The Changing Face Of Silicon Roundabout – 7th October 2020
I took these pictures, as I walked round Silicon Roundabout this morning.
The area is certainly changing.
This map from Transport for London shows the future layout.
The current status of the four sides of the roundabout are.
- North-East – In Use – Two-way
- North-West – In Use – Two-way
- South-West – In Use – Two-way
- South-East – Closed
It was originally planned to be finished in 2022.
Covid Humour
I have yet to hear any good humour about the covids.
Although an incident this morning at my local station was thought funny by those present at the time.
- The large lifts at the station are now limited to six passengers at a time.
- A couple of other passengers and myself, were waiting to descend, when an enormously pregnant lady appeared at the lift doors.
- She smiled and asked! “Have you got room for another two?”
- A guy in the lift, pointed to everyone and did a quick count on his fingers.
- He then said. ‘Not if you’re expecting triplets, Madam!”
We were all laughing and smiling, as we walked to the trains.
Is The NHS The Cause Of The Rise In The Covids?
I was lying in my morning bath thinking this morning and I had the heretic thought, which is the title of this post.
How many prominent people in the UK have died from an attack of the covids? There have been some at an advanced age, but generally they were suffering from something else as well!
The highest profile person to be hospitalised by the covids, has been Boris. But despite his weight and obesity, he came through it unscathed, due to excellent care in an NHS hospital!
I’m 73 now, but if I look back to my twenties and thirties, I see an optimistic, fit, slim guy, who felt he was immune from health problems. I can also only remember one of my peers at Liverpool University in the 1960s going into hospital and it was so memorable, I can’t remember what he had.
The youth of the UK, don’t think the covids will happen to them and growing up in an NHS, which has looked after their every need, when they look around them, they feel it will get them through, if they catch the virus.
So the fact that the NHS is there and got the fat Boris, through it, means that they think, they’ll be alright in the end.
Conclusion
The success of the NHS could be a factor in the rise of lab-confirmed cases of the covids.
Are other countries with good health systems, that coped with the first wave, xperiencing a second one?
Getting A Flu Jab
Ten days ago, I got a text message from my GP’s surgery, asking me to make an appointment for a flu jab.
I have phoned several times since and have not got through successfully. As I also need a B12 injection and some more Warfarin, for which I might need a quick chat on the phone from my doctor, it is getting increasingly important that I get through.
Dr. Rosemary Leonard on the BBC this morning, said that there were a lot of people wanting flu jabs this year, so I may march in to Boots, as was suggested in the text message.
Incidentally, why can the GP Surgery text me, but they have no simple way I can text or send them an e-mail from a form with Capcha to sort the bad from the good?
Healthcare and computing seem to have a match made in hell!
Whitby: Hundreds Of Jobs Created At Woodsmith Mine
The title of this post, is the same as that article on the BBC.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Two hundred jobs are being created by a company developing a huge potash mine in North Yorkshire.
I have been watching this project for some time and I’m rather glad, that Woodsmith Mine seems to be past its troubles. This is an extract from the first paragraph in the Wikipedia entry.
The mine is expected to have a life of 100 years and has been labelled the biggest mining project in Britain for decades; its twin shafts will be the deepest commercial mineshafts in Britain. The project is expected to generate over £100 billion for the UK economy over a period of 50 years.
When the project is up and running, it will be the deepest mine in Europe and have the longest tunnel in Great Britain.
I also feel that Woodsmith Mine, shows that mining don’t have to ruin the landscape.
Siemens and Macquarie Form Calibrant Energy To Tackle Distributed Energy Market
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Greentech Media.
This is the introductory paragraphs.
Macquarie Capital and Siemens have formed a joint venture to finance and build distributed energy projects, joining an increasingly competitive landscape in the growing corporate renewables market, the two announced this week.
The partnership, called Calibrant Energy, will initially focus its energy-as-a-service model in the United States, where corporate and industrial customers have become heavyweight renewables buyers as they seek to reach decarbonization goals.
It looks a good idea for a business venture.
I also like it, that two big corporate beats have got together tp finance and install renewable energy systems like solar.
Glasgow To Roll Out ‘World’s Largest’ Fleet Of Hydrogen-Powered Refuse Trucks
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Cities Today.
Some points from the article.
- There will be nineteen trucks.
- The project is a joint venture between Scottish Power Renewables, BOC and ITM Power.
I think that refuse trucks could be a large application of hydrogen.
Toyota, Hitachi, JR East To Jointly Develop Hydrogen-Powered Trains
The title of this post, is the same as that of yjis article on The Mainichi.
This is the first two paragraphs.
TOKYO (Kyodo) — Toyota Motor Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and East Japan Railway Co. said Tuesday they will jointly develop hydrogen-powered trains as part of their efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
The three companies have agreed to collaborate on development of test railway vehicles equipped with hybrid systems that use hydrogen-fuel cells and storage batteries as their source of power.
It appears that Toyota will provide the fuel cell technology.
Are Floating Wind Farms The Future?
Boris Johnson obviously thinks so, as he said this about floating wind farms at the on-line Tory conference today.
We will invest £160m in ports and factories across the country, to manufacture the next generation of turbines.
And we will not only build fixed arrays in the sea; we will build windmills that float on the sea – enough to deliver one gigawatt of energy by 2030, 15 times floating windmills, fifteen times as much as the rest of the world put together.
Far out in the deepest waters we will harvest the gusts, and by upgrading infrastructure in such places as Teesside and Humber and Scotland and Wales we will increase an offshore wind capacity that is already the biggest in the world.
Just because Boris said it, there is a large amount of comment on the Internet, describing everything he said and floating wind turbines as utter crap.
Wikipedia
The Wikipedia entry for floating wind turbines is particularly informative and gives details on their history, economics and deployment.
This is a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry.
Hywind Scotland has 5 floating turbines with a total capacity of 30 MW, and operated since 2017. Japan has 4 floating turbines with a combined 16 MW capacity.
Wikipedia also has an entry for Hywind Scotland, which starts with this sentence.
Hywind Scotland is the world’s first commercial wind farm using floating wind turbines, situated 29 kilometres (18 mi) off Peterhead, Scotland. The farm has five 6 MW Hywind floating turbines with a total capacity of 30 MW. It is operated by Hywind (Scotland) Limited, a joint venture of Equinor (75%) and Masdar (25%)
Wikipedia, also says this about the performance of Hywind Scotland.
In its first two years of operation the facility has averaged a capacity factor in excess of 50%.
That is good performance for a wind farm.
Hywind
There is more about Hywind on this page of the Equinor web site, which is entitled How Hywind Works.
This is the opening paragraph.
Hywind is a floating wind turbine design based on a single floating cylindrical spar buoy moored by cables or chains to the sea bed. Its substructure is ballasted so that the entire construction floats upright. Hywind combines familiar technologies from the offshore and wind power industries into a new design.
I’ve also found this promotional video on the Equinor web site.
Note that Statoil; the Norwegian government’s state-owned oil company, was renamed Equinor in 2018.
Balaena Structures
In the early 1970s, I did a lot of work for a company called Time Sharing Ltd.
At one point, I ended up doing work for a company in Cambridge started by a couple of engineering professors at the University, which was called Balaena Structures.
They had designed a reusable oil platform, that was built horizontally and then floated out and turned vertically. They couldn’t work out how to do this and I built a mathematical model, which showed how it could be done.
This is said about how the Hywind turbines are fabricated.
Onshore assembly reduces time and risk of offshore operations. The substructures for Hywind Scotland were transported in a horizontal position to the onshore assembly site at Stord on the west coast of Norway. There, the giant spar-structures were filled with close to 8000 tonnes of seawater to make them stay upright. Finally, they were filled with around 5500 tonnes of solid ballast while pumping out approximately 5000 tonnes of seawater to maintain draft.
It sounds like Statoil and Equinor have followed the line of thinking, that I pursued with the Cambridge team.
My simulations of oil platforms, involved much larger structures and they had some other unique features, which I’m not going to put here, as someone might give me a nice sum for the information.
Sadly, in the end Balaena Structures failed.
I actually proposed using a Balaena as a wind power platform in Could a Balaena-Like Structure Be Used As a Wind Power Platform?, which I wrote in 2011.
I believe that their designs could have transformed the offshore oil industry and could have been used to control the Deepwater Horizon accident. I talked about this in The Balaena Lives, which again is from 2011.
Conclusion
It is my view, that floating wind farms are the future.
But then I’ve done the mathematics of these structures!
Did Boris’s advisors, as I doubt he knows the mathematics of oblique cylinders and how to solve simultaneous differential equations, do the mathematics or just read the brochures?
I will predict, that today’s structures will look primitive to some of those developed before 2030.
Is Trump’s Recovery From The The Covids Down To His Mother?
Donald Trump’s mother was born Mary Anne MacLeod at Tong on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland.
This Google Map shows the position of Tong to the island’s capital of Stornoway.
This is Wikipedia’s introduction to the village.
Tong is a village on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, 4 miles (6 kilometres) northeast of the main town of Stornoway on the B895 road to Back and Tolsta. The population of the village is 527 (2001 census). Fishing forms part of the local economy.
Families probably have to have granite in their genes to survive in places like that for decades.
By reputation, Highlanders are not wimps.
I have just looked up the rate of the covids in the Highlands.
The latest figure of lab-confirmed cases is 185.7 per 100,000 of the population, which compares to 617 for the whole of Scotland and 1952.4 for Manchester.
Is there something in Highland genes, that resists the covids?
The Anonymous Widower 