Sarastro
Institutional money manager 🇬🇧🇨🇭🇫🇷
Markets, energy, history, politics
- Reposted by SarastroUK AR7 auction results are out today 🍃⚡ Excellent results with over 8 GW of capacity! The strike price of £91/MWh for England/Wales fixed projects was significantly below the administrative strike price of £113/MWh that so many reported on last year, but was always the upper limit.
- Much cheaper than coal. m.economictimes.com/industry/ren...
- Reposted by SarastroI want to come back properly on this Economist piece that questions Britain's approach to net zero. It gets three things wrong imo: 1. Ignoring periods of v cheap renewable energy 2. Misdiagnosing the relative costs of renewables 3. Looking backwards, not forwards.
- Reposted by SarastroLarge chunk of the world won’t care about oil embargoes very soon
- Solar panels from $0.1/w ..
- Reposted by SarastroI think a big reason prices are so low in SA is that, while the costs of solar and BESS are falling yearly, Chinese manufacturers are also just undercutting everyone else in open/no tariff markets—see the two SA BESS systems that were priced at ~72/kWh: www.linkedin.com/posts/mlkubi...
- Reposted by SarastroSaudi Arabia is installing solar for 1.4 cents per kWh and is on pace for a 50% renewables electricity grid by 2030 In CT our standard offer rate is 9.7 cents per kWh for supply. Obviously we aren't a desert but it seems pretty feasible we can do a lot better than Natural Gas Ned is planning for
- Reposted by SarastroSunny deals: Solar prices shine! #finsky
- Reposted by SarastroDesalination seems to currently use about 3 kWH per cubic meter, so at these prices, the water needed to grow a pound of almonds would cost you around $0.30
- Yesterday the Saudi Government’s Renewables procurement body signed 7 agreements for PPAs with ACWA relating to 15 GW of solar power, the largest single deal that has been signed to date and significantly boosting the Kingdom’s plans to decarbonise its electricity grid by 2030. on.ft.com/4eSvrYa
- Just take a look at the prices at which these deals cleared.. these are obviously for intermittent solar (without batteries) but all the same they represent interesting benchmarks for public procurement of solar power in sunny places
- At these levels we are within the envelope in which SA can have plentiful supplies of water from desalination at v low prices and it can probably manufacture synthetic (and renewable) fuels that can store energy for use in other areas at prices that are lower than the cost of oil or gas today.
- Reposted by SarastroSorry to wade into the air con wars again, but... I spoke to @jim.londoncentric.media last week about why more homes in London don't have air con. The bottom line is: air con in Britain is almost always a heat pump, and heat pumps are good for the climate www.londoncentric.media/p/why-london...
- “The UK’s sea level is rising faster than the global average and at an accelerating rate… Sea levels have risen by 13.4cm in the UK since 1993, compared with a global average of 10.6cm, according to the annual state of the UK climate report published on Monday.” on.ft.com/4lzrgmM
- “..the unlevered after-tax IRRs of TEF .gas.. power projects have unlevered after-tax IRRs of 3%-28%, a sharp drop from pre-2025 levels as capital costs have surged by as much as threefold.“ www.enverus.com/newsroom/str...
- Reposted by Sarastro"In a ... hint of past financial turmoil, mortgage defaults begin to rise, along with ... credit card delinquencies. But this time, it’s different. Unlike other financial disasters, the underlying cause of this one is not financial, it is physical, and it is not clear how it will ever end."
- This is thought provoking from the FT. It’s already clear (as I have previously discussed in this stream) that insurance companies are raising premiums and withdrawing cover for housing in some US states given the frequency and intensity of wildfires, storms and hurricaines. on.ft.com/46dSz0R
- This is thought provoking from the FT. It’s already clear (as I have previously discussed in this stream) that insurance companies are raising premiums and withdrawing cover for housing in some US states given the frequency and intensity of wildfires, storms and hurricaines. on.ft.com/46dSz0R
- When Buffet said in Feb 2025 that property cover prices had gone up, he added “Climate change may have been announcing its arrival,” he said. “Someday, any day, a truly staggering insurance loss will occur — and there is no guarantee that there will be only one per annum.” .”
- Clark notes “Günther Thallinger, a management board member at Germany’s insurance giant Allianz, warned global temperatures were fast approaching levels where insurers would no longer be able to operate, creating “a systemic risk that threatens the very foundation of the financial sector”.
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View full threadon.ft.com/3Tdrfbx More today Insurance needs $1tn from private equity to close gaps, says Aon chief
- Here’s Prime Minister of Jamaica, Andrew Holness, discussing how solar and batteries can help reduce power prices across the economy www.facebook.com/share/r/16aF...
- The fall in price of solar panels and the continued increase in their efficiency has led to a big fall in power generated by solar. The same has been true of batteries. ember-energy.org/latest-insig...
- And, given developments already in the pipeline - perovsykte solar panel, quantum dots and sodium batteries further price reductions are on the way.
- The problem has always been that solar is intermittent - generating while the sun is shining but unable to supply needs outside the peak sunny hours.
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View full threadOr to put it another way, you can expand the volume of cheap solar considerably while lowering cost if you also use some battery capacity to manage intermittency.
- It is certainly true that climate change risks are long-tailed risks. But the market is a discounting mechanism and long term risks are increasingly being reflected in short term profitability via the insurance market. Investors should watch these carefully. www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...
- The big take-way from the crisis is that the drive to shift away from imported hydrocarbons to renewables and batteries was the right strategy on cost and risk grounds.. www.ft.com/content/c139...
- Your regular reminder that the output of the French nukes, marvellous as they are, are sensitive to weather conditions www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
- We once thought that economic growth in China would led to huge increases in demand for oil as people bought and drove more cars, industry needed more energy and people took more planes to more places.
- On the back of these expectations, oil companies have invested billions of dollars in higher cost oil production in places like Kazakhstan and Brazil.
- But as you can see in the chart below - taken from the IEA’s Oil Market Report published this week- things have not turned out as expected. Chinese demand for oil has plateaued and is likely to fall off materially in the next decade even as demand for transportation increases.
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View full threadIf you were in Government in a high cost oil producing country you’d need to have an economic strategy to manage the risks and if you were in Government in an oil importing country you’d need a strategy to take advantage of lower cost energy from renewables.
