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new nuclear: Government desperate to avoid C word

October 21, 2013 by Casey Cole

The Government today announced that an agreement has been reached for construction of new nuclear at Hinckley Point in Somerset.

The big sticking point had been the strike price (guaranteed buy price for generated electricity), which has ended up at whopping 9.2p/kWh, or 8.9p if the developers also build another plant at Sizewell C.

The most telling aspect of the press release is DECC’s reluctance to mention all the investors. They can bring themselves to name EdF, the biggest part of the investor consortium. EdF have such a strong UK brand that we’ve all forgotten they’re French.

But only buried at the bottom of the press release does it mention that a Chinese company is likely to be EdF’s partner on the project.

Instead they insist on referring to the project as “Home Grown Energy.” Which is awesome doublespeak. The plant will be owned by France and China. The fuel (which will be mined, obviously, not grown) will come from Kazakhstan, Australia, Canada or Namibia.

Nothing homegrown about that.

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local generators save the grid – and no one notices

October 12, 2013 by Casey Cole

I’ve been talking to an electricity aggregator this week, exploring possibilities for getting better value for the electricity from small combined heat and power units (CHPs). This is important because better value for electricity = lower tariffs to the homes using the heat.

We were looking specifically at using these CHPs to take strain off the local grid during times of extraordinary demand. Having this spare capacity available in an emergency is worth a hell of a lot to the DNO, who runs the local network. In fact, for each megawatt of generation capacity, you might get paid several tens of thousands of pounds each year.

So what do you have to do to get paid? Just be ready to generate electricity at short notice. They’ll probably only call you 6 or 10 times each year, and probably only need you for an hour or so each time. Easy.

At last! The benefits of producing energy locally get some recognition, right? Well… no.

Continue Reading »

Posted in chp, energy | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

webnugget found: I love Econtalk

February 28, 2013 by Casey Cole

When sifting through the long tail of news and analysis content on the web, you can find your expectations diminished in the face of a huge amount of mediocre material. I recently did a clean out of my RSS feeds because I realised that several of them had become more of an obligation rather than a source of good information.

And then, as has just happened to me, occasionally you find a diamond. In this case, not just a shiny rock, but a real diamond.

Continue Reading »

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DECC pays for Big 6 intelligence gathering

January 16, 2013 by Casey Cole

Last year the Energy Technologies Institute launched the £100m  Smart System and Heat Programme, which “aims to design a first of its kind Smart Energy System in the UK.” As part of this programme, they’re doing a £3m piece of research into consumer behaviour on heat networks.

A member of the research team got in touch this week to ask if she could come in for a chat about what behaviour trends we’re seeing at Insite, our metering and billing company that looks after around 7k customers on community heating schemes. She was really nice about it and we began to talk about potential dates for the meeting.

Then, as we talked on the phone, some other details began to emerge. Would ETI agree to show us interim results? No, interim results are typically only reported internally to ETI. What about final results? Well, maybe, it depends on whether the ETI members choose to release the results to the public – but there’s a good chance the results will not be released.

I was stunned. For clarity ETI is 50% funded with public money from BIS, DECC, TSB and EPSRC.

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Posted in ESCO, smart metering, utilities | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

switch off a light – and make half the UK nuke fleet redundant

July 13, 2012 by Casey Cole

I tweeted Tuesday that 1/2 of us don’t take basic actions to save electricity in our homes (citing Greenwise) and wondered whether all that wasted electricity might be equivalent to a nuclear power station. When I got home I took a stab at the numbers.

The verdict? There’s more than just one nuclear power station lurking in that wastage.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Green Deal, smart metering, utilities | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

antidote to smart meter hysteria

July 5, 2012 by Casey Cole

The Daily Mail and others have recently been fomenting anxiety to do with smart metering. A spy in every home! The energy companies will know when you have a poo! Etc. There’s no questions that privacy is a critical issue for smart metering. But the recent media hysteria has been extremely unhelpful in promoting reasonable discussion.

Darren over at Bealers.com has written up an excellent summary of smart metering privacy facts. Worth a read.

Here’s the upshot: Continue Reading »

Posted in smart metering | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

little progress on license light?

June 25, 2012 by Casey Cole

As summarised in earlier posts, license light is pretty much the only tool in OFGEM’s toolbox to allow small scale generation schemes to get value for the electricity they generate. It’s nothing to do with subsidies or guaranteed prices or feed in tariffs. Instead license light is trying to redress the fact that our electricity market just isn’t a level playing field. The big companies can afford to play, while small time (usually low carbon) generators are squeezed out.

I noted in the earlier post that the GLA were working on a pilot to trial license light. They had hoped to get the license light toolkit and sample contracts published by end of March 2012. This hasn’t happened.

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Posted in chp, ESCO, london, private wire, utilities | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

UK is facing electricity shortage

May 14, 2012 by Casey Cole

In my last post, I said that “between a quarter and a third of current UK electricity generation capacity will come offline by the end of the decade.”

In a subsequent comment, Mel Starrs asked me for my sources. It’s such an important fact, I think it’s worth fleshing out.

Continue Reading »

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inevitable slide into gas?

May 3, 2012 by Casey Cole

Sometimes a tweet just won’t do. Yesterday I tweeted this:

DECC cnsltn out on gas gen. Um, 25% of UK elec gen lost by 2020. 20 yrs to new nuclear. No coherent RE strat. #DoneDeal #Fracking #3Degrees

…but somehow it doesn’t immediately convey the whole point. So here’s an expanded version:

DECC has today published its call for evidence  to “to inform a gas generation strategy to deliver a secure and affordable route to a low carbon economy.”
It’s lovely of them to ask. But consider the backdrop to this consultation:

  • Between a quarter and a third of current UK electricity generation capacity will come offline by the end of the decade. (It’s worth reading that sentence again – the implications are massive.)
  • New nuclear will not fill the gap. It will take at least 8 years to build each new nuclear power station and the stable of new UK nukes is struggling get out of the gates – that 8 year clock hasn’t even started ticking. In a massive setback to new nuclear, last month RWE and Npower abandoned plans for two new power stations in the wake of the collapse of the German nuclear market.
  • Without a radical change in policy, Renewables and energy storage will not grow at a sufficient rate to fill the gap.

So what does that leave us?

Continue Reading »

Posted in chp, climate change, energy, renewable energy, sustainability, utilities | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

how did Green Deal lose its way?

April 19, 2012 by Casey Cole

To have any hope of hitting our legally binding carbon targets and to keep people out of fuel poverty, we have to radically transform the energy performance of housing stock.

But the bill for refurbishing our stock to the required standard is very high: something like £7bn to £15bn per year until 2050. A hell of a pill for treasury to swallow as part of general spending.

Enter Green Deal. Under this arrangement, Government don’t have to fork out the money. Instead, Green Deal captures the estimated value of future energy savings that result from a low-energy refurb, converts these annual savings into one lump sum and then uses this lump to carry out the refurb in the first place. Get it all just right, and the capitalised savings are worth more than it costs  to carry out the refurb. Brilliant! Refurb bill sorted. Continue Reading »

Posted in Green Deal, PAYS | 6 Comments »

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