Amongst all the awful news around at the moment, there was one good news story this week from the energy sector which gave our team something to hang on to. As of midnight on Wednesday, Britain had gone 2 months without coal generation – another new record!
Admittedly this incredible achievement has been possible largely due to a significant drop in electricity demand due to the shut-down of large parts of the economy. However, it is also due to the enormous changes going on as part of the energy transition. The emissions associated with a unit of electricity (Grid emission factor) has dropped by more than 50% in the last 8 years alone. Here’s a graph back to 1970 that was produced for the GLA a couple of years ago.
One thing that sadly hasn’t changed much is heating. Almost all homes in the UK are still heated by burning oil or gas. How prehistoric does that sound! We’re literally burning these fuels in our homes to heat ourselves. Sometimes we’re not even burning it, we’re just releasing it – I can smell the unburnt gas right now through my open window from the flat below – don’t get me started on gas combi boilers…
Let’s hope that once Britain can embark on a road to recovery it will be a green one, ending our reliance on not just coal but other polluting fossil fuels.
We think tepeo has an important part to play in the green recovery, and so we are very pleased to be able to update you with the news that in July, we will be installing our first ZEB (Zero Emission Boiler) in a trial customer’s home. We still plan to go to market in Spring 2021, so please sign up via our website if you want to be kept updated.