Energy

It is fairly common these days to come across somebody on social media who thinks that leaving the freezer door open or running the air conditioner outside might provide us with a means of halting global warming.  And while engineers and physicists might be tempted to laugh at the suggestion, …

In early August, American essayist John Michael Greer made the prediction that climate activism was about to lose a great deal of its lustre: “Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, …

It is rare for the entire spectrum of the British press to agree on something.  But a couple of weeks ago they all agreed that fracking had been banned in the UK.  Pro-fracking outlets like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail reported the news as an unconscionable government cave-in.  Meanwhile …

Throughout history it has fallen to poets and artists rather than scientists and economists – still less politicians and journalists – to present the true nature of the human condition.  With this in mind, I wondered if there might have been a popular song that sums up our current human …

Among many other essential reforms, if the UK is to meet its 2050 climate targets it needs to install 4,000 electric vehicle charging points every day.  That’s according to Keith Anderson, CEO of Scottish Power.  Anderson also called for an equally fantastic effort to replace domestic gas central heating systems …

Officially, Britain’s worse power outage in a decade is being recorded as an unusual event that nobody could have reasonable anticipated.  Dig a little deeper into the National Grid report on the 9 August 2019 blackout, however, and we discover an electricity system that has been allowed to become increasingly …

Thinking about car ownership in the years before the financial crash, I reasoned that there were two groups of people who fared best.  The first were those rich enough to buy brand new cars.  Although they lost on the rapid decline in the re-sale cost of the car, the price …

Serious questions remain about the failures that resulted in a widespread blackout across Britain on 9 August.  According to Jillian Ambrose at the Guardian, the event was triggered by lightning from one of many storms that crossed the UK that day: “National Grid has blamed a lightning strike for Britain’s …

Despite claims to the contrary, the first task of the agencies involved in the UK power outage yesterday will have been to cover their backs and, if necessary, lay blame somewhere else.  So it is that a story emerged that it was a freak accident coincidentally affecting two separate generators.  …

Green campaigners will no doubt be cheering the announcement of the closure of the Aberthaw B coal-fired power station yesterday.  As Jillian Ambrose at the Guardian reports: “Doug Parr, the chief scientist and policy director at Greenpeace UK, said the shutdown of Aberthaw should encourage more government support for renewables …