Renew Extra Weekly

 The UK energy policy debate seems to reaching some sort of political break point. The Labour government is continuing to push net zero, but the right of centre view is that it, and renewables, are undermining the UK economy by pushing up energy costs.  And, instead,  coal, gas & nuclear are favoured, as in a new report from Tory-leaning think tank Onward, backed by shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho . But there were bitter green responses. And the Onward report was challenged by Carbon Brief - gas won’t be cheap. Neither will new nuclear.  However, Labour also has another, slightly separate, problem. It is under pressure from industry and some unions to support more gas drilling, even though few see new drilling as very helpful economically, and some say it could be disastrous in climate terms.  Or would it?  Some say not, if carbon capture and storage (CCS) was backed as a compensatory measures .   But CCS is still unproven at scale an...

 Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is booming, but it’s still not clear what its net impacts will be in energy/carbon terms- views differ. However, it is clear that there is a growing drive to use it more and more- with big profits to be made by whoever powers the growth. Not surprising then that all the usual suspects have turned up for a share in the proceeds – most obviously power plants powered by fossil gas, but also nuclear and renewable energy.   AI data centres are not exactly popular, since, ideally, they need to be near centres of population, where data processing demand is large. Although AC power can transmitted over long distances (a few hundred miles) without too much energy loss, digital data info is more sensitive - there are latency (delay) effects over long distance.   And rather than the use local mains grid power, it’s common for AI centres to set up their own local dedicated power units.  Such is the scale of the AI boom that all ...

 As wild fires spread around continental Europe, and also hit the UK, an unusual consensus seemed to emerge in UK press - climate change is real and we need to act urgently on clean energy. You would  expect the Guardian to say things like that, but the Telegraph ran an opinion piece saying that ‘the right needs to get serious about climate change’ and another saying that party leader Kemi Badenoch ‘must reverse course on net zero before she destroys the Tories’.  She did come back with a response , but it was mainly left to others to maintain the contrarian view, with, for example, John Constable , one time editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, saying ‘Climate change is real, but it is an unfortunate fact that renewables are useless.’ And in a Prosperity Institute paper, ‘Good Money After Bad- The Spiralling Costs of British Green Energy Initiatives and What We Can Do About It’, David Turver developed the contrarian view in more depth – with endorsement...