By Barney Smith On 1 April Greenbarrel opined “Just as last year climate change raced up the agenda with 2050 seeming so close, now the corona virus makes July 2020 seem so far away, at the very limit of popular vision if the newspapers are to be believed.” Almost a month on, the journalists are [...]
By Oliver Nelson-DummettOliver Nelson-Dummett Today we are introducing a new writer to Greenbarrel who, as the title of his piece suggests, looks at the arresting idea that people can power their homes by light shining on their windows, using what are known as luminescent solar concentrators. This article is planned to be the first in [...]
In 2009 ten of the forty largest listed companies in the world by market value were European, whereas now only Shell and Roche Holding are. Furthermore there are almost no new large European firms: most have existed for more than a century. Europe, which includes the UK, is almost absent in new technologies. It does [...]
Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson think that world population forecasts are wrong. The UN’s current best guess is that the world population will increase from 7.8 billion today to 9.8bn in 2050 and then level out near 11bn by the end of the century. Bricker and Ibbitson think that the population will have already levelled [...]
Decarbonising a developed economy is a difficult task, but it is especially challenging when that economy is a major producer of fossil fuels. For a long time the U.S.A. has been a major producer as well as the leading centre of expertise for the oil and gas industry, but in the last few years its [...]
Last week, BP published their latest Energy Outlook (for calendar year 2018). It does not make for comfortable reading because it shows that the actual speed of decarbonisation is not keeping up with the timetable and limits set by the Paris agreement. In 2018 global energy demand and carbon emissions from energy use grew at [...]
If you can’t produce it, why not import it? Such is the idea behind Atlantic Superconnection, the company that proposes to import electricity from power plants in Iceland that use renewable energy. Iceland produces nearly all its electricity from low carbon sources, about three quarters hydro-electric schemes and one quarter geothermal (hot water or steam [...]
Some of the 700,000 clients of the energy supplier First Utility were surprised when they received an email on 25 March stating that it would henceforth be known as Shell Energy. They should not have been surprised, because Shell had bought the company in 2018, but at that time there was no change of name [...]
This is the first of two articles on the chaos in the UK’s energy policy On 7 February the government announced that the energy bills of 15 million households could increase by more than £100 a year after the regulator Ofgem said it was raising the level of a price cap. Consumers on default tariffs, [...]
Scientists tell us that the earth is warming at the rate of 0.20C per decade because we emit too much CO2. Some people are sceptical while others wonder how one can be so precise about an object whose temperature varies from -500C to +500C in place and time. How far can we trust the scientists? [...]