It can’t set much clearer than this - these 2 YouTube videos promoted right next to each other. Charging rate of 1000kW is bonkers - adding 400 miles of range in 6 minutes.

Every now and again, it's worth popping quickly onto the Telegraph's website to remind yourself just how hysterically and ludicrously obsessed they are with Ed Miliband and net-zero. Just from the past few days...

It’s weird how the continued closure of the strait isn’t news in the uk any more even though the impact is predicted to be about to spread massively. Pretty damning how news is focused on the novel rather than the important.

Dynamic agrivoltaism has adjustable PV panels for protecting crops & generating energy. The panels are managed according to the type of crop and its needs. Sun’Agri has more than forty projects in operation including apples, grape vines, tomatoes, maize. irrigationeurope.eu/en/dynamic-a...

Lovely chart showing how the electricity generation by gas (yellow) has been replaced over the last 6 years with battery discharge (blue).

It remains unclear at this stage whether the government will meet its clean power by 2030 target and whether it will deliver promised reductions in bills, but they are giving it a right good go. www.businessgreen.com/news/4529760...

So the next time you interview a grid operator complaining about renewables and electric cars, ask him: "What incentive structure do you have in place to reward electric vehicle owners for avoiding grid congestion on the moments and locations grid congestion actually occurs?"

Ban those Heat Pump fridge freezers! Stick with good old traditional ice cellars.

Michael de Podesta (@protons4b.bsky.social) wrote a brilliant explanation of the efficiency and benefits of heat pump tumble dryers last October

In a rational world the government would be asking people to respond to the current fossil fuel crisis by car sharing, turning lights off, and generally saving fuel and energy. And yet Ministers can’t even propose better efficiency standards for tumble dryers without the right wing press going mad.

Stunning data viz from @neilkaye.bsky.social Took me a while to decode. Black lines are 30 year averages. Peaks up and down are gb variations over last 12 months from those averages. Clearly visible is the recent sunny dry April and the wet Oct 25 — Feb 26. Oh and the generally warming planet.

Three of Britain’s top five electricity decarbonisation records have been set in past two months…🥳

Just to crib Jan's great chart here a little bit - here are just a few of the headlines that came out when growth somewhat slowed in 2024 Many, many media outlets do not really know how to handle technological change like this

For the first time ever, heat pumps outsold gas boilers in Germany in 2025. 48% of all new heating systems installed last year were heat pumps. Gas fell to just 39%. A decade ago, heat pumps had a 7% market share. The transformation has been remarkable.

One is reminded of the story of King Croesus, who, before attacking Persia, consulted the oracle. The oracle told him that if he proceeded, he would destroy a great nation. What Croesus didn't realize was that the nation would be his own.

AI LLMs can generate slop, but they can also debunk AI-generated slop! I couldn't verify any of the below, so I asked ChatGPT. Answer: Japan has not built 3,200+ km of solar canopy for the Shinkansen. The image is AI slop. There are no credible engineering, gov't, or company sources for any of this.

Forgive me if this is getting repetitive, but this is the first time creating sankey diagrams. Here’s latest take showing energy flows in my 100yo house in Suffolk UK with heat pump, 14kW east west PV array, 13kWh battery & EV. Net cost of electricity for month was £44. Mean temp for month was 8°C.

Another look at the energy used by our 100yo house in Suffolk this March so far. We have a 14kW east/west PV array, 10 kWh battery, EV & heat pump. We used 2,500kWh of energy, but of that we only needed to buy 612kWh and we also sold back 345kWh. Here are the energy flows:

Here are energy flows for our 100 yo house for March so far. Solar generated 80% of requirement (heating, hot water, cooking, car etc) and with smarter control of the battery we could have been more self sufficient. I find this utterly amazing. 7kW one each of east and west roof faces.

It all felt very coordinated. Interesting that it was apparently illegal! Why oh why did Vaillant need to participate in this! FYI @chrisnelder.bsky.social

Available in red…

Cracking news!

This is excellent news. Go to the shops. Buy a thing. Plug it in and then immediately harvest energy from the sun. I’m guessing that this will have a power limit before it needs a proper spur from the consumer unit, DNO approval and MSC certification etc, but it’s really helpful.

New Zealand imports all its petrol, diesel and fuel oil. Their fuel prices spiked within a few days of the Strait of Hormuz being blocked. Suddenly there was a mad rush on people wanting to buy EVs - even old second hand Leafs.

Good morning. One thing we need to think about is the price elasticity of demand for oil and gas (ie. how much demand falls when prices rise). The OBR has the price elasticity of natural gas at ~0.1. Doubling the price lowers demand by only 10%. So if we lose 20% of supply, price would need to…ouch

2nd hand electric cars are bonkers cheap at the moment. This is a typical price for a 5yo 66,000 mile mg5 electric estate car with 200 mile range which, btw, is still under the manufacturer’s 80,000 mile / 7 year warranty. I would immediately buy one if I didn’t already own one!

Today we generated 50kWh of electricity from PV array on roof of our 100yo house. We used this to heat our house + hot water using a heat pump with 15kWh electricity (replacing 50kWh of gas.) And added 140 miles range to our EV using 35kWh electricity (replacing 14 litres or 140 kWh petrol)

It’s disappointing that this @theguardian.com article about lithium ion battery fires doesn’t mention that many of the fires likely to be caused by scandalously badly made unbranded or fake branded batteries that should never be offered for sale. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Could one of the ‘achievements’ of autonomous vehicles be to reduce average occupancy of cars on our roads to < 1! (In 2024 average occupancy in England was only 1.1).

Inflation doesn’t just happen, it has a trigger or a number of triggers and this talk discusses a reasonably common trigger, a fossil fuel price spike, which they call ‘fossilflation’. These talks and always full of insight and well worth the annual subscription in my view!

Kier Starmer: "What gives us control is renewables. Our own home-grown energy which is then more secure and more independent. That’s why I think we should go further and faster on renewables. Let’s get control of our own energy…so we don’t have to keep worrying that our bills are going to go up"

Those still labo(u)ring under the false idea that UK electricity prices are high because of its energy transition (a claim repeated endlessly by anti-transition Tory and Reform politicians) would do well to read this short thread and study the charts. Renewables are the solution, not the problem!

I can highly recommend this thread + linked article. Reading it I now properly understand how marginal pricing works and why the linkage between gas and electricity pricing in the uk has weakened recently and should be largely history within 4 years (as it already is in Spain) and how CfD helps.

I can't resist a good Sankey diagram, and earlier this week the Climate Change Committee re-published their version of the UK energy system. Three interesting takeaways for those who missed it first time 👇

Learn why China is building new coal-fired power plants at a record pace while its use of coal for power generation has been *falling* and why the pipeline of new coal plants hit a record high even while its existing coal power plants are sitting idle about half the time.

Best roundup of the effects of Trump's war on Iran on the global energy system so far is from @carbonbrief.org (no surprise there): www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-does... Don't believe the placations - these markets are going to be disrupted for a while.

Got oil heating? Get a heat pump cleanenergy.campaign.gov.uk/heat-pump/

Apropos of nothing in particular, just resharing this chart showing why North Sea gas is drying up (we burned it all already)

This is a good moment for Europe & UK to remember that they can stick up wind and solar, insulates houses, far quicker than they can find new gas in e.g. North Sea If you're chasing more gas, it's now a case of which unreliable regime you prefer to depend on news.sky.com/story/market...

The UK government's sanguine support for the breaking of international law (that included the reported killing of 150 people in a school), sits oddly with their furrowed-brow, earnest insistence on jailing people for holding paper signs protesting against genocide www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

What a great report by the Norwegian Consumer Council on how digital products and services are getting worse (enshittification)! Lots of good explanations and examples, but also very actionable with policy recommendations.

Rather puzzled / alarmed by this setup. A 210L unvented cylinder sitting on shelf supported by scarily thin struts with no sign of an expansion vessel anywhere. And in case you are wondering, I’m very sure it isn’t a bubble top. But.. no sign of any discharge from pressure release outside.

The world is turning upside down with tariff wars and Epstein revelations It’s reassuring to see normality in some places Like the news that Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is going to be even more over time & over budget giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

@energysmartwv.bsky.social Nate. I once saw pictures of a domestic heat pump being removed that has the external heat exchanger and its associated fan housed separate from the compressor and associated power electronics.

And as a rough comparison: Hinkley Point C: - estimate now up to £35bn+ - 6 million homes - proposed 2008, ready approx 2030 Dogger Bank Wind Farm: - sub £10bn - 6 million homes - proposed 2008, already producing power

Pleased to report that I did not get this embarrassingly wrong: the government has not abolished or amended the Boiler Upgrade Scheme at this Budget. The ECO levy has been abolished, but the extra government funding to replace it will soften that.

🧊❄️ “Brutal cold snaps” and a “barrage of snow” - how accurate were these headlines? We review the most dramatic weather headlines from this week and separate fact from fiction. Read more 👇

Grid scale batteries are changing our electricity system. Excellent new visual story on batteries in FT today shows just how far this technology has evolved. Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning. ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

In the late 1970s I worked in a computer shop where we sold 4kb memory cards for £100 (£550 in today’s money). So… if those prices had held, the 24gb of main memory in the computer I bought today would have set me back £3,300,000,000! Exponentials are wild.