Oh, bugger!
Pete Smith @ April 2, 2008 # 7 Comments
It had to be April 1st, didn’t it, but it was no joke. I doubt if anyone noticed, but yesterday morning while updating this site to enhance your viewing experience, some finger trouble on my part caused a Wordpress widget to go berserk and bring down the hosting server. It took about a day to [...]
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Fairly Big Hydro
Pete Smith @ January 10, 2008 # No Comment Yet
On 7th January, BBC News carried an item about a large hydro-electric scheme in Scotland. Monday saw the completion of a major phase of the project, with breakthrough at the end of a 5-mile tunnel at Glendoe, near Fort Augustus, Loch Ness. The cameras were there to capture the moment as the 220 meter long [...]
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Pssst! Wanna Buy Some Green Energy?
Pete Smith @ December 10, 2007 # 4 Comments
The Observer reports that Britain is running out of renewable energy, as a surge in demand from businesses has outstripped the supply of electricity generated from ‘green’ sources. Firms’ interest in reducing their carbon footprint has far exceeded new capacity coming on-stream. This leaves companies which have pledged to become ‘carbon neutral’ with a sizeable [...]
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Renewable Energy
Pete Smith @ December 10, 2007 # No Comment Yet
Shares in Renewable Energy Holdings (REH.L) were up today on the news that the green technologies firm has agreed a deal to purchase the Kobylany wind farm site in Poland, which will provide 30 MW of generating capacity with an accompanying off-take infrastructure and transformer station. REH will pay €68,000 per MW of generating capacity, [...]
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Africa To Feed Europe’s Energy Appetite
Pete Smith @ December 6, 2007 # 8 Comments
An article in last Sunday’s Observer (’How Africa’s desert sun can bring Europe power‘) describes a £5bn plan to generate electricity in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, and export it to Europe. More than 100 solar installations, each equipped with an array of thousands of mirrors, would generate enough power to [...]
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Village Green
Pete Smith @ November 28, 2007 # No Comment Yet
The environmental propaganda machine continues to rumble forward on ‘The Archers’, BBC Radio 4’s venerable soap opera and green information channel. Tuesday’s episode featured an earnest discussion of anaerobic digesters on farms, turning animal muck into methane and generating electricity for sale back to the grid. According to jet-setting career agriculturist Debbie Aldridge, calling home [...]
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UK’s First Community Hydro Scheme
Pete Smith @ November 23, 2007 # 5 Comments
A new community-owned hydro power project has launched a share offer today. Torrs Hydro New Mills Ltd plans to install new hydro-electric technology in the 200 year old weir at the Torrs in New Mills, Derbyshire. The company, a joint venture between Water Power Enterprises and High Peak Friends of the Earth, is an ‘Industrial [...]
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Go-ahead For Biomass Plant
Pete Smith @ November 22, 2007 # 5 Comments
A plan to build the world’s largest power station fuelled by biomass - in this case wood chips – has been approved by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The £400m, 350 MW plant was proposed by London-based Prenergy and will be built in Port Talbot in South Wales. It will burn some [...]
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Biofuels Issue Brief
Pete Smith @ November 17, 2007 # No Comment Yet
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has published an ‘Issue Brief’ on biofuels. The document, the first output from WBSCD’s new workstream on clean energy technology, provides an overview of biofuel production and use with a special focus on the transport sector. It describes first and second generation biofuels and explores their [...]
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Solar Revolution Running Out Of Steam?
Pete Smith @ November 15, 2007 # No Comment Yet
It’s a good job someone’s looking at increasing the supply of silicon for the solar industry (“IBM Recycles Silicon”) . In his article “Profit from the End of Cheap Oil“, Ian Cooper describes how the hopes of the solar industry to provide a viable energy alternative to oil depend on a reliable and continuing supply [...]
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