Author: jpl113

Infrastructure and : Part 4 – Parting Ways

It somehow felt appropriate to end my internship with a week cut short by the bank holiday. My main project was in good shape to begin with, so there were no concerns about finishing it in just 4 days, the general atmosphere at the office was cheerful due to people returning from bank holiday weekend trips and longer holidays, and I swear that even the weather seemed to get better as the week progressed. On the other hand, it was weird to part ways with something that you were so intensely involved in for a short period of time. No more skimming through energy news in the morning, suiting up every day even though you knew it was not really all too necessary, and coming up with creative uses for the IF-statement in Excel, even though there surely was a proper way to get the same task done.

So what have I gained from my internship? Well, working at the intersection of policy, economy, and environment has been an outstanding learning lesson for me. Not only have I familiarized myself with an important area of industry, but also extended my knowledge in a myriad of other fields: research skills, Excel, statistical methods, the energy market, business culture in the UK, and the list goes on. All of these aspects are easily transferable to any kind of career path that I choose to take. On that topic it has to be said that based on my experiences here, I would be lying if I said that I could never see myself working in the non-profit sector at some point in my life. I have really enjoyed the stress free yet productive vibe and the sense of dealing with meaningful issues. As a fun fact, according to my back-of-the-envelope estimates on my last day at the office, my final report will have to save the organisation 2 hours of research in the next 12 months to offset the expenses caused by my coffee consumption over the time of my internship. However, this does not keep me up at night, since I am sure that when the time comes for the next paper to be published or event to be held about infrastructure, someone will remember my report and appreciate my endeavours.

I can only be grateful to Green Alliance and the Careers Service for this great experience, and hope that maybe one day you (yes, YOU!) will choose to partake in Charity Insights after reading my ramblings here. If you read this and have some further questions about the Charity Insights programme, feel free to approach me via email or social media. I will end my presence in this blog with the same parting words that I received on my last day of work in the form of this lovely card:

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Thanks for taking an interest in my blog!

Infrastructure and I: Part 3 – Best Friends Forever

As promised, before I share with you all the exciting turns of events that have happened on the field of infrastructure, I will tell you a little about the technicalities of my Charity Insights story. So please, do stay a while and listen.

It all started when I was more or less scrambling for something to do for the summer after my first year. Many freshers seem unbothered about how their first summer in university is spent, but I felt like more new experiences could be amassed by working rather than chilling in Summer. Too bad many (read: nigh all) businesses look for penultimate year students for their internships, as I am sure many of you are painfully aware. I cannot quite recall how I came to be aware of the Charity Insights bursary, but I do remember not taking it too seriously at first. I mean, what could the non-profit sector possibly hold that I would be interested in? Sure enough, I found myself browsing through pages and pages of charities before the answer materialised in front of me – think-tanks. Research focused, analytically driven and often specialised in a narrow sector, think-tanks felt like the embodiment of myself in an NGO form.

Skipping a bit, I ended up making just a single speculative application for Charity Insights, to a think-tank I previously knew little about. Some thought was put into whether to send the application to HR or the person I would ultimately like to work with. I opted for the latter, which I think is a fair choice if the organisation is quite small. My advice to future Charity Insighters is to just be confident with your application. I had little prior work experience and were dubious about my other merits as well. Nonetheless my application received great interest from my supervisor to be. In my opinion, a Charity Insights internship is quite easily marketable to organisations, given its unique structure and short duration. On the other hand, once you have successfully found an organisation and have a clear-cut project in mind, the bursary is fairly straightforward to secure. The bottom line here is that the high chance of success makes taking your time to polish the application well worth it, in contrast to some advertised vacancies where there might be 200 applicants per internship and success rates are dismal. So if the thought of applying for Charity Insights ever crossed your mind, I highly recommend you to go for it!

And so we smoothly transition into week 3 at Green Alliance. In addition to continuing my project on data sources and work on the Infrastructure Pipeline (see previous post), I have done background work leading up to a short analysis summary and a blog post that is to appear in the Green Alliance blog in the near future. The responses to my emails from the institutions have been quite varied, some actually shedding light on the questions I had, some merely attempting to explain why no one seems to know how the numbers add up in a 3-year-old official paper.

I will save a more elaborate wrap up of my doings for the last blog, likely to appear in the next few days.

Infrastructure and I: Part Two – Friendship Established

After a few week break I am back again, with your weekly insight into the future of the UK energy infrastructure! Many of the Green Alliance staff are on holiday, making desk space plentiful, which means I have been able to work my first 40-hour week at an office job ever! Takes a bit of getting used to, but overall sitting at a desk for 8 hours straight is more fun than expected.

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Just another day at the office… (Sorry I just couldn’t resist!)

So what have I been doing in my first full-time week? Well, the focus in the past five days has momentarily shifted from dusty data archives to the forward looking analysis of future electricity generation projects. Indeed, I feel like prospective wind farm expenditure is all I know anymore! This is due to the summer revision of the National Infrastructure Pipeline shuffling the project titles around in a peculiar way. The number of projects listed decreased from 646 to some 400, even though the total planned expenditure, the “value” of the pipeline, actually increased. This meant that the missing third of the projects were probably not actually dropped but rather regrouped under headings such as “Various renewables” and “Post-2020 generation”. So I went, googling through 100 odd wind farm projects to figure out if the numbers actually did add up. You would reckon that it is easy to get a credible estimate of the capital expenditure of a multi-billion pound offshore project with its own web site and generous media coverage. Instead it was sometimes impossible to even get a good idea of whether a project was ongoing any more, when a press release or a news flash from 2012 was the latest piece of information available. A comforting fact is that I am not the only one having trouble keeping track of things. Take for example National Grid’s Transmission Entry Capacity register, which still allocated 52.5MW of future capacity to an onshore project a month after it has been shut down by the officials. (Edit: Just today they updated the register, stripping this shred of comfort from me.)

I do not know if I can become any more fluent at googling, but at least I have learned a lot about the renewable energy market. Reading through news archives, government reports, consent applications, financial statements and annual reports really gives you a better understanding of how government subsidies affect the energy market, and the unharnessed potential of new floating offshore wind turbines, to name a few examples. Also, who knew the government had an e-archive dedicated to conserving not only snapshots of official sites from more than ten years ago but also saving tens of thousands of tweets made by official bodies for future generations. This not only made me ponder the historic value of a single tweet but also realise that the informative value of a website drastically decreases if every hyperlink leads to a 404 error.

In addition to wind farm research, I compiled my findings on the different data sources into a yet to be finished Word file. The finishing touch is pending explanations to some discrepancies, which I have chased to the point of emailing the corresponding institutions asking for clarification. Fingers crossed they reply in time!

Lunch break with the other interns has provided a nice social aspect to the otherwise solitary nature of my work. And when it comes to lunch venues, nothing beats beanbags and a roof terrace on a sunny day! (Too bad there have not been too many this week…)

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Not quite sunny but good enough!

Tune in again next week when I share with you the story of how I got from first hearing about Charity Insights to present time, along with the usual update on my project!

Infrastructure and I: Part One – Getting Acquainted

Emerging from the underground and into the buzz of people that is Victoria station at 9 am, I did not know what to expect from the day. Spotting a familiar looking piece of scaffolding, I let out a sigh of relief – at least I was walking in the right direction. Indeed, it was the same construction site I had been circling around for ages a few months earlier when making my way to the office of Green Alliance for my interview. Finding that white door tucked next to a screaming red cafe proved to be a much simpler task the second time around, and I was happy to tick the box found in many first day guides: arrive 15 minutes early.

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Green Alliance is an environmental think-tank aiming to stimulate green ideas and debate amongst businesses, politicians, and other NGOs alike. Most concrete examples of the organization’s work are the variety of events organized to spur discussion on environmental questions, and reports that often delve deeper into the numerical side of these issues. During my internship I will be working under the Sustainable Economy department, which strives to highlight that green economic development is not only “ethically” right but also economically sensible in the long run.

A major part of the sustainable economic development is played by good infrastructure planning. (See Green Alliance blog) Once erected, power stations and transport links tend to be in place for decades to come. To meet the emission targets first of which are coming up in 2020, right policies and investments have to be made today. My project will revolve around the National Infrastructure Plan, a 150-page official publication explaining what, when and with whose money new civil engineering works will be carried out in the next five years. A good starting point was to dissect the data that underlies the decisions set out in the plan.

Thus far, I have become well acquainted with the archives of the Office for National Statistics, Eurostat and OECD, scouring for data under headings such as infrastructure or civil engineering, and normalising them with respect to currency, inflation, and other factors. I have also taken first steps to familiarise myself with the way the data is gathered and processed. Knowledge of such metadata plays an important role when trying to explain the discrepancies in the data from different sources.

Now, for some people the description above might sound like something that would lull you into sleep the second you step into the office and open that Excel spreadsheet. I, however, have really enjoyed working on this project. From my perspective, every time series I deal with is an encrypted story of the real economy, just waiting to be interpreted. Safe to say I am looking forward to following weeks when we turn our attention to the future and assess how projects in the Infrastructure Pipeline match up against emission targets. Because of my part-time working schedule the next blog post (with more pictures I promise!) will unfortunately not be until mid-August, so sit tight until then!