This post is by Sam Hampton of the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford
There are nearly six million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, including a wide variety of business types, ranging from fairly large manufacturing companies to small family firms, social enterprises and micro-businesses. Altogether their energy use produces enormous quantities of carbon emissions. Read more
This post is by Nick Robins, professor in practice for sustainable finance at the Grantham Research Institute. Read more
This post is by Sarah James, a volunteer and trustee of Westmill Sustainable Energy Trust. Read more
Reinventing Retrofit was published yesterday by Green Alliance, with support from the Zero Energy Buildings Catalyst (ZEBCat) programme, supported by the European Regional Development Fund.
This blog was first posted by Business Green. Read more
The collapse of government talks with Hitachi this week takes almost 3GW of future nuclear capacity off the table. While opinion on nuclear is polarised, the UK had been relying on it to meet long term climate targets. With this week’s announcement, 9GW of proposed nuclear capacity has now been suspended. This leaves an increasing low carbon energy gap which will have to be filled by 2030 to meet legal carbon targets. Read more
This post is by Rebecca Windemer, PhD researcher at Cardiff University.
At the start of my research into wind energy, I met an elderly couple living opposite a wind farm in Cornwall who questioned why people were opposed to them. Read more
2018 was a mixed bag for energy and climate policy. On the plus side, unbeknown to most of its millions of consumers, the UK’s power sector provided a third of the country’s electricity from renewable sources, over twice as much as five years ago. Read more
This post is by Sir Graham Wynne, Green Alliance trustee and chief executive of the RSPB from 1998 to 2010. Read more
This week, world leaders meeting at the COP in Katowice are under pressure to act on the IPCC’s recent warning that to limit global warming to 1.5°C requires “rapid and far-reaching systems transitions occurring during the coming one to two decades, in energy, land, urban, and industrial systems.” Read more
This post is by Sivapriya Mothilal Bhagavathy of the University of Oxford, Samantha Crichton of the Sustainable Energy Association, Melanie Rohse of the Global Sustainability Institute and Daisy Goaman of the Centre for Sustainable Energy.
It has been ten years since the Climate Change Act, and the UK has made significant progress in reducing emissions from the power sector, dropping them by nearly 60 per cent on 2008 levels. While five years ago fossil fuels contributed nearly two thirds of the UK’s power, by August 2018 over 60 per cent came from zero carbon sources. This is an excellent example of what clear goals, well designed policies and technological innovation can achieve. Read more
