Yesterday, DECC released stats on the Renewable Heat Incentive which as you could guess is probably my favourite policy. There are a few interesting things that have come up but overall the RHI is quite successful, and is spending not at it’s total budget level but is showing steady growth. This might just be the scheme getting…

Institutions are generally considered to be the rules that organise society. I like to split these into two major types, just to help make them seem more real. My first type is ‘hard’ institutions and my second type is ‘soft institutions’. Some authors split power in this way between hard and soft but I don’t…

Transitions in the Gas Network 6 Month Review This short document gives a brief overview of the current problem being researched, progress made so far and then discusses the next stages of the project. Why is a gas transition needed? The UK is currently addicted to the use of gas for heating our homes and…

In an attempt to carry out some real analysis (verging on numerical but not quite) I’ve decided to go completely off topic for this blog and think about the wider concept of consumption and economic growth. I do get frustrated when David Cameron starts spouting off about the UK becoming an ‘aspiration nation’. I would…

Mention ‘power’ to any professional working in the energy policy sphere and they immediately think you are referring to electricity. Mention power to any social science academic and they are immediately thinking of lots of very complicated themes and ideas. The subject of this blog is the second kind of power, not electricity but social power.…

This is more abstract than a usual blog but I’m going for it on the advice of my supervisor. It’s also the day after my 26th birthday so that’s another excuse if it doesn’t make a lot of sense – fingers crossed it will. So a new concept for readers to get your heads around…

In terms of gas transitions, any low-carbon gas could potentially be an important aspect and hydrogen as a concept may well be one of those things. I however am not convinced that hydrogen is a panacea to the UK’s heat problem – our addiction to gas. I was on the steering group for the recently…

Although thinking endlessly about the UK’s energy system and potential transitions is good and interesting it often makes sense to take a step back and look at the wider context. Maybe the UK is an outlier in terms of gas and how it is used. Maybe it’s perfectly normal. So what I wanted to do…

Recently released DECC data show just how much gas we are importing and how this is likely to change in the future (as far as I can tell this includes expected production from shale gas – probably fairly small). I’ve produced the graph below to display this data. As you can see, the UK went form exporting…

Biogas seems to have been in the news a fair bit recently, with a major feature on Sunday’s Countryfile as well as George Monbiot writing for the Guardian. These features focused primarily on the food versus fuel debate but that’s only one of the questions around the use of biogas. The role of biogas in gas transitions has…