FEEDBACK Meccano magazine predicts a decarbonised grid... in 1937 SPONSORED FEATURE | CIBSE PATRONS Invasion of the clone army A leading political figure suggested cloning young engineers might solve our industrys recruitment problem, but CIBSE Patrons chair David Fitzpatrick has some other suggestions first! Power of wind and sun I stumbled across a copy of The Meccano Magazine from August 1937. An excerpt from Inventions of the future reads: We are accustomed to a countryside that would seem very surprising indeed to our ancestors, with its arterial roads, its railways, its coal mines thrusting their galleries below the ground and its aeroplanes darting overhead. The people of the next century may equally be accustomed to a countryside that would astonish us by the absence of coal mines, steam trains or factory chimneys vomiting clouds of smoke. Lofty wind-towers may rise above it, and the mirrors of sun-motors may gleam here and there, while great barrages with their turbines may close the river mouths. By such methods electricity will be generated, to be transmitted by overhead cables or underground to be used in countless ways. The world will then use as much energy as it needs, but it will be cleaner, healthier and pleasanter than that in which we live. If we knew about this in 1937, why is the end of the world nigh 82 years later? Dave Cooper FCIBSE LinkedIn CIBSE Building Simulation Group discusses weather files Can a much clearer and simpler referencing system be adopted for the plethora of weather les now available? Chris Yates What do you mean by referencing system? Standards? Naming conventions? There are standard formats, but les will be of varying quality. Do we need an indication of data quality, or a central source/governing body? Dr Claire Das Bhaumik FCIBSE This is a universal issue and will get worse as the data we have available increases. For example, access to Actual Meteorological Year data is increasing. Chris Yates CIBSE Journal welcomes readers letters, opinions, news stories, events listings, and proposals for articles. Please send all material for possible publication to: editor@cibsejournal.com or write to: Alex Smith, editor, CIBSE Journal, CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark, Newmarket Road, Cambridge CB5 8PB, UK. We reserve the right to edit all letters. CIBSE Aug19 pp15 Letters / Patrons.indd 15 T here were many important people at this years CIBSE Patrons annual lunch at the House of Lords, but, arguably, the two biggest VIPs were CIBSE Graduate of the Year Reanna Taylor and Patrons Arkwright Scholar Laurie Maddalena. Our host, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, spoke to them directly during her presentation, saying the UK would need you and many more like you to do the practical stuff in fact, we could do with having lots of clones of you. As vice-chair of the Committee on Climate Change, Baroness Brown was referring to the mounting engineering challenge of delivering on the governments 2050 net-zero carbon target and recruiting the skilled workforce to make it possible. In 2017, British universities produced 23,850 engineering graduates 22,000 less than the country needed, according to Engineering UK. Overall, engineering employers reported a shortfall of 59,000 skilled people that year, despite a dramatic rise in the total numbers attending university from 230,415 in 1997 to 382,620 in 2017. This suggests we do not have a shortage of graduates rather that they are graduating in the wrong subjects. Why? Because the funding model does not work for technical subjects. It costs, on average, 2,000 a year to put a student through a humanities degree, but this rises to 12,000 a year for engineering. With tuition fees at 9,250, it is not hard to work out why universities look to grow cheaper degree students to achieve a greater prot margin. The upshot is that many thousands are emerging from three years of study with a degree that gives them limited prospects of getting a job and an average debt of 50,000. Meanwhile, the engineering industry is crying out for 59,000 more skilled people every year. The building services sector, in particular, offers fantastic career prospects, particularly as it has been tasked with decarbonising the built environment in little more than a decade if the 2050 target is to be achieved. We also hear that major construction employers are struggling to spend all of their contributions to the Apprenticeship Levy. Surely the solution to the nancial shortfall is right there? Give the levy surplus to SME engineering rms if they agree to spend it on recruiting apprentices and/or to help pay for more expensive technical degree courses at university. It is important to recognise that more and more of our future generations will come to us through the apprenticeship route as Reanna did. Not everyone wants to go straight to university, and very few people like the idea of the huge debt. The apprenticeship model allows you to learn on the job and move onto a degree later if you want to. If that doesnt work, then maybe it will have to be cloning. To join CIBSE Patrons and/or suggest topics for future columns, email cbrown@cibse.org www.cibsejournal.com August 2019 15 19/07/2019 13:20