User:Pglbrookes/sandbox

Dr Len Brookes is a mathematician and economist, who before his retirement from full time employment with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 1979 was responsible for Economics, Forecasting and Energy Policy at the London HQ of the UKAEA. Since then he has been self employed as an author of papers on energy and associated matters and as a consultant to a large number of organizations in the public and private sectors in the UK and overseas. He has given invited evidence on energy and on global warming to the Government and Parliament (the Lords) on a number of occasions. Before entering this field in 1967 he enjoyed a successful career as a Civil Service Administrator. During World War II he served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, principally as a commissioned staff instructor at the RAF Flying Instructors’ Schools at Montrose, Scotland and Upavon, Wiltshire. He looks back with some nostalgia at having been chosen to give a public aerobatic display at Upavon on the first Battle of Britain commemoration day on 15 September 1945.

The following is a list of some of his fields of interest: 1. Analysing the role of nuclear power in electricity systems and presenting the public case for a substantial component of nuclear power in the UK electricity system. This has included analytical papers in learned journals; papers presented at conferences in the UK and other countries; public debates with leading members of the anti-nuclear-power movement; and numerous book reviews of pro and anti books on nuclear power. Brookes was also the joint editor and part author in partnership with Professor Homa Motamen then of the economics department of Imperial College of the collection of papers comprising the book “The Economics of Nuclear Energy” published by Chapman and Hall in 1984. 2. Techno-economic assessment of research programmes, notably leading a study of the case for research on high temperature fuel cells and as a leading member of a study on the economic case for the UKAEA’s  programme of basic nuclear research leading to a recommendation for an appropriate level of expenditure in this area. 3. Development of mathematical approaches to forecasting electricity demand. This included the development of a forecasting model of the UK electricity supply system that incorporated a trend extrapolation “S” Curve identified by utilising Brookes’ fundamental discovery of a generalisation of the linear regression formula that exploited the fact that many important complex functions have linear transforms – see below*. The model itself incorporated the full details of the UK Electricity system and computed the key economic and planning parameters of interest to electricity planners. 18 November 1968 as PAU Internal Memorandum No: 21, a member of a series under the auspices of the Programmes Analysis Unit (PAU) sited at Harwell. Further developments appeared as PAU Internal Memos culminating in No: 43 dated 24 February 1970 announcing the availability of a sophisticated computer programme named “Alfit” capable of producing fits to a wide range of functions and incorporating fitted weights in lieu of the original empirical weights in order to produce greater accuracy. 4. Developing expert systems programs (Artificial Intelligence) (1) for balancing the benefits of hydro-electric systems against the environmental disbenefits in developing countries and (2) for providing the government of Malta with a tool for balancing economic  benefits of new capital projects against any likely environmental disbenefits. 5. Analysing the mathematical characteristics of the way commercial-energy-dependent activity penetrates national economic systems as they become more industrially developed. 6. But what Len Brookes is most noted for is scepticism about the benefits – if any – of attempts to achieve energy conservation (in mitigation of a presumed global threat from carbon emissions from fossil fuel consumption) through the medium of widespread improvements in energy efficiency. Brookes has contended in many papers offered in journals and at conferences between 1979 and the present century that widespread individual measures to raise energy efficiency at the microeconomic level result in increases in energy consumption at the macroeconomic level. (He subsequently discovered that the great liberal economist W. Stanley Jevons had published similar claims over 100 years earlier!) 7. At about the same time as Brookes’ earliest papers on this topic were published, Professor Daniel Khazzoom of San Jose State University, published papers making the same point about mandated standards for domestic appliances. In 1992 Dr Harry Saunders, an economist practising in California demonstrated that, over a wide range of  Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow’s neo-classical growth theory. This provided welcome support for Brookes work at 6 above but has led to some confusion about whether Saunders conclusion is essential to the claims made by Brookes and Khazzoom whose updating of what has come to be called “the Jevons paradox” does not in fact depend upon the acceptability of Saunders’  erudite work. 8. More recently Brookes has demonstrated graphically that if “energy efficiency“ is defined in economic terms  energy cannot be used with greater economic efficiency than in a system in which all the relevant resources used in delivering an energy service or product are jointly used unpreferentially with maximum economic efficiency. This makes the economic efficiency of energy simply part of general economic efficiency (thus providing support for an earlier contention by Professor Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford University, California). It follows that any attempt to give priority to energy-saving (or indeed the saving of any other individual resource) is likely to entail misallocation of economic resources and lead to a sub-optimal result (a higher than necessary total cost) unless by sheer chance the energy (or other privileged resource) saving approach happens to coincide with the minimum total cost approach. It further follows that such an extra cost needs to be justified as serving an environmental or other non-economic end:  it cannot be justified  on the frequently claimed grounds that, for example, carbon saving can be delivered  at zero cost or even at a profit. 9. In the course of his studies he claims to have identified two cultures in the personnel working in the broad energy efficiency field – one consisting principally of those who think primarily in terms of  raising energy efficiency to reduce energy consumption and those who think primarily in terms of raising energy productivity, which could be expected to lead to a higher level of employment of energy relative to other available resources just as one expects improvements in labour productivity to lead to higher levels of employment of labour. In a paper published in the Energy Journal, distinguished US economist Ronald Sutherland made a similar distinction, referring to “the conservation paradigm” and the “economics paradigm”, accusing adherents to the former of embracing a “free lunch” fallacy, believing that carbon emission targets can be achieved at low cost or even at a profit by high profile energy conservation measures. 10. When invited  by the Lords’ Science and Technology Committee to offer evidence to their study of energy efficiency Brookes presented a paper based on 6 and 8 above plus other arguments. This was well received by their Lordships who, in their report, suggested that the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate provided a possible explanation for the failure of the Government’s strenuous efforts to reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions by measures to raise energy efficiency. The Government responded by financing three studies, one by a team at the University of Strathclyde, another by a team from Cambridge headed by the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, and a third by the UK Energy Research Centre based on the University of Sussex. All three acknowledged that there was some loss at the macroeconomic level (they called this “rebound”) of savings at the microeconomic level but maintained that this loss was substantially less than 100%. However they could be categorised as using approaches based on the “conservation paradigm” notwithstanding the erudition of much of what they wrote. The UKERC group offered a detailed partial rebuttal of Brookes’ version of the K-B postulate in a supporting paper to their report. Regrettably this incorporated serious inaccuracies in its contentions about Brookes’ beliefs, stipulations and statements and ignored points and papers that he drew to their attention at their drafting stage. 11. In addition to scepticism about the claims made for what can be achieved by raised energy efficiency, Brookes is also known for deep scepticism about whether any threat from climate change can be attributed to the emission of CO2 from man’s use of fossil fuels (he submitted an invited paper on the subject to the study by the UK House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs of the economics of climate change). He has also produced a detailed study demonstrating the intrinsic unsuitability of wind energy parks as elements in national electricity systems and therefore as having any relevance to a programme of reducing carbon emissions.
 * The standard linear regression formula emerged as a special case of this generalisation. When this generalisation was invoked it greatly simplified the necessary curve-fitting operations for important functions (including some for which satisfactory methods had not previously been found) without transgressing the fundamental requirements for true statistical fits. The original paper announcing this discovery was published on