Money, energy and pies...

Perhaps it's just because I wrote about the credit crunch last week (and thank you to all who responded to my question about public spending – I'm still gathering evidence about this), but it seems that there has been a lot of talk about money and energy in the news this week.

I'm sure many of you will have noticed the EDF plans to buy British Energy for £12.5bn. There has been a lot of debate about what this means for the UK. On the one hand it seems that a total of four new 1.6 gigawatt EPR nuclear reactors could be built at two sites, Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk. On the other hand there are fears this takeover could lead to an increase in energy prices for consumers. On the third hand (or perhaps foot) there is a fear about job losses, particularly in Scotland.

A McKinsey study has shown that CCS could be economically viable by 2030, but that it will take subsidies of around £8bn to get achieve this. Both Al Gore and the Environment Agency are keen to see CCS fitted to coal fire power stations as soon as possible. In fact they have both gone so far as to recommend that no new coal fired power plants should that cannot capture and store carbon dioxide. Al Gore event went on to urge young people to engage in civil disobedience to stop non-CCS plants being built!

There have been several other announcements on the energy front this week. Google has teamed up with General Electric to develop a "smart" electric power grid and promote clean energy. Three Scottish developed Pelamis wave power devices have been installed off the coastline in Portugal and will generate 2.25 MW peak power. Naturally there were some questions about why the technology had not been installed in Scotland, where it was developed. The answer, if you are interested, appears to be because the Portuguese feed-in tariff offers a better investment return than the UK Renewables Obligation in this case. Moving across the border, Portugal's neighbour Spain has just announced that they have somewhat blunted the sharp cuts in their solar power subsidy scheme.

Moving away from money, three other stories have caught my attention this week. Firstly, my favourite quote of the week was delivered by the Scottish Green's who have compared the aviation opt out in the Climate Change Bill to "diet plan with an opt-out for pies". A high tech solution has been proposed by a rocket scientist to track what's happening inside a Greenland glacier – he has put 90 rubber ducks onto the glacier and is looking to find out where they end up. This reminded me of the story of how the adventures of a container of rubber ducks, frogs, turtles and beavers that fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean provided extremely valuable evidence about global ocean currents. The Met Office has told climate sceptics that they have their head in the sand. This stern response comes after prominent sceptics claimed that global warming has stopped (presumably due to the rubbish summer we've just suffered). In fact we'll all be reassured to know that global warming is continuing unabated. Finally, ecotarianism appears to be the new way to save the planet – it is all about eating sustainably, which seems much harder than it sounds particularly when you take into account the minefield of global food supply chains.

Oh, and one final thing, apparently some bloke called Jeff Hardy was quoted in New Scientist in an article about careers for chemists in energy.