Utility Week - authoritative, impartial and essential reading for senior people within utilities, regulators and government
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UtILItY WEEK | 13th - 19th March 2015 | 31 Community Editor: Ellen Bennett, t: 01342 332084, e: ellen.bennett@fav-house.com; News editor: Jillian ambrose, t: 01342 332061, e: jillian.ambrose@fav-house.com; Associate news editor: Mathew Beech, t: 01342 332082, e: mathew.beech@fav-house.com; Insights editor: Jane Gray, t: 01342 332087, e: jane.gray@fav-house.com; Research analyst: Vidhu Dutt, t: 01342 332026, e: vidhu. dutt@fav-house.com; Reporter: Lois Vallely, t: 01342 332080; e: lois.vallely@fav-house.com; Business development manager: Ed roberts, t: 01342 332067, e: ed.roberts@fav-house.com; Business development executive: Sarah Wood, t: 01342 332077, e: sarah.wood@fav-house.com; Publisher: amanda Barnes, e: amanda.barnes@fav-house.com. General enquiries: 01342 332000; Membership subscriptions: : UK £577 per year, overseas £689 per year, t: 020 8955 7045 or email membership sales manager Paul tweedale: paultweedale@fav-house.com. ISSN: 1356-5532. Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office. Printed by: Buxton Press, Palace road, Buxton, Derbyshire SK17 6aE. Published by: Faversham house Ltd, Windsor court, Wood Street, East Grinstead, West Sussex rh19 1UZ 3,580 average circulation Jan–Dec 2014 Membership subscriptions: UK £577 per year. Overseas £689 per year. Email: paultweedale@fav-house.com Peter Mannion 'MP' @PeterMannionMP The latest in the 'Why I'm Standing Down from Parliament' interview series in @Telegraph is Tim Yeo. Awkward. William Marchant @richonlyinname Hard life being system operator. If emergency reserve doesn't get used, it's wasteful. If it does, we're in the abyss. Bad press either way. John Cushman @jackcushmanjr US running out of room to store oil -- AP. (Here's one idea: you could leave it in the ground.) 3WhitehallPlace @3WhitehallPlace Today we are boosting the Green Deal by offering an annual pass to the Pencil Museum in Cumbria with every plan John Stevens @johnestevens Green Party motion to axe policy "to ban all cars... as this would probably prove unattractive with the electorate" Steve Hawkes @steve_hawkes Paddy Power offering odds of 100-1 that the 'empty chair' actually beats Ed Miliband in a head-to-head debate Twop Twips @TwopTwips AVOID having to make your face 'funny for money' for Comic Relief by being Ed Miliband. Robert Llewellyn @bobbyllew Mentioned 'wind turbines' to someone this morning, reaction was visceral. Then said coal burning power station. Fine. Tim Poffenbarger @poffey21 With a name like Bertrand Piccard at the helm, this solar plane is destined for success. Best of luck to Piccard and Borschberg. Anna Finke @quercus_aliena #Florida is the new ridiculous: In Florida, officials ban term 'climate change' Top Tweets Disconnector Top cat Energy company bosses in the UK are always getting it in the neck for "fat cat" pay packets. And it is true that with annual salaries of between £500,000 and £4 million (before bonuses), they are at the upper end of the pay scale compared to us ordinary folk. But by comparison with their peers, the heads of the big six are paid pretty modestly. Take Li Hejun, for instance, the chairman and founder of Chi- nese photovoltaics manufacturer Hanergy Holding Group. This month he was officially declared China's richest man, which is no mean feat in a country that boasts more oligarchs than Russia. Li had been ambling along as a run-of-the-mill billionaire up until 12 months ago, since when shares in his Hong Kong-listed company have soared 550 per cent, giving Hanergy a market capitalisation of $40 billion. By way of comparison, Twitter comes in at a meagre $31 billion. It's enough to make a big six fat cat feel sorry for himself. And Li doesn't even have to put up with the inconvenience of being hectored by Daily Mail journalists. Hey, that's communism for you! Secrets on tap As it happens, although China has undergone something of an economic miracle over the past decade, there are dark mutterings that much of its technological advancement has been founded on state- Disconnector sponsored industrial espionage, with dedicated campuses of whizz-kid security agents whose sole purpose is to hack into the computer systems of corpora- tions in the west and steal their intellectual property. Arraigned against them are the sundry security agencies of the good guys, such as the CIA, GCHQ and Germany's feared BND intelligence agency. Well, not quite so feared, as of last week. The agency is getting a brand new HQ so it can move to Berlin from Munich, but critics have baulked at the cost of nearly £1 billion. They won't have been mollified on hearing that thieves broke into the newly finished building and stole the taps from the bathrooms of several of the upper floors. When workmen turned the water on, it was a while before anyone noticed the flooding, by which time several million pounds-worth of damage had been done. Needless to say, the national press and social media have not been kind to those charged with ensuring the nation's security. If thieves had such easy access to what was supposed to have been one of Germany's most secure buildings, who else has been strolling around the place before the spooks move in? Perhaps they should not have been so surprised, though. In 2011, top-secret plans for the new offices went missing, leading to fears they had been stolen by a rival intelligence service or crimi- nal gang. Or maybe someone just really wanted those taps. Fly by night In case you missed it, Solar Impulse 2 has completed the first leg of its attempt to circum- navigate the globe. The proto- type solar-powered aircra took off from Abu Dhabi last Monday and touched down 12 hours later in Oman. Over the next five months it will attempt to cover 32,000km to make it the first plane to fly around the world using only its own power. It's a single-seater aircra without heating or oxygen, and the flights over the big oceans can take up to five days, so the undertaking is as much a test of human endurance. It is being bankrolled by Swiss businessman Andre Borschberg, who is also one of two pilots involved. The other is compatriot Bertrand Piccard. The aircra's 72m wingspan is larger than many passenger jets but is made of carbon fibre and weighs about the same as a family car. The 17,000 solar cells on its wings charge batteries during the day to give it night-time power, meaning it has a range limited only by the pilot's ability to stay awake at the controls. As long as the two intrepid Swiss adventurers don't encounter anything unexpected – such as a solar eclipse – they should be fine…