Andrew Charlesworth, BusinessGreen, Thursday 29 July 2010 at 18:31:00

Now there are eight investors

E.ON is the latest investor to join the Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA).

The five founding members of the OWA - DONG Energy; RWE Innogy; ScottishPower Renewables; SSE Renewables and Statoil – were recently joined by Mainstream Renewable Power and Statkraft. E.ON joining the party brings the total investment into the project to £9.2m so far.

The OWA is an R&D initiative designed to reduce the total cost of offshore wind energy. Giant offshore wind structures need to be installed at a rate of around two per day for the next decade if the UK is to meet its target of deriving 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Currently less than one turbine a week is installed, but the OWA aims to reduce costs by 10 per cent over the next decade which would enable deployment to happen faster.

Collectively the OWA partners represent 61 per cent of the offshore wind capacity licensed in UK waters (30GW).

“E.ON has installed 64 per cent of all offshore capacity in Europe so far this year, and we have another 4000MW of offshore wind in our project pipeline, so reducing the cost is of vital importance to us,” said Michael Lewis, European managing director of E.ON’s Renewable business. “The OWA will help focus the industry’s efforts to tackle the big issues in a coordinated way and the results will benefit us all.”

A report to be published soon by consultancy Arthur D Little criticises the government’s fixation with wind energy.

“Given that offshore installation is dependent on favourable weather conditions, [two turbines a day] seems like a physically impossible schedule, even if all the supply ships and engineering equipment were available on the scale required for such an undertaking, which they are not yet,” Nick White co-author of the report and energy practice leader at the consultancy. “Policy makers seem to gloss over these real-world engineering constraints.”

Lawrence Latif, V3.co.uk, Thursday 29 July 2010 at 17:33:00

Entourage personal information manager finally being replaced with Outlook

Microsoft is trying to generate interest in its upcoming Office for Mac 2011 productivity suite by drip-feeding information about new features.

The company has released the first in a series of videos showing that it will finally replace the cumbersome Entourage personal information manager with Outlook. Other additions include the debut of the ribbon interface on the Mac, and a template gallery.

For years Microsoft decided not to port Outlook to its Mac suite, instead sticking with Entourage. While the application had many functional similarities with its Windows cousin, poor integration with Mac OS resulted in a program which was difficult to use over prolonged periods.

Users will be delighted to hear that Outlook for Mac will properly integrate with Sherlock, the built in search for Mac OS. At this point it is unclear whether Outlook will be able to handle large mailboxes more efficiently, avoiding the common database corruption suffered by users.

The demonstration sees the appearance of the much maligned 'conversation view' from Outlook 2010 on Windows. Whether it will work more reliably remains to be seen, but it is nice to see Mac users having some sort of feature parity on Microsoft products after all this time.

Microsoft has also updated PowerPoint's template gallery, which now allows for easier browsing. The firm also mentions that it will integrate with third-party template web sites, allowing users to easily manage their library.

Again, there was no mention of increased compatibility between versions, vital for those times when presentations have to be loaded onto another machine.

In this preview Microsoft made no references to increased stability or inter operability among Windows and Mac versions. Those who use Word and Excel will have experienced first hand how poor the applications work in an enterprise environment, where documents are shuttled among users with different versions and operating systems thrown in.

Instead, the firm mentions that it combines the best of Apple design with its software development expertise. The problem for heavy users of Office on Mac is not design flourishes, but the ability to rely on a piece of software which, rather than helping to reduce their workload, adds to it.

So far, little of what Microsoft has announced in Office for Mac 2011 points to an easier life for Mac users. Its decision to ditch Entourage is a positive one, but major improvements to Word, and especially Excel, will be needed if Microsoft's claim of Office 2011 being the "definitive version of Office" holds true.