Clem Cowton
@ClemCowton
Director of External Affairs @OctopusEnergy Group || Board, EnergyUK || Board, UK100 || Board, Sussex University Energy Group
If you buy illegal drugs you are to a non-trivial degree morally implicated in the crimes committed by drug dealing gangs.
What’s an unpopular opinion you believe is genuinely true?
The Sovereign AI Unit is hiring for an early career policy position! If you know anyone 1-3 years into their career that is high-agency, cares deeply about public service, and wants to do some of the highest ambition work in UK policy - this is the role for them.
The gas lobby tried very hard to make sure this video never saw the light of day
An apparently necessary reminder that the Tory government rightly cancelled a bunch of hydrogen heating trials, mostly because the local residents reacted unfavourably to the prospect of this happening in their kitchens.
£1660 gas bill is just stupid money. With electricity at today's prices it'd mean an annual energy bill of ~£2570. You'd also need ~240GW in electricity capacity for the H2 supply alone - that's more than triple today's.
Any energy minister who could stomach those kinds of headlines would be put off by this one: heating bills would AT LEAST DOUBLE if we switched to hydrogen heating
It's certainly one way to clean my kitchen…
An apparently necessary reminder that the Tory government rightly cancelled a bunch of hydrogen heating trials, mostly because the local residents reacted unfavourably to the prospect of this happening in their kitchens.
#WastedWind 14 - 20 July 💰 Last week, Britain wasted £9,813,955 shutting off wind turbines while also switching on gas plants. 📅 Highest day: Mon 14 July - £3,614,347 📈 In 2025, wasted wind has already cost Brits: £704,706,338
Our LondonCentric piece this morn shows how Asif Aziz’s company repeatedly rents some of the UK’s priciest retail spaces to students who vanish without paying millions in tax. There’s so much money for HMRC in the WestEnd if it just enforces compliance. open.substack.com/pub/londoncent…
This can't go on bills. It simply can't. It would be insane to pay for this through bill levies. 😣🤦♂️ ieefa.org/articles/uk-fa…
Solar has smashed expectations. A genuinely remarkable technology that is going to do an astonishing amount of heavy lifting in the years to come. Way more than the experts predicted. The International Energy Agency has been totally cooked here. Left in the dust.
"kilowatts per hour" is a real unit. In 2024, we installed solar at a rate of 68,000 kW/h. It's just not the same unit as "kilowatt-hours," of which solar generated 2,129,000,000,000.
This has been occupying my brain for a week
every few decades, Britain faces a generational moment of self-reflection, when a ruling consensus breaks down and a new settlement is required today we need a new, sovereign consensus a short piece on where Britain finds itself, where we need to be, and how we get there:
In southern England I use a figure of 400w per sq m for the solar gain from a south facing window, and without effective shading the cooling load from air con in summer will often exceed the heating load in winter, even in rainy old Blighty!
9 social housing apartments in Mallorca Recessed balconies with adjustable shade, lots of natural materials, access to natural light and ventilation By Estruch Martorell, Estudio E. Torres Pujol + Ripon Tizon
I can understand the call for the UK and Europe installing more air-conditioning (it’s got hotter!) But, if that’s the case, there’s *also* the need to install more shading. This is social housing in Barcelona by the way…
Three of the newest wind farms are now available on my live renewables map… ✅ Dogger Bank A ✅ Moray West ✅ Neart na Gaoithe All three include live output, curtailment as well as historic data.
Latest in ‘hydrogen is the future’ news
Vauxhall owner Stellantis axes hydrogen vehicle production with 'no prospects' for 'niche market' gbnews.com/lifestyle/cars…