemes and deep geothermal could provide continuous energy in the form of heat – an aspect of UK’s energy mix often neglected. Large swathes of wind turbines would tap into an abundant resource, albeit intermittently, to provide us with enough electricity to keep the 32 inch LCD TV’s glowing in all our living rooms.
Both, we are told, are vital parts of our future, “carbon free”, energy mix. But are both treated as equally vital now? At the British Wind Energy Association’s roundtable I was told that without government help now, achieving our 15% 2020 renewable energy targets is impossible. Onshore and offshore wind farms projects would dry up in a few years time because of the credit crunch and the persistent difficulty in gaining planning permission. The industry is crying out for assistance ahead of the Treasury’s budget.
Meanwhile, at the Royal Academy of Engineering’s geothermal event, one of the few civil servants with knowledge about heat gave a meandering presentation about half thought out strategies to encourage the adoption of geothermal energy. By his own admission, the obscure legislation in place now is insufficient to hit the 2020 targets for renewable heat. Yet the financial assistance for engineering firms which specialise in geothermal energy won’t be close until April 2011, and remains a “big, big job”.
Compared to wind, geothermal seems categorised as a quirky little technology, a pet project for kooky engineers, just like hydropower, solar power and biomass. High profile, prominent wind turbines, despite an installed capacity so far of only 3.5GW, seem to be turning into the silver bullet everyone says doesn’t exist. Anyone heard the one about the eggs all in one basket?
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
Comments:
|
"I am a firm believer in the principle of commercial acceptance: both these technologies have a lengthy pedigree and whereas windpower has made something of an impact with investors on an international scale, geothermal extraction has not and is limited to some geographically advantageous locations. I think the underlying reason is simply that windpower provides electricity whilst geothermal energy is low grade heat. Electrical energy has wide spread application and can be converted to other forms but low grade heat is only useful where it is extracted and the point of use is local. Furthermore, electricity does not leak away in transit to anything like the proportion that heat does. So, whereas wind turbines may be a modest local capacity in terms of situation when compared with power stations, they can be linked to make a national or international facility, something I just cannot envisage for geothermal energy. No doubt I shall be hit with schemes for turning geothermal energy into electricity but I would need to see some convincing figures before I would bank on it against windpower which is a world wide resource, up there where it can be seen, even if it has its vagaries."
John Gayfer, Alcester |
I went back to school for this edition of PE. Not something, it has to be said, that I was particularly looking forward to. As a youngster, school didn’t agree with me. School was coming at it from one angle; I was going off at a tangent. I doubted things would have changed much as a 30-something.
But Kingsford Community School impressed. Head teacher Joan Deslandes, who is a star in the firmament of the wider London education community, talked about Kingsford achieving results, from time to time, on a par with the private system. This, she noted, with a delicate turn of phrase, was unusual for a school in Kingsford’s “context”. The context, in this case, is the underprivileged area of Beckton, east London, on the far side of Docklands. Students at Kingsford are in the rare position of being able to study Mandarin Chinese with some success – and also the engineering diploma.
One of a small number of so-called “Confucius classrooms” around the country, Deslandes and her team of young, enthusiastic teachers have pioneered the teaching of Chinese with engineering; it is even hoped that pupils taking the engineering diploma will soon be learning the vocabulary of technical and business Mandarin. They can also experience work with Chinese engineering firms and students. There’s a vision of the future – and the demands of the world of work – at Kingsford that is compelling.
So it seems a shame that the school may struggle, somewhat paradoxically, to find enough local engineering firms to take students on for work experience. Some pupils engaged on the construction diploma had to take their experience in the retail sector recently – a situation that was far from ideal, as the teachers admit. They hope that this year’s crop of entrants on to the diploma will be able to work in appropriate businesses.
The engineering diploma represents an opportunity that could help to deliver the engineers and technicians the country so badly needs in the future. For kids that are technically-minded but may find theory a turn-off, at least at first, it could be the route that leads on to apprenticeships, university or industry. It’s easy to bemoan skills shortages and more difficult, of course, to do something about them.
So, London-based engineers and engineering firms – over to you. Is it time you got involved in the diploma scheme? At Kingsford, you’d receive a warm welcome.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
 27 March 2009 |
The age-old cry of engineers has been that they’re underpaid and overworked and generally unappreciated by the rest of the world. Particularly in the UK. And particularly by the chattering political classes.
Well, one hates to disillusion, but engineers probably couldn’t ask for much more than they’ve got in a report out today from the House of Commons select committee on innovation, universities, science and skills. The report, called Engineering: turning ideas into reality, suggest that not only have MPs got to grips with what engineering is about, but they also recognise that it’s got a lot to offer that isn’t being taken advantage of.
A blog isn’t the right place to go into detail of what the report does and says, so we’ll put up a truncated version – just the summary of what the committee is about and its conclusions and recommendations – that you can reach by clicking here. There’s probably somewhere on the parliament.uk website where you can get the full version of 135 pages.
To my mind, good bits include the fact that the MPs weren’t waylaid by the constant gripe from government that the profession is fragmented: it’s multi-faceted, they said, so there are bound to be lots of different aspects, and besides, the profession didn’t have a problem presenting a pretty united front to the committee.
It’s good, too, that they gave the DIUS minister John Denham and the government chief scientist John Bennington a pretty rough ride about the degree to which government has good engineering advice on tap. Neither Denham nor Bennington wanted to have a “government chief engineer” post; oh dear, that’s just what the committee thinks would be a really good idea.
There’s lots more sound stuff inside this report on the generalities of engineering in the UK and its relations with decision-making, and on specifics such as nuclear power, geo-engineering and plastic electronics. I suspect you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement with much of it.
But that is, of course, all very well. What one would like to think is that this report might have some influence outside the engineering profession. And that’s maybe where you and I come in.
I haven’t read all the national newspapers today, but so far I’ve spotted only one small item on this report, in the FT. There’s a strong likelihood that the committee’s conclusions will bounce around the engineering profession for a while, but not outside. Newspapers will ignore them, government will probably slip out a toe-curlingly anodyne response on Derby day or some other time when attention is elsewhere, and most MPs and decision-makers won’t know anything about any of it.
So it’s up to engineers to keep this high up on the agenda. What are you going to do about it? And if the answer is “Nothing”, then you really do have to stop using that age-old complaining cry of the unappreciated engineer.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
| 17 March 2009 |
In the spirit of the age, we’ve signed ourselves up this week on Twitter. I was talking to a chap at one of those arduous CAD conferences a few weeks back, and he said Twitter was the thing – actually, he referred to a component of canine anatomy, but this is a family website, so I’ll not repeat it.
Twitter, for those of you who are so last year as not to have caught up with it yet, is a kind of web- or mobile-based short messaging service that enables you – encourages you, indeed – to send very short notes about what you’re doing at almost any time.
Now you’d have to be about 14-years-old (or self-obsessed in the manner of Snow White’s wicked stepmother) to want to chronicle, blow by blow, every activity and action you take across a day. And in any case you only get 140 characters to express yourself. That means, I suppose, that there is some art in it, but it is very small art.
But if the original target market for this was rather silly teenagers with too much bandwidth or too many free minutes on their mobiles then, according to my CAD conference informant, corporations have not been slow to see the potential. You can now, he reckoned, use Twitter to get pretty instant feedback on products from the people you’ve sold them to, send notices of forthcoming events or new ideas out to a circle of friends and users, and generally build up a community. All in 140 words a pop.
Well, it sounded worth trying. As both a noticeboard and a feedback mechanism. So we’ve gone and done it. The URL is http://twitter.com/profeng and we’ll put up occasional bits of info on what’s coming up. And we’ll see what we get back. As you may gather, I’m pretty sceptical about all of this… but I’m happy to be proved wrong. Or right.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
| 13 March 2009 |
One of the joys of fortnightly publishing is that you have, on occasion, to project yourself forward in time to ask whether what you’re about to write is going to be sensible when it’s read, which will probably be sometime in the middle of next week. Bloggers and TV people get it so much easier. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Coverage of the ongoing crisis in the auto industry has been a particular problem for folk like us. We can write in the printed magazine about GM and its survival plans and financial machinations and such like, but we always have in the back of our minds, as we press the button to send it away to be printed, that it may all look awfully foolish by the following Tuesday or Wednesday.
What that means is that we develop, in this business, a way of handling time-sensitive information that we hope enables us to retain the impression of intelligence. And if we can’t find that way, then the safest thing to do is not to write it.
I’m reminded of this eternal verity of the hack’s trade because, in the news reports that said this week that GM had decided it didn’t need a $2 billion chunk of public funds, there seems to have a lot of caution thrown to the wind. There has been talk of the end of the crisis, of at least an end to the downward curve.
Well, we’d all like to think that. And maybe it’s true. But maybe not.
I’m about to disappear for a weekend away, and I know where my money’s going on this one: straight back into my pocket. It may be cowardice, but at least this way I know when I come back in on Monday morning that I’ll not be hastily trying to rewrite my own inaccurate history.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
| 3 March 2009 |
“Shaped by a new industrial activism, the Government wants to work with business to put the UK at the heart of the emerging multi-trillion pound global market.”
Now I know we’re not meant to publish the operational notes that government departments send out to warn people of ministers’ movements, but this one, quoted above, seemed just too opaque not to share. It’s about an appearance, scheduled for breakfast time this coming Friday, of cabinet ministers Lord Mandelson and Ed Miliband to “set out their vision of a UK economy at the heart of the global growth in low carbon goods and services”.
Now I don’t have any problem with the ministers strutting their stuff on behalf of a possible business opportunity for UK plc. The fact that our new nuclear power stations and our older automotive industry are both dominated by non-UK interests might be taken as an indication that not enough of this kind of thing may have been done in the past.
What intrigues me, though, is the phrase: “A new industrial activism”. What does it mean?
Government policy towards industry over the past umpteen years has been very much non-interventionist… except, really, for the previous period when Lord Mandelson was in charge of things. In fact, laissez-faire is so ingrained in UK governmental circles that industry doesn’t bother knocking on government’s door much these days.
So has this changed? And if so, shouldn’t we be told? Because, strange as it may seem to ministers, this kind of thing actually matters. To a lot of people.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
| 8 February 2009 |
The “British jobs for British workers” row that rumbled on at the Lindsey Oil Refinery and other sites over the past few weeks was about a demand to provide local jobs for local people. Media reporting made this sound like quite a simple issue: in fact, it isn’t.
Engineering construction has long been one of the industries that’s most difficult to categorise. As an activity, it happens with great intensity on a few sites in the country at any one time – an oil refinery here, a chemical complex there, a power station somewhere else. Once the project is built, the need for those skills in that neighbourhood usually goes away, and the skilled workers who built the plant will reassemble, maybe across the other side of the country, on the next project.
It’s for this reason that the government 20 or so years ago, when it was trying to bring responsibility for workplace training as a whole down to a local level, involving local employers, excluded two industries from the new arrangements: construction and engineering construction kept their own original national training boards. They were different.
And they still are. The contractual relationship between skilled employee and the employer is different from most of manufacturing and service sector employment. And the geographical element remains, in that many of the skilled trades at Lindsey are highly mobile and likely to find their next jobs in Grangemouth or Teesside or on one of the new nuclear power stations.
So if they’ve got a gripe, it actually isn’t a local matter, it’s a national one. It really is “British jobs for British workers”, not local jobs for local people. Which is perhaps rather more uncomfortable than some of the softer views we’ve been getting on this.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
| 2 February 2009 |
London, you may gather from the news broadcasts, has snow today and, at the risk of sounding soft and southern, I have to say that it’s probably the most snow I’ve seen in the capital in one day – and I’ve lived here many years.
But even so, the reaction seems to me to be, well, a bit feeble.
Around the corner from the PE office are sandwich bars and a few useful shops; only around half of them are open. Public transport is patchy. Buses are off the road entirely, underground lines work only where under the ground, and surface trains are available only on a few lines. Lots of people simply couldn’t get into the centre of London today, even if they tried.
The argument will be, of course, that this is a once-in-20-years happening, and you can’t provide for that. And on long stretches of commuter rail line, I have some sympathy with that argument.
But I don’t have a lot of sympathy with withdrawing all bus services, particularly as, in a matey gesture of bonhomie, Mayor Boris has decided to waive the congestion charge for the day. So highly skilled and trained bus drivers aren’t allowed on our icy roads, but your average car driver, who’s probably not driven in conditions like these, is being encouraged to do so. Pretty mixed message there, I reckon.
But is the tendency to give up the ghost whenever the weather turns a bit crinkly just a London phenomenon? Well, fortunately, in a week or so, I’ll be able to tell for certain. In our Q&A survey sent out to readers last Friday is a question on precisely this topic: if there was six inches of snow, we ask our readers, would you be able to get to work?
Outside at the moment, there’s around six inches of snow. I’m at work. So I know my answer. But am I just foolhardy?
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
Comments:
|
I was born in February 1947. The snow was so deep that our local doctor drove my mother to the hospital in case they got stuck on the way!
As a child I can rememer walking to the bus stop with snow piled up alongside the footpath nearly as high as I was. The busses still ran (in open country in rural Hertfordshire, not in the protected city of London!) and life continued as normal.
I now live in central Germany. It is a legal requirement here to have your vehicle "winter fit" if you venture out in bad weather.
This means: winter tyres, snow chains in the car in case of need, enough antifreeze in the screen-wash abd adequate wiper blades to ensure clear vision.
If you cause a hold-up (let alone an accident) through lack of any of the above, orr are stopped by the police with an obscured windscreen because the washers and wipers cannot cope, then expect a fine and points on your licence.
Amazingly, virtually everybody manages to get to work, even with fresh snow.
Enough said??
|
| 26 January 2009 |
Around 2,500 staff at Corus plants up and down the UK learned today that their jobs are to disappear. More woe for engineering and manufacturing.
But when it comes in these numbers, the woe is pretty concentrated, and the places where it is concentrated are some of the same places where we’ve seen bad times in previous downturns. Rotherham, South Wales, the Black Country: these haven’t exactly been areas rich in job opportunities even on good days.
I’m old enough to remember back to the times when Richard Thomas and Baldwins established Llanwern as one of the biggest and most fully integrated steelworks in the world; vast railway marshalling yards with RTB shunting locos; the glimpse of redness and heat inside the huge factory. Magic stuff.
But over 40-odd years since, Llanwern has seemed one of the less favoured of the UK steel plants, losing out to Port Talbot down the road, or Teesside and Scunthorpe on the other side of the country for development and investment. Now it’s going to be mothballed. And the jobs are going.
There’s the rub. You can keep a plant mothballed for ages in the hope that something will show up, but you can’t mothball the people. If in some future time the steel market revives to the point where Llanwern’s capacity is needed again, the steelworks can be dusted down and fired up again.
But can you do that with the people who’ve worked there for 40 years and more?
Back in a previous recession, I visited one of our major automotive companies in a big industrial town. It was, it said, about to revive its apprenticeship scheme, but to recruit apprentices it was having to advertise 40 or 50 miles away – not because of any job boom in its home town, but because so many people had been hired and fired by auto firms in the local area that parents warned their youngsters off jobs in the sector.
Mothballing? I’d like to believe that this isn’t just a euphemism. But if I were a worker in Llanwern at the moment, I think I’d know what it meant for me.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
Comments:
|
"Mothballing:
What could we do to prevent these "boom" to bust cycles that you refer to in our historic industrial locations?
The bigger you are the bigger you fall! Replacing one large industry with another is easy. Greater manufacturing diversity is key. We need to do more to enable small to medium companies to benefit from Govt funding incentives. Simpler, faster and more transparent access to funding would help. This will require govt to focus on long term gain and not short term numbers. A diversified industry base does not mean you cannot benefit from the local skill base either. People are more flexible than we believe when it comes to learning and adapting to new skills. The key is to prevent them from forgetting and losing the skills they have and to avoid having them move away from their local environment."
Adrian Waldock |
| 14 January 2009 |
General Motors has announced at the Detroit Motor Show that it is to make its own batteries for its forthcoming range of electric vehicles. “The design, development and production of advanced batteries must be a core competency for GM,” said chairman and chief executive Rick Wagoner.
Well, yes and no.
The core competency for GM, you might think, is to make cars and other vehicles without losing a packet of money. And that is something, you might also think, that Mr Wagoner and colleagues have not, so far, shown high distinction in. But we’ll let that pass…
There seems to be consensus that electric vehicles and hybrids are the way of the future. Just look how all the big carmakers have been jostling for position over their announcements at an otherwise pretty depressed Detroit show this week. And if this is the case then GM has to be a player in that market: you’d expect nothing less of the world’s biggest (or is it second biggest?) carmaker.
But battery-making as a core competency? Forgive me if I raid the collective memory bank, but wasn’t General Motors the group that, only weeks ago, decided its parts and accessories business AC Delco was something that it would be better off not owning? And wasn’t there, a few years back another components group called Delphi that was spun off – though probably not far enough for the comfort of GM’s upper echelons?
Vertical integration, where big companies had to own and control all their operations and supply chains, was, until very recently, seen as old hat, so 1970s, not the way to do it, and certainly not sustainable in a globalised mega-group. But now?
You can argue – and maybe you will, because the essence of this blog is that you should feel free to respond and give me my due comeuppance – that battery technology is the new powertrain, which is the heart of an automotive business. But companies including GM have been a lot less precious about sharing their powertrain technology latterly than they were.
So what does “core competency” mean in this instance? Does it mean anything? I’d really like to know.
| Got a comment on this? Post it here and we’ll publish it (with the proviso that it should make sense). |
Comments:
"Maybe more important to check out the credentials of Carlos Ghosn in this area - now that he is candidate successor for GM !"
Geoff Bertenshaw, Geldrop, Netherlands |
© PE Publishing 2009
|
