Category: News

2016 outlook for carbon reductions has never been better…

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

$500m pledge at COP 21: A return to global carbon trading

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 [...]

Read More
Solar panels in a town, pic

Renewable Projects: Round-up & 2016 Preview

"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 [...]

Read More

The UK Green Revolution is now over?

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. [...]

Read More

Greenfield site development: Location, location, location

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 [...]

Read More

Structuring renewable energy projects: local development

There’s an inherent commercial tension within the way companies approach structuring renewable energy projects. In any new area, there’s naturally an element of trial and error that's characterised renewables for both technology providers, developers and investors (as technologies evolve, as legislative frameworks and policy develops and so on). It comes with the territory in emerging industries. However something that’s often overlooked is the way deal-structuring goes through the same kind of trial and error. In many respects, this area is more critical to the delivery of low-carbon solutions than even the technology itself. To explain the issue simply, [...]

Read More
Atacama Desert

Final pre-flight checks before we begin Atacama development

We’re delighted to announce we’re making the last few preparations to launch our first Deal Stream 2 project, planned to break ground mid-2016 in Chile’s South Atacama desert. The project is for a sub-50MW solar energy facility that meets all the requirements for delivering a high quality, profitable solar park with excellent long term revenue potential. The key to building high quality renewable energy assets that deliver both effective carbon reductions and offer long term value creation for investors is defining the right kind of project. This first Atacama solar development is an excellent example: Location: [...]

Read More

Why is climate change policy a leaky mess?

I’ve just read a carbon abatement report for a natural gas pipeline that runs across hundreds of miles of continental Eastern Europe.  It’s leaking 2.4 millions of tons of methane (CH4) into the atmosphere every year.  The equivalent of about 60 million tons of CO2 (going by the standard equivalency measure).  And that’s just from one facility in one country. Multiply the issue across the natural gas systems of Europe alone, and the equivalent of billions of tons of CO2 is spewing out into the atmosphere for no reason other than faulty well valves and leaking low-medium pressure pipes. You [...]

Read More