The wind industry is approaching a structural inflection point. Early fleets in Europe and the United Kingdom are aging faster than advertised, composite blade waste is outrunning recycling capacity, and decommissioning liabilities are coming due just as subsidy structures change. Two recent posts by Peter Clack capture the twin problems: rapid performance decay well short […]
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The National Energy System Operator’s figures put transmission investment at about £64 billion through 2030 and another £89 billion after that—more than £150 billion in all. The Guardian’s mapping of official recommendations points to well over 4,000 miles of new power lines by 2041, plus subsea cables and converter stations to move Scottish and offshore […]
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September 17, 2026 Unseasonable heat is pushing power systems that serve more than 100 million people across the United States and Canada into a tight operating window — just as plants and transmission equipment that were scheduled for fall maintenance are still needed online. Temperatures are running more than 20°F above normal in parts of […]
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Hamburg-based Enerparc AG, one of Europe’s largest independent solar park owners, filed for insolvency at the Hamburg Local Court. On September 7, 2026, the court appointed restructuring attorney Stefan Denkhaus of BRL as provisional insolvency administrator. Operations at the parks are continuing while administrators try to stabilize the group. Enerparc reports about 5.5 GW of […]
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Administrator Lee Zeldin is expected to formally rescind the Biden-era carbon pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, completing a multi-year rollback of greenhouse-gas rules that the administration argues threatened grid reliability and raised costs. Reports indicate the announcement is timed for a G20 energy ministers meeting in Houston […]
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ENB Pub Note: This article first ran on the Energy News Beat Substack. The U.S. is facing an $89 billion liability in the wind industry that nobody is talking about. Scotland’s first commercial wind farm is being held up as proof that wind power can be circular. A Mott MacDonald report for ScottishPower Renewables says […]
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ENB Pub Note: This article was on Doug Sheridan’s LinkedIn post and his insights are spot on. Americans’ utility bills are delivering unpleasant surprises, with residential electricity prices rising at more than twice the rate of core inflation. California, Maine and New York have seen multi‑year rate hikes that would’ve been politically unthinkable a decade […]
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Kind of Ironic that we lost power over the holiday and had a great dry run. Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend. As we had company, a storm rolled in on us, and only 900 people in our county were without power. As you have heard me say, it is better to prepare […]
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However, it only captures part of the story. It does not fully capture system-level costs, weather extremes in places like Germany, consumer price outcomes in the West, or end-of-life realities. Those gaps matter when the claim is that firm renewables are already cheaper than new fossil generation and insulated from fuel shocks. Renewable Wind, Solar, […]
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Australia’s official grid planner has rewritten the script. The Australian Energy Market Operator’s 2026 Integrated System Plan still describes renewables, storage, transmission and gas backup as the “least-cost” path to 2050. The same documents show coal staying until 2049, wind delivery falling well short of earlier ambition, transmission scaled back after cost blowouts of up […]
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