By Julian Singer We last looked at the performance of AIM-listed renewable energy stocks in April 2021. The plots below show the performance of the same stocks, plus some new ones, over the last two years. Clearly all stocks have been affected since the beginning of the year by fears of inflation and the invasion [...]

By Barney Smith In April 2022, the Prime Minister released a 31-page document entitled “British Energy Security strategy.” It perhaps makes most sense as a follow-on to the ten-point plan put forward in November 2020. It takes into account both the latest news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the most recent report on Climate Change by [...]

Dubai World Expo 2020 closes on 31 March. Delayed a year by Covid it has still managed to attract 20 million visitors, only slightly down on the 25m predicted. Spread over 1000 acres there are pavilions or exhibits from 237 countries and 28 organisations. Some attendees surprise. How can small countries like Palau (population 18000) [...]

By Barney Smith To try to isolate the problems of one sub-sector of agriculture is to realise how complicated are the inter-relationships in the overall biomass sector and how inadequate are the available data. The industrial North (broadly Europe and the US) is more concerned about the future climate of the planet and de-carbonisation, so [...]

By Barney Smith Lots of people have heard of the Eden Project, but far fewer have actually visited it. This is a record of some of our impressions as we joined the second, more restricted, group. The Eden project is a huge environmental and educational project, undertaken to show that humans have a good side [...]

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 [...]