UK Government Fixes Energy Prices at 2x 2013 Levels for..... 35 Years ?

Can it really be true that UK Prime Minister David Cameron is so staggeringly badly advised on energy matters,  that he has allowed himself to sign agreements for new Nuclear plant which fix wholesale prices at TWICE 2013 levels until...  2048 ? 

Yes it can, it seems. 

The technological reality of power-generation science is that there are two truly long-term solutions to our energy needs.   One is fusion,  the other solar photovoltaic.    All the others are interim solutions which will ultimately fade in the medium term.    Coal is just too filthy to continue with;  nuclear fission too generative of desperately toxic wastes with multimillenium half-lives;   wind a green dream which is too uselessly variable (unlike the wave power it has stolen attention, and funding, from);  gas a wasteful interim which should have been saved for space-heating (for which it is perfect), but having been stolen for power generation in the 'dash for gas',   will gasp its last pressure all too soon. 

Fusion by comparison is clean, with only pure water as waste product,  and capable of generating astonomically large amounts of energy from tiny amounts of heavy water fuel - but is one of those engineering challenges that is just so fiendshly hard to crack, we're probably still a half-century, from switching on commercial stations. 

By contrast Solar Photovoltaics - 'PV' - solar panels - are proven science, and simply now on the standard electronics-sector down-slope,  of price against volume.  There is a chance that in a couple of decades PV will become so cheap that even fusion will be mothballed.   The future is, solar farms:  clean, silent,  harmless:  solar pergolas can sit quietly above sheep farms or vineyards or crops without problems,  and the vast areas of farmland makes it very viable to co-locate massive power-generation arrays with fully productive agriculture.   

By 2048 photovoltaics will be so staggeringly cheap that the 9p/KWH that Mr Cameron has seemingly signed up to pay for the next 35 years will look rather ludicrous.   That contract will have to be broken,  and as always, it will be the taxpayer who has to bear the penalties of doing so.  

Mr Cameron,  when a very elderly statesman,  will no doubt be called back on to political talk shows to explain how on earth he got - and took - such stunningly bad advice, way back in 2013.  





 

An Open Letter to George Entwistle, Director-General of the BBC

Mr Entwistle

I am a collossal supporter,  recommender,  'fan'  and enthusiast for most of what the BBC does.   I am possibly the UK's most dedicated listener and collector of BBC output:  it has been the soundtrack to the whole of my adult life.  

I am sorry to say this - because I have no doubt you are a good & decent man,  but you have appalled me with incompetence in this latest matter:  and unless you undergo a truly massive change of heart and of focus and of management technique within the next few hours,  then you you must resign immediately.   Today.

I have just heard you interviewed on the Today programme by John Humphries,  and was appalled by the stuttering, bumbling excuse-making embarrassment that you made of yourself.    I am sorry for that too but there it is. 


It is completely incredible that after the Savile debacle,  any DG could possibly not have put the flames of hell itself under the buttocks of every single manager and editor in the BBC, and made it collossally clear in words of very few syallables that their balls would be on the hotplate  if anything remotely contentious were in preparation,  yet not notified to the DG. 

Since that monumental foul-up you should have been checking every planned transmission weekly:   indeed it amazes me that every DG does not do this.    To John Humpries just minutes ago, you were just making the excuses that in essence "..there is so much going on.."  that by implication you don't have time to do such a thing.   If you really believe that, then you are an incompetent as a manager and you must resign right now - on reading this.      That is because you will have completely failed to understand what delegation is about:  you repeatedly asserted that you believe in putting the right management in position and then 'letting them manage'  without your oversight.     But that is a nonsense:  all large organisations need oversight from above and any skilled manager knows that if you delegate properly,  YOU personally will not be excessively busy - the whole point of delegation is to have time,  to do what only you can do.  

Every DG should have a slot once a week of an hour - that is all it needs -  where with a small senior team of two or three,  you review - in very brief - what is in the running order a week or two weeks ahead,   plus anything which has been 'jumped' up the running order for reason of urgency.     Most programmes will require ten seconds discussion:  it is only the very few, perhaps a few tens of programmes,  which need even a minute or two.   Plainly only a very few,  like this one,  need to be flagged as "contentious" - a hardly difficult notion to grasp.    That will allow you and your seniors to stop anything dead in its tracks that needs stopping.  

That I even need to explain this simplicity suggests you really are not up to the job,  for it so self-evident that this should be a routine part of managing the BBCs output.   Do not make excuses that "there are too many output channels"  - that why you have subordinates who can summarise for you.  In essence "anything contentious on your channel(s) this week ?"  is all that need be asked. 

As to Twitter, it was a sign of complete disconnectedness from how the communications world works that when John Humpries asked you if you'd known about the Tweet out twelve hours before the show which flagged the problem,  you started bumbling on about how "...I sometimes check twitter in the late evening...".  

How can you NOT realise that thousands of tweets are being issued each second globally,  and no individual can check them.   You simply MUST have a technical team with some simple computing tools  within the BBC, which electronically LOGS ALL tweets globally that mention the BBC - this is technologically trivial.   The output of that process needs to be screened by the equivalent of a clippings team hourly and anything alarming, must be flagged direct to senior management immediately - day or night. 

I am sick to the pit of my stomach to think of the risk that this very fine organisation is being put right now:  if we lose it (and there are plenty who would like to kill it off each time the licence fee is up for renewal) we will never get it back.    Either wake up,  apologise for your own desperately blinkered approach thus far,   declare a new clarity of management method and GET ON with all the above - or get out of the job today,  for the sake of this great public enterprise.  

Abu Qatada and the Saga of the Three Months... Theresa May IS Right

In the UK papers this past week the question of whether the UK Home Office "got it's dates wrong" has been batted back and forth and large amounts of hot air and grumbling has been generated.

May I just - instead - inject a simple line of clear logical analysis to this :

1.  The European Court appeal rules are perfectly clearly set out - see here for a PDF version:  http://tinyurl.com/ECHR-Appeal-Rules


2.   An extract from the relevant Section VI(b) of those rules (page 13) clearly state that :

"The Panel declares inadmissible any referral requests which:
. . .
(b) do not comply with the three-month rule set out in Article 43 § 1 of the
Convention. 

In this connection, it is to be noted that the period of three months within which referral may be requested starts to run on the date of the delivery of the judgment, irrespective of whether the party concerned may have learned about it at a later stage.
It expires three calendar months later and is not interrupted by bank holidays or periods of judicial recess. The request for referral should reach the Registry of the Court before the expiry of the above-mentioned period. "



3.  The judgement (which triggered all this controversy) was handed down on 17th January 2012.


4.  Consider:    If we define time-intervals, for some purpose, where we agree we will disregard the hour of the day (as here), and simply define periods by the date then - looking at a couple of simple examples :

a.  If we were speaking of a period of one day,  beginning on the 5th, then on what date would you describe the subsequent period, as beginning ? 

Plainly and categorically, the 6th.  The next period begins at the start of the succeeding interval of time - here one day - hence the subsequent period begins one day later.   Seemingly trivial. 

b.  Now  -  extending that notion,  if we define a period of one calendar month, as beginning on 17th,  then on what day of the succeeding month, would you describe the succeeding period of one calendar month  as beginning ? 

Plainly it has to be at the start of the succeeding interval of time, which is 17th : were you to consider it  instead 18th,  then what would the beginning date of the next succeeding period be - 19th ?  And then, 20th ? and 21st ?  That is plainly wrong, as the boundary date would be 'drifting' down the months.    The only possible answer for the start of the succeeding period, is 17th.

SO - if it is plainly true that the succeeding period begins on 17th of the succeeding month,  then what is the end date, of the one-month period which begins on  17th?    Plainly, the answer must be,  the 16th of the following month. 


c.  And so it proves, for any longer period - a three-month period beginning ON 17th January, plainly, categorically and definitely, ENDS ON 16th of April - NOT 17th April.


If the ECHR or its spokespersons do not agree with that, they are simply wrong:  it is not a matter of opinion, or open to dispute: it is an unshiftable, indisputable logical fact arising from their own procedure wording. 


5.  Abu Qatada's lawyers submitted their appeal papers at 22:00 on Tuesday 17th of April:  22 hours outside the legal deadline.


I am not personally a great fan of Theresa May:  but on this she has been abused quite wrongly.   She IS right.    She deserves to receive apologies from many sides.    If the ECHR turns out not to agree would be a travesty - they will be making themselves - and their procedures, a laughing stock.

Go Theresa.   :-) 

Viglen's Bordon Tkachuk Embarrasses Himself on Apprentice 'Interviews' - Sugar may tell him "You're Fired", say sources

On BBC 1's The Apprentice tonight,  millions heard one of Lord Sugar's senior lieutenants embarrass himself.

Doing what ?   exposing his clear lack of knowledge of  I.T. terminology...   not such an issue you might think, except the embearrassed head-honcho in question was none other than Bordon Tkachuk,  CEO of  Viglen Computers.

While grilling the apprentice candidate-you-loved-to-hate Stuart Baggs,   Tkachuk was clearly heard to refer to the term "ISP" (Internet Service Provider) by saying  "....I know what ISP is - Internet Service Protocol "  and talked of it allowing  "....internet connection .. over Bandwidth (sic)".

This makes about as much sense as a plumber telling you he's going to install a gruntle-nirgle under your sink.  The man plainly knows nothing at all about I.T. in detail  -  tens of thousands of IT professionals jumped on Twitter as soon as he said it, and started shooting from the hip:   " #WhatisanISP ?   Internet Sugar-Panderer ?   Internet Service Plonker ?  ".

None of this would matter of course if he hadn't been arguing hammer and tongs with Stuart Baggs about whether he (Baggs) really owned a telecoms company:  Tkachuk insisted he didn't  -  Baggs (correctly) said he did, and that he offered telecoms services to customers on his home island the Isle of Man.   Bagg's company,  Bluewave, offers wireless hotspots and has a IP microwave link to the mainland to provide IP datacomms to businesses in the island.   That's definitely "telecoms" to anyone in the business:  but plainly Bordon Tkachuk is not in the IT business - though he might screw a few computers together now and then.

This column cordially invites Bordon Tkachuk or Lord Alan Sugar to issue an open letter of apology to Stuart Baggs for treating him so badly.    Perhaps Bordon might like to hire Stuart as an I.T. adviser ?

A Cataclysmic Foul-Up of a Policy Announcement

It's perhaps not so unusual for a new government to make a cataclysmic balls-up of an item of policy.   Or, occasionally, a cataclysmic balls-up of an item of PR.    But both, on the same weekend,  on the same subject, is really pushing the boat out. 

I'm not sure who is formally considered to be in charge of government PR, but whoever it is needs to be spending more time with his family.  Or perhaps spending more time with a beginner's book on PR.     "...Forcing people to work...  for nothing.."  ?      Oh, well done.   What a finely-crafted image that is. 

Poor old Danny Alexander on the World This Weekend sounded like a deputy head prefect trying to explain a new sanction against fourth formers caught smoking.     And 'sanction' - amazingly - was the word he allowed himself to use:  thus opening the door for every left-winger to describe it as "forced work" and elicit all the chain-gang imagery which the redtops will revel in.     What on earth is Iain Duncan-Smith thinking in allowing this garbled, incompetent version (of his presumably originally sensible policy)  to get out ?     Of course it is sensible to nudge the work-shy back to work - and let's not pretend the numbers of those are small, please - but for goodness sake,  the message could be so much better put, than this unbelievable, ham-fisted mess. 

The form of words needed for this policy is surely that,  after a generous period of providing unemployment benefit for those fit and able and out of work to look for work full-time,  we should simply invite people in order to still benefit from that same support and help, to contribute to earning the money they receive, by working for the state for some of the week (and continuing to look for better paid work the rest of the week).    All that needs doing, is to invite people to continue their receipt of benefit by working for the state, at the minumum wage.  So  £65 earned is worth about 11 hours a week (say three mornings).   That will still leave them plenty of time for job applications and it will get them out in the fresh air, in company with others and with the satisfaction of contributing something.   

Gulf Oil Leak... Not So Dramatic After All

So yesterday we hear from no less than the U.S Government,  that the oil spill in the Gulf is...  75% cleared up already.  And despite all the wailings and gnashings of teeth only a month or so ago,  about the enviroment being "ruined for decades to come" and "the worst ecological disaster ever to hit America" and such hysterics,  we hear that the actual amount of oil leaked was about 5 million barrels, or 200 million gallons. 


And what is the sea volume of the Gulf itself  ?      Well.... actually it's 693 Quadrillion gallons..   er..yes, that's 693 million-billion gallons... or if you prefer,  693 thousand-trillion gallons..... or  just plain old 693,000,000,000,000,000 gallons  (as compared with 200,000,000 gallons of oil).   


Rather a lot less noughts in the latter figure.  In fact, scaling the Gulf to an Olympic-sized swimming pool, this is like tipping just about one cupful of oil, into the deep end.    Not quite so devastating as earlier implied.


More importantly than the bald figures,  what is crucially different about the Deepwater Horizon spill is that it leaked from more than a mile down in the ocean,  rather than on the surface, which is where most spills occur - when tankers break up or hit reefs.    In the many major oil tanker disaters, like the Prince William sound spill of years ago, the oil was released right at the surface in those cases - so it ALL floated on top, causing great thick surface slicks which sloshed over huge areas of shoreline, choking and killing creatures in the tens of thousands. 


But down in the Gulf, most of the oil has been streaming out at huge depth, drifting away in every direction as it slowly surfaced:  so it has been truly distributed through quite a lot of that vast 693 Quadrillion gallons.   Add to that the fact that it is warm, and the oil light,  it is evaporating and being consumed by ocean organisms massively faster than in the cold north of Prince William sound.  


Perhaps the earth won't crack in two then. 
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/science/earth/04oil.html

A Letter to the Times and Sunday Times on their New 'PayWall'

I emailed the papers the other day after the new (mad) regime was announced.   I doubt anyone sensible will reply.... 

Hello Times and Sunday Times online Marketing Dept  
 
Constructive Feedback on your new Subscription Scheme  (and I why I will only join after you alter it....)

Who am I ?    I'm a regular, enthusiastic reader of the Sunday Times and (less frequently) the Times in paper format.  I have been reading your papers for 40 years.      I am also a web-cognisant businessperson:  I own several businesses in the IT sector and work in web-specific technologies so I am aware of the technical as well as commercial issues. 
 
I'm sorry to say it but you have missed a very important point,  in setting your present pricing scheme. 
 
I might pay £2 a week  -   but NOT in the form you're currently promoting  -  let me explain why. 
 
 
1.  When I buy a broadsheet,  I buy it for a specific experience.  It is to sit down with a whole newspaper, and luxuriate, in having the whole paper to pick amongst and choose from, over a period.   That period might last several days, even a week  -  but the reading has a minimum period too - any broadsheet buyer wants to sit down over a coffee and spend a minimum of 20 or 30 or 40 minutes in the sheer pleasure of reading, just to get started.    SO -  when I do that, I don't mind paying £2 for that much enjoyment: the coffee I buy to go with it will cost at least that much. 
 
 
2.  However, when I read online,  it is a completely different experience, and a different mode of reading.  I can still read for pure pleasure: but never in the same way as with a physical broadsheet.   I,  and a million people like me,  am more likely to 'dip in' for single articles to get our updates in smaller snippets.    I'm also much more likely to arrive there from an aggreator link (NewsNow being my starting point most mornings)  -  impossible too if your 'paywall' blocks them   -   or I'm likely to go electively and search, to catch up on a specific story. 
 
This being so,  I and readers like me are reading much more incrementally:  small fragments,  not the 'big swig' of reading that the real paper gives. 


3.  So - CRUCIALLY:  I DO NOT MIND PAYING for that incremental reading:  I don't even mind putting my money on a credit with you:   but I want to SPEND the money, incrementally - same way as I read.     That means micropayments,  not flat subscriptions.
 
I would be perfectly happy to put £10 on credit with my 'Times Account'  :   but I don't want to be told it has 'expired'  because I've been away.   If I've not read,  then I've not spent:   a flat subscription is you taking my money when I'm not looking.   Micropayment (pence per article charged from pre-credit at the moment of opening)  is spending electively.   
 
 
4.  MICROPAYMENT.   Think about it:  there are lots of models of Micropayment already proven working.   Anyone with a Pay As You Go phone ( a massive acknowledged commercial sucess as a charging model) is using micropayment:  they don't get charged when they don't make calls:  they pay WHEN they make calls.    Exactly the same with pre-credit  VOIP telephone accounts:  we put credit up ahead for the next few months use, but only spend the money when we make calls:  businesses all over the world now use VOIP instead of legacy telephones and they all pay like this.
 
 
I do hope you see the light.   Else no-one will read your columnists ever again.    The site does seem 'dark'.   Whatever will Jeremy Clarkson do if he thinks no-one is listening ?

 
CHARGE ME UP FRONT,  but let me spend on a per-article (repeat-read allowed once paid) basis,  and I'll join tomorrow.    So  -  not till you institute micropayments.  
 
No reason not to really:   why not just offer both options ?
 
Good luck
ThatColumn