The only time you have to say something is a feature, not a bug, is when it appears to be a flaw. The notion behind this idea is that there was an intention. That aspect of a software, or product design, or service experience was not supposed to be a flaw but an intentional part of the design. It assumes there was an intention, some objective being served.
The reason people might think it was a bug could be because:
They had different objectives from that of the way the product designer had imagined the objectives of their users to be
They were not the target audience of the product/service
They were forcefully making a product fit their needs
They did not know how to use the product – which could reflect badly on the UI design or the UI of whatever instructions needed
The product had a poor product-market fit
The product designers were giving excuses for themselves
There isn’t supposed to be a debate whether something is a feature or a bug. It should always be resolved by the one who had designed the product/service. If it was a result of something being overlooked, it is a bug, and pointing out that it could be a feature is just an excuse.
We all want to make the world a better place. And in Singapore, we’ve somewhat cultivated the idea that we need to force people to take the right action or they won’t. Often it is because they will point to others who have not done it and say ‘why don’t you ask them?’
The people who failed to bring their trays back to the shelves at the hawker centres before NEA’s mandate had excuses – they were busy, the cleaners had to have something to do, they forgot, and so on. But it was never clear enough that they ‘had to’ do it. Once the mandate and the penalties came, it was clear. As clear as day. So, mandates make requirements clear to a large extent. It makes people sit up and recognise they had to take some action. More so than the consequences of dirty hawker centers, or when you have to take over a messy table.
What can we learn from this that we can apply to climate change?
If we don’t feel hit by the experience of a messy, unclean hawker centre, it is even harder to feel like we need to take any particular course of action just because we have a few more hot days. After all, one could turn up the air-conditioning (which worsens the problem at the system level). So mandates are needed to help with the coordination. The direct consequences alone are insufficient because of externalities, so the government should step in to ‘make them feel the pain’.
One of the big struggles of corporate is that when you have clearly defined roles where there are job titles, managers, and the ‘managed’, there is this false sense that you get promoted because you’ve proven yourself. Now, you start being required to work with entirely new skills, and you no longer have to use that much of what you were good at.
The tricky bit often in management is that the corporates are not sufficiently focused on training and bringing you up to the level required because mass training is easier to justify than just training a handful of people. Moreover, in many organisations, being in management has a lot more to do with handling internal politics and jostling for resources than to do with getting the real work done. Politics is of course important because that enables the delivery team to be able to deliver but if you just got promoted from being the best performer in the delivery team, you’re almost completely oblivious to what this new management role really is about! Not to mention growing the skills overnight to be able to do the new job well.
Some organisations, like the military that operate based on the old British aristocratic style tries to overcome this problem by having two classes within the service. The commissioned officer and the non-comissioned officer tracks are ways in which you focus one group on the ‘leadership’ (really, it is more management) skills. In contrast, the other group are more focused on ‘operations’ (or what is deemed more as ‘follower’ type) tasks. Of course, reality is a lot more complex than that but this form of organisation, while crude, aligns expectations and allows the specialists to focus on the frontline nitty gritty and have the ‘leaders’ focus on the big picture elements. Over time, though the commissioned officers have ever been trained in the basics, they lose their ability to really keep up with the changes on the ground to be able to command at high level.
Yet that form of organisation is probably not ideal as it can be a bit elitist and does not incentivise people to perform in ways that allows them to utilise their potential well. It boxes people into neat categories that serves the organisation more than the individual, and at some point, a lot of people would give up on the system as they find themselves uninterested in being thumbed down as second-class citizens, or being forced only to do the big ‘leading’ kind of stuff.
The market presents a new way of organising people, and as our markets develop, I’d expect a lot more small tiny firms to exists and serve large swathe of people when technology enables them to.
Continuing my series of musings about the nexus of sports and life. Something more important than winning in the sports arena is that your character is being built. How do you measure the extent of character development? What am I thinking about exactly? And why does it matter?
You can’t measure character. It doesn’t mean it is not important but you just cannot measure it. In the film Les Choristes, the Maths teacher, Mr Mattieu, formed a choir believing it would help reform the badly behaving boys. And it did! But how do you measure it? What changed? Maybe the school grades, maybe the noisyness of the classroom, perhaps even their sense of aspirations. In sports, the players’ performance can be seen in their behaviour on the pitch or courts, as well as their scores, but perhaps also in their lives, the way they treat the people around the sport, and so on. Even how they treat their competitors and how they talk about them. Max Maeder, the Singaporean kite-foiling Olympic medalist, impressed everyone by giving kudos to his competitors after finishing third in his final race when asked to comment on the race.
So that’s what I’m thinking about. There’s something unmeasurable that we can achieve in sports and sporting culture. Are we going to invest into that as a nation? Do we care enough about our people’s lives and their mental fortitude, resilience in face of struggles, competition, and need to perform? Those are precisely what sports offers us an opportunity to train and build up. And so investing in sports is not just about shiny stadiums, sport science degree programmes but also providing athletes with sport psychologists, equipping athletes with the science involved in training, practice, self-care and so on.
An excerpt from Roger Federer’s commencement speech for the graduating class of 2024 at Darthmouth this summer:
In tennis, perfection is impossible… In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches… Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches?
Only 54%.
In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.
When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.
He could be considered perhaps the most long-running, persistently successful individual athlete of our times, and the lessons he can draw from his experience are timeless. If we could have more of such models and examples to train, motivate, and encourage our next generation of Singaporeans – for their lives not just in sports but other aspects, won’t it be great?
Electrification is often easy in many cases. It is just about changing appliances. Of course, it is also about lifestyle and way of life. I personally still prefer to cook over a gas stove. But I won’t stop cooking without one; I’ve used various electric stoves before as well and didn’t face any major issues.
I’ve lived in house that had gas heating and also one with electrical heating. Regardless, the level of thermal comfort tends to be a trade-off between use of energy and insulation rather than necessarily the equipment for heating though the efficiency of the appliances would play a part. Going on to bigger things, there’s the electrification of transport. For most part, this can be based off just taking public trains or trams instead of driving. It can also involve using electric bikes. Of course finally, there’s the transition to electric cars.
None of these really do reduce emissions in and of themselves assuming no particular changes in energy efficiency of the basic fuel used. It is the energy source that matters. Electrification must be paired with switching power generation to renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydropower and so on. It is meaningless to have electric vehicles on the road and heating of homes with heat pumps when you are generating the power. The challenge of the energy transition is that many things are taking place together and people are not able to really keep track of how much emissions are going to be or might be. Therefore, the direction and rate of change is perhaps more significant to give a sense of how much change can or will happen.
Abatement of emissions through increasing power generation through renewable energy combined with electrification remains the simplest and most effective way to decarbonise our economies. However, the complexity lies in the fact that power prices affects the economy broadly and in many countries, they are subsidised at least for some sectors of the economy. By increasing the demand for power through electrification, the plans for subsidies for certain sectors might be affected. If supply is not increasing fast enough, power prices may increase in a way that reduces the competitiveness of other sectors and the economy as a whole. At the same time, there is also a risk that renewable power supply that is coming online is much more expensive, leading the overall electricity prices to increase anyways even if the supply is keeping up with demand.
Governments are afraid of adversely affecting the power prices as it has very broad sweeping economic consequences. Additionally, power transmission and distribution investments will also have to accelerate to cope with the increased demand and supply for power. Unlike the older set of infrastructure invested over time and much longer ago, we are looking at a huge ramp-up during a short period which means the infrastructure cost will have to be passed on to customers during an intense period of change. So while electrification combined with renewable power generation is the easiest pathway to decarbonise, there are systematic and political challenges around the distribution of the cost of energy transition to consider. Overall, the players who are electrifying some of the previous energy uses actually pass on parts of their cost of transition to the overall system as their participation in the market raises the cost of power for everyone.
For the typical electricity consumer, they would expect their share of the energy transition cost to be converting their load to be drawn from renewable energy sources. However, they now have to pay a share of the heightened infrastructure cost from the increased load, as well as the increased energy cost due to competition for renewable electricity. These complexities are slowing down a process that needs to happen much more quickly.
I keep thinking about the role hydrogen would play in the netzero energy system. It is important because most specialists in the field think it will be incredibly important. But I’m afraid some of them think of the importance not from an energy or thermodynamics perspective but from a technological, socio-economic perspective. I think that is misguided for something that is so nascent and imature.
The solar and battery learning curves cannot be used to project what happens to hydrogen because it is fundamentally a more complex type of project. A lot less plug-and-play compared to solar panels or batteries. For solar panels, the technology takes in light and transform it into power, which in essence is the flow of electrons. There is of course the issue of DC power versus AC power but the inverters will deal with that translation; and you can plug directly to existing electricity grids. Of course, when you have a lot of them the grid must start shifting but at least you get a shot at getting started. And after that you’ve got batteries coming in, again almost ready to work with the existing electrical infrastructure.
Green hydrogen production integrates with the electricity system fine as well; it takes in power, feeds the electrolyser which separates pure water into oxygen and hydrogen, storing away the gas as it is being produced. However, the most valuable output in the process, the hydrogen, needs to be properly stored and transported to where it is needed. And all of these infrastructure do not yet exists! The largest part of the revenue generation problem has not been sorted!
This is why it is so difficult to get hydrogen started, and so expensive to do so even when the technology seem more and more established. The challenge is that a lot of that infrastructure would also serve some of the current fossil gas interests. There are issues of couse with the risks of interest conflicts when the fossil industry push for hydrogen.
The fact that hydrogen is not so plug-and-play to our current system means more evolution is needed before we are ready. Instead of putting direct incentives into hydrogen production, we should be using our resources to solve the problems along the journey to the hydrogen future. A lot of these problems involves collective action, coordination of choices and displacement of swarthe of economic activities that requires proper thought about restructuring.
There is really much more work to do than administering incentives. And this is definitely not an area the government can easily rely on market incentives to accomplish.
When Blunomy first started out as Enea Consulting in 2007, the world was not that different. We were burning lots of fossil fuels, except a lot more coal and oil. There was also less renewables then. Solar panels were incredibly expensive and people thought wind turbines were so clunky (and expensive for the amount of power it generates) it was not possible for the world to have more wind turbines than combustion turbines.
The period of 2000s saw the mainstreaming of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and gas was broadly touted as the transition fuel as the world cross from coal towards renewables. Emissions from combustion of gas was less than half that of power generation with coal, and gas power plants could fire up faster than coal power plants. Energy transition then was about fuel switching and the metric was more around carbon intensity per unit energy. Unfortunately, there was no regulations to push for shifts in this metric and so when the economics doesn’t line up, it simply was ignored. Coal power continued propagating in the world especially in the developing countries. Even in developed countries, coal plants were continuing to operate or even refurbished to extend their lifespans. Singapore’s Tembusu Multi-utilities complex which burns a mix of coal and other fuels, was commissioned as recent as 2013.
All these meant that as energy demand increased, the mainstreaming of gas especially through LNG was only serving incremental demand and not exactly displacing coal. Today, it gets lumped as ‘bad’ with coal and there are calls for it to be eliminated from the system. In many sense, people are considering gas no longer as a transition fuel but to be leapfrogged somewhat. The leapfrogging makes sense from a carbon intensity point of view. But by most counts, gas is a superior technology even to renewable power generation as gas power can still serve as baseload and is dispatchable unlike wind and solar which do not respond to the beck and call of power demand. Batteries help to overcome this but as long as the economics of renewables-plus-batteries is not superior to coal or gas, it will be a tough sell.
The reason for expansion of LNG was because of the superiority of gas in terms of technology, the way it matches our energy use, and the falling costs in the early 2000s. Projecting the way forward, this is unlikely to be true anymore as exploration in certain jurisdiction have slowed or ceased, existing gas fields are no longer as productive, and material costs have risen to counter the competitiveness. There is also a question of the new generation of engineers bothering to enter into this space if they perceive it as declining.
This is where bioenergy comes in and becomes positioned so awkwardly that it finds itself a little stuck. More on this soon.
As we move from 2023 into 2024, Goods & Services Tax (GST) in Singapore will rise by another 1%. Given the prevailing rate is 8%, the 1% rate increase is actually a 12.5% increase in the consumption tax. No doubt companies will try to convince you to buy stuff before 31 December 2023 to benefit from the lower GST, rather than wait till next year. And if we were to project this logic forward, knowing that GST might eventually be 10%, there is a question of whether we should bring forward some of our purchases even more.
This is more of a psychological trick than anything. Take for example, your interest in an iPhone that may cost you $1000. Buying it before end of the year will save you $10 at the most because of the 1% additional GST that you will need to pay next year. That is hardly a ‘discount’.
Let’s say you got 10% discount from a Black Friday sale instead. Would it compel you to change to a new model rather than stick to your old one? You might. But what if instead of using your existing phone for 1 additional year (eg. 3 years instead of 2 years). If your original phone was also costing $1000, you’d effectively get a discount of 33% just by using it for 1 additional year. Obviously, it goes down if your base time length is longer.
But you get my drift. The biggest discount is when you can use your goods for longer and get more life out of it. There is no point chasing after lower prices of new goods upfront if you keep replacing them quickly. This is an element where sustainability on the consumer end actually lines up with economics but the challenge is psychology.
What does it mean if companies declare that they are committed to the energy transition including committing resources towards it, and massive investments, only to make a U-turn when oil & gas turns out to be way more profitable? It tells you that it had always been about the money it makes rather than the transition. Never mind that the fossil fuels continue to drive up carbon emissions and hurting the climate. In fact, maybe climate change would drive up demand for energy – especially in terms of heating or cooling, or requiring more activities in the economy to deal with and mitigate the impacts.
Can the work of accelerating the energy transition be left to the markets? Can profits really motivate companies to support the transition and reduce carbon emissions? Does the market demand understand, appreciate and would be willing to drive and pay for the transition? I don’t think so. Absent regulation, it is unlikely for the markets to drive the emergence of the solution. It is as if we want seat belt manufacturers to drive the messaging around safety and benefits of having seat belts rather than legislate it as a requirement in cars. Or just waiting around for cars to adopt them as the standard feature in a car.
We probably don’t have enough time for all that to make an impact on mitigating climate change. Regulations will be required. To put a price for carbon on the market, to push technologies and options in the market that will reduce emissions. We must also evolve and steer the regulation as our understanding of the technologies and impact on environment advances. We don’t have to get everything right on the first try but we do need to be trying.
New York Times just ran an opinion piece about Big Oil and whether the rhetoric about these big international oil companies actually push for the energy transition or not, their contribution to the development was probably not that significant anyways. There is minimal capital redeployment from oil & gas towards renewable energy. The truth is that capital coming into renewable energy is largely from other sources and areas.
The big oil players were in any case just trying to defend their turf when they invest into renewable energy; and in other instances, it was probably just more of a PR exercise. The recent big retreats from the rhetoric around energy transition can only serve to create more climate anxiety amongst the younger ones, and discourage us further about our ability to get the climate transition right. There’s really limited plan B options for us as the human race on earth facing climate change so everyone needs to work together regardless what the big oil is trying to do.
The biggest challenge for the world with the big oil not doing much to withdraw from the fossil fuel business is not about the market, the demand from the energy users but perhaps more about the people who are continuing to work within the big oil’s supply chains and operations. If we are serious about the transition, we need to give oil rig workers something new to work on that can help with the climate transition; we need to get the refinery process engineers to work for some other sort of plants. In general, we need a coordinated effort to transform our economies by making it a mission to do so.
When the world sent people to the moon decades ago, we were creating new industries using taxpayers’ dollars. We were using military spending to drive advancements that would usher in a new era. We could do the same with energy transition. It will take a lot of political will and convincing people but there is enough resources to redirect ourselves from the global warming path that we are on.
