• Question: What is the biggest project you have taken part in?

    Asked by birchy2712 to Hilly, Lee, Liz, Tadhg, Yasmin on 22 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by DarkDestroyer13, xx.
    • Photo: Tadhg O'Donovan

      Tadhg O'Donovan answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      Hi @birchy2712, @DarkDestroyer13 and @xx,

      My biggest project so far has been to design, build and install a solar power plant in rural India; this will bring electricity to a community for the first time!

      The community is about 200km from Kolkata (Calcutta) and we will install some large mirrors to focus the sun on some very efficient (42%) solar panels to generate electricity. During the day we will generate much more than the community needs, so we’ll use the electricity to generate hydrogen – that we we can store the energy and at night – or later in the year (on cloudy days) we can burn the hydrogen to generate electricity.

      There are lots of technical challenges, but also societal challenges – as the community is not used to having street lighting or air conditioning etc etc. Our solar power plant will also improve their health, as it will power a small health clinic.

      It’s really exciting to see all this happen! The project has taken nearly 3.5 years and cost £3 million, and has about 15 engineers and researchers working on it!

    • Photo: Lee Margetts

      Lee Margetts answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      I’ve done some work with the Nuclear Fusion community. The joke is that energy generation from Fusion will be available in 50 years time. That is as true today as it was 30 years ago. A prototype Fusion reactor called ITER will be built in the south of France and will cost tens of billions euros.

    • Photo: Yasmin Ali

      Yasmin Ali answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      The work I’m doing now is on a really big project… I’m working on the design of a gas platform and pipelines to bring back gas from the North Sea to be cleaned up onshore and used to generate electricity. It will take a couple of years and cost hundreds of millions of pounds to do!!

    • Photo: Liz Meddings

      Liz Meddings answered on 25 Jun 2015:

      I spent a few weeks working on Abu Dhabi airport which is the biggest construction site in the world! Many of my colleagues have been working on it for a few years! I prefer smaller jobs as I’m involved in the whole thing and they are designed and built much faster.

Comments