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Showing posts from December, 2012

December: Reasons to Be Cheerful…?

Well, a Merry Christmas to you all. The President is already several Xmas lunches for the better, including the Past Presidents’ Lunch. Apparently it is not until you are a ‘Past’ that the Secret of Eternal Youth is passed on to you.   For this guy the secret couldn’t come sooner! The Big Xmas Present this month was the Energy Bill. It was just the thing to use to bury good news. Published the same day were the public versions of the reports that Alistair Buchannan used for his scary Annual Lecture on UK energy security . But also published were some real sweeties in consultations from the Energy Efficiency Deployment Office on electricity consumption reduction.   Grief Reduction – the ‘R’ word! Check it out, read out Technical Resources on the CIBSE website , write in! Plug Guide F for all it is worth! There could be £3000/kW on offer in the capacity mechanism if I have my sums right! The Father Xmas Problem It was never clear to me as a child why Father Xmas bo

Political November…?

A building services engineer takes over the most powerful country in the world? Your President bottles out in the shadow of the UK political class. And the Energy Bill arrives just as DECs risk to all intents and purposes leaving. Thanks to the Counter Terrorism Acts this blog will not mention Guy Fawkes… We Paramount Leaders My Chinese student was conspicuously triumphalist this month. His country had changed presidents (OK Paramount Leader) and. it hadn’t cost $4billion. Indeed he noted they had actually changed the President. So a special congratulations from one President to another: to Xi Jinping in taking charge of the People’s Republic of China. I used to joke that there were more qualified engineers on the PRC Politiburo than CEng’s in DTI. The Politburo engineering count is now down to 3, but retirements taken into account, that probably still beats the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. Xi was trained as a chemical engineer, which, of course, is just