Professional Engineering

back to top

 Letters: Culture, management and safety

I read with immense interest Ben Sampson’s article in PE, 8 July, and the idea that the appropriate “Safety Culture” has to be developed. This is an issue that is close to my heart, but I would want to add an important observation to the debate to enable the appropriate organisational culture to be developed and critically maintained. My interest is in “Organisational Problem Solving” and the use of an organisational approach for the resolution of many perennial presented organisational problems.

With this in mind I would suggests that Mr Anderson will have the same list for his envelope when organisation’s continues to use single initiative. Using a single initiative to resolve the identified safety cultural issues has the unfortunate habit of introducing a competitive organisational behavioural dynamic that is created through each initiative’s need for attention.

When sets of single initiatives are promoted they are all competing for the attention of the affected people, the executive who have a vested interest, the managers and the operatives. The executive, the management and the staff, from my experience, tend to make the decisions in the following form, “Political, Career and then the Overt Organisation”.  The consequential effect on the decision-making processes compromises the organisational needs, hence the repetitive management failings that Mr Anderson and the author have identified.

If we use the following simplified example it should help to clarify the weakness of using a single initiative approach. One initiative may be to do with cost management and tighter budgetary control, another maybe promoting quality, another maybe dealing with absenteeism and sickness and even the need to develop a safety culture. At the individual level each person is making his or her own decision in the form I identified above.

Depending on their position in the organisation and personal interests and the political culture they experience may, influence them to choose safety yet another could favour a cost management approach and another absenteeism and so on. In essence each of these single initiative are being at one level or another are being compromised. Self-interest will always affect the personal decisions we all make.

Even though I agree with all the observation that the problem can often be traced to the organisational culture and the please to improve the safety mentality I would want to suggest in the light of the above that the steps for success starts somewhere else.  That place is with the development of “organisational Leadership Skill” as this enables the executive; the management and the staff to all understand in organisational terms what they are managing. 

It enables them to design the systems, procedures and practices to be developed and tailored to continuously reinforce the appropriate identified organisational performance culture.  It, critically, develops the ability to test the decision-making against the needs of the identified and agreed organisational performance culture.
 

One of the main outcomes of this approach is that the decision-making is no longer political, which means that the “political, career and overt organisation” approach is reversed and becomes “overt organisation, career and then politics”. I should add that anyone who ignores the politics is doomed but by using this developed approach the politics can be appropriately managed without compromising your organisational overall performance culture, which is critical when attempting to maintain the developed performance culture. Naturally all the single initiatives such as safety culture are included but designed to reinforce the overall performance culture.

The value of the development of this approach is that it is quickly achieved, not without some pain, it s extremely cost effectives and has the important ability to avoid the problem of the organisation regressing into it old practices. I am sure that the “enveloped list” would radically change to listings of success.

Almeric Johnson,
Shooters Hill, London

back to top

 Letters: Realism is more urgent than ever

In PE (11 February 2004) you published a letter in which I warned that, by excessive debt, we were risking a debt-deflationary spiral which governments are powerless to resolve. I concluded saying “The time has come to get real”.

But, of course, we didn’t. Now we are facing a triple crunch of credit, climate change and energy; with global crises of water, food, loss of rain forests, land and species creeping up on us. So the time for getting real is more urgent then ever.

The International Energy Agency now, at last, admits that conventional crude oil supplies could no longer meet demand by 2012. Climate change has to be under control less than ten years. Still, bankers and others in financial services obviously do not understand that their job is not simply to make as much money for themselves; it is to ensure that the priority for investment now has to be for whatever is needed to avoid climate change becoming unmanageable, and to prepare for the consequences of energy shortages. Because of shortage of time, investment must be directed towards things which produce the biggest reduction of carbon emissions for every unit of currency invested.

The Government commitment to an emissions reduction in overall energy consumption, with renewables and nuclear replacing fossil fuels. With these alternative sources coming mostly as electricity, at four times the cost and investment in fossil energy, it is essential for priority to be given to an overall reduction in energy, by redeveloping all energy using systems for minimum consumption. This is because, in general, with the higher prices of energy supply, reducing energy investment is less costly permit than producing new supplies.

Unfortunately, at present, the focus is on renewables and nuclear feeding into the existing very inefficient, wasteful and irrational systems.

The UK has most to gain because we use much more energy per unit of GDP than most competitors. Furthermore, by focussing on consumption minimisation, a much wider range of industrial activities would be involved. Also the public would benefit considerably by using less of expensive energy supplies. They would also suffer less lifestyle change than would occur if expensive energy was fed into wasteful high consumption systems. Let’s get real and rational!

John Davis,
Swanage, Dorset

back to top

 Letters: No favourable wind

Our Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband’s Lord Hunt two weeks ago, and now Ben Sampson, in your magazine, talk of some 30GW of wind generating capacity by 2020. Britain’s peak demand is 56GW so they try to give the impression that this 30GW of wind power will be a major part of our electrical power requirements.

Wind power is available from wind turbines on average 27% of the time so the 30GW of wind generating capacity is in fact only just over 8GW of power. Worst still, that power costs 3 to 4 times as much as our base load electricity!

To cover for this intermittency of the wind, the power plants of Britain will have to have the full 56GW capacity, because although the average wind power is available 27% of the time, there are periods when the conditions across Britain are windless.

As to the 60,000 to 70,000 jobs in the wind industry and the lots of money to go with them, why do we not put the effort and money into essential, base load, clean, nuclear power which has insignificant CO2 and has a 50 year safe record in this country. This will make us independent of gas imports from countries like Russia for the generation of our electricity.

Maurice Ginniff,
Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria

 Letters: Open letter to Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate

Dear Mr Milliband

The latest announcement from your department is that the 1GW London Array wind farm is to go ahead. However one must ask at what cost and with what security?   Using an optimistic assumption that the load factor may be around 28.5 %( 2500) hours then the annual output of the Array would be 2 500 000 MWh. This represents only 0.6% of the present UK electricity consumption of 400 000 GWh. 

Nuclear Issues (June 2009) gives a figure of £92/MWh as the most recent figure given by Minister Mike O’Brien last November.  However this is only part of the picture. The subsidy of 1.5 ROC`s (Renewable Obligation Certificates) per MWh has to be added. The `worth` of an ROC given by Ofgem is their 2007 figure of £52.95 which is an increase of £10 on the 2005 figure. This means that the subsidy that the London Array could collect when fully operational could be up to £100/MWh, giving a total cost to the consumer of a staggering £200/MWh!!   

Compare this figure with the consumer cost for carbon free nuclear electricity of £38/MWh (Mike O’Brien’s figure quoted in Nuclear Issues June 2009) which is about one-fifth of the cost of off shore wind and one must ask the question how can such an expansion of the offshore wind programme be justified? In addition nuclear electricity is not intermittent and unlike wind energy does not require costly carbon emitting back up plant. Also by year 2050 the wind turbines will have had to be replaced possibly at least twice while a nuclear station built in 2012 would still be in operation by 2050. Also the load factor of nuclear stations can be over 90% compared to an average 25% for wind turbines. Where is all this money for wind subsidies coming from given that the country is already in massive debt? Your strategy compares with that of other countries such as the Netherlands where all subsidies for renewables have been stopped on the grounds of cost. They can’t afford it!

This is all to feed a programme of carbon reduction based on a theory of anthropogenic global warming which does not have any scientific proof. Indeed the earth has been cooling not warming over the last decade. Evidence of this comes from the NASA Microwave Sounding Unit and the Hadley Climate Research Unit.

By contrast there is overwhelming scientific evidence that present climate change is a cyclical process that is based on the magnetic effects of the sun and has been with us for hundreds of years. (See letter to US Congress http://www.climaterealists.com)

Terri Jackson,
Bangor, Co Down, Northern Ireland

 

PE will have accomplished a great service to UK energy planning, if the proponents of the massive wind power expansion featured on p29 of the 8 July issue are alerted to the warnings about alternative power sources, identified in the MacKay book reviewed on p52.

The proposal to replace gas and other fossil fuels by renewable electricity as the centrepiece of the 80% carbon reduction plan will bring ruinous costs and many technical challenges for companies and households.

A cursory glance at any utility bill will show that electrical energy is about four times the price of gas.   Winter gas consumption in kWh can be ten times electricity kWh.  As renewables are often over twice the price of other forms of electricity generation, government plans could see power bills increase by a factor of eight in a couple of decades.

Householders will also have to replace their gas-fired boilers by a suite of electrical heating appliances and upgrade their main fuses and wiring by a factor of 2 or 3 to handle currents of 120 amps continuously (25kW boiler, 6kW shower and 3 kW kettle ). Plenty of business for IEE qualified electricians.

Paul Spare,
Davenham, Northwich

 Letters: One-way traffic

May I respond to Paul Gillians’ letter on the suggestion of a high speed rail to Scotland. He should be aware that it took considerable effort to create uninhabited England north of Leeds but it was necessary to discourage those from the south seeking to share the benefits of living in Scotland.

However we do need a high speed rail link in order that we Scots can travel swiftly to the south in order to assist those who live there when they create problems and difficulties which need to be sorted out.

Allan Macpherson,
Sauchieburn, Stirling

 Letters: Mystery machines

Over the past few weeks both in England and Scotland I have driven past numerous tower like structures which for reasons unknown to me are called “wind turbines” (sic). At the top of each tower is a stationary thing that is shaped like a propeller. 
 

My wife thinks that they may have some connection with electricity generation but I'm not too certain as there are no moving parts!

Can any member please help?

Paul F. Shipman,
Broughton Astley, Leics

back to top

 Letters: Engineering in the North

I think that the inhabitants of Teeside and the Newcastle area (both well to the north of Leeds) must be most surprised to find that they live in an uninhabited, sheep infested waste!

I wonder if Mr Gillians has ever been north of Watford. As he reads Professional Engineering he is surely aware that there is still a lot of engineering in those areas despite the efforts of politicians and bureaucrats to get rid of it.

Roger Berry,
Martinstown, Dorchester

 Letters: The bigger picture

Paul "between Leeds and Scotland there is nothing but barren waste" Gillians’ letter (PE 8 July) may have been as tongue-in-cheek as he believes the proposal for high speed rail to Scotland to be (I for one cannot tell), but his contribution does at least open a useful opportunity to debate high speed rail, and hopefully avoid fallacies on both sides of the argument.

For a start, there seems to be an erroneous belief in some quarters that high speed trains can only travel as far as new high speed tracks can take them. While this may be at least partly true in Japan and indeed in the singular case of Eurostar in the UK, we really should be able to understand that high speed trains can run (at lower speeds) on conventional tracks. After all, that's what the Eurostar does to get to Paris!

Therefore, it is not necessary for new high speed lines to stretch all the way from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh for rail journey times to be dramatically reduced between these points. This would be a useful goal because a genuinely competitive train service on these routes, plus Manchester-London, could significantly reduce the need for domestic air travel.

If Britain is to embrace high speed rail, then it should be done based on three precepts. Firstly, it should fulfil a need other than the vanity of faster trains.  Secondly, it should open up new strategic transport links, thus benefiting the economy on a national basis. And thirdly, it should be capable of reducing domestic air travel.

A promising proposal is that for a London (Euston) - Heathrow hub - West Midlands high speed line, connected to the existing high speed line from the Channel Tunnel to London. For the first precept, it would relieve the congested southern end of the West Coast main line, thus clearing the way for more regional, suburban and freight traffic. For the second, it would open up new strategic links between Heathrow and many British cities, as well as opening the way to direct international trains from the West Midlands to the continent with journey times competitive with air.

The third one might prove more difficult, however. It is suggested that this route could cut London-Birmingham journey times to 45-50 minutes. But there are no Birmingham-London flights to reduce, and Birmingham is not on the main line from London to Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, meaning that journey times on these routes via the proposed new line and then joining the existing route somewhere in the West Midlands may not in fact be much faster than today.

However, we are engineers and can solve problems if given the opportunity!

Caspar Lucas,
Stourbridge, West Midlands

 Letters: Tales from the far side

As keen amateur anthropologists, we were intrigued by the letter from Paul Gillians in the current PE.

So we packed our desert gear, and set off for the “barren waste” of County Durham.

To our great surprise, many of the sheep had learned to walk on their hind legs, and to speak a language with much in common with English.

We found an electrically powered local transport system, the Newcastle Metro, and told them we came from Fareham, near Portsmouth. 

“Whey it’s a shame you can’t afford proper local transport”, they told us. “Ye’re getting fobbed off down there with concrete sectional ro-ads reserved for bushes” (I think that meant BUSES).

And how strange it was to find a car factory in this barren waste! The poor deluded Nissan workers thought they had a more secure future than the van builders of Southampton.

Many people told us they wouldn’t move South of London if they were paid to; while others said that a few more namby Southerners should travel North of Watford from time to time, rather than relying on what they called “Google Flat Earth”. How very strange!

More seriously, Laurencekirk station, a little south of Aberdeen, is the latest in a long list of railway openings or re-openings that exceed passenger traffic expectations rapidly (in this case by over 100% within weeks). High Speed to Scotland sounds good to us.

Ken Strachan,
Nuneaton, Warwickshire

 Letters: The value of operations

Aerospace courses are failing to meet employer's needs.

I can somewhat agree with this statement. As an Aerospace engineering graduate, there were the requisite workshop and lab courses but not a focus on operations and maintenance. Luckily I started my career in a power station in Ops and Maintenance. 

More than 10 years on I am comfortable in design and engineering phases as I understand the operational and maintenance requirements. Engineers, who have focused on their career on design, struggle with the operational and maintenance practicalities. Design and its operations and maintenance should not be separated and would be a welcome strength to university courses.

M. Atkinson

 Letters: North and south

Paul Gillians’ letter, (Do Sheep Pay Taxes? PE 8 July) brought a wry smile to my lips. I worked out of an office in Leeds in the late 1960s traveling widely throughout Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland.

During this time, students from Doncaster produced a poster designed to attract business to the north of England. They called it “a northerner's view of a southerner's impression of the British Isles”.

The view from Portsmouth, according to Paul Gillians’ letter, has perhaps not changed very much!

Harvey Holmes,
Hilton, Derbyshire

back to top

 Letters: Where ignorance is bliss

Excuse me if I am not surprised that Whitehall has decided against the post of a government chief engineer adviser (page 10 PE 8th July 2009). After all, why change a ruining formula, when the economy is on its knees.

At least however we can finally identify the bottleneck preventing common sense. You can almost set the scene with Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Humphrey Appleby advising his minister on the disadvantages of actually employing someone who knows what they are doing.

One would have hoped, that with a civil service still large enough to run an empire, we might have moved on from the technical infrastructure and organisation of canals and navvies. Now however, despite the obvious gaping knowledge gap so clearly demonstrated by the EcoVillage fiasco, the same scientific advisors are going to tackle the big one: Nuclear Power.

Assuming, as is my experience, that maths school students become science graduates and science school students become engineering graduates, may we anticipate safety critical structures designed with “light string” and “smooth inclines” (A-Level Applied Maths). In my humble opinion, the government chief scientific adviser would do well in taking advice from an experienced manufacturing and logistics engineer.

Presumably in a parallel universe somewhere, there is a country like ours where the leaders take advice from a government chief engineering adviser. Technical difficulties like transport infrastructure, environmental pollution, and power generation are so well under control as to be insignificant while scientists protest at the lack of attention paid to their hair brained schemes.

Tim Wynne-Jones,
Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire

I really must take objection to Laura Gardner's statement that "The final major development [of the bicycle] came in 1888 with the patenting of pneumatic tyres....” 

Some consider that another major development occurred with the evolution of the practical recumbent rider position.  Various examples of alternatives to the saddle appeared around the turn of the century, but it wasn't until George Mochet followed the example of Baron von Drais and cut one of his streamlined Velocars in half to create a Velo Velocar, that the recumbent bicycle really made its mark. 

The resulting machine proved so fast that the design was banned from competition by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI - effective governing body of cycle sport) in April 1934 - which also relates to the recent 'Unfair Advantage' article in PE!

The modern recumbent machine, in all its varieties, is increasingly enjoyed for its unique combination of comfort and low aerodynamic drag.  Meanwhile, one of the foremost modern bicycle designers, Mike Burrows, refers to the common diamond frame machines so beloved by the UCI as 'Victorian': history says he has a point!

Mike Croker,
Steyning, Sussex

 Letters: Taking a whole-country approach

I do hope Paul Gillians had his tongue firmly in cheek when he wrote his letter about there being no need for a high speed rail link to Scotland, because of his claim that economic migration out of the area the line would run through had left no one to use it.

This sort of idiocy is why the economic migration occurred in the first place and why it is continuing. Until all of Britain is recognised and has proper transport links, then we cannot move forward as a country. I had thought until reading Paul’s address that he came from London or the South East, where such ignorance and insularity is commonplace. My objection to some of the new rail plans was their reading as “A line from London to…, a line from London to…, and a line from London to…”

We see daily the consequences of focusing all economic activity in the South/ South East. It is a disaster. Proper links to Scotland and the North of England would help stop the rot and possibly reverse some of the damage.

On top of that, an effective rail service should have good CO2 emissions reducing benefits, since it is currently necessary to fly to Scotland if you want to do business effectively. What should really be done is to take some of the massive effective subsidy on air travel and use it to build proper, more green transport systems.

Mike West,
Trowbridge, Wiltshire

 Letters: Reducing our way back to health

I do not need to look up Wilson or the White heat of Technology – I was part of it. I played my part along with a few million others in driving the oil escalator ever upward through all of the twentieth century. We changed the face of the world militarily, politically, economically and socially.

One of the things we did not do was anticipate the crunch. We knew about peak oil by 1966 although we never used that description nor really believed it would happen. It should be obvious to any engineer that the physical consequences of economic expansion cannot continue indefinitely. Continuous expansion is an exponential and it cannot fit into a finite world for ever.

The EEF may well have some sensible things to say but these must reflect a fundamental change in the basic philosophy of our world. Our current philosophy is expansion, hedonism, greed and waste. This has served some of us well on the way up. There can be no doubt that the current economic disarray marks the start of the descent. We will need a new reductionist philosophy. That is not an option but a vital necessity.

There are many factors to consider but the fundamental one is that wealth can be created in only one way. You take materials from the earth and convert them to usable artefacts. This can be done by hunting, gathering, farming or mining and manufacturing. The financial system has never created a single pennyworth of wealth. Its correct function is to facilitate production of wealth as defined above. But the financial tail has been wagging the manufacturing dog for far too long.

Money is simply a token of wealth and cannot create it. When our philosophy recognises this truth then we may be in a position to negotiate the well-oiled and dangerous slope that faces us all.

Colin Walker,
Coventry

I read with interest the recent article 'Space race' published in the 24 June issue concerning future trains for the deep lines of the London Underground.

Having recently visited Amsterdam I was impressed by some design features of the local trams. Firstly I was impressed by the ability of these vehicles to negotiate very tight bends without any screaming of wheels on rail. On looking closely I realised the coaches were all short and had 4 wheels, i.e. no bogies. Combined with the second design feature of being articulated they achieve low rail wear and high passenger capacity for the overall length.

It was also noticeable they have very good acceleration and braking capacity to give high average speeds despite many stops. I cannot see why all this technology could not be mirrored onto an underground train and meet London Underground's Malcolm Dobell's stipulation that it exists today.

Paul Lakra,
Wembley

 Letters: Flywheels on the railways

I write in response to a letter in the 24 June issue of PE entitled ‘Keep flywheels off trains’.

As the proprietor of a company that proposes flywheel energy storage for this application I thought I should correct any misunderstanding as the letter writer had clearly missed some key points.

The first is that electrical regenerative braking is notoriously inefficient and storage of the energy onboard the train with a high-speed flywheel will give very much higher efficiency of energy recovery.

The second point is one of infrastructure. As the Underground is being upgraded the trains are getting heavier and draw more electricity requiring upgrading of all the line electrification systems. If you fit the energy storage to the train and perform ‘peak shaving’ it is possible to run the train with a much lower power input from the electrified line, so avoiding the cost and service disruption associated with upgrading this equipment.

Jon Hilton,
Horley, Banbury