A need to move forward with speed

Last week’s Climate Change Committee online launch of their joint Progress Report to Parliament 2021 really is required viewing. It offered an opportunity to hear from CCC Chairman Lord Deben, Adaptation Committee Chair Baroness Brown, CCC Chief Executive Chris Stark, and other leading CCC voices about progress being made and the vital next steps on the path to a Net Zero, climate resilient UK..

This year the CCC #TheCCCUK published both their annual report on progress in reducing emissions and their biennial report on progress in preparing for the impacts of climate change. Both reports are available at.

Lord Deben started the online launch saying: “There is much to celebrate. The problem is there is very little action, very little delivery to show that what we have promised we are going to achieve” & explaining the CCC has looked at promise/action department by department”; and Chris Stark ended it explaining: “We have reached the end of the statutory reports we supply every five years – an exciting time for us. The CCC will now shift its focus to real world progress to real world delivery just as the government must.”

An Editorial in today’s Guardian carries on the campaign: “Targets are all very well. But not if there is no way of reaching them. In which case, they are a sham. This is the problem now confronting the government. The UK’s stated goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 78% by 2035 compared with 1990 levels is very ambitious. “Remarkable” was the word used last week by Lord Deben (the former Conservative environment secretary John Gummer). He chairs the climate change committee (CCC) that advises the government. Its latest reports make an unflattering contrast between impressive aims and the absence of plans to meet them.

“A strategy setting out how the UK intends to meet its net zero pledge is promised before the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow in November. But there is little sign so far that ministers grasp the scale of the challenge. Not a single government department, the CCC finds, is moving at the necessary pace.”

A great informatic from the Raconteur supplement in yesterday’s Sunday Times on Sustainable Innovation which looks at CCS, cities and towns, the circular economy, travel and more.

Behind a paywall in The Times Simon Clarke MP for Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland, and former exchequer secretary to the treasury and minister for local government and regional growth writes today about green jobs: “New jobs and industries with huge global export markets are being created right across our industrial heartlands. The think tank Onward estimates that up to 1.7 million additional green jobs could be created by 2030 and that these will be disproportionately located in areas that are the focus of the government’s levelling up agenda.”

Interesting developments

• A joint National Grid ESO & UK Power Networks project is demonstrating how wind & solar farms can dynamically feed in power to provide voltage control services to balance the system & help more efficient grid running.
• One of the UK’s largest low-carbon heating systems will soon begin warming homes and offices in London’s Square Mile by capturing heat from more than 650ft below the streets of the City.

Congratulations …………

• … to BBC Springwatch, GeoPura and Siemens Energy as you will learn from this Springwatch-behind-the-scenes video, hydrogen was put to good use to reduce the series’ footprint.

• …to Ørsted who have installed their one thousandth offshore wind turbine in UK waters, which is also the sixteenth to be installed at Hornsea 2, which will feature 165 turbines in total, will become the world’s largest offshore wind farm once completed next year.
• ….to Verdant Power whose grid-connected tidal power demonstration project in New York City has exceeded performance projections by every measure. The three turbines on a novel mounting system have exceeded energy output by 40%, generating over 275 MWh in eight months of continuous operation.
• ….to AWS Ocean Energy who achieved a critical milestone in the construction of its 16kW Archimedes Waveswing wave energy converter when the two major sub-assemblies were joined together and Waveswing finally took shape.  Malin Marine at Westway Dock, Renfrew is building the prototype Waveswing. The £3.4m project has been funded by Wave Energy Scotland as part of the Novel Wave Energy Converter development programme.
• ….. to Welsh marine energy developer Marine Power Systems (MPS)  who reached over its £2 million crowdfunding target in an ongoing campaign that just opened for the general public.

Your input needed

• If you are involved with the tidal sector you might want to respond to an invitation to give feedback to the EU-backed Tidal Stream Industry Energiser Project (TIGER) which wants your input in order to evaluate how tidal energy sector could transition from manufacturing single prototype devices to tens or hundreds of commercial devices per year
• Four conservation and community development organisations in the South of Scotland have launched a challenge to companies to find an innovative technological solution to tackling climate change through land use.