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.
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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.
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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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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…)
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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?
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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.
Read more on BIEE white paper conference: tax or trade?…
