UK Energy Brokers could have a brand new product to market soon to the commercial energy market, because on the day that British Gas gets rapped over record profits, a brand new energy saving product is released in the United States.

A Silicon Valley based company called Bloom Energy, has finally launched its new commercial energy brokers product the Bloom Energy Server, that could change the way companies buy business energy in the future.  The Bloom Energy Server is a large metal box about the size of a small van, which can generate electricity from a wide range of different fuels, and at the same time producing very low greenhouse gas emissions.  This could be a new type of renewable energy source, and unlike traditional renewable energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels, each solution produces a constant source of energy for years, which could allow companies to be self sustaining or even disconnect themselves from the national grid.

What Is The Bloom Box

The product that has been dubbed the “power plant in a box”, is in fact a new type of large fuel cell, capable of generating 100 kilowatts of electricity, which uses solid oxide fuel cells, which generate electrical power through an electrochemical reaction between oxygen and an additional fuel such as natural gas, ethanol gas and even landfill gas, which causes electrons in the cell to flow through the ceramic materials which in turn generates an electrical current to power businesses or homes.

The Future Market – The shape of things to come

Will this new product be the start of the end for traditional forms of energy generation, and could this lead eventually to every business and home having there very own mini power plant on site.  Well only time will tell, for the time being this product remains out of the price range of most small businesses, and its long term viability and reliability remain to be seen.  

We would like to see how the market takes to this new product over the coming months and what rival competitors now bring to the market following this launch.  This new technology, like anything will develop over time and once mass produced, we will see the cost point come down to a level that makes it viable for everyone.  We don’t expect this to ever be a perfect solution but it could make a big difference to future generations and go along way to a reliable and sustainable form of energy.

In Summary

With the pending introduction of the UK carbon reduction commitment scheme, it is highly likely that we are going to see a big uptake in these new types of technology as business energy brokers look to advice clients on reducing their overall carbon emissions in the future.  Many questions on the reliability and the long term value of this product remain to be seen.  However we look forward to seeing what happens in the future, and what additional technology breakthroughs bring to the market.

The UK’s renewable energy industry today offered a cautious welcome to the announcement of the final version of the government’s Clean Energy Cashback, arguing that it will provide a boost to domestic energy generation but still does not go far enough to support businesses keen to install renewable energy systems.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) today announced the so-called feed-in tariffs that will be available to businesses and households that install renewable energy systems from 1 April. Under the feed-in tariff scheme, households and businesses that install renewable energy systems will receive money from their energy supplier based on how much energy they generate, providing a further incentive to invest in technologies such as micro wind turbines and solar panels. (more…)

The targets set out by the Climate Change Act will not be met without a major overhaul of the energy consumption of existing buildings.  The evidence, says the Royal Academy of Engineers, is staring us in the face, simple maths tells us that the target of cutting emissions by 80% by 2050 is not attainable without radical measures.

Buildings currently account for almost half (45%) of the country’s emissions, with most estimates suggesting that 80% of the buildings we will occupy in 2050 have already been built.

This means that even if we achieve the unlikely goal of completely eliminating carbon from all other sources, emissions will still stand at 36% of today’s rate if nothing is done to improve the performance of these buildings.

A report published by the academy acknowledges the vast scale of the challenge while outlining what could be done to meet it, both in terms of new build and refurbishment.

Report author Prof Doug King, said: “The sheer pace of change in the regulation of building energy performance has already created problems for the construction industry and the proposed acceleration of this process, aiming to achieve zero-carbon new buildings by 2020, will only widen the gulf between ambitious Government policy and the industry’s ability to deliver.”

The report reinforces the hierarchy of carbon cutting techniques, once again emphasising the need to tackle energy efficiency before looking at the savings that can be made by headline-grabbing renewable energy technologies.

“Before renewable energy generation is even considered it is vital to ensure that buildings are as energy efficient as possible, otherwise the potential benefits are simply wasted in offsetting un-necessary consumption,” said a statement from the academy.

“Creative solutions to make buildings more energy efficient include basic techniques, known for thousands of years, such as using daylight, natural ventilation and thermal mass, where masonry is used to store heat and moderate temperature variations.

“However, with the application of scientific analysis, these aspects of a building’s design can make a very substantial contribution to meeting the performance and comfort needs of the occupants without resorting to energy consuming building services installations.”

As nations debate sweeping carbon-emission cuts in Copenhagen, one country has become a model of ambitious targets the U.K. Whether it has the right system in place to achieve those goals is another matter.  Britain has one of the most open, competitive energy markets in Europe. Its system has delivered real benefits to consumers in the form of lower prices for electricity and gas. But there is growing skepticism that the U.K. will be able to hit its target of a 34% cut in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 and 80% by 2050 with the kind of deregulated, liberalized energy system it currently has in place.

It’s still cheaper for U.K. power providers to entice consumers with inexpensive energy generated by dirtier technologies such as gas-fired power plants than through cleaner means such as nuclear or wind power. Critics of the government say Britain hasn’t yet come up with a financial framework that adequately encourages construction of cleaner plants.

Many Western governments have championed energy deregulation, even as they face doubts about whether decarbonizing an economy can be left to the market. A recent report by the U.K.’s Committee on Climate Change, or CCC, an independent body advising the government, said it was unsure the market in its current form “will deliver required investments in low-carbon power generation” through the 2020s.

“You can’t be confident that arrangements designed to deliver the efficient dispatch of a fossil-fuel fired plant can deliver a totally different objective” of big investment in nuclear and renewables, says David Kennedy, the CCC’s chief executive.

The U.K.’s record in reducing emissions leaves room for improvement. The CCC says they fell at less than 1% annually from 2003 to 2007, and will need to fall at 2% a year for the U.K. to meet its targets. The government says Britain’s greenhouse gases have come down by more than 20% from 1990 levels and that it is on track to meet its goal of a 34% reduction by 2020.

The U.K. broke up and privatized its electricity monopoly in the 1980s and 1990s, and removed controls on prices. But a big chunk of the U.K.’s electricity-generation capacity will disappear over the next decade, as high-emitting coal-fired power stations and older nuclear reactors are shut. What replaces them will have huge implications for the U.K.’s ability to keep to its carbon targets.

In theory, the price of carbon should dictate decisions on such investments. The European Union’s emissions-trading plan sets an overall cap on the output of greenhouse gases. The price of permits to emit CO2 then creates incentives to cut emissions and invest in low-carbon technology.

But the recession triggered a steep fall in the price of carbon in the EU trading system, and it has languished at about £15 a ton for months, down from around £30 in the summer of 2008. The result: the economics of capital-intensive projects like offshore wind farms still don’t add up.

Instead, companies tend to opt for gas-fired power stations, which are cheap, quick and easy to build. But burning more of the fossil fuel means the U.K. may miss its emissions target.

Sam Laidlaw, head of utility Centrica PLC, has called for a support mechanism to be activated if the price of carbon in the emission-trading system fell below a certain floor. This would provide the certainty companies need to make investment decisions, he says.

Others advocate tougher state intervention. Even the opposition Conservatives say they are looking at ways of supporting the carbon price. From the party that drove through the privatization of the U.K.’s energy sector, that is a big change.

Renewable technology that uses energy stored in the ground to heat buildings and provide hot water could be installed in hundreds of thousands of homes and offices by the end of the next decade, a report said today.

About 8,000 ground-source heat pump systems were operating in the UK – far fewer than in other European countries, such as Sweden, although the market was expanding rapidly and doubled last year, the Environment Agency report said.

The document concluded that the technology could be installed in 320,000 homes and businesses by 2020 with support from the government.

If enough support was given through the renewable heat incentive, which will be introduced in 2012 and pay homeowners and businesses a guaranteed price for generating renewable heat, more than 1m ground-source heat pumps systems could be put in place.

At the top end of its potential, ground-source heat technology could be installed in more than one in 10 homes and in 40% of commercial buildings, the report said.

Even if growth was limited to 320,000 homes and business – 1% of households and 11% of commercial buildings – it could provide 30% of the renewable heat the UK needed to produce to meet its 2020 target.

“Ground-source heating is a rapidly growing technology that has the potential to produce at least 30% of the country’s renewable heat needs – but it needs financial support in order to grow,” Tony Grayling, the head of climate change and sustainable development at the Environment Agency, said.

“We would like to see this technology given adequate financial support through the new renewable heat incentive to meet its full potential in the UK.”

Germany and Spain will provide Europe’s biggest growth in windpower over the next decade but Britain and Italy might give the best returns on investment, the head of the European Wind Energy Association said on Friday.

‘We believe Germany and Spain will continue to be the two biggest markets in terms of new wind capacity in the next 12 years, with the UK and France right behind them, then Italy,’ EWEA chief executive Christian Kjaer told reporters.

EWEA forecast in a report launched on Friday that 25.1 gigawatts of wind capacity would be installed in Germany between 2009 and 2020, 23.3 gigawatts in Spain, 22.8 in Britain and 19.6 in France.

But the support mechanisms for renewable energy in Britain and Italy generate the most favourable returns for large-scale investments.

‘If I could get planning permission, I would invest in onshore wind energy in the UK or Italy,’ Kjaer said. ‘Both pay very good prices per kilowatt hour.’ ‘That said, there is more uncertainty than in countries such as Germany and France where you’d know your income for the next 20 years, because of the feed-in tariffs. So, if I’d burned my fingers in the financial crisis, I’d put my money in France or Germany.’

Wind power provides a greater share of national electricity in Denmark than any other European Union country, at 20.3 per cent, the report showed, followed by Spain at 12.3 per cent and Portugal at 11.4. Britain and France take 9th and 12th place, largely because their complex planning regulations have hampered the growth of the windpower market so far.
 

A radical new design of electrical generator that solves an engineering quandary and promises to be cheaper, lighter and more reliable than anything currently available has been unveiled by scientists at the University of Edinburgh. The work by Markus Mueller and Alasdair McDonald at the university’s Institute of Energy Systems has solved one of the fundamental engineering problems faced by builders of offshore wind turbines.

A new company, NGenTec, was formed ten days ago to exploit the new design. It is chaired by Derek Shepherd, a former managing director of Aggreko International, a Glasgow-based supplier of mainly diesel-fuelled generators.

Mr Shepherd said of NGenTec: “Our technology has the potential to revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making wind power cheaper and more reliable and greatly increasing the efficiency of wind turbines for electricity companies.”

The blades of conventional turbines are connected to a generator via a gearbox. In harsh conditions at sea, this is prone to breakdown, leading to costly repairs which themselves are at the mercy of the weather.

The alternative is to dispense with the gearbox and connect the blades directly to a generator via an axle.

The institute’s design, through a novel arrangement of the magnets inside the generator and the copper coils that produce electricity as they pass the magnets, has succeeded in cutting the weight of direct-drive generators by up to half and made assembly much easier. A prototype installed on a wind turbine has proved that the design works.

Derek Douglas, an entrepreneur specialising in raising finance for start-up companies, has joined NGenTec with the aim of raising £4 million to prove that a 6MW generator would work and then a further £10 million to set up an assembly and manufacturing operation.

He said: “Although our technology has applications onshore, offshore is where we think there is the most added value. It means that you don’t need such big towers and such deep foundations.”

Mr Douglas said that NGenTec, in which the University of Edinburgh has taken a 17.5 per cent stake, had the potential to be one of the most successful spin-out companies the university has had.