By Barney Smith It is becoming clearer that one of the industries which will be most affected by COVID 19 is the bottled water industry. Yet the industry was already under consumer pressure following the by-now famous Blue Planet II episode in early 2018. That broadcast focused minds on the damage done by non-recyclable plastic [...]
By Barney Smith Even before this issue was highlighted, there was no doubt that one of the casualties of the Covid 19 pandemic would be the campaign to reduce the use of plastic in the world, particularly single-use plastic. That is hardly surprising, one of the main focuses of the fight against the virus has [...]
By Barney Smith It is good to see that the Virus has not changed absolutely everything: for cometh mid-June, cometh the BP Annual Statistical Energy Survey for 2019. Bearing in mind that the Survey is essentially backward-looking because it is supposed to be about last year, it is scarcely surprising that in his introduction the [...]
By Oliver Nelson-Drummett Vibrations are everywhere. From traffic rumbling over a bridge to footfalls on a pavement, the modern world is filled with ambient energy that can be harvested by materials that exhibit the “piezoelectric effect”. Deforming these materials causes a small charge displacement across them, leading to a build-up of voltage. If such a [...]
By Julian Singer Dr Philipp Grünewald is very interested in what we do all day. As Deputy Director of Energy Research at the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford, his research work and the METER project which he runs tries to understand what we use electricity for. To do this the project sends volunteers a mobile [...]
By Barney Smith Fishing nets are specifically designed to catch marine wildlife, but since modern nets are made of plastic a new threat has emerged: when nets, pots and other gear is discarded, lost or abandoned in the sea, these so-called “ghost nets” form aimless but deadly floating death traps for ocean wildlife. At least [...]
By Barney Smith If de-carbonisation and ending overwhelming reliance on fossil fuels are given aims, as is an increased role for electricity from renewable sources, then perhaps it is time for us to say a little about why we think that intermittence is a handicap in the rise of renewables? Put another way, how are [...]
By Julian Singer, 12 May 2020 Earlier this year the New York based financial and business news website Business Insider published a study listing twenty-one clean technology start-ups that it claimed would transform the industry. It was particularly interested to know if there were any unicorns (start-ups with a valuation of $1bn or more). Specifically excluded [...]
By Julian Singer On 28 April Professor Steve Sorrell of the University of Sussex gave a cogent and interesting presentation of his work on the limits of Energy Sufficiency[1] in an online session as part of the Oxford Energy series. Energy sufficiency can be thought of as a goal or a set of actions that [...]
By Barney Smith Last week saw Shell release its three hundred and six page annual report, “Energy for a better future”. It was drafted before the recent collapse of the oil price and any proper assessment of the full impact of the Corona virus. At the time there was much news focus on the dividend [...]