The 7th Annual British Renewable Energy Awards took place at the end of last month. It has just been announced that the the Eden Project's "SolarFair" solar power scheme achieved the "runner-up" position in the "Flagship Project Award" category.

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I've been involved in quite a few debates in various places around the web over the last week or so, and I've been revisiting those conversations and reflecting on what our glorious Group of 20 leaders achieved in Cannes last week, particularly regarding what they refer to as "Global Governance".

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but by the time they reach adulthood engineers understand technology better than politicians. If this is not self-evident to you, dear reader, please watch the presentation given by Jacque Fresco in Bristol, UK on August 21st 2010. Jacque's views on politicians are forcefully expressed at around 44:44 into the 3 and a bit hour video:

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Michael Hart is dead. Long live Project Gutenberg.

Michael was the founder of Project Gutenberg, and typed the first ever "e-book" into a computer via a Teletype machine way back on July 4th 1971. That "book" was the Declaration of Independence of the United States from Great Britain. and Michael died on September 6th 2011, aged 64. According to his obituary in the Economist:

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We travelled up to Bristol yesterday to hear Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows talk on their one stop in England on the Venus Project World Lecture Tour.  Unfortunately we arrived late, after enduring traffic hell on the M5 motorway northbound from Devon.  We missed the start of Roxanne's talk, but we did get to hear all of Jacque's talk and the subsequent  Q&A session.  During his talk Jacque had made it quite clear that he thinks a lot of people talk bullshit, including politicians, psychologists and lovers! He had occasionally used some four lettered vernacular also. We got surprised in the foyer after his lecture by Jacque himself, who unexpectedly emerged to shake our hands and enquire if Kasia had been offended by any of his fruitier language. She assured him she hadn't been!  Having been sat near the back during the main presentation it was great to see him up close and chat briefly, even if he did take the opportunity to illustrate one of his points by suggesting that my prior conditioning might lead me to punch the guy opposite me on the nose!

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Earlier this week Dutch energy consulting and certification company KEMA announced that the Hoogkerk "PowerMatching City" had been officially opened by the mayor of Groningen. According to KEMA:

Hoogkerk is the first microgrid project in Europe to integrate a full-scale, operational “smart” residential community energy system. The community includes 25 interconnected residential homes equipped with micro-cogeneration units, hybrid heat pumps, PV solar panels, smart appliances and electric vehicles, and additional community-based power produced by a wind farm and a gas turbine.

Whilst 25 homes seems to me to be stretching the definition of "a city" a bit far, it seems that:

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Whilst the Group of Eight and the World Trade Organization chatter away to little effect, and Bill Gates ponders how to tweak capitalism so that the "one billion people [who] live on less than a dollar a day" can benefit from it, you may be wondering if there isn't a better way to organize society. In the 20th century the alternative most often put forward was communism. That doesn't seem to have worked out terribly well either though.

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