Renewable Energy Articles

The 2007 White Paper “Meeting the Energy Challenge” is the UK government’s international and domestic energy strategy designed to address long term energy challenges faced by the UK.  It aims to deliver four key policy goals:

• To put the UK on a path to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60% by 2050, with real progress being seen by 2020.
• To promote competitive markets in the UK and beyond, helping to increase the rate of sustainable economic growth and to improve productivity.
• To maintain reliable energy supplies in the UK.
• To ensure that every home in the UK is adequately and affordably heated.

The policy also recognises that the UK will need 30-35GW of new electricity generation capacity over the coming two decades as many of our current coal and nuclear power stations reach the end of their lives.

Solar energy has been around for decades. Ever since a team of bright sparks (no pun intended) realized the potential to harness the heat and light from the sun into a lasting energy resource, much has been said about the revolutionary renewable energy source.

The UK has long been a supporter of solar energy and the turn of 2014 saw its solar power industry install its 500,000th set of domestic panels. Latest figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change have highlighted this major milestone with around 1,900 solar schemes being introduced every week on average.

Half a Million Installations

But with over 20 million occupied households in the UK, there a number of questions that remain; how close are we to entering a new age of energy power? Can we really move to a full dependence on solar energy? Are the costs of such schemes fully justifiable investment?

We’ve teamed up with SolarTech Ltd, one of the UK’s leading solar panel installers and industry experts, to outline just what 2014 has in store for the solar industry.

Natural gas power plants are releasing less of the harmful greenhouse gas emissions as compared to more conventional coal power plants. Since United States has been shifting its focus from coal to more cleaner natural gas (mostly due to the "shale gas revolution") this has also resulted in the positive fact that US power plants are today responsible for significantly less emissions than this was case ten or twenty years ago.

Not only that, power plants fired with natural gas also release significantly less nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, two infamous air pollutants, meaning that natural gas power plants are also improving air quality in comparison to staying with coal power plants.

In raw numbers, natural gas fired plants emit 549 grams CO₂ per kilowatt hour, while coal fired power plants emit 915 grams per kilowatt hour of energy produced. This is a massive difference that clearly shows that natural gas is significantly more cleaner energy source than coal, and because of the recent shale gas discoveries natural gas has also become cheap, and therefore cost-competitive with coal, which was the main factor that enabled transition from coal to natural gas in United States.

Throughout the world changes are being made which aim to help reduce the effects of climate change and to ultimately make us a green energy run planet; from Australia to New York there have been developments. But the real question is whether all the small changes that we are making throughout the world are making a substantial difference?

It is hard to believe that there has ever been a time in which nearly all energy used was from a renewable source. However, before the development of coal in the 19th century this was the reality as there was no other option. In recent years we have come to realise that we have all been a little too greedy when it comes to the materials that are beneath the Earth’s surface.

We therefore have been developing numerous ways in which to utilise renewable energy to its maximum potential. We now seem to be stepping up our game from residential solar panels and wind turbines at commercial properties. With plans to have what is, to put it simply, a giant solar panel constructed on the moon and more immediate plans for huge offshore wind farms, the next stage of the process seems to be about to get into full swing.

North Carolina is rapidly becoming one of the fastest growing solar energy markets in the United States. It has been reported that the state currently has more than 800 MW of solar energy project in development or under construction, which is third largest in the country, trailing only behind California and Nevada.

One of the reasons why solar energy is in the state's focus is because of the progressive renewable energy portfolio standard which obliges utilities to meet 12.5 % of their energy needs from renewable energy sources. In fact, North Carolina was the first state in the southeastern United States to adopt a renewable-energy portfolio standard.