Energy

Although the current UK government is bending over backward to facilitate shale gas fracking, there are still many hurdles that energy companies will have to cross if they are even to recover any gas according to Caroline Almond at Natural Law Review: “Despite strong UK Government backing in relation to …

Delegates at a recent IPPR Community Energy event heard that England’s urban poor were losing out on community energy schemes that were set up to help them. According to Taylor Heyman at Power Technology: “The Rural Community Energy Fund (RCEF) and Urban Community Energy Fund (UCEF) were set up in …

Public support for renewable energy is very high according to the latest issue of the DECC Public Attitudes Tracker.  Eighty-one percent of us now favour renewable energy, while just four percent oppose it and two percent strongly oppose it.  This is in stark contrast to public attitudes toward the UK …

A little known – but costly – fact about your electricity bill is that around 20 percent of what you pay is determined by where you live.  This is because energy companies charge customers according to the distance between their home and the power station; this allows the cost of …

The intermittency problem is the biggest barrier to renewable energy generation.  We cannot run our economy solely on wind and solar energy because there are too many times when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.  So, like it or not, until such time as new …

Following the collapse of the Doha talks to freeze oil production, many analysts had expected oil prices to fall.  In the end, prices remained fairly stable – although still a long way short of their 2014 peak.  One reason why this might have happened is that the oil glut has moved …

The end of the 2015/16 financial year has seen a wave of insolvencies in the renewable energy sector according to the Yorkshire Post.  The wave of bankruptcies and redundancies are directly attributable to the UK government’s decision to scrap subsidies and impose new taxes on the industry: “According to the …

Economists and politicians have been reassured that there is twice as much oil beneath the ground as humanity has used to date.  However, international security expert Nafeez Ahmed argues that nearly half of the 1.7 trillion barrels of oil still to be recovered does not actually exist. The discrepancy, reported …

Centrica – the parent company of British Gas – has made a u-turn on its approach to energy generation according to Emily Gosden at the Telegraph. Previously, Centrica’s manifesto for cutting wind farms in favour of more large gas-fired power stations helped to inform the current UK energy policy.  However, …

A fifth of global energy generation came from renewables in 2012 according to the International Energy Agency.  But which countries use the highest proportion of renewables in their energy mix?  Perhaps it is the hi-tech Germans?  Or maybe it is the fast-expanding Chinese? Not even close!  Only two European countries …