The electrification of heat and transportation is vital to the UK achieving Net Zero. In this short piece, Sean explores how a weighted average wholesale electricity price could reduce electricity prices for consumers and substantially delink wholesale natural gas and electricity prices. This promises not just to insulate UK consumers from global natural gas price volatility, but also facilitate the electrification of heat and transport by making electricity cheaper, which is essential for meeting the UK’s net zero targets.
Reflections following the first two parts of Looking North – a series of conversations between the worlds of art, literature, natural science and ecological conservation.
With concrete goals and a focus on community planning, the St Andrews Forest is shaping up to be a great climate action initiative. But one vital next step in its development is identifying specific data that need to be collected from forest locations in order to quantify progress towards its goals of carbon sequestration, supporting biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Through the University’s 2022 Summer Teams Enterprise Programme (STEP), a team of seven St Andrews undergraduate students from across degree programmes and with diverse backgrounds were brought together to create a draft protocol for assessing the benefits of the Forest programme.
The energy trilemma describes the difficulty in achieving a coherent balance of clean, affordable, and secure energy. Improvements in one factor in the triangle distorts the other components. In this blog post, I explore how ‘smart technologies’, connected by the internet and powered by new ambient energy harvesting devices, can be vital to overcoming the energy trilemma and to achieving energy sustainability.
Host James is joined by Dr Emilka Skrzypek (St Andrews) for a special youth-focused episode of the All About Energy podcast. Our hosts welcome two guests into the virtual studio – the winner and runner-up of the Centre for Energy Ethics’ 3MPlanet competition: Isabella Cuervo-Lorens and Georgina Steel. Our guests reflect on their journeys into the worlds of sustainability and climate change and the importance of the youth voice.
Climate adaptation and mitigation initiatives have driven up demand for rare minerals. Over 3 billion tons of rare minerals will be needed to achieve the global goal of reducing emissions to net-zero. A key site of extraction of these minerals is Sub-Saharan Africa. Will these regions acquire a share in this mineral boom or will the historical exploitation of these communities continue under the guise of supporting the ‘Green Transition’?
Flying is a convenient mode of transport, but it is also a major contributor to carbon dioxide emissions. The question is, how could we make airplanes run on renewable energy? By considering the basic physics of the problem, in particular the concepts of energy density and combustion, we see what makes jet fuel such a brilliant fuel energy-wise, why batteries are not a likely alternative, and why hydrogen might be the key to sustainable aviation.
During the ‘Energy Debate’ panel hosted on Friday 13 November as part of Energy Ethics 2020, it became clear that the challenges of powering the world on renewable technologies were as palpable as the need to overcome them in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; and reducing this reliance is imperative if we are to limit the impacts of ongoing climate change.
