Dr Mike Colechin is director of Cultivate Innovation Ltd …working with the organisations and individuals who are delivering innovative, low carbon energy solutions.
Prior to setting up Cultivate, Mike was the Energy Technologies Institute’s Partnership Manager, supporting organisations delivering low carbon energy innovation, informing government policy, and building investor and industry confidence in these new approaches.
Mike is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer with over 30 years’ experience in the transport and energy sectors, with time spent both as a Combustion Engineer and as a member of E.ON’s R&D Management Team.
For a long time I’ve wanted to put a tool on the internet that anyone can use to build their own electricity system. But I wanted it to go beyond a simple annual energy balance where you can quickly assemble your favourite technologies into a system which could never work! For me it needed to…
These pictures of old wind turbine blades being landfilled (and this recent Bloomberg article) disturbed me somewhat and got me thinking – we’re often keen to deploy new technologies without considering end-of-life issues so just how difficult is it to dispose of waste from various forms of low carbon generation? So being a numbers person…
So I’ve used the Easter break to examine the performance of the GB electricity system over the past financial year using the data available from Grid Watch*. When I model electricity systems I try to ensure that the modelled system is secure, i.e. the lights won’t go out more often than the security standard dictates.…
I live alongside the Midlands mainline from London to Sheffield and am very used to a train passing every five minutes. Fortunately it is down a cutting so the noise is attenuated and for most trains there’s just a barely perceptible vibration of the ground. The stone trains from the local quarry though are a…
Imagine a six year-old spending the day building sandcastles and exploring the rock pools on a sun-drenched Cornish beach… and then spending the night unable to sleep because of the pain from the sunburn on his back. That’s my memory of 1976 (that and a very long car journey fighting with my brother in the back…
I’m sure many of us come across the campaign to divest from fossil fuels, or perhaps are part of it, encouraging the institutions we’re involved with to sell their shareholdings in the fossil fuel industry and invest more ethically. Fossil Free Indexes publish a list of 200 publically listed companies with the highest levels of…