The UK government confirmed that it is lifting the ban on fracking this week in an effort to boost local fossil fuel production amid a deepening energy crisis.
Three highlights of 2020
Comfort as a Service: Eneco, a Dutch utility, are already trialling this in 60 new build homes. We have seen an increasing number of heat as a service propositions over the past few years, but this is the first true comfort as a service offering we’ve seen, where the supplier takes all the risk, and the customer pays a fixed fee. On top of that, Eneco provides heat pumps and PV optimisation, so it’s possible for these buildings to be net zero – the PV supplies all the heat pump electricity. It’s an exciting proposition.
Decarbonisation as a mainstream theme: A recent whitepaper we published with Alpiq, a European energy company, looked at 3 Ds: decarbonisation, digitalisation and decentralisation. What came out of that clearly is 2020 has seen decarbonisation become a huge mainstream theme, which is almost just accepted as the norm. If more companies like Shell continue to declare net zero emissions by 2050, or announce energy strategies like B