Author Archives: Alison Kidd
May-October – Our solar battery data
So, here’s our 6 month update of life with Bert our Wattstor battery (May to October). Every month we learn new things. As well as the shorter days, October has been rather misty and murky but still our 4 kW … Continue reading
1000 footsteps, foraging & mere exposure
Last Saturday night, I attended the inaugural 1000 Footsteps pop up restaurant event. Adele Nozedar is a foraging guru and her partner, Liam Fitzpatrick a chef. Together they are creating unique meals where the vast majority of the ingredients have … Continue reading
Living with Bert-the-Battery for 5 months
We’ve now had our Wattstor 6 kW battery (‘Bert’) for 5 months. The first chart shows our daily kWh averages and how they are changing as summer tails off into autumn. Our daily average demand (red) has remained relatively consistent … Continue reading
Is playing golf on a Friday afternoon such a bad thing?
Liam Fox recently told an audience of Tory activists that it’s the “duty” of our business leaders “to contribute to the prosperity of our country”. Instead, Fox complained, they are letting us down by choosing to play golf on Friday … Continue reading
Simply touching money makes us less helpful
I’m working on a project with the artist group, Larks and Ravens, on the topic of money – what is it?, where did it come from? what’s it doing? And how on earth did we get to a point where … Continue reading
Electric vehicles as storage – a psychologist’s view
“LONDON (UK) 10th May 2016: Automotive industry leader Nissan and multinational power company Enel, today confirmed plans to launch a major vehicle-to-grid (V2G) trial – the first ever carried out in the UK. The trial will work by installing and … Continue reading
What does it mean “to know by heart”?
There’s an intriguing recent study showing that people’s sense of whether faces are familiar to them or not is affected by physiological signals from the heart. The experimental subjects were wired up to a heart monitor and during the facial … Continue reading
Maybe we’re the ‘weird lunatics’ not them
Challenging article by Slavoj Zizek in the New Statesman about why we, as Europeans, feel so threatened by the migrant refugee crisis. We feel threatened by the strangeness of the other instead of seeing the strangeness in ourselves through other … Continue reading
Talk to the humans….
If you are an academic and/or a scientist, read this recent lecture by Daniel Gilbert. It’s worth it. Ouch. Click to access SPSP2016.pdf
Domestic Energy Storage
We are thinking of buying a domestic storage battery to better exploit our PV panels. They already generate more electricity than we use over the course of a year (see graph below), but that doesn’t mean we have sustainable electricity … Continue reading
