By Julian Singer On 9 September Energy Vault, the Swiss energy storage company, announced a merger with Novus Capital Corporation II, a special purpose acquisition or “blank check” company that listed on the New York stock exchange in February. The combined company is valued at $1.1 billion. The combined company will start with $388m in [...]
By Julian Singer While most of us were enjoying a few days of sun in the middle of last week, the electricity grid controllers in Wokingham were sweating with anxiety. The same weather conditions that had brought the sun also brought very still conditions. Wind power output dropped to near zero, after been well below [...]
By Julian Singer While most of the renewable world is focused on storing electricity, Norwegian company EnergyNest has concentrated on storing heat. It was founded in 2011 and received the first commercial revenue from its Thermal Battery in 2016. Since then it has been expanding its range of application. The principle is very simple: a [...]
By Julian Singer Minesto is a Swedish company that generates electricity by “flying” kites under water. This seemingly bizarre idea is best understood by thinking of a kite flying in air that is induced to follow the trajectory of a figure of eight. At the extremes of the trajectory, and at other points, the kite [...]
By Julian Singer The news on batteries is dominated by Gigawatt manufacturing sites such as those proposed by Britishvolt in Northumberland and Northvolt in Sweden. AMTE Power, who made a successful entry into AIM in March, is going a different way, focussing on specialist markets with its Ultra range of batteries, each of which has [...]
By Julian Singer The government is reported to be considering an incentive scheme to encourage home owners to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps. A sum of £4000 was floated, recently increased to £7000. Even so it is unlikely that many owners will take up the offer. The problem is not just that heat [...]
By Julian Singer At the annual Oxford Energy Day in 2019, whose theme was storage, a bewilderingly long list of possible techniques was presented, many of which were still academic or at the stage of laboratory testing. Now we are seeing an increasing number of these ideas being implemented by small companies that are building [...]
By Julian Singer Geothermal Engineering Ltd (GEL) has finally produced steam from its United Downs production well near Redruth in Cornwall. It has been a long story. The project was initially announced in October 2009 followed shortly by funding of £1.5m from the then Department of Energy and Climate Change. Planning permission was granted in [...]
By Julian Singer The water in abandoned coal mines has received increasing interest as a source of residential and commercial heating. There are certainly many such mines in the UK and most of them will contain significant volumes of tepid water, but how much useful heat can be delivered? Two projects at Gateshead and Seaham, [...]
By Julian Singer Angus Energy is a UK oil and gas company that operates three small oil fields in the Weald Basin of Sussex and Surrey, and which listed on AIM in 2016. In 2020 it acquired a majority interest in the dormant Saltfleetby gas field in Lincolnshire, and plans to install processing facilities so [...]