Monday, March 19, 2007



Misplaced priorities

This graph is taken from the Ministry of Research, Science and technology's Energy Research Roadmap [PDF], and summarises government funding for various types of energy research in 2004/05. It's quite depressing in the priorities it displays - a government which at the time was wanting to cut greenhouse gas emissions and relying heavily on energy efficiency and renewable generation to do so was ignoring those areas and instead focusing its research efforts on oil and gas exploration. And we wonder why EECA consistently failed to meet its targets...

Fortunately, these priorities will be changing. According to the roadmap, hydrogen and CCS are now low priorities, while wind and wave energy are going to be a lot more important. But as with most of climate change policy, this is something we should have done years ago.

3 comments:

I note that there is a section for household energy efficiency - is there one for efficiency in other areas? (Sorry my eyes are too bad to read the labels particularly well)

Posted by Span : 3/19/2007 03:48:00 PM

Span: the last column: "productive sectors - energy use".

Posted by Idiot/Savant : 3/19/2007 03:54:00 PM

Cheers ears!

Posted by Span : 3/19/2007 07:30:00 PM