I genuinely don't plan family walking holidays around energy infrastructure. But here's Dinorwig upper reservoir seen from Carnedd Filian

"The London Strategic Heat Main will transport low carbon heat and potentially cooling, initially from anchor heat sources at Riverside Campus, located in Belvedere, in.. Bexley, to areas of high heat demand across London." nsip-documents.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/published-do...

I remember when being actually paid money to use more electricity was surprising, weird, noteworthy, we had discussions about who was going to bake cakes or charge the car. That was like, last year or something Now it's just... normal 😎 bsky.app/profile/ener...

Energy Stats UK@energystatsuk.bsky.social · last mo.

National average pricing for Octopus Energy Agile Tariff: Sun 28-06-2026 Min: -5.4p (14:30) Max: 33.1p (18:00) Avg: 13.0p Avg Excl Peak: 10.8p Peak 4pm-7pm: 27.8p Get graphs & pricing for all 14 UK regions at http://energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-tariff-pricing/

The long-awaited LDES results are here - the "minded to" projects are below. 5 quick takes: 1) Lithium going far beyond 8 hours, that debate must surely be dead now.

"Iron-air can be for wind what lithium-ion has been for solar PV", CEO claims

Multi-day energy storage startup Ore Energy signs 1GWh iron-air battery deal with Dutch utility

Ore Energy has signed an agreement with a utility in the Netherlands to deploy up to 1,000MWh of multi-day-duration iron-air batteries.

energy-storage.news

Great Britain: fleet-wide battery cycling has fallen about 15% since early 2025, but that average hides a split. One-hour batteries lean on frequency response for availability income and now cycle around 0.6 times a day. Two-hour units pair it with wholesale and re-trade, holding near one cycle.

It's 2026 and Ofgem are still telling people to buy halogen and CFL lights ?!? Can you even still buy those any more?

Ofgem@ofgem.gov.uk · 2mo ago

Three top tips for reducing your lighting bill: ↔️ Swap out your incandescent filament bulbs with modern LEDs, CFL or halogens 🌆 Turn off the lights when no one’s in the room 💡 Motion sensors are a great way to ensure you are only using lights when you need them

The new bill for electricity after July is actually _less_ than the present April bill, because the fall in consumption has more than compensated for the rise in unit rates! electric bill component: April £796 for 2700kWh July £783 for 2500kWh (For London - costs more in the North!)

Michael de Podesta found his aircon usage in London correlates well with days when his PV generates plenty of power to run it. The aircon is still needed after the sun goes down, so PV energy stored in his home battery is used to keep it running.

PV and AC

Friends, we are just reaching the time of year when we will begin to use our air conditioning system. Of course this use should ideally all be covered by our solar PV generation, but I just wondere…

protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com

1/ Published today in @natcomms.nature.com: our analysis on long-duration electricity storage needs for coping with #Dunkelflaute events in 🇪🇺 . Joint work with my stellar @diw.de colleagues @kittelmartin.bsky.social (lead) and @aroth.bsky.social 🎉https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72681-5

April 2025: first time ever that GB solar generated over 12 GW onto the grid April 2026: seven days *in a row* that solar generated over 12 GW

If anyone else with dodgy eyesight has found that today's Bluesky update has disallowed pinch-to-zoom: Chrome > Settings > Accessibility > Force Enable Zoom

Wow that's a lot of not gas

Ofgem's consultation on how electricity transmission might be charged based on location, after Zonal pricing was dropped NESO are also consulting, and perhaps DESNZ will launch theirs tomorrow! www.ofgem.gov.uk/call-for-inp...

Got no horse in this race but the physics of cooling satellite data centres are interesting, a discussion here. My fagpackets seem to match up with some of the actual experts! Every kW of sunshine that lands on a satellite has to be reradiated, this has been solved for small satellites since 1957.

Max Fagin@maxfagin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Skeptics need to drop the cooling issue. The existence of ~10,000 of these ~10 kW OAP satellites proves that we know how to generate/reject power/heat in space at scale. Focus on the economics. The logistics. The launch costs. But drop the radiator issue. It's silly. bsky.app/profile/maxf...

reneweconomy.com.au/nsw-awards-c...

NSW awards contracts to six huge 8-hour battery projects, including the biggest in Australia

NSW hails biggest and best result yet for long duration storage, with six massive batteries declared winners of latest tender, and at lower prices than previous auctions.

reneweconomy.com.au

Crazy how many spells of 20-21 GW wind power we had this January. Think it's about the ninth time and not the end of the month yet! This would have been a new record only a couple of years ago, and now it quietly just keeps happening.

Air temperatures ⁰C in our hallway. Warm air is flowing rightwards along the ceiling from the kitchen (been baking) and exchanging with cool air flowing leftwards at floor level from the stairwell. The house thermostat is set at 20 and is trying to make any kind of sense of all this.

Michael de Podesta@protons4b.bsky.social · 7mo ago

protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2026/01/06/v... In my home, "room temperature" varies considerably with height. It might be so in your home too. In which case, take care where you place your thermostat. Best wishes Michael

Saw this chart from Ben Watts (his real name, I think) about different time profiles of European electricity consumption. Fun. www.linkedin.com/in/kilowatts/

If they think explaining a curved-top wing is difficult, their minds will be blown by symmetrical keels on boats! The same shape on both sides, yet creates lift so the boat doesn't drift sideways. All that Bernoulli mumbling about bigger distances and velocities over the curved side - nope!

21. Everyone is defining long-duration storage technology wrong. It's not about 6 or 8 hours — you can do that with lithium-ion and probably would — it's about having the capex to add more GWh of capacity decoupled from the capex of adding more GW.

Cottam coal power station demolished today (the cooling towers). Will be replaced by a solar farm, using the same grid connection.

UK energy flow chart 2024 assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6887aa...

So yesterday was sunny and windy and prices were very negative, -£30/MWh. Last night and today, prices went high again +£80. We badly needed a few hours storage. But our 2.7 GW existing PSH fleet hardly reacted! 0.5 GW maximum. (Dark blue line on chart) Why were they not busy pumping and storing?

The UK currently has 3GW of pumped storage capacity, but NESO (the system operator) expects this to more than triple to 10GW by 2035. In fact, by my count there is already 7GW of capacity that has begun the permitting process, and 5GW of this has now received planning consent. (3/9)

Renewables plus Nuclear producing 102% of GB demand ! Plus another 5% gas. The excess 7% is being pumped into storage and exported to Ireland and Norway. grid.iamkate.com

www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/edf-r... EDF now only own 16.2% of Sizewell C - might they pull out of it altogether?

EDF reduces stake in Sizewell C as boss sacked | New Civil Engineer

The UK’s flagship gigawatt-scale new nuclear projects under construction – Hinkley Point C in Somerset and Sizewell C in Suffolk – are both subject to

newcivilengineer.com

"Adding a co-located 4-hour battery of 6.8GW capacity to ... the 8.6GW tidal barrage... reduced the negative impact on constraints costs" www.severncommission.co.uk/final-recomm... A multi-GW pulse of power at inconvenient times of day is one of the problems with both tidal and PV - same solution?

Final Recommendations - Severn Estuary Commission

Introduction The Severn Estuary Commission was established in March 2024 by the Western Gateway Partnership to assess the feasibility of tidal range energy generation in the Severn Estuary. After a y...

severncommission.co.uk

Sorry to see this dumped. On buying a home (new or old) you'd have been given 2 or 3 years to remove the gas boiler and fit something else. The sale price of the home would reflect this. Change of ownership seems like a great time to change central heating. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Scottish government scraps green heating plans for new homes

Acting net-zero secretary Gillian Martin told MSPs the legislation, drafted by the Scottish Greens, would

bbc.co.uk

Good for England to do this, but please learn from the implementation debacle in Scotland - the Scot DRS collapsed. Pity it doesn't include glass bottles, plastic food trays, food tins or tetrapak, and is 'recycle' not 'reuse'. Beware if this is intended to replace household recycling collections!