GenZ: what will it be like?

Well, I've certainly seen toddlers doing this. However, I have to say that I also find myself hovering, finger ready to tap when I read books. A family member confesses to having tried the reverse squeeze gesture (opening out finger from thumb) in order to see a magazine picture better (and obviously failing):

... some toddlers attempting to treat magazines like iPads and TVs like touch screens. So Gen Z will be tech-fluent in many ways, and certainly more connected than any generation before it. One consequence will be a multicultural a nd globally oriented mindset —even more so than the Millennials that preceded them. Kids are already Skyping with friends and family on the other side of the globe. A quarter of Gen Z participants in this study said all or most of their social-network friends live a plane journey away. Expect even more linguistic and cultural borrowings and consistencies across nations and regions. F_INTERNAL_Gen_Z_0418122.pdf

  So, while these things are undoubtedly true. We must be careful not to let them hide the continuities with our own experience. We must also be wary of thinking that it makes others somehow completely different to us. The truth is that many things remain the same. We still hunger and thirst, we tend to be attracted sexually to others, we normally desire physical closeness with others and we seek to establish emotional bonds with others for mutual support. Culture never takes those things away; it merely refracts them through varying mental contexts, artefactual opportunities and habitudes.

So yes, we need to understand the differences, but we need to do so in a way that does not alienate them from us. And by recalling that they are still trying to achieve common human things, the same sorts of things that we try to achieve, then it starts to help us to understand them. Only then should we try to get a sense of how the technology changes things, and in particular the way that they most automatically focus on the world and expect things to work.

Reasons Young Christians Leave Church

Hard to resist finding out what this shows up: The Barna Group - Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church: 

One big reason uncovered is that "much of their experience of Christianity feels stifling, fear-based and risk-averse" which is in contradistinction to their "desire for their faith in Christ to connect to the world they live in." Interestingly, part of the reason, I think, that I've found myself in a 'meta-church' ministry: I don't find myself drawn to servicing the stifling and fear based ways of many churches and drawn to connecting faith more fully with the world.

The fearfulness is perhaps related to another dimension of dissatisfaction: "Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow." I suspect that the shallowness is a fairly direct consequence of the risk-aversity.

The next set of reasons deserve fuller quotation:

 "“Christians are too confident they know all the answers” (35%). Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in” (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that “Christianity is anti-science” (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries." 

I'm particularly interested in this because it resonates so much with what I'm so often finding in my work and relating with young people. I would want to underline that we need to pay heed to this. And this is probably related to another theme emerging from the research where the issues expressed are captured in this sort of way: "not being able “to ask my most pressing life questions in church” (36%) and having “significant intellectual doubts about my faith” (23%). "

Sexuality also comes up as a major issue, mainly this is something about the tension between church and culture in this area. It's not so much about same-sex attraction in particular as the general difficulty of such different attitudes between the two domains of living.
There is a hopeful note sounded: 

"many churches approach generations in a hierarchical, top-down manner, rather than deploying a true team of believers of all ages. “Cultivating intergenerational relationships is one of the most important ways in which effective faith communities are developing flourishing faith in both young and old. In many churches, this means changing the metaphor from simply passing the baton to the next generation to a more functional, biblical picture of a body – that is, the entire community of faith, across the entire lifespan, working together to fulfill God’s purposes.”"

Again, I've seen something of this and would add that newer generations are far less hierarchical and don't defer just because of established social positions but tend to relate well to being engaged in an open and friendly manner where respect is given as well as received on the basis of common humanity and offering what one has to the 'conversation'. 

Barrage and gas: energy and generation

There's debate brewing over the proposed Severn barrage; start here for the arguments: Colin Luckhurst: The Severn barrage would be good for renewable energy, but opposition from conservationists is powerful | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "A barrage stretching across the wide mouth of the estuary from south Wales to the northern coast of Somerset could hold the turbines that – judging by the example of the only European example now in place, at the mouth of the river Rance in Brittany – could generate electricity both from the incoming tide and the normal river outflow."

A creative bit of thinking notices that natural gas is very high pressure when released and gets really cold as it is slowed down; perfect candidate for electric generation by turbine and also uses for refrigeration ... check it out.

New underwater turbines

This looks potentially important: a new and more efficient and easier to install way to generate leccy from tides. Read more here: New underwater turbines promise clean energy from UK tides |
Environment |
guardian.co.uk. It's a big deal because: "There is an immense potential resource of clean energy from the tidal flows around the UK: conservative estimates suggest there is at least five gigawatts of power, but there could be as much as 15GW, equivalent to 15 million average family homes. Tidal generators can harvest the energy of these moving streams, with the added advantage that the resource is, unlike wind, predictable."

UK tides ... stronger tides are yellow and red. Image: DTI

Solar so good for our house

Worth looking at, this: Solar so good for our house | Money | The GuardianHere's the pleasant surprise; "We, a family of four, have produced 92% of our electricity usage from the roof of a century-old terraced house in south-east London - laying to rest the idea that Britain is not sunny enough for solar power. It also disproves any suggestion this sort of technology only works in state-of-the-art, modern detached houses.
Not only will we not pay for any electricity, we should get a rebate of about £50 once a payment from the so-called renewables obligation (RO) scheme, which rewards microgeneration schemes with cash, is included."
This at rates which could see the initial sum repaid within about 15 years -depending on electricity prices. Of course this was a subsidised initial outlay. So as the writer says,

I received a 50% grant for the system from the government's low-carbon buildings programme - the total cost of buying and installing the panels was £17,000. Unfortunately, the government is so pathetic at supporting low-carbon technologies that it last year cut the maximum grant to £2,500 because the scheme was so popular. As a result, demand has collapsed to the extent that the small company that fitted my system has gone out of business.
That means your return on a system purchased now will be lower - little more than 3% for one like mine this year, rising to close on 4% when the RO payments increase next year. Still, 4% that is not taxable is comparable to a building society account that you do pay tax on.

And there is a really interesting reflection on use of electricity, which at first seems counter-intuitive, but as I think about my reactions I think this might be true for many.

You might think generating your own power would make you relaxed about leaving lights on or the TV on standby. But the contrary is true. It has woken us all up to the realities of energy use. The computer, TV, lights, everything, we now turn off at the wall when they are not in use. We have some of those remote control switches to turn off wall sockets that are hard to get to. In future when we go on holiday, we will empty the fridge and freezer and switch them off. The challenge now is to raise that 92% figure to 100%.

Rubbish offers hope of meeting green energy targets - Business News, Business - Independent.co.uk

Rubbish offers hope of meeting green energy targets - Business News, Business - Independent.co.uk: "The Government and local authorities are investigating the potential of anaerobic digestion, a technology that uses natural bacteria to break down organic material such as food waste and farm slurry, producing liquid fertiliser and a gas that can be used to generate electricity, or be piped into the gas grid, or turned into fuel to power vehicles. The process also generates heat that can be diverted to warm nearby homes or businesses."

Don't believe 'em when they say intermittancy is a problem

Scientists of the University of Kassel in Germany prove that the entire country can be powered by renewables only. They connected biogas, wind and solar power in a distributed way and show it can deliver both baseloads and peakloads.

There's a video too ".

Those horizontal wind turbines just got more feasible

What I liked about this article is that it explains in simple terms what the engineering difficulties have been for this family of wind turbines.
Here' the bit that draws me in:

It may resemble a giant rotary washing line, but it might just help Britain meet its hugely ambitious new wind energy targets. At least that's the claim of the company developing a novel "vertical axis" wind turbine dubbed the Aerogenerator.

The 144-metre high V-shaped structure would be mounted offshore and capable of generating up to 9 megawatts of electricity, roughly three times as much power as a conventional turbine of equivalent size. Switching to such a design could ensure that thousands fewer turbines would be needed in order to meet the government's new wind power target, says Theo Bird, founder of Windpower, the Blyth-based firm behind the new turbine.

As unique as it may sound, the Aerogenerator is in fact just the latest addition to a family of wind turbines that generate power through a rotating vertical shaft as opposed to the horizontal shafts of the more familiar windmill design.

Breakthrough in solar power in Wales

This looks like a potentially very significant breakthrough in the search for mass distributed solar power: "those behind the Welsh operation think they may have made a crucial breakthrough. Their solar cell works in a different way from most, and is not based on silicon - the expensive raw material for conventional solar cells. G24 Innovations (G24i), the company making the new cells, says it can produce and sell them for about a fifth of the price of silicon-based versions. At present, it makes only small-scale chargers for equipment such as mobile phones and MP3 players. But it says larger panels could follow - large enough to replace polluting fossil fuels by generating electricity for large buildings.... The new so-called Graetzel cells offered a simpler and potentially cheaper way to generate solar power."
David Adam on solar power in Wales | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited:

UK could be 100% green leccy by 2027...

... but is there the will to take on powerful lobbies to make it possible? George Monbiot comments; "a new study by the Centre for Alternative Technology takes this even further. It is due to be published next week, but I have been allowed a preview. It is remarkable in two respects: it suggests that by 2027 we could produce 100% of our electricity without the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power, and that we could do so while almost tripling its supply: our heating systems (using electricity to drive heat pumps) and our transport systems could be mostly powered by it. It relies on a great expansion of electricity storage: building new hydroelectric reservoirs into which water can be pumped when electricity is abundant, constructing giant vanadium flow batteries and linking electric cars up to the grid when they are parked, using their batteries to meet fluctuations in demand. It contains some optimistic technical assumptions, but also a very pessimistic one: that the UK relies entirely on its own energy supplies. If the German proposal were to be combined with these ideas, we could begin to see how we might reliably move towards a world without fossil fuels."
The German proposal is for a European+Iceland+North America electricity grid ...
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Stop doing the CBI's bidding, and we could be fossil fuel free in 20 years:

Power-generating buoys shelter in the deep

A new kind of generating buoy which sits beneath the storm levels at c.50m. Looks hopeful and is being developed by a British firm and tested offshore in Scotland.

'A town with 55,000 inhabitants would need half a square kilometre of seabed covered with 100 buoys to power it,' says Grey.
He adds that they could be effective in the North Atlantic, from Scotland down to Portugal, along the Pacific US shoreline, from San Francisco in the US up to Vancouver in Canada, along the coast of Chile, and even in South Africa and New Zealand.
But calmer seas, such as the Mediterranean do not have enough wave height to pump the buoy.

Power-generating buoys shelter in the deep - earth - 14 June 2007 - New Scientist Environment: