Renewable Energy
The Californian energy market has been in the news recently: first there was the much heralded announcement that the state had managed to meet 100% of electricity demand with renewable energy sources. This magnificent feat lasted for almost 15 whole minutes mid-afternoon on Saturday [...]
Over the past few months we have been inundated with claims from interested parties that more renewables are the (only) solution to the energy crisis. They also claim that renewable energy is cheap, deflationary, and will deliver lower bills to consumers. They tend to [...]
While Britain has been struggling with unprecedented retail market chaos, there have been unprecedented events of a different sort on the other side of the world in South Australia, which saw negative demand on the transmission system for the first time ever. In fact [...]
The Government has finally announced a review of so-called “green tariffs” to assess whether suppliers are communicating appropriately with consumers, or whether they are engaging in “greenwashing”. According to the Government, 9 million British households are now on green tariffs, with over half of [...]
Today Citizens Advice has published a report, Home Truths, into consumer experiences with home heating approaches including low carbon technologies and new insulation. The report draws on the calls made over the past three years to its Consumer Service from people who needed help [...]
The use of hot springs has been known since antiquity and there is evidence that Native Americans used geothermal energy for cooking as early as 10,000 years ago, yet despite this, by the end of 2019, there was only 13.9 GW of installed geothermal [...]
One of the consequences of the energy transition and the increase in renewable generation on the electricity system has been the growth in negative electricity prices, where production is curtailed and/or consumers are paid to take surplus generation. These events are still relatively rare [...]
Ofgem has now published National Grid’s technical analysis of the 9 August blackout. Much of the meat is contained in the appendices. The report does not answer many of the questions that have been asked in relation to the incident, and throws up a [...]
National Grid has now published National Grid ESO’s initial report into the 9 August blackout. The extremely repetitive 26-page report sheds some new light onto the events on the day (and I was rather gratified to see that my hunch relating to Hornsea tripping [...]
Since Friday’s blackout, there have been press reports that National Grid has presided over three “near-miss” situations where system frequency fell close to the lower frequency tolerance of 49.5 Hz, 1% below the target level of 50 Hz. National Grid responded to these reports, [...]