David Strahan – Page 7 – write first draft

Will the real peak oil policy please stand up?

August 30, 2011 By David Strahan7 Comments

First published in Petroleum Review, September 2011. There has been much excitement in the press recently about the last government’s attitude to peak oil. Documents released under Freedom of Information requests seem to show New Labour facing both ways: dismissing the issue in public, while privately worrying about its potential impacts. Far more relevant today is the attitude of the coalition, which is just as perplexing and equally dangerous. (more…)...

Cold storage

August 26, 2011 By David Strahan1 Comment

First published in Energy World, September 2011. Only connect. In the last twelve months Britain has shelled out £4.3 million pounds to wind farms that were not producing power even though the wind was blowing. Over the same period our power stations and heavy industries chucked 800 gigawatt hours of waste heat up the chimney, about the same as all the heat consumed by the entire country. (more…)...

European supergrid ‘decades away’

August 26, 2011 By David StrahanNo Comments

First published in Windpower Monthly, September 2011. Plans to build a European supergrid to distribute wind power from the northwest of the continent and solar from the south are decades away from realisation, according to Tim Yeo, chairman of the UK parliament’s Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, which is investigating the potential benefits of such a scheme. (more…)...

Europe pays for Germany’s nuclear ‘Nein danke!’

July 29, 2011 By David StrahanNo Comments

First published in the New Scientist, 29 July 2011. Europe's energy consumers will find themselves paying a high price for Germany's decision to get out of nuclear power. (more…)...

Coal and gas to plug German nuclear gap

July 7, 2011 By David Strahan4 Comments

First published in the New Scientist, 7 July 2011. Chancellor Angela Merkel's government claimed to be "ushering in the age of renewables" as German MPs passed legislation this week to phase out nuclear power by 2022 – but the basic arithmetic of the energy-switch policy suggests the country will struggle to fill the hole left by nuclear power – and emissions may rise in the interim. (more…)...

David MacKay interview

June 4, 2011 By David Strahan8 Comments

First published in Sustainable Business, 4 June 2011. My interview with David MacKay has the feel of a university tutorial. Perhaps it’s not surprising, since the chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change is a professor of physics at Cambridge. But the impression is reinforced in his cramped office on the sixth floor of DECC, where I negotiate piles of paperwork and shuffle furniture so we both can see his computer screen. (more…)...

DECC model highlights inconvenient energy truths

June 1, 2011March 19, 2018 By David Strahan4 Comments

First published in Energy World, 1 June 2011. For those of us with an anorak in the closet, the government’s new online energy planning tool, the 2050 Pathways Calculator, has provided hours of perplexing fun. (more…)...