Energy Views

This is the autobiography of Dr Eddie O'Connor, the Irishman founder of wind farm developer Airtricity, wind/solar developer Mainstream Renewables and supergrid company Supernode. (As always, my views are my own). Before his own firms, he cut his teeth working for ESB (Ireland's then monopoly power generator and transmission provider), before leading Bord na Móna (BNM) the state-owned producer of peat for power stations. The memoir's title comes courtesy of a Civil Servant's label of Eddie during the period when he more than halved BNM's workforce (before increasing productivity from under 1,700 tonnes per head, to over 5,000). In short: it's a great book. Eddie is a no-nonsense and thoughtful writer and, given his impressive achievements, modest. The main focus is on his time at the four companies, and his leadership ethos, and only very briefly about his upbringing. Within its 230 pages, A Dangerous Visionary describes how he built Airtricity, whic...

Hydrogen is bandied about by many authors as the solution to all our energy challenges. Consuming it in a fuel cell vehicle or turbine, the proponents frequently remind us, produces just water, rather than the dreaded CO2 produced by fossil fuels. Gaseous hydrogen plasma (purple) in a discharge tube The hydrogen that we increasingly read about is gaseous hydrogen, a component of the air that we breathe. As opposed to cryogenically-cooled liquid hydrogen, which is combusted in space rockets. Gases, as our teachers taught us at school, have the advantage of being compressible, unlike liquids, and whilst in vehicles this requires expensive carbon-fibre tanks, this helps to overcome the lower energy density of hydrogen relative to petroleum-based fuels like diesel. But pure hydrogen in gaseous form can unleash terrifying results: the airship Hindenburg's explosion resulted from the ignition of its hydrogen envelope, and the viral video showing an explosion at Fukushima Daiichi...