Grid Flexibility

With ambitious decarbonization targets and a favourable regulatory landscape, Portugal is an appealing market for renewable energy developers and producers. Like other European markets, however, Portugal’s clean energy industry faces challenges related to permitting, grid connection, and the availability of remuneration schemes – hurdles which threaten to slow the country’s energy transition.

The European solar landscape changed forever in 2022 and managing the supply chain, grid, and permitting constraints will be key to a solar-dominated energy future for the continent.

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 success of unsubsidized clean power facilities in the country – whether driven by corporate power purchase agreements or selling direct to the wholesale electricity market – has prompted the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to ponder whether contracts-for-difference payments will be fit for purpose in the years ahead.

European renewables, including Spanish solar, made big gains as energy demand recovered before the second wave of Covid infections. Nuclear was a notable loser, in part because clean energy volumes in the north of the continent drove down power prices sufficiently to make reactors uncompetitive.

Doubling down on renewable energy investment and energy transition spending is required to ensure a truly green global recovery from the Covid-19 crisis and its economic aftershock, claims the International Renewable Energy Agency.

U.K. Power Networks has tendered 18.2 MW of flexible power capacity to six companies across eight regions. With regular feed-in returns hanging in the wind in the U.K., flexibility and peak time management payments could be an alternative source of income for the solar industry.

Outlining energy pathways for the next 30 years and beyond, the U.K.’s National Grid has released four different scenarios, considering growing electricity demand and a significant increase in energy infrastructure from new renewable generation and EV charging networks. Only two of them meet the U.K.’s 2050 carbon reduction target on the back of a large growth of renewables and energy storage, and almost completely decarbonized transport.

A report published this week by the UK’s Committee on Climate Change warns that the country is currently not on course to meet emissions reduction targets set out in its Carbon Budget legislation; and outlines a series of actions it believes the government should take in order to get back on track.