Energy Transition Engineering

Engineering on the job The different fields of engineering are not well understood by the general public but they are expected to make things work, provide essential services, grow the economy. All of the unsustainable activities we enjoy are actually well engineered systems, they work and they are doing what they were meant to do.   We seem to be stuck in a conundrum loop.  Transition Engineering is a pretty simple idea – there is a methodology that all engineers will learn and use to develop and carry out the transition projects in every engineered system.  This is the same thing that happened 100 years ago when a simple, but heretical idea emerged in the engineering fields of the time – safety engineering.  Most people may not even be aware of the rater straight-forward methodologies of safety engineering that were set out in 1911. But – nobody wants to be in the future where safety engineering did not emerge and become a professional norm in all engin...

More or Less? I keep getting people telling me how excited they are about electric cars. The number of passenger vehicles registered in New Zealand has been just over 2.5 million for the past 10 years. There are 600 cars per 1000 people, compared to 400 per 1000 for the USA.  In 2015 the government of NZ spent $3 billion on roading and local govt spent $1 billion. New Zealand drivers consume 152,000 barrels of oil per day and at $70 NZD per barrel, that is about $4 billion on fuel per year.  There are about 100 registrations of electric cars per month which is about 0.4% of the registrations. There is no economic benefit to NZ if we import an electric car or a petrol car - it's the same. If Kiwi's changed to the same car ownership rates as the car mad, car dependent USA - that would reduce the amount of money flying out of the country. to import cars and parts and reduce congestion and fuel spend by 30%.  We wouldn't get to save much on roads, as we would h...