Call it serendipity or what you will, but I feel compelled to tell a tale which has some very interesting, fortuitous and coincidental consequences.

It also illustrates the clear advantage of keeping an open mind, meeting interesting people and engaging in some of the age-old practices of picking up and reading a “real book” and not being so over-dependent on what I must call – for want of a better description – “digital engagement”.

My serendipitous encounter involved real people, a bit of history, and two books. And, as you would expect, a clean energy message with a clean energy pioneer, William Armstrong, at left.  Read More

Last Word: Serendipity or Waking Up to Reality?

Call it serendipity or what you will, but I feel compelled to tell a tale or two which have some very interesting, fortuitous and coincidental consequences.

It also illustrates the clear advantage of keeping an open mind, meeting interesting people and engaging in some of the age-old practices of picking up and reading a “real book” and not be so over-dependent on what I must call – for want of a better description – “digital engagement”.

My serendipitous encounter involved real people, a bit of history, and two books.

You wouldn’t imagine there would be any commonality between Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” (first published in 1719) and a book by Henrietta Heald about William Armstrong “Magician of the North” who lived (1859 – 1900). Armstrong was a real living man and Crusoe a figment of Defoe’s vivid imagination.

But both had something in common. They utilised clean energy powered by water for very useful purposes. To survive on his island, Crusoe  invented a process to mill corn using the energy from a flowing river.  I read about this not in the original story by Defoe but in a fascinating book on literary heroes (and other fictional characters) in “Sebastion Faulks on Fiction”.

Being a great admirer of the writing skills of Mr Faulks – Birdsong, Charlotte Gray and even a James Bond book (as invited by the Ian Fleming trust) called Devil May Care – I was so pleased to pick it up in a Singapore Change Alley bookstore called Precious Words (a bookstore with a difference, as they offer books for lease as well as sale!)

And here’s where the serendipitous bit comes in. I was on my way to meet a client, Andrew Affleck of Armstrong Asset Management. Yes, you guessed it. Named after the same Armstrong – William – and subject of the book, which I found lined up in the bookcase in Andrew’s conference room.

I had certainly heard about Armstrong from Andrew before as to why he had chosen the name for his company. The Englishman was a great admirer of the very inventive, industrious William Armstrong. And as I flicked through the book, waiting for the meeting to start, I came across the reference to Armstrong’s invention of hydro-electricity.

Tapping the energy of a river on his Newcastle on Tyne property in 1880 to produce the power to light his house, history records that his was “the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity”.

At the time he was recognised as highly as the Stephenson’s – Robert and George, locomotives and railway line; Michael Faraday with his electromagnetism discoveries;  as Brunel, with his railway and bridge engineering, and Charles Darwin, with his Origin of the Species and others. But history has ‘shamefully neglected’ Armstrong, according to the novelist and thriller writer Len Deighton, an expert in military history, who welcomes the publication of the first comprehensive biography of this remarkable man.

Armstrong went on to be associated with ship building, armaments, cars and aircraft, but it was his first pioneering work in clean energy that I was most interested in. Water power to electrify lights.

So imagine my surprise – yes, obviously I had  not religiously read Robinson Crusoe so well as a boy – to discover that Mr Defoe had his hero use the energy from a flowing river to work its magic and drive a mill to grind his grain to help feed him in this remote place. The author didn’t have to invent this out of his creative mind, as using water to drive a mill had been around the for centuries.

But for me, reading – all within an hour or so – about the fictional hero of water energy on a remote island and the historic figure of the English early industrial age with his hydro-electrical powered lights made me think.

How sad it is that when the world had access to clean energy  it turned to fossil fuels to drive its industrial age and in the process severely damaged not only the environment on earth but produced excessive amounts of Carbon dioxide – and many other nasty greenhouse gases – which we are now doing our best to reduce, and eliminate if possible, to save the planet.

It was another historic figure – a contemporary of Armstrong’s – the Swedish Nobel prize winner in chemistry in 1903, one Svante Arrhenius, who released his landmark work in 1895. He talked about the “greenhouse effect” and what would happen if industrial emissions grew enough to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. He predicted a warming of about 5 degrees Celsius.

But he was wrong in that he predicted it would take 2000 years for that to happen. Latest predictions by climate scientists are that the earth is on track to reach that landmark 5 degrees C warming by 2050. Arrhenius should have said 200 not 2000 years. But he had no way of knowing the extent to which industrialisation, along with the digging up and burning coal, exploitation of oil and gas, would do so much damage.

And I doubt if his contemporary William Armstrong – the magician of the north (England) – really foresaw what would happen to hydro-generation, which has become a major source of energy for any countries, lighting for homes, streets and buildings, or his other clean and not so clean inventions.

But we can but take hope from the fact that these men – Armstrong  in particular – is now the inspiration for a movement to fund clean energy production and distribution on South East Asia.

Hydroelectricity might well figure among some of the to-be-funded projects. But more likely is solar, which is not only taking the world by storm – in the nicest possible way – but based on forecasts will be responsible for by far the majority of all the world’s energy well before the end of this century. Shell’s latest forecast is that by 2070, solar photovoltaic panels become the world’s largest primary source of energy.

Solar, by way of photo-voltaic on roofs of buildings everywhere,  as well as solar thermal by way of large arrays of mirrors to reflect the heat of the sun onto  towers to heat salt to produce steam to drive turbines to produce electricity 24 hours a day. This is happening in Spain and California now and plans are for massive use of solar thermal in Australia and the Sahara.

Advance in solar technology are considerable. Thinner and more effective solar cells.The work of the SERIS centre in Singapore to utilise solar cells in the windows and facades of buildings. Or the work of special glass now installed in the Empire State Building. Or the work of companies like Phoenix Solar – in Singapore and around the world – to install solar panels on many buildings as an alternative to fossil fuel power.

Interesting to note that the first solar power plants in the world were in France. We noted in an article a few months ago after friends reported on visiting the world’s first modern solar furnace – and the world’s largest – at Mont Louis, near Odeillo. It is believed to have been built in France in 1949 by Professor Félix Trombe. The Pyrenees were chosen as the site because the area experiences clear skies up to 300 days a year.

France has been doing other work on solar thermal – the THEMIS solar power tower is a research and development centre focused on solar energy and is located near the village of Targassonne, in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales, 3 kilometres from the world’s solar furnace in Odeillo.

We must not ignore one of the latest advances in solar from the UK.  Eight19, which takes its name from the time it takes sunlight to reach the earth – 8 minutes and 19 seconds – is a developer and manufacturer of third generation solar cells based on printed plastic.

Originating from technology initially developed at Cambridge University in the UK, these flexible, robust, lightweight solar modules benefit from high-speed manufacturing and low fabrication costs.  With a fraction of the embedded energy of conventional solar modules, printed plastic solar modules are particularly well suited to consumer and off-grid applications.

What is the world coming to? Printed plastic solar modules. Solar cells incorporated in glass windows.

And we end with the work of another genius – Sir Harry Kroto, of Cambridge, another Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, for his work with C60 – the wonder carbon.

Could this open the door to genuinely cheap, clean, low carbon energy?

Could this be the 21^st century  equivalent to Armstrong’s innovations, and that of his fellow Victorian inventors?

Keep your eyes and ears open. Read and meet real people. Recognise serendipity when it hits you!

Note: The first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon).

References:

1. “Faulks on Fiction”, by Sebastian Faulks, BBC Books, 2011 www.sebastianfaulks.com

2. “William Armstrong: Magician of the North”, by Henrietta Heald, McNidder & Grace, 2012 www.williamarmstrong.info

3. Armstrong Asset Management, Singapore www.armstrongam.com

4. Solar Energy Research Institute Singapore, www.seris.nus.edu.sg

5. Phoenix Solar, Singapore, www.phoenixsolar-group.com

6. Eight 19, www.eight19.com

Source: www.abccarbon.com