Having dispatched Trilemma1 to Room 101 let me now try and place a finger in the dyke of Trilemma2 recently proposed by Mr Marchant before it is taken seriously by anyone and a dam wall breaks flooding regulators with confusion and obfuscation that is not required. Trilemma2 has raised three related but simple issues; Flexibility…
Thanks to the good work of my colleague, David Wright, Mandarin-speaker and China expert, Turquoise recently played host to a large delegation of business and government people from Zhejiang Province. Located to the south of Shanghai, Zhejiang has China’s highest per capita GDP and is home to many of the country’s largest, privately-owned companies. Turquoise’s…
It’s very easy to get caught up in hyperbole in the period immediately following a subsidy cut announcement, as all the stakeholders desperately clamour to make their voice heard the loudest. Given the recent cuts to solar subsidies, depending on who you listen to, you could very easily believe that the industry has either been…
Ian Marchant, ex CEO of SSE and ex IE President, has suggested we need a second Trilemma (see below). However, as the first Trilemma achieved nothing, the second is surely a step in the wrong direction. The first trilemma was a brain teaser that the power industry created where it was befuddled into doing very…
It must have been incredibly dispiriting, and at times scary, to have spent the holidays in the north of the British Isles being inundated with torrential rain day after day as Desmond (not me!), Eva and Frank swept in from the west. Two years ago, it was the south & west that bore the brunt…
My eye was recently caught by an interview given by David Palmer-Jones, chief executive of Suez UK, to Andrew Cave of The Sunday Telegraph in which he fondly remembers some of the Grimsby Town FC squad emptying old-fashioned metal dustbins in order to get themselves fit and earn some extra cash during the 1970’s. How…
Last Thursday saw the third hosting of the Turquoise wine tasting challenge, which afforded us the opportunity to say thank you to the people we have worked with during the course of the past 12 months: clients, investee companies, co-advisers and other partners. The event saw 11 teams competing to demonstrate their knowledge of fine…
Apart from being one of Gloria Gaynor’s better known hits, it also signifies that, as of today (Friday 15 October), the heat in our home will be on. Many of you will have had your heat on since the cold snap in September or so National Grid tells us from daily demand for gas. This…
London is currently in breach of EU limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in the air, which is linked to a range of respiratory illnesses. In July, King’s College London published a report which estimated the mortality burden of NO2 and PM2.5 pollution in London in 2010, with as much as 140,743 life-years lost. We clearly…
Please don’t think that this is a gratuitous attempt to insult the reader….it’s just the popular name of a pressure group in Lebanon which is demanding that the government do something about the waste crisis in the country. Those inhabitants who live near the main municipal dump have said “no more” and as a result,…