No.83, Thursday, 26th. February 2026

The wind is picking up this morning from a fairly steady light breeze to a blustery light to moderate breeze. At this rate we should have fresh and possibly even strong breeze by lunchtime. We are used to low diurnal temperature variation in the westcountry (shorthand for Devon and Cornwall) but today is ridiculous, with a minimum of 11ºC and a max of 12 degrees!

During a conversation in the pub yesterday I found myself recalling a major climate change mitigation strategy from the turn of the millennium, and since then have been thinking about tragic missed opportunities. I was involved in a major London-wide energy project that essentially came to nothing.

In a speech at the time I remember explaining why CHP technology could be thought of as a bridge between the carbon economy and the hydrogen economy, a transition that we expected to take around a century. CHP is Combined Heat and Power and in simple terms is a more efficient means of providing electricity and heating in areas that are reasonably densely populated. It is quite common in Scandinavian countries and Germany.

The transition to a clean energy future will be costly and disruptive. Had we made a start in 2000-2005 we would already have a lot of the infrastructure in place and therefore be making considerably more efficient use of fossil fuels. Since the modular heat and wire networks would be in place, the switch to renewable energy would be relatively painless and, more importantly for me, would offer the opportunity for local communities to own energy production and distribution in their area.

Sadly, it will never happen. As an aside, I remember at the time being proud of the fact that a Newton Abbot engineering company built CHP units consisting of gas turbines producing around 3-15MW of electricity, ideal for communities within cities as well as areas from deserts to extreme cold. They still build them today.