Renew Extra Weekly

It’s that time of year when editors seem happy to let a few dubious stories through. Most of the media ran with this one on yet another nuclear fusion breakthrough- this one at the Lawrence Livermore labs in California, at the National Ignition Facility. Well, with the climate change threat looming, non-fossil energy is a big issue just now-  and its certainly cold out! So is help at hand? Well no, not for some time at least . And at unknown cost. Even if this laser based system, which was designed primarily for replicating the physics of H-bomb ignition, can be made to deliver energy on a large scale reliably and safely , it’s going to take a while- it’s a very long shot . An equally familiar but arguably much more welcome newspaper article was this one on energy saving . As seems to be said almost every week now, saving energy saves money.  And it’s available now. But no one seems to notice. Energy conservation is just not sexy. Not like high tech fusion or  hydrogen- ...

It’s been a wild year politically in the UK. After a period when windfall taxes were resisted, we ended up with a government which bowed to them- as did most of the EU. And they even  got extended to cover power. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt hit electricity generation companies with a 45% Energy Electricity Generator Levy , on their ‘excess returns’ as he attempted to fund measures to ease the cost of living crisis. That was in addition to the existing windfall tax on North Sea oil & gas operators which is to be raised from 25% to 35% and extended by 2 years until 2028.  Renewable energy suppliers that operate under the Contracts for Difference system are exempted from the new electricity tax, but not those who are operating under the Renewables Obligation (RO). So they will be hit quite hard- they had after all enjoyed a significant wind fall since the RO subsidy level was high, based on the assumption that gas was cheap. It no longer is.  There will now be an incentive to...