Monthly Archives: May 2014

Wind Energy and the Future

I have been researching wind energy lately for a very interesting project. The more I have dug into it, the more interesting it has become. To be honest, couple weeks ago, if someone had asked anything about wind energy I wouldn’t have been able to even have a two-sided conversation. It’s amazing how much one can learn in just couple weeks with the right resource of information and by talking to right people.

Offshore wind farm

The global power markets are huge. Annual sales reach $2.2 trillion and are expected to grow up to $17 trillion by 2035. While the world is struggling with pollution problems, the clean options have become more and more popular. Now it’s another question how green they actually are, but surely they are more environmental friendly than using fossil fuels, which now constitute almost 80% of the world’s energy consumption.

Despite counting for less than 1% of global energy, the markets for wind turbines in the future may look very positive. China is the global leader in terms of annual market and cumulative wind capacity. In 2013 new wind installations were up by 24.1% from 2012, with 16.1 GW of new capacity connected to the grid, bringing annual total capacity up to 91.4GW.

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Online Guides: Behind the Scenes

When we want to learn about a new topic, we don’t go to libraries anymore to browse through dozens of books only to be left confused. Schools only cover limited subjects, and if you don’t have a lot of money taking a course on the new topic might not even be an option.

So what do we do then? Internet has become the new “educator” for literally everything. We might ask help or recommendation through a social media, but usually the leg work is carried out in Google, YouTube or Wikipedia. Of course there more targeted channels for asking from the expert such as Quora or LinkedIn groups, but the three above are still the most used as we sometimes are shy to ask help from strangers.

Why?

For Wikipedia the answer is quite obvious, being probably the most comprehensive source of information for anything. Google and YouTube, the two most popular search engines are getting smarter and smarter. That means that they can better service the query with more accurate search results. This is really the key. Before you had to try several queries and try to guess the exact keywords to lead you to happiness.

Along being the most used tools for learning, search marketers have realized that various guides and easy to understand –approaches are being received with gratitude, and often work well as link builders and traffic magnets.

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7th EBAC Meeting & 1st Green Business Task Force Meeting

7^th EBAC meeting took place in Bangkok last Sunday. Due to the still on-going political situation, the UN building in Rachadamnern was closed and the meeting was kindly hosted by the Chairman of Greenspot Co., Ltd. Mr. Chote Sophonpanich at their office. It was nice to see some familiar faces, but even nicer to see a half room full of new faces and more younger generation as well.

The whole weekend became quite action packed as both task forces that I am part of had meetings at the British Club, scheduled for the day before the EBAC meeting. Green Business Task Force chaired by Mr. Carson Wen opened the day with an inaugural meeting for the members to get to know each other better and select the projects to support the UN ESCAP Sustainable Business Goals.

It was really nice to meet a room full of new people – all working in green business. Carson opened the meeting as the Chair welcoming everyone to the meeting and thanking all for coming despite the political crisis situation. Ms. Barbara Meynert, who chairs the Connectivity Task Force, spoke about ESCAP and their Sustainable Development Network.

In the introduction session, I witnessed three very interesting presentations about clean energy: wind, bio fuel and ground energy storing by Gilad Regev, Anthony Dixon and Bruce Hicks respectively.

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4 days in Tokyo

Vacations are luxury that I can rarely afford. This time was different though: Wisa won flight tickets for two to Tokyo at her company’s Christmas lucky draw, so I had no excuses to take time off.

While having traveled in South East Asia quite extensively, I had previously missed out Japan completely. I used to live in a Japanese populated area in Bangkok for few years, so I wasn’t entirely off guard what to expect, but was still blown away – positively so. Unfortunately we didn’t have a tour guide, but still we managed just fine.

Being such a huge city (13 million population), Tokyo is incredibly organized. Everything works, I mean everything really works. The airport reminded me of Hong Kong in some ways: it was easy to get from the airport to the center by train/metro. 60 km was done in about 40 minutes and boom, we were right in the middle of the action.

Tokyo-Sky-Tree

The hotel we stayed in was in a walking distance from the Tokyo station, and after a few broken English consultations we found it quite easily. The hotel, Sotetsu Fresa Inn Tokyo Kyobashi, was quite new and very clean. The room was really small, but served it’s purpose for us as the base during the 4 nights stay.

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