Energy efficiency is not just a California dream
As a mechanical engineer in Arcadis’s buildings business, I’m fascinated by energy, efficiency and the way that we build and operate building portfolios. But the UK’s construction industry remains extremely carbon heavy.
Half of our annual CO2 emissions are contributed through the construction and maintenance of all the buildings and structures across the country.
The construction industry in California has always piqued my interest when it comes to innovation in energy and the environment. I took part in a knowledge-transfer scheme that took me to Los Angeles. The focal point was attending the US Green Building Conference.
The event is packed full of consultants, scientists, engineers and students all looking to learn about the next big steps in the green aspects of the construction world. It became increasingly clear to me that we need to look to other industries for inspiration and solutions.
The discussion that caught my attention focused on BMW’s work in energy storage. A group of franchises in southern California have now created a portable demand response market on all BMW electric vehicles by offering customers an app that allows them to export back to the grid at peak times (to reduce distribution use of system charges and at times of Triads – or the US equivalent).
They’ve engineered a smart network where energy isn’t something that sits in your fuel tank, it takes the form of a currency on your phone. I understand that Nissan too are trialling this in Japan. How brilliant.
Buildings aren’t as cool as the new BMW i8 (or Nissan Leaf – whichever floats your boat) and we are becoming increasingly aware that demand management and asset optimisation are growing in importance in the buildings and manufacturing industries. But perhaps there is an opportunity to create a smart buildings network as the grid becomes smarter and smarter?
Technology firms will continue to provide solutions to manage energy for clusters of buildings, but our ultimate goal might be a network of connected smart buildings. This could use big data to allow us to switch a building on to ‘lean mode’ from a phone if there is going to be a Triad that afternoon or even to dovetail two fluctuating demands from different customers. Anything could be possible.
Designing, building and operating energy-efficient buildings is a fantastic achievement of the era we live in. However, the way we embrace technology and motivate people to think strategically and take accountability for energy and our environment is a monumental challenge.
We can look to other industries for guidance and assess how they might inspire us to innovate in our own field. I hope that this will make me a better engineer who feels a little more proud of the industry I work in.
Fred Edwards, London
Wizards wanted
You referred to a need for a radical shake-up of the way engineering is talked about in schools (Editor’s comment, PE May).
As a bit of a left-field retired engineer, I have been interested in the way engineers attempt to interest school kids. When design and technology was introduced into the syllabus in the 1970s I read a bit about its structured format and realised that it would not have inspired me when at school.
I recently explained to a young grand niece how she could add up an infinite number of fractions and show that the answer was two. I have since learned that she has become keen at maths!
Regrettably I am not a relaxed and confident communicator to a classroom full of kids – but if forced I might go along these lines:
How many of you liked the Harry Potter stories? (Hoping today’s kids still remember Harry.)
Would you believe me if said I was a wizard before I retired? (General negative response.)
I could then talk as follows:
The truth is that I went to a special boarding school by its own special school train where most of us had to sleep in dead men’s beds. There I made a start in learning difficult spells. Most pupils found them difficult but the real test was to be able to see how they could be used to help make all our lives simpler, easier and quicker.
By the time I finished my full-time education I could see how difficult spells could be used to stop buildings collapsing, make cars move and make aeroplanes fly.
I then went on to join up with some groups of clever wizards. We worked mostly out of sight, hidden in our caves where we set about making life better for people.
After work we also went unnoticed, travelling back to our homes looking much like everyone else.
Then I would move on to explanations about difficult spells being not easy to learn unless you really try, but once understood they can do these things. Those difficult spells are in the language of maths. The hidden caves are the offices where most engineers work, out of the eye of the public who do not know much about how we work.
Then a bit about the strong need for engineers and relatively equal opportunities for women (with examples).
The good news is that you can learn the spells at any good school. I only went to my boarding school by train because my father was a civilian helping the occupying forces in Germany after the Second World War and I had to attend Prince Rupert School in Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast. This was located in what had previously been Germany’s submarine barracks and many of the crews perished towards the end of the war.
Denis W Oglesby, Bingley, West Yorkshire
We’re not all copycats
I refer to the article “JLR thwarted in its lawsuit against Jiangling” (News, PE July). As an engineer working on original equipment, I fully empathise with the alleged victims of copycatting.
However, as a Singaporean, I was disturbed by the conflation of “Asia” and the “Far East” with the widely asserted trend of intellectual property violations in China. While “Asia” is a convenient label for categorising countries by geographical location, lazy generalisation of these countries’ other characteristics based purely on proximity is offensive and misleading.
Singapore, for example, consistently ranks highly for intellectual property protection: the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2015-16 ranked Singapore fourth in the world, and agreed with the US Global Intellectual Property Center’s International IP Index 2016 in ranking the country top in Asia. Furthermore, the Global Innovation Index 2015 ranked Singapore as the seventh most innovative nation in the world.
The underlying principles of mutual respect, honesty and intellectualism are, undoubtedly, values that Singapore shares with the UK.
Perhaps the engineering community could take some inspiration from economists and the financial world: the “tiger” economies roared unmistakably in the 1980s, while the more recently coined “G20” and “Anglosphere” are now common parlance.
Joash Lee, Derby
Shared waterway
The article with regard to burning coal seams refers to the Solway Firth as being in Scotland (News, PE August).
People hereabouts might well take exception to this claim, as the Solway Firth lies between south-west Scotland and Cumbria, in England. It is in effect a marine inlet between the two countries.
It has been mooted that the Solway Firth is the remnant of the ancient ocean Iapetus, which preceded what is now the Atlantic.
Dr C L Murray, Wigton, Cumbria
Experience required
There is a long-held view that there is a shortage of professional engineers.
Prior to graduating from Cambridge University with a masters in engineering I was recently looking for a job in mechanical engineering. I contacted numerous well-known companies (the likes of Lotus, Triumph, Cosworth, McLaren, Reaction Engines, MG), only to receive either no response or an admission that there were no suitable positions.
Therefore I believe the problem is an unwillingness on the part of companies to invest in their personnel. They expect someone with all the relevant experience to be available as and when they need them.
David Walker, Shifnal, Shropshire
Don’t dismiss barrage idea
So Edward Grist has had the audacity to propose a Severn barrage. Paul Spare appears to be exasperated at the very mention of such an unworldly, unworkable idea (Letters, PE August). Is he right?
That paragon of common sense, the Central Electricity Generating Board, roundly dismissed a barrage scheme 40 years ago. And there we have it. It is unfortunate that the board didn’t dismiss some other pet projects of the era.
Engineers clearly recognise the problems of the intermittency of renewable power generated from environmental sources. It is almost pointless to state that: the wind may not blow; the sun may not shine; the moon keeps on moving. They also recognise the operational idiosyncrasy of power demand, the “Coronation Street correlation”.
Undoubtedly some supply intermittency is reasonable and some may be barely tolerable and has to be carefully considered. Same will have to apply to demand in the end, after very considerable public animosity.
Unfortunately we do not now live in former more simple, mechanistic, coal-burning, cheap nuclear, controllable times, when even the government appeared to know what it was doing. I hesitate to say that the government now doesn’t know. We live in hope.
Views about supply and demand of power are changing. But what is eminently clear is that the UK is going to struggle to provide suitable and sufficient power in the not-too-distant future.
A lot of money will have to be forthcoming for whatever. A lot of politics – like fracking – will have to rationalised. A lot of clarification about nuclear waste disposal and plant decommissioning will have to be set out.
The birds are waiting to come home to roost. Ideas about a distributed/decentralised power generation/storage/supply might just kickstart
new and better ways of thinking. The essential operative word is storage as regards this issue: of any type, for any level, at any location, and with reasonable cost.
The government has to start thinking a bit harder. The Severn barrage cannot be just dismissed out of hand. Even now it could be part of the mix.
William Ralph, Oxford
Nuclear versus tidal energy
I was interested in the letter in favour of a tidal energy scheme, the Severn barrage, and another opposing it, suggesting that it would be compromised by the large tidal range (PE July and August). However, sea-cooled stations are affected by tides, too.
All nuclear stations are on the coast, and sea-cooled, and in the discussions of Hinkley Point C no mention has been made of the problems of cooling on the Bristol Channel. I was once associated with a team making flow measurements in the last two or three LP stages of all types of large power station steam turbines, including Hinkley Point B. When they returned from their first sortie there, they reported difficulty in acquiring repeatable results.
I immediately thought: tidal range, so I looked up the tide tables for the Hinkley area where the tidal range is very large (between 6 and 9m at Minehead in July 2016; greater in some other months). This affects the condenser pressure with impact on the turbine backpressure and hence performance.
I found the dates and times of highest water (‘springs’), which occur only twice per month. So, I told them when to go, at which dates and times. They then acquired sets of consistent data at what turned out to be the design point! The upshot of this is that the turbines were only operating on design twice per month.
For this reason I tend to agree with Edward Grist, who suggested that the tidal power scheme should be considered seriously as an alternative to further nuclear at the location.
However, there seems to be controversy around a tidal barrage, including the likelihood of silt building up, but it seems that could probably be dredged at suitable intervals.
The tidal schemes under construction in Brazil with outputs in the 3,000MW range mentioned by Grist are apparently attracting fierce controversy.
The tidal river barrage on the Rance in Brittany has been operating successfully for 47 years, but it’s relatively small, with only 240MW installed capacity.
Small modular reactors have been suggested as an alternative to large nuclear plants. Presumably they could build on Rolls-Royce experience with their nuclear submarine power plants, and could be built in shorter timescales than required for Hinkley Point C.
The latter timescale should include the time to resolve problems with EDF’s present two PWR power stations of the same design, based in France and Finland. However, it seems such resolution could be remote.
Professor Nigel Wood, London