Public Appearances

Over the next few months I am making a few public appearances in connection with either my book, News from Gardenia, or electric cars and energy futures or sometimes both.

 The dates I know about so far are:-

 Saturday 12^th May.  Lincoln ‘Reading Room Live’  at 7:30pm

 Sunday 13^th May   Ecovelocity @ London ExCel 1:00 pm

 Tuesday 15^th May  Oxford launch of electric car rental scheme  11:00 am

 Monday 4th June  Hay on Wye festival  2:30pm

 Sunday 10^th June  Bristol  Big Green Week.  11:00 am

 Wednesday 13^th June  Cheltenham Science festival  11:30 am

Avengers Assembled Plasma Fantasy

I recently came across a story going around the fringe of fringe science conspiracy circuit about Nuclear Plasma Batteries and the many people connected with them who’ve been ‘murdered’ over the past few years.

I posted a question about it on Google + to see what the general opinion would be to such a notion.

As I expected I received a very level headed response which was universally sceptical, I have sniffed around a bit myself and I would say the story utterly bogus. 
There are without question historically accurate cases of big corporations buying companies and patents and sitting on them. Patents for devices or systems that could undermine their core business. 

This fact makes some people furious so they start from there, from actual fact and then enhance/embroider all the way to Nuclear Plasma Batteries and strings of murders across the globe.
The very notion of 'the perpetual free energy source' is obviously a potent one for some people on the fringes of science, but in the fantasy this is usually connected with the military, is produced in secret and is one little gizmo which produces so much power, it bends light and can shatter the planet.

As depicted in the excellent and entertaining Avengers Assembled movie, it’s the Tesseract, a wibbly-wobbly shaped cube full of twinkly light strings which has to be housed in a massive facility and only understood by someone with a mid European accent.

Strangely the very obvious 'perpetual free energy source' is already with us, well, we wouldn't be here without it.

It’s the ‘big yellow ball in sky’ energy source, it’s fairly predictable and reliable and the way we capture that energy could change the energy market quite dramatically.

A big change would, I humbly suggest, only take place if small, local, distributed, ubiquitous, uncontrollable solar energy collection is done by individuals and not large corporations.

This could clearly be unsettling to the status quo and if I saw a story that 10,000 people who had installed solar panels and other forms of micro generation had been bumped off by big, scurrilous corporations to ensure our continuing reliance on their evil product, I might be more concerned.
If enough people go about this in the right way, and all the signs are that they will, having some weird quantum cube producing endless free energy, which obviously needs to be guarded by super hero's, will be rather unnecessary.

The future of energy needs to be small, local, networked, distributed and semi ungovernable, I would suggest that is a lot more threatening to power and control obsessed multi-nationals and their over-lobbied lap dogs in government.

I’m not suggesting all corporations are evil, far from it. Corporations are in an excellent position to discover and develop new technologies, many of them are already doing so at a breathtaking pace.

I also don’t see all governments as evil institutions, without the over arching policy objectives of big governments, progress would be knee jerk, chaotic and short term.

However the changes we have seen in media due to the development of the internet, the de-centralised ubiquitous availability of data and information could transfer to the energy sector.

Instead of having 3 or 4 global, uber-powerful corporate bodies which control the flow of energy and the systems used to produce and deliver it, we could be entering an age where energy generation is a small, local activity.

This is not to say energy creation will be in some way outside the jurisdiction of governments, as Carlos Ghosn said when I gave him a lift, ‘governments are endlessly creative when it comes to taxing things’ but it will change the relationship.

Not only that, we probably don’t need ripped and pumped-up superhero’s to guard our solar panel arrays, although Scarlett is always welcome to hang around my gaff to check everything's in order.

Charging for Fully Charged

I started making Fully Charged in 2009 off my own bat. I’d been pitching the idea around various TV broadcasters in the UK for a year, they showed interest in me doing something but felt the subject was too ‘obscure.’

‘No one knows about electric cars’ they told me.

I replied as politely as I could, ‘Well, that’s kind of the reason for making the show.’

TV companies, I was informed, are scared of coming over ‘preachy and ‘green’ and would love me to have done a show about cooking. I partly jest, but cooking is safe and don’t challenge the status quo as are singing contests and dropping insects on ‘celebrities.’

So I started making it anyway in a half-baked amateur way. I’d had plenty of experience making Carpool and I felt sure there was an audience for a show that took a close look at electric vehicles and the future of energy.

However, making Carpool is a lot easier. I produced over 80 Carpool episodes myself, although it was complicated to arrange the recordings, many thousands of e-mails, phone calls and texts to my passengers saying ‘I’m right outside.’

Once it was recorded, the editing was fairly straightforward.

I edited the whole thing on an iMac in my office, backed up by some chunky Drobo drives which contain thousands of hours of footage. I then compressed the video and uploaded it to iTunes and YouTube.

6.3 million views later, people are still discovering the series for the first time.

Making Fully Charged was a lot more complicated to do as a one man operation. If nothing else, getting the classic ‘drive by’ shot of an electric car meant driving somewhere, pulling off the road, setting up the camera, driving around the corner, turning round, driving past the camera, turning around, driving back to the camera before anyone swiped it, and moving on to the next location.

Exhausting and slow.

I made some episodes and had fantastic support from a small but growing audience and of course the companies that made the cars. But no actual cash, no budget to pay someone to help me.

Right from the start my online video efforts I have been greatly helped by two lovely young chaps, Wil Harris and Justin Gaynor who run a company called Channel Flip. Last year we started looking for a sponsor for Fully Charged, and eventually found one in British Gas.

For overseas viewers the title ‘British Gas’ can be confusing, clearly from the comments on YouTube some people think it’s a gasoline supply company.

British Gas used to be the only supplier of gas (i.e. the stuff you cook with) in the UK, they have never supplied petrol or gasoline.

After Margaret Thatcher privatised the company in 1986 it has become one of the leading suppliers of electricity and gas in the country.

They are now at the forefront of supplying solar panels and electric car charging points and their support of Fully Charged is a fairly clear sign that they are very committed to supporting renewables and systems to refine the way we use energy.

As with all large corporations there are sure to be reasons to criticise their corporate policy, but on the whole and judging by the people I’ve met at British Gas, they have a very realistic grasp of the problems facing us. We don’t need to find alternatives to burning fossil fuels to be ‘green’ or trendy, we need to do it because they are, by definition, unsustainable.

What their sponsorship means is that I can now make far more shows that cover a far greater variety of topics and I get a bit of help in the process.

When I worked for big broadcasting companies the money that paid for the production came from the advertisers, all sorts of companies I may have very good reason to be critical of.

The sponsorship was indirect, it was hidden from us as creative people and we had no direct relationship with that source of funding.

Now the picture is very different, it’s very new and hasn’t really been tried much before the last couple of years. I do have a direct relationship with British Gas and no one truly knows how these relationships will work in the long run.

I don’t feel restricted by the relationship, I didn’t set out to use Fully Charged as a platform to criticise energy companies, I just wanted to highlight the advantages of being open minded to new technologies, as opposed to sneering and negative as the Clarksonian lobby encourage us all to be.

It is of course a compromise but it’s a compromise for both parties, it’s my job to make sure I am honest and open, transparent if you like about this sponsorship but also follow the original goal of the series.

I hope I’m doing that.

Smart Grid Anyone?

I recently posted a couple of amusing pro renewable images on Google+

This one

(picture from this blog )

 And this one

(picture from this book)

What's really thrilled me is the sheer number of comments generated by those images. It is fascinating to watch this argument develop. It does often seem to be between renewables and nuclear, I can find no examples of people defending coal, 'natural' gas or oil as fuel sources for generating electricity. I guess corporations running those very common institutions are just keeping their heads down.
The argument which is slowly coming to maturity is around micro generation and smart grids. All the talk of solar PV not being enough, we need big nuclear central energy generation as a base is becoming increasingly questionable the more I find out about it. 
If, as in Germany, nearly every house with a suitable roof was fitted with panels, if every business (B&Q in Germany is a good example) used their roof space to mount panels, and all those millions of panels fed into a smart grid that could deal with the various flows and rates of power, our reliance on big, industrial generation plants would diminish enormously.
In the UK if every old mill site (there are around 3,800 in England) had a micro turbine installed, buried, no one would see them, they would generate enough electricity for several million homes. If every farmer has a 15 kW wind turbine, (they are not that big) and every massive ugly landscape despoiling electricity pylon (we're used to them so we don't write to the Daily Mail about them) was fitted with an internal wind turbine our dependence on imported, increasingly expensive and finite fuel sources would diminish dramatically. All these things require a fairly enormous upgrade to our national grid, but that is a lot cheaper that building more coal burners, more 'natural gas' burners and massive new nuclear facilities with all the problems those systems carry with them.
I'm not now and have never been opposed to nuclear power, I'd happily have a nuclear power station in my back garden, modern iterations of the technology are safe, clean and reliable. However I wouldn't want a nuclear waste fuel storage facility in my back garden, or near my back garden, or near my country, or even on the planet I inhabit. This problem is real, it's concrete quite literally, it's incredibly expensive, the power companies don't pay for it, we do though our taxes and we will continue to pay for it for many 100's of years. No one has solved this problem there is talk of solutions but they are way off, expensive, complex and risky.
To say 'solar panel manufacture requires dangerous chemicals' is heart breakingly tragic and blinkered. If you gathered all the toxic waste from every solar panel factory on earth in one place and stored it next to a kindergarten the risk management would be well within our technical abilities. If we gathered together all the nuclear waste from every power plant on earth and stored it anywhere we'd be in big trouble.
I'm very excited to report that I will soon be conducting an interview with chief technicians at the National Grid Headquarters near Reading to discuss the development of the smart grid in the UK.

EDIT  I have quite rightly been castigated for not linking back to where the pictures came from. My excuse is that I collect so much stuff I forget the source. Not good enough I know. I was sent the correct links by @MikeTonge  on the Twitters and I thanks him for his efforts. I will do better in future.

Hero in my Family

So, that's it. I've finished shooting the TV program about my late father and his role in WW2. He was in 192 Squadron, based in Norfolk, flying in Wellington and Halifax bombers from 1943-45.

It was an incredible journey and I really hope the end result is worth a watch.I was blessed with a really good crew, very sympathetic researchers and director who weren't looking for 'the crying celebrity' shot when they discovered something about their father's war time history.

That said, if the show retains it's working title of 'Hero in my Family' I think it will be well deserved. My dad is a hero, an incredibly brave man, who despite seeing his peers blown to bits and burnt to death around him, continued doing the task he set out to do. We even discuss the controversy of the late stage bombing campaign carried out by Bomber Command and the American Air Force.

I hope you get to see the show, it's going to be broadcast sometime in May, as soon as I have exact dates I'll be blathering on about it big time.