Disconnector Online

The arrival of water competition for Scottish business customers has seen Scottish Water split into retail and wholesale operations. The dividing line is not entirely clear cut physically or geographically, since retail subsidiary Business Stream is co-located at Scottish Water’s Fairmilehead office in Edinburgh.

Commiserations are in order over at French utility company Suez. It wanted to register the phrase “delivering the essentials of life” as a European Union-wide trademark. EU watchdog the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs) said no. Undeterred, the company went to the European Court of Justice. And lost. Stick to the merger, eh Suez?

Disconnector is much taken by the news that Germany’s Reichstag is bidding to become the greenest parliamentary building in the world. The great man hopes the powers that be over there manage a bit better than City Hall and the Mayor of London’s London Development Agency.

Shock has been expressed at the news that Jonathan Hodgkin, director of network regulation at water regulator Ofwat, is to replace Richard Ackroyd as director of regulation and capital investment at Yorkshire Water. Ackroyd last week took up the chief executive's role at Scottish Water, replacing Jon Hargreaves who took early retirement last December after four hectic years at the helm of Scotland's publicly-owned water undertaker.

The great man (Disconnector, not our Ken) notes that a German town got more than it bargained for when it decided to tap into a local source of geothermal energy.
The historic centre of Staufen in the Black Forest has begun to sink after engineers drilled down 460m or so to extract heat.

Nuclear safety regulator the Health and Safety Executive has just published reports on the four nuclear reactor designs under consideration for a new-build programme. The exercise included a special public comments process. This was advertised in national newspapers, leaflets were left in every public library and letters were sent to MPs, etc, etc.
Guess how many comments this trawl produced? Well, since you ask, it was 29. And 12 of these were deemed to be largely irrelevant to the designs involved.
You can’t win ’em all.

Talking of new nuclear reactors, Disconnector notes that EDF’s newest reactor project, at Flamanville in Normandy, has run into a spot of bother.

Here's something to ponder. “A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.” That was one of the epigrams of US radio comic Fred Allen, and thanks to Prospect’s magazine for the reminder.

The arrival of the competitive market in Scotland has coincided with the revival of the debate among Members of the Scottish Parliament about the status of Scottish Water.

Now here’s another sign of the times. Copper piping and wiring found in many of America’s repossessed homes are now more valuable than the properties themselves.
Thieves are apparently stripping empty houses of copper, aluminium and any brass in their plumbing and heating systems to take advantage of the soaring price of scrap metal, much of which is being sold to China and India.

Last week a UK website had a news story claiming that “Most households are now switching energy supplier every 20 minutes.”

On the grounds that it always happens first in the States and then gets exported over here, be very worried about the following.

Recent visitors to the beach at the Devon resort of Dawlish were no doubt taken aback and concerned to see that the sands were littered with broken lavatory bowls. It turned out to be a novel art installation with a message.

Metal nicking is now clearly endemic, universal and ubiquitous. The great man reflects thus after learning that the Saudi Electricity Company, investigating the reason for some recent power outages, discovered that five pylons had toppled over thanks to the effect of high winds but also the intervention of persons unknown who had prised off key steel supports. Further inspection of other pylons found a number had also been visited by local scavengers keen to make money from recycling stolen metal.
Where will it all end, asks a troubled Disconnector?

Supporting UK sports is raising tricky issues for utilities. Take EDF Energy, which sponsored rugby’s Anglo-Welsh Cup last Saturday. It was faced with a resounding win from Wales’s Ospreys who, as the logo on their shirts made clear 15 times over, are sponsored by Npower. A careful choice of image for the match programme meant this was not obvious, but when the Welsh won it was not so easy to play down the Npower connection.

Could this start a trend? The great man notes that across the pond the good folk of the land of the free are being polled about renaming San Francisco’s Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility as the George W Bush Sewage Plant. So who will be the first to urge a change of nomenclature for the sometimes smelly Mogden Sewage Treatment Works over here? Should the west London facility henceforward be known as the Anthony Charles Lynton Blair Dirty Water Project? Just a thought.

Should Severn Trent’s erstwhile chairman Sir David Arculus be renamed the Teflon knight? Disconnector muses thus in the wake of the whopping fine imposed by the water regulator for the company’s former misdeeds. These involved falsifying information sent to Ofwat and providing misleading information about leakage rates. This led to a Serious Fraud Office investigation and a guilty plea in court earlier this month.

Maybe it’s the way you tell ‘em. Recently, telecoms regulator Ofcom suggested that the next generation of super-fast broadband cables could use the sewer network. The Daily Telegraph plainly got a bit confused about that, failing to clock that BT has already co-operated with Thames Water in such a fashion.

Former trade and energy minister Brian Wilson obviously enjoys putting the green movement’s noses out of joint...

Disconnector was intrigued to learn that most of the companies bidding for the very big contract to run the Sellafield site and complex in Cumbria turned up to make their pitches by car. The team from US engineering and management giant Bechtel arrived by helicopter.