I would not agree with all that was said about gambling everything on this unknown source of energy but in all fairness we pump millions and millions of euro every year into fair less feasible ideas.

Bottom line is oil and gas will not last for ever and unless we find a way to turn our oceans into oil for us to burn and sell they will last. So whats wrong with doing the investigation and prove that the country can produce capable engineers rather than just being know as greedy property developers.

Its easy to critise try and write something positive and I would say 90% of the respondents would never post another comment

The Marine Institute and SEAI prepared a National Strategy for Ocean Energy.
The Government has committed €26 million to create an Ocean Energy Development Unit. There is a target to create 75MW from Ocean Energy (OE) by 2012 and 500MW by 2020. This money will go towards creating wave and tidal test facilities, purchasing wave power, support for industry research, a national wave tank facility (not sure what this is). The Ocean Energy Strategy Report (2005) estimates the domestic OE market to be €176million by 2020 and €784m by 2025. The government has invested €4.3million in ten OE companies.

Are the government throwing money down the drain? Or is the money invested likely to make a return to Ireland’s economy?

There are many interesting points raised such as

1. US energy consumption would rise from 80 quads (in 1980) to 130. In 2008 it was 98 quads. This was mostly down to market driven increases in energy efficiency

2. Petroleum supplies were predicted to be severely strained in the near term with real prices to double and consumption to be at 16 quads by 2010. In 2009 the real price of oil was $43 approx and in 1975 it was $48. Consumption is a 27 quads.

3. Nuclear and Solar were to account for 41 and 11 quads respectively. In 2008 it was 8 and 1.5 (for all renewables).

4. Jimmy Carter called for Solar power to account for 20 of all energy by 2000 at a predicted cost of $3trillion ($7.7 tr today). To put this in perspective, the current (2008) total value of all shareholder-owned electric utilities is $652 bn.

The article is overall, critical of most govt intervention into the energy market. Quoting Horn and Krupp (2008) the final line is ‘Mandates presume the govt already knows the best way to proceed on energy. But the govt doesn’t know any better than anyone else.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/135213.html

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/interviews/default.asp

I mean, imagine requiring a government bail out for failed investment, made by hundreds of thousands of citizens who thought micro-generation in one’s own backyard was a sure money spinner. This is a great danger. If there was an oil shock in the morning, it would precipitate a huge boom in energy investment. Which may or may not result in investments that are prudent. We could easily have another Anglo Irish bank who catered to the needs of greedy individual investors, who put forward ‘personal guarantees’. BOH.

To build a little bit more on my point about social values informing behaviour, investment and economics, as much as scientific principles do, consider this. Where did the utility scale renewable energy business model come out of in the first place. It wasn’t always there, it had to be invented. We have made some discussion above about the fact the Danish and Germans did play a considerable role in its development and made a new industry. But there is one way to look at this from an economic point of view, if you input the social behavioural point I mention. That is, if you look at the fact that many people independently began to mount wind mills, solar panels and so forth on their roofs. Of course, with some very flawed results. The tiny wind turbines that you buy and install yourself, probably take more energy to make and effort to install than they produce. I understand progress has been made at that micro scale. But if anyone reads analysis done of solar PV installations, the findings are often shocking. You can find the solar PV array half mal-functioning, or operating way below expected efficiency because of the way it is installed and so forth. I acknowledge, a lot of improvements have occured in that area also. But really, if one was to point to one significant factor, that was behind the development of utility scale renewables technology (apparent from the big factors such as climate change policy, energy security and so on), I think someone must have looked at the micro scale renewable generation efforts, and said, we can do better if we add some scale and manage the investment and technology a lot better. That is the key thing to understand, if you take my point about social behaviour on board. People are going to insist on wasting vast sums of capital (in national aggregate terms) embarking on all sorts of schemes to generate their own power. The weight of administration alone, of so much repetition of failed micro generation projects would be huge. But you cannot stop society wanting to divorce itself from fossil fuels. It is going to make that choice anyhow, and moreso going forward. What we can do, is to try and manage the investment better, and to subsidise technology and industries which may deliver back to society, the value of that investment in years to come. I don’t believe at this stage it is a choice between either doing renewable generation or not doing it. That choice doesn’t exist anymore. But what we can try to do, is be kind to ourselves through better planning and management. BOH.

No ones wants to drive wind power down your throat, no more than anyone wants to do with wave power.

Denmark’s derives 21% of its energy requirements from wind power. I do not have figures on comparable costs per kW-h with coal, but at the true cost of coal to the environment, I would wager it is cheaper. If you believe CO2 is the threat that many feel it is (as I do) then it is probably cheaper still.

Of course there is a risk of a “bubble”. The world endured railway bubbles and telecom bubbles, but we did not kick out trains and the internet afterwards, nor did anyone regret their invention.

If wind power is economically viable and wins the race into the market, then it will deserve its place. At the moment, we live in the world of the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”, when no one really knows what will happen. We will just have to use our collective national wisdom, such as it is.

PS There are two types of people in the world: those who hate, fear and despise Al Gore, and those do not, or who rather admire him. If you are not in the first camp, you might find his book “Our Choice”, published by Bloomsbury in an attractive colorful format, but a paperback and cheap at Eur18.99 in an Easons special offer. Gore goes over the renewable energy alternatives. Oddly, he does not mention wave, which is probably a weakness of the book, or an indication of international opinion on wave power.

Very, very sensible utterings above, thanks. But I think you are trying to avoid the main issues. They can only be defined in terms of social science. It cannot all be encapsulated in physical scientific terms. I would argue the same of the banking crisis. If we try to define it in terms of classical economics alone, we will deny ourselves a complete overview of the challenges we face. I learned one key lesson in my studies at Architecture school, if nothing else. Architecture always exists in a social context. Many of the solutions we witness today in our built environment do not make sense, if divorced from the social context. Think of books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. If you refer back to the 1960s for instance, the experts all thought the population of the world was growing too fast, and many of the big thinkers of the day spent their time wondering how to build cities to accomodate the teaming populations, the globe would have to sustain somehow. The back to the land movement of the 1960s may seem pretty stupid today, but we are divorcing it from its time in history. Isaiah Berlin’s book, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, was one of the many references on my reading list in architecture school. I have only read part of it, but Berlin is one of the key intellects in this discussion. In recent times, there seems to have been a revival of that ‘large scale’ sort of thinking in recent years. The green party politics and green movement in general, simply happens to be a place in which folks are free to allow their imaginations and defintion of the problem to roam free, to the scale they want to use.

The vision of the large scale solution went out of fashion for a while, but it is back again in force. I don’t know if that is a bad or a good thing, and if we have the morals required to finance such undertakings in today’s society. As you rightly point out, there is considerable risk, that many citizens will have to pay for some sort of techno fetish. Japan had some of the leading theorists in that ‘large scale’ project thinking back in the 1960s. But maybe that kind of thinking was appropriate to Japan’s society and Japan’s challenges of that day. I am not sure, it would deserve deeper investigation. In the United States in the 1960s and 70s, all of those biosphere projects built by private millionaires for themselves, were a result of the concerns of the 1960s. Just as many had built nuclear fall out shelters and so on, in the 1950s. You are correct of course in being concerned, that state funds would end up in another panic attempt to combat some perceived threat or risk. As I mentioned above, the off-grid movement was also part of that 1960s idea, of some cataclysmic event that would happen. The idea of being totally independent came out of that. The wealthy built their own biodomes, the less wealthy simply tried to power their family’s needs on solar panels. For a percentage of the population at any one point in time, these responses may seem entirely rational. I read somewhere recently, that women in the welfare state do make a rational decision to become married to the state rather than to a male companion. I mean, if you weigh up the two alternatives, given job instability in the modern society, the state provides most of what men did in the past, with a bit more stability. What is so different between that decision making rational, and someone who thinks we need to marry our energy security to wind resources rather than oil? Not every woman will choose to be married to the state. Not every person will choose to become wedded to oil and gas either. I recommend for further and deeper exploration of the subject than I can offer here, a reading of Henrik Lund’s book, Renewable Energy Systems: The Choice and Modeling of 100% Renewable Solutions. It is an example of the modern revival of large scale systems thinking to try and solve the problems faced by society today. I haven’t studies the book myself, but I have heard the author describe his ideas, and they do deserve attention. BOH.

I would like to offer slightly simpler roundup compared to Brian O’Hanlon’s above.

Most reasonable people are revolted by the idea that government should be in the business of picking technological winners in the green economy or anywhere else. Gambling my money on some pet speculative project without a credible business plan? No thanks. No more state-sponsored speculative bubbles please.

I differ from most people in that I think that this speculative gamble is already occurring with wind. Wind is capital intensive. Our ongoing massive investment produces profits and jobs in Denmark, but few in Ireland. The financing produces yet more profits in Germany. A handful of Irish accountants and lawyers have also become very rich. Under REFIT, all of this is underwritten by consumers. We think this is really smart, but it may not be.

Wind is “mature”. Wind “works”. Donkey-and-cart is also a mature technology which works, but it is not the future of transport. These phrases conceal the fact that wind has not and will never meet future energy needs. It is not possible to design away newtonian physics as Brian O’Hanlon seems to think. The velocity-cubed law isn’t going away. Wind is the most variable form of renewable energy with the largest land take. Proposals such as the Spirit of Ireland scheme claim to “solve” the variability problem. They do no such thing. They merely filter some of the high frequency variability from the wind power spectrum at staggering cost.

Minister Ryan, on the other hand, thinks that the variability problem will be addressed by electric cars and smart grids. Admittedly, this is a much more plausible proposal than giant salt-lake low-pass filters. But we still don’t know that EVs are the technology of the future.

I want my tax money spent on health-care for my parents and education for my kids. Not gambled on someone else’s techno-fetish.

The military failure states you mention are very useful, and do help to put the current situation into some kind of perspective - learn, anticipate and adapt. Certainly when discussing a subject as broad as renewable energy policy, it does help to have a framework to base analysis upon. Some more thoughts in rounding up the debate. The part that I cannot understand for the life of me is, when so many students in Ireland opted for financial, business and legal qualifications, why we made such a mess in precisely those areas. I noticed a story by Mary Carolan in today’s Irish Times newspaper, Anglo fails to obtain orders for €84.4m. It described a situation where a Limerick property developer has argued in court, that Anglo were throwing money at him, and setting out conditions that a personal guarantee would never be called upon. Yet, here we are, in 2010 and new management at Anglo Irish bank is calling upon the same guarantee. The total loan amount oustanding to the Limerick property group is €165 million.

Here is the way I see it (I am not sure how many at Irish Economy have or are buying into my way of thinking). Have a read of Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed. That is where I am coming from. The problem with Long Term Capital Management for instance, is they received so much funding, they ran out of ideas for where to invest the moment. Anglo Irish bank seemed to be in that same position in the 2000s. They had gained a reputation for doing alchemy with their funding, and suddenly they could not turn the money away. Refer also to Ciaran O’Hagan’s pieces in SBP dated April 4th 2010, Markets respond well to government bank package. We are in a situation now, where traders are looking for worthwhile yields, and as O’Hagan says, Irish bonds seem to be the new fetish. Of course, the early history of Anglo Irish bank was marked by a series of successful coordinations with IDA funded enterprise in Ireland, with the provision of office and factory space. It was that, which made Anglo’s reputation solid in the early days. Refer to Simon Kelly’s article for the Sunday Tribune on April 4th 2010, Thank you, Anglo, for being there for business.

My biggest suspicion is that Irish state pensions waded big time into bonds in Irish banks, specifically Anglo Irish bank, post the reforms of the pension industry by minister McCreevy (Seanie’s old pal). It is worth reading Sarah Carey’s column in the today’s IT, Imagine we all got the same pension on retirement? Now if we could have tapered off this expenditure in property development, and ramped up renewable energy investment, there might have been a chance. That is the strange thing about financing of projects I suppose. That is why I was so encouraged by minister Eamon Ryan in his Dail debate last night, where he talked about a new electrical grid infrastructure required to bring jobs into parts of Ireland - as much as sending the renewable energy out, of those same parts. If you can get all of the moving parts right, there is indeed a window of opportunity, and it could all be financed properly. If I am right and Irish pension funds were used to buy debt from Anglo, it would explain a whole lot of things. Peter Schiff in his Crash Proof 2.0 book, notes the United States by selling debts, were exporting inflation and buying other peoples’ goods in the pre-2008 days. Now they are buying their own debt back, and thereby keeping inflation at home, while not buying goods from abroad. There is a whole balancing act there also, which the green economy in Ireland will have to deal with, from the financing point of view. I am not sure how it will pan out. BOH.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0421/1224268775290.html

“We have no tides of note. Suggesting tidal would have been lunacy of the highest order. ”

There are two distinct tidal technologies, tidal stream and tidal range. The latter is interesting in an Irish sea context.

Lunatics may be interested in this report from SDC in UK

http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/Tidal_Power_in_the_UK_Oct07.pdf

The more I think about, possibly the education failure was just part of the wider failure …. what the Americans call very expressively a clusterf**k.

I think there was failure at second level to change the points system in some way. We have known for 20 years we are short of young people taking Higher Mathematics and Science, yet it seems that only now it is being addressed. I know lecturers in Electronic Engineering who lectured to packed rooms in the 90s. Now they have few Irish students, and spend most of their teaching time on the ‘net lecuring to Chinese students. Brian above noted the lack of Irish engineering postgraduates, and on the postgraduate course I attend, Irish postgrads and postdocs are a minority.
I know Indians, Italians, Germans, Turks, and Chinese who are doing postgraduate courses here.

We have never had a critical mass of technical companies to take up our PhDs but it is a chicken-and-egg situation. If our postgrads can acquire experience overseas, perhaps they can come back and add value here.

Hope that answers it. I cannot pretend to be infallible on this matter.

Interesting 2nd last paragraph in your post above. Most of which I understand and agree with. But I am perplexed with your comment “failure to modernise our educational system”.
What do you mean by that?

It is off-topic, but he have moved to the consequences of falure, and how to acquire the talent required to get us out of the slough of despond in which we find ourselves.

I do not read business books (except ones like Freakonomics), but I do read military history. A major study on military failures find the following contributors: Failure to Learn, Failure to Anticipate & Failure to Adapt. When you get two together, you have Aggregate Failure. All three lead to Catastrophic Failure - France, 1940, for example. We have suffered a catastrophic failure that has cost us a large portion of our national independence, and means a period of being a colonial cash cow for bond holders and overseas bankers.

No point in beating that one to death. However, we have also taken a major hit in the failure to modernise our educational system. Because many school leavers were tempted by easy-money in lower-skill jobs, and because other school leavers believed (understandably) that law and business courses were the road to monetary success, we now lack the people with technical skills to invent and develop “stuff” that will bring back commerce and jobs.

It is sad, frustrating and challenging. I do not think the way forward is clear, as yet.

We have no tides of note. Suggesting tidal would have been lunacy of the highest order. My comments referred to wave which is many years away from large scale deployment.

Then consider the seminal thesis presented by Frederick P. Brooks, in The Mythical Man Month. Brooks project managed the IBM 360 operating system, which integrated the entire product line of IBM computers back in the 1960s. The project ended up costing the same as the Manhattan project, which developed the atom bomb at the end of WWII. IBM almost went bust with the IBM 360 OS, and Brooks once said:

It is a very humbling experience to make a multi-million-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable.

I worked with many employees at Zoe developments who had the experience of making those mistakes. You probably will not find those people in the ranks of our best consultant designers, because they aren’t on the front end, of putting their own money on the line. One of Zoe’s most spectacular mistakes of course was the headquarters buildings for Anglo Irish bank. I have wrote and speculated about the project at length at my blog site. I had discussions not too long ago with Frederick P. Brooks, about the program management applied by Dublin Airport Authority and how techniques in construction management and software project management can be transferred. I am particular interested in the success stories in software PM. I do agree with a lot of aims of Dublin Docklands Development Authority and their efforts to introduce biodiversity into the middle of the hard urban environment. DDDA got the best landscape consultant in the world, West 8, to advise them. Indeed, it was that same attempt to push the biodiversity agenda which was at the root of the disaster at North Wall Quay, Anglo Irish headquarters. So I have had first hand experience, of at least one highly ambitious and expensive green agenda gamble going belly up. The West 8 projects have been a huge success and regenerated many urban landscapes all over the world. Yet in Ireland it came un-stuck in a major way, and I had a front row seat.

Fred Brooks had an insight into project management, that certain individuals may be 10x more productive than another. It is important to realise that. If you work out the ratios, I understand there are four Einstein type brains somewhere in the world. I believe there are sixteen Leonardo da Vinci’s. Most of whom are stuck somewhere in India or in China, if you look at it from a statistical point of view. The United States will be lucky to have one or two Leonardos, and will more than likely import a couple more. Like they did back in the days of Werhner von Braun and the idea of space travel. Just some more thougths, on the issue of management of the green economy in Ireland. BOH.

I find it is always an enjoyable experience to read anything that the author Michael Lewis publishes, including his biographical novel about serial entrepreneur Jim Clark, which he entitled, The New New Thing. There is one section of that book in which Lewis describes the educational filtration process in India, whereby students identified with particular tendancy to excel in mathematics are cherry picked from a young age, and supported in their education. Many ended up working in Silicon Valley for the first company that Jim Clark founded, which was Silicon Graphics. Also in the book by Lewis, is an entertaining account of the boat that Jim Clark built. I think it is funny to read these accounts of high technology which has to exist in the salt water environment. For another interesting account of the education system in India, it is worth reading Tom Friedman’s modern classic, The world is flat. The thing we have to be aware of in Ireland is as follows. I became aware of it during the property and building boom. It is darned hard to get large volumes of good human resources on this island. I always remember the undergraduate I hired for summer months, not so long ago, who phoned me on the second day of his employment, and demanded better hours and better pay. He was set to earn €550-00 after tax per week. The point is, a top company trying to hire in Ireland always has to put up with that, whenever the economy gets organised around any effort, any ‘gamble’, be it green energy or property speculation. It will be so much easier to develop a new green technology in a place such as India or China, where you have a large domestic market, a growing economy, and a huge pool of highly trained and motivated human resources. The likes of which we cannot compete with in Ireland. Friedman in his classic book noted how India alone produces 100k business school graduates per annum. Try that out for size. Ireland has a working population of 2 million at best, all included, and even that is shrinking fast.

Toby above mentioned the company, Sun Microsystems which did manage to fill a gap in the market created by the demise of DEC. It is hard to believe many engineers were using Sun Sparc systems, rather than Alpha’s until quite recently, before Opteron etc came along. A podcast worth listening to, is of the former CTO at Sun, Bill Joy. I have included the link below, in which Joy talks about building a book also, to be powered using renewable technologies. Joy talks a lot about designing his boat to change its power generation technology, at the point at which it becomes feasible. In other words, he is tracking both economics and technological development. It is simply at pet project for Bill Joy, a man who developed an entire operating system for Sun, and now works in the venture capital field, alongside the original investors in Google. I was delighted to see that minister Eamon Ryan in his Dail debate this evening, could make the connection between cloud computing and the requirement for better electricity support infrastructure. I have been circulating my ideas about this for a little while now, amongst energy companies and elsewhere. I wrote a blog recently, The wall of sweat, about my days as a line worker in Dell’s production facility in Raheen in Limerick. It occurs to me, that with the right energy generation facility, and grid infrastructure, Ireland would not need to export physical computer systems anymore, but could export virtual ones to a huge global IT market. Who needs Michael Dell’s 1.0 million boxes per quarter then eh?

Finally, I spoke to some of the guys involved in Airtricity in the early days. They tell me that China does supply a lot of human resources to electrical engineering departments in Ireland at the moment. But that universities are struggling to keep open faculties in these areas. The bright boys and girls in Ireland are simply too busy getting law and accountancy qualifications. Still though, Ireland seems to attract students from around the globe to come here and study engineering. Only the other day, I met a fellow from Iran who works in the nuclear industry and is doing his Phd thesis in Ireland. How about that. Our Irish chaps won’t even touch engineering Phd’s with a barge pole, and we have people who come from as far away as Iran. I will point you all to my blog entry, School for Innovation I wrote a while back. The idea was to disseminate some awareness of industry and innovation amongst young graduates in Ireland. I know in Ireland we are in the business of over-production of professionals, who then need to emigrate to find work. Some other economy gets the huge benefit of our investment in human resource development. That has been going on for years, but I am interested in ways to try and alter that fundamental behaviour. I am delighted if I have added some useful points to the debate. BOH.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/

Aaarg, gremlins! I meant “wave & tidal” in last para. Spirit of Ireland is essentially tidal - a form of hydro power. My feelings about SOI is much the same as I feel about wave power. Let a commercial company look for investors to bring the energy to market - I would not nationalise it.

The government should be (maybe they are) formulating a policy for national energy supply into the medium and long term.

See Hugh Sheehy’s excellent post above.

Quote:

“GE and their competitors have made tens of thousands of these [wind turbine] ]units. They work. They’re very visible and many people think they’re ugly, but they work.”

I am not sure what you mean by “massive expenditure” on wind turbines. Relative to what? Not nuclear fusion; the estimate is 2020 for first ignition, and 2040 at least before a Watt of fusion power is delivered commercially. You should be comparing wave power to the full cost of carbon, including the environmental damage it causes.

You are right about wind and tidal. Poor choice of words.

“Wind turbines are a mature technology and comparison with nuclear fusion research is totally inappropriate. ”

It is fully appropriate to put the massive scale of expenditure on wind turbines in Ireland in some kind of global context. In my view it does not matter that the technology is mature (it is mature, so is donkey-and-trap technology).

“I think a punt on tidal power would be a bad bet for Ireland Inc. Breda O’Brien seems to be proposing to nationalise it and pour resources into its development. ”

Wave and tidal are two very different things. O’Brien is backing wave for some reason. Personally I think the prospects for tidal are much better. Scalability, for starters.

DEC were an excellent in their own way, in the end probably too engineering oriented than market oriented for its own good. Too many smart engineering solutions at the one time!

I’ve read FOT’s denigration of Irish IT, but he may not realise it is government-funded, trendy IT “showcases” he is talking about, like (what was it?) the European Media Lab set up with MIT that became almost a joke. Lots of guys I knew left DEC and set up their own companies, which flourished. Parthus was one “star” for a while, ultimately taken over, but not a failure. There are other companies which were smaller but under the radar. No Irish Nokia, unfortunately.

Smart grids, new batteries & photovoltaics are area that Ireland might look at. Since the electronics/ IT sector has declined, we should be looking at what we can leverage out of it into the new energy sector.

I wonder how long it would take DEC to whip together a prototype of a virtual PC product? A couple of hours I would imagine, they would have it brainstormed and figured out. Pity there is no large vertical company like DEC around these days to go an do it. IBM announced those ’smart city’ jobs a while ago for Mulhuddart, but I don’t know if anyone is offering something as basic, as the virtual office/pc cloud application I suggested in a blog entry, In the clouds. Clayton Christensen talks about the danger of setting the bar too high. RCA radio company for instance, were developing transistors in their labs for a long, long time to replace vaccum tubes in their top end radio and TV products. But Christensen suggested, a simple application such as the hearing aid was a much better application of the early transistor technology. Because it offered huge benefit in terms of light weight to consumers of existing hearing aid products. The users were not as demanding of perfection as consumers of radios either. So it was a much lower bar, a much easier technological problem to solve.

The cloud PC idea I have in mind is something Ireland could do easily. We could build a utlility computing centre somewhere like Cherrywood. It is mostly product design, as all the technology required to build a virtual PC already exists. It is only a matter of pulling it all together in a vertial product. Challenges such as that, are a lot easier to manage that salt water environment, energy generation from waves. The cloud is a lower bar in terms of challenge, than the wave. Notwithststanding the lack of success the state in Ireland has had with IT projects, I would rather see it invest in the cloud, than in the wave. We might see some actual return for the investment. As Clayton Christensen would say, be impatient for profits and patient for growth. BOH.

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2010/04/in-clouds.html

Intel and Compaq gained, of course, but it was two new companies who took the space that Digital might have filled - Sun in workstations, and Cisco in networking.

I hadn’t ever looked at it that way before. Very good insight.

The trouble I suppose with state control of wave power technology, is that you don’t get the guys in the garage working on it then. The guys in the garage don’t get an opportunity to go anywhere near the technology. I talked to someone recently in Ireland tasked with driving innovation in Ireland. There background was in accountancy. I notice that about Ireland. Only people with financial knowledge are allowed to run anything. So far, they haven’t seemed to do so well.

I wrote in a blog a while back, about how DunLaoghaire Rathdown County Council objected to Dell establishing a base in Cherrywood Science and Technology Park. My ex. employer, Dunloe Ewart was at the end of their tether when DLR coco objected to Dell as a tenant. DLR coco had bought into a joint venture partnership with Dunloe Ewart developers, which my boss Liam Carroll inherited. He recently settled up with DLR and now they own development land in Cherrywood and have effectively become developers. I noted that John Gormley recently objected to an expansion of Carrickmines retail park, which is a stone’s throw away from Cherrywood LUAS terminus stop. The idea of ministers Gormley and Cuffe was to keep the critical mass near to the LUAS infrastructure. Minister Gormley and minister Cuffe had to challenge local government on that.

My knowledge of the situation is, DLR coco were happy to allow the bank controlled developer to build carpet housing on the science and technology park. While the retail centre, happened across the motorway on the side of a hill. I wrote a business plan early last summer, about Cherrywood. It is amazing though how disfunctional and open to all sorts of abuse, state controlled projects really are. Check out Vimeo website for Fintan O’Toole’s 20 minute speech at TASC conference. He mentions the IT projects which the state has undertaken. Not good, not good. BOH.

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2010/01/duopoly-two-headed-monster.html