Allan with two ls

Allan Jones has one of the highest paid sinecures in Australia. He should not be confused with Alan Jones who relentlessly exposes Clover Moore as a fraud on his radio programme and has campaigned for her political opponents.

Allan Jones lost his job when voters ousted Ken Livingstone as Lord Mayor of London and was flown to Sydney at ratepayers and taxpayers expense to give lectures on "Green Transformers". He was appointed to his present post, "Chief Development Officer, Energy and Climate Change", a sinecure created specifically for him, by the City of Sydney in 2009.

The City of Sydney announced quietly in a press release on Tuesday that the agreement with Cogent Energy that he had negotiated with great fanfare in April 2012 had been dissolved. The agreement had been to install "Trigeneration" of electricity in the Council's residential areas.

There is nothing new about trigeneration which uses hot water for cooling! Absorption cooling was of course used in the kero refrigerators marketed by Electrolux and others in the 1930s. Vapour compression cycle refrigerators and air conditioners almost completely replaced these because they had a very low coefficient of performance, were unreliable, difficult to regulate and expensive to maintain. But property owners were to be given no choice, and would have to live with the exhaust gases from the generators.

It turned out the mathematics being used was ridiculously out, and the costs could not be sustained despite the huge planned subsidy of $25 "per tonne of CO2 saved", whatever that may mean. The Council spokesperson called for evermore elaborate subsidies from the State Government to make the plan viable. And when Clover Moore says jump O'Farrell says "how high".

Allan Jones in Sydney