By Barney Smith From 31 October to 12 November the UK will chair the UN Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow (COP 26). This meeting is designed to follow on from the Paris conference 5 years ago which agreed that the world should try to limit the increase in global warming to 1.5 per cent [...]
By Barney Smith In September 2021 the Global Wind Energy Council produced a report on off-shore wind for 2020 which showed an increase of 6.1 GW, year on year. This was the second largest increase on record and constituted a 15 per cent increase on existing estimates. The cumulative total is now 35 GW. The [...]
By Barney Smith Last week the UK Government produced the long-awaited Hydrogen policy strategy which seeks to put some flesh on the bones of the “Ten-Point plan for a Green Industrial Revolution” launched by the Prime Minister in November 2020. Crucially, it recognises the importance of hydrogen within that overall plan. The strategy notes that [...]
By Barney Smith Oxford PV is a private company, originally a spin-off from Oxford University, with world-class expertise in the use of perovskite photovoltaics and solar cells. The firm’s web-site states “its low-cost, highly efficient photovoltaic technology, when integrated with standard silicon solar cells, will dramatically improve performance”. Their tandem solar cells will deliver significantly [...]
By Barney Smith An analysis of the historic cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase in the deployment of renewable energy systems has consistently coincided with steep reductions in their costs. The cost of solar photovoltaics has, for example, declined by three orders of magnitude over the last fifty years. Similar trends [...]
By Barney Smith Just when it seemed safe to leave Big Oil to its own devices for a bit, Shell is involved in several actions which are sufficiently newsworthy that they cannot be ignored. On Thursday 30 July the company released figures for Q2 2021, which were the best figures for any quarter since 2018 [...]
By Barney Smith The Prime Minister’s ten-point blue-print for a “Green Industrial Revolution”, released in November 2020, included the following extract (from Point 1), which also incidentally contains the firmest commitment in the whole plan viz:- “And by 2030, we aim to produce 40GW of offshore wind, including 1GW of innovative floating offshore wind in [...]
By Barney Smith In the follow-up to the AGM, ExxonMobil finally had to concede not two, but three seats on the Board to the activist investor Engine No 1 which wanted the company to take more account of the energy transition, of climate change and its inevitable impact on the Oil and Gas industry. ExxonMobil [...]
By Barney Smith According to the latest Review, which, unusually, came out this year in early July, 2020 was the most aberrant year ever, with primary energy use falling by 4.5 per cent and carbon emissions falling by more than 6 per cent, both being the fastest rate of decline since WWII. The US, India [...]
By Barney Smith If, and it is a big “If”, the whole world suddenly wholeheartedly embraced electric cars, what would be the consequences? Leaving aside the problems arising from the substantial rising demand for more electricity from renewable sources for charging the cars and the problems caused by the world’s over-reliance on copper and cobalt [...]