Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 27

How many bins do you need?

Last year Prime Minister Rishi Sunak congratulated himself for scrapping plans to make households sort waste into seven different bins. The plan mainly existed in Rishi’s mind, which made if very easy to scrap. But it does raise an important question – how many bins is the right number?

I ask because I had a press release recently from the Northern rail company, who currently sort their waste into a total of 33 different bins. Rishi would spontaneously combust at the thought of it.

Why 3...

Heating homes with supercomputers

Did you know that Britain has a national supercomputer? It’s hosted at the Advanced Computing Facility at the University of Edinburgh and it’s used on our crunchiest problems, such as climate modelling or processing health data. It’s in the news this week because of a trial of a new heating idea – an idea that chimes nicely with the seasonal heat storage technologies I was writing about recently.

Supercomputers generate an enormous amount of heat and need to be kept cool. This heat is often ...

Superyachts, by Gregory Salle

The superyacht is often used to illustrate luxury and extreme wealth, for those who approve and aspire to such things and for those who don’t. A yacht is the ultimate symbol of success to some, and visual shorthand for inequality to others. We understand the symbol without really taking those yachts very seriously, and so Gregory Salle invites us to dwell a little longer on the subject in his book Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquility and Ecocide.

Personally, I wasn’t initially convinced that...

What we learned this week

You’ll have heard by now that 2023 set a new record for the hottest year since reliable thermometers were invented. Just for a change, here’s the article on that from the Daily Mail.

2023 was a record year for solar installations, heat pumps and domestic batteries, according to MCS. Welcome news, since we need every year to be a record year for a while to meet targets.

Less positive news on larger scale renewable energy projects though – over a thousands wind and solar projects are await...

What is inter-seasonal heat storage?

One of the frustrations of solar power in the UK is that there’s a lot of seasonal variability. It’s cold at the moment and so this is when my household uses the most energy. It unfortunately coincides with the point in the year when the solar panels generate the least power, thanks to the short winter days and lots of cloud.

Come May and June the situation will be inverted. The solar will be producing generous quantities of power that I don’t need. It would be so useful to be able to store a...

Recycling telecoms infrastructure for EVs

Does your street have one of these? There’s a slightly smaller version about twenty metres down the street from me, and I found five on a quick walk around the block.

They’re telecoms cabinets, and if you live in Britain, there’s a very good chance there’s one nearby. BT has 90,000 of them scattered around the country, and they contain the connection points for home phone lines and broadband.

They’re a critical part of telecommunications infrastructure – or at least they have been. A...

Not the End of the World, by Hannah Ritchie

My son is currently working towards grade four in piano. If he gets down about his mistakes, I remind him of how hard those exam pieces felt when he tried them for the first time. He is learning and making progress, and all forms of progress exist in tension between what was and what will be.

That tension is easy enough to hold with small things, like building a jigsaw or repainting a room. But it seems to me that the bigger the issue, the harder it is to keep perspective. For something ...

My favourite books of 2023

I know I’m a month late for this sort of thing and everyone else writes their best-of lists in December. But I tend to get a lot of reading done over the Christmas period. Better late than never.

As usual, there’s no particular order to these favourites. Of just over a hundred books I got through in 2023, here are a handful that I enjoyed most, got plenty from, and would recommend for a variety of reasons.

The Seaweed Revolution, by Vincent Doumeizel

I’ve been expecting this book f...

10 favourite posts from 2023

A usual, I have got to the end of the year without giving much thought to wrapping things up before the holidays. But I’ll leave you with some of my favourite posts from this year. They’re not in any order and there’s no particular criteria for inclusion. They’re just posts I was pleased with and wanted to share again.

China’s sponge parks – there are so many of these in China and they’re often beautiful, imaginative and a very clever form of climate adaptation. More of them in the UK pleas...

Danish Design Heritage and Global Sustainability, by Ditte Lysgaard Vind

I visited Copenhagen for the first time last year, and I was impressed. Bikes are everywhere and if it isn’t quite there just yet, a truly sustainable modern city feels within reach in a way I hadn’t seen before. It’s also clearly a place where good design is valued and is part of the culture.

The family were less excited about exploring this. They told me that I should consider myself lucky to get to either the Danish Architecture Centre or the Design Museum, but under no circumstances ...