http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/podcasts

Just scroll down to the March 5 podcast.

100,000………..

If they were all functioning at the level one would expect in business, the Irish health service would be the best in the world.

Have all the computer systems of all the Health Boards been integrated yet and if not, what percentage of support staff spend their time doing repeated data entry?

Perhaps the HSE could use the method employed by Cypress Semiconductor in Silicon Valley. The bottom few percent of performers are fired every year. Those are the paper-shuffling buck-passers I am referring to.

This coming from someone whose business blog hasn’t been updated in nearly a fortnight!

VAT gets paid by everyone, pensioner, social welfare recipient and squillionnaires alike.

But back to your point – charging VAT on something you encourage is a way of saying you support it, without having to spend any money on your support. Incidently to get the grant the installer has to be approved by SEI. The qualifications required? Training? Plumbing? PhD? Nope – a tax clearance certificate. QED

By the way, have the blog up and running on my site.

Is it simply there as a tracking device and a way of having even more people in the civil service doing pointless jobs?

In the case of solar water heaters, the VAT is almost the same as the value of the grant. Give it with one hand and take it back in the other I guess…

So its good. Pity it is supplied by monoculture sitka, but that’s not their fault.

CHP plants are usually flexible in their output, and as such they facilitate the introduction of wind energy, which is less flexible or predictable. All recently constructed gas fired station have been CCGT stations which ideally need to be run continuously. Thats why
The new Aghada Power Plant is the wrong type. These stations virtually sterilise the grid for wind energy, and as a result wind farms are often effectively switched off at night.

Wood pellets? An ideal way to use waste sawdust, but once a few thousand stoves go in, sawdust moves from being waste to commodity. It just doesn’t make sense to hammer mill timber into sawdust, dry it, compress it etc., all to make pellets, some of which have problems keeping themselves intact in a silo where moisture in the air turns them back into sawdust again.

The most sensible option for many is a log gassifying stove, but they aren’t grant aided, so haven’t been very popular

I agree about wood chips. How is the Grainger biomass CHP plant viewed by the Greens?

Talked to my coalman about wood pellets – he is making sure to stay abreast of developments so that he still has a livelihood no matter what happens re coal.

Can we not generate the pellets on a local basis?

Speaking of which, I remember the wood-chip-logs initiative of the 1980′s. Were they a good idea and what happened to them?

“The Cork South West Region currently uses N Billion KWH of energy generated using X, Y and at a cost on P, Q and R.” etc.

Quite right. I’d love to have the resources to pull out that sort of information, but I’m running my campaign on a shoestring. For good reason, Greens don’t accept corporate donations, so on PR, advertising, even preparing blogs and podcasts, we don’t have the research resources. So yes, you get some generalities and aspirations. But that is a different matter from the solid promises you get elsewhere that mean absolutely nothing when the election is over. Anybody remember the Health Strategy almost five years ago?

Under the current regime it is virtually impossible for a community to set up a wind farm. For example, just to ask Eirgrid if you can get a grid connection costs up to €30,000. Then Eirgrid can say “no”, or say “yes” but you’ll have to connect to a substation 30km away, and you’ll have to pay us as sole supplier to put in the line at whatever charge we want to make.

Other European countries have an appropriate regime that provides a grid connection automatically for wind farm developers, so that communities can own wind farms themselves, keeping the money in the locality.

When I talk about biofuels for local consumption, it is perhaps an unexplained reference to the fact that we graze cattle on marginal land that would be better used with short rotation timber cropping for wood chips. Sadly, most of the wood burning stoves installed locally only take wood pellets which have to be shipped in from further afield, and which require a lot more energy in their production than chips.

The only energy crop around here seems to be gorse and pyromania is rampant. See
Gorse Fires for more

It’s me that needs beaten up as he asked me to do this on Monday. Sorry Quentin!

On a side note: There’s an interesting press release on Quentin’s site about backyard burning. This one always gets me – poeple go on about incinerators but one ‘backyard burn’ emits more dioxins than an incinerator would be allowed to in months… but it would be much more powerful an argument with the figures to prove it.

Quentin asked me a couple of days ago to set up a blog section on his site – I’ve been a bit slow off the mark. It should be active tomorrow. I’ll comment here when it’s up.

OK I think that’s enough free publicity for the Greens from me… especially as I’m not sure how to vote yet!

Surely there is a ton of things he could write about in this area and use the feedback via comments to help tune the Green’s message?

But looking at Quentin’s front page what I see is “Appropriate community owned wind and wave power generation. Bio-fuels for local consumption”

What I want to see is:

“The Cork South West Region currently uses N Billion KWH of energy generated using X, Y and Z at a cost on P, Q and R.

We propose to replace this with A% Wind at a cost of €J, B% Wave at a cost of €K and C% Bio-fuels at a cost of €L.

We propose to do this over S years. The overall capital cost shall come from the following sources D, E, F. The result of this long term investment is an energy generation system which costs €T per annum compared to the current €U and emits V% less heat/CO2 etc.”

In this election I refuse to vote for any party that provides vague aspirations. Give me cold hard facts, targets and numbers and you’ll get my Number 1 even if I don’t agree with all of your policies.

They need to become the “Party of Science”.

Proper environmentalism is based on rigorous science and strategic thinking. Every policy they define should be backed up with rock-solid science and a detailed long-term financial analysis proving why it is in our best interests to adopt them.

Happy clappy “let’s shut down all the power-stations and get everyone back on their bicycles” will never work.

A scientific approach includes taking bad science to task whether that is coming from the big pharma companies or clueless scaremongers.

If they take the scientific approach, they’ll lose a bunch of the usual loons who believe in the healing power of crystals and think that composting toilets should be compulsory, but what they’ll gain is mainstream respect, influence and the ability to get things done.

If they don’t then they will remain a fringe party of “well intentioned nice people” who achieve nothing other than an air of middle-class smugness.