Energy: why Meg has the answer

It's slowly beginning to dawn on most people that there's a rather large cloud on the horizon when it comes to switching on the kettle in years to come.
To put it crudely, our clapped-out and polluting power stations may not generate enough energy to do it.
Whether you agree with the folk who'd like to climb up the cooling towers at Ratcliff-on-Soar or not, experts agree that the UK will struggle to generate enough power to keep the economy on the road in the next 10-15 years.
Plenty of people have come up with ideas as to how we can get round that problem. They boil down to using less power and generating it more cleanly.
But there is another problem which is a lot less obvious: exactly who is going to develop these new technologies?
In decades past, the nationalised Central Electricity Generating Board put a lot of money and effort into research and development. When it was privatised, the R&D work faded away amid an era when oil and gas seemed plentiful and cheap.
Those days are gone. So, it seems, is the generation of power engineers we used to produce.
This is why a new project announced in Nottingham may turn out to be crucial to switching your kettle on in the future.
The project – the Midlands Energy Graduate School – will see the University of Nottingham team up with Loughborough and Birmingham universities to train a new generation of energy researchers and engineers.
These are the people desperately needed to help take new energy ideas off the drawing board and turn them into practical, commercially viable reality.
MEG, as it will surely be known, will do more that train engineers. It will also encourage research by economists and social scientists into the impact that an era of scarcer, more expensive energy will have on everyday life.
This is important. We're just beginning to crawl out of a recession brought on partly be our collective failure to behave in the way that economists expected us to.
And since we're still gorging on energy in the same way we gorged on credit, research into what will make us turn the kettle off might not be a bad thing.