[SystemSafety] Electricity via "Renewables"

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Not system safety in the small, but safety in the large, if you consider climate change the great 
threat which it is.

The organisation Ember Climate has estimated that electricity generation in the EU in 2022 was 32% 
hydro + nuclear; 22.3% wind + solar; 19.9% gas, 16% coal; 9.8% "other" (yes this does add to 100%). 
This means that for the first time the EU generated more than half its electricity from so-called 
"renewables" (although I consider nuclear power environmentally problematic for reasons which I have 
addressed elsewhere).

GB was not included.

https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/european-electricity-review-2023/

I joined in the IET EngX Forum in mid-2021, hoping for some exchange of views on how we transition 
to a climate-neutral power-supply-and-consumption technology (which BTW I do consider a safety 
issue, for reasons which I hope were apparent in my SSS'22 Keynote on the July 2021 German floods.

I stumbled on a whole spectrum of climate-change sceptics and indeed deniers. A few were obviously 
real people and responded to critique and argument, but the majority behaved like trolls. Some were 
fixated on certain tropes; a couple behaved like Twitter bots; from experience I would say that a 
couple of them were indeed (driven by) bots. I managed to shut one down (a rather effusive one, fond 
of citing all the typical "sceptic" institutional sources) by elaborating in detail on its modus 
operandi (that in general is how you recognise bots) and after some months it quit.

I mentioned to the "moderator" that there were some bots around. She ardently and categorically 
denied it - all users were genuine people. So I explained how a "genuine person" can use a bot to 
generate posts, and her response was to lock the thread. (Is it really too much, I wondered, to 
expect a professional to understand the technology which they oversee?)

Most of the good and useful discussion on the EngX forum comes from electricians talking problems 
over. Indeed, the section on the Wiring Regs BS 7671 has by far the most traffic. It seemed to me 
that EngX has little to offer engineers looking for discussion of engineering-relevant topics, such 
as how we transition to climate-neutral power generation. Pity.

PBL

Prof. i.R. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de




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