Sunak’s next distraction will be ‘pylon wars’. Thousands of miles on high voltage cabling are needed to ship electricity from off-shore wind farms to towns and cities. This requires hundreds of thousands of new pylons. Everything that was off-shore and out-of-sight suddenly becomes an environmental battleground. Communities are already mobilising to challenge the process.
Renewable Energy
By the end of this year, Alberta will have successfully phased out coal-fired generation, which was the dominant source of electricity just six years ago. Alberta is already becoming the renewable energy capital of Canada. More than three-quarters of solar and wind generation capacity built in Canada last year was in Alberta.
Of the 473 commissioners for whom Heern could find information on what they did after they left utility regulation, 50% of them went to work for one of the industries they regulated, or in an industry-adjacent role such as consulting. “That revolving door is definitely alive and well,” Heern told me.
After decades of ideological mismanagement of the blocs’ electricity market policy, change may be on the horizon. The EU’s policy has nearly obliterated the continent’s renewable energy industry, leading to the easily predictable–and predicted–dependence on Russian gas and oil. It took the invasion of Ukraine and skyrocketing energy prices for the EU to ask “how did we get it so wrong.”
Despite the Tories best efforts to kill them, small-scale renewables have continued to grow under Britain’s pioneering feed-in tariff program. … Read more
Denmark never ceases to amaze me. Despite switching back and forth between conservative and progressive governance over the past decades, … Read more