By Barney Smith It is instructive to realise that “sustainable” now reaches into areas which would have been hard to imagine even five years ago. The other day I came across a circular about Potash, about which I was up to then ignorant (and not just about “sustainable” potash) Potash, as I am sure you [...]

By Julian Singer A new Contracts for Difference (CfD) round is due to be launched this month. It will the fourth such round with the first one being finalised in 2015 and the most recent in October 2019. In the CfD scheme renewable energy projects bid for contracts in which they will provide a certain [...]

By Barney Smith It was never going to be plain sailing: we all expected Boris to try to wing it with a few platitudes and a couple of Jokes and we were not disappointed. He did, the outcome was somewhat predictable. Not that it was ever going to be easy. The Indians were the first [...]

By Julian Singer Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage is usually associated with large systems and high costs. The number of £1 billion is frequently quoted, for example in the UK government’s CCS competition (cancelled in 2015), the Energy White Paper of December 2020 and Shell’s CCUS Infrastructure Fund. Large systems progress slowly even if there [...]

By Barney Smith From 31 October to 12 November the UK will chair the UN Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow (COP 26). This meeting is designed to follow on from the Paris conference 5 years ago which agreed that the world should try to limit the increase in global warming to 1.5 per cent [...]

By Barney Smith An analysis of the historic cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase in the deployment of renewable energy systems has consistently coincided with steep reductions in their costs. The cost of solar photovoltaics has, for example, declined by three orders of magnitude over the last fifty years. Similar trends [...]

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 Last October we wrote about the performance of AIM-listed renewable energy stocks (Greenbarrel, Oct 2020). The most striking feature was that most of these stocks had shown a sharp increase in price around the beginning of June. Now, six months later we look at how they have performed since then. As before [...]

By Barney Smith In October and November 2020 Greenbarrel duly recorded the opening salvoes in the fight between Veolia and Suez, the world’s two largest environmental services companies (both French).  The battle was joined in the summer of 2020 after Veolia purchased 29.9 per cent of Suez from another French company, Engie, which decided to [...]

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, [...]