KING’S College LONDON
Founded 1829
University of London

Prof. Donald  T Swift-Hook,
MA,MSc,PhD,CEng,FIEE,FInstE,
CMath, FIMA, CPhys, FInstP,
Visiting Professor of Electronics

Please reply to: Bourne Place,
Horsell Common Road,
Horsell, Surrey  GU21 4XX
Tel: (01483) 757274 Fax: 769761
donaldswifthook@hotmail .com

Mohammad Sani,
Saving Our Planet
Sneumvej  13-B,
DK-6731  Tjaereborg
Denmark 9 September 2000

Dear Mohammad,

Following the World Renewable energy conference at which you made such an impact, I shall be delighted to join Saving Our Planet Engineering Consultants.  I have produced what I hope you will feel is an improved English version of our Mission Statement.

I should perhaps give you more details of  my background, so that you understand better where I am coming from. Most of my scientific and engineering career was spent in the power industry with the old Central Electricity Generating Board and I landed up as Head of a Research Division.  At various times, I was on the Councils of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Energy.  I had close connections with many Universities, funding their research (with CEGB funds) and getting external external PhDs in my own laboratories for more than a dozen of my staff  (and for myself incidentally). Since 1979 I have been a Visiting Professor at Kings College London. I retired early from the CEGB just before privatisation.

I have been active in renewable energy since 1973 when I started up a major programme on wave power and a few years later I moved into wind power.  I represented the UK in the International Energy Agency on the Wind Energy Agreement and I led several multi-million pound international projects (as operating Agent) including Off-Shore Wind Power and  Wakes and Clusters.  During my time as Chairman of the British Wind Energy Association back in 1981, I started up the European Wind Energy Association and was Hon. Treas. of that international organisation  for several years.  I am now an independent  energy  consultant.

I have a particular interest in publications. I was Editor of The Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (PtA) for 10 years and I edited an Energy Series of books for the Institution of Electrical Engineers from 1979 until a few years ago when it was combined with their Power Series. (It is always difficult for an Editor to find authors and I was reduced to including my own book “Wind Energy and the Environment” in my Series).  I am on the Editorial board of the Pergamon/Elsevier Interenational Journal Renewable  Energy and my other Editorial Boards have included Physics in Industry for the Institute of Physics and International Journal of Electronics for Taylor & Francis. I have been on the Publications Committees  and the Books Committees of both the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Physics at various times and shortly after I joined the Publications Committee of  the Institute of Energy, I helped to set up the association with Pergamon involving Renewable Energy and that was the point at which I joined their Editorial Advisory Board. (Incidentally, the Elsevier stand at Brighton this year deserves great praise for the tremendous impression it created).  So much for my background  and relevant experience.

I have been actively involved with the World Renewable Energy Network (WREN).  Our Secretary General, Professor Ali Sayigh, is Editor-in-Chief of Renewable Energy. We (WREN) also run the World Renewable Energy Conference (WREC). The proceedings of the World Renewable Energy Conference appear in Renewable Energy and, incidentally,  they occupy a significant fraction of the Journal’s  total shelf-space.  From my position with WREN, WREC, the Editorial Board and the Publications Committee of the Institute of Energy which is affiliated with the Journal, I am particularly concerned with the Pergamon/Elsevier International Journal Renewable  Energy and how it should develop. Here are some thoughts.

The affiliation of Pergamon and Renewable Energy with the Institute of Energy has not been particularly active as far as editorial matters are concerned: the Institute has not generated an overwhelming  flood of papers.  The origin of the Institute was as the Institute of Fuel and its own professional Journal is effectively a Journal of Combustion. (Indeed, having failed to broaden its scope, we have often discussed in Committee whether we should change its name to just that). Most senior members of the Institute, and most Authors from the Institute, tend to have a fuel-type back-ground in coal, gas, oil, nuclear energy or electricity.  Although they have paid lip-service to the need to embrace the renewables and the environment, there has been relatively little practical support in learned society terms (in the way of conferences, membership of committees and working groups, publications, etc).  So Members of the Institute will not contribute many papers  to Renewable Energy, I believe.

There are signs of changing attitudes in the Institute of Energy, however.  Energy World, the  house magazine of the Institute of Energy, has shifted its  emphasis dramatically in the last few years towards environmental concerns and renewable energy.  That undoubtedly reflects a shift in the interests of the readership at large, who are the professional Members of the Institute (4,000 odd who receive Energy World ‘free’ as part of their subscriptions) plus a few hundred subscribers (mainly institutional).

As a subject, renewable energy does not have a strong academic base. (You may have noticed that not many of us can flaunt the title Professor.) The subject is developing rapidly but it does not generate a very large proportion of papers in academic Journals.  Most of the papers are presented at conferences and although the average standard of such work tends to be lower in general, many valuable nuggets are included, particularly by (international) Government Ministers, senior Civil Servants, business men, decision-makers : movers and shakers who will appear at an international conference but would not normally find time to write for a formal engineering or scientific journal.

The International Journal Renewable Energy is fortunate in having the World Renewable Energy Conference in its pocket to provide a massive and regular input of papers.  The international spread of the Authorship is dramatically wide.  It would be interesting to know whether this produces an equally wide international readership for Ttthe Journal.  My experience is that you are lucky if you get just two or three subscriptions from any third world country for any Journal -  that is all they can afford  -  but multiplied by the number of countries involved in WREC (110 countries at the Brighton Conference),  that could represent a very useful readership.

The new Renewable Energy World magazine has taken a major corner of  the market.  It is a ‘freebie’,  publishing papers of general interest and of fair-to-medium standard, with good design and print quality, in colour.  One response Renewable Energy could make would be to move ourselves to a higher  technical level.  This might give us a more academic image and attract a more professional level of workers to subscribe. We could debate whether we ought to raise our acceptance standards to a higher level for the Journal by refereeing more strictly, in particular more strictly than WREC do.

If we did so,  we would no longer publish all of the WREC papers and then we would lose our  WREC franchise;  we could land up no longer publishing any of the WREC papers.  Any Conference  wants  to publish its Proceedings in full and WREN would have to do so separately (possibly with a different publisher). Then any readers who wanted the WREC papers would buy those Proceedings instead of our Journal.

We should also reflect that the refereeing procedure for WREC in fact allows for  extraordinarily wide and deep peer-review.  The whole field is divided into about 10 subject areas and  a papers selection committee, consisting of a dozen or so eminent international specialists, is appointed for each. All that prevents full advantage being taken of this impressive range of expertise which is available is the time constraint.

Some renewable energy markets are developing dramatically right now. Wind power has expanded by more than 40% per year over the past two or three years and is now at a level where several billion pounds are being spent annually in Europe alone. (The cost has come down to levels where wind is economic and can compete with most other generation.  If Britain needed any more power, wind would be the way to supply it. Unfortunately we don’t!  With 70% surplus capacity, we are shutting down power stations.  Every new wind turbine we install puts more miners out of work.)

These huge expenditures on wind energy mean that a correspondingly huge work-force has suddenly been created. Directories (listing companies, organisations and individuals who are working in renewable energy) have suddenly become fatter and more frequent.  Such a huge work-force is a huge potential readership.  This is a dramatic new development and Renewable Energy should consider how to  take advantage of it. (Mail shots to those listed in various Directories would be an obvious suggestion.)

Government subsidies are the basis for these developments in Europe and everywhere else around the world.  In the past,  such funds have proved fickle and erratic. The American wind-rush of the mid-eighties died within 3 years.  I believe that this time support will be longer lived under pressure from the Rio and Kyoto Conferences. There is a reasonable prospect too that, by the time the subsidies  do dry up (as they probably will eventually!), more power will be needed (as old plant is retired, particularly nuclear) and wind will be an economic option in its own right.

Photvoltaics and other solar  technologies can also claim strong growth-rates percentage-wise but they start from a much  smaller base (ten-times  smaller), so the expenditures are relatively insignificant compared with wind. Also,  except in niche markets such as instrumentation,  there is no prospect of pv becoming economic within the immediate future  -  only the next five or ten years concern us.  A high proportion  of the funding for solar energy goes into RD&D projects and produces lots of technical papers but those who are spending much bigger budgets on wind farms are too busy to write. This results in an imbalance in Renewable Energy as an international Journal.  Their pages no longer reflect the levels of activity in the outside world, and therefore the level of potential readership. Wind energy is very under-represented and solar is over-represented, especially photovoltaics.  Incidentally, this is just as true of the WREC papers as it is for all the others in the Journal.

I know from experience that it is difficult to do much about such a problem.  A journal is, to a large extent, in the hands of its Authors. Yoou can only publish papers that they offer to you.  (Maybe you don’t have to publish all the papers that they offer yoou but you certainly can’t publish any that they don’t offer you!)  If the potential readership (the work-force in the outside world) is now heavily biased towards wind energy they will only buy the Journal if it has plenty of wind energy papers.  At present it does not.  The question is how to attract (or extract) a flood of papers from this new flood of potential wind energy authors.  As a group, they will tend to read whatever they write – if only they would write it! Renewable Energy needs to capture a good share in publishing it.

I will copy these remarks to Prof. Lindley, Renewable Energy’s Associate Editor for wind, to see if I can provoke some ideas from him.  David and I are friends from way-back.  We worked for the CEGB together in the 1970s,  he followed me as Chairman of the BWEA and he was President of the EWEA in the 1980s.

I have couched most of my comments in practical and business-like terms, on matters affecting circulation and material for publication. There  are,  of course, moral and ethical considerations too.  For many people, the motivation behind all of the renewables is to save the planet from a crisis,  be it an energy or an environmental one. A publication may have more particular responsibilities.  For instance, I believe that Renewable Energy provides an important service to third world countries by helping them to publish their work,  even though it may often look amateurish in comparison with some of the major players’. Only in that way will they raise their technical standards.

In most modern  fields of engineering, it is difficult for a business-like approach to encompass such moral and ethical considerations. (IT in particular, is intensely  competitive and seems to thrive on a dog-eat-dog attitude.)  You yourself will be acutely aware, however, that the environmental field is an exception.  It is almost a requirement that an environmental publication should demonstrate strong moral and ethical attitudes,  if it expects to be read.  This makes a necessity of virtue  -  and we should make a virtue of this necessity.

One of the key issues for  renewable energy is to educate the public.  They need to understand what is  involved if they are to lend their support.  Many of us regard such education  as a moral imperative.  Again, I find it  interesting that the business imperatives  of the Journal chime in total harmony with this  moral imperative.

I look forward to working together with you and I will welcome the opportunity of discussing these matters further with you.

Yours sincerely,
Donald  T. Swift-Hook