News

Viewed as independent countries California and Texas would both rank among the ten largest economies in the world. One Democrat and the other Republican, the feature they now have in common is failure to prevent extensive and disruptive interruptions to power supply – California in 2001 and Texas in February 2021. In both states near-catastrophic failures raise questions as to the viability of highly market-driven power systems, which contrast with the stability of more integrated models of the East Coast of the US, and internationally. The answers matter, not just for Texas, but for developed and developing economies everywhere.    You can read the full article here.

Abstract   (Deadline for submission – extended to 5 March 2021 at 23:59 GMT)
Increasing temperatures and erratic weather are set to triple the demand for air conditioning by 2050 (IEA, 2018). A sudden growth in the demand for electricity can put existing infrastructures on the verge of collapse and will result in potentially irreversible environmental damage (Khosla et al., 2020). In fact, current active space cooling technologies come with a number of issues for the environment: from the use of super greenhouse polluting refrigerants such as hydrofluorocarbons (McLinden et al., 2017) to disposal mismanagements of old technologies, which continue to leak environmentally harmful gases (Lickley et al., 2020). Evidence show that vernacular practices in rural areas (Mazzone, 2020) and green design and architecture can alleviate the effects of urban overheating (Yenneti et al., 2020).

Good Energy, the 100% renewable electricity supplier, announced yesterday that Juliet Davenport OBE has decided to move on from her role as Chief Executive Officer and take up a Non-Executive Director position with the company as well as its subsidiary Zap-Map. Juliet will remain CEO of the company while the formal process to find the new CEO is undertaken.

Energy systems around the world are going through rapid transitions that affect many aspects of our lives. The continuation and acceleration of these shifts will bring important changes to the way we fuel our cars, heat our homes, and power our industries in the coming decades.

The UK government has set out plans to clean up the energy system, support up to 220,000 British jobs, and keep bills affordable as the transition to net zero by 2050 moves forward.

A  Special Lecture on Energy and Climate Change hosted by the Department of Atmospheric Physics, Oceanic and Planetary Physics (AOPP).

Nick Eyre began the Michaelmas Colloquium series with a talk on ‘Energy and Carbon in the Anthropocene’ which also acted as an early lecture for Masters students in the School of Geography and Environment.

You can watch the presentation of the #ONESuperyear for Nature webinar on through Micrsoft TEAMS.

Marina Topouzi, Research Associate in Energy Demand at the Environmental Change Institute, has been involved in developing retrofit standards for low energy buildings that involve specifications for new roles and skills. She recently attended a training course to become qualified as a ‘Retrofit Co-ordinator’. She gives a short overview of how these different aspects are expected to be linked and changed to help deliver improvements to the UK’s building stock.

The scale-up of smart local energy systems (SLES) that combine renewable energy (RE) and smart technologies for system flexibility has been seen as a potential way to accelerate the energy transition to deep decarbonisation (Ford et al, 2019).