A paper by Andrew Blakers, Bin Lu and Matthew Stocks of the Australian National University shows how, and at what cost, the southern and eastern states of Australia could be converted from coal-fired power production, currently two-thirds of the total, to rely solely on renewable electricity. In their calculations power is provided almost entirely by [...]
The year 2017 saw mixed fortunes for Greenbarrel. In February our original website Greenbarrel.org crashed. Various attempts made to resuscitate it failed. The three founders of Greenbarrel myself, Barney Smith and Julian Singer spent from April through to mid-August constructing our new platform Greenbarrel.com. This involved repopulating the archives with our past best features and [...]
On one view, this book tells us hard truths about the environment in India, on another it reflects the somewhat obsessional interest in the river Ganges of its author, Victor Mallet, the Financial Times’ Delhi-based correspondent from 2012 to 2016. His thesis is that India is killing the Ganges with pollution and the polluted Ganges [...]
After a period of procrastination the UK government is allegedly moving to put a cap on energy prices. This is the first intervention in the energy market since privatisation 30 years ago. It has certainly upset some of Mrs May’s more right-wing back-benchers who believe that interfering with market forces damages competition. What the government [...]
The re-election of Chancellor Merkel in the recent German elections was predicted by most of the opinion polls, as was the need for a further coalition Government. But the results were less predictable. Once the Socialists (153 seats) had announced that they would go into opposition and thus not take part in a new “Grand [...]
The Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) has announced funding of nearly £4 million from the Newton Fund* to enable researchers from the UK and China to collaborate on five projects to develop the next generation of offshore renewable energy (ORE) technologies. These three-year long projects, funded as part of the Joint UK-China Offshore Renewable [...]
The suave Mr Iain Conn, the head of Centrica which owns British Gas, one of the so-called “Big Six” oligopoly of providers which has dominated the UK retail energy market, can hardly be said to be lacking in self-confidence. As an unnamed colleague of his at the major oil company BP, where he previously worked [...]
Since Mrs Theresa May became Britain’s prime minister a year there has been repeated talk that her government would introduce a cap on energy prices because of widespread discontent with the way the so called “Big Six” power suppliers have been over-charging consumers. Nothing was done until she called a general election. It then seemed [...]
This week, BP published Energy Outlook 2017, their best prediction for the period to 2035. A key judgement is that rapid improvements in the competitiveness of renewable energy mean that increases in renewables, together with nuclear and hydro energy, will provide around half of the increase in global energy in the next twenty years. The [...]
Greenbarrel.org took advantage of a holiday in the United Arab Emirates to visit Masdar City, Abu Dhabi’s test bed for a sustainable eco-city, whose long-term goal is to “…transform Abu Dhabi’s economy from an oil foundation to one with a knowledge and innovation base.” The goal is ambitious and so is the term “city”. In [...]