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...

A couple of years back, I remember vividly once telling my daughter about what solar panels are. She quickly grasped their crucial limitation and then announced that, "we should have lunar panels too". Well, I said, it would great if you could invent one of those when you go to university.  Well, maybe she could build an effective lunar panel, as researchers at UCLA and Stanford have built in their lab a precursor, which they call a Radiative Cooler . It's an aluminium disk that's exposed to the night sky, and exploits a phenomenon called Radiative Sky Cooling to coax small amounts of electricity from the temperature difference between the surface looking up at the night sky and the air immediately surrounding it. So, I suppose you could say that the device is powered by the total absence of the sun, rather than the presence of moonlight. The effect means that if you were to sit on your roof at night - and I'm not recommending that you do! - you'd fi...