Light Weight Web
This essay is likely to be revised, probably several times. It is tracked on archive.org, so that you'll be able to go back through versions. I'm not promising to do serious work on this proposal by myself, but if others are interested I think it may be worth pushing forward with.
Discussion of this proposal can be found here, and, if you wish to contribute, I'd recommend that in the first instance you post to that thread.
Updated: 25th February (three times); 26th February; 27th February.
Continue reading →Questions, and futures
Dumfries and Galloway Council, acting on direction from the Scottish Government, wants each community in the region to produce a document called a 'Local Place Plan' summarising its planning issues and priorities. Auchencairn has made no progress on this over at least two years. As incoming chair of the Community Council, I've set up a working group with representatives from other key civic society groups within the village, and started working on the plan. Because the deadline is now tight, we've had to work fast.
As part of this process, I've led the working group in preparing a questionnaire for villagers which explores questions which may be in contention within the village. This isn't 'my' questionnaire, it is a group effort; but it's fair to say I've led the effort.
Continue reading →Aviation-fuel, and generating capacity
I wrote in my last piece on aviation fuel that I thought that electrolysing the amount of hydrogen needed to fuel the world's jetliner fleet would use more electricity than the world's entire generating capacity, but that I would have to run the numbers.
Well, now I have. It wouldn't. I was wrong. It would use just 19.25% of our entire current electricity production. Electrolysing and subsequently burning hydrogen is pretty inefficient, however; the round trip efficiency is only about 60%. Lithium ion batteries have much better round trip efficiency at around 95% (declining slightly over the life of the battery, but not much). So powering all our commercial air fleet with electricity from batteries would, at a first estimate, use only 12.3% of our current electricity production.
Continue reading →Lies, damned lies, and aviation fuel
Since my last post about aviation fuel last week, the commentariat, inspired by Rachel Reeves' gibberish about a third runway at Heathrow, has been engaging in a paean of magical thinking.
Wouldn't it be nice, say The Rest is Politics today, from Syria, to which they've flown, because of course they have, if we could make aviation fuel from waste? After all, the aviation industry say we can, so it must be true, mustn't it? Specifically, for example, GE Aerospace say
Continue reading →The potato famine and aviation fuel
I was listening to my friend Lesley Riddoch's podcast this morning, and she spoke, inter alia, of plans to produce 'green' aviation fuel at Grangemouth.
Lesley doesn't need me to teach her lessons about the potato famine. She knows as well as I do that the problem was not lack of food. She know as well as I do that in each successive year of the famine, Ireland exported record amounts of wheat.
Continue reading →