The Future of Energy

Yesterday, I went to a fascinating series of talks as part of "One World Week" here at Warwick. The event was called "The Future of Energy: A Power Struggle". The speakers  included heads of large energy companies, a lawyer specialising in energy and an American researcher into energy systems.

It was really interesting to see where the emphasis was put in the different talks, in terms of the "future energy mix". For example, Kevin McCollough (NPower) thought that nuclear was an inevitable part of our future, whereas David Hone (Shell) focussed on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a technology to push, so that we can keep using the current fossil fuels that we do currently. Adrian Gault (Committee for Climate Change) suggested that it would be very difficult to meet our emissions targets for 2050 without significant bioenergy and CCS contribution, with all the new cars sold in 2030 being electrically driven. Mark Jacobson (Stanford) put forward an ambitious model based on Wind, Water and Sun (WWS) which the rest of the panel thought was too lofty a goal.

Wind Turbine on Campus: getting involved!

I've recently been getting involved with the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) society at Warwick, and went today to have a closer look at their wind turbine; I went there before and had a look, but this time I got the chance to look at the whole system up close, including the data logger and inverters!

It was great to see it up close, although it wasn't turning at the time, and I'm hoping to get involved on the data logging side. At the moment, the output power (and other data) is stored within the inverter for 10 days or so, and needs to be downloaded onto a computer. This would be a good starting point for a data report (perhaps weekly), where a graph of performance over the week, average power output, percentage of uptime and total energy generated could be put online.