Thank you for staying with us. You're still watching The Breakfast on Plus TV Africa and right now it's time for a hot topic. We're talking about how over 80% of Nigeria's crude oil has been stolen and that is being said by the former president, Olushegun Abbasanja. He made this statement saying that over 80% of Nigeria's crude oil has been stolen and joining us to just review this and talk about it in depth is Joe Femi Danguru. He's a public policy analyst and yeah that's who we're going to be having today. Good morning sir, thank you for joining us. Okay so former president Olushegun Abbasanja came out to say that over 80% and that is quite a large number of Nigeria's crude oil has been stolen so whatever we're working with right now is about 20%. I want to know your thoughts on this statement. Basically sometimes I just feel that why is it that when our leaders want to leave their position of leadership it seems their eyes are becoming or their eyes become so clear to see a lot of things. The general chief Olushegun Abbasanja was there as a military leader. He was there as a civilian president so he should know a lot about this and so he won't take it for granted. I what he has just said is not important. It's quite important to have this figure but my concern and my thought has always been when they were there or when he was there what was his effort? What was that effort mean to cut the still in the meeting and everything I was doing because it's not just now you know so there should have been a kind of intelligence report to the president outside there and he should have been able to wade into some of those things but you know they should tell us what they did. He should have said look I know this thing when I was there and this are the actions I took and these are the actions I should be taking and make suggestions. It is not just enough to tell us that look this is what it's been stolen and yes who we then what do we do? How have we been battling the theft? So those are the things that we should be hearing. I'm not just making all this open and kind of comment. Yes it's good to know that it's been stolen since the years maybe how many years it has been stolen. What have we done? What should we do? But now we are seeing the president the new president President of the military with the efforts of the military with the efforts of other good citizens and consultants and people who are you know pursuing or trying making you know fantastic effort to cut this theft. So that is the way we should be talking about. How do we cut the theft? So how do we improve on what we have? How do we sell those things legitimately to the benefit of the citizens of Nigeria? I think that is what is important that is what the people want to hear. They are fed up of hearing 80 percent stolen, 70 percent stolen. They are fed up of all this figure. They want to see these things being sold appropriately and the money coming back to Nigeria it through the right channels so that the NNPCL would declare exact amount that has been sold, exact amount that has come into the government cover and then we begin to see the reality. That is what is important to the masses and not just the figure of what has been stolen and what is sold and not. So it talks about NNPCL coming out to you know let us know but even the World Bank has accused NNPCL of not being transparent in their numbers. Do you think that's going to happen because at this point obviously there's a trust deficit where we don't even know whatever is going on.  Do you think for them to be able to say okay this crude oil is not being stolen and we can account for it? Is that where the NNPCL starts to bring some form of transparency to the masses? There should be transparency in all what the government is doing and what the government will do. You know it's not just the World Bank that has told us this just like the President of Barcelona said it. A lot of our leaders they know they are aware of some of these things and they are finding words. It's just you know when we look at Aramco, we at some point I think we said Aramco was interested in their partnership with us. You see the transparency in all these other places you know but the phone is this or it's not the phone the reality is this that when we have a company that is now a limited ability company or possibly in the nearest future to be a public official company not declaring their assets, not declaring their profits. We do not know how money is being made or made, how money is being spent and you know we don't have the accurate figures of all these things. And for years so now we have a President who said let us figure it out, let us do it right. I think that is the most important thing now. We should figure it out. We should do the right thing. Enough of all these big companies, enough of all these political maneuvers. Let's begin to do the right thing. Let us call clean and say this is what and what we are selling and this is what we are making out of it and this is what we have done with the money. Unless we begin to do things right, unless we begin to approach the system correctly we cannot go to places and be saying we want investors to come. We are not transparent with some of this. This is the major source of our income and we should get it carefully and we should get it very well and that is what we should do. So now that we have a new board of NNPC in place, let us know their mandates and let it be open. Let NNPC say these are these and these are these are what we have. Let us have investors relations program that they'll be able to say this is what until we begin to have that. This should be displayed on their website. Everything should be transparent. Technology should be brought into this system wherever we know when is this taking away, where it is at that moment and these are things that are so simple and we should be able to do it right. Okay. I think I mean I love the fact that you've said we should be transparent but let's look at the root cause of the matter. We've seen this happen over time for years. You know they've always come out to say Nigeria's crude oil is being stolen, Nigeria's crude oil is being stolen but why is this so persistent? Why is it that no administration comes in and puts an end to this? And also is this a security issue or is it maybe a poverty issue for instance?  So what do you think is the root cause of the matter? Look at it this way. We can't just be blaming everything on poverty it's just our mindset. Most of the people or some of the people that are being caught at some of these illegal finance you see they if you call them broke guys okay fine or you know low-end people yes we're at the people behind the scene. How many people have been sent to Nigeria? How many people have been prosecuted? You know it is not just you know women also those ones that you see that have been you know arrested and there are people behind it that we we kind of see you know I don't know much about that terrain but I look at it that this behind them have you seen any you know any you think these guys that have been arrested are the ones telling this do you think they have a network for the contact? No so it's beyond what we are seeing and that is why sometimes it's quite difficult because it's a network I mean such networks are highly you know connected somehow so you can say security issue but now that I believe this government or president what I mentioned is serious about it much more we are seeing efforts the Nigerian Navy we have the Tantia or something I forgot that name correctly now that's Genema who has the contract to monitor and to you know possibly arrest the people who are handed over to the police or to the Navy. We see a lot of activities going on now unlike before so let us see how you know sometimes you just have to wait and see how each government performs and that is why I'm looking at these words that we're seeing now but until we get to do grass fruit of it to the root cause of this then the root cause we know the root cause is because of few individuals they want to be richer they want to be wealthier and they think that is the only way crime will always be committed one way or the other all over the world but it is for the government to put things in place to put a lot of you know laws in place that we that we guide and that would take care of those things so if you try to beat them this way they go the other way that is it and that is why we have to be consistent that that's why we have to be proactive and it is you know it's itself for all of us to be concerned and to be able to do things right. So staying on the transparency issue and you said crime will always you know happen do you think that the reason why the federal government and the NNPCO is in coming out to say what exactly the numbers are is because of you know them wanting to perpetuate crime as well so it is for corrupt reasons do you think that? Well you see I don't want to guess I don't want to speculate why am I a musician we do one thing or not do another thing for me it's let us encourage them let us tell them this is what the people want and let them do it I think the people who are there they know it the new chairman of the board of retroven NPC is a gentleman that has worked all his years on the industry he knows what transparency is all about Shifaki Ellura is somebody that you know I know as well that's so we believe with him at the helm so about fear right now we should be able to give a good guideline and to guide the the the board and the entire organization to do the right thing and good enough he was immobile when the the president was appointed apparently and he worked together with him so they know what it is I haven't worked with such an intentional organization and seen what the number so let's hope by this one we bring a new idea you know into the whole system and it's just that annually like every other company we do they declare their asset they declare profit and loss you know they just come out clean with an audited account annually this is supposed to be supposed to be quarterly reports monthly reports you know so these are simple things that you respect them to do so we watch and see if things we change really less a few months and begin to understand it and if not I think we can still discuss it further then okay a few weeks ago I had an interview with you and we spoke extensively about the parliamentary system of government and I remember you saying you do not care whether it was parliamentary elementary whatever it is as long as we have like a better and thriving economy and a better Nigeria but do you think that if we switching into a parliamentary system of government can help combat this issue of all theft I'll tell me again that it's about people it is the system no matter how good how creative how good how superior system is people we are created people so it is the people as the conscience of the people you know it is not because we are operating uh parliamentary system or we are doing presentation or whatever system will be operate the system is as good as the people operating it you know you can buy the best car if you don't know how to drive a car you have collision with the car you have a terrible accident with the car and all that we save you if you don't buy it so it is not just buying the brand new car it is not buying the most expensive car that matters you have to know how to drive the car you have to have a license to drive in a lot of this goes into that so it is not about just having the parliamentary system the people we're driving so who are the people again the election there will be campaign how do people source the money for the election campaign and uh a lot of all these things will come up again firms will be sold by the parties and if one person is buying a form of hundred million how do we control that you know so a lot of all these things will happen the people will go into the parliament I mean if you have the policies now in place you have the laws in place you have the oversight policies in place so what stops the same people from you know doing their job so it is not the system for if we are talking about the low cost and whatever the people so until when we have people who are conscious of these people who are you know sincere about bringing Nigeria forward about moving this country forward about going there to serve are not going there to be selfish now we have in most cases it's selfishness it's a personal grandeur small it is where people don't think about humanity it is where people think about me myself and I so we have to begin to look into that it is the people for goodness sake it is the system can be any system but the people who drive the system that is what matters and by the way this is not I believe every every four years you see people coming about this idea of constitutional reports and doing wrong thing or the other I mean people are getting fed up this is not the right time to even bring this out now in my opinion because people are thinking the masses are thinking of how to feed themselves how to feed their children how to send themselves their children to school let us look at this important agenda as Nigeria citizens and let us begin to see which one is in look now we don't have steady electricity let's focus on that let's monitor that let's achieve that we don't have you know food the president declared in August last year he declared a state of emergency on the food insecurity what happened between August and December and January I mean we have people in this country we have people in the ministry the president has seen it and said look you know something might happen let's do now let us really help us get up since that we have named to work we have gotten the order to proceed and to do the right thing then I am a family a world bank they said in October last year I said the things we happen this way so who are those people not doing their job well is not a system people we have to do their job well people we have to be committed you know if we say look we are going to bring in loans for students to have the loans why can't we work it out and make it work these are things that we should do we have enough right now to do so that as soon we don't go astray and the minimum which we can resolve that issue you know there are things of our hands right now you know we shouldn't bring things that we just confuse the people and people are not interested ask anybody on the street whether that is their concern right now you know that is not a concern I think that is just for the elite who want to you know begin to have you know meetings here and there and you know possibly traveling to Abu Dhabi to do things people don't really I think majority of the people on the street they don't really care about this now they just want to see how to live well in this country yeah I would agree with you because no matter what you're going to call it if you're saying parliamentary presidential whatever it is it's just on paper it's still the makeup of the people who go there and if they're doing their jobs right but like I said there's a prevalence of this over time in Nigeria where you've seen oil theft now I want to know do you think this has impacted our economy because now you're talking about how people just want to live well and just feed their bellies because that's like the major thing at the moment we're talking about food in food shortage and food supply and people really don't have food people can barely feed people can barely make ends meet now do you think this oil theft has impacted our economy like over time I mean sure this is glaring it's glaring that is what I'm saying people are aware of this previous government was aware of it it is not real to anybody calling into the government and that is why it takes guts the guts of every leader to you know to just fight it head on and say look I'm going to put a stop today so and I think that is what's important you know the audacity to say listen uh this cannot continue you know so which I think this government you know sometimes I just want us to begin to you know give people the chance of you know let's see how far he can go with it we are seeing efforts being made you know you know areas of our economy and sometimes this you know the central bank comes with policy the policy might not be good enough for them they will want to find a way to adjust or to modify then you know so I think in one of these things that we have seen in the past have you know they really messed up their economy thank god we are not in recession right now but you see when you talk about economy it's a global issue nobody call me right now uh it's it's it's diving in a way you see a couple of other developed nations they're having in the sessions they're having problem they're having crisis from us in Europe by protesting and a lot of all this is you know but the point is that they always find a solution to it quickly within you know they don't just go about begging and ask the people oh come on help us we have a problem oh come on they find the solution within themselves and they resolve the issue within themselves because they don't want to make themselves laughing starts and they believe they are competent enough to solve the problem of their country and this is where African leaders should begin to you know look in words and let us everything you have issues you go about as okay oh he please help me and all that yes you can ask for help no doubt about that but what are the issues what are the solutions we can find locally and how are we tackling this solution sincerely you know because if we say give us money give us idea give us this and we take the money if the money is not being utilized for what it's supposed to be for if the contracts are being inflated you know a lot of things come up and it is not the like before the global community sees what is going on that's why we talk about transparency because you cannot continue to do things the way you've been doing it before you know and you have citizen journalism you have a lot of things that people with us expose some of these things so we have to be very careful so for me the economy has been in bashing for a long time to call the you know for a long time before now rather so and if it's not that they will still be in this day you know don't do on me before for a long time so because we have to be going to find out we continue to see technology we come with good result people have to drive this technology we have to invest in the right technology we have to invest in the right educational programs so all of this is if we are to set up new universities what are these universities going to come up with you know so we want to set up more universities we have to be able to think of funding them and if they're private universities we have to think of how will the people have the money to fund them you see so a lot of all these things we shouldn't just be talking about problems problems and problems let us begin to find solutions local solution national solutions it is not the government that controls the states the state budgets their own money their employees are they doing it right in the states are they doing it right in the local government let's not forget the fact that these people are part of our system and until when we begin to monitor them accordingly until when we begin to look into what they're doing properly so it is not just only the federal government in the states and the local government they are part of this system and we have to look into it and you see when we want to give money to the so-called poor people how to we don't have a good data to say this one we go with 75 000 25 000 whatever we want to give let us have a good data and that is why we have the social security we have the social benefits in all this country is with data you see it is not enough for someone to say some millions were stolen in my bedroom in my bed house why do you take them so much money to your bedroom in government house in the first instance so anybody reading that that is not in Nigeria will just laugh and say look at how this people are wasting money so these are things that there are simple things that all many people will just ask you why what is going on in that country I mean these are the things we have to begin to look at and then you look at the money you know now netflix is here a lot of all these organizations show their company and they are here making use of our local talents our local talents are bringing hundreds of millions and billions into the economy so let us talk more into this local economy and let us think of how to do things to export if we don't begin to export to generate foreign exchange how do we hope to have more foreign exchange in this country so the problem is what we know what an ordinary person knows and if you ask when we are setting up this economic committee economic council and whatever let us put ordinary people sometimes let us put them in in here let ordinary people that will say it wrong that will say the street you know the way the street we understand it let them share their opinion let them share their thoughts about some of these things I know it's good to have professors to have doctors to have business and rules here and there but let us have ordinary people you know let us hear their opinions as well because sometimes most of these people don't go to the market they don't see what you see what I see until we begin to understand that and then they have the feedbacks that they want to hear people tell them what to hear what what they want to see so let us begin to engage the common man put it that way in all the systems as well which is not just the so-called big guys that have to sit down and know and decide let's involve the common man on the street into some of these things I think that is clear clear what's true yeah okay I mean I like what you said about you know starting from the local government because at the end of the day they're all part of the system and we need to look into the grassroots a lot of times we blame the federal government saying the government is not working the government is not working but then how do you engage you know your local government chairmans how do you engage your councilors how do you engage your state governor even before you move it up to the ministers and then the president but I like what you've said about everything let's stay on the crux of the matter which is the oil theft now what are some long-term solutions you think you know can be introduced to ensure that we reduce it significantly or even eliminate the fact that you know a lot of our oil our crude oil is being stolen and as the case might be for my president of messenger said over 80 percent of our crude oil has been stolen so what are some long-term solutions or policies that you even think the government can introduce to ensure that this you know doesn't happen again and we just combat it and eliminate it totally I think this is sometimes the way our parents have been laid here and there uh we don't they're just open to some of these uh pipeline first we have to use technology to come to combat some of these things and we have to get the people as well you know everything is about the people where these things are best only people see them and who are the people still in western they are not gross they are citizens of this country in Konaigawa with some other people so when we begin to look at the technology we can have a technology to monitor the both things and once it's been properly monitored it will be easier to detect where these things have been stolen how it's been taken away I mean you can't just you know take a badge in ship mode of her out of this country without anybody seeing it let's let's be candid with some of these things so let us be very very uh helpful to this country and let us begin to approach issues with uh you know with the mindset of this is my country it is a country that I want everything good I want good for this country or to begin to get into that because most people say what is my business Nigeria is not good for me but once we live in this country and we understand this country and we understand we appreciate living in this country it is them most of these things will become uh easier to manage and to monitor this is what is going on where people around the world uh in some of this developed country they just appreciate their country they know this is our country the Americans appreciate their country maybe the Germans appreciate the Germany all these people so until we begin to speak well but to make people just speak well about their country when they discover that somebody has stolen the oil and then it comes back and then becomes a big man in the society you think the people don't know that they knew them but they can't see anything they can't talk about it so until we begin to make people make them you know let us feel it just the good part of it we have to be passionate about this we have to talk you know to the mindset of the people that look this is your country and before you can say that they want to see you do what you preach that is what is it you want to see you do what you preach and that is what is important you know our churches have to be part of it our most have to be part of it yes we want to go to heaven but you know people will tell you yes I want to go to heaven yes but I have to enjoy what God has given me God has given us these we are not buying it from anywhere it is right here with us it's a gift and we have to let everybody partake in this gift it is for just one person it is for the the whole Nigeria so if you are looking at it from the from the religious dimension from whatever dimension you want to look at it it's a gift from God and God knows what he has given us so let us not begin to you know damage this country for every poor that is turning is a damage to the society it's a damage to the yet unborn citizen we shouldn't be in debt like this and we should be able to see ourselves as you know brothers keeper it is what you know for one man to just build a mansion it is not just one man for us to have about 20 cars or putting in for whatever proof and just one man in the community and the rest community the rest of the community are suffering and they are begging for rise that is not what it should be we should be a brothers keeper let us practice what we preach we just put it on our bed every day and showing class that is not what Nigeria should be we are good people and let us remain good people unless we take it to the grassroots unless we take it to the primary school to the nursery school because you can be a shock when you see even children primary school nursery school condemning their country i'm telling you that i want to go out of this country a child a five-year-old that is what he hears that is what they discuss that's the new nigerian dream you know and let us begin to do the right thing it is not what a parliamentary element whatever i said it again it is the people who practice and the people are us we nigeria you and i and every other people are there that is hearing this but i will say what is he saying the politicians are not hearing yes what we make them hearing we go to the constituency offices and we begin to drop letters we begin to make that feeling and we begin to bombard their telephones and to say look i want to see you i want you to change this narrative when we begin to do that the citizens have a role to play and once we play this role it is not just strike of a day or two that cannot you won't send any signal to them because they know after two days we need to go back to face the reality so doing these strikes and whatever may not really have until when we begin to do a one-on-one discussion with them a one-on-one agitation with them for them to understand it even as a strike they're just standing in their house and they won't go anywhere and they're enjoying their house there's electricity for them 24 so they don't have the problems you and i have so that is not touching them you know so we have to find a way to make sure they understand what we are talking about don't allow people to steal our food or because if you know those who are stealing this food and don't say anything let the law takes its course just like the nabda kuman said it you know people who are bringing all right some drugs or fake drugs into this country what is it you find them just maybe 50 000 and the man has made 500 million what is 50 000 let us review those kind of laws let us bring him up just say we want to change the system we're going to that is not the main issue right now okay sir let us monitor it let us do what is right and let us contribute for goodness sake enough of all this talk talk talk we know what is right let us just begin to do it all right easy i think that's a very good way to end we know what is right let us do what is right and i love the fact that you highlighted the fact that um our natural resources are a gift from god and all Nigerians should be a particular of this gift not a select few so we want to say thank you for coming and just sharing your thoughts with us thank you so much sir i appreciate you thank you all right we'll be speaking to joe femi dangora he's a public policy analyst and we'll be talking about how um about 80 percent of nigeria's crude oil has been stolen and that was being said by the former president olu shagun or basundar we'll go on a short break when we return and we'll be talking about the businesses and the clampdown um on them trying to find how to move across or move above the forex crisis that we are on right now please stay with us


Okay, we're getting things started now. It's gone 12.15. Welcome to this TMZ market's weekly charting analysis webinar with myself Jasper Lawler. Just going to skim through the, or look in detail, I should say, the risk warnings on the screen at the moment. Being a busy day in markets already, some big moves in the oil price, also a lot of movement around the British Pound building on the gains from last week. So I'll probably discuss those two things up front, but I should say anything that you want to talk about here, discuss anything you might have in mind. So we've got the short-term charts on here. You can see that this is the Brent crude price down in the left-hand corner here, and we've had a big pickup today. Going up $2 and then dropping a dollar again. If you hadn't been following, basically we've got the G20 summit going on. A lot of hot air as usual from politicians, but one thing of note was that Saudi Arabia and Russia were talking about a big agreement. The oil price shot up on expectation. But as is usually the case, particularly in the oil market, is that it was a bit of a disappointment. Nothing was really announced. Oil has held on to its gains though, still up 3% on the day for Brent and WTI, as you can see on the screen down here. So it's been a good rally. It's just pulled back a bit. We're into sort of, as I said, it was up to down one, so we're in the 50% retracement range. So you think this rally's still got legs now as a possible level. But really this is all about speculation as to whether OPEC do anything at their unscheduled, I should say unscheduled there, sort of the non-standard meeting that they held, holding this month ahead of their official meeting, which I believe is they've recently said was in October, formerly thought it was November. So you know that being the case, you know the timing is a bit tight in terms of this meeting and their next official meeting, whether it's October or November, still pretty close. So to my mind, good chance that nothing really gets agreed. What we're looking for of course is for them, these big oil producers to freeze output. Russia and all the OPEC nations, but obviously Iran's holding out because they're still building up their production after sanctions were put on them by the US and the rest of the world for a number of years. So if we have a look at the, I'll dive straight into the oil price. This is my daily chart. Got a few levels on here, but I think the main crux of it is that we're basically in a range now. Looking at the cash price, it's pretty much 41 to 51. But you can obviously kind of rough estimate that to more like 40 to 50. That's kind of the range we're in now. As soon as we've got to 50, that's a lot of people saying was actually maybe not justifiable that it's got the legs to push much beyond 50, maybe we're in a 40 to 50 range now. And that has actually panned out pretty well. We had a big old drop, but that was just matched by a big old rise again. We're not really in a long-term trending environment as we were from this period beginning in January. We're now making fresh lows, but then highs again. Just kind of thinking about the dynamic of this trend, pulling up to the weekly chart here. I know most of us don't trade on a sort of weekly chart basis, but just looking at this, we're making higher lows. This is a fairly obvious trend, particularly with the benefit of hindsight always. But there's a low there. We take it out. We obviously make a decent new low. We take out this swing low down here as well. So then what you're kind of looking for is for some sustainability of that down leg. So the level I had on my chart was this sort of 46-60. Equally, you could have used these levels down here more in the sort of 45-60 area for an area where the price would roll over again to continue the downtrend. But it didn't do that. It basically paused at the level I had on the chart, and then just the following rammed right back up to this swing point up here, which you can see this week, the candle was two lows on either side. You could call it kind of into a swing high, and the market's rolled off from there. It's basically pulled back. It's dropped down again below this kind of swing level. To my mind, we're getting a good rally in the price at the moment, but we're kind of directionless, and we're right in the middle of the trading range here. I would not be bet in the lodge that this kind of 50% pullback continues into a new high. We're not really in an environment of buying the midpoint of the rally. We're in a range so that they're kind of safer, I mean, not safer, but the more reliable trading in this environment is buying the bottom of this 40 to 50 range, selling the top of the 40 to 50 range. Once we get a breakout in a weekly close above 51, really, that's a different game. Then we're into kind of pushing into new highs again. That's an uptrend. You can start to kind of buy more aggressively on the retracement, but to my mind, we're still kind of range bound on this oil price. That would sort of suggest that nothing's going to happen this month in the meeting in Algiers with these oil producers, and I think that makes sense. So a little bit on the order, and then the other thing in terms of just what's been going on today is for those of you really worried about the result of Brexit, a little less need to be so worried, I would say, based on the last few days' data. Basically, the reason, I don't know if you read the morning call from the insights here. Obviously, slightly biased, but I believe these are useful just to set you up for the day. I actually happened to write this one this morning and just sort of mentioned that the basis for the Bank of England's decision to cut interest rates, which is obviously, the betting that that was going to happen is what drove sterling down so much, drove cable down so much, and euro sterling up so much, this move after Brexit was basically the Bank of England were going to do something. They acted really quickly after the Brexit result. Basically, on the back of the big, sharp drop in services and manufacturing PMIs in July, they have both rebounded hugely back to levels way pre-Brexit to sort of highest levels since going back to March this year. So, stronger than they were in all this opposed uncertainty leading into the vote, well into an expansion again. So, the economic data is not really supporting the Brexit's going to cause us a big problems narrative. And if you've been following, Michael and I have been saying, we've been saying that this is, of course, the economy could roll into a recession. Who knows what happens down the line. But there's just this supposed uncertainty.  You know, if you're consuming your washing machine broken down, are you not going to buy that just because of a political vote about Europe? I don't think so. And so, the data is bearing it out now. So, that is all quite supportive of sterling. And you can see that this is the daily candlestick chart of the British pound, kind of sorry, I'm moving it around a bit too much here. This is the range that we've been in. These were the lows down at 128. We've got as high as 135 in that kind of initial rebound. And then we've been we've been stuck in that 129 to 135 Tiberia since. But to my mind, this move above the 50 day moving average, the slight peep above that high from August suggests that we're making our way towards a breakout from the range to the upside. That obviously depends largely on what the Bank of England decide to do. But this data would suggest they're not going to do much more in terms of easing policy. We do have some hard data from the UK this week. So, we've got UK industrial production and the trade balance. But probably more important, we do have Mark Carney along with a few other UK central bankers talking on Wednesday in front of the Treasury Select Committee, the politicians, and might have a bit of explaining to do. Why have they cut interest rates when the economy just seems to be doing absolutely fine? To my mind, they acted too hastily and a lot of politicians are going to be accusing them of the same. They do have a pretty solid defense though. They're just going to say, well, you know, maybe the cut in interest rates help the confidence and that's why the economy's recovered is partly because of what we've done. Pretty spurious, I would say. There was some day to the other day that mortgage rates basically haven't been affected by this last interest rate cut. So, how that's exactly benefiting people is unknown to me. Nonetheless, that would probably be what we hear on Wednesday and that could affect whether we get a daily or weekly close above this previous swing point. That's the first important level, I would say, is the 3370 and these were a couple of kind of real spike highs. I'm just short of 135 but it's 135 that we need to get above ready to confirm that we're out of this trading range and going to make bigger headway into that Brexit drop. So, jumping around a bit, I know in terms of qualities, currencies and things, let me get back to the indices. A general state of play is how we go through things. I'll start with the U.S. I've got someone requesting the NASDAQ and the US30, so I'll start with the US30, I'll follow that a lot. NASDAQ, I don't update as much but obviously these things are all fairly correlated. This, I actually did a weekly update, sorry, a chart forum update today, this one up in the corner based on the weekly chart, you can see here, one week, just because I think it's kind of notable that this was the previous record high from May last year and we've broken above it obviously. We've been making a series of record highs in US markets this year but really looking at this chart, it's just sideways isn't it? We've broken above it, we've made this high and we've really not done much beyond the kind of second week after breaking higher, we've just kind of chopped along there and the bottom of the range has basically been that old record high. So, to my mind, always good to have a top-down view, I think if we get a weekly close below 18, what am I calling that, 18 370 I believe, that's making the picture look a lot shakier for US stock markets. Maybe not falling off a cliff but maybe just meaning a retest of 18 thousand and then you know once we get to that level then obviously questions get re-asked, we need to see a close below there to see further downside. The end of the day central banks are pretty supportive of markets, they're always putting a bit of a floor under but it's a matter of whether some other issue like European banks, whatever the case is, can create enough fear in the markets to at least see a sort of temporary bigger drop. Scaling down things a little bit here, you can see the range a bit better on the daily chart, so this support here, this swing low on the daily chart has worked pretty well and we're getting a bit of it to kind of short-term, double bottom in around the 18, 3, 40-ish, a fake out there on Thursday and then obviously they're kind of the strong response to the jobs numbers on Friday and today we're obviously going nowhere because US markets are closed for Labor Day. So to my mind, the next point is whether we can get a, this is really to me the main swing high that's next in line is this 18, 5, 70, it's still in the middle of this range that we've been talking about but that would be the next step to suggest that we can actually push up again through these record peaks. Looking at momentum, we're sort of, you know, we're kind of giving up the ghost a little bit here, you know, if we can get to an oversold level and the markets still above the highs, you know, that's actually a positive reversal on RSI and that's a bullish sign price holding up despite lower momentum. But it does sort of look like we're getting a bit exhausted here in US markets, unable to push higher and it's unclear what the next catalyst to be to really justify the next big rally. So obviously a similar picture on the NASDAQ and obviously what's notable here is I've had that pink line in my chart, God knows how long, that's basically the old record high on the cash index for 816, you know, our charts don't even go back to 19, what was it, 1999 when the NASDAQ topped in the dot-com crash. Worth noting that long-term trend line break out here suggesting there is a bit more to this than just retesting the high, but understandably the record high from the dot-com boom, a serious psychological level. Well done if any of you, long than NASDAQ in 1999 and held on until now, you now break even. But obviously we're struggling at this top and it's kind of corresponds with that sideways range that we saw in the US 30, we're seeing a similar thing here. To my mind the kind of level of note is just a swing high from August 1st, you can see a series of false breakdowns there. So if we actually get a close below that, then we're running into this previous zone of support that you can basically see from these kind of recent swing highs from last year. And I think probably the default assumption would be that 4,700, probably the lower bound of that range would act as some sort of support. Should that give way, then obviously looking at the previous swing high down at 4, which happens again to be the around number again, 4,600. These markets are all trending higher in my mind, but just looking a bit exhausted. So maybe some opportunity, don't get too caught up in the fear of a sell-off, because they could be an opportunity to get him. So looking back to UK markets now, we're kind of in a state of play at the moment where the FTSE 100 had a big rebound off the Brexit low thanks in part to the drop in cable, the drop in the British pound which made all these multinational earnings, foreign earnings, worth more when they repatriated them back into British pounds. So there's obviously less of that effect when the pound recovers. So actually, we'll almost get into a stage where good economic data for the UK is bad for the FTSE 100, because the pound has swung around so much. So you note today that the FTSE 250 is higher, that's all a bit domestically focused, the FTSE 100 is lower, only marginally. And this was a good breakout on Friday, out of this kind of sluggish down range that we'd had for the previous couple of weeks. And to my mind, that is a sign that we're going to be able to push above that August 15 high. Obviously that's the next plane resistance level, and then you can see from the higher time frame, I would put the resistance in at this kind of, this was a little interim swing high in here, and you can see it's basically that range, so isn't it? I would say it starts around 770 and goes up to those record peaks, which on our charts about 7125. I think there's a good chance, because again looking at this, obviously it's solid there, solid breakout post-Brexit, and then we've been trending higher, higher low, and then another higher low looks like it's being formed here after having bounced off. It's hard to see, but this candle is a kind of swing high, because it's, we've got a lower candle on that side, and obviously a series of lower candles on that side. So this, this was kind of the level that we got that strong rebound off last week on the jobs day, and again you can see it a bit more clearly. That was that weekly swing, and then we had a few false breaks above it, drop below, and then retest. So resistance becomes support as what we're getting. Any other markets that you want me to cover, please do let me know. I'm going to move on to the Germany 13 next. We do have a bit of European data this week, but that's all going to be pretty well over shadowed by the European Central Bank on Thursday. No one's really expecting them to do anything in terms of cutting interest rates, or easing one at policy in any way, because well basically there's not really the kind of data to justify it. Obviously the UK data is recovered. We saw a bit of a drop in the German services PMI today, but I would be, you know, the other countries actually saw an increase. So it would be a struggle for the ECB to warrant doing anything based on the European economic data, which is mostly held up. Even immediately afterwards all the kind of business confidence ZEW type surveys, they were okay. So that said, probably no interest rate cut. The time the data comes out as always with the ECB is 1245 London time on Thursday, but then the important thing will be the 130 PM on Thursday will be the press conference. And what we could see is them revise down their economic projections, sort of going along with the Bank of England narrative that Brexit is really going to harm the European economy, or at least do some sort of negative damage to it. And so that could mean some weakness in the euro, and could mean a bit of positivity for for German markets like the Germany 30, other European markets that benefit from a weaker euro. So I'm wondering what that random pink line is. It's quite a well-defined trend line here. It doesn't work from the previous peak. It kind of does work if that's like an aberration. But you can see it works pretty well through these peaks down here. We paused at it, we pulled back right to it now. So the fact that we came up to it, pulled back, and now we're up to it again. Is the sort of action that would suggest a break higher? And obviously that matches you know, looking at the UK 100, that pulled back to the previous weekly swing high and then a move higher. It's a similar sort of action. So they're all kind of working well together the indices suggesting the continuation of the high. But obviously you need that you need that break above the break above and close above the high to confirm you're in the new trend.  I would put the kind of interim support levels that these two swing highs here would have got a little false break of there and eventually broke higher on Friday. I would say that short-term resistance is next support. But if that gives way then we probably are looking back to that daily swing low back in the sort of, I've said 10, 490 but really obviously 10, 500 is the round number. How are we doing at the time? Yeah, we're okay. So we've got about seven minutes left. So we've had to look at cable. Well, since we're just talking about the the ECB, I'll have a quick look at the euro. I know someone's asked about Dolly Yen. I'll certainly look at that next. Euro greater scheme of things is very much in a range. We need a break above basically 115, a close above 115 ish to to show that we're out of this sideways market equally to the downside which doesn't look as likely at the moment. We'll be a close below 105. So we had an inside week only just about pushed a little bit to the downside and we're kind of holding on to that that support at the moment will be basically in the middle of a kind of smaller range. So the bigger range is 105 to 115. We're in a kind of smaller range of basically 109 to sort of 114 at the moment. And so we see that's 200 day moving average kind of basically flat drifting through the middle of the trading range. And to my mind the action recently is that of support giving way and a previous support acting as resistance. So we've got the 200 day moving average below us but to my mind the support held went back to previous support sold off. To my mind the next logical action would be a move down to the previous swing low down here at the sort of 104 45. But again it's not a great trending environment so not as easy for trade. And it's been like that for a while in the Euro dollar. Dolly Yen definitely getting interesting. I mean Michael and I were highlighting the chance of a double bottom at 100 pretty much since we got there and it's starting to pan out. One of the extra reasons to believe that we might be seeing a bottom here in the Dolly Yen is we had a break above this pretty nicely well-defined downsloping trend line which has been working to some extent in coordination with the 50 day moving average. So we had some chat from the Bank of Japan's Coroda overnight. What he was saying is that everything's still on the table in terms of the Bank of Japan easing monetary policy so they could cut rates further they could do more QE they could buy different kinds of assets. So he's saying we've still got plenty more we can do. Basically what you can interpret from this action today is the market doesn't really buy it because dollars dropping the Yen strengthening. His comments would suggest if they're going to do more policy easing that the Yen should weaken. There's been a bit of a belief in that which has pushed the market higher but you know I would say probably the reason we're seeing a bottom carved out here in Dolly Yen is that that the Bank of Japan are still easing policy they're probably not going to ease much more but obviously what we're kind of gradually edging our way towards is a federal reserve rate hike. So it's the dollar strength playing out here more than the more than the Yen weakness. But nonetheless we've had a breakout we're testing this trend line here so you know we're sitting right on this broken trend line at the moment you know here down to this swing low at the sort of 102 80s is sort of interim support in the belief this trend line break held holds. If we get a false break of this trend line and get a deeper pull back then this sort of 101 75 which is this little swing low here to the 102 round number you know that kind of fits in about with a a 50 percent retracement I believe. Yeah you can see that's based in almost exactly a 50 percent retracement of this up move would be at 102 and then you've got that swing low at 101 75 just below it if we get there so you know looking at this kind of areas potential support for the move above the trend line to continue if not you know this is a little combination of support areas down here. And just we've already covered all so I think I'll just round things off here with with with gold. That's it well I'll leave my short term chart alone let's go to my so so we highlighted this last week we got again you know some sort of same old style of analysis we're looking at these long term swing highs so you know swing high low high low and then I mentioned at the webinar last week that hey we're approaching this previous swing high in combination with this swing low here so that's a confluence of support and obviously with the we had the non-farm payrolls ahead of us there was good chance there was going to be some movement in gold and we've got a nice hammer reversal here there's not been a bit much of a preceding trend so I can't really call it a hammer it just looks like a hammer in terms of the candle but not obviously a long wick suggesting some buying interest off that previous swing how you'd interpret that would be that you know resistance to support you know and then we're going up to retest resistance again so again dropping down to the daily chart we're holding this swing low at the moment so you know obviously the kind of opposite effect swing low turning into resistance on the on the on the upside but I would imagine that we're going to push through that and so then the next area of resistance would be the sort of 132 to 145 but we had quite a sharp reaction there that obviously quite a big sell-off from that point might be a bit of a difficult one to get through initially and so then some chance for a pullback to whether we you know maybe this 103 30 again I'm getting a bit ahead of myself we actually get above here and then maybe a drop to here and then up to the top of the range again is this sort of thing I'm looking to to play out here obviously you've got to be prepared for being wrong and you know if we get a drop right down through this this support here then I think that the game has changed and we're probably looking for a pretty sharp drop down into the one 260 so as long as you're able to sort of change your mindset if that support gives way could be a quite decent run because obviously we don't have too much in the way of support given this big jump that we had back in June on the I assume what was a good old but yeah on the the Brexit day obviously so that is it so we've got the ECB this week we've obviously had some interesting server sector server sector data from the UK building up nicely from Art Kearney talking on Wednesday not too much in the way of kind of corporate earnings but obviously we're back into September now so we're kind of moving out of summer trading it's a shortened week for the US but we could be back in business starting tomorrow when the US is trading again thank you very much for attending today good luck with your trading this week and it's Jasper Law signing out


The supergrade concept, I think it's fairly self-evident that Ireland can benefit from that and it's no surprise really that it was an Irishman who came up with the idea to begin with. So I'm going to talk more about smart grid in Ireland, the smart grid concept. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about the imperative to move to a smart grid here, the potential for smart grids for Ireland and current smart grid activity if I can get through it all in the 20 minutes allotted. But I'll preface it by saying I think as David said, smart grid does mean different things to different markets and to different countries and regions. The one thing that it always does mean is that it's communication and information technology embedded within an energy system. And I'm just going to try to identify for Ireland what it means. So why will we move to a smart grid? We don't have any particular targets or policy objectives that say we must deploy a smart grid. The closest to that we have is a government directive saying we had to look at the cost benefit of smart metering and we have done that. But we don't have a target for that. We do have targets for reducing our energy use and greening our energy supply. And smart grids can help us to do that in a more efficient manner. If we just look at where we are today in our electricity, electricity provides 17% of our total final consumption. So we actually use more direct energy for transport and for heat than we do for electricity. And our current consumption is about 24,000 gigawatt hours. That compares to UK, which has over 10 times that, 328,000 gigawatt hours. So we're small. And our CO2 intensity is something that has decreased significantly over the last 10 years. You see here current 2010 levels, the average was about 475, I think it's actually grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. I think somebody did this for me and gave me the wrong number. Our 2007 level, our 2005 level was 674. And that's down from 2000 when the number was over 800. And that has been driven by a move towards more efficient plants, CCGT generation plants. And then in the last number of years, by the large deployments of renewables onto the system. Our max demand is 5,000 megawatts, that was in December last year. We have installed dispatchable capacity about 6,800 as of December 2010. And installed renewables as of June of 1789 and 1450 of that is renewables. And you don't have to remember all those numbers. They won't be important later on, but they do give a context of where we are as an energy user. So I did say we had targets. So we have a renewables target under the EU's 2020 directive, 16% by 2020. And we expect to meet that by 40% of our electricity source coming from renewable energy, 10% of our transport coming from renewable energy. And we have an additional target of 10% of our passenger vehicles to be electric. And then a 20% energy efficiency target. And all of those targets have plans that are published by our Department of Energy here. The National Energy Efficiency Action Plan and the National Renewable Energy Action Plan. So the plans are in place, but they are by no means easy to achieve. These are challenging targets. And we have an additional EU target of reaching our 20% reduction of our carbon emissions in the non-EU ETS sector. And this is a fairly strange and tricky slide and concept to get across. But I think it's an important one when we think about smart grids. And you see here that the orange is those parts of our economy that are within the emissions trading system. The green are in the non-emissions trading system. We expect, we project that by 2020, we'll have reduced emissions 27% below our 2005 level. And our target is 20%. So that sounds good, except when you look at the split between the amounts that's in the emissions trading sector, they're 35% below. The rest of us are 17% below. The emissions trading sector includes those people who are big emitters, but most importantly, it includes the electricity system, the electricity generators. So if you think about how this interacts with our other policy directives, the more that we green our electricity sector, the more wind we put on our sector, the more decreased they have in the emissions trading system side. So we don't actually get the benefit towards the national target of 20%. And then the other thing is it creates an incentive for us to move as much of our direct use of energy, our direct burning of energy for transport and for heating towards electricity, because that takes the burden out of the non-emissions trading sector and moves it towards the emissions trading sector. But the interesting thing about that is that it actually ties directly to what we would get from the smart grid concept. So it underlies the smart grid concept. I said that our target was pretty hard. It's already looking hard. This shows the national renewable energy efficiency action plans, projection for how much capacity we would have in renewables between 2010 and 2020. So the pathway, how we're going to get there and already we're below. We're in the middle of 2011. We're expected to have above 2,500 megawatts of renewables by the end of this year. We only have less than 1,800 now. So there's a big hill to climb. There are a lot of reasons that the build rate hasn't been what it was expected to be when this was published. This is probably not the form to talk about it. But one of the issues is really that it is projected to be extremely difficult to operate a system with very high amounts of variable renewable energy. And Ireland's target is the highest. Air Grid presents this quite regularly. We have 38% within our 40% of our target will be met by variable renewable energy. And that's the highest within any EU target that exists under the NREAPs. So we're trying to do something that nobody else is trying to do. And it requires Air Grid to take as a system operator to understand how we operate a system like that. And they've done some fairly cutting-edge work to look at that, including the facilitation of renewable study. And they've also contributed to some work that's being done in the IEA that looks at how you operate a system with very high variable renewables penetration. And this shows essentially what that piece of work said, which is that operating that kind of a system requires a flexible energy system. It requires a flexible electricity system and a lot of flexibility available to system operators. So these are some of the means of getting flexibility that were identified within that study. So market and system operation changes. And so that includes things like offering day ahead pricing, offering ancillary services markets, shorter gate closure periods, sharing balancing across markets, as Ana had referred to. Curtainment of variable renewables, it's not a nice way to get it, but it does provide flexibility. Demand side participation is, I think, the bit that we'd like to see, providing some more flexibility, interconnection, storage, gas cycling, and coal cycling as well. But I circle here the two that really tie this smart grid concept together. If you can make the market and system operation changes that allow pricing, to give a price signal, then you can allow demand side, as well as the other means of flexible generation, to respond to that price. And the cheapest will respond. The market will bring the cheapest forward. And I suppose it's our view that demand side should be one of the cheapest. Longer term targets then. We only really have one at this point, which is the 2050 target, to reduce our emissions to 80% from 1990 levels by the year 2050. We don't have national targets beyond 2020, but we expect we will do before too long. But we have that very big and challenging 2050 target to look at that the EU is adopting. So SEAI and EPA together commissioned UCC, Ryan Gallahore's group, to look at or to adapt the times model, which is, again, developed by the IEA, to adapt that to Ireland, to essentially build the Irish times model. And they've done that. It's a bottom up cost optimization model. It solves for a least cost approach to meeting that long term emission reduction target. He looks at the energy sector, the energy sector only in that. But and I would say that it also has some limited intelligence in relation to imports. And a further iteration on the model will look at a regionalized model that will incorporate the UK and potentially France, to the wider electricity market that we'll have going forward. So with this caveat, I would just say it's a starting point to look at how an energy system will work towards a 2050 target. And really we're at a pace where with the smart grid and the smart grid concept being utilized in Ireland, that longer term view is where we can see the real benefits from having that kind of a look. So this is just showing one of the outputs of that work. And I'm just including it to show you really the scale of the reduction that we need. So this is the scale of the challenge of reaching 80% reduction by 2050. And you see that the electricity sector is going to be required to produce around 30, a little over 30% of that total reduction. And the interesting thing is that we won't necessarily get there on the basis of the outputs of this model using less from playing efficiency in relation to electricity. We'll actually use more electricity, but we'll have to use very, very low carbon electricity. I think these numbers are quite low in comparison to some of the things that people look at as targets to drive towards. So 21 grams per kilowatt hour, it's very low. And move on to talk a little bit about the potential for smart grids in Ireland then. And this is going to look similar to what David showed you as to what smart grids can do, because that's really what we want them to do. But the kinds of things that smart grid can enable for us are behavioral changes. So we get more information about energy use to the consumers of energy than they are enabled to have peak demand reduction, demand management, feedback on energy usage, more information. One of the guys that I work with whenever he talks about this sort of thing, he says he refers to the fact that if you went on a diet, you wouldn't do it without scales. You need to have the information. You need to know how much you use in order to monitor how much you're going to reduce and to set goals for that. That said, we don't necessarily want to rely on behavior change to get the sorts of savings that we can get from this. We need to enable technology. So there are a number of other things that enabling technology to respond to information that you can have across the system will give us. So within the transmission and distribution networks, having the more information will allow reduced line losses that allow greater efficiency in how those systems are operated, how the networks are operated. We can, they'll assist in integrating variable generation, especially in the distribution network, allow us to put in more distributed generation, aggregate that distributed generation, use it more efficiently. And then importantly, it will facilitate things like electric vehicles, enabling smart appliances, moving energy to heat, energy use from heat to electrification. And doing all of that within a context of a automated demand reduction system. So the system itself hears the price signals from the energy system. The system in your home and the system in your home tells your washing machine, turn on because it's midnight and there's wind being curtailed somewhere on the system. So we need technology to help us access energy, use savings, maximize our use of our low carbon energy and generate cost savings for our users. So a bit about Ireland and why this is a good place to maybe look at doing these things. We have a small but advanced electricity system, but we're off on the corner of a very big market and we have very light interconnection to that very big market. And this very, very challenging target for variable renewable energy within our system. And that target is going to require us to develop some new operational strategies and market mechanisms and probably we'll need to develop them before other countries. Eventually everybody will have these issues. We're just going to have them first. We're also a single electricity market and I thought it was interesting actually that Anna's presentation showed what they'd like to see in the European level. But we kind of have that already on the island level in that we have one market across the island. We have one transmission system operator, one distribution system operator, common ownership between both of those within the south and the north. And we have regulators that work together on regulating the single electricity market and on a number of other issues. So I think the important thing to note here is that because we were so concentrated in that regard, we can actually get all the important decision makers, a lot of them are already here in one room. That's something that's very attractive to industry. It's very attractive that you can get all of those people together. You can fit them in one room. You couldn't do that with Switzerland where they have something like 500 distribution system operators. So it's a uniqueness to Ireland. Another point to make that I didn't include on the slide, but it came up today at lunch is the fact that some Irish consumers are, I would say in my experience of being here for the last 10 years, the Irish people are very flexible. They're able to respond to changes, respond to changing experiences quite quickly. And in comparison to other places that we talked about where there has been quite a bit of consumer advocacy around responding to things like smart grid and responding to different ways of doing things. In my view, the Irish will respond very positively and quickly towards this. So that will be another advantage to us in developing a smart grid system. We also have a lot of the right companies here already. We have a research infrastructure that is focusing now on combining industry and in partnership with academics. And we have on the one hand, the electricity research center, where that kind of working together developed organically. And on the other hand, you have the international energy research center, which is being developed on the basis that we have some good researchers and the development agency see an opportunity to attract industry to work with those researchers. So you have two perspectives. They work on different sides of the smart grid issue and one on integration issue, one more on the smartening, the building in the energy demand at the site. But the fact that they're both looking at participation between industry and academics I think is something that's very useful here. And we have some innovative smart grid companies already in the indigenous local SMEs. They have capacity around software development, around energy services, energy management services, software, and network technologies. And I'm going to just talk a little bit about how that issue of having the high variability impacts on how our system operates and how it does create an opportunity to use the smart grid concept. And this just shows a picture of what the system demand would have been a couple of days ago. Up on the top, the red line, the system operators will tell you that in the past this is what they operated towards. They operated towards a very predictable, you know, you knew what the demand was going to be. It's a very predictable number of that red line. But now you have the green line on there, the wind generation, and it's not that predictable. You have a forecast and you can operate to the net load or the net forecast of demand that's going to be that day. So the forecast demand, lest the wind, is what you'd operate towards. But even that is going to add more variability into the system because what happens actually might not be what was forecasted to happen. The interesting thing that I'm going to point out here is we have two occurrences in this spot where the net demand actually, the amount of wind on the system would actually be greater than 50% of what the demand is. And part of the operating, and you guys can correct me on this if I'm wrong on this, but I understand it as part of what came out of the Silitation of Renewable Study was that it's safe to operate a system where up to 50% of your demand is met by variable renewable energy. Beyond that, you really need to start looking at other ways to deal with it. So I'm reading that as this is potential for times when you'd have curtailment. But the thing that I think is most interesting is that I just grabbed this because it was the first day I could get 24-hour period when I was doing this. This was just Monday. So if this is the case, we're already curtailing wind on Monday, on just a random day that I picked. I didn't have to go searching for a day we're curtailing wind. We have this issue now. So we have an opportunity to access zero carbon renewables now if we can move demand into that slot. And now I want to just go over. This is going to be another one that's a little bit difficult. It's a new one that I haven't actually presented before. But this is the concept of how you might be able to get some of that demand. And it's trying to get it from residential heating. This is an issue that has been controversial. It's controversial even within SEAI. And I'm going to show you why. And it really is because the CO2 impact of moving towards electrification isn't something that's not as obvious as one might think. So what we've done here is we've taken, say, 200,000 dwellings. And we've looked at the CO2 impact of those dwellings for heating. And this is space heating and water heating. A building built before the 2005 regulations would use about 20,000 kilowatt hours per year for heating. We have now an extensive retrofit program. So we assume that all of those houses, all those 200,000 dwellings, had the retrofit program applied to them. So they have very good insulation. They've essentially minimized the amount of heat that they need. So it cuts that in half. So they're about now 10,000 kilowatt hours. And the emissions implications of those are the CO2 emissions that you see on the left-hand side. And that's the implications of using a combination of oil and heating, because we're trying to get the whole country represented here in order to meet that demand for heat. So then we looked at, well, what happens if you, two minutes, okay. What happens if you do that via electricity, rather? And so we looked at electricity that had the CO2 intensity of the 2005 electricity. And you see that it has very big impact on carbon emissions. It doesn't look good. And even if you look at 2010, when we've already decarbonized significantly, it's still not, you don't get the benefit of the retrofit that you've done. And even if we look at 2020, we've met our 40% target. We have a lot of wind on the system. The carbon intensity projected then is still such that it's less carbon intensive to just burn gas in your house or oil. But the interesting thing here is this relies on an average over the year CO2 intensity. And averages don't really mean anything when you're running an electricity system, and the dispatch changes every 15 minutes. So if you look, if you assume that you can take all the bits of that heating that are discretionary, and what we assumed was 3,500 of those kilowatt hours are for water heating. And we all have cylinders that have good insulation. We certainly will have cylinders of good insulation on them if we've had a retrofit done on our house. And then another 1,500 kilowatt hours can be discretionary because the heat doesn't necessarily have to come on exactly when you need it. It could come on before, and you can store some heat. This is with technology today, and this is assuming you can take that discretionary heat and move that towards the time when you have that zero carbon electricity available to you. And suddenly electrification of residential heat makes some sense. This is, as I say, there are policies in place that are in EU-based policies that militate against this at the moment, but it's an area where I think Ireland has the potential to lead Europe in moving the debate on, moving the debate towards militating for electrification of heat rather than against it, but when you're able to do it with a smart grid system. I'm going to just kind of cruise through the rest of these because I don't really have time, and I just want to give you a few things. There are a few more, and you can refer to these in your package, a few more slides that show the outputs from the times, and they just really show that for the 80% reduction, we actually will use more electricity in heat and electrification, but we'll have to really move the CO2 intensity of that electricity significantly down, and we'll need to do that by greening our electricity supply. I just wanted to show you the last ones of these, and it really just shows that, as I just said, we actually, on the 80% case, we use more than we would in the business as usual case, electricity, but that electricity is significantly less carbon-intensive than it would be in the business as usual case. So, smart grid road map, this is something that was referred to by Dermott, and this is something we'll be producing later this year. We're still working with a group that includes the regulated energy, infrastructure companies, the development agencies ourselves, the regulator, and our department that are helping us put together this road map. There are a number of things that we know will happen. A smart meter rollout hasn't been decided yet, however, a lot of reports have come out that points towards a positive outcome there. And a lot of things that could happen, and we'd like to see, for instance, a demonstration of a test bed, that's something I think is very good. We know we will see development of system operation program to enhance system flexibility, and Fintans Lye, who's here, is going to be leading that effort for Air Grid. And longer term, there are a number of other things we'd be looking at that we don't know will happen, but we'd expect to happen. And as I say, we'll be working on this and publishing something by the end of the year. There are a couple of things on current smart grid activities I was intending to show you. The smart meter trial, I think, is the one to really highlight. If you don't know about the results, it's worth looking at. It was the most robust trial of customer behavior that has been done. It's statistically significant for a representative of the entire population of users in Ireland, and it showed that with time of use tariffs, static time of use tariffs, and in home displays, we could get savings of 3% overall in electricity use and 11% at peak time. So 11% that's moving, flexible demand that can help those periods of time when we have low carbon energy available to us. The cost-benefit analysis, as I said, it points to positive direction for most of the scenarios that were considered. There are a number of additional trials underway. I'm not gonna go through them. I'm just gonna say there are a number that are underway, but there's an awful lot more that we can be doing in terms of trialing this technology.  We'll hope to see come out of the smart grid roadmap. The last thing I wanted to point out is the demand side vision paper that was published by the CER. And the regulator in Northern Ireland recently. This is, I think, something that kind of happened fairly quietly, but it's potentially very, very useful and groundbreaking, really. And that we have a regulator who's not only identified the high potential opportunities for the use of demand side and really for the smart grid concept, including dynamic time of use tariffs, which we'd have to have in order to really capitalize on that opportunity that I was really trying to elucidate where we get demand that can respond to the times that you have a price signal that tells you that there's low carbon energy available to you. And they've also stated that a number of priority actions will be followed through by themselves and the regulator in Northern Ireland working with the regulated asset companies. And they're all very positive for the development of smart grids here because, as David pointed out, regulation is one of the key elements of this. So we have a regulator who's positively engaged in this and that's something to really be, hopefully, be thankful for going forward. So I'm gonna end it there. Actually, I'm not gonna tell you my conclusions because I think you got the gist that I wanted to give you and the time is running out. But I do wanna point out that we have developed a virtual picture of what a smart grid looks like and it's an animated. I was gonna show it to you but the technology wasn't able to do it. But I've given you the link to that on the SCAI website and it's a nice thing to look at to see how a smart grid is, how we would expect a smart grid to work and how it would interact with a building, office building and a home. And it can give you that picture and it's something, hopefully, worth looking at. Okay.


Well, hello there folks. Welcome to another episode of The Joy of Miniature Painting. I'm Caleb Thompson, and I'll be your host for the evening. I have pre-recorded this talk. This is allowing me to focus on the live painting performance. As it turns out, I am terrible at multitasking. I would have to pause whenever speaking. And I don't think I'd get everything covered that I want to. Caleb, sit up straight. I paint. Whenever I tell people that, they understandably assume I mean on a canvas. I paint miniatures. Tonight, we'll be painting Reinhold, Gobber Speculator. He's a happy little miniature used in the tabletop game War Machine. We want happy paintings. Happy paintings. If you want sad things, watch the news. In miniature painting, there are numerous techniques which can be used. Many of these, such as striping, glazing, or tube brush blending, are time consuming. Others, like pigment shading or zenithal highlighting, involve additional supplies beyond brushes and paint. If you've done any painting on canvas or elsewhere, you may recognize some of these terms. They're really not unique to miniature painting. They're just techniques we've appropriated. In the interest of time, and because I would like to be able to complete something today, I'll be going over just a few tools in a painter's utility belt. Dry brushing, washing, and base coating. I can't go over 45 minutes, because we have a menal organizer with no sense of humor. Painting is sort of a general term. I also dabble in things like converting miniatures by changing them from what their sculptor intended, changing a pose or swapping body parts, in basing them by giving them interesting surroundings that help bring the models to life, by showing them running over rocks on a bridge or crouching behind a fallen pillar, and in building terrain to make the battleground more interesting than a flat, wide-open field of green grass. There are less glamorous parts of the hobby, like cleaning mold lines, or picking the superglue out from under my fingernails after I assemble bits. But most of my time is spent painting. That's good, because it's the most exciting to me. Painting is my hobby. It gives me an outlet from work that I find more satisfying than lying on the couch and watching Netflix. It lets me step away from the technical and interpersonal demands of my job. It uses the creative, imaginative half of my brain that gets less exercised than the logical analytical hemisphere. I can lose myself for hours getting the right wet blended color gradient for a rippling cloak, or finding that perfect transition between the shadows and highlights of a muscular arm. I'm pretty terrible at freehanding wood grain, but I do that too. Having a hobby is super important. People with hobbies are generally healthier. They're also at a much lower risk for depression and dementia. I came into this hobby already depressed. Painting helps me forget that. As all miniature painters soon learn, there are a few super easy ways to take a flat and boring piece and give it vibrancy and visual interest. The very first step of painting a model is to base coat it. This is the step where you throw down the base color of each section. Paint a leather belt in a mid brown. Stone is gray. Cloth might be green or blue or red. When applying the paint, we usually want to add some amount of water to thin the paint. The amount can change drastically based on the brand of paint and even on the specific color. A common description of the desired result when thinning is that the paint should have the consistency of skim milk. Just a little bit thicker than water. That's not super useful. From what I've been able to gather, when people say that, they're mostly regurgitating something that they've been told. But a painter does get a feel for the right amount of water for a paint through some amount of trial and error. For base coating, you might want somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 1 paint to water. Other painting may be closer to 1 to 1 as desired. Why are we thinning down the paints that we paid so much money for? Doing so prevents them from clogging small details on the model's sculpt. And it allows for a much smoother coat. Think about it this way. When we paint the walls of our houses, we want to fill in tack and nail holes. We accomplish this by using undiluted paint straight from the bucket. Roll it right onto the wall and all our sins are forgiven. In a miniature, a lot of details aren't even that large. Thinning the paint helps keep from losing those details. In my experience, not thinning your paint sufficiently, especially during the base coat step, is the only thing you can't come back from by staying calm and thinking about how to fix something. This is why you see real life me painting a miniature with some paint already on it. I base-coated ahead of time because it's a little bit boring to watch. I wouldn't do that to you. Don't worry, it's like a 3D coloring book. It can be fun. A base-coated miniature could totally be used in a game. Any way you want it to be, that's just right. But there are some tricks you can use to get a better looking model without much more work. And it really makes all that time spent base-coating. The first is shading. This is the process of relatively brightening some colors in your model by darkening the parts where the light doesn't shine as much. The simplest way to shade is to use a premixed wash liberally over an area of the model. Highly textured areas work really well for this. Chainmail? Throw black shade over the gray or metallic paint. Hair? Use brown or even a blue shade to add depth and character to the area. Caleb, show these nice folks how shading works. Go ahead, I'll wait. This talk has changed a little bit, as you might have guessed. This model is now shaded. It started pretty white. It started pretty white. You wouldn't have been able to see any of the details in here, especially like in here. This is a very textured belt, and you can start to pick some of that out. Now, this piece back here is actually pretty clear if you're sitting where I'm sitting, but not where you are. Anyways, the idea is that I basically just watered down the black paint really well and slopped it all over the whole model, and it sunk into all of these cracks and crevices, and it's pretty dark now, and storm troopers as we know are very white and clean, but you do still need to see those shadows to set that up. So, I'm going to bring back the whites now while I keep talking. While the paint dries on that, I'd like to talk about something more serious. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the most important aspects of this model is that I'd like to talk about something more serious. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in four adults in America experiences mental illness. These can include schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and others. Yet, approximately 60% of adults do not seek treatment. Mental illness affects our work and personal lives. A serious mental illness costs America almost $200 billion in lost earnings each year. I want you to look around the room. I'd like to talk about something more serious. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in four adults in America experiences mental illness. These can include schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and others. Yet, approximately 60% of adults do not seek treatment. Mental illness affects our work and personal lives. A serious mental illness costs America almost $200 billion in lost earnings each year. I want you to look around the room. One in four of us is probably suffering from some sort of mental health issue. And yet, there's a stigma around mental health issues. We're afraid that if we admit to being sick, others will judge us for it. We're afraid to seek treatment for it for fear that others will find out. And sometimes we even create false limits for ourselves, because we are unsure whether we will be able to succeed. I encourage you, if you feel that you may have some illness, to seek help. You should be able to feel comfortable going to friends or close coworkers to discuss things like this. Certainly, feel free to come and talk to me. Sometimes just talking through these things helps out a lot. Then again, sometimes we need a little bit more help from a professional. We shouldn't be afraid to do that either. This is your bravery test. How we interact with each other is really important. We need to be sensitive to each other's situations, cognizant that we may not know all there is to know about them. We need to be available and supportive of our friends and peers. There are some much smarter people than me talking about this. People like Ed Finckler and Jenna Cullian. You can find a few of them on mentalhealthprompt, mhprompt.org. This is a wonderful organization dedicated to get the conversation going to help people working in the tech industry affected by mental health issues. And that's the biggest way we can make a change. We can beat the stigma around mental health by simply talking about it more.  Once the wash is dried, we can move on to the simplest way to highlight an area. Dry brushing. With dry brushing, we break our paint-thinning rule. Usually done with a brush with firmer bristles and without a point, dry brushing takes undiluted or only slightly diluted paint and applies it very lightly over an area. This is accomplished by taking the lighter-colored paint onto the brush, then wiping most of it off onto a rag or a paper towel or the back of your hand. This is the hardest part of this method. If you can do this, you can do anything. Once there's almost no paint left, we can lightly run the brush over a textured area to leave the paint mostly on the highest areas with the sharpest corners. Shwoop! You have to make those little noises or it just doesn't work. These are the opposite of the dark areas that the wash settled into and they leave us with a really cool progression of light to dark paint. I didn't give myself a prompt on that one, but I do want to show you a little bit about how dry brushing works. We're going to see how this works because both of my brushes are very wet. Sort of closely, the light reflects just right. You can see some of the texture in here. But we're going to see if we can bring it out a little bit more so that it looks like these two areas that have been dry brushed. I'm going to take some white paint, grab a little bit of that and wipe most of it off here. Then just on the back of my hand, I'm going to keep going until there's not a lot coming off. Then right over these areas, I'm going to real gently run the brush over. It's too heavy. I really want almost nothing coming off. So, these brushes are pretty wet but I'm still getting a decent effect. Like I said, you can come back from quite a bit of this if you know how to do it. So, I've covered up a lot of the flat areas with white that I didn't want covered. I'm just going to go back over them with the black and I'll end up still having a pretty good edging going without having lost too much of the original color. The nice thing is that you can go back and forth over these quite a bit until you've got just the effect that you want. Careful demonstration and I'm sorry. So, this is all stuff that I learned before I ever picked up a brush. I got into the hobby with a co-worker as an excuse to spend more time with him and to learn a new thing. We went out and bought $100 worth of miniatures and supplies but we were too afraid to start. We watched YouTube tutorials together for days. The secret to doing anything is believing that you can do it. Anything that you believe you can do strongly enough, you can do. Anything. As long as you believe. There's a little bit more generally about hobbies. Since I'm the one on stage, I guess that means I get to do that. I promised I'd talk about how hobbies can prevent burnout. In the original title of this talk, Painting Miniatures to Stay Fresh, the concept of Stay Fresh was more about not getting tired of what you're doing than acknowledging how cool you are. And you are. Yep, you. Burnout is a form of psychological stress and vital exhaustion. While the American Psychiatric Association does not consider it a disorder, it is recognized by the World Health Organization. For our purposes, we can say that it is a mental health disorder. Burnout manifests as being tired and without energy, feeling demoralized and increased irritability. According to the MacArthur Foundation, it's been suggested that it can be a result of resources for adapting to stress being broken down. You may have heard the metaphor of a battery representing the certain amount of mental energy available to us each day. As we use this energy to solve a problem or interact with each other, that reserve is depleted and we need to find some way to recharge it. It's different for everyone. Burnout can be considered similarly. We have a certain amount of battery for dealing with the stresses presented to us by our work, by writing code, and just by sitting in front of a computer. We all recharge differently, but for many people, doing something very different than what they're burned out on is what's most effective. People with Type A behavior patterns are more likely to be affected by burnout according to the World Health Organization's International Statistical Classifications of Diseases. Type A personality is characterized by high ambition, desire for achievement, impatience, competitiveness, and a sense of urgency. Some or all of these traits are present in many of us, and I certainly recognize some of these in myself. Doing something creative and challenging that has nothing to do with computers helps to break up the concepts of work and play. Do you ever go home and still have some work problem churning in the back of your mind? I don't know about you, but it's not uncommon for me to untangle that sort of thing as soon as I stop thinking about it consciously. Hobbies like painting are a great way to be focused on one task and unconsciously working through other things. You wouldn't believe how helpful it is to just step away. I know this is somewhat uncouth advice in a culture that pushes developers to always be ahead of the curve, but step away from the computer. I have found not sitting in front of a computer to be very effective at increasing my happiness and in preventing and reversing professional burnout. A healthy work-life balance is, to me, far more important than always being familiar with the latest JavaScript framework. A new way to work through work is to be prepared to get to a better and more efficient job. I've been working through these months with a number of my friends and they've all been working on a lot of these. I've worked with them since I was a little kid, and I've worked with them since I was a little kid. I've worked with them for a long time, and after I got back from work, I've worked with them for a long time. far more important than always being familiar with the latest JavaScript framework. We've known about this sort of thing for a long time. In the 1880s, organized labor groups petitioning for 8-hour work days used the slogan 8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for what we will. Hobbies are great for building relationships and for meeting new people. They usually involve some sort of an accomplishment. With painting I want to show off my best models to people. By the way they're up here and I'd love to show them to you when we're done talking. Bird watchers want to brag about the rare species they saw. Grease monkeys might want to share the roar of the engine in the feeling of a smooth acceleration. Hobbies give introverts like me an excuse to talk to people who they wouldn't otherwise meet. They're also a great way to recharge. We all want to be around people, yes even us introverts. But we also need time alone. I can paint with others around or alone at home. I can paint at home and then show off to my friends later. Or I can paint with others and take my masterpieces back and put them into my showcase. Some hobbies even let us make money. Hobbies like Etsy are a great way to start selling custom leather work or knitting. If you don't have one already consider starting a hobby. Write poetry. Join an improv club. Learn to work wood. Paint. Whatever you do get away from the glowing boxes we surround ourselves with so much as developers. It will give you time alone, an excuse to geek out with others and accomplishments to share. It will help you to meet new people and to prevent burnout at work. If you're very, very lucky it will even make you happier. I'm about to wrap up here. I'd like to thank my employer, Thoughtbot, for both allowing me to come and chat with y'all and for enabling me to do so by covering my costs. Thoughtbot is a fantastic place to work and they do a lot to help prevent occupational stresses. If you're interested in working with us please do come talk to me about that. We're a design and development consultancy and if you have a product that could use an expert hand I'd love to chat about that as well. I also co-organize Keep Ruby Weird, a Ruby conference up in Austin. We'll be back in October of next year and I hope to see y'all there. For more on mental health, conferences and painting follow me on Twitter at Caleb Thompson.  Back when I was growing up he'd be on PBS. My parents would watch him sometimes. He always bored me back then. But in preparing for this talk I watched a lot of The Joy of Painting. And he's just a very happy, calming gentleman. If you ever watched any of The Joy of Painting you may have noticed that there are quite a few Bob Ross quotes in this talk. And of course I'm dressed up as him right now. So thank you Bob. From all of us here I'd like to wish you happy painting and we'll see you next time.


Welcome to Cointelegraph's Poetry Minute. The Mass Adoption of Blockchain Technology, a poem by K.F. Kelvin St. Bernard. First, they came with mathematics, and I did not understand, for I am not a nerd. Then they came with cryptography, and I did not understand. For I had better ships to do, then they came with Bitcoin, and I did not understand. For I have only $50 in my bank accounts, then they came with ICOs, and I still did not understand. For I was watching Game of Thrones, then they came with Crypto Kittens. Now, I understand. It is in my head, a technology that will reshape the world, the future, an immutable, transparent, decentralized... So this has been the Poetry Minute with Cointelegraph Media. Please, don't forget to subscribe, and if you have a blockchain-related poem in mind, leave it in the comments below with an actor you'd like to hear read it, and we'll track them down for you. Thank you, and good night.