The Ocean’s Power

Nowadays the buzz words of the energy industry are “renewable energy“. Renewable energy is energy which comes from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves and geothermal heat. As you might have noticed some of the afore mentioned resources come from the Earth’s biggest natural resources, the Oceans.

Oceans can produce different types of energy, including thermal energy from the sun’s heat and mechanical energy from the action of waves and tides. Public and private institutions around the globe are investing big bucks to harness this energy resource in ways that are safe, sustainable and environmentally safe.

The U.S. Department of Energy, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has announced a joint research to study the potential environmental impacts of harnessing energy from the oceans. The research will also develop techniques and regulations to support the responsible sitting and permitting of offshore wind energy facilities and ocean energy generated from waves, tides, currents and thermal gradients.

Speaking on the matter the US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said:

“The nation’s oceans represent a major potential source of clean renewable energy, and the Department of Energy is committed to developing the innovative technologies that will harness that potential,”

As afore mentioned there are many ways to generate energy using the oceans like, tidal, waves, offshore wind farms. But without doubt the most innovative and eco-friendly one is OTEC or Ocean Thermal Energy Conservation.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) uses the temperature difference that exists between deep and shallow waters to run a heat engine. As with any heat engine, the greatest efficiency and power is produced with the largest temperature difference and up until now this was the biggest challenge for OTEC. But recent developments in efficiency of heat exchange assisted by modern designs performance can reach theoretical maximum efficiency making OTEC a viable and efficient renewable energy resource. For detailed information on OTEC please read: Ocean Thermal Energy

As you can see there are many ways to harness energy from our oceans but we must do it in a responsible way without affecting the ocean’s eco-systems.

If you would like more information on our range of energy broker services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

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Is Facebook Responsible For Higher Energy Bills?

As a market leading energy broker we have noticed that the current generation is more committed to discovering and reducing its carbon footprint than ever before.  But despite this growing awareness and our need to conserve and reduce our energy consumption, there is one thing that has changed our lifestyle, and increased our energy consumption like nothing else we have ever seen before.  Facebook, the social networking site accounted for 1 in every 10 internet visits in September – up 4% from the same month last year, now overtaking popular search engines such as Google in the rankings.

Astonishingly Facebook now attracts 55% of all visits to social networking sites but others such as Twitter, Linkedin and Tumblr have seen visits at least double in the last 12-months, a recent report suggested.

With all of this increased online activity comes an obvious need for an increased supply of electricity, both from the millions of online users, to the huge new data centers needed to host all of this data.  With its membership now passing the 500-million mark back in July, the storage and transmitting of messages, pictures and other information through Facebook uses a vast and still rapidly increasing amount of energy, as the network continues to expand its worldwide operations.

And with 4.5 billion updates posted to Facebook every week, the vast amount of energy needed for all of this online activity is enormous.

One of the pricing fundamentals of any commodity is the supply and demand factor, and with any increased demand, we see an impact on the supply and eventually the cost.

Because of Facebook’s rapid growth, their new hosting facility will need to be twice the size of its previous data centre, and to compound this issue the main source of electricity for the site is from coal fired power stations, the largest source of global warming pollution.

But this problem isn’t just limited just to Facebook, as the demand for cloud based applications grows Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others are investing billions of dollars to build new data centers to meet their growing demand for Web services, adding to the world pollution from computing.

In fact a recent study has estimated that the average user now spends at least 7-hours a month on Facebook alone, and reports suggest that this desire for social networking is set to increase further over the coming years.

Given that energy is an expensive and rising cost, these service providers do have a financial and environmental motivation to use as little electricity as possible.

But the implications for increased online activity is unlike anything that we have ever experienced before in our life times, and our desire and hunger for further social media interaction wont stop here.

Facebook is set to launch its latest Google taunting product on Monday, the long anticipated Facebook email system. The launch of an @facebook.com email is not itself a great surprise, as the existence of a secret project officially known as Project Titan has been circulating since February.

We just hope that our dwindling business energy supplies can cope long term with all of this increased use of energy.

More Facebook Facts

• Facebook like served a billion likes in the first 24 hours after its launch
• To put your friend count in perspective, the average user has 130
• People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook, while the current active official user count now stands at over 500 million.
• More than 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded to Facebook each month.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, after China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia.
• There are more than 800,000 developers building applications for Facebook.
• 70% of Facebook users live outside of the US.
• Yahoo! tried to buy Facebook in 2006 for $1,000,000,000.
• 8,300,000,000 hours are spent on Facebook monthly.
• Facebook was originally bankrolled by a co-founder of Paypal for $500,000

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Ofgem’s new Unit spent more than £5m on energy consultants

Last week Ofgem quietly announced on its website the details of expenditures on external energy consultants.  In just six months the energy regulator spent over £5m on new green taxes and incentives that ranged from feed-in-tariffs to smart meters.

Ofgem has an annual budget of £50m, if spending continues at the same rate by the end of the year the amount spent with external consultants will account for 20% of its total budget.

To administer environmental programmes and sustainability projects Ofgem created a special unit called, Ofgem E-Serve. The “E” stands for Environment, Energy and Efficiency. The new unit has used external consultants on 63 different occasions between April and September this year accounting for the total sum of £5m.

The details were quietly published on Ofgem’s website last week, ahead of new rules forcing state-funded organisations to detail all spending of more than £25,000. Among the highest paid sums is an energy consultancy company that pocket a total of £1.4m.

A spokesman for the regulator said: “Ofgem is unique among Britain’s regulators in capping its costs to 3% below inflation. This and other savings has saved more than £11m.”

On top of that, the value of schemes Ofgem has to manage has rocketed from £150m a year to £4bn. Such increase required a significant investment to be able to deliver these projects.

More about Ofgem E-Serve

Ofgem E-Serve focuses on administering environmental programmes and the delivery of sustainability projects such as offshore electricity transmission. Already running a £15bn offshore transmission tendering regime and many environmental programmes and services (some £3bn per year) and this is expected to more than double in the next decade.

Operation of Environmental Programmes (Existing Schemes) sits under the newly created role of Group Finance Director along with the support services covering HR, Information Management and Technology, Finance and Risk Management, Procurement, Building Services and Project Management. Development and implementation of the Offshore and Smart Metering projects sits under the newly created role of Commercial Managing Director along with Legal, and New Scheme Development.

If you would like more information on our range of energy broker services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

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Our monthly analysis of the UK gas and power markets is now available on line for the month of November 2010. The service is intended to keep you up to date with all the major news in Europe’s gas and power markets. It is also designed to keep power executives focused on market activity in an easy to digest format.

Your find our November 2010 report here and all historical energy reports can be located here.

If you would like more information on our services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

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SSE announced a 9.4% gas price increase for next month

Scottish & Southern Energy to increase its standard gas prices by 9.4% from December 1st. Britain’s second largest energy supplier stated the increase is based on higher forward annual wholesale gas prices.

According to the energy supplier, annual wholesale gas prices have increased by more than 25% since the company last made changes to its prices in March 2010. The increase will affect around 3.6 million customers, mainly households. We are yet to see if this will affect business gas and energy prices.

With winter just about to kick in, these hikes could not have come at a worse time and from our market experience as leading energy brokers we can forsee that this move by SSE is likely to be followed by the other major energy suppliers, known as the “big six”.

Alistair Phillips-Davies, energy supply director of SSE, said: “The last few months have been marked by rising wholesale gas prices and, having absorbed losses in our gas supply business for some time, we cannot delay an increase in retail prices any longer. I am sorry it will take effect during the winter period.”

With wholesale gas prices raising month after month, it was only a matter of time before energy prices started to go up. Our advice is to be prepared for a sudden increase in energy bills over the next few months.

Even though these hikes are mainly aimed for households, business owners must be on their toes as business energy prices should go up as well. To shield your business energy expenses from imminent price increases, review your energy contracts to make sure you are on the best and cheapest energy tariffs possible.

Here at Catalyst Commercial we offer a complete range of energy brokering services to help your business save precious money with gas and electricity bills.

If you would like more information on our range of energy broker services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

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