No Hot Air

Lifesaver Water

We've never done a water story before, but the story of Lifesaver is so disruptive and shift changing that we can't resist

Using nanotechnology to filter the filthiest of water down to potable water in less than 10 seconds, the Lifesaver does what it says on the bottle.

Using chemicals to sterilise water is not always effective, and you will still be drinking a poisonous cocktail with some dead pathogens in it”

We first found Michael Pritchard  the inventor on TED, Riveting Talks by Remarkable People.

The video is amazing and inspiring.

While you're there, check Barry Scwhartz, Dan Arielly, Daniel Kahnemann and just about anyone.

More than meters get smart

We like to approach everything from a different and sometimes disruptive perspective: energy buying, energy "risk", TPIs, energy "shortage" etc. And although we love Smart Meters, and have been a fan of SM from day one: Aren't we forgetting that it will all be about what SM can do despite (some) people getting hung up on arcana like technology and data flows?

End users are mostly content to get accurate monthly reads. If they can get half hourly reads, that's good too. Worrying about how reads are delivered is akin to sitting in a restaurant obsessing about what is happening in the kitchen. Most people would rather not know- their judgment of success depends on the eating experience, not the recipe or the ingredients or how skillful the chef is. As vital as those things are to delivery, end users don't generally find them important. And so with data. Just do it. Do you know how to program computers? Probably not.But you're reading this.

We have been saying for a while that the intersection between phone and metering will fracture. And why not? Phones themselves now include fixed and mobile while blurring the difference between computing and television while disrupting old models of content delivery. The visual display of energy metering information may not be as compelling as seeing a movie, but the mechanics behind delivery  isn't that much different.

The next generation of wireless technology will give rise to the internet of things, where everything has an IP address. Pulses of electrons and molecules in energy flowing through utilities will simply be one more type of digital information. But wireless or smart metering only refers to the medium - the important thing is the message. How food gets from field to factory to kitchen to plate is mere detail, even most of the time to the gourmet.

An example is to compare the  Verizon Hub Phone and the Onzo Energy Meter

The Verizon Hub Phone has several nifty features: Wireless and Fixed Calls, Cable TV, traffic reports, web access, call forwarding, contacts etc etc. In short a iPhone type experience based on touch technology that integrates several existing products. This is done to smarten up  the home phone and make it more accessible to the technophobes - they don't care how it works they just want to see their energy bill. Which they can't do. Yet.

You can't even see your energy bill on the Onzo, although you can see energy use. It looks really cool and geeky.  But why pay the same price as the Hub Phone for far less?  Surely the same experience can be delivered from a meter to any number of existing screens: Phone, TV, PC or the Verizon Hub Phone.  And probably to similar UK products coming soon from the likes of Vodafone or O2. Of course it can. And for cheaper. It's only a matter of time.The leap from meter to phone or a similar destination is only one of imagination.The whole point of modern ICT is to simplify things. Not to add yet another application or device, no matter how cool it might look.

Smart is another word for intelligence. And the intelligence in smart meters is the data and various levels of interpreting it. The device itself is actually as dumb as that hunk of metal currently residing under 26 million stairs. It's not the gadget - that's dumb in the meaning of silent. It's the widget on the screen - that's smart.

Without Hot Air

How could we resist a title like  Sustainable Energy - without the Hot Air ?

We can be jealous about blurbs like these:

The Freakonomics of conservation, climate and energy.

A Tour de Force

For anyone with influence on energy policy, whether in government, business or a campaign group, this book should be compulsory reading.

But, apart from the obvious benefits of people mis-Googling and ending up here,  it looks like we do share more than a nifty title.  We chose No Hot Air as the name to represent our commitment to new thinking and counter-intuition.  We toyed with the name of No Inconsequential Bull****, as being much more representative but figured we were already alienating large numbers of the potential audience and why push our luck further.

New thinking based on facts and the real world (or the surreal world of UK Business Energy buying) is what we do.  Counter intuitive thinking  is how we get there. We face the world as it is and how it could be and not trying to construct (and sell) a reality  based on mis-conceptions, half-truths, disingenuousness or plain old fraud.

Business users seem especially prone to looking for excuses not to do something about energy, and the energy risk industry of consultants, regulators and shills enable them. We've talked a lot recently about two opposite trends, where energy is seen as a major problem while actually plunging in price. We have pointed out the contradiction of businesses needing to get their act together on energy when the worst of energy price rises are, for the next few years, behind us. The reason for declining energy prices depends on declining energy demand, and it's a conundrum and a key reason why we concentrate on energy use, not price. We also think that carbon taxes can reward either good behaviour or the simple good housekeeping that many UK business energy users don't practice without the data, or time, or people they can trust, to deal with.

One thing No Hot Air, and Without Hot Air share is that information on energy should be free. You can download the entire book for nada, zilch, nothing.  We've said from day one that  our big problem is how to make money by telling people to do nothing, in an industry that thrives on creating an illusion of scarcity and crisis. Tell people everything will work out and get ignored.  Create a problem, describe a crisis, sell the solution, get invited on the Today show.

As we like to say, we don't have a crystal ball, but no one has to cross our palm with silver either. No Hot Air, the one and only. But at first look, Without Hot Air, with a healthy stress on "debunking myths" are people after our own hearts.

We want to replace paper....

What would it mean for the planetary carbon footprint, and yours to replace paper?

Plastic Logic is working on it, has a prototype and a big new factory in Dresden. The Plastic Logic Reader appears on first look to be a 1/3 the weight of the Mac Book Air, but the company doesn't want to replace the PC, (and think of the energy implications of that noble cause), they want to replace paper.

The company, whose technology was initially developed at Cambridge University, is focused on doing in plastic what today is typically done in silicon. Why do that, is an obvious question when the chip industry has amassed such expertise in turning silicon wafers into the guts of all sorts of electronics.

The answer, according to Glass, is the relative cheapness of scaling up a plastic display factory versus building a chip-making plant. In the end, making semiconductors from plastic, with its low temperatures and quick production time, could be 40% to 50% cheaper than using silicon

Plastic screens will of course be far more efficient and have minimal impact on ambient temperature than even today's LCD screens. 

We've talked before about the impact of OLED displays: Looks like  Plastic Logic and Universal Display could end up being the VHS v Betamax battle for 21st century energy efficient self-refreshing display technology.  Who'll win?  Maybe not either one, but every one else will. Hope you will be reading NHO on one soon.