By Julian Singer The UK’s drive to reach net zero emissions depends hugely on affordable offshore wind energy. In the most recent auction of Contacts for Difference (CfD) in September 2019 the strike prices of the successful bids were around £40 per megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity, well below the government’s guideline price for wholesale electricity [...]
By Julian Singer In a trading update dated 9 March 2021 Invinity Energy Systems, the manufacturers of vanadium flow batteries, announced that it had 9.1MWh of capacity in the final stages of contract negotiation. This is on top of 18.6MWh of orders obtained in 2020 and 50.3MWh of sales under discussion. Invinity was formed from [...]
By Julian Singer In March the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (DBEIS) issued its Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy as promised in the Energy White Paper of last November. The UK industrial sector contributes 9 per cent of the UK’s GDP and provides 2.6 million jobs directly, but emits 16 per cent of UK emissions, [...]
By Julian Singer The UK may have the largest offshore wind capacity in the world, but little of it is operated by UK companies. It is well known that most of the equipment and technology for wind farms comes from non-UK firms. What may be less well known is that, according to the Crown Estate, [...]
By Julian Singer When we last wrote about Simec Atlantis Energy in March 2019 the company had just transformed itself from a tidal power developer into a “global developer of renewable and sustainable energy projects”. Behind this was an admission that tidal power was not going to break through to commercial success, at least not [...]
By Julian Singer In an on-line event arranged by the Oxford Martin School on 1 March three experts explained how captured carbon could be stored underground and how much storage would be needed. Carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) is a part of all four IPCC[1]scenarios for reaching net zero CO2 emissions in 2050, and [...]
By Julian Singer Faradion is a privately financed, Sheffield-based company that is developing sodium-ion rechargeable batteries. These batteries are not yet commercially available, but solve two problems with the standard lithium-ion variety. First, they are safer. In lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), if for any reason the electrodes come in contact, the resulting current can be large [...]
By Julian Singer EQTEC, the waste to energy company, has seen a significant rise in its share price over the last nine months, first in June 2020 when it increased from its previous year’s average of 0.15 pence to 0.5p, and then again in December 2020 to above 2p. EQTEC concentrates on producing synthetic gas, [...]
By Julian Singer On 8 February 2021 AMTE Power announced its intention to seek admission to trading on AIM. AMTE develops specialised lithium-ion batteries for particular niche markets. It was founded in December 2013 when it acquired the battery manufacturer AGM Batteries with its small-scale manufacturing plant in Thurso, Scotland. AMTE is currently working on [...]
By Julian Singer Although it is accepted that hydrogen will be a key component of future energy systems, it is unclear exactly where it will be used and how it will be produced. This uncertainty has made governments and companies hesitate about committing huge investments. According to the International Energy Agency the production of hydrogen [...]