The IET Prestige Lecture 2010

Transition Engineering : The most important engineering discipline in human history

The IET Prestige Lecture is free to attend and is of value to professional engineers and anybody with an interest in alternative energy. It is also intended to promote engineering as a profession and late intermediate (year 7-8) and high school students are particularly welcome.

A Prestige Lecture is presented every year throughout New Zealand but this is the first time that it was given north of the Auckland area.

Dr Susan KrumdieckDate

Thursday 22 April 2010

Times and Venues

Lecturer

Dr Susan Krumdieck is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Canterbury where she lectures on Thermodynamics, Energy Engineering and directs the Final Year Projects Programme. She is the director of the Advanced Energy and Materials Systems Lab., an interdisciplinary research group including engineering, sciences, social and community organizations.

She has been actively pursuing a wide range of research in strategic solutions to complex problems and untenable dilemmas. "Advanced" means incorporating complexity, history, the future and people into the engineering of energy and materials with a systems perspective. Her research includes development of demand response systems, fuel retail constrained allocation system, individual and freight transport energy constraint risk assessment tools, and personal and freight transport adaptation investigations.

She also actively works with local communities in New Zealand and the Pacific to help transition groups set up new structures and pursue change projects.

More information on her work and the forthcoming Signs of Change e-Conference can be found on her website.

Report on the lecture

The problem is un-sustainability

This was the hypothesis presented by Dr Susan Krumdieck at the Institution of Engineering and Technology Prestige Lecture 2010 about Transition Engineering last Thursday, 22 April.

Dr. Krumdieck addressed the problems facing the world due to the finite availability of fuel sources; the continually increasing population and its expectations.

She made the startling observation that none of the new energy sources currently being researched, such as hydrogen fuel cells, biofuel from growing algae and CO2 capture, would ever be commercially viable. This conclusion followed years of being employed at the cutting edge of such research. A, perhaps less surprising, observation was that reverting to nuclear power was the worst possible idea; the use of nuclear energy for electricity generation only ever having been developed to assuage the guilt of developing nuclear weapons.

Rather than trying to engineer new and increasingly sustainable energy sources, an impossible goal, mankind would be much better employed in reducing un-sustainable levels of energy consumption and adapting our needs to the available energy as a key to survival. Society depends on engineered systems for survival.

She traced the roots of Transition Engineering to the early 20th Century when public outrage over worker safety led to the establishment of Safety Engineering as a discipline. She suggested that Transition Engineering will become equally important in addressing the 21st Century’s great challenges: climate disruption, resource depletion, ecosystem reclamation and population reduction.

More than 160 people were fascinated by her lecture at Taipa Area School’s Cultural Centre (including 120 high school students). Around 60 more (including 10 students proposing to go on to university engineering courses) enthusiastically welcomed the lecture given at Kerikeri High School’s library the same evening. It is hoped that the lecture will stimulate more young people to enter engineering as their chosen profession.

About The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is one of the world’s foremost professional societies for engineering and technology. It is headquartered in the United Kingdom and is very active in New Zealand with many members and fellows here. It has a close working relationship with the Institution of Professional Engineers in New Zealand (IPENZ). Its history dates back to the Society of Engineers, formed in 1854, and the Society of Telegraph Engineers, formed in 1871, which later became the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). A Royal Charter was granted in 1921.

More information about membership of The Institution of Engineering and Technology and the New Zealand branch can be found on their website or by contacting the Far North Representative, Martin Wale, by email to mawale@theiet.org.