Dan Grey
@dangrey
Energy and transitioning from fossil fuels. Complex issues I try to shine a light on. Ex-UKAEA and Met Office, now working in community energy. Occasionally politics Exeter, UK
I've got further away and it's got considerably bigger – and is now producing lightning!
Once again I can save you precious minutes: because it was designed before the impacts of burning fossil fuels began to be felt, and we either thought climate change wasn't real or ignored its imminent threat
If I had half an acre of spruce I'd definitely want to thin it and get some oaks in! Research on CO₂ uptake shows that undisturbed forests are net negative – a sink. Natural England has some excellent research for UK habitats publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/...
Total nonsense on BBC #r4today this morning from George Godber, fund manager at Polar Capital: "we've shut down our domestic gas supplies". NO. Our domestic gas supplies are *exhausted*. We've burnt the lot; we're down to the dregs. Completely unchallenged by presenter Sean Farrington, of course.
You've seen the wildfires in Spain; well, an extraordinary area of the country is forecast to reach a Fire Severity Index of "5 – exceptional" on Thursday, apparently only for the second time since the service began in the early 2000s.
As far as I can tell from @robhawkes.bsky.social's map, every gas-fired power station that's currently online is purely operating for system stability. Solar, wind, nuclear, biomass and some imports are providing all the power we need
No. It's because so many of us no longer use our bodies to move ourselves around, and instead use cars for all journeys. As a result we are overweight with poor cardiovascular health leading to cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, while causing toxic air pollution There I've saved you five minutes
Electric car sales in the UK in June were up 35% on June last year, reaching 30% of cars sold. Petrol car sales fell to 52% of cars sold, down 2% on the year. Steady progress...
17% of Ireland's electricity is imported from Great Britain; all of it and more is consumed by data centres, more than all of Ireland's households Ireland's previous corporation tax rate of just 12.5% led to the the US digital services majors siting their data centres serving the EU in the country
The little graph that appears when you select an asset is indecipherable! Are the coloured areas stacked? Independent? What's the difference between non-SO curtailment and BOA curtailment? The latter isn't curtailment aiui; acceptance of BOAs is unrelated to constraints
Here's such a ULCC I saw last week off coast of Devon. Huge (it was 10 km away) and surprisingly fast. Note the exhaust plume behind the ship trapped in the marine boundary layer 🫤
In 2025, UK purchases of electric cars skewed heavily towards premium vehicles. I must say I find that surprising. (Btw the BMW "Ix" is actually the iX. Seems DfT can't cope with model names lol. I imagine they all use Ipads too.)
I think it's worth putting the UK into context when discussing tax: tax in the UK just isn't that high. With a state-funded health system, it could do with going up a few percentage points.
Later in the week things were better managed, including by issuing "emergency margin notifications", which are really just wake-up calls to generation and supply operators to fulfil their obligations. 8/
NESO called the emergency instruction (to stop exporting power to the Netherlands) and emergency request (for more power from France) "normal emergency tools". You can be judge of whether emergency actions can ever be "normal". We were lucky the Netherlands and France could help. 3/
Out of six non-nominal actions NESO can take to maintain sufficient supply margin, issuing emergency instructions and requests to interconnectors is number four. There are just two actions left after that and then it could be rolling power cuts. To have reached that position is surprising. 2/
Watching back @neso-energy.bsky.social's discussion of managing the electricity network last week and I am unimpressed. Everything was "green" right up until it wasn't, necessitating emergency actions to reduce exports to the Netherlands and to import more from France on Tuesday evening. 1/
Bruegel shows that European gas storage refilling continues to be at the lower bound for the time of year. With El Niño conditions developing, this seems a bit of a gamble! A strong El Niño makes a cold winter more likely. But a *very* strong El Niño makes *warmer* than average more likely!
On the left is where Xlinks proposes a gigantic data centre (red) and battery energy storage system (blue) in north Devon. On the right is a render of the project from Xlinks. I am wondering if Xlinks have completely failed to notice that the land is steep hillsides and valleys!
GB record solar output is somewhere around 17 GW. "Distributed" solar peaked at 16.3 GW and then there was 0.5-1 GW from the big transmission-connected solar parks ("BMUs"). For contrast, Germany's peak is around 45 GW!
Eventually the hot weather moved away and demand plunged at the weekend. On Sunday afternoon, with demand for large generators at just 13 GW, there was so much generation available the market was paying customers to use energy. What goes around comes around! 8/8
It's also substantially more than NESO expected this summer. The "most likely" national demand was expected to be just over 28 GW and there was forecast to be a less than 10% chance of needing more than 30 GW. We needed 32 – several large power stations' worth more. 6/
Polish tax-payers pay €2B a year to keep mining coal in their country – and an additional cost is their health 👇