Disconnector Online

It’s a tough life being a regulator. Communications watchdog Ofcom has been advertising recently for a non-executive director. The board meets once a fortnight at present, but will be moving to a three-weekly cycle soon. The meetings are generally held on a Tuesday in London between the hours of 10am and 1pm (followed by a briefing or lunch with guests to 2pm).
The remuneration for what amounts to half a day’s work every three weeks is, wait for it: around £40,000 a year. Plus additional fees if the non-exec in question chairs a board committee. Also on offer is a digital package comprising Sky Plus/Cable/DSL (worth £31 per month) and broadband (at £25 per month). Directors can also claim a free laptop for use if required for Ofcom business purposes. But of course!
Form an orderly queue. The great man is thinking of putting himself up as a candidate to Russell Reynolds Associates, the firm handling the appointment.

The great man also loved the following, though those of a nervous or squeamish nature may wish to look away at this juncture. It transpires that there is now a company offering a T-shirt which claims to allow buyers the opportunity to offset their, ahem, farts. Farts can contain methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
The T-shirts have eye-catching slogans such as “Flatulence is
natural. But it can be neutral” or “The gas we pass is killing the grass”. Each T-shirt comes with a certificate for a 1,000lb reduction in greenhouse gases and a card explaining climate change issues.
The company behind this whizzo notion is called, naturally, Fart Neutral. And it hails from San Francisco. Oh, those wacky west-coasters!

Congratulations are in order for those dedicated green detectives from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa). They were called out recently when members of the public reported what looked like sewage floating out at sea off the beach at Portobello, near Edinburgh. is quoted as saying: “On this occasion it was sea squirts, but the next time it might not be.” Quite.

However, the great man is thinking of sending out special brickbats to Scottish and Southern Energy and Drax Group. Both companies snubbed an invitation to meet marchers from Christian Aid who spent a lot of August on a trek around the UK designed to draw attention to climate change and its impact on the developing world.

They have been getting very hot under the collar. The great man refers to wind energy trade association British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) and assorted “greens”. The reason for their wrath? Well, BBC Radio Four ran an investigation recently which suggested that British windfarms were under-performing and that some windfarms had been put up in not very windy areas just to collect a subsidy.

You couldn’t make this one up. The owner of the Ringhals nuclear power station in Sweden is counting the cost of a little glitch that closed the plant last week, and one that will keep it closed for some time to come. And it was all the result of a spanner in the works. Literally, that is, not metaphorically.

It is all getting rather heated north of the border in Scotland’s second city. The good burghers of Glasgow are – let’s not mince words – a tad pissed off with the nation’s water company. The problem? It’s the backlog of burst mains, road subsidence and what’s seen as a failure to tell other agencies what it is doing.

Disconnector suspects that National Grid is relieved that BBC chiefs have decided to pull the plug on Auntie’s ill-starred venture Planet Relief during which the likes of Jonathan Ross were going to host a huge “awareness day” featuring a mass switch-off of lights and appliances.

Disconnector couldn’t resist this. A colleague has received a press release about a company called Ansell that is, apparently, a “leader in total hand protection solutions”. Yup, it makes gloves.

A colleague was invited along with the great and good in the water industry to the official naming of Thames Water's two marvellous new "skimmer" vessels last night. As an ex-sailor, he was intrigued to see if the Heath Robinson devices rigged up by Thames water engineers to break the bubbly over the bows actually worked, as it is considered bad luck if the bottle doesn't smash first go. Their efforts weren't helped by the fact that the bottles had to be wrapped in cling film to prevent broken glass "polluting" the river.

A sister magazine to Utility Week, Truck & Driver, has launched a campaign to persuade lorry drivers and operators - and that includes utilities - to cut down on diesel spills from over-filled or badly sealed fuel tanks.
The statistics of 16 deaths and 3,000 serious accidents involving motorcyclists skidding on split diesel between 2000 and 2004 are bad enough, but a colleague of the great man knows the personal pain behind those statistics. When he was 17, he crashed his beloved Suzuki 185 on spilt diesel, breaking an ankle and removing large areas of skin from arms, legs and back (OK he was only wearing jeans and a T-shirt!).

Back in June, Disconnector reported Northumbrian Water’s discovery that a discarded bra was the reason for a blocked sewer and some localised flooding problems in the
northeast.
This brought a snort of derision from Anglian Water. Staff at the company’s Cambridge sewage treatment works recovered
an entire wardrobe’s worth of clothes, which had been dumped down a drain and flushed through to the works.
Disconnector wonders about the story behind that particular, ahem, deposit.

Well, they may differ north of the border. Congratulations are in order for ScottishPower, whose staff restaurant at its Cathcart site in Glasgow recently collected a national award from the Scottish Consumer Council for introducing a range of healthy eating options.
The restaurant, managed by catering firm Eurest, adopted meals with reduced levels of fat, salt and sugar and offered plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. As a result, the energy company is now the proud owner of a Healthy Living Award.
Disconnector knows this is a little bit below the belt, but wonders if this means that such Scottish culinary delicacies as deep-fried Mars Bars in batter are now permanently off the menu?

Here’s a thing. The prospect of a nuclear revival has turned mining companies’ attention back to uranium. The race is now on to find deposits of the stuff to help fuel the new reactors expected to dot the low-carbon landscape of the future.

Next month, two new branches of high street chain Marks & Spencer are due to open.
The plan is that these new shops will be pretty green. They will incorporate a rainwater collection system to be used to flush toilets. Efficient lighting and ventilation will reduce heating and energy losses.

Disconnector couldn’t resist this one. The Environment Agency recently took Severn Trent Water to court over the polluting of a prime fishing river in the Midlands. The agency’s
legal man in court was one Jonathan Salmon. The agency investigating officer was called Adam Shipp. And the media person who wrote the press release was Michelle Dolphin.
Whoever said nominative determinism was dead?

The great man is indebted to the London Evening Standard for what follows. “You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then you execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.

Paddle time: pictured are staff from Essex & Suffolk Water, who took part in a dragon boat race on Hanningfield reservoir to raise money for charity and celebrate the infrastructure’s 50th birthday. The crew, by the way, were called Reservoir Frogs. Arf, arf!

Listening to BBC Radio 5 late last night, Disconnector was intrigued to catch a debate between Uswitch energy consumer policy director Ann Robinson and Utility Week editor Steve Hobson on energy billing.
It appears Uswitch has come up with some new research saying a third of customers regularly receive estimated bills, and inaccurate estimates can push some vulnerable customers into debt. In our experience, most customers complain than estimated bills leave them owed money at the end of the year but leaving that aside the argument that bad billing causes debt is getting rather tired.

Earlier this month, Gordie, our new PM, made a determined bid to upstage the launch of the Tories’ Quality of Life Policy Group report with that photo opportunity of himself and the iron lady at Number Ten. The picture got a lot of coverage, particularly as Baroness Thatcher was dressed in, ahem, red.

All right. First it was drains blocked by a bra, and then it was a wardrobe’s worth of clothes flushed down the sewer. Now it’s the curse of the, ahem, baby wipes.
Well, that certainly seems to be the case in the Highland
settlement of Kingussie, where the local sewage treatment works is feeling the strain because of discarded baby wipes – and other toiletries.

The great man appreciates that the methodology involved in trading entry capacity to the gas transmission network is not exactly mainstream. In fact, it is positively arcane, but Disconnector wonders whether it has to be impenetrable?

Pounds plunge: a daredevil water worker has fulfilled a lifelong ambition by taking a terrifying leap to raise money for charity. Thirty-six-year-old Sara Johnson (pictured), who works in Essex & Suffolk Water’s St Mary’s call centre, performed a tandem parachute jump and raised £500 for a charity that bankrolls a support group for people suffering from multiple sclerosis in East Anglia.

Dun roamin: er, not really. We couldn’t resist this cheesy picture of National Energy Action’s Jenny Saunders and ScottishPower’s Ann Loughrey with a “centurion” when both met up at the fuel poverty charity’s annual conference in Chester last week.