Energy security in the news

While recently discussing the BIEE energy white paper conference, I briefly mentioned the issue of domestic energy security. To many of the speakers, the real concern was not whether we would be able to source fuels from international markets but whether the energy infrastructure in the UK could provide reliable performance once the fuels arrived here. Some cited examples included the 2006 fire at Rough gas storage facilitiy and the 2000 fuel protests.

It’s uncertain whether the conference had any impact on government thinking about energy security, but events so far this week will certainly have kept domestic issues high on the agenda. The highlights so far:

So there you go. It’s only Wednesday and already there are crises in electricity generation and refinery capacity. I hate to think what the rest of the week will be like.

Changing the fonts in R plots

I use R to do almost all of my statistical analysis and plotting. It has a very steep learning curve but once you get into it, it’s very powerful and you can customise almost anything. The only problem is that these changes are not always obvious or easy to do. Case in point: how to change the fonts on an R plot.

Here are some R commands to plot a few made-up data points:

x < - 1:10
y <- x + rnorm(10)
plot(x,y,main="Basic R plot")

And here's the resulting plot:

Basic R plot

But say you don't want to use Arial as the font for the plot? What if you're doing a Wild West plot (I don't know why but just suppose...) and want to use something like Playbill? This can be done in the following steps.

  1. Find the font settings file Rdevga. There are two versions. The first is system-wide and can be found in $R_HOME$/etc/Rdevga (e.g. C:/Program Files/R/R-2.6.0/etc/Rdevga). The second applies only to your user account and can be found in $R_USER (find this in R using Sys.getenv("R_USER")). If Rdevga doesn't exist in your user directory, just copy the system-wide version there.
  2. Modify the user or system-wide Rdevga to add your desired font. The comments in the file explain how to do this; for example, to add Playbill, add a line that reads "TT Playbill : plain". A full list of available fonts on your system can be found (on a Windows machine) by going to Control Panel > Fonts.
  3. Count the number of uncommented non-blank lines in the file and note the number of your newly added line. After a default R installation, a line added to the bottom would be 20.
  4. (Re)start R so that it reads in the new settings. Redo your plot using the font options to select your desired font, e.g. plot(x,y,main="Basic R plot", font.main=20, cex.main=3)
  5. Et voilà! New plot:
    Basic R plot with different font

Some final notes. First, you might have to change the scale of the font for it to look right (e.g. the cex.main command). Second, you can change the font for specific parts of the plot but it’s tricky to change them all at once; see the help files for more information (type ?par in the Rconsole). Third, you can have a maximum of 32 fonts defined in your Rdevga file (i.e. the standard 19 plus 13 of your choosing, unless you replace the standard ones). Finally, this change only works for functions which call the windows method; so exporting to jpg, bmp, png etc should be fine but pdf and postscript will revert to the default fonts. You can change the fonts for these plots but that’s for another time.

Hope this helps!

Follow the dollar

It can sometimes be tricky figuring out which way the political wind is blowing. Today for example was the Pre-Budget Report which is one of the three times per year that major policy initiatives are launched (the others being the Budget and the Queen’s Speech). For energy folks, there were two bits of news: an additional £170 million for low-carbon energy technologies and progress towards a CCS demonstration project.

However today also marked the release of the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. This review of government spending over the next three years sets out the government’s highest priorities, written in the form of Public Service Agreements.

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LaTeX references made easy

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to find this. Latex is my typesetting software of choice but I’ve always found references to be a pain. First you’ve got to convert your existing EndNote references into BibTeX. Then you need to tweak that file making sure all the ampersands, double-quotes and other marks are TeX-friendly and finally you need to find a style file that makes the whole thing display the way you want to. (I’m sure by this point people are thinking why even bother…)

Anyway I’ve found two things recently which make references in LaTeX much easier. They would have been really useful about a year ago when I was writing my thesis but better late than never.

  1. The LaTeX Bibliography Styles Database is just that: a database of bibliography styles. It’s mainly useful for finding the right style for a particular journal (as opposed to for reports etc).
  2. Even better is the custom-bib package. Once installed, just run latex makebst and answer a series of questions about how you want things formatted. It then automatically creates the .bst style file which, even if you have to make a few changes, is a heck of a lot easier than starting from scratch. It’s worth it just for the “make titles display as entered” feature alone (many BibTeX styles default to sentence case for titles, which is a pain if you want something like “A history of London” rather than “A history of london”).

Upgrade day

Apologies if things don’t look quite like they should. I’ve just upgraded Wordpress and it broke my old customised theme. Hope to have a new design up and running before too long. Say within the next six months?

BIEE white paper conference: tax or trade?

Last week the BIEE hosted an “academic critique” of the recent energy white paper. It was a well-attended event with insightful presentations from economists, engineers, and social scientists. I’d read the white paper when it came out but, as I do less policy work now, a forum like this is really useful to help understand what the big wigs think are the important issues. Perhaps not surprisingly, most were disappointed with the white paper in one way or another: it didn’t take into account recent policy changes (e.g. the EU energy and climate Action Plan), it gave insufficient attention to domestic security of supply issues and it generally failed to provide enough detail for academics (or anyone else) to independently verify the white paper’s chances of success.

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