The market seems to have welcomed last week’s announcement that Scottish Power Ltd (wholly owned by Iberdrola, the Spanish electric utility company) was to sell all its non-wind generating capacity to Drax for a consideration of £702 million. This in pursuance of Iberdrola’s expressed intention of lowering its carbon emissions. Iberdrola shares showed a modest, [...]
On Monday 15 October Cuadrilla, having weathered a last-minute legal appeal, finally started fracking operations in the shale basin below their Preston New Road site. Fracking involves injecting liquid underground at high pressure to force open fissures and allow access to oil and gas. Experts do not yet know whether fracking in the UK is [...]
Given the recent news stories about Tesla, this is perhaps a good moment to try to assess how far the electric car has come and whether it needs to travel further before the “electric revolution” can really be said to have arrived. One of the issues is that of overall perspective. For example, Norway has [...]
On 14 September, PVCrystalox reported on the first half of 2018. In terms of trading, this was another difficult period, with far fewer wafers sold, resulting in a fifty per cent decline in revenue (€6.2 million as against €12.6m in H1 2017). This brought gross losses up to around €0.9m, though profit before tax rose [...]
Amidst all the current excitement about possible imminent fracking by Cuadrilla, an interesting wrinkle in the legal position in Scotland has been exposed over the summer. In the first week of May 2018, INEOS applied for a judicial review of the apparent ban on fracking in Scotland announced by Ministers from the Scottish National Party [...]
The overall picture given by the Survey is somewhat mixed. Renewable power grew by 17 per cent, the largest increase on record and accounted for almost half the growth in power generation. Yet, as Bob Dudley points out in his introduction, “There has been no improvement in the mix of fuels feeding the global power [...]
The London Stock Market FTSE 100 contains a number of companies whose operations are mainly outside the UK. At a more modest level that is also true of the AIM market. One such company is China New Energy Limited (CNEL), which produced its Annual report for the year ending 31 December 2017 on 29 June. [...]
It would seem that the pessimistic scenario forecast in PVCrystalox’ latest Annual Report is coming to pass. The CEO is quoted as saying “After 7 years, the Board has concluded that there is no real prospect of any change in market conditions which might permit a return to profitability for the Group’s wafering operation without [...]
While wind power in general is seen as environmentally desirable in terms of the planet and emission reduction, it comes with a significant price, paid by birds and bats, species which are also of concern to environmentalists. For there are numerous fatal collisions between birds, bats and wind turbine blades. It is to be hoped [...]
On 26 April 2018, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) released its latest annual report (the 13th) on the world wind-power situation up to the end of 2017. The new global total for installed wind capacity is 539 GW, which is an increase of over 52 GW, an addition of roughly ten percent on the [...]