Just Jack

I saw a couple of things on my stay in Barcelona that caused me to think about our attitudes towards energy usage and recent attempts to conserve energy for environmental reasons.

I visited a fountain display of lights and music at la Font Magica near the Placa d’Espanya. Such a display that I found both impressive and enjoyable also struck me as an entirely frivolous waste of energy. Surely no real benefit could be claimed to be derived from this regularly repeated displays?

Of course I am not suggesting that anything that has no clear or measurable benefit should be banned or avoided but it made me wonder which energy (or any other important resource) consuming activities should be deemed acceptable and which should not. The doors on the metro didn’t open automatically, a minor inconvenience perhaps but a similarly insignificant energy saving.

How annoying does something have to be before it is deemed worthy of an energy consuming remedy? How impressive does something have to be before it is deemed worthy of spending our precious resources? Is there a metric we should be using to make these decisions?

I noticed a few things in Barcelona that are different from Blighty that I thought worth a mention.

• Large bins in the street have foot pedals to open them removing the need for (presumably full) hands to do the opening.
• Some steep hills (for instance near Park Guell) have street escalators.
• Street and metro escalators slow down when not in use. Is this to save energy?
• The metro isn’t plastered with adverts like the London Underground but they do have TV displays in the stations and in the trains that display metro information and ads.
• Metro train doors don’t open automatically. Another energy saving trick?
• Metro trains are very much like London’s ‘Bendy Buses’. Carriages are connected and individuals can walk from one end of the train to another unimpeded.
• Arrows in the carriages light up before a station is reached, indicating which side of the carriage to exit on.
• Metro security (ie. not the police) carry large truncheons.

A concrete tower - 40 storeys high - stood bathed in intense white light, a totally bizarre image in the depths of the Andalusian countryside.

The tower looked like it was being hosed with giant sprays of water or was somehow being squirted with jets of pale gas.
…

It is Europe’s first commercially operating power station using the Sun’s energy this way and at the moment its operator, Solucar, proudly claims that it generates 11 MW of electricity without emitting a single puff of greenhouse gas.

Read more at the BBC.

But with positive marketing “it became mainstream, it became sexy, attractive, and this is exactly what has to happen with the environmental movement”, he said.

You tell ‘em Arnie.