Tuesday 19 November 2013

Fairphone

I recently came across the site of a really interesting project, so thought I would share it.

Fairphone is a project to make a phone that is built around being fair, with conflict-free resources and a transparent supply chain.

Their blog is a really interesting read, as it goes into detail about what goes into making a phone, and how they are working to make their phone truly "fair".

It's an interesting idea, and I managed to get one of the first 25,000 phones produced, so I will write a further post when it arrives to see how it performs! They have sold out of their first batch but you can register for the second batch here.

See the below video for an introduction!


Wednesday 13 November 2013

Exchanging Climate

A good friend of mine, Oli Haydon, has recently started a new project, Exchanging Climate. This is a platform for sharing ideas between climate scientists and enthusiasts.

I'm hoping to get involved in the near future, but wanted to make people aware of this to give as wide a circulation as possible.

Links below:

http://exchangingclimate.com/

https://www.facebook.com/ExchangingClimate


Tuesday 5 November 2013

Webinar Review: Challenges with Round 3 Offshore Wind Farms

Yesterday, I watched a Webinar on the challenges ahead with the latest set of Offshore Wind deployment off the UK coast, known as Round 3.

The first speaker, Maf Smith of RenewableUK, discussed the current state of the industry and the ways that RenewableUK were mitigating the problems associated with the huge scales required for Round 3. A particularly interesting point Mr Smith made was around industry confidence. In the last year, a significant proportion of members of RenewableUK have decreased their expectation of GW of offshore wind power to be deployed by 2020. This can be seen at around 7 minutes into the webcast. The fact that projects of this scale under these hostile conditions have never been done before both increases the stakes and potentially increases the challenges faced by the industry.

The second speaker, Matthew Knight of Siemens, discussed in further detail the problems associated with the scale of the Round 3 project, which will be deeper, further and larger than any previous offshore wind projects. Interestingly, his focus was on the advantages of collaboration between all stakeholders, even those that are competitors. The nature of the offshore wind industry (first of a kind, complex, in a hostile environment, huge sums of money at stake) means that collaboration could give huge cost reductions (~20%),  outweighing the potential margins of a more competitive system (~1%). A quote from Mr Knight (at 31 mins) really sums this up well:
"[offshore wind]... cries out for collaboration at all levels."

In my mind, Mr Knight is calling for offshore wind to compete as an industry against other electricity sources (offshore wind, solar, fossil fuel etc) on cost rather than competing on cost within the industry.

Both speakers were really interesting and gave their own take on the potential problems and possible solutions, and I will be watching more Windpower Monthly webcasts in the future to learn more about this industry. I really enjoyed my time working on Round 3 at the Crown Estate so it will be interesting to see how the collaboration aspect of the industry develops; it was definitely something that the Crown Estate was focused on as well.

Overall, definitely worth watching!

The link to the webcast is below.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/webcasts?commid=90159&source=JHLI