350 has hired Tim Hyett as Managing Director in order to increase the scale and scope of fundraising within the group to capitalise on the additional opportunities presented by successful negotiations of the new Paris Agreement at COP 21 in December. Nick Dimmock, Managing Director of Solar 350 comments; this announcement is slightly belated as Tim joined us in late November of last year in anticipation of a successful outcome of COP 21. He has been contributing significantly to the success of the business. Tim’s role is to attract additional EIS and Institutional investment to 350 companies, to gain FCA regulation [...]
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Solar 350 has green lighted the creation of the Mexican SPV (special purpose vehicle) called Solar 350 Baja Cali 1. This is the legal entity is due to hold the development assets of the first of the Mexican Solar projects. Specifically, this is a 60 Mw Project located towards the top of Baja California in Mexico. The plant will service the energy needs of the rapidly developing Baja region and the rapidly increasing industrial base located around the border town of Tijuana. Many of you will know of Tijuana from its reputation as a party town, but the rapid economic development [...]
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It’s important not to get too cocky about the health of the renewables industry worldwide. Figures released by the Clean Energy Pipeline organisation this week showed that global clean energy investment enjoyed double digit (14%) growth last year over 2015. But before you pop open the low carbon champers and celebrate another bumper year, the figures are a little misleading. For a start, many of the projects included in the figures have been raising money for years, which means the fact they came to fruition in 2015 makes the numbers look better than they really are. It’s not a sudden flow [...]
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January is traditionally a time when we think about fresh starts and making the coming year better than the old one. It’s the time when diet books, quit-smoking services and recruitment companies are at their busiest. And this year, in the renewables sector, it’s also time for a positive change. 2015 saw investment decline in the UK as the last few subsidies and tax breaks ended for a lot of solar and wind (and of course, global emissions kept rising), but 2016 will be different. The outlook is more positive than its been in years. This is because the last-minute COP21 Paris [...]
Read More[View the story "Day 2 highlights - COP 21 " on Storify]
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[View the story "COP21 - Day One Coverage" on Storify]
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We're not ones to say "We told you so..." at 350, but we're delighted to hear that the COP 21 Climate Change summit has already established that carbon trading from emissions reductions is firmly back at the heart of the global climate change agenda. Regular readers of this blog will know that re-energising the carbon market is the most practical way to address global emissions increases. And more to the point, it's also the fairest way to affect greener, clean development in the developing world. On the opening session in Paris (COP21), Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland announced an [...]
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"With so many renewable projects out there, you’ve got to apply some pretty strict criteria to separate out the best opportunities from the riskier ones. That’s our challenge..." This week I managed to pin down our busy Business Development Director, Bill Goldie to get a run down of the 350 projects we’re engaged with. In between trips to China, India and Mexico, he explained his number one priority for selecting a renewable energy projects: “Generally, the projects we work on are exceptionally high quality in terms of their development potential, and based in countries that are transitioning from developing to [...]
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Thank heavens. The UK renewable boom was started by the pied piper of misguided climate economics (former energy secretary Ed Miliband) and it's now collapsed under its own weight. To misquote Winston Churchill, never in the field of reducing CO2 emissions has so much been wasted by so few. That's not to say the UK renewable sector hasn't had a good run, but from an environmental point of view it has been about as effective as paying people to run round in circles to reduce unemployment. Now there are going to be casualties. Potentially a lot of them, too. [...]
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One of the issues that we face when looking for power projects offering the best carbon reductions is selecting the right location for a project. This has always led us to look at the developing world, because that’s where emissions are rising, and rising fast. In effect, the world is no longer developed or developing, there are really about 5 grades from developed, transitioning, developing, under developed and least developed. There’s little carbon benefit from developing in Europe and it's very expensive because power prices are so low. The evidence for this is obvious; the installed capacity in EU and [...]
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