Passionate about energy
Every engineer knows that energy saving is good. It's almost invariably linked with worthwhile emissions savings and there are attractive financial returns. Also, installing new equipment, instrumentation and/or controls usually solves what are often annoying maintenance and/or operations headaches, as well as resulting in cleaner plant and better working environments.
Cool energy savings for Flurocarbon Hertford site
Cool energy savings for Flurocarbon Hertford site
Cooling the tube
Anyone who travels on London Underground knows that the tube is too hot, particularly on the deeper central area lines. When Transport for London's (TfL) Cooling the Tube programme director Kevin Payne tells you: "We're going to move from warm, to uncomfortable, to a place we certainly don't want to be, if heat dissipation remains unmitigated," it's clear the problem is getting acute.
Blowing hot and cold
Last summer's government energy strategy - which called for power generation from renewables to rise to 20% by 2020 and for CO2 to be reduced by 60% before 2050 - is going to have a profound effect on plant, and that includes HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) installations. That's particularly the case in non-domestic buildings, where space and water heating account for significant energy use and emissions. And it's not only about increasing the use of air source and ground source heat pumps, or solar hot water systems: variable speed drives (VSDs) on existing fan and pump equipment, as well as CO2-based building energy controls are among other technologies that need to play their part.
Building better controls
Improved sensors, electronic controls, automation, modern materials - they're all great, but they're not only about developing radical, high tech engineering solutions. Many can also give a huge boost to old, some very simple and efficient, techniques. And, the major advantage: they're tried, tested and well understood, so all the new technology needs to do is get them working better.
Going underground
What keeps London Underground's head of operational engineering awake at night? Top of Maurice Poole's list is the competence of project and maintenance engineering people - across all the professional sectors. That's not just in his own organisation, but throughout the infrastructure companies (Tubelines and Metronet, the latter now in administration), currently upgrading the network, and main contractors, such as Balfour Beatty.