By Barney Smith If de-carbonisation and ending overwhelming reliance on fossil fuels are given aims, as is an increased role for electricity from renewable sources, then perhaps it is time for us to say a little about why we think that intermittence is a handicap in the rise of renewables? Put another way, how are [...]
By Barney Smith India is the world’s second-largest hub for the manufacture of turbines and the fourth-largest onshore wind market by installations. By 2019, 37.5 GW of wind capacity had been installed. Yet in that year, only 2.3 GW of capacity was added. Why? To some extent, this comes on top of what was already [...]
By Barney Smith Last week saw Shell release its three hundred and six page annual report, “Energy for a better future”. It was drafted before the recent collapse of the oil price and any proper assessment of the full impact of the Corona virus. At the time there was much news focus on the dividend [...]
By Barney Smith On 1 April Greenbarrel opined “Just as last year climate change raced up the agenda with 2050 seeming so close, now the corona virus makes July 2020 seem so far away, at the very limit of popular vision if the newspapers are to be believed.” Almost a month on, the journalists are [...]
By Barney Smith On 31 March Greenbarrel looked at hydrogen from a technological perspective as a potential solution to the intermittent nature of those renewable “stalwarts”, solar and wind. But how does this technology look from a company perspective? We put this to Sir Roger Bone who took over the Chairmanship of ITM at the [...]
By Barney Smith Early on 25 March 2020 saw the release of the fifteenth Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) report for 2019, almost a year since Greenbarrel reported the release of the GWEC report for 2018 in rather more settled times. The report is the most widely used source of data on the wind energy [...]
It is not easy to reconcile the conflict between the immediate political imperative to help Flybe and the longer-term necessity of reaching the target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But this is not in itself a reason to welcome the British Government’s recent decision on Flybe. Delaying payments due for air passenger duty [...]
Why on earth are we contemplating a third runway at Heathrow to cope with a projected expansion of air travel when at the same time the new Conservative Government is committed to reducing CO2 emissions and making the UK carbon-neutral by 2050? Decarbonising transport in general and air travel in particular is one of the [...]
Recently Easyjet announced that they will start straight away to “off-set” the carbon emissions resulting from their flights, a decision which the airline expects will cost around £25 million in the next financial year. This was welcomed with favourable articles in both the mainstream and the specialised press and rightly so. Easyjet are one of [...]
The Chinese market for motor vehicles is by far the largest market in the world. So what happens to car sales in China really matters. A cold there means pneumonia elsewhere. Recently the Chinese economy as a whole has been stagnating, for a combination of strategic reasons and as a result the overall Chinese car [...]