The National Energy System Operator (“NESO”) has published its Winter Outlook for 2026/27, offering what appears to be a reassuring assessment of Britain's electricity security. It expects enough generating capacity or imports to meet demand, with a de-rated capacity margin of 5.9 GW, equivalent [...]
I gave this speech at the Cirrus Investor Conference in Namibia last week: . Ladies and gentlemen, Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. The question before us - green energy versus baseload energy is often presented as a simple choice. But for [...]
Britain’s civil nuclear programme stands at a critical juncture. With aging AGR reactors nearing the end of their lives and delays to new projects like Hinkley Point C, the UK faces a potential capacity crunch. Yet one of the most significant obstacles to progress [...]
Every year I summarise the previous year’s energy news, and every year I make some observation about how interesting and unpredictable the market is. 2024 has been no different, but this year, politics has had a bigger impact than before, and one which probably [...]
In its Clean Power 2030 plan, system operator, NESO, states that materially all of the existing fleet of CCGTs will be required to run approximately 5% of the time in order to meet demand on days when renewables output is low. “Around 35 GW [...]
Continuing my series on critical minerals, in this post I will look at some of the main metals required for lithium-ion batteries, the core component in electric cars and current battery-based grid-scale electricity storage solutions, lithium, cobalt and nickel. In a lithium-ion battery, the [...]
Following on from my recent post about the challenges of upgrading power grids to meet net zero ambitions, in this post I will set out the issues relating to the supply of critical minerals for the energy transition. This issue is creeping up the [...]