Energy Costs
The energy minister Greg Barker has spoken out in favour of energy company profits, insisting they are necessary in order to fund crucial investment in new power plants and that Britain enjoys some of the lowest electricity and gas prices in Europe. Ministers want Britain’s energy suppliers to help fund £110bn of investment in new power plants to keep the lights on this decade. “Unless companies are making profits they cannot reinvest those profits back into new projects,” Mr Barker said. Mr Barker’s comments come as British Gas is expected to reignite debate over profits and prices with a household price rise of up to 8pc in coming weeks.
Telegraph 21st Sept 2013 read more »
Energy companies are to be paid ten of millions of pounds to keep old power stations on standby amid mounting fears of blackouts.
Telegraph 21st Sept 2013 read more »
NuGen
SPANISH utilities giant Iberdrola is in talks to sell its 50 per cent stake in nuclear consortium NuGen to Toshiba-owned atomic plant builder Westinghouse, a source said yesterday. The owner of Glasgow-based ScottishPower runs NuGen with French peer GDF Suez. Their joint venture owns a site at Sellafield, in the north-west of England, where it wants to build a 3.6 giga-watt power station. The source said that a deal could be announced as early as next week.
Scotsman 21st Sept 2013 read more »
Oldbury
A MET tower has been demolished in a controlled explosion at Oldbury Nuclear Power Station. The steel structure, which was erected 48 years ago, stood 45 metres tall and was destroyed yesterday as part of the plant’s ongoing decommissioning process. Just three explosive charges weighing a total of 1kg were used. It took less than ten seconds for the meteorological tower to come tumbling down.
Gazette 20th Sept 2013 read more »
Opinion Poll
A study carried out by researchers from Cardiff University and the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan shows an overall increase in support for nuclear power since 2005. The survey suggests that 36% of the British public now support nuclear power, with 29% opposed to the production of energy using nuclear power plants. In Japan however, support for nuclear power has dramatically decreased in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The study asked detailed questions on the use of nuclear power, the risks it carries and the health and safety regulations surrounding the industry. Wouter Poortinga, lead researcher of the study, said that despite the increased support, the British public still favour alternative renewable energy production methods.
Blue Green Tomorrow 19th Sept 2013 read more »
France
France will use some of the proceeds from its nuclear power plants, alongside a new carbon tax, to help fund an overhaul of the country’s energy policy, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Saturday.He did not specify the size of the contribution from nuclear power or how it would be applied.Ayrault was detailing objectives set out by President Francois Hollande on Friday to cut fossil fuel use to support a long-term goal to halve energy consumption. Hollande reiterated on Friday an election promise to cut France’s dependency on nuclear power from 75 percent to 50 percent by 2025, starting with the closure of the country’s oldest plant, Fessenheim, by the end of his term in 2017.
Reuters 21st Sept 2013 read more »
Bloomberg 21st Sept 2013 read more »
A village here with a population of 95 people is where one of the world’s leading-edge projects is under way — the construction of a nuclear waste final disposal site, albeit amid protests from local residents. The planned disposal site in Bure, northeastern France, is supposed to begin operations in 2025, following a similar facility under construction in Finland and another seeking construction approval in Sweden. Although the Bure facility has yet to receive the final green-light for construction due to opposition by villagers, a test facility has already been completed at a depth of 480 meters underground, where an endurance test and geological surveys are under way for a planned storage period of 100,000 years.
Mainichi 19th Sept 2013 read more »
Germany
Unfortunately, the New York Times – once a great journalistic outfit — has gone and published a horrible (horrible!), myth-filled article on Germany’s renewable energy transition. So, I’m putting all the fun stuff off in order to deal with this BS right now. Rather than make this a flowery, conventionally journalistic piece that makes you feel like you’re strolling through yet another “informative” story somewhere in the mind of a concerned but relaxed NYTimes journalist who is “exploring the real world” and coming to “interesting,” counterintuitive, and even “shocking” conclusions (what would journalism be if it didn’t surprise you, right?), I’m going straight for the key BS points one by one as they appear in the NYTimes article. Not wanting to further impress some BS myths onto your minds, each section below starts with the counter-point rather than the message the NYTimes‘ Melissa Eddy and Stanley Reed provided.
Clean Technica 20th Sept 2013 read more »
Nuclear Weapons
A NUCLEAR weapon 260 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima nearly detonated over the east coast of the US in 1961, recently declassified documents have revealed. Two bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on January 24,1961 after a B-52 bomber broke up in flight. One of the bombs apparently acted as if it was being armed and fired – its parachute opened and trigger mechanisms engaged.
Scotsman 21st Sept 2013 read more »
Independent 21st Sept 2013 read more »
ITV 21st Sept 2013 read more »
Energy Efficiency
Green Investment Bank (GIB) is to tap foreign investors for advice on how to pump cash into energy efficiency projects. The bank will mark its first anniversary as a standalone institution next month with a gathering in Edinburgh featuring some of the biggest players in clean energy finance. Funding groups from Asia, Europe and the United States will be represented at the Green Bank Conference on 17 October. In total, about 20 of the most influential people in international clean energy financing are expected for the first of what could become an annual gathering. The event comes a year after the European Commission granted state aid approval for the GIB.
Scotland on Sunday 22nd Sept 2013 read more »
The government has billed its Green Deal as “the most ambitious home improvement programme since the second world war”, but it has now been revealed that just 12 homeowners are making repayments through its finance package for energy-efficient work carried out on their property. Since the scheme’s launch in January, householders have been able to sign up to the deal, which allows them to pay for energy-efficiency improvements to their home with no upfront cost. Work is funded by a loan repaid through their electricity bill, on the promise that annual repayments won’t be more than the savings made from the energy-efficient changes. Figures released by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show that by the end of August just 372 households had actually signed on the dotted line – and only 12 had taken out a loan and had the work done. This is despite the government spending about £16m on the project so far, and setting a target of signing up at least 10,000 households by the end of the year.
Observer 22nd Sept 2013 read more »
Climate
Scientists will this week issue their starkest warning yet about the mounting dangers of global warming. In a report to be handed to political leaders in Stockholm on Monday, they will say that the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation have now led to a warming of the entire globe, including land surfaces, oceans and the atmosphere. Extreme weather events, including heatwaves and storms, have increased in many regions while ice sheets are dwindling at an alarming rate. In addition, sea levels are rising while the oceans are being acidified – a development that could see the planet’s coral reefs disappearing before the end of the century.
Observer 21st Sept 2013 read more »
Will Hutton: It is make your mind up time. This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by the UN in 1988, will publish a paper that will form a crucial part of its fifth assessment report. It will reaffirm that climate change is happening, is manmade and that the balance of evidence is that it is accelerating dangerously. It is the work of 259 scientists from 39 countries who have to submit their work to detailed and open scrutiny before the panel will publish. It is global science’s best assessment – hedged with probabilities and acknowledging uncertainties – of where we are. We should be desperately concerned. However, it will be met by a barrage of criticism from the new “sceptical” environmental movement – almost entirely on the political right – which, while conceding that global temperatures are rising, insists that there is still insufficient scientific proof to make alarmist predictions. There is certainly no need for governments to tax and regulate the burning of fossil fuels, or subsidise renewables, or come to “freedom-denying” international agreements. Economic growth, technology and the magic of human adaptation through tried and tested market mechanisms will see civilisation through what is already an over-hyped crisis. Don’t be bamboozled, as Britain’s centre-right media move to join with the sceptics to rubbish a careful body of scientific work that has been arrived at by exhaustive cross-examination. We will be reminded of the IPCC’s earlier “mistakes”, notably its estimate in the 90s that global average temperatures were rising by 0.15C a decade, when since then they have risen at a third of that rate.
Observer 21st Sept 2013 read more »
Nicolas Stern: On Friday, 195 governments around the world will accept a summary of the most comprehensive assessment of the basic science of climate change that has ever been written. The IPCC’s report, which has been prepared by 259 researchers from 39 countries, will show even more clearly how human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels and deforestation, are creating a dangerous trend with immense risks for the lives and livelihoods of billions of people around the world from shifts in extreme weather, rising sea levels and other serious problems. It will also underline the fact that delay is making things much worse, both because the ratchet effect of emissions is causing a rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases and because we are locking in our dependence on the fossil fuels that cause the problem.
Observer 21st Sept 2013 read more »
More than 250 climate scientists meet in Stockholm tomorrow to finalise the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When it comes out on Friday it will be the most comprehensive report on climate science ever published. It will show that scientists have upped from “very likely” to “extremely likely” their judgement that it is human activity, rather than natural variations, which have caused most of the rise in global temperatures since 1951. Since we have the irony pot on the table, let’s ladle out another helping: while experts have been becoming more convinced, the rest of us have been moving in the opposite direction. The number of people in the UK who think climate change is happening, and is caused by man-made greenhouse gases, is falling, polls show. How have we arrived at the paradox of experts and public moving in opposite directions? There are two key reasons – the complexity of the science and the simplistic nature of much media reporting, some of which is wilfully ignorant.
Independent 22nd Sept 2013 read more »
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will say next week that certainty has increased from “very likely” to “extremely likely” that human activity has caused more than half of the observed temperature rise from 1951 to 2010, in a large part due to fossil fuels and deforestation.
Independent 22nd Sept 2013 read more »
Christopher Booker: The news that hundreds of scientists and officials from all over the world are this weekend converging on Stockholm to discuss the next 2,000-page report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) again highlights what is the most terrifying political conundrum facing our country today. Emerging in instalments over the next seven months, this report will try to convince the world, without a shred of hard evidence, that the prospect of catastrophic man-made global warming is “extremely likely”. Listening to the vacuous drivel still pouring out of the likes of President Obama and Connie Hedegaard, let alone our own “climate ministers” Ed Davey and Greg Barker, we realise that the lunatics are still firmly in charge of the asylum which the rest of us unfortunately have to live in. As I say, just how we are to escape from this madness back into the real world is as intractable a political puzzle as any that faces us.
Telegraph 21st Sept 2013 read more »
Scientists working on a landmark UN report on climate change to be published this week are at loggerheads over their explanation for why the earth’s surface temperature has stopped rising as rapidly as they previously predicted.
Telegraph 21st Sept 2013 read more »
