Recent posts by simon gray

Jackdaw and the UK energy mix

In a not-entirely-unpredicted move, the UK Government has announced that it is going to give the go-ahead for drilling to start in the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea.

In not-entirely-unpredicted counter-news, the Tories have complained about it being too little, too late, and the environmentalists are saying the decision will contribute further to the climate catastrophe.

In reality, it will neither solve the UK's energy security problem or bring down bills for domestic consumers, nor will it lead to further coastal erosion of the east coast of England or flooding of Southport on the west coast. In the global scheme of things there's only a few cubic litres of gas down there, the way energy is priced on the international market is effectively a cartel anyway, and wherever the gas people use comes from, people are going to use the gas anyway.

It's this last point which I want to talk about in order to explain why the decision to allow drilling isn't the disaster the environmentalists say it is, and how it could have the potential to be beneficial, environmentally.

The Energy Mix

In terms of the main sources of where we get our energy from - gas, nuclear, wind, bio, and solar - the latter four are pretty much fixed in terms of what they can deliver; the nuclear reactors sit there and react, the wind blows, the compost rots, and the sun shines. We cannot spin up a new reactor when we need more electricity, we can't make the wind blow any harder (in fact when the wind is blowing too hard we have to turn the wind generation off), and we can't make the sun shine any brighter. In a very real sense, we take what we're given from these sources and be grateful.

It's not entirely unknown for there to be occasions when the sun and the wind are just right in late summer and early autumn that we can generate our electricity solely from our low carbon and renewable sources, and indeed generate more electricity than we actually need - when this happens, we export it through the France and Norway interconnectors. For the most part, though, these sources are not meeting all the need, and that energy needs to come from somewhere else.

Bridging the Energy Gap

There are two sources for bridging the energy gap when this happens - we import the shortfall in electricity from the various interconnectors which are part of the global energy grid, and we use gas, whether we're using that gas to heat our homes or using it to generate more electricity, whether we're using our own gas or whether we're using Norway's gas.

Gas is bad, but not as bad as it's made out

But here's the, shall we say, beauty of gas; unlike our low carbon and renewable forms of energy, gas can literally be turned off and on by the tap at the drop of a hat - we can store it, and we can increase or decrease extraction when stored stocks are running low or almost replenished. So with gas we can easily balance our shortfall of other energy generation in real time (and the people managing the gas and energy grids literally do balance it in real time, and it's paid for at the wholesale end similarly in real time), opening and closing the taps as demand rises and falls compared with the other sources of generation.

In an ideal world, we would have enough low carbon and renewable generation capacity not only to generate our electricity but to heat our homes, and we'd always be able to either sell any surplus electricity abroad through the interconnectors, or if everybody is experiencing surplus, brake the wind turbines and put covers over the solar panels.

But we are not in that ideal world; for the foreseeable future, we are going to need the convenience of gas for our overall heating and our electricity, and it surely makes sense to use our own gas rather than buying Norway's gas, even if due to how the North Sea licences were dished out in the 1980s that means our taxpayer is not benefiting from it now the way Norway's taxpayers are continuing to benefit.

In a world slightly more ideal than the one we live in, but still not completely ideal, the profits from increased gas production from the Jackdaw field could at least be invested in increased future production of renewables, rather than that investment having to come from the Education budget or the Defence budget.

What would you do?

If you're interested at playing the role of the Energy Secretary or Grid Manager, I've made a fun interactive tool - The Energytron - which lets you see what happens if you increase nuclear generation, or see how many more solar farms you'll need to reduce gas.

Botched executions in the USA

As yet another execution in the USA is botched, it's worth pointing out that the death penalty there is designed to be Cruel And Unusual by design; by design it causes the maximum amount of stress and trauma to the condemned person, even when it is not botched.

Even when everything goes smoothly to plan, the methods used to judicially murder people — gas chamber, lethal injection, electric chair, and firing squad — draw the process out as the condemned is marched from their cell to the execution chamber, and tied to a gurney, a chair, or a post, and any further preparations made before the execution itself is delivered.

And then when the process itself is started, it is not instant; the choices of chemicals and gasses used, the action of electrocution or of shooting somebody, make for minutes of sheer torture in agony for the final minutes of life.

By contrast, the long drop method of hanging as used in Britain in the first half of the 20th Century at least makes for an instant death from the drop, and the whole overall process itself was over and done with from beginning to end in a matter of seconds.

For those with both a morbid curiosity of the subject as well as those who feel a moral obligation to further inform themselves, the fictionalised documentary film Execution and the BBC's Life and Death Row actual documentary series make for essential viewing.

#crime

Conviction and punishment for sexual assault

Over on Threads, another user said thus:

Castration for sex offenders should just be a basic requirement.

It's not an unpopular thing to say; the urge to viscerally respond to a viscerally wicked crime is understandable.

There are many reasons why it's not actually a good idea, not least because, as I replied:

Well, it might stop the ability to reoffend with the penis being the principle weapon used in the assault, but there are plenty of ways of sexually assaulting people without using one’s penis as a weapon, and indeed it wouldn’t stop the ability for a physically stronger person to exercise violent control over a physically weaker person, which is mainly what most people who commit sexual assault are doing.

To which the other person replied to the effect that the death penalty could be the alternative. 

Again, viscerally understandable, but in practice an even worse answer.

If you’re going to kill the rapist, they might as well kill their victim when they’re done.

Plus, see the already woefully low — for a variety of reasons, some of which have solutions — conviction rate for rape plummet even further, since the whole reason the death penalty was abolished in the UK was people who had served on juries were increasingly reporting that they did not want to be responsible for potentially sending an actually innocent person to the gallows.

Saying ‘yeah, cut their goollies off’ feels like good allyship, but it’s really not.

We need to improve the conviction rate; we need to find out from juries after an acquittal the details of what did not cause them to find the accused guilty. Was it because the evidence was lacking? Was it because prosecution witnesses were not sufficiently believable? Was it because they genuinely concluded the accused was genuinely innocent?

We need to improve evidence gathering when a report is made; we need to be better at preserving the physical evidence in a timely manner, we need to develop better interview technique to be more sure about what the victim, the accused, and any witnesses are saying in interviews.

We need to improve reporting; how cases of sexual assault just go unreported because victims either feel their complaint won’t be taken seriously, or worse, because they feel the trauma of going through the process to the end — with no guarantee of a conviction — will actually be worse than the initial assault.

And, of course, we need to do something about the atmosphere in which seriously disturbed people commit sexual assault in the first place; we need to deal with the toxic climate on our streets, in our homes, and on the internet where people take frustration as an excuse to be violent with their hands as well as their words.

All this should be perfectly capable for a sophisticated civilisation to achieve.

#crime 

Leadership elections

Leadership elections for membership organisations — how’s this for a process:

All those who would be leader declare their candidacy and are nominated for the election by however many signatures from whatever constituency the organisation decides as an appropriate gatekeeping method.

The nominated candidates are then put forward to the membership to vote by ranked preferences, the voter marking as many preferences as they wish.

The counting of those ballot papers, however, is done twice — a count using the Alternative Vote method (which will tend towards the most preferred candidate) and a count using the Condorcet method (which will tend towards the least disliked candidate).

If both counts result in the same candidate at the top that’s grand, and that candidate is duly elected winner.

If the counts result in two different candidates at the top, then both candidates then go forward to a second round as a straight A/B choice. Possibly with a reöpen nominations option with an agreed threshold.

To my mind, this should ensure the winner really is the duly elected choice of the membership of the organisation with minimal room for folks to grumble, and whilst it might sound complicated, it’s not really any more complicated than a lot of organisations’ ways of running leadership elections.

#Democracy

Private sector forms functionality - just as bad if not worse than the public sector

In #LocalGov #LocalGovDigital we're rightly concerned about how too much of our online service design and user experience falls short of the high expectations many of us would like to see of it.

But having to deal with an online letting agent's landlord/tenant portal right now, oh my days, the worst pothole form I've ever completed is a breeze compared to this.

Speaking to somebody from the letting agent's office just, she said 'I have a word for it', which I responded 'the word I have for it is abomination!' She went on to say at the previous place she worked they tried the particular product portal for a week and got rid of it it was so bad.

It's the year 12,023 of the Human Era. The Internet should be better than this by now.