Eddie O’Connor on Decarbonisation and the failure of economics and economists. In this blog post, Eddie discusses how the SuperGrid discussed in previous blogs will require changes in economics to operate. Indirect Costs (somebody count the carbon!) Despite the excellence of Martin Wolff’s article in the FT this week, and the facts … Read more
WindEurope have stated that the installation rate of wind needs to double in order to assist in decarbonising Europe. An installation rate of at least 30 GW is required for Europe to meet estimated installed capacities for wind from the EU Commissions report “A Clean planet For All” In this report, there are several scenarios … Read more
The UK has been both the European leader, and world leader in the amount of offshore wind it has installed in its waters. The UK currently has an offshore wind installed capacity of approximately 10GW, with ambitions to reach an installed capacity of 40GW by 2030 as set out by Boris Johnson in the recent … Read more
Eurostat released data on Europes 2018 renewable energy shares last week and the data shows that the share of gross final energy consumption coming from renewable energy sources has reached 18% in 2018, up from 17.5% in 2017. To put this into perspective, Europe has a target of obtaining 20% of its gross final energy … Read more
Renewable energy sources overtook fossil fuels to become Europes primary source of electricity for the first year ever, according to EnAppSys. Their recently published annual report on the EU power market found that renewable energy generated 1,029 TWh (last year, equal to 37.5% of Europes electricity generation. 23.3% of generation cam from fossil fuels, and … Read more
Renewable energy is estimated to account for approximately 49% of total power generated in Spain in 2019 according to Spanish grid operator Red Electrica de Espana (REE). The installed capacity of renewable energy in Spain grew by 10% with nearly 5GW of new capacity coming online. In addition to the increase of renewable energy on … Read more
It is always interesting to have a conversation with those who have not yet understood the benefits of renewable energy to society. One can always expect the argument that wind and solar would never get built without subsidies and that they are not competitive in the real market. These people also seem to forget that … Read more
As renewable energies compete, and beat existing fossil fuel technologies on price, we expect the trend of stranded fossil fuel assets to continue unless countries take a step back and re-evaluate their power generation construction plans. Offshore wind power is on course to be cheaper than coal generation in Japan as soon as 2022, leaving … Read more
Marco Mensink, director general of the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC), has claimed that Europe’s renewable energy sector is “not ambitious enough” to supply the vast quantities of carbon free power required to decarbonise the supplies of the largest industry. “For some reason it’s not really happening yet for large industry,” Mensink told a RE-Source … Read more
Decarbonizing the U.S. power grid rapidly will cost $4.5 trillion, according to a new report from the energy consultancy and research firm Wood Mackenzie. For context, the 2018 U.S. military budget was $700 billion. A huge rollout of wind and solar power generation, a reinforced transmission network and the vast deployment of energy storage will be … Read more