THE CARBON WAR

222
The Winning of The Carbon War
really not be leaking at all. I wonder if Carbon Tracker’s gas report has been
too lenient with the industry on the subject of fugitive emissions.
In the UK, another disaster hits intended shale gas drilling plans. Cuadrilla’s
application for a fracking licence in the Bowland Shale, the deposit
underlying much of the north of the country, is rejected by Lancashire county
council. Campaigners are overjoyed. “In the future, this may well be seen as
the day the fracking dream died”, the Guardian’s Damian Carrington writes.
And so to another inevitability. The UKOG Chairman David Lenigas, he
of the Saudi Arabia below Gatwick Airport based on one well with no flow
measurements, “steps down” from his post. He launched a “reserves” media
frenzy with his ludicrous and mostly uncontested hype. But the London Stock
Exchange then asked some inconvenient questions about the information he
was providing for investors. Unlike the BBC on the day. And, needless to say,
Lenigas’s “stepping down” attracted somewhat fewer column inches of media
coverage than the “Saudi Gatwick” myth did.
The UK Conservatives are undaunted in their enthusiasm for shale,
however. Chancellor George Osborne presents a budget on June 8 th in which
he proposes a “sovereign wealth fund” for communities that support shale
gas. He also has multiple spanners to throw into the works of the competition.
More on that tomorrow.
London, 10 th July 2015
A launch event for a battery storage product, UK-style. Simon Daniel, CEO of
Moixa Energy, a luminously smart and infectiously enthusiastic inventor-entrepreneur,
is our host. He risks the observation in his introduction that the BBC
has compared his company to Tesla. The audience of entrepreneurs, investors,
solar executives, and journalists mull this one in silence. No whooping and
cheering, Tesla style, for the British.
Simon has a vision to set out for us. Most if not all the people in the room
share it, but it is still powerful to see the picture painted so compellingly by
someone who really knows what he is talking about. It is a vision of a revolution
in direct-current (DC) electricity use, emerging hand-in-glove now with the
solar revolution. The “internet of things”, Simon says, is seeing exponential
growth in electronic and battery operated devices that use DC power. Moixa
is redesigning the whole architecture of local power, distribution and storage,