Tag Archives: uk

Web Applications

The changing landscape of UK Energy

In the last year I’ve been building up a list of websites that help understand how electrical energy is produced in the UK and how it feeds into the grid. Building this understanding seems to be a vital requirement to understand the nature of the investment we need to make in the UK’s energy infrastructure and also massive potential that we are still failing to tap into.

But the other thing I’ve learned is that a lot of ideas that I grew up with around energy are probably no longer true. In particular the nature of solar energy, which while quiet and passive is steadily becoming a key part of the country’s energy infrastructure. This means that often there is more cheap renewable electricity in the middle of the day so it makes sense to run things like washing machines in the afternoon. This is a totally different paradigm from the one I grew up with where the cheapest costs were always at night when demand was lowest.

The demand curve is still true but I think this now illustrates the problem of storage and release. If wind energy is available all through the night when demand is low we need to be able to store this more effectively than we do now (if we store it at all, which is something I’m still trying to understand).

I’m really grateful to the creators of the following tools for their efforts in creating such helpful visualisations and utilities and for the creation of the underlying APIs that allow such projects to exist.

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Work

The BBC “across”

The term “across” is absolutely endemic at the BBC and because so many people in UK media pass through the BBC it also crops up across the sector generally. Although I was initially scornful of it as a term I have long since caved to the inevitable and use it as well.

Being “across” seems to have originated in the fact that the BBC have multiple media streams and when a journalist talks about being “across” things they might well mean that they are producing pieces on a topic across multiple media, say television and radio. It might also mean that they are tracking a breaking story and are watching other media outlets for what they are saying about a story.

Outside this context though the word more or less means “understanding”. So when someone from the BBC is “across” something it means they understand it, sometimes if they are “across” it enough they can also make decisions about it. When someone isn’t “across” something then they do not feel they understand it or they are unprepared to answer questions about it.

Ironically this meaning then seems to seep back into broadcast journalism and I have heard journalists on air saying that they are “across” developments such as the formation of the coalition.

At this point “across” feels kind of ubiquitous apart for people who have been raised in single stream media so I think it’s worth you being “across” it too.

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