Infrastructure Archives - Page 9 of 13

Blue bins

In the first episode of my recently launched podcast, I kind of ranted about the blue bins in the National Recycling Programme that Singapore has. My major gripe was that the system for blue bins which was completely open access and operated by riding on the back of the public waste collection system was designed to fail because by seeking to include everyone, it made securing a clean stream of recyclables harder.

I noted that an alternative system where people sign up to gain access to the blue bin, and pledge to abide by the ‘rules’ of using the blue bins could do better. They could pledge the following:

they will use the blue bin only for recycleables allowed,
they will ensure the items are cleaned and ready for recycling,
they will only access the blue bin themselves,
they will ensure the blue bin is locked after their use,
they will not deposit into the blue bin when it is full or when they note it is contaminated

Friends at Upcircle has shown that by giving assurance to people who care and show up for the environment that you are able to deal with the recyclables properly, you can actually obtain good quality post-consumer recyclable stream. By preventing those who doesn’t care about recycling from taking part in pseudo-recycling by their own terms, we can actually do better.

Recycling better by excluding people isn’t exactly the best narrative to the ears but in due course, that can actually change the culture.

What about the baseload?

I get asked this question a lot; by the people operating power systems, by the Oil & Gas industry, and the traditional old school bankers. They also ask about price of intermittent renewable energy plus energy storage; and when that will reach grid parity. Essentially, they are saying that the new innovations cannot replace the current technologies because the cost don’t stack.

I’m not sure those are the right conversations to have or the right questions to ask. Economics do drive a lot of systems and considerations but they probably should not be hijacking our priorities and our realities. Climate change is real; and if we are to put our best foot forward to make the difference, we are not going to make it. Putting our best foot forward is about using our minds, engaging our hands and changing our lives.

Yes, baseload power will be changed, energy prices will increase, perhaps our spaces, our wealth will have to be sacrificed. But our earth can remain a sanctuary for life, and our world can remain intact; if only we are putting our best foot forward. Not dragging our feet, not trying to maintain status quo. Not trying to exercise malicious obedience.

Making the transition III

I have written about green ammonia and hydrogen before. And I might keep talking about them because they are important candidates as energy vectors in a decarbonised world. They are quite likely what is considered as the end points of the transition for the world towards zero carbon or low carbon. What does it mean to transit to green ammonia or green hydrogen? What needs to take place, and who will move first? What should the players be looking out for in order to make the switch?

We need to start defining intermediate steps for the switch. There is actually very little doubts about the inevitability of the switch. Yes there are concerns that it might be energy intensive, the costs are high, and the market is not formed yet. But realistically, most new things are like that. When the Apollo mission took up 60% of the computing power of United States in order to perform its calculations for the project, there wasn’t anyone saying the industry is not formed yet we should wait for better computers before we send man to the moon. We just viewed the mission as a series of problems to be solved, within the budget constraint.

The transition needs a budget; it can be a small one or it can be a large one. The issue is that the businesses needs to take a stance and say that climate change and the transition is a mission I want to be on, and to explore the series of problems to be solved in order to complete the mission. And we don’t wait for costs to come down before we make the transition, we take active steps towards it. That is also what leadership is about. That is really the only issue people should be considering.

So for example, if you’re providing equipment for natural gas systems – be it power generation, cogeneration, for steam methane reforming, etc. You need to start thinking about the smaller pieces of things: are your valves able to handle hydrogen? Do the membranes in your cryogenic tanks work if it was to be filled with hydrogen? What about your manpower, are they able to be trained in the safe handling of the gas? All these to prepare for the transition. You won’t be able to make the transition overnight or achieve it through a single project. It takes much smaller steps.

So start making them now.

Making the transition II

Transition means being in an in-between state, crossing over to something which is supposed to be perhaps a less temporary state. The challenge, however, is that one can get stuck in transit. Natural gas as a fuel risk being in that state because it wasn’t really adopted fast enough as a transition fuel. And now renewable electricity from solar and wind has more or less leapfrog it in terms of cost advantage. Once battery or other energy storage technology moves along the cost curve and decline sufficiently, natural gas might even be bypassed.

So the world is in a somewhat confused state. When is it right to use gas? What should be counted as alternatives for decarbonisation? In any case, gas prices are spiking now so what does it mean? Should that mean we move forward into more renewables which might even be more expensive? Or we move backward into coal?

These decisions are not meant to be made in categorically; because the entire system needs to be considered. And what is at the margin in terms of choice needs to be clearly identified. If the additional unit of power that satisfies both energy security and the quantity demanded can be obtained through renewables, it should be used. Of course if that is not available, one might have to step back into more carbon-intensive processes. Availability can also be based on budget.

Natural gas itself, needs to be displaced by greener fuels without threatening the underlying combustion technologies that underpin the gas turbines. But that is perhaps for another day.

Corporate ladder II

I wrote about the corporate ladder previously; I asked the question of what we are actually climbing in our lives. But what if we are really climbing the corporate ladder? What exactly is that about? What if we aspire to have influence over the business, over something that we had thought was important in life. What difference does it make?

Does it matter whether you become a CEO before 40 years old? Or whether you reached there climbing the corporate ladder as opposed to having founded the business? What do others think of a professional CEO? Would it be better if he had worked the grounds and been in operations? Or if he was just a businessman? Or if he had been some office corporate slave who had been putting together powerpoint slides? What do you need to build that path towards that position?

You probably will need some kind of persistence and tenacity. But what do you lose in the process if you try to shortcut it? Who do you actually care about? Is it about yourself? The problem with any ladders including the corporate ladder is that they are designed only with the individual’s desire to rise to the next rung in mind. It appeals to the self, and reinforces it, making one feel more right, more just in serving just oneself. So how can a person who reached the top by climbing be really trying to serve the earth, or shareholders, or the employees, or the customers? If all his life, he’s just trying to lift up himself. Higher and higher.

Green economy

What is the green economy? It is an entire system of production and consumption that actually acknowledges and properly handle the constraints and boundaries of the environment, nature and ensures sustainability of the system. The blue economy is captured in that. So is circularity in the economy. And so is the notion of nature based solutions.

Greenwashing is not part of the green economy even if the activity is borne out of it. A large part of the green economy is the government; they no longer just ensure monetary stability, enforce the laws and support various other institutional structures. They also have to provide some kind of structure to govern the pricing of carbon, enforce accounting of carbon emissions, invest into the technologies that enhances the sustainability of our economy.

All of these things are not entirely new to the government but they need to get used to being involved, taking responsibility and ownership over this area they used to leave out. Not only this, they need to look upon the transition towards this green economy as ultimately part of the security and future of the jurisdictions they are looking after. It can be difficult; when banks don’t finance baseload coal fired power plants you might think energy security is being undermined. But maybe that’s not the right problem we want to deal with; because energy security can also be about energy efficiency, switching to more decentralised sources of energy, and using more renewables.

So are we electing and choosing leaders who care about the future to lead governments? Are we behind them in their approach and thinking about creating a future that we can exist in?

Commitments and backtracking

What happens when you make a commitment and then realise it’s too painful to fulfill it? You rethink your priorities and determine whether the commitment is still that. But isn’t every choice that way? So every choice is actually a commitment. Then public pledges and all really is just about increasing the cost of unwinding a commitment rather than making it impossible.

Banks are caught in a bind with republicans states in the US making it illegal for banks to refuse financing coal fired power plants. If this had been the case elsewhere in the world the banks won’t be able to easily defend themselves. But in the US, it somehow becomes a legitimate excuse.

And so GFANZ is looking like its commitments are under threat. But let us remind ourselves that the real work is not limited to the financial world; and if the banks are not financing projects then we are going to have to finance it using other channels and other ways. After all, the world is still flushed with liquidity even though central banks are trying to tighten. Redirecting them to climate efforts is more worthwhile in the long run for humanity than funding more random tech solutions that merely optimise a small area of life.

Seasons & cycles II

Spring brings new energy and life from the harshness of winter, and transits towards the sunny summer time where we start thinking of going on breaks and to the beach. We return in late summer into autumn where we start prospecting for work again, and then working on them towards winter where we enter into a brief year-end break before looking forward to springtime again.

And there are proper working hours – sensible ones that works with our daylight: 8am to 6pm. Rest day on Sunday.

There are costs to these cycles. Days are shorter in winter, and maybe a bit too long in summer. There are times when you want to grab some food while feeling still awake late in the day in summer but then shops are going to be closed. At the same time, you can’t ski in summer; while being at the beach in winter would be really miserable. It means that different business activities in different parts of the economy would be in lull versus thriving at different times of the cycle.

Yet these costs doesn’t have to be mitigated; they can be leveraged into strength. In Singapore, what we pride upon – being almost on 24/7, having a strong nightlife while keeping streets really safe, yet continuing to be productive through the day, and keeping all of these on through the week, through the months and through the year. During festivals, even Chinese New Year when supermarkets now choose to close only for a few hours or half a day at the most. We leveraged on the fact we have people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds hence allowing staff of different ethnic group to keep activities on.

All of these were thought of as ways to mitigate the costs of cycles. But did we ever had to do that? Or it’s too much?

Going purpose

Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia has just announced that he is giving the full stakes in the company to trust entities that are committed to addressing climate change challenges. The company is valued at about $3 billion according to New York Times but I imagine the value that it is going to have in terms of making a difference for the world will be way more than that.

Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.” Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.
Yvon Chouinard

Patagonia has always been leading the way in terms of its focus on sustainability and profit for a purpose. To a large extent we need to recognise that Earth and our existence on it is not just the source of all wealth but also all the income stream and values we can generate. It thus serve also as the greatest possible investment we can make in our lifetimes for both our own and our descendants’ future.

The continued fragmentation of the world, driven both by political interests, the self-interest driven nature of capitalism, and the sheer inability to coordinate climate action beyond lip service is frustrating. But Patagonia gives us a clear example of how meaningful drastic actions can be taken that flips the switch on our incentives.

And aligns us to the better angels of our nature.

Failed experiments

When does an experiment fail? And I mean a true experiment. One that you have no clue what the results would be but you had hope for things to go one particular way (which probably formed your hypothesis for the experiment).

Popular entertainment and even our education system would have us believe that an experiment fails when it failed to produce results we had hoped for. But in reality, a failed experiment is one that did not produce any useful results to prove or disprove the hypothesis. This happens because perhaps you are testing too many things at the same time and did not really isolate the hypothesis.

I’ve myself experienced many different policy experiments through my public service career. And too often, the service thinks of failure based on outcomes. But if we are seeing our ideas as trials and testing them out, the critical piece in the outcome is what it informs us, rather than whether what we hope to achieve is reached.

We have lost sight of our pursuit for knowledge and truth which will serve our longer term interests, in exchange for short term results and perceptions which is worth nothing in the future. At the end of the day, we ought to be refining our approach to challenges and not specific outcomes. Because we simply have to live yet another day to test out something else, so that eventually we may land on ideas and approaches that helps us thrive.

That had been the power of centuries of scientific inquiry and to stop right now would be a waste.