Blowout Week 101
The focus this week is on OPEC and the lack of action there until at least June and on COP21 talks in Paris. Astronauts on the Space Station have warned of dire consequences of climate change and...
View ArticleBlowout week 109
Back to the harsh realities this week. The UK is going to freeze in the dark after all. Then we continue with OPEC’s call for production cuts, Petrobras slashes reserves, help for the North Sea, Japan...
View ArticleBlowout Week 137
This week we return to Hinkley Point, where yet another potentially deal-breaking complication has arisen as a result of the US filing suit against the China General Nuclear Power Company – a 33.5%...
View ArticleBlowout Week 167
We kick off with Elon Musk's offer to rescue S Australia from blackouts and follow with stories that include the requisite dose of OPEC vs. the US shale producers, US needs Canada’s resources, Shell...
View ArticleBlowout Week 184
Elon Musk, making good on his promise to solve South Australia’s energy woes, has signed a contract with the South Australia government to install the world’s largest (100MW/129MWh) battery bank next...
View ArticleElectrocuted
Electric cars are very much in the news. The Tesla bubble looks like it may just have burst with static instead of exponentially rising sales, France has declared it will phase out diesel and petrol...
View ArticleBlowout Week 185
This weeks Blowout kicks off with a number of stories iterating through the options of nuclear power, clean coal and batteries. Also in the mix is a big new oil find in Mexico; the growth of LNG;...
View ArticleBlowout Week 186
The irrepressible Elon Musk is at it again. Having just got South Australia back on track he has now turned his attention to the U.S., which he claims can ultimately be 100% powered by a solar panel...
View ArticleBlowout Week 196
The big news in the Energy Patch this week is the Kurdish independence vote, which threatens to disrupt the global oil market and could lead to civil war in Iraq. We follow up with the usual dose of...
View ArticleBlowout Week 197
Which is the world’s largest energy company? Exxon? Shell? Neither; they come ninth and twenty-third. The winner? Russia’s Gazprom. Read all about it in this week’s feature story. Follow-up stories...
View ArticleCan Puerto Rico go 100% solar?
With seasonal variations in output of only around 30% Puerto Rico is at an ideal latitude for solar power, and despite generally low capacity factors (caused by cloudiness) it can be argued that if...
View ArticleBlowout Week 202
This week’s Blowout features Germany, where the Greens have dropped their demands for a fossil-fuel phaseout as a condition of entering a coalition government and the coal-fired Energiewende is set to...
View ArticleGrid-Scale Storage of Renewable Energy: The Impossible Dream
The utopian ambition for variable renewable energy is to convert it into uniform firm capacity using energy storage. Here we present an analysis of actual UK wind and solar generation for the whole of...
View ArticleBlowout Week 211
This week we return to the Big South Australian Battery (BSAB), the alleged success of which – the “Tesla effect” – is spawning a raft of similar projects elsewhere in the country. Coming after we have...
View ArticleBlowout Week 215
This week’s lead story highlights the perils of basing policy decisions on speculative computer models. It seems that the ozone layer isn’t healing as predicted after all, so the dangers of man-made...
View ArticleBlowout Week 216
Britain’s free market approach to green energy is not going to save humanity from climate change, claims Labour’s Jeremy Corbin in this week’s feature story. So let’s nationalize the UK energy...
View ArticleBlowout Week 217
This week's lead article features the "imminent end of cheap finance" - does this mean disaster for the renewable energy sector? We follow up with our usual mix of stories from around the world - OPEC;...
View ArticleBlowout Week 248
In this week's Blowout we feature China, where the central government's edict to cancel over 100 planned coal plants is being ignored by local authorities who are continuing to build them anyway (the...
View ArticleBlowout Week 249
This week's feature story exposes the mess Germany's Energiewende has become, and in the follow-up story how it's torpedoing Europe's carbon emissions goals. Coming after we have the Trump-OPEC war of...
View ArticlePowering the Tesla Gigafactory
Tesla has repeatedly claimed in publications, articles and tweets from Elon Musk that its Reno, Nevada Gigafactory will be powered 100% by renewables. Specifics on exactly how Tesla plans to do this...
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