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UtilitY WEEK | 27th March - 2nd april 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 Oldpuddle @Oldpuddle Living proof of kipper stupidity. RT: @RogerHelmerMEP: Temperatures drop during a short solar eclipse. It's the Sun that drives the climate! Martyn Williams @MartynWilliams2 I think @RogerHelmerMEP may be the man to back my plan to anchor the moon partly in the way of the sun, like a sunshade to control warming guynewey @guynewey Possible eclipse marketing slogans. Coal: producing baseload electricity through solar eclipses since 1856. Adam Scorer @adam_scorer Waiting patiently for Solar Armageddon. Just a bit murky. Jamie Stewart @Jamie_IH Call me a cynic but sure Swansea lagoon was announced ages ago. Could this be to offset flack from greens over oil&gas tax cuts? #budget2015 Simon Evans @DrSimEvans 45,000,000 tonnes of CO2 Potential increase in emissions caused by today's budget tax breaks. 3WhitehallPlace @3WhitehallPlace Do you live in Scotland or The North? Worried about your energy bill? Why not switch to a warmer part of Britain? #PowerToSwitch William Marchant @richonlyinname Frustrates me a little that we have to financially incentivise networks to do things that should be covered by their core allowed revenue. South Staffs Water @SthStaffsWater Globally we use 200,000,000 litres a second to produce food. Cut your food waste to help conserve the earth's water. #watersavingweek Top Tweets Disconnector Sunshine on a gloomy day It's been a good week to be British, because we've all had a chance to indulge in two of our favourite pastimes: moaning about the weather and being embarrassed by the sporting prowess of our national teams. True, the England rugby team didn't really follow the script, they played well and entertained the nation with a nail-biting, climatic game in which they might have clinched the Six Nations trophy right up until the last minute of play. Ultimately they still lost, of course, so all was well. Then last week's near-total solar eclipse saw almost the entire country shrouded in cloud, but it nonetheless turned into a once-in-a-lifetime oppor- tunity to moan about a natural phenomenon, which many people indulged to the full. It meant National Grid didn't need to cope with the expected surge in electricity demand aer the event ended and people put the kettle on, but curiously enough it meant a bigger-than- expected surge, and earlier. The reason? Once people realised there was nothing to see, an estimated ten million of them went indoors and tuned in to Stargazing Live on BBC 1. And put the kettle on. It resulted in the biggest surge Grid has seen for a decade at nearly 2GW, more than for an England game or a Wimbledon final. Disconnector In a way, it's a bit of pity the company coped so well. It would have been fitting if people had trooped indoors in such large numbers that it had overloaded the system and resulted in tem- porary blackouts. Then we could have all shaken our heads and muttered "typical" as we rolled our eyes heavenward. Which is something else we Brits do so well. Some crappy ideas work… Disconnector was amused to learn that the "poo bus" unveiled at the end of last year in the South West has been com- missioned to run a regular route by First West of England, start- ing on 25 March. The company has decided to call it Service No 2. The single-decker coach (featured on these pages last autumn) runs exclusively on biomethane gas produced at Avonmouth from sewage and food in anaerobic digesters. It has thus far completed a few publicity runs between Bath and Bristol airports but the recep- tion from the public has been so positive that First West of England has been encouraged to give it a regular route, four days a week, around the Bristol area. It just goes to show that if you're open and honest with people – and especially if you approach a project by appealing to people's sense of humour – they can be more accepting than you think. Going on the piss – really That's a theory that's going to be tested to destruction by Clean Water Services, based at Portland in the US, which is currently petitioning Port- land's Environmental Quality Commission to allow it to reuse recycled sewage water to make beer. Yup, according to a report in the Telegraph, the com- pany's Mark Jockers said Clean Water Services' "special purifi- cation system" would make the sewer water cleaner than the average glass of water. "The water that comes from the high purity water system is the cleanest water on the planet," he said. Jockers said: "What we're really trying to do here is start a conversation about the nature of water, and there's no better way to start a conversa- tion than over a beer." Hmm. The first hurdle may be getting permission from Portland's health authorities to set up a production facility, but Disconnector suspects that won't be the last one. Since beer becomes urine with such remarkable alacrity, it seems somehow poetic that the urine should be turned straight back into beer, but Disconnector suspects that even the whizzkids in Ad Land would have a hard job selling that one. For starters, what the hell would you call it?