energy independence

With the last incumbent to enter and leave the revolving door of UK prime ministers having caused alarm by reportedly preparing plans to effectively ban big solar on farmland, Harald Överholm, CEO of clean energy company Alight, says politicians need to put discredited arguments behind them and get on with the urgent business of shoring up energy security.

At the beginning of June 2021, during a meeting with Spanish businesspeople organized by the Portuguese-Spanish Chamber of Commerce, the Portuguese Prime Minster António Costa urged his neighbors to work on jointly exploiting the potential of plentiful lithium reserves found on the Iberian Peninsula. As Luis Ini reports from Madrid, his words reflect an increasingly evident reality: the need to achieve autonomy in the field of energy, especially in energy storage.

Spain’s Ingeteam will supply a 70 MW/340 MWh facility based on almost 60 lithium-ion containers to provide storage services to the grid.

With each of the 10-year network development plans produced by Europe’s electricity transmission system operators years in the making, the latest such publication may already be out of date as the bloc prepares to fast forward its energy security and climate change ambitions.

A conference about the UK’s electricity market showed organizations are considering the future of the country’s energy sector and how to achieve a net zero economy.

The kingdom has had a ban on new large scale clean energy projects since January 2019 as Covid-19 exacerbated a situation in which generation capacity already outstripped supply. Lifting that embargo, and re-starting renewables auctions would be a step in the right direction, according to IRENA.

A team of scientists at Lausanne have calculated the costs and job impact of the 2050 Energy Strategy, in force since January. The results show the additional investment called for by the strategy is offset by savings on imported fuel and electricity.