Energy Efficiency

A Moment to Savour?

On October 7, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Legal Battles, Nanotech, Products, by Tim

Regular readers will know all about the saga of Oxonica, the small university spin out that managed an IPO and then spent the following few years bogged down in legal battles while losing 95% of its value before finally delisting and scattering its executives to the four winds – presumably before they were ripped limb from limb by irate shareholders.

Yesterdays announcement that the only bit of the company that ever looked like making any money – before a dispute about royalties erupted – has been sold to the company that they spent two years and several million pounds fighting is particularly ironic.

There’s a tale of hubris, greed and huge egos behind this, and one that will no doubt emerge in time.

Bringing UK Nanotechnology Into Disrepute?

On July 13, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Legal Battles, Products, by Tim

The company that most have pointed to as the UKs leading nanotechnology company, Oxonica, finds itself in the news again this week after losing the second round of its court battle with Neuftec, and becomes the latest company to find itself in difficulties after being saddled with a huge legal bill.

Well, companies go bust all the time, and it is usually confined to the courts and the financial press, so it was surprising to se how personal this fight had become, with the dispute migrating from the Court of Appeal to the Daily Mail!

Where do we go from here, to the House of Lords and the News of the World?

Job Vacancy and Redundancies at Oxonica

On June 25, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Finance, Legal Battles, Sustainability, by Tim

Our old friends Oxonica are looking for a new CEO and are making a number of other redundancies as well.

Having developed product offerings in all of its businesses, Oxonica is now focusing on partnering the Group’s businesses to secure profitable platforms for growth. In 2008, Oxonica’s Diagnostics business was partnered with BD and the Company is currently in partnering discussions for its remaining three businesses. The structure and value of the resulting partnerships will be announced on completion of the negotiations.

An interesting statement which could be read as the code for flogging off all remaining assets and hoping to get a few quid from licence fees and royalties but not attempting any further business development, something the company describes as a “sustainable, relatively low?-?risk business model”

Losing Control of Geoengineering

On June 24, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Nanotech, geoengineering, by Tim

The New York Times seems to be going to town with Geoengineering with an article Pressing the Case for Geoengineering yesterday and a column on Building a Better Biosphere? today.

Yesterdays article illustrates the worries that the eco lobby have over engineering solutions for climate change, and I recently heard the same line from Greenpeace.

Francelino Grando, a senior government official from Brazil, worried that geoengineering might be seen as a solution instead of a stop-gap. “It may give people the impression that we don’t have to worry about climate change because we can solve it through engineering,” he said. “But the only real answer is that we have to fundamentally change the pattern of energy use.”

Oliver Morton’s column today takes a slightly different look at the issue, looking at methods of engineering the biosphere to capture carbon or alter energy flows. The rationale is as follows:

Humans have had great success in increasing the amount of food plants can yield, the amount of fiber than can be spun from them and the number of pretty colors in which they can flower, but so far have not really turned their minds to the problem of simply making them eat and store as much carbon as possible. If that effort were made, significant improvements might result.

Cue horror from the Green lobby. Not only is there a suggestion that we can carry on as normal but also that we can use geoengineering, biotechnology and synthetic biology to clean up the mess afterwards.

Of course it is hard to get this past the green lobby in most governments and despite the US Chief Science advisor raising the subject “Mr. Holdren later clarified that the White House was not strongly considering pursuing geoengineering as a policy.”

So if we accept that getting Geoengineering on the agenda in the US and Europe may be tricky, the idea seems much more attractive from a Chinese perspective, and that is the problem. If the technology can be shown to work, it will be deployed, perhaps locally at first, and then globally.

China has already been experimenting with cloud seeding for a long time, and if Western governments refuse to even look at the issue then they risk losing control over it.

Nanotechnology and Sustainability Podcast

On April 22, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, by Tim

A number of people asked about the possibility of re-recording the podcast of the talk I gave at Green Futures at the weekend as the quality is a bit patchy. It’s something I have been meaning to do for some time, as I can talk several orders of magnitude faster than I can type. I should also point out that this was a talk given to an audience with no knowledge of (or prior interest in) nanotechnologies so the more sophisticated among you may already know most of this.

Here’s my first attempt, not word for word but using the same notes so it may be the same thing in a slightly different order, so now you can do something more useful while listening to my mellifluous tones with a bit of added hiss. If I do this again I promise to buy a proper microphone!

Tagged with: Health & Safety • london • photovoltaics • podcast • Sustainability

Time For A New Green Agenda?

On April 19, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Health & Safety, Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Yesterday’s meeting started me thinking about why, despite some NGO finding another potential climate related catastrophe almost every day, there is a feeling of frustration and a lack of progress. It looks to be the fault of the Green movement itself.

If we take a look at the history of the environmental movement, most if it sprang from the anti establishment movement of the early seventies, when people were fighting against corporate greed and government inaction. This was inexorably linked with left of centre politics, and into this rainbow coalition were drawn all of the other popular movements demanding an end to war, liberation for Palestine, legalisation of LSD and a whole variety of other causes. As a result, it is hard to get any rational discussion of environmental issues without running into some rather naive anti capitalist rhetoric, and this probabl;y goes some way to explaining the Green movements confrontational stance. In a nutshell, they are a bunch of old hippies, still fighting the battles of 1975 in 2009 because a) that is all they know how to do and b) there is a natural human instinct to try to preserve the status quo even if you started off fighting to overturn it.

If we look at the green leaders we see people such as Lord Jonathon Porrit and George Monbiot, sitting pontificating about how people should live their lives from a position of unimaginable privilege when viewed from most of the developing world. I have been in plenty of meetings with this strata of the green movement where people have had the arrogance to try to deny developing nations the very technology which would allow them to start improving standards of living. “We’d rather let them starve than risk using GMOs” seems to be the rather depressing view, which completely missed the point that while we in the west are rich enough to waffle on about downshifting, and slacking for the several billion other people living in grinding poverty would result in an early death.

Let’s face it, cycling to work or trading tomatoes for lettuces with your neighbour might make you feel better, but isn’t going to save the world, so what is?

Well it has to start with economic growth. Population will continue to rise anyway, and contrasting the living standards in London and Lagos illustrates why money is important. So demanding that x% of GDP be spent on mitigating climate changes isn’t really going to work because that money is being raised through green taxes which just takes more money out of the economy and leaves less of a margin to do good works with. But stimulating economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean pollution, as I mentioned yesterday the environment in the UK is actually getting cleaner and greener while at the same time we have got considerably richer.

It seems that the established Green movement knows only how to use the stick – taxes and scare stories – and not the carrot to change peoples behaviour. Nudge by Richard Thaler would be a good place to start looking for ideas. In addition this obsession with technology being bad is really holding back progress. technology isn’t all bad, as you’ll find out if you ever need to go into hospital.

The other thing that we can do to make a real difference is to encourage the development of, and if safe, the deployment of the whole range of new and emerging technologies that can address climate change. Should we be bothered that an entrepreneur or a company that comes up with a way to make a major difference to carbon dioxide emissions gets rich on the back of it? Of course not, we should applaud it and hope that it it will encourage others to try. There are a huge range of technologies, from nanotechnologies in thin film solar cells, through to engineering carbon capturing microbes using synthetic biology to solar shaded and geoengineering that we need to develop.

Groups such as Friends of the Earth and ETC have fought tooth and claw, and in the dirtiest possible way to encourage the wholesale rejection of technologies. It’s these old hippies with their 1975 mindsets that need to be rejected, not technology. Let’s forget the politics and see some action. If their approach is not appropriate for the 21st century then wither replace them or start a movement that is.

Tagged with: clean-tech • geoengineering • nanotechnologies • photovoltaics • synthetic biology

Technology or Simplicity?

On February 9, 2009, in Development Issues, Energy Efficiency, Europe, Events, Health & Safety, Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Living The Simple Life?

In a change from the usual run of nanotech and investing conferences, I’ll be at the “Ideas For A Greener Living” exhibition at Olympia (London) on 18th April. I’m taking part in a debate with ‘eco expert’ Penney Poyzer, organised by the 21st Century Technology Network. At the core of this is whether we should rely on technology to try to solve our problems – the counter argument is of course that that technology has caused a few problems too.

I’m interested to hear the opposing view. Is it that we should live in a simpler way, as do the beasts in the fields, or perhaps as rural villagers in India, or do we just live in cities and recycle our rubbish and save bits of old soap?

The great conundrum my my point of view is whether sitting around a dung fire in a hut is any more environmentally neutral than using renewable energy – which of course requires technology for its production and distribution. Is it possible to reject some parts of technology but choose to make use of others when it suits you – such as being rushed to a modern hospital in an ambulance rather than being treated by a grizzled old hippie with a bag of herbs and some Tibetan beads?

I have no idea, but it will be interesting to find out the opposing view and see if there are some solutions that we can all agree on.

Tagged with: ideas for greener living • olympia • Sustainability

Save the Planet – Shoot Yourself

On February 3, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Nanotech, Publications, Renewable Energy, education, by Tim

Saving 10 tons of CO2/year

I’m not sure whether the credit crunch has brought on about of pre apocalyptic fever or whether living a a world of instant gratification has resulted in attempting anything on a timescale of more than a few weeks has people wailing & gnashing their teeth in jaw snapping frustration. Whatever the cause, environmental issues seem to be resulting in a lot of people foaming at the mouth, stripping off their clothes and running around in the snow barking at car drivers, advocating compulsory sterilization or writing bizarre articles.

Ottilia Saxl takes time off from kicking the backsides of whoever recently besmirched the good name of the Institute of Nanotechnology to be absolutely furious at global governments for “failing the stop use of fossil fuels, failing to limit population growth, failing to protect the rainforest…” and gives a ragbag of reasons why nanotechnology is a vital part of any solution. In fact the new issue of Nano Magazine is packed with articles about how nanotech could help save the planet, and therein lies the problem.

Most of these kind of articles spend 50% of their length regurgitating well known facts about population growth, energy usage and infant mortality, working themselves up into a frenzy of moral indignation, only to let the reader down with the news that researchers somewhere have come up with an idea that may have the possibility to address some problem or other at some point in the future.

I always find this kind of article rather lazy and ultimately disappointing, after all it’s just a matter of cutting and pasting two groups of facts and finding some justification to link them.

So, if you really want to save the planet, stop wasting time and energy by writing pointless articles based on flimsy evidence. Charity starts at home, but saving the environment starts in the governments of India, China and the USA. There are also a number of other ways to make a difference

Breathe less. An average persons respiration generates some 900g of carbon dioxide a day, so by breathing less, or avoiding getting steamed up over global warming issues you could make a real difference immediately.
Shoot yourself. My thanks to Jonathan Porrit for pointing out that doing something about population could help stop climate change, even if he can’t do the demographic maths too well. Of course the quickest way to make a difference would be to shoot yourself. Ending your life 40 years ahead of schedule would save over 400 tons of carbon dioxide, and this could be easily increased by bumping off a few other people too.

Disclaimer: As science education and common sense seem to be in short supply when ‘climate change’ is concerned, I should point out that I am not suggesting that anyone actually follows either of the techniques above, or wastes any time working out the amount of carbon dioxide saved by genocidal megalomaniacs in the 20th century.

Tagged with: clean-tech • Institute of Nanotechnology • Nanotech • nanotechnologies • ObservatoryNANO

The Physical Sciences are the Cornerstone of Prosperity for the US Future

On January 23, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, US & Canada, by Tim

The new US administration seems to be moving quickly, allowing the use of embryonic stem cells and Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu addressed all the national labs yesterday. A couple of the heartening points reported at CosmicVariance are

The DOE is the principal supporter of physical sciences in the US, and the physical sciences are the conernstone of prosperity for the US future.
Restimulation (is that a word?) of the economy is #1 on the priority list. DOE will get considerable funds in the stimulus package, not just to get the economy going but to provide a long term path for the US.

The grand challenge that the DoE is setting in terms of sustainable energy is certainly laudable. Whether or not you believe in anthropogenic global warming or have any faith in the measures taken to date is irrelevant in the face of the absurdity of over reliance on a single form of energy.It certainly seems to have inspired and excited plenty of people…

I am truly awed by the vision presented by Chu here, and so hopeful that we can get our country back on a path to long term prosperity by supporting research in the physical sciences. At least half of our present economy relies on the knowledge gained in the 20th century about our physical world…one can only imagine the revolutions to come.

Tagged with: DoE • energy • nanotechnologies • obama • photovoltaics

Organic Photovoltaics Almost on the Market, Again?

On December 2, 2008, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Health & Safety, Nanotech, Products, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, by Tim

It’s been long known, although not in the clean tech community, that there are several major problems to be overcome before organic photovoltaics can get to market. One of the most pressing issues has been lifetime – it doesn’t matter how cheaply you can produce things if the major cost ends up being a tea crazed workman clambering up a ladder to rip out the dead solar calls and replace them with working ones every few years.

The German government has just announced a new project aiming to address the lifetime issue.

The project, called “OPV stability” targets to significantly increase the lifespan of organic solar cells (OSC) with the goal of yielding competitive organic photovoltaics (OPV) for potential commercial use.

Konarka felt it significant enough to pop out a press release that they are involved in the three year project, which is odd as they have been 18 months from market since 2002 or so. Perhaps they will now be 54 months away from market?

Tagged with: clean-tech • konarka • Nanotech • photovoltaics • solar