By Julian Singer Verditek was formed in 2016 to identify business opportunities in the clean technology sector. It initially invested in three companies, one making flexible solar panels and two making different types of air filter. The company now focusses on solar panels manufactured at its factory in Milan with only a minor interest in [...]
By Julian Singer Quaise Energy proposes to drill wells of up to 20 kilometres deep into the earth’s crust to find temperatures of up to 5000C. The heat will be brought to surface to produce electricity using a conventional steam generator. Quaise plans to start drilling its first well in 2024 and to be producing [...]
By Julian Singer At the end of June, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) submitted to Parliament its annual progress report on the reduction of carbon emissions, as it has done every year since 2009. Although it is doubtful if many members of parliament have read all 618 pages of the report, they would have found [...]
By Julian Singer At the end of June Invinity Energy Systems, the manufacturer of vanadium flow batteries (VFBs) for electricity storage, announced its results for 2021. They show a sharp increase in revenue, up from £0.7million in 2019, £0.2m in 2020 to £3.2m in 2021. As explained by CEO Larry Zulch, much of the revenue [...]
By Julian Singer Writing about the renewables investment fund Greencoat UK Wind plc has often been a challenge. Since it was founded in 2013 it has steadily expanded its portfolio of UK wind farms and equally steadily increased its dividend to equal or beat the RPI. Its share price shows little volatility, and has even [...]
By Julian Singer On 7 July, while the Prime Minister was busy resigning, another part of his government announced a small step towards fulfilling one of the many goals it had set itself. This was the result of the fourth Contract for Difference auction held by the DBEIS. The general structure had been announced last [...]
By Julian Singer Modern Water, the supplier of treatment and monitoring equipment for salty and contaminated fluids, was taken over by DeepVerge, another AIM-listed company, in 2020. Before the takeover DeepVerge’s main product was Labskin, a laboratory-grown skin that mimics human skin and is used by skin care manufacturers and consultants to test products. The [...]
By Julian Singer On 7 June, at one of the Oxford Energy seminars, Dr. Chris Ballentine gave a fascinating talk entitled “Natural (gold) Hydrogen – Pipeline or Pipe dream?”. Gold hydrogen is hydrogen that occurs naturally in the earth’s surface. How wonderful if we could just drill for it like methane! The idea seemed absurd [...]
By Julian Singer On 25 May Scottish and Southern Electricity (SSE) reported preliminary results for its financial year ending 31 March 2022. Earnings before interest and tax, or operating profit, were up at £1.5bn (2021: 1.3bn) with earnings per share up at 95.4p (2021: 78.4p). These results exclude revenue from its one third stake in [...]
By Julian Singer Biofuels form part of many plans to reach net zero. When burnt they may emit as much CO2 as a fossil fuel, but since the biomass withdrew CO2 from the atmosphere while growing the net effect on the atmosphere is small, even after taking into account the carbon emitted collecting, transporting and [...]