Every minute of every day, five thousand times as much energy as we need hits the earth in the form of solar energy. That surplus isn\u2019t going anywhere; it just gets absorbed into buildings, into the ground, the desert or the sea, warming everything up. <\/p>\n
But what if we could harness more of that? What if we could make energy as abundant as data on the internet? Imagine the global problems we could solve. In my opinion, this is not only possible; it\u2019s beginning to happen right now. <\/p>\n
However, before we can begin to see a real step-change, we must address the perpetually complex question of what\u2019s truly going to drive that momentum and turn us into a more independent and sustainable society.<\/p>\n
To begin to answer that question, let\u2019s first look at the influence of global markets on the UK\u2019s fuel and energy production, and the ever-present concern that we\u2019ll eventually run out of resources. Ten years ago, the world was focussed on peak oil; we thought we were going to run out of it and that it would get really expensive \u2013 but the reverse is now happening. <\/p>\n
The business models of fossil fuel companies have failed in that respect. The price of oil has fallen to around $50 a barrel and is likely to stay there. So effectively, what happens is that it\u2019s not worth extracting oil anymore because people don\u2019t want it in sufficient quantities. We\u2019re not going to run out of oil, because demand will continue to fall.<\/p>\n
But gas and electricity are different, because of the way they\u2019re being generated. Gas extraction is a complex issue; we\u2019ve had a lot of gas coming onto the market in the US from shale, but the price plummeted so they stopped producing. We now have gas coming from Russia through huge pipelines, and from Qatar as liquid natural gas in giant containers. <\/p>\n
Both of these sources are politically disruptive, and if there was any fluctuation in production we\u2019d have a short-term supply issue which would drive up cost. Energy companies won\u2019t absorb these variables, so they\u2019ll always be passed onto us as consumers. And while we\u2019ve seen fewer price hikes in recent years compared to around five years ago, political and event-led drivers make the market volatile and unpredictable.<\/p>\n
Check out Part Two in our Sustainability Series to find out whether Brexit will have an impact on our gas and electricity prices. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every minute of every day, five thousand times as much energy as we need hits the earth in the form of solar energy. That surplus isn\u2019t going anywhere; it just gets absorbed into buildings, into the ground, the desert or the sea, warming everything up. But what if we could harness more of that? What…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eco2solar.co.uk\/hq-eco2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}