Posted by Sohail Azad
On 11:52
The revelation in today's paper that some UK companies have been manipulating Facebook to show job opportunities only to under 35s is just a iceberg-style manifestation of the ageism that permeates society and handicaps a lot of older people from getting an even break. Society is institutionally ageist in at least four ways.First is that Government's way of presenting the data hides the immense level of unemployment of older people. The official records show that unemployment in the 50-64 year old...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 04:04
Wind power costs are plunging and it might not take too long before they get down to �40 per MWh, well below recent UK wholesale power prices which have been at �45 per MWh in recent times.Offshore wind power costs have seen the sharpest decline, although falling prices for onshore wind should also be evident in the UK if only the UK Government were offering long term power purchase agreements (PPAs) for them as well as offshore windfarms. Anti-renewable commentators are still quoting costs for...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 08:09
The Leave campaign's claim that after Brexit the UK could simply divert the money we pay to the EU into the NHS was certainly a whopper, but in terms of the implications for the UK it wasn't even the biggest. Not close. The biggest lie was the implication that the UK could, whilst leaving, have a sensible discussion with the EU about trade and come to a trade agreement that suited us just fine. As the Leave Campaign said: 'we will have a new UK-EU trading relationship. There is a...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 11:04
Just as the UK Government has stopped onshore renewables (mainly wind power and solar pv) from getting all-important long term power purchase agreements (PPAs) through the feed in tariff system (the big one being now reserved for Hinkley C), so government agencies are moving to make sure that the rules of the electricity market favour centralised generators over decentralised ones. The Government says that no subsidies will be available for onshore wind and solar pv. Yet it is busy doling out subsidies...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 10:45
In what must come as a welcome boost to the flagging hopes of renewable energy workers and supporters Nicola Sturgeon has announced the Government's intention to establish a publicly owned energy company that will be fuelled specifically from renewable energy.Seehttps://www.energyvoice.com/other-news/152781/breaking-sturgeon-proposes-publicly-owned-not-profit-energy-company/Credit, of course, should also go to the Scottish Greens upon whose votes the SNP depend for a majority and who have been very...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 04:23
The Scottish Government (SG) should open discussions to establish a mechanism to enable �subsidy free� community renewable schemes. It is great news to see a decline in costs of offshore wind schemes, but as good as they are, they are not involving ordinary people. Community renewable schemes, using a definition given to me by Jon Halle of sharenergy are:'Community renewable schemes are majority-owned and run by members of the public, including both people local to the scheme and supporters...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 05:34
John McDonell's speech to the Labour Conference came out with a lot of green sounding rhetoric on renewable energy but the commitments are vague and potentially fatally undermined by what could well end up as a commitment to centralised re-nationalisation of parts of the energy system.Now I'm all in favour of the community owning our energy system provided it is local people - city councils, cooperatives, local not for profit companies, but not centralised monopoly nationalised industries. These...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 06:21
Now, I'm not taking up an ideological position on this, and it may indeed prove to be the case that driverless cars end up reducing pollution by large amounts. But I feel that it is also plausible that we are going to end up being driven by a lot hype into a rather ungreen future or, more mundanely, into accepting a piece of 'modernisation' that makes little difference to pollution outcomes.Now of course electric vehicles are to me something that represents a great gain, especially as electricity...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 02:09
Offshore wind prices are plunging fast. A leading wind expert says that the next round of UK contracts awarded (next January) for offshore wind projects will undercut the price given to Hinkley C by around 25 per cent. Not only this but the contract length will be only 15 years for the offshore wind projects compared to the 35 years for Hinkley C. In Germany, meanwhile, the latest round of contracts for onshore wind are being issued at under �40 per MWh, a great deal less than anything a British...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 23:05
The Government's review of energy costs is obviously a set-up designed to argue against a major emphasis on funding currently commercialised renewables and energy efficiency technologies, so here I critique this viewpoint and suggest some ideas for what a genuinely far-sighted clean energy effort to reduce costs might involve. Ideas which, I suspect, will be comprehensively ignored by the review.The Government has given its review of energy costs to Dieter Helm whose opinions are hostile to promoting...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 08:13
Just as in 2005 the UK was rushed into an ill-judged nuclear programme by scare-stories of imminent power blackouts, we are now being herded into a panic mode by lop-sided projections of future energy demand out of fear of electric vehicles.EVs are the future of motorised road transportation of course, and I'm sure it will happen quite quickly. But if you work out the figures based on past trends you find out that after re-working the National Grid's recent projections peak demand is actually likely...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 06:46
British politicians are engaging in what can only be seen as a self-defeating series of postures on Brexit that undermine their self-declared aim of securing a free trade agreement with the EU.As I commented last November,( http://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/why-leaving-eu-is-bit-like-building.html ),the best that the UK can hope for in the medium term is a Norweigian or Swiss type deal that leaves us in the Single Market with at best a face-saving deal to obscure the continuation...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 00:55
The latest announcement from EDF that Hinkley C will be further delayed and that EDF will be hit with even more cost overruns risks making true the prediction of EDF former Finance Officer that the project will bankrupt the company. This may well lead to increasing pressures on the UK Government to put billions of UK taxpayers money into the project.Hinkley C, which former EDF boss Vincent de Rivaz said (in 2007) would be generating by the end of this year (2017) will now, according to EDF,...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 03:40
As political scenarios go, the new Parliamentary position is just about as good as it gets for an Opposition. The Government is facing an almost impossible task (securing 'good' Brexit terms), is much too weak to push through much the Opposition doesn't really want, and has seriously lost its political momentum. Crucially, the historical precedents are heavily stacked against the Government surviving anything like its full Parliamentary term.Let's put it this way. The current Tory Parliamentary...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 06:45
The French Government's announcement that it will legislate for a carbon floor price of 30 euros per MWh marks a dramatic turn in EU energy markets which will now be shifted to favour nuclear power above renewables. This is because just over half of nuclear power generated in the EU come from reactors in France, whereas less than 10 per cent of EU renewable energy production comes from France. The fact that nuclear power is being given special privileges undermines the policy credibility of the...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 04:21
I suppose it's inevitable that any party will engage in some soul searching and point-settling when it loses votes, but we should consider that in the context of a generally greater focus on the two party contest that it is unlikely that ANY Green Party strategy would have avoided a substantial fall in votes.The focus on the most Presidential campaign that has been framed in Britain for decades (May versus Corbyn), the relative resurgence of Labour and also the special appeal that Labour made to...
Posted by Sohail Azad
On 01:52
Now that Donald Trump has pulled the USA out of the Paris Agreement more attention has been focused on China's role in reducing carbon emissions (the title of a book of mine that has just been published). And it seems there is a good chance that China will be able to reduce its energy-related carbon emissions by as much as two-thirds by 2050.Given China's apparently accelerating growth in output of carbon emissions, this does seem a strange conclusion to make. But only if we ignore recent trends...
