GREEN ENERGY IN THE MEDIA
ENGINEERING WITH ROSIE: AN ENERGY POWERHOUSE She’s passionate about green energy transition technologies and a whirlwind of energy analysis and explanation. And an internet sensation with close to 800,000 views and 30,000 subscribers to her popular 15-minute ‘Engineering with Rosie’ YouTube clips. Here we find out a bit more about what drives the dynamo Rosie Barnes.
SHE’S PART CATALYST-STYLE PRESENTER, part female version of Prof Brian Cox and possibly the best candidate for a TV series on renewable energy engineering and technologies. For those yet to tune in to Rosie Barnes’ fun yet educational ‘Engineering with Rosie’ clips covering wind energy, energy storage, hydrogen, wave energy, battery storage, electric vehicle technology and more, here’s the lowdown.
Inspiration for renewable energy topics? At first my ideas came from questions that people would commonly ask, eg why do wind turbines have three blades? More recently it’s usually based on topics that I want to learn more about, such as my recent video on carbon capture. I was having trouble finding out how the technology actually works and thought probably other people outside that industry would also be interested to learn. More than 20 other topics are on the shortlist!
Time taken to prepare the 15-minute clips? Between 20-60 hours to make each video. The fastest are the ‘video essays’ where I present my opinion on a topic that’s not too technical and doesn’t need much research. The ones that take the most work involve an actual engineering project or complicated analysis and lots of technical sketches. Animations take a really long time too, around half a day to make 10 seconds. The longest time I spent on a video was my gingerbread wind turbine. It was much harder to get working than I expected and I was baking and testing for over a week!
Your viewer demographics? Spread pretty evenly from aged 25 to 65+ years, much older than is typical on YouTube. Geographically: mostly North America and Europe/ UK and a smaller number from India, Australia and South Africa. Surprisingly, about 96 per cent male. I had expected and hoped that more women would want to watch.
What’s in it for you? People get in touch with speaking opportunities and leads for my consulting business Pardalote which provides services related to energy technology development. But I love that I can get experts on pretty much any topic to spend a couple of hours explaining an interesting topic to me personally. I think one of the most appealing aspects of my channel is that I talk to real experts.
Challenges and frustrations?
“I believe that if the general public had a better understanding of engineering then we would make better political decisions with respect to action on climate change.”
One: the way that new, clean energy techs are expected to be perfect in a way that the technologies they are replacing are not. This is sometimes called the ‘nirvana fallacy’. Examples include waste from wind turbines getting so much more attention than waste from coal power plants, or fires in batteries or EVs vs fires in fossil fuel power plants or petrol cars. Two: the opposite, when a new technology is reported as being the big saviour, that all we need to do is wait for this technology and it will solve all our problems in one go, and render all our existing clean technologies useless. I call this type of reporting ‘magic beans’ stories.
Greatest technological potential? 1 – energy efficiency; 2 – electrification of everything possible (especially transport and heating); 3 – demand flexibility (including smart charging, smart appliances); 4 – grid interconnectors; 5 – electricity 46 SPRING 2021
