There’s a characteristically comprehensive special report on energy in today’s “Financial Times,” a series of interesting articles, mostly on the state of play of fossil fuels. There’s also a great guest column from Jeremy Leggett the founder of Solarcentury, a provider of “intelligent generation.” Nota bene: According to Leggett, “In 2008, for the first time, both the European Union and the US added more capacity from renewables than from fossil-fuel and nuclear sources.”
He also tells the story here of a smashing distributed generation success story in which it was demonstrated that “…renewable power can produce baseload electricity in a secure and reliable manner without help from conventional power.” We keep hearing about the “intermittency” of renewables from naysayers and the fossil fuel industry. This test was a good way of refuting that particular canard. (Energy storage, not incidentally, is going to be a very big story indeed as renewables continue to burgeon.)
