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kind of bump, because actually i'd be quite interested in that as well, but also to record a chance encounter flying back from Glasgow earlier in the year, that had a slightly Ballardian flavour to it.
Had taken my seat by the window, and a well-groomed late thirties early forties man in a relaxed but expensive suit sat down beside me, having had a short discussion in Spanish with the person in front, and then turned to me said hello, and asked me what I'd been up to in Glasgow, in the accents of 'international English', (slightly soft 'classless' tones and deracinated vowels) which, being expressive of a non-English-speaking background is quite exotic and appealing to me. I explained briefly, wary of a bore, but felt it was polite to ask him also what he'd been doing.
Turned out he'd been setting up an offshore windfarm. He was an an engineer who specialised in renewable energy. This was certainly interesting enough to want to continue, and he told me a bit about the engineering challenge about fixing large windmills in often turbulent seas, and the heavy duty sub-marine structures required.
I said I felt that as an industry outsider it was often difficult to get a sense about the effectiveness of renewable energy from the press and media generally.
He gave me a bit of energy 101 (stuff i could have probably worked out, but which it was useful to be told clearly and by an expert) - that the big problem was not generating energy, it was storing it, and that for anything bigger than a mid-sized house, batteries were unfeasible. He also pointed out that the only large-scale battery or way to store energy available on earth had used the same technology for thousands of years, which was that of damming reservoirs.
The well-known consequent problem for energy sources like windfarms and solar power being that their main power sources are variable and intermittent in force.
The UK energy sector is required to use any resources of renewable energy *before* using non-renewable energy power generation. I need to be careful about my terminology here because, as this person pointed out, renewable energy is not the same as 'clean' energy necessarily, and 'clean' or 'green' energy is not the same as renewable energy. Renewable energy sources include wind and solar power, but also chip-wood burning generators (a quickly growing industrial use a friend of mine who started out as a woodcutter and woodland manager is currently making a sizable amount of cash from). 'Clean' energy can, I believe, also include nuclear energy, which is not renewable. Some of this categorisation is ignored or confused in much media coverage I think.
I asked if we'd reach a stage where we could rely totally on renewable energy (let's stick with that phrase for the moment). He said that in fact there have been numerous days in recent years where 100% of the UK's energy requirements had been sourced using renewable energy. However, at times of high levels of usage, the amount generated wasn't sufficient for national requirements.
There is a slogan, he said, being used in the industry and in government, which is 20 by 20 - that is to say, 20% of yearly energy use being provided using renewable energy by the year 2020, and I believe that a 25% level was being set for 2025.
What were the biggest challenges? He asked me how long I expected a power plant to be in use for. I suggested a couple of generations. He said it was about 25 years. He then asked what sort of time frames banks looked at when investing. 7 years? He said it was actually more like 14, but with a 7 year break/assessment point. Then he asked how long governments tended to plan for, and I laughed and said 'an electoral cycle?' and he said 'right.'
He explained the challenge they had was securing the large amount of funding required to set up a windfarm, and his job, which was in part salesman (unsurprisingly, given his smooth but not unpleasing conversation), was to secure funding from lots of different places.
There are some more details, which were probably interesting, but which I've forgotten, but we moved on to talk a bit about my work and some of the challenges there, and also about his family, and it was here that I felt something almost sinister sitting to one side of him, something in the way he talked about his wife and children. It was very proprietorial, there was a strange sense of anger and need to control that seemed to come from frustrations with his father. They 'won't do' this, of course 'they don't understand the details'.
We disembarked at City airport, but happened to meet again on the tube from City, and he struck up conversation in a more jocular tone, about what men could expect from women - something along the lines of 'you've got to know how to get what you want, right?' followed by a wink. I found all this allied with his general bland approachability and appearance, and clear intelligence, unpleasant and irritating, especially as I've always been terrible at knowing how to get what I want, or even what I want in the first place, and perhaps slightly naively dislike generic assumptions about men and women, or me for that matter. The sinister configurations or disjunctions of his personality, which had been only latent or possibly even projected earlier in the journey, had now become more clearly visible - these configurations being unreformed personal beliefs as hidden components of his futuristic manner and job. It was this that reminded me of Ballard.
He gave me his card and said I should get in touch as it had been pleasant talking to me. I think I may have thrown it away, though it may be buried in with the heap of other business cards lying around in drawers at home. I felt both repulsed and intrigued - I have no desire to see him at all again, and am at the same time curious to know more.
― Fizzles, Saturday, October 11, 2014 10:10 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Karl Malone, Monday, 20 October 2014 02:31 (nine years ago) link
seven months pass...