We travelled up to Bristol yesterday to hear Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows talk on their one stop in England on the Venus Project World Lecture Tour.  Unfortunately we arrived late, after enduring traffic hell on the M5 motorway northbound from Devon.  We missed the start of Roxanne's talk, but we did get to hear all of Jacque's talk and the subsequent  Q&A session.  During his talk Jacque had made it quite clear that he thinks a lot of people talk bullshit, including politicians, psychologists and lovers! He had occasionally used some four lettered vernacular also. We got surprised in the foyer after his lecture by Jacque himself, who unexpectedly emerged to shake our hands and enquire if Kasia had been offended by any of his fruitier language. She assured him she hadn't been!  Having been sat near the back during the main presentation it was great to see him up close and chat briefly, even if he did take the opportunity to illustrate one of his points by suggesting that my prior conditioning might lead me to punch the guy opposite me on the nose!

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Earlier this week Dutch energy consulting and certification company KEMA announced that the Hoogkerk "PowerMatching City" had been officially opened by the mayor of Groningen. According to KEMA:

Hoogkerk is the first microgrid project in Europe to integrate a full-scale, operational “smart” residential community energy system. The community includes 25 interconnected residential homes equipped with micro-cogeneration units, hybrid heat pumps, PV solar panels, smart appliances and electric vehicles, and additional community-based power produced by a wind farm and a gas turbine.

Whilst 25 homes seems to me to be stretching the definition of "a city" a bit far, it seems that:

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Whilst the Group of Eight and the World Trade Organization chatter away to little effect, and Bill Gates ponders how to tweak capitalism so that the "one billion people live on less than a dollar a day" can benefit from it, you may be wondering if there isn't a better way to organize society. In the 20th century the alternative most often put forward was communism. That doesn't seem to have worked out terribly well either though.

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